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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I have been informed that Majel Barrett Roddenberry has died. She is best known to many as Nurse Chapel aboard the original Starship Enterprise. Despite being a major celebrity, she was perfectly at ease joining the rest of us in the hospitality suites until all hours of the night.
Somewhere I have a photo of her behind the suite’s ‘bar’ counter chatting with Buzz Aldrin, Lori Garver and another close friend of mine, Beverly Freed at once of our International Space Development Conferences.
She and her husband Gene Roddenberry, who died in the early 1990’s, were strong supporters of the National Space Society’s goal of a solar system wide human civilization.
Here are a few links to photos of Majel I took at the 1993 ISDC in Huntsville, Alabama.
Majel accepting posthumous award on behalf of Gene Roddenberry.
Majel accepting posthumous award on behalf of Gene Roddenberry
Majel with Lori Garver (currently member of the Obama transition team for space policy)
Majel with Buzz Aldrin
Meanwhile, the band played on… Home on Lagrange anyone?
Note: the dates on the files are the dates on which the rolls were developed, not the dates they were taken. Photos were scanned from prints and thus the quality is not wonderful.
Not much information yet but a Marine fighter is down in a residential area on the approach to Miramar. No fatalities reported so far: the pilot ejected and there are no reports of deaths on the ground.
That might well change but I hope the worst result is only a destroyed home.
Unless things have changed since 1978 when I was doing a building automation system for them, the County of San Diego has its main building complex just off the end of one of the runways at Miramar, so one would presume services were quite rapidly on the scene.
It’s definite. No casualties.
Later reports indicate the early good news was wrong, sadly. There may have been three casualties on the ground.
Jane’s reports the following:
Thales aims directed-energy weapon at ground, naval applications. Thales Air Systems Division is working on a joint development project with the Ecole Polytechnique engineering school in Orsay, France, to develop a directed-energy weapon (DEW) for ground and naval applications. Project Director Philippe Antier of Weapon Systems, Thales Air Systems Division, told Jane’s that the aim of the project is to provide a capability against missiles, aircraft and unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) to a range of up to 10 km as a complement to very-short-range air-defence (VSHORAD) systems, with the goal of having the system operational by 2015
When it is steam boat time, you steam…
It is a strange old world. About 2 weeks ago I was on a flight from Huntsville, Alabama, where I took part in the National Space Society board meeting, back to Washington, DC where I had some consulting work lined up. As I and two other board members walked to the luggage retrieval area, I commented that if someone had told me twenty years ago I would find three people from my address book on a Presidential Transition Team I would have thought them crazy.
One compatriot said, “You know what that means don’t you?”
“No”, was my puzzled answer.
“You’re now a genuine Washington Insider”, he replied.
I did know one of the Bush 2000 space transition team really well and a second shared many contacts with me. This time around is different. I find it very strange to find people I have known for decades and in two cases worked with for years, in actual position to define space policy for the next four to eight years.
The good news is, they are all good people who are both aware of New Space and who wish it to succeed. At least two of them have tried to work angles to get their own private sector trips into space. What I do not know is how much real influence they will have on globally important issues. I know for a fact all of them are aware of the disaster that is ‘ITAR’, a regime whose purported purpose was to prevent transfer of weapons related knowledge and hardware and whose actual, unintended consequence, has been the creation of competitive non-US space industries. Niches, whether biological or market, will be filled and all the State’s horses and all the State’s men working together can do nought but delay that inevitability.
With Hillary Clinton in State, there is a personal channel of communication available for this issue from within the transition team membership. I very much hope they use it.
SpaceX tested the Falcon 9 a few days ago, November 22nd, on their giant test stand in McGregor Texas. I have reported previously as SpaceX increased the numbers of engines by a few at a time each test and am happy to report they have now succeeded in firing the nine Merlin engines in a sequence and for a period of time identical to that of a real mission.
Nine engines fired for 160 seconds; two were then shutdown and the remaining seven burned until the 178 second mark. The two engine shutdowns are done in the later stages of flight when much of the fuel mass has been burned off and the ‘G forces’ climb. This spare ‘oomph’ means a Falcon 9 can lose two engines and still reach the required orbit.
The stage developed 855,000 pounds of thrust at sea level. This will increase to about 1 million in vacuum. The Falcon 9 is not a little rocket.
A first flight attempt is expected from their Cape Canaveral pad during the first half of the coming year. I am not betting on a successful first flight, although it is a possibility. While the Merlin is now a fairly well understood engine, there are complex dynamic interactions between engines when you fly with more than one. I am sure Elon’s team has modeled and tested to the best of their ability, but simulations and ground tests are still ‘theory’ relative to real live flight.
I have no doubts whatever that the SpaceX team will have Falcon 9 flying for hire within the next two years.
You can watch the test here
I am sure most of our readers are not amongst those who can write checks for $200,000 to fly Virgin Galactic a few years from now. The first will be ‘high flyers’ of the sort who always subsidize new market frontiers. They will pay the high price to be early adopters and by doing so they will generate the capital required to lower costs as companies begin to fight for market share. That is capitalism at work and it is just the way we like it.
