MarsBlog.net

Keith Cowing has also opened a check-in topic at NASAWatch for Michoud and Stennis employees.

UPDATE: updated the NASAWatch URL.

Posted on August 31st, 2005 under Miscellaneous. Comments: 1

• Michoud Assembly Facility is now expected to reopen not earlier than September 26. Access to the facility is by helicopter only due to surrounding roadways being flooded. Spaceflight hardware does not appear to be damaged, beyond some water on one ET. MAF has no electrical power and communication is limited — maintaining the pumps may prove problematic if the water keeps coming up.
• Lockheed Martin now has a hurricane information page up.
• NASA has named Bill Parsons, former Stennis director and current Shuttle program director as their official in charge of the hurricane recovery efforts.
• The water is reportedly down in Metairie. Aaron Broussard announced that it may be possible to allow residents back in on a limited basis starting Monday, but only to gather belongings for a 1-2 month evacuation.
• Meanwhile, water was between 8-10 feet deep along St. Charles and rising.
• Slidell updates and check-ins are available at the aptly-named Slidell Hurricane Damage Blog.
• MSNBC has someone from the Corps of Engineers on, reporting another seven-hundred-foot long breach in a floodwall. He also says that it will take 2-4 days to plug the breaches once they figure out how (?) and perhaps months to drain the water from the city.

UPDATE:

• There’s new video out showing the 17th Street Canal breach. It took me a moment to recognize the area around the lake entry of the canal, but then it hit me — all those pilings in the water there used to be The Dock. That huge building and all of the restaurants around it are completely gone, but for the pilings. The pedestrian bridge nearby appeared to be intact. Coconut Beach is flooded (less, it seems, than the areas on the other side of the levee from it…oddly enough), the clubhouse was not visible and probably gone, and the tall garage structure behind it that someone used for restoring cars was missing its rollup doors and some of its siding.
• From the same footage, the difference in water levels from Jefferson to Orleans Parishes was striking — there didn’t seem to be all that much water on the Jefferson side of the canal at all.
• Jazzland is flooded, as are the low points of I-510 in the area. Kinda weird to see the up-close footage of it, considering how many times I’ve driven that stretch of road. The same for the overpasses on I-10 at Read and Bullard, where a number of people had gathered for rescue.
• Eddie Gabriel, the pianist at Pat O’s piano bar, is apparently missing.
• Police have been pulled off of search and rescue duty to control the looting downtown. I wonder how many people will end up dying because of this. Way to go, people. Hope the sneakers and stereos were worth it.
• The Causeway is apparently in good enough condition to support a train of school buses evacuation survivors from the area near Lakeside Mall. There are also buses loading downtown (near the Sheraton?) beginning the evacuation of the Superdome. The Twin Span, meanwhile, looks worse than in the few pictures I found of it yesterday — the flyover part on each span looked intact, but the rest of the spans were shredded to varying degrees.
• Oops, Ochsner is pronounced “OSH-ner” not “OKS-ner”. It’s apparently the only hospital still open in the city.

UPDATE:
Sheesh — this makes it sound like the area is descending into a Mad Max-like chaos, from Mandeville to Lafayette. Not good.

Posted on August 31st, 2005 under Miscellaneous. Comments Off

Looks like the Twin Span is not quite as “gone” as was reported this morning. Photos show otherwise intact segments of the northbound span shuffled in places like fallen dominoes, but the southbound span largely intact. Er…sort of. The deck is intact, but the integrally-cast concrete guardrails have been…removed? If you look closely at the photos, it looks like someone scraped the railings from the deck with a dull knife…the deck is flat all the way across now. How the heck could something that weird happen?

I haven’t seen any pictures yet, but I’ve heard that I-10 on the west side is in similar condition where it goes around the southwest side of the lake. The Causeway was described as intact, but damaged, and only open to emergency vehicles (naturally).

