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Someone named Chris Bergin attempts to tell the disappointing true tale of the X-33/VentureStar – What really happened.
And gets a good bit of it right, surprisingly.
My favorite bit:
A five foot long tank was built and tested at NASA Lewis (now NASA Glenn), but the larger structure for the X-33 was going to be a step too far. Skunk Works’ designers of the LH2 tank had heard from engineers that storing liquid hydrogen in a pressurized composite (notably material IM7/997-2) tank with the hollow honeycomb walls was simply doomed to failure – but their advice was ignored.
Heh. I wonder who those engineers might have been…?
There’s still plenty of not-quite-accurate “official version” stuff here, though he does seem to have talked to some program insiders since he gets a few of the lesser-known aspects correct. Someday, someone will write the True Inside Account of the X-33 program — it’ll make for some amusing (and perhaps instructive) reading.
Something tells me you won’t find these books at your local Barnes & Noble.
Which is, no doubt, a good thing.
“The Dance of Death” is about how death prevails over all, rich or poor. As with many other skin-bound volumes, “there was some tie-in with the content of the book,” said Sam Streit, director of the John Hay Library.
H.P. Lovecraft would, I’m sure, be amused.
Or neither?
Upcoming NASA launch draws anti-nuke protesters…a whole thirty of ’em.
I’ve had barbecues bigger than that. Maybe next time GNAW-N-PIS should offer free weenies and beer.
ADDENDUM: It’s not the size of your protest, it’s how many people your handful of protestors ‘really’ represent:
“We are few, but we represent many,” said Peg McIntire, a 95-year old woman with the group Grandmothers for Peace, who protested Cassini and other nuclear-powered space missions.
“We do represent thousands of people, just this little group here,” she said.
[hat tip: brucekgag]
Rand Simberg points out a little blurb at Space.com’s Astronotes (entry dated January 6) regarding the anti-New Horizons protest Bruce Gagnon scheduled for today at CCAFS.
Unfortunately, Leonard David seems to have done Bruce the favor of filtering out his standard suite of fearmongering talking points, making him sound almost reasonable and leaving me with little material for pithy fiskery. He even left out the obligatory buttressing commentary from the other luddite Bobbsey Twin, journalism professor Karl Grossman. (Is it me, or is it odd that Mr. David — a space journalist, and thus someone one might fairly assume to be pro-space — should be helpfully tidying up the ravings of an anti-space moonbat?)
About the only funny bit here is Bruce’s quote at the end:
“We might have escaped Cassini, we might escape New Horizons, but with plans to put nuclear reactors on the Moon to power bases there in the coming years, NASA will be launching a host of these missions. One thing we have learned is that sooner or later, space technology can fail.”
Translation: I make the same doom and gloom predictions every time nuclear material is launched into space, sooner or later I’m going to be right! Just you wait and see! Well, stopped clocks are right twice a day, too, Chicken Little.
On the other hand…it makes me wonder if maybe there isn’t a clever tactical calculation in Bruce’s repeated (and repeatedly wrong) prognostications. While he has been stating his opposition to the launch, Bruce doesn’t seem to have been pimping today’s protest much at all — it has been listed for two weeks or thereabouts on the GNAW-N-PIS website, but none of his four blog posts on New Horizons in the past month (1, 2, 3, 4) have mentioned it. His earliest mention of the January 7 protest on Globenet (Yahoo group registration required) was posted on December 28, while a November 17 appeal for funds to run ads in central Florida newspapers expressing opposing the launch conspicuously omits mention of today’s protest. Given how little advanced publicity he’s given it, I won’t be surprised to learn that few people turned out for the event (nor will I be surprised when in the next few days he posts a triumphal after-action report touting how large and “successful” the micro-protest was…Bruce’s protest events are always large and “successful”, even when they’re not).
