We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
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The Centre for Policy Studies published a report warning that the National Health Service is “on the brink of implosion” as government plans for a record 40 billion pound cash injection risk being squandered on bureaucracy. The author of the report, Dr Maurice Slevin, is a cancer specialist at a top London teaching hospital:
“I have seen at first hand the steady decay of a great public institution … The NHS is on the brink of implosion.”
Slevin, who came to England from South Africa and now works at Barts and the London NHS Trust, said he was full of enthusiasm when he started working for the NHS 24 years ago. But today it was clear that the quality of care delivered in Britain was far below that of other western countries. He warned that without major reforms, the 40 billion pound promised for the NHS over the next five years would “simply disappear into deeper and deeper layers of bureaucracy, with more and more monitoring of more and more targets.”
“Waste is endemic. The Department of Health itself admits that up to a fifth of the NHS budget is lost through waste, fraud and inefficiency.”
So it’s not more money that needs to be thrown at the public services as some community minded people would have us believe. The NHS is a strange institution, rooted in the meta-context of the collective effort the British nation experienced during the WWII and resisting any rational discourse by both the politicians and the public. Horror stories of patients suffering at the hands of NHS are part of regular reporting routine and yet, it still seems to be a political suicide to talk about real modernisation and de-nationalisation of the health care system.
Public services, being the most direct way for politicians of bribing the public into voting for them, have always been the most sensitive political issue. I have this horrible vision of the entire GDP disappearing into the NHS blackhole before the British public acknowledges the failure of the NHS as a system of health care provision and confronts the gruesome reality of public services.
Hear a speech declaring a holy war and, I assure you, your ears should catch the clink of evil’s scales and the dragging of its monstrous tail over the purity of the language.
– Dr Cruces, head tutor of the Guild of Assassins in Pyramids by Terry Pratchett
And now for something really different… those of you interested in the battle of musicians against the RIAA may be aware of the good fight songstress Janis Ian has been carrying out. She’s fired off another broadside in the LA Times.
Janis is giving the RIAA fits because she is exposing the Big Lie: that RIAA has any interest whatever in the welfare of the average artist. Anyone who has worked in the lower echolons of music knows what sleazy bastards they are. If you complain, people assume it’s just “sour grapes” because you are small fry. But Janis and other artists like her are a very different matter. They’ve seen it all from the top and have come out of the closet to tell us it isn’t any different there either.
The Sony’s and Times Warners of the world are simply out to rob the artist and the consumer blind. They cook the books, they lie, they cheat… and as Glenn Reynolds has often said: “They may be vulnerable to a RICO.”
I look forward to the day it happens.
Oh, yeah… go visit her website and buy something. The lady has to make a living if she’s going to keep on fighting for Truth, Justice and all.
Peggy Noonan hit the right tone. I think she understands the dream.
And Buzz… I did to:
“Buzz Aldrin captured it this morning. He tried to read a poem about astronauts on television. He read these words: “As they passed from us to glory, riding fire in the sky.” And tough old Buzz, steely-eyed rocket man and veteran of the moon, began to weep.
He was not alone.”
The Washington Post reports that remains of all seven crew members have been found.
This will make it easier on the families. I hope they all get a missing man flyover.
I’ve now seen more (but still sketchy) details on the telemetry timeline in the port wing. There is enough there for me to suggest another possible scenario.
The first problem detected was a temperature rise in the port hydraulics. All the flight surfaces on the shuttle are controlled by hydraulics. Pressure is supplied by the APU’s; control is supplied by actuators controlled by the shuttle computers (GPC’s). There are 5 GPC’s. If I remember the architecture correctly, each controls a seperate hydraulic loop. If a GPC fails and tries to ram an aileron full down, the other 4 override it. This is not handled in electronics, it is handled in the hydraulics themselves. The pressure from 4 actuators pushed by hydraulics one way over rides the one going the other way. So long as no more than two GPC’s fail unsafe, control is still possible.