ADDENDUM: GAH. Olbermann just described the Twin Span as the “Causeway”.

ADDENDUM (Wednesday Morning): Just saw some new video showing the Bayou Sauvage area at the south end of the Twin Span. Flooded out, of course, but I’m surprised anything there is still standing at all considering where it is. The “castle”, in particular, is still standing. Jazzland is flooded out but there didn’t seem to be any obvious structural damage (collapsed rides, destroyed buildings, etc.) — it was a very short clip, though, so who knows. Getting closer to Michoud but still haven’t seen it.

One of the levee breaks appears to be in the canal at the Orleans-Jefferson line in Metairie, close to the lakefront, on the Orleans side. The bridge at the lake end of the canal appears to be blocked either with debris or with material being used to block the flow. Some of the new video includes a pass eastward along I-10 from the south side of the freeway, looking north. The watertower is still standing, the neighborhoods and the Vets area are of course flooded.

Miles O’Brien is now in Slidell, which is the first report I’ve seen from there. While the video shows some flooding and mud accumulation from receded water, Slidell doesn’t have the standing floodwater that New Orleans has, and appears to have more wind damage (broken limbs, downed power lines, trashed signs, peeled rooves) than water damage.

And now they’re back to the Superdome fixation. Why do they keep showing aerial shots of the Superdome? There’s nothing new to see there.

Here is the latest Michoud Assembly Facility status from NASA as of this afternoon (8-30-05):

MICHOUD ASSEMBLY FACILITY (MAF):
* No injuries reported at MAF
* First priority is to take care of the NASA families – civil service and contractors – affected by Hurricane Katrina. Assessing their needs and working to provide logistical support and resources
* Working with Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) through NASA HQ to support those affected by the storm
* Working to ensure the facility is protected – provide additional security support
* Limited transportation, communication in the area
* Preliminary damage assessment – roofs damaged, windows damaged, leaks, high-bay door damaged, power lines, down, trees/limbs in roadways.
* Five barges are stranded on top of levee along East Side of facility, some concrete cracks evident in levee.
* At this time it appears space flight hardware at the facility wasn’t damaged, however a preliminary damage assessment hasn’t been complete yet.
* MAF communications are getting better, but still far from normal. There may have been significant damage to the fiber network.
* MAF damage assessment will be started in earnest today. Ride out teams are tiring and must cope with thedevastation of their homes and family concerns.
* MAF will remain closed through at least Wednesday

I’m hearing that MAF is actually expecting to reopen next Tuesday, not the day after tomorrow. Which is equally laughable, given the inaccessibility of the site…not to mention any damage that might result from the still-rising weather.

Posted on August 30th, 2005 under Miscellaneous. Comments Off

For one of those countries among our alleged “betters” insofar as learning and historical perspective are concerned, the Germans seem to be forgetting something: Katrina Should be A Lesson To US on Global Warming

The toughest commentary of the day comes from Germany’s Environmental Minister, J?rgen Trittin, a Green Party member, who takes space in the Frankfurter Rundschau, a paper owned by the Social Democrats, to bash US President George W. Bush’s environmental laxity. He begins by likening the photos and videos of the hurricane stricken areas to scenes from a Roland Emmerich sci-fi film and insists that global warming and climate change are making it ever more likely that storms and floods will plague America and Europe…

The left-leaning Die Tageszeitung also delivers a punchy plea for more attention to global warming, saying politicians should pay more attention to Katrina’s alarming images than to election polls and economic forecasts. “Hurricane Katrina has delivered terrible photos. Experts are already calling it the worst hurricane of all time. But this year’s hurricane season has only just begun. Flooded villages, mud slides, sandbags….Scientists are quite calmly saying that we will see this kind of thing more often. After all, this is what they have been forecasting for years — climate change, human-caused and irreversible. But a change of policy is not in the cards. Politics is trapped between voters and industry lobbyists. And of course, there is the killer argument: Protecting the environment impedes economic growth.” This is not how it should be, the paper opines. Indeed, more “pictures from New Orleans should encourage us to follow science’s advice on climate protection.”…

“People will argue about the causes of climate change for a long time to come,” the paper writes. “But its effects are already reality. They are called Katrina, or the flood catastrophes in southern Germany, Romania, Switzerland and Austria….”

