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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 ran across this interesting tit-bit today:
US probably used classified helo in Bin Laden operation
The US military may have operated a hitherto undisclosed classified helicopter type in its recent raid on Osama bin Laden’s compound in Pakistan. Images of the wreckage of a helicopter that reportedly crashed during the operation, apparently due to an undisclosed technical malfunction, do not conform to any types that are known to be in service with the US military or in development
This was in a Jane’s newsletter teaser so this is the total information I have available at this moment. Has anyone else heard any interesting rumors?
In light of the recent killing of OBL and the use by the military of drones and other surveillance gizmos to track down where the villain was hiding out, it is worth noting that these pilot-less aircraft are not just in the hands of military people. You can get some pretty sophisticated ones via the regular commercial market, a fact that is both beguiling for aviation enthusiasts and modellists, and presumably, a bit of a concern for the military who want to keep the airspace all to itself.
Chris Anderson, head honcho at Wired, the techno magazine, has his own website devoted to the whole business of building and using the things. Anderson, of course, is also author of The Long Tail, one of those books that I need to read again.
On a related theme regarding drones, robots and high-tech in war and defence, here is another reference to a book by PW Singer, that I blogged about the other day in a piece about sea piracy.
Aerospace America, a publication of the AIAA, had a number of interesting items this month.
After 20 years of manoeuvring by corrupt politicians and lobbyists, none of whom gave a damn about the country, we finally have a solid contract out for a new aircraft refuelling fleet. The existing fleet is mostly based on the Boeing 707 of the 1950’s…
The NanoSail D2 payload, which failed to deploy in November… suddenly deployed. Needless to say the engineers involved are rather ecstatic. Now we will get some data back on using solar sails in space. It is about time.
An old friend of mine, Scott Pace, now director of the GWU Space Policy Institute argued the Republican Space Socialist line in an interview. From another source (Rand Simberg) I have heard that another old friend, Jim Muncy, who is a long time Republican Conservative spoke of how the role reversal of the parties on capitalist space development caused his head to explode. Jim started off his career working for Newt Gingrich as a staffer and in the Reagan White House under Presidential Science Advisor George Keyworth.
Another item mentioned as an aside that the vaunted Chinese high speed rail system was thrown together by using substandard rail bedding on long stretches which will now have a very limited lifetime. Left unsaid is that this will probably lead to some very spectacular crashes and mass casualties followed by show trials of the people who were pushed to complete their state assigned quotas…
From other news sources: a company in Mojave has come up with a replacement for Hydrazine that is 5% the cost, so nontoxic you can pour it on the ground and I believe even has a better ISP… Look Ma, no bunny suits!
For those of you who did not watch it, or possibly for some of those who did but are not familiar with the issues, Elon has just blown the launch industry as we know it to smithereens.
Falcon Heavy is bigger than I thought. It is 53 metric tons to LEO, for about $100M per launch. Elon expects to fire off 10 Heavy’s and 10 F9’s per year from Cape Canaveral by mid decade, but can hold the price per pound on an FH to $1000/pound at as low a rate as 4 FH/year. They will be launching twice the payload for one third the cost of the largest commercial rockets presently available (the Delta 4 for example).
SpaceX is currently producing 50-60 Merlin engines per year, which is more than all other engines built in the US per year; when they are flying the new rocket they will be producing 400 of a more capabile Merlin 1d per year, which will be more than all other engines produced on the planet.
The rocket is designed to exceed all current NASA standards for man-rating, with 40% margin above expected flight loads. They will have the capability to launch a Dragon capsule on a lunar loop mission with a single FH. The Dragon capsule will be deep space capable so they are a long way towards taking over the exploration of space from the fossil-space industry.
The first launch will occur perhaps in 2013 (I had trouble hearing him) with no customer satellite, although someone might come forward later to take a cut rate flight.
These are heady and exciting times we live in.
SpaceX is announcing today that they will be building the next larger vehicle after the Falcon 9, a Falcon Heavy with a lift of about 32 metric tons to low orbit and the ability to put most commercial communications sats into geosynchronous orbit. This puts them into the lift capacity range of the current top end Delta, Atlas and Ariane vehicles and at a price of $96M will have a rather significant impact on the current marketplace.