However, it may not be the size of the protest that matters so much as it having happened, and Bruce being on record as opposing the launch beforehand. If by chance something should go wrong with New Horizons, Bruce and his pals could then use the incident — and their established (however minuscule) opposition to the launch — as the basis for primly saying: “See? I told you so!“. In the media feeding frenzy that would likely ensue after any launch accident with New Horizons (regardless of the actual dangers), the panicked bleatings of the mission’s opponents would be transmuted into prophetic but regrettably unheeded warnings, the shrill “This time for sure!” becoming the sage “I’ve been warning about this for years.”
This pseudo-prescience is a potentially more effective means of demonstrating to potential supporters the righteousness of one’s cause and one’s fitness to lead it than the after-the-fact “they should have known” reasoning exhibited after Katrina. And that would seem to put Bruce in an uncomfortable position — because it would provide a very public event that could be exploited to validate his long-standing opposition to launching nuclear material, nothing would help his cause and enhance his name recognition and the like as much as the very sort of accident he claims to be working to avert.
The Times-Picayune has a fascinating account of what went on at Michoud during Katrina.
With the future of the nation’s manned space program hanging in the balance, 36 workers rode out the storm at the Michoud Assembly Facility, battling terrifying winds, torrential rain and a life-threatening storm surge. They managed to keep all four of the plant’s pumps operating throughout the storm, which prevented water from entering the factory’s main buildings.
And, perhaps most important, Michoud’s levees held firm even as other levees in the area broke under Katrina’s punishment and flooded 80 percent of the city. No one is sure yet whether the success of the levees was a function of better design, maintenance, nonstop pumping or just pure luck, but days after Katrina was gone, the Michoud site emerged as an island of green surrounded by a miles-wide wasteland of submerged neighborhoods and washed-out highways.
At one point during the storm, a string of runaway barges slammed into the concrete flood wall that rises from the levee protecting Michoud from the Mississippi River-Gulf Outlet. The impact cracked the wall, but it didn’t break through the flood protection structure.
“If (the barges) had broke that wall, we would have been on top of (a roof) waiting for helicopters to rescue us,” said Joe Barrett, a Michoud equipment operator who stayed during the storm.
The plant sustained about $120 million in damage, Michoud spokesman Marion LaNasa said. NASA received $324.8 million from Congress in December for hurricane recovery efforts at Michoud and Stennis Space Center in nearby Hancock County, Miss., where shuttle engines are test-fired.
But the damage could have been much worse.
As Katrina roared through New Orleans on Aug. 29, a group of workers at Michoud known as the ride-out crew did everything they could to save the factory from the storm’s hardest punch.
They manned the plant’s four pumps until 4 a.m., when winds reached hurricane force at Michoud as Katrina’s eye approached southeastern Louisiana, said Malcolm Wood, the plant’s critical operations and maintenance manager, who headed the crew. Before leaving their post at the pump station, the workers filled the machines with fuel and left them running. Together, the pumps removed 250,000 gallons of water an hour from the 832-acre complex.
Looks like Jefferson Parish President Aaron Broussard could benefit from a lesson in pump operations from the Michoud rideout crew.
The storm dumped 14 inches of rain on the plant, and winds sent a 20-foot-high storm surge lapping over a 19 ?-foot-high levee protecting its southeastern side. But the pumps kept running, and the factory’s most critical buildings stayed dry…
Barrett and the other pump operators rode in a large dump truck to the pump station. As they approached, they saw the renegade string of barges pushed against a levee floodwall not far from where the station outflow pipes cross into the waterway.
Barrett noticed cracks in the wall, but no water was leaking through them. “That was a big eye-opener,” he said…
With roads flooded outside of the plant, helicopters became the only means of delivering supplies to the ride-out crew during the first week after the storm.
Shades of the power plant in Lucifer’s Hammer. I’m told that the MAF pumps not only kept the facility more or less dry, but protected part of the Folger’s coffee processing plant down the street from flooding, thanks to a low-lying portion of the plant being within the levees protecting Michoud.
The article makes a passing reference to the tank that was in the VAB at the time of the hurricane, and was hit by a falling chunk of the concrete roof. Rumor has it that it may not be worth the expense of stripping the foam from the LOx tank and putting it back through proof testing and X-ray inspection, given the short remaining life of the Shuttle program, and that as a result it may end up being the first full ET ever to be scrapped.