The S?ddeutsche Zeitung uses its feature page as a defacto editorial by focusing on the hurricane as its theme of the day. Among its articles, it cites a study by US hurricane expert Kerry Emanuel of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology that shows a rising tendency for hurricanes that exactly reflects the curve of greenhouse gases. German scientists from the Max-Planck Institute hail the study as the first proof of a real link. “If this man-made warming continues, we will have to expect stronger storms in future” Emmanuel tells the paper….

I saw some talking head from NASA on one of the news channels yesterday, showing some data on the warmth of the water in the Gulf over some recent span of time (not sure how far back), and illustrating in time lapse the elevated water temperatures this year. The elevated temperatures, he explained, fed the storm system, helping to turn Katrina from a smallish hurricane as it left Florida into a monster as it passed over the Gulf and inland over the Delta.

Which is similar to the descriptions of the circumstances of the Galveston Storm of 1900, an event of which the better-informed German eco-left is probably not aware. That hurricane, too, came as a surprise, during a hot summer in which unusually warm water temperatures were recorded in the Gulf.

Looking back in time to similarly catastrophic events which precede the bulk of the “greenhouse gas” emissions which eco-moralists seem to nowadays blame for every natural disaster which pops up would undermine their ability to pin the blame on human activities, of course, so I guess it shouldn’t be a surprise. Like the religious moralists who will certainly proclaim in the days to come that God Himself sent Katrina to punish the region for its embrace of gambling, boozing, lewd behavior, and homosexuality, there are sure to be those even in this country who will see in Katrina the retributive hand of Gaia or Mother Earth, punishing Man for his prodigious production of “greenhouse gases”, pursuit of economic growth and profit over “sustainability”, dependence on technology, alteration and exploitation of “natural” “ecosystems”, and a host of other green sins symbolized by the commercial and industrial activities of the area.

ADDENDUM: And of course, there will inevitably be sneering rebukes from some quarters over any plan to focus resources on getting oil production back up to pre-storm levels…”putting profit over people”, for example. Halliburton will no doubt be referenced.

But as Isaac Cline himself recorded less than three weeks after the storm which bears his name, such an ordering of priorities isn’t new, nor is it proof of some moral defect of modern society — it’s the forward-looking response of those determined to recover from the experience, repair the damage done, and move into the future:

The grain elevators which were full of grain suffered the smallest damage. Ships have resumed loading and work is being rushed day and night. The railroad bridges across the bay were washed away, but one of these has been repaired and direct rail communication with the outside world was established within eleven days after the disaster. Repairs and extensions of wharves are now being pushed forward with great rapidity. Notwithstanding the fact that the streets are not yet clean and dead bodies are being discovered daily among the drifted debris, the people appear to have confidence in the place and are determined to rebuild and reestablish themselves here. Galveston being one of the richest cities of its size in the United States, there is no question but that business will soon regain its normal condition and the city will grow and prosper as she did before the disaster. Cotton is now coming in by rail from different parts of the State and by barge from Houston. The wheels of commerce are already moving in a manner which gives assurance for the future. Improvements will be made stronger and more judiciously; for the past twenty-five years they have been made with the hurricane of 1875 in mind, but no one ever dreamed that the water would reach the height observed in the present case. The railroad bridges are to be built ten feet higher than they were before. The engineer of the Southern Pacific Company has informed me that they will construct their wharves so that they will withstand even such a hurricane as the one we have just experienced.