I have heard unsubstantiated rumors (I have not had time to dig further yet) that SpaceX may already have a customer signed up. We will all know shortly as the official press conference will be streamed live at 11:20am Eastern Time.
This comes hot on the heels of one of the most incompetent reports (from Aerospace Corp) to hit the aerospace sector in a long time. The report claims that private commercial space will be more expensive than government programs and does so by using a model that is so divorced from reality that one wonders what they were smoking and where you can buy some.
Note: The Aerospace report is demolished here if you are interested.
ED: The Aerospace document seems to have been pulled. If anyone can find it again, the title is: “The Financial Feasibility and a Reliability Based Acquisition Approach for Commercial Crew – Presentation to Administrator Bolden”, John Skratt, The Aerospace Corporation. Perhaps it became too much of an embarrassment…
ED: I have a copy of the Aerospace document for you now.
I have for many years used Continental Airlines for most of my travel as I have found them reasonable and relatively easy to deal with. They always worked with me to solve problems and I never had any complaints about their service. I was a bit worried when United merged but at first it did not seem to cause any problems.
Now, the penny has dropped. I have been extending my travel here in the US and have changed the return date 6 times. Suddenly they have decided my ticket is ‘not changeable’ and the 6 people who have done so in the past ‘were in error’. I actually do not believe this is the case. What I believe has happened is that the unfriendly skies have now taken hold and these people are totally bureaucratic and have no concept of working with their customers.
This does not bode well for the merged company. If they can leave a long time, loyal customer stranded, I suspect they are going to make many, many enemies amongst their potential customer base.
If I had their stock right now, I’d sell.
This is not going to be your usual Samizdata article, if there is indeed any thing usual about articles on Samizdata. However, I strongly suspect his will be the first mission study ever published here, and I should know since I am responsible for most of the space blather around these parts.
I recently got my hands on an interesting NASA study for a deep space manned spaceship called the Nautilus. The more I have thought about the concepts behind the power points, the more excited I have become as to the possibilities… for a private Mars mission.
The NASA design study is interesting because if I were a many times over billionaire or consortium of billionaires, I could buy the majority of the vehicle today using hardware that is flight tested or is an incremental advance on such commercial goods. Nearly everything else one would need will be in that category by the end of the decade, with the exception of two important components. More on that later.
The Nautilus Deep space ship concept.
Image: NASA
To build this for a reasonable price we must avoid R&D where ever possible; we must avoid shaving pounds or adding efficiency or elegance for the sake of doing so. Given that criteria, I want to buy:
- A keel made out of one or more ISS truss segments. The only changes are the number and location of various attachment points.
- A set of Bigelow Aerospace Habs used for cargo holds lining the keel.
- A rotating joint good for many years of operation in vacuum.
- A rather largish ion engine with its fuel tanks and plumbing.
- A toroidal habitation module made out of specially designed Bigelow Habs.
- A Masten Aerospace or Armadillo Aerospace lander for Mars orbit operations.
→ Continue reading: Mars needs Billionaires
Many congrats to the samizdatista;s at XCOR Aerospace on their new contract. They have been quite busy selling the Lynx suborbital space-plane, what with the wet leasing offers and the KLM frequent flyer miles deal. A sale of 6 flights to Southwest Research Institute is definitely a good start to a hopefully long and profitable life for the Lynx line.
So come on guys, please don’t stick me on that test flight! I know you should make me prove I trusted the numbers that came out of that simulation code! Please don toss me in that briar patch Br’er Greason! 😉
We have a fair number of aviation and photography enthusiasts at this blog and readership, so here is a nice little “two for the price of one”, courtesy of that haven of wackiness, Boing Boing.
“If you wanted to fly and there were no supervisory authority in the airline industry and no regulations enforcing safety standards, you would be very reluctant to fly fledgling airlines. You would prefer the established ones that had the track record and the reputation. So a complete lack of safety regulations in the airline industry would favour established firms, making the entry of new ones impossible and killing competition and consumer choice.”
Raghuram G. Rajan and Luigi Zingales, from page X (in the Roman numeral segment) of “Saving Capitalism from the Capitalists.” Published in 2003.
This is an interesting defence of government-imposed safety standards. I am not wholly convinced by this line of argument; it is, for sure, an interesting way of trying to show how government regulation actually stimulates rather than restricts entry into a particular line of business.
