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]
|
A few good words 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.”
|
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.
|
Thanks for some thoughtful and timely postings on the shuttle disaster, in particular the one about the hydraulics failure.
Of course we cannot know anything for sure right now, but have you noted the comments of former Nasa/shuttle engineer Don Nelson, who was rebuffed by the White House science adviser when he wrote last year pleading for presidential intervention to avert a second shuttle disaster.
He is interviewed over at msncbc.com
Another interesting sidelight, and one which it is difficult to evaluate, appears on the Sfgate website of the SF Examiner.
An amateur astronomer in the SF Bay era who routinely tracks shuttle re-entry showed a report some photographs (he won’t release them) showing what he believes to be a kind of “lightning bolt” of electrical energy shooting across the Columbia’s contrail before the breakup.
The reporter say: “They show a bright scraggly flash of orange light, tinged with pale purple, and shaped somewhat like a deformed L. The flash appears to cross the Columbia’s dim contrail, and at that precise point, the contrail abruptly brightens and appears thicker and somewhat twisted as if it were wobbling. ”
Just fyi.
If he had a spectrogram, it could be important. He is mostl likely seeing ionized atoms from something being burned off the shuttle.
As to Nelson: he was interviewed on Ch4, and much to the news anchors dismay, said NASA was certainly paying attention to safety. His worries are more general. They are also more in the vein of adding safety features until the shuttle becomes next to worthless for its’ primary task. I, too, have followed the long debate about escape systems, eg ejections seats (how do you get people out of the lower deck) or charges to sep the manned pressure vessel so it can parachute (with massive loss of payload capacity).
Nelson’s thing is to remove the flight controls so that escape seats can be put in place there… and that all flight would be on auto pilot. NASA and the astronauts have said No. I agree with them. Robots and automation are fine, but I certainly wouldn’t feel safer that way.
And Nelson admitted, on air, that his recommendations would have had no impact on either Challenger or Columbia. You can’t fly a debris field.
Isn’t it likely that the shuttle system is so complex that the risk of disaster can’t be reduced below approximately 1/100 launches? I think that’s what Richard Feynman came up with back during the Challenger investigation.
Right now, we’re at 2 disasters in about 128 launches.
If that’s about the best we can do, and it appears that it is, should THIS VERSION of the shuttle be flying at all? Look at it as a sunk cost, and say: why not redirect the billions of dollars of future shuttle spending toward a more reliable system that’s got much greater capabilities. It might be manned, or it might not be manned – but the shuttle as it exists doesn’t appear to justify either the cost or the safety risk.
I’m mortified about all the typos and a sourcing error that got into my post above.
“Report” should read “reporter” and SF Examiner should be SF Chronicle — du-uh!
My only excuse is that I was at work (newspaper production), copytasting for shuttle story material by extensive web-searching, and didn’t have a lot of time to post.
BTW, a second (pro) astronomer, Anthony Beasley, was also watching, at an observatory north of Los Angeles and reported seeing objects already flying off the shuttle and trailing it which he surmised might well be tiles. This appears to underline your comment about the other California report http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2003/02/02/1044122251986.html
Dave: Certainly forgiven. I too have been less careful with my re-readings and double checks than usual. I’ve just been rushing to get information and thoughts up as quickly as possible. Some of these posts went directly up from first type in with only a cursory double check for howlers.
And don’t forget the first hand report by Doug Jones in one of the comments here: he saw something separate from where he was watching outside XCOR at the Mojave Civilian Test Flight Facility. That’s perhaps 100 km inland from the Pacific Ocean in California.
BTW: I hope my commentary was of some help to you. The NASA guys who really know the vehicle inside out are too busy to talk and would risk being taking as “official spokespersons” if they did, so external engineers who have followed the program for 25 years like myself and Rand and a few others are probably the next best thing you can find.
Just don’t take anything I say as gospel. It’s informed opinion. 🙂
Apropos that Buzz Aldrin anecdote that Dale excerpted from Noonan’s piece, I’m reminded that he’s the same Buzz Aldrin that very competently punched an obnoxious television reporter some months ago. I really like Aldrin.