ADDENDUM: Moonbattery has an interesting set of graphs showing the number of hurricanes hitting the U.S. by decade. For all hurricane categories, the number has been below the historical average since 1951, and the number of major hurricanes (category 3-5) below the historical average since 1961. Was there that much global warming in the 1940s? I’m sure George W. Bush was to blame, somehow, despite being just a toddler at the time.

Posted on August 30th, 2005 under Miscellaneous. Comments: 2

Listened to Hugh Hewitt on the way home just now, struggling to pronounce New Orleans place names. As a public service, here are some of the names you may come across in the coming days or weeks and an approximation of the right way to pronounce them (keeping in mind that I was not native to New Orleans and had a vaguely Fargo-like accent when I moved there and learned these names):

• New Orleans: many locals say “NAWlins”, the other acceptable form is “n’wORlunz”.
• 9th Ward: “NEIT wauhd”
• Plaquemines: “plak-a-min” or “plak-a-minz”
• Tulane: “TOO-lane”
• Metarie: “METry” to hardcore locals, “MEDderie” to others
• Tchoupitoulas: “chop-a-TOO-luss”
• Mandeville: “MANDAville”
• Pontchartrain: “PONch’trane”
• Rigolets: “WRIGGLEeese”

Feel free to correct my pronunciations and suggest others in the comments.

Posted on August 30th, 2005 under Miscellaneous. Comments Off

Spent the last hour or so watching video of the storm damage in the New Orleans area.

Near as I could tell from the unfamiliar angle of the aerial shots:

• the Yacht Club was on fire — it’s pretty much a goner

• Lakeside was under ten-plus feet of water
• the Hyatt had lost a good portion of its glass facade
• the shiny white membrane installed on the Superdome for the 2002 Super Bowl had largely peeled off, along with at least two of the vent hood thingies ringing the apex of the dome
• Clearview Mall in Metairie got hammered, with the Veterans Blvd facade of the new Target store ripped apart and the parking lot a couple of feet deep in water
• what I think was Esplanade Mall near the I-10/Williams Blvd. interchange was under water
• there was a Fox reporter standing near what looked like the new pump heads along I-10 near the I-10/610 merge (which were, unfortunately, just barely breaking the surface due to being knocked out)
• the main tourist area of the French Quarter appears to have held up and didn’t appear to be flooded
• the racetrack clubhouse appears to have lost a good chunk of its roof
• MSNBC is really, really milking their inside footage of the Superdome leak

Strangely, despite ominous sounding descriptions of what CNN’s Jeanne Meserve had seen on a filming trip from which she had just returned, there hasn’t been any video coverage of New Orleans East, the 9th Ward, and St. Bernard Parish, the parts of the metro area which reportedly suffered the worst damage. Nor has there been any footage showing the Causeway or the Twin Span. From Meserve’s report, we’ll probably see new video tomorrow like that of the morning of September 12, when the smoke had cleared and the first clear footage of Ground Zero became available. She was convinced that there were hundreds of fatalities waiting to be uncovered, and reported seeing many bodies floating in the water.

As far as Michoud goes, Space.com reported this afternoon that MAF had suffered some roof damage and water intrusion, but that the facility was on onsite power and its pumps were up and running.

ADDENDUM (12:30am): Holy crap…apparently there is a two-block-long breach in the 17th Street Canal in Lakeside, allowing water from the lake to run down Canal Street with whitecaps. Unbelievable. Not good at all.

Water at Tulane University Hospital is rising at a rate of an inch every five minutes, They’re currently working with FEMA to arrange evacuation by air.

None of the news services have been out to Metarie, where I used to live.

CNN is showing video of looters cleaning out stores. Yeah, color me surprised.

ADDENDUM: Fox reports this morning that the Twin Spans are “gone”. Wow. But again, it’s not all that surprising considering they’re twenty feet above the water at the outlet (or in this case, sea entrance) of the lake. The older Highway 11 bridge and train bridge beside the Twin Spans are probably gone, too, as is the bridge at the Rigolets. I saw some video last night showing the High Rise and Downman lift bridge still standing. Something tells me the Causeway (if it is still intact) is going to be seeing a huge increase in traffic for the next year or two, as there is no other viable route from Slidell to New Orleans.

