Samizdata

What with islamic snipers, bombers and hostage takers, I never did get around to this story while it was current.

It seems the recent ground based anti-ballistic missile test was quite successful. Keep in mind this test series is an engineering effort and not testing of a product to be deployed. I point this out because most journalists I read don’t know the difference nor understand that bugs, glitches, failures, mistakes and blowing things up spectacularly are all part of everyday engineering R&D.

I must admit my own most spectacular glitch was not in the same league as these lads can accomplish. My “best effort” caused a dump of a fifty thousand gallon water deluge into a helicopter hanger outside Denver late one night in 1976. Well… it probably does rate well up the engineering test bug Richter scale. Fortunately for my career and possibility of future procreation, no helo’s were in at the time.

But that’s life in the world of engineering. “The thrill of victory and the agony of defeat”, along with a good healthy dose of the totally unexpected.

The Space Elevator concept is one I’ve always found to be of interest, but which I personally placed at least a century or more in the future. I remember many fun discussions in the early days of the sci.space netnews group; in which calculations of exponential tapers, masses and tensile strength tables were batted about gleefully. Carbon nanotubes were still in the future back then; and even in later discussions we all considered mass production of real fibres to be very far off.

Well, sometimes even those of us who have one foot in the next decade are too pessimistic. A company, High Lift Systems, has been formed to work on a near term design. Advances in production of carbon nanotubes have (mostly) solved the last basic problem. We will soon be able to build sufficient quantities of sufficiently strong material to actually build one.

Of course there is that one little detail of raising $10 billion dollars in the capital markets…

Armadillo Aerospace has finally let one of it’s team fly on their testbed. Although the flight was a tethered one of short duration and trivial height, it encompassed all the dangerous bits of engine startup, liftoff, hover, setdown and engine shutdown. Major kudos are due to John Carmack and his team! You can read more and find the video here.

In John’s own words:

We finally let someone ride on one of our landers. Only a few seconds in the air, but still pretty damn cool!

If the name John Carmack sounds familiar… it’s probably because it is. He is a founder of Id Software and the author of all those classic state-of-the-art pushing games from Castle Wolfenstein through Quake Arena and beyond.

I’ve just been reading a very long transcirpt of a DOD press briefing entitled “Gen. Kernan And Maj. Gen. Cash Discuss Millennium Challenge’s Lessons Learned“. It’s about the recent experiments in future warfighting methods, techniques, procedures, C-cubed and so forth. It’s a very long transcript. I woke abruptly from a deep alpha state when I read this comment by Cash:

And the big idea is, I want to be able to, as a concept developer, strike any target on the globe within 45 minutes from the time the president says, “Strike”. Forty-five minutes. That’s the big idea. Then I want to follow up that strike in 20 hours with a ground force. That’s the big idea.

Hands up for everyone who recognizes the significance of “45 mimutes”.

Objects in a Low Earth Orbit (LEO) do one full orbit every 90 minutes. The exact time varies with the orbital parameters, but this has been a rough number for human operations from the time of John Glenn to the time of the International Space Station. 45 minutes is one half an orbit, the time required to reach the antipodes from where you sit.

Maj General Chases’ requirement can only be fulfilled by a suborbital spacecraft or a space based weapon. Since these experiments were aimed at studying future warfighting capabilities and requirements, I would suggest he is thinking about a manned suborbital bomber. It is technically feasible in the near term and I personally know of at least one USAF guy who was pushing for the idea a decade ago. He left the service but that does not mean his ideas died.

It’s not that far out and there are those of us who think it might already exist in the very deep black world. More because it could and because it would be rather useful than because we “know” anything.

It just seems like such a bloody good idea.

What happens when a “we-didn’t-go-to-the-moon” moron calls an astronaut a liar? Yep. You got it in one. He gets decked… and that is exactly what happened when Bart Sibrel, an ignoramus, shoved a camera in Buzz Aldrin’s face.

One should remember Buzz is in his 70’s at the very least. So we have here a demonstration of what a lifetime of physical fitness can do. Mr Sibrel should consider himself lucky… had he done this twenty years or more ago, he would now be doing a richly deserved pretzel impression in an emergency room.

Congratulations to Buzz for giving Mr Sibrel his just deserts… and he’s definitely got my vote the next time he runs for the NSS board!

Buzz Aldrin chatting with members of National Space Society
at their 1992 conference in Washington, DC (photo: D.Amon)