Markets have a certain ponderous inevitability. They take time. If you have neither the money nor the desire to wait twenty years, there is another option.
At this point I must stop a moment and note that I am on the Board of Directors of the National Space Society (NSS) and have been part of the space activist cadre since Adam first looked up and dreamed of giant space colonies at Lagrange 5. So I really want lots of folk to look at this competition and join in.
This is not a lottery of any kind. The NSS and Virgin Galactic have worked together to make it possible for one person to earn their way onto a SpaceShipTwo flight near the end of the decade. All you have to do is join NSS and work your butt off in the community promoting the future of humans in space. The person who is judged to have done this most successfully will be selected as our Space Ambassador. They will be expected to work even harder at this task upon their return to terra firma.
I will not be signing up myself as I am hoping I will find other ways to earn my way off planet. The point of this initiative is to let folk like you believe you can turn your dreams into reality.
Ad Astra… and next year in L5!
The people at ISRO, the Indian Space Research Organization, have scheduled their first lunar probe for October 22nd.
You can read the Times of India and The Hindu for more information.
I sometimes wonder if we will see a second ‘Race To The Moon’, this time betwixt India and China for pretty much the same reasons as the first. If so, I hope to be sitting in the lounge watching the news with a Guinness in hand after flying Virgin Galactic to the Bigelow Luna.
Speaking of tourism… Richard Garriot flies to the space station today. There is no bar there, but hopefully the Russians keep a little stash of vodka for ‘medicinal purposes’.
Richard’s aunch occurred successfully at 3am EDT. Docking will happen Tuesday and there will be live coverage on NASA Select starting at 0530 EDT.
Richard Garriot, son of Skylab astronaut Owen Garriot, will leave Kazakhstan for the International Space Station on Sunday, October 12. He is also going to be a bit creative with his sojourn:
Inspired by his artist mother, Richard will be hosting an art show in space. The show will incorporate art created by his mother, by sculptors, art submitted by artists through a competition and also art that Richard will create during his time in space. After Richard’s mission, the art will be put up for auction to benefit the Challenger Center.
You can find out more here.
Over the last week I kept running across articles and video about a heavy weight couple who lost weight after the embarrassment of being asked to move to a different seat so the airplane could take off safely. On one Fox News show the talking heads went on about the times they were asked to move. None of them were particularly large so they talked overly long about how a jumbo jet could be unsafe to fly because a mere wisp of a talking headess was in the wrong seat.
This riled me a bit and has been roiling about in the back of my mind for some days. The people who write or talk about these things are supposedly educated, but the level of ignorance shown makes me very worried about what schools are actually requiring students to learn, even at the university level.
In hopes some of these ignorant but otherwise intelligent folk happen to drop by Samizdata, I will provide a bit of a remedial lesson in basic physics and a bit on aeroplanes as well.
I am hoping everyone is at least familiar with what a lever is, or at the very least a childhood teeter-totter. If two children sit on a board on opposite ends, they can find a balance point regardless of how fat or skinny the two are. One can move closer to the fulcrum, the thing upon which the board rests, or farther away. A child of a given weight at a given distance from the fulcrum creates what is known as a torque. The two children can balance these torques: Mass of child 1 times distance from fulcrum = Mass of child 2 times distance from fulcrum. In more typical notation: m1 * d1 = m2 * d2.
If you understand a teeter-totter, you can understand everything else I have to say.
An aeroplane has a number of points that are of interest. The most important to this discussion are the ‘center of lift’ and the ‘center of gravity’. If you had a very hefty jack and the underside of your 747 could handle it without a requirement for body work afterwards, a single point at which the aircraft could balance like a toy on a pencil is the center of gravity. This is just like the balance point of the children, but with the entire class and their teddy bears instead.
The fulcrum is the center of lift. This is a balance point created by the airflow over the surfaces of the plane in flight. Ideally, and in the simple case, the center of lift should be near the center of mass and both should be on the center line of the aeroplane. If one wing were longer than the other, the center of lift would shift away from the center line. This would not be a good thing unless you are Burt Rutan and know how to do tricky things which no normal mortal would think of doing.
In practice it is impossible to get the two exactly together. If the center of lift is forward of the cg the airplane will want to pitch up. If it is aft of the cg it will try to pitch down. Similarly if it is to the right or left of the cg. the airplane will want to roll right or left.
You can control the attitude of the aeroplane by neutralizing these forces. If you have a pitch up tendency, you dial in a bit of pitch down on the elevator trim tabs. Likewise for the other directions. In worst case you can use the control column and use deflection of the elevator or ailerons themselves to counteract the problem. It is not wise to fly like this under normal circumstances. If you run out of trim you have either not done your weight and balance papers properly or you are flying a Lancaster to Europe in WWII with a max bomb and fuel load and expect you are going to die anyway.