ADDENDUM: Then again, maybe there won’t be enough of Slidell left for commuting to be a concern. CNN is reporting that there has been no word out of Slidell yet, and that it apparently took a direct hit by the storm surge.

Posted on August 29th, 2005 under Miscellaneous. Comments Off

I had lunch last week with a group of my former Michoud coworkers in town on business, and of course the subject of “Tropical Wave 12″ came up. Nobody seemed particularly concerned about it…but then, who would have expected it to suddenly turn into a Category 5 hurricane with “New Orleans” written on it? Watching the weather coverage, I don’t see how this can not be a bad thing for New Orleans. In the six-plus years I lived there, there were a number of hurricanes which appeared to threaten the city, but then swerved into Biloxi or Gulfport at the last moment. This doesn’t look like one of those times. The only bright side in this is that Katrina is not coming from the east — conventional wisdom has it that a hurricane from the east will push the Gulf into Lake Ponchartrain and the lake into the city. Of course, when you’re looking up from twelve feet below sea level, it really makes little difference from which direction a Category 5 hurricane is coming at you…a slightly-less-major catastrophe is still a major catastrophe.

As far as space interests go, it bears reminding that New Orleans has an important role in the U.S. space program. Stennis Space Center is located in Harrison County, MS, about 40mi from NOLA and just inland from the Gulf coast, and is home to the bulk of this country’s liquid rocket engine testing facilities and part of Lockheed Martin’s commercial satellite manufacturing capacity, as well as part of the Navy’s meteorological service. The place to watch is Michoud Assembly Facility, where the Shuttle’s External Tanks are built (facility status can be found here). Michoud is behind levees on the Intercoastal Waterway, on swamp-reclaimed land. There are two new major welding fixtures for the ET, which are built into tension-pile pits in the floor roughly 20ft deep, in addition to partially-sunken fixtures for other ET and non-ET hardware. And then there is the irritating tendency (when I still worked there, anyway) of the rooves of the engineering buildings to leak like showerheads in heavy rain, saturating ceiling tiles until they burst over the desks below like water ballons full of wet kleenex (I learned not to stick around when everyone else started leaving ahead of a major rainstorm after an Indiana Jones-like episode of dodging exploding ceiling tiles while running down the second-floor hallway of Building 102).

Of particular sentimental concern is the booster (S1-C-15) parked in front of MAF. After watching the History Channel’s “Save Our History” episode on Apollo artifacts last night, and seeing the extreme corrosion restorers have discovered while working on the Saturn V at JSC — and recalling the corrosion already externally visible on the MAF booster in the intertank and interstage skirt — I have to wonder whether it can survive 150-175mph winds.

Looking at the Shuttle program, the six month delay in returning to return-to-flight, combined with the ten or so ETs currently in inventory, means there is enough cushion that even massive damage to Michoud will likely have little immediate effect on the Shuttle program, depending on how much RTF-prompted rework of tanks in inventory has to be done at MAF rather than KSC and how quickly the MAF VAB and final assembly cells can be restored. On the other hand, if the damage is severe enough (particularly in monetary terms), it may add political strength to the calls for early retirement of Shuttle — for example, if the cost of repairs to MAF to support a 2010 flyout ends up being dramatically out of line with the value of Orbiter flights beyond those for which tanks are currently available. As for the stack-derived heavy lifter, there has been talk for several years that the Boeing Delta facility in Decatur has at least the physical capacity (tool sizes, hook heights) to produce ET-sized tankage, so at least a potential alternative to MAF exists if NASA were to choose to close the plant altogether rather than repair it.