Let’s posit a heat induced hydraulic failure in the port wing. The temperature rise is a common mode failure which overrides the redundancy. I do not know if they have any additional failsafe to return and lock the position of the aileron at a neutral position. However even if they did we can see a potential problem. The shuttle was in the second of two banks in an S curve the shuttle follows for bleeding off energy. Just at the time communication was lost. If the shuttle has just been commanded to roll and lost all hydraulics when put under the pressure by the actuators, we have the shuttle going into a roll that will go faster and faster. It seems likely (to me) we’d lose the aileron very quickly, followed by breakup within seconds.
Even on level flight, I could imagine serious problems from complete loss of use of control surfaces on the port side. I doubt the fly by wire system could deal with something that extreme. I doubt you can fly a brick that way. Period.
CORRECTION: After chatting with another knowledgeable friend and doing a bit of checking I found I was in error about the number of loops. There were 4 loops in the Enterprise drop test article; they apparently cut this down to three independant loops for the first flying article.
THIS is a tragedy, too. What makes the Columbia‘s loss more striking than the deaths of train passengers is that space exploration is forward-looking, not just part of ordinary life, and such a loss is a setback to something important, and noble. It’s not that astronauts’ lives are worth more than those of anyone else; it’s what they do, and what it stands for.
– Glenn Reynolds yesterday
Richard Madeley & Judy Finnigan, a well known pair of daytime television presenters on UK Channel 4, are the epitome of Middle England sensibilities, not to mention falling hook line and sinker for whatever PR hype is trawled in front of them. When they saw the music video for All The Things She Said by the teenage Russian lesbian couple called TATU, they were so shocked that they are demanding not just a boycott but that the TATU single be banned.
So yet again we here are told by the self-appointed guardians of ‘morality’ that things which they find distasteful or threatening should be suppressed by force of law. I can almost hear Ivan Shapovalov, TATU’s creator and promoter, chuckling as these idiots take the bait and provide his winsome couple with a whirlwind of free publicity.
Disturbing to some, it seems!
Well given that TATU’s single looks like topping the UK charts, I guess not all that many people agree with these statist prigs.
For those of you who are not upset by lesbian schoolgirls in really short skirts singing infectiously catchy tunes, check out their live gig at the 2002 MTV Europe Music Awards (in English) or their rather splendid little OTT video in Russian (fast connection recommended for both links).
TATU singer Julia signs petition to ban Richard & Judy
I’ve noted a few interesting items as I’ve read through coverage this AM.
- My first sighting of the media’s second stage reporting: when they start finger pointing and looking for a “whistleblower” or a “smoking gun”. Jackals need a carcass, and they will find one.
- I was right about some debris making it into the Gulf of Mexico. Coast Guard cutters have been dispatched to search for locations where debris is supposed to have come down off shore.
- There is an unconfirmed report of something coming off over California and someone suggested it might have been tiles. I’m a bit skeptical a tile would cause a trail visible at a distance of 70 miles or so. Meteor trails come from dust particles, but they are traveling many times faster.
- The breakup occurred near the point of maximum temperature. It’s hard to imagine a worse time for it. Or perhaps a more likely one for the top scenario.
- O’Keefe is immediately putting the investigation into an external investigation team’s hands, which is a wise move. During the days after the Challenger, some of the sleazier denizens of Capitol Hill tried to use it for political advantage. In particular I seem to remember Senator Fritz Hollings (D, Disney and sometimes NC) as one who particularly tried to use the 7 deaths to gain media attention for his own political ends.
I think I will be calling it a night very soon as it has now passed 3am here in Belfast and I am starting to hear my mattress’ siren call; “come to me”.
ONE MORE THING: If you can’t sleep and need reading material, you might find it interesting to relive the past. I believe all the discussions about the Challenger accident will be found in this 2.5 megabyte tar.gz file. Right click and download, Look for January 28th, 1986 and start reading from there.
You might even recognize a few names.