My take is that if a fledgling airline, say “Ultra-Cheap Airlines Inc.,” can persuade investors and others to get it started in business with a few aircraft and so on, then the staff on the aircraft – such as the pilots – will not set foot into an aircraft if they fear that safety has been compromised, or if the aircraft are poorly maintained. Pilots are not usually self-destructive, as far as I can tell. In fact, a debutant airline business would bend over backwards to show customers that it had set high standards, get consumer watchdog organisations and other certification providers to give it a “seal of approval”. What the authors of the quote don’t seem to understand is how the “established” airlines got to be in that positions in the first place. Presumably, they had to start by persuading a highly nervous customer base that flight was safe, or at least, not lethal.
And of course, if the standards imposed by regulators are particularly onerous, then it is hard to see how a small business operating a few aircraft could afford to compete with the big boys. Regulations are a form of barrier to entry, much in the same way that extensive licensing of doctors is designed, quite deliberately, to regulate the number of people working as physicians.
This book is generally pretty good, however; it is interesting to read this book alongside the Martin Hutchinson/Kevin Dowd book about financial markets that I quoted the other day.
We are in to the last half hour of the countdown for flight two. This time there is a real Dragon capsule, a vehicle which will be tested in orbit and then put through a re-entry, the first to be done by a private venture. This is a difficult sequence and even partial success is a major step forward. It is the second flight of a designed from the ground up launch vehicle; the first flight of a pressurized capsule that will someday be manned; and the first re-entry and recovery for the capsule.
It is a lot to accomplish and I will be reporting on what I see.
0854: The are proceeding to terminal count with no holds. Terminal count is when all of the interesting things happen. Preumably they have polled all of the key people for launch go. Terminal count will start in 1 minutes at t-10 min.
0856. Terminal automatic sequence is running…
0859. T-7. Chill down progressing. All going well.
0900. Chill down complete.
0903. The rocket is in terminal account. They have gone to a terminal count abort. They are safing it now.
0904. This is not unusual. The engineers will check out the reason for the abort and possibly correct it within this launch window or delay until later today. They have several possible windows today. They will probably recycle to at least t -10 if things can be cleared. Second launch window will be the next option.
0915. The time has recycled to t-13. No word yet as to the reason for the abort. Could be just a minor item that is out of bounds or a too tight constraint. This happens nearly every time. They detect things on their rocket that I doubt anyone else does and have an automation level that is far beyond the competition.
0920. The next open slot is 10:36 to 10:45 Eastern time. That is 15:36 to 15:45 UTC (GMT). No word from the engineers yet.
0934. Back channel info is that it was a problem with the range telemetry and they are fairly sure they know the source of the problem. They had a similar issue on Flight 1, although I do not have enough information to say whether it is exactly the same issue or not. Everyone is currently showing a retry in the next slot, although nothing official has come out yet.
0936: It is official. Retry in about an hour. Sounds like it was a problem in the link to the ordinance on board. Whether that was destruct or other is not clear to me yet.
0948. Okay, they’ve given detail publicly now. It was a false abort on the telemetry monitoring the self destruct explosives. A correction has been made to their database and they will proceed with the countdown at the next TDRSS (Tracking and Data Relay Satellite System) window in a bit under one hour.
1022. They are polling the net prior to restarting the count. at t-13.
1033. Polling for restart of terminal count… everything looking good so far. Prechill in progress.
1038, Chill down complete, Now they go to internal power in preparation for lowering the umbilical tower…
1052. Dragon is in orbit!
1054. My post mortem. The launch was nearly flawless. They have definitely got their control equations down pat this time as the roll attitude was rock steady from lift off through orbital insertion. Staging was perfect. No sign of any impingement of the separating 1st stage with the 2nd stage engine. The have again demonstrated capabilities that I do not believe anyone else has, with their automated sequencing, their ability to detect and abort on problems and then to analyze and retry without weeping and wailing and burning of midnight oil. The one day delay from Tuesday to today was due to a factor that would have scrubbed other vehicles for days if not longer. That delay was due to cracks in the expander extension. They simply removed it for this flight. When a rocket goes upwards the external pressure falls to zero and changes the way the jet expands. For vacuum operations you need a longer expansion nozzle to extract the most energy out of the hot gases. For this flight they did not need that wee bit extra so they did without it.