Aside from the effects on spaceflight, I’m curious to see how well River Ridge stands up to the flooding. I moved there from an area near MAF in New Orleans East in 1998 in part because it was one of the higher areas between the lake and the river (+12ft) — and even at that I moved to a second-floor apartment in 1999 after Hurricane Georges came just a little too close to the city for my comfort. But seeing as how Big Muddy is just down the street, I wonder how the place will fare in a 25ft storm surge and a couple of feet of rain.

Like the potential for Michoud to be closed due to excessive damage, I have to wonder what will be done about NOLA if it takes a direct hit. Will it be worth pumping out and rebuilding, given the city is already below sea level and sinking at a rate that will require major civil-engineering intervention (beyond the current levee system) in another thirty or forty years? It’s highly unlikely that a city as large as New Orleans or one with its long history would simply be abandoned, so what would rebuilding look like? If the city is deemed worth rebuilding, will it just be a haphazard restoration to something approximating the pre-storm conditions, or will the city take the opportunity to address the flooding and subsidence issues early (Netherlands-like sea barriers, raising whole areas of the city to above sea level, etc.) while everything in the city is already disrupted? And who will pay for the reconstruction? A category 5 hurricane hitting any U.S. city would be a hard thing for the insurance industry to swallow, and it can only be worse for New Orleans given its peculiar nature: below sea level, full of old and neglected buildings predating modern hurricane building codes, structures weakened by rot and termites, etc. I expect the fedgov is probably going to be picking up the bulk of the tab to rebuild the city.

New Orleans by its nature has long been a disaster waiting to happen, but by luck the city has been spared by the recent large hurricanes which seemed headed for it (at the expense of Biloxi and Gulfport, unluckily for them). It looks like that luck is now running out…no matter what changes with Katrina in the next two days, it isn’t going to be pretty, and there’s going to be a whole lot of people ruined by it.

ADDENDUM: I wonder just how much of the delta will disappear under the storm.

ADDENDUM: A FEMA official on the Weather Channel just described the potential flooding as turning the city into “a giant cesspool of disaster”. Now they’re talking about the various new floodproof bridges and levees — should be interesting to see if they live up to their specs.

ADDENDUM: The weather bouys in the Gulf have been knocked out. That can’t be good. Katrina is being compared to Andrew and Camille. That’s not good either.

ADDENDUM: Commenter rps points to a Spaceflight Now article which gives the ET inventory as two at KSC and seven complete at Michoud, plus 8-10 in various stages of construction.

And Max “The Veil Baby” Mayfield is on Fox right now showing a storm surge model, with the track of the hurricane passing directly over MAF.

It’s not looking good for New Orleans or the Shuttle program.

Posted on August 28th, 2005 under Miscellaneous. Comments: 11

Larry Niven must be getting a good chuckle out of this:

During its close fly-bys of Saturn’s ring system, Cassini’s instruments showed that the environment around the rings is an atmosphere composed mainly of oxygen molecules, similar to the atmospheres of Jupiter’s moons Europa and Ganymede, the European Space Agency said in a statement.

“As water comes off the rings, it is split by sunlight; the resulting hydrogen and atomic oxygen are then lost, leaving molecular oxygen,” said Andrew Coates, a co-investigator from University College, London.

No word yet on whether Cassini has imaged any integral trees.

Posted on August 21st, 2005 under Space Science. Comments Off

Mark evidently watched a different 24 this season than the one I caught. Unrealistic plot, unlikeable characters, and a treatment of nuclear power that went beyond technical inaccuracy to blatant fearmongering over nonexistent risks.

Bleah. I’ll stick to Battlestar Galactica, thanks. The plot is fascinating, the characters are likeable, and while the technology is as contrived as that of any science fiction series, at least it doesn’t have real-world consequences. Well…unless it lowers the ethical constraints on building a product line of genocidal fleshbots who look like supermodels…and of course we wouldn’t want that…

Posted on August 17th, 2005 under Entertainment. Comments Off