In between the family gatherings last week, I found time to do a little reading. I took home with me three books that I hoped to finish, but didn’t manage to finish any of them, unfortunately.
First up on the bookpile was Bruce Gagnon’s Organizing Stories, which (sorry, Bruce) I purchased used through Amazon. I started to read it while waiting for my plane at DIA, but didn’t much past the second chapter. The first few chapters seem to be biographical material — Bruce’s attempt to explain why he has the outlook that he does — and are revealing both for what he says and (even more) for what he implies but leaves unstated. I’ll be sure to provide a review if and when I can force myself to slog through the rest of the book, but fisking it chapter by chapter as I had intended to do when I purchased the book would require much more time and effort than it really merits.
Once I got up to Michigan, I switched from Organizing Stories to the Friedmans’ Free to Choose…an abrupt change that resulted in a severe case of philosophical whiplash from which I am still recovering. FtC was a fascinating read, not least because it is twenty-five years old and aside from references to Jimmy Carter as President reads like it could have been published yesterday. The book is a great distillation of a number of core elements of conservative/libertarian economic philosophy, expressed in the context of a handful of real-world matters such as school vouchers, labor relations, consumer protection, and price and wage controls. The Friedmans don’t just praise the virtues of the free market, they explain why the free market works and dismantle the traditional arguments made against it by socialists, marxists and other opponents of free market capitalism, and explain why market freedom is required for political and social freedom. I wish I had read this book prior to responding to Ryan Zelnio’s proposal for an international lunar development scheme, as many of the Friedmans’ arguments regarding the efficacy of government programs versus the operation of the free market and the behavior of government bureaucracies apply to the arrangements he suggests. It was also amusing to recall Greg Klerkx’ account of NASA’s anti-commercial antics in the 1980s and 1990s in the same context. A worthwhile book that I highly recommend (even though I haven’t quite finished it yet myself).
The one book that I didn’t get to at all was Bastiat’s The Law, which had I finished would have reduced the current bookpile to The Lunar Men, a historical account of the Lunar Society of Birmingham (an influential intellectual club that included toymaker Matthew Boulton, steam engine developer James Watt, potter Josiah Wedgwood, multi-talented Erasmus Darwin, and chemist Joseph Priestley, whose cross-pollenization kick-started the Industrial Revolution in England), and Lost Discoveries, a history of science that purports to show how many of the fundamental elements of modern science and technology were discovered (and then lost) centuries or millennia before they were “discovered” in the conventional timeline (which sounds a bit kooky in a David Hatcher Childress kind of way, but looks to actually be kooky in a PC/multi-culti way judging from the reader reviews).
Added to the bookpile thanks to Christmas gifts is Everest: Summit of Achievement, a big and very pretty coffee-table book from the Royal Geographical Society, documenting the exploration of Mt. Everest in the 20th Century.
Dan Schrimpsher asks an interesting question: What is sovereignty? In this case, relative to future colonies on the Moon and other celestial bodies.
Addendum: I’ve belatedly added Dan’s Space Pragmatism to the blogroll.
Back before Thanksgiving, I was fixing the weatherstripping on my office window and accidentally stepped on my 8-year-old UPS. After the sparks had vanished and the smoke had cleared, it was clear the thing was a goner — both the battery-powered and non-backed-up surge-protected outlets were dead (despite a scorched spot the size of a hockey puck on the back, there was luckily no damage to the carpet). So, off I went to CompUSA to buy a new UPS.
That was on November 19.
As is typical of everything I have ever bought at CompUSA, the new UPS — an APC Back-UPS ES 500 — there was a mail-in rebate involved, which required me to mail in a form printed with my receipt to get $12.00 back. It was prominently printed on the rebate form that the purchase had to be made by December 19 to qualify, so I mailed it on November 22 to give it plenty of time. And then forgot all about it.
On Monday (that would be December 19), I received an email from the APC Rebate Center, which included a link to their rebate tracking website. I followed the link, and found the following information (click image for a more legible view):
 (Below this, it lists a bunch of $15-$30 software packages to choose from, none of which were of any interest to me.)