Airplanes have a bunch of numbers which pilots have to know. Among them are the ‘aft cg limit’ and the ‘forward cg limit’. Basically these mean you are too tail heavy or nose heavy to fly with enough of a safety margin to deal with the unexpected. They are not absolute limits. You are not going to reach the ‘my god we are all going to die!’ limit unless everyone piles into the tail and the pilot can not keep the nose down even with full downward elevator deflection.
Inside the cabin the pilot has readings off the landing gear that tell him what the weight and balance looks like after all the luggage, consumables and passengers are on board. If those indicators show the aeroplane is approaching the aft limit he or she will have a flight attendant pick someone from far aft and move them as far forward as possible.
That is all this whole storm in a teacup story was about. It is standard aviation practice that goes back to the first time Wilbur took Orville along with him.
I just received this note in private email from a fellow board member of the National Space Society:
For those who haven’t been on a news site or station in the last few hours, a small asteroid that was discovered *this morning* is going to enter the atmosphere over the Sudan at 10:46 PM EDT. Estimated size is in the 10 ft
range. It is not expected to reach the surface, but it *is* expected to create a 1 kiloton fireball. Should be visible from northern Africa and possibly southern Europe, so there might be a chance of live video on one of
the major outlets. Interestingly, I am having trouble getting into spaceweather.com and space.com, so it looks like people are paying some attention. – JP
So if you are one of our readers who happens to be well to the south in Europe, please do report back if you see anything a couple hours from now. I will be watching for videos to show up in blogs and the big outlets.
We can all be very, very happy it is only a couple meters in diameter…. this time.
Note: The email seemed to indicate today; the only article I have found elsewhere so far seems to indicate last night. I am still looking…
Rand Simberg is live blogging the conference in Lake Buena Vista and from his initial description it sounds like all the players are there.
It is really not too difficult to understand why the military would find the idea of beaming power from space to a front line post a more appealing solution to energy requirements than driving trucks loaded with petrol hundreds of miles through ambush country.
Power from space starts to sound cheap when compared to a cost of as high as $200 per gallon for gasoline pumped into your Hummvee on the battlefield.
The launch live webcast link is here..
2322. This could be an interesting evening. As you know, the third launch failed at staging. It was quickly determined that the cause of this was a ‘burp’ from the Merlin engine after shutdown. There is some fuel and oxidizer left in the system when the engine shuts down, and in a regen engine there will be a bit more because the oxidizer is warmed and the nozzle cooled by running it through tubes around the outside of the bell. When they checked test data they found this had actually occurred in a ground test but the transient was ‘down in the weeds’ at sea level pressure and had not been noticed as it was perhaps only a tenth of an atmosphere of pressure and thus hidden in the 1.0 sea level pressure. At high altitude the ambient was near zero so the burp was significant. What happened then, was that after a perfect first stage burn and a flawless staging… the engine burped perhaps 2 seconds after sep and was enough to cause the first stage to ram the second stage just as it was ready to fire.
For flight four they have raised the delay from first stage cutoff to stage separation from 3 second to 5 seconds to account for this. There were no other flight anomalies of any significance on flight 3; flight 2 with the earlier Merlin regen engine has successfully staged and fired the Kestrel engine almost to second stage cut off so I am hopeful we will see a successful orbital insertion today.
2349. Fueling is in progress and near completion, or at least as near as they will go this early. The final top off will not occur until later in the launch. I am wondering if this might be partly to prevent the RP1 (kerosene) from chilling down as much as it did on a previous flight. Ah, the webcast has just now gone live.
0011. They are into the terminal count but they have been giving us loads of talking head chatter instead of the interesting stuff. I’d much rather listen to the real internal loop than people assigned to interpret to us. There is in any case only about 5 minutes to go.
0013. As you can see if you are watching the video, the tower is retracted, and we are now hearing the real control loop. 2:30 to go! Launch director gave a green, range is green, about 1 minute to go!
0018. She’s going up and looking great so far! Max Q… first stage going great. Getting close to time for pitch over and MECO.
0021. Second stage is burning beautifully!!!!!! There is no roll problem this time. Now we wait 4 minutes as she goes down range.
0022. No sign of roll anomalies like on flight 2. The slosh baffles are doing their job. 315 km high now…
0024. Almost there… the bell glows red hot but it is built for that. We now have lost signal, probably due to range.
We are waiting now for whether we got the orbital insertion…. and…. THEY HAVE DONE IT!!!!!!
0043. They are in orbit with their dummy satellite. The only things we need to hear now is whether they get a successful recovery of the 1st stage from the Pacific. It should have come down on parachutes but I don’t expect I will hear about that until ‘tomorrow’. I feel a bit like Elon… I hardly know what to say. I must admit that I was here screaming like the SpaceX employees and I now feel just limp, tired and very, very happy. So… another Falcon 1 launch latter this year and then on to the much larger Falcon 9 next year!
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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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