The Dragon capsule is now due to orbit the Earth 2-3 times before they do the re-entry. I will keep my ears open for the results. I am also going to be listening to find out of the first stage comes down in a recoverable condition this time. It is Elon’s long term goal to be able to recycle stages to bring costs down even further but so far there has been little success there. They will get to it… it is far less important than the goals they have reached.
All in all, this has been a very good day for commercial space.
1216. A little bit more post mortem. One glitch that has been noted, not a particularly big one and one that happens on other rockets as well, was a bit of a fireball from the umbilical during liftoff. This was caused by drainage of fuel left in the hoses. Some thought it was a pretty good size fireball. It would not be notable except that this is only the second flight so everyone was a bit nervous about anomalies. The Dragon capsule is in orbit and is exercising its Draco thrusters and being put through its paces. Re-entry will be in 2-3 hours, somewhere off the coast of Mexico I believe. There have been no reports yet on the splash down of the first stage. Telemetry on it lasted fairly long this time so it may have remained intact through its re-entry this time. I’ll pass on anything else I pick up over the next few hours. Personally, I think I’m going to go out and celebrate with a large coffee.
1402. I’m just back from a coffee and doing a bit of obligatory work… while I was away the capsule re-entered and parachuted into the Pacific. All flight parameters were nominal for human space flight. The only item still to be ticked off is the recovery of the first stage from the Atlantic. I have seen nothing yet as to whether it survived its return. I will let you know when I find out. The new age has dawned. Private manned orbital activity is now possible although a couple years away. SpaceX is running an aggressive but prudent test program and will not fly people until the F9 is a few more flights up the learning curve. They may also (for NASA use) be required to use an rocket escape tower on the capsule.
1443. What with all the excitement due to the main event, I completely forgot to mention that they *also* released several small payloads, ‘CubeSats’ for paying customers. So this was not only an Engineering test, it was also a commercial (although high risk) flight.
1507. I am still catching up with things. Just to let you know: the capsule was on floats within 35 minutes of the drogue chute deployment. That tells you the re-entry was right on target. Great work SpaceX!
Dragon Capsule after splashdown in the Pacific.
Photo: rcvd by Gwyne Shotwell’s mobile phone from the Pacific, with thanks to SpaceX
1545. Elon Musk just announced another surprise. After separation from the capsule, they relit the 2nd stage engine and sent it into an orbit with an 11,000 km apogee. Now is that cool or what?!! Elon has also said that in the future the Dragon capsule will land propulsively and be ready for turn around and re-use. The heat shield was barely touched… it was designed to handle lunar and martian return re-entries. They have confirmed that it would take the worst case… as an alternative to the Orion. Unconfirmed: Gwynne Shotwell says the landing was within 800m of the target point.
1600. Elon has said that NASA said if all went well, the next flight might be allowed to do prox-ops at the space station. Everything went smashingly on this flight, so there is a high probability the next Dragon will go to ISS. First stage re-entry gave them a lot of data, but was not successful. Elons says it will come eventually… this is a long term goal that they are approaching incrementally. No one has ever done it before with a liquid first stage. It might take 2-3 years to beat this one down.
1608. If you are on line right now, you can watch the press conference here
1658. The Press conference is over and I am about to call it a day on this live blog and attempt to do some work. There is one other item that Elon stated which has to be repeated. The Dragon capsule has nearly the same volume as the Orion capsule. Dragon has a heat shield which can survive a Mars return re-entry, which Orion cannot. It is probably a more capable spacecraft than Orion. It costs far less and has sucked up a fraction of the cost of the Orion thus far. And now, to top it off, Dragon has flown and landed. Orion is still on the ground. Enough said?
Viva la capitalism!
With that, I bid you all a good night… and that’s the way it was… Wednesday the Eighth of December, two thousand and ten.
The MD-11, a derivative of the DC-10, first flew in revenue service a mere 20 years ago, making it just middle-aged by aircraft standards. However, KLM’s birds are included on this list because they’re the only three-engined jets currently operating in scheduled transoceanic passenger service — with the exception of an occasional Qantas A380.
This delightfully catty witticism nicely rounded off an interesting Wired presentation: Fly Away on These 10 Classic Airliners
I always thought the A380 a hideous gargoyle of a plane. And Qantas is a pretty rubbish airline these days. So have at ’em both, I say.
(H/t: Instapundit)
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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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