In other words, though my purchase was made on November 19 and this date was printed on the form provided by CompUSA, APC Rebate Center (actually operated by a company called Parago) evidently held off on processing the rebate form until the rebate promotion had ended, and then tried to offer me what appears to be remaindered software in lieu of the promised (but now “expired”) cash rebate.
I’ll be sending them a letter tomorrow (since they don’t provide you with a means to contact them online or by phone when they decide to mess with your rebate), to see if I can pry the promised cash out of them after all.
This is the second time I’ve used a mail-in rebate (the other being on FrontPage 2002 purchased through Amazon), and both times I’ve had problems. Maybe I’m just unlucky with these things, but I have to wonder if the whole mail-in rebate concept isn’t just an upselling scheme, in which customers are enticed into buying a product on the promise of a lower net price, offered with the expectation that they will neglect to mail in the required rebate form within the allotted time…Naah, that’d be unethical…
ADDENDUM: You know, the more I think about this, the less sense it makes.
I could only get a rebate form by purchasing the UPS. They could only have contacted me if I had mailed in the rebate form. I was emailed the notification that my refund had been denied at 4:04am on December 19. Unless the Parago rebate center receives its mail after midnight, they must have received the rebate form prior on December 17th at the latest (the 18th being a Sunday).
The time stamp on the email itself proves that they had received the form prior to the end date of the rebate offer, and therefore the purchase was made prior to that, i.e.: within the promotion period. So, whether they go by the stated requirement of purchase prior to December 19, or try to move the goalposts and claim that the form had to be received by December 19, either way they owe me twelve bucks.
Oh, brother…who thinks up this rot?
Children’s Space Charter
Kumbayaa…
Jeff Foust was wondering where the controversy over New Horizons was…it looks like Bruce has found a sudden groundswell of public opposition:
The national media has begun checking in with us about the building opposition to the launch. Journalism professor Karl Grossman’s op-eds, reporting on opposition to the mission, are now appearing in papers across the country. I’ve been hearing from people – Oregon to Florida – who have been writing letters to Congress, NASA, and their local papers expressing their outrage about the launching of nuclear power into space. NASA is losing the support of taxpayers nationwide as they push these toxic launches.
Sounds like a major surge of support for his position…but then, what quality of “organizer” would Bruce be if he didn’t present his position as having strong and growing support? Some evidence of this beyond a few papers reprinting Karl Grossman’s ill-informed and misleading op-ed and anecdotal evidence of “hearing from people” might convince me that this wasn’t just a self-serving misrepresentation.
As for NASA losing support nationwide because of RTG-powered spacecraft…prove it.
Plans are also underway in Florida for a demonstration at Cape Canveral Air Force Station on January 7.
And I’m sure that all five or six of the participants will feel good about themselves and their moral superiority afterwards.
Bruce then goes on to demonstrate that he knows little if anything about New Horizons beyond the fact that plutonium is involved:
The planets have been out there a long time and aren’t going anywhere.
In fact, time is of the essence where Pluto is concerned:
Scientists believe that as Pluto continues its 248-yearlong orbit around the sun, its tenuous atmosphere eventually will freeze and collapse to the surface. Pluto has been racing away from the sun since its closest approach in 1989 and scientists do not know how much time remains before Pluto’s atmosphere collapses. Once that happens its atmosphere is not expected to re-emerge for about 200 years.
“Some people think its 20 years off and some people think its five years off,” said Stern. “No one really knows when Pluto’s atmosphere will snow out and collapse.”
Oh, but what do they know? They’re just scientists.
Of course, no Bruce Gagnon anti-space-nuclear-power post would be complete without his trademark appeal for alternatives:
Develop alternative technologies for space exploration. No nuclear launches!
And as usual, Bruce insists on alternatives but offers none…not even a glimmer of a clue as to what other options he might have in mind. Given his poor understanding of physics and engineering and his fascination with windmills, one has to wonder if he expects deep space science probes to be powered by the solar wind…
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