Fox News has a number of anecdotes from people who have reported on debris. The report includes some knowledge on the effects of spaceflight disasters I would rather have lived out my life without knowing.
I’d have waited awhile, but the TV mediots are already trying to place the events of today into A Grand Context. They are speaking in sweeping generalization and grand predictions of Its Effect On America, The End Of The Space Station… and so forth.
Yes there will be some effects, but primarily this is a human tragedy. We’ve lost some brave people and many of us empathize with the great vision and are saddened by the loss.
But it is not going to cause any Earth shattering changes. It is not going to scar the national psyche. It is just a family funeral of loved ones in which we are all part of the extended family; those of us in the space community feel it perhaps more deeply than most but not nearly so much as their co-workers in Houston and Cape Canaveral or their families.
With all of that said, I can now plunge into the punditry.
The shuttles are going to be grounded for anything from months to a year. This will cause an enormous impact on the ISS scheduling. Completion will be thrown back by years. It is not only the loss of time while the fleet is grounded; it is the loss of capacity. Columbia was not much use for ISS missions and so it was useful for other non-ISS missions. Now those missions will have to be cut or serviced by the remaining fleet. That means a lengthening of the ISS completion time line. This can be somewhat ameliorated by giving the Russians a bundle of money to handle most of the supply trips.
We can’t abandon the ISS for a long period of time. It must be reboosted at regular intervals because the vast solar arrays give it a lot of drag. There is a small amount of gas even at that altitude. Enough to slowly bring it down. So there is no real option of abandoning it for a couple years. You can’t.
You also can’t risk bringing something that big into re-entry in one piece; and you can’t disassemble it without shuttle support.
So NASA must get the fleet flying again. President Bush has already said we will not abandon space. In the community, we all knew that. It’s simply too important now.
There will almost certainly be a push for a replacement vehicle. The shuttle is, after all, a 1975 base level of technology. It’s been upgraded and retro fitted, but even the newest shuttle, the Endeavour, is nearing 15 years old. The problems are budgetary and the inability of the “old aerospace” to perform on anything like a reasonable time and budget. I had actually much hoped NASA would work with the existing shuttles until the end of the decade, long enough to let the start up companies move in and revolutionize the field.
NASA will go to Boeing or Lockmart for a replacement. They are not going to talk to XCor or Armadillo or any of the other companies who will develop the true space ships.
What is my guess? I will suggest we’ll see a half hearted program for a shuttle replacement initiated. It will run over budget or be stillborn like every other such program in the last 15 years. The ISS schedule will stretch out to a completion date of 2010, almost 30 years after Ronald Reagan called for a space station to be completed in 10 years. An X-Prize space ship will fly suborbital this year or next year and there will be private tourists on private suborbital flights by 2006 and orbital by 2010. NASA will then buy one for crew turnaround. The Russians will get a big capital infusion to turn out more Soyez and Protons.
The world will keep turning and the sky will stay firmly in place.
Time for a belated tea (I’ve been running on nuts and candybars all day) and the late news is on in a half hour. I’ll be back then with whatever new info I have. The main thing on my mind now is: “where did the crew compartment come down? Did it burn up and break up during re-entry or hit mostly intact?
It’s a pretty sturdy bit of structure and about the only chance they’ll have for… well, humans don’t do so well in a re-entry plasma.
Later.
LATER: Networks seem to be far behind the blogosphere curve. Only thing new is that some partial remains have been found. They also suggested loss of a one of the control surfaces. While that would indeed cause loss of control and breakup, I see no reason for it to occur; and besides which, that port-side tire telemetry tells me a different story. So I’m still standing by my first scenario.
ONE MORE THING: One of the TV shots clearly showed one of the re-entry engines from the back of one of the OHMS pods (those bumps in the back by the tail). So much of the debris came down more quickly than I thought, and that probably means it came down in much smaller pieces than I expected. I also am wondering what portion came down in the smoking field they showed. Nothing there was identifiable from the helicopter overview.
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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