Sic Semper Tyrannis

There Be Dragons - Jonathan Goff

At 3:44am this past Tuesday, a rocket blasted off from Cape Caneveral, Florida on a historic mission to demonstrate the ability of a commercially developed and operated transportation system to safely deliver cargo to the International Space Station. This flight is only the third flight of the Falcon 9 rocket, developed by Elon Musk’s startup Space Exploration Technologies (SpaceX), and the second flight of their Dragon capsule, so the tension in the atmosphere at SpaceX was understandable. The first launch attempt, last Saturday morning, was scrubbed due to a leaky check valve in the central engine’s turbopump, which was fortunately caught by the Falcon 9’s flight computer, enabling a safe abort of the engines with only half a second to spare before the planned liftoff.  SpaceX was able to diagnose and repair the problem over the weekend, and was ready to go again at the next launch window, on Tuesday morning. Fortunately, the Falcon 9 delivered a flawless performance, lifting the Dragon capsule safely to orbit a little over nine minutes after liftoff. I had literally been keeping my fingers and toes crossed for the whole flight while watching things from home (my past experience in rocket testing has made me somewhat superstitious). I choked up at the reaction of the SpaceX team when the Dragon’s solar panels finally deployed. If you need some inspiration, and haven’t seen the flight footage, I’d strongly suggest watching the unedited SpaceX broadcast (launch starts at ~44:40 mark).

While those initial thrilling moments were an excellent start to a historic mission which is the culmination of nearly six years of hard work at SpaceX and NASA, the most historic portion of this mission is about to begin tomorrow morning. Over the past two days since the launch, the Dragon capsule has been slowly catching up with the space station, while performing several tests to demonstrate to NASA the capsule’s ability to safely operate near the station. Earlier this morning, the Dragon performed a maneuver that allowed it to pass only 2.5km below the station, where the picture at the beginning of this post was taken by an astronaut on board the ISS (Don Pettit, the one who will be operating the robot arm for tomorrow’s “berthing” operation). This final test verified the ability of ISS crewmembers to send commands to the Dragon, and to test the inter-vehicle communication system. With the completion of today’s tests, SpaceX has actually fulfilled all the requirements they had originally planned for their second Dragon flight. However, over the past year, SpaceX has worked with NASA to gain permission to combine the second Dragon flight with the third and final Commercial Orbital Transportation Services (COTS) demonstration flight, where the Dragon capsule will ultimately berth with the station (using its robotic arm, controlled by astronauts on-board), cargo will be unloaded from inside the Dragon capsule, and a small amount of non-critical cargo will be loaded back into Dragon for the return flight. It is this final set of operations, which will start in the early morning hours tomorrow (around 7:30am on the east coast) and end with the hatch to the ISS being opened early Saturday morning, which will be the truly historic part of this mission—marking the beginning of service of the world’s first commercial space cargo delivery vehicle, completing SpaceX’s part in the COTS development program, and marking SpaceX’s transition into operational service as part of the Commercial Resupply Services program which it won flight contracts from at the end of 2008.

 

Hi! Ho! Its off to the asteroid mine we go!

If I recall correctly, my three year old mind registered the work of the Seven Dwarves as mining?

This really appeals to the science fiction reader that I was in my youth.  I read a book about this.  Heinlein, right?  "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress?"  As I recall the Moon colony (Gingrich was not yet a candidate for mayor) mined various rare earths like lithium or some such thing.  They then loaded the rocks into an electrically driven rail gun, a mass driver.  The ore fell in the ocean somewehere at a reasonalble depth and were recovered.  Easy huh?

Actually it was the marriage customs of the moonies that really interestrd me, but, then, at that age....  pl

http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,2112996,00.html

The Space-X mission

http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2012/04/17/1st-private-mission-to-space-station-set-to-launch-april-30/

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Maybe NASA isn't so dumb afer all.

pl

Viking found life on Mars?

"Researchers reanalyzed the results of a 1976 experiment conducted by NASA’s Viking robots to detect for life on Mars. The robots picked up soil samples from the Red Planet and looked for signs of microbial metabolism. At the time, scientists concluded the Labeled Release Experiment showed geological activity, not biological.

This time, researchers distilled Viking data into sets of numbers, hoping that method could better reveal complexity. The result: Close correlations were found between the complexity of the Viking data and those of terrestrial biological data sets. The researchers say their findings show NASA’s Viking robots found biological activity after all."  Washpost

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Worth noting.  pl

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/blogpost/post/viking-robots-found-life-on-mars-in-1976-scientists-say/2012/04/13/gIQA7QvAFT_blog.html

New Science Post on The Athenaeum

    http://turcopolier.typepad.com/the_athenaeum/2012/02/lake-vostok-largest-sub-glacial-lake-ever-discovered.html

Bon Voyage, "Curiosity"

A great project. Come August we will see if they get the thing down to the surface in running order. The re-entry vehicle will burn its way down to 200 miles an hour, then parachute drag down to 50 then a self contained rocket with the rover on a tether will lower it to the surface. Let us pray. pl

http://www.cbc.ca/news/world/story/2011/11/26/mars-rover-liftoff.html

CERN repeats FTL test

"The initial series of experiments, comprising 15,000 separate measurements spread out over three years, found that the neutrinos arrived 60 billionths of a second faster than light would have, travelling unimpeded over the same distance.

The idea that nothing can exceed the speed of light in a vacuum forms a cornerstone in physics - first laid out by James Clerk Maxwell and later incorporated into Albert Einstein's theory of special relativity."  BBC

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OK, science boffins, what are the implications if the CERN data proves correct?  pl

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-15791236

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speed_of_light

FTL? Beam me up.

 
""You could say it's peanuts, but it's not. It's something that we can measure rather accurately with a small uncertainty," Ereditato told The Associated Press.

If the experiment is independently repeated - most likely by teams in the United States or Japan - then it would require a fundamental rethink of modern physics."  Forbes

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Ahah!  I knew it all the time!  Einstein?  There always seemed to me to be flaws in his equations. 

All of us Asimov, Pournelle and Drake readers will be vindicated.  I want to ship over in "Hammer's Slammers," or "Falkenberg's Legion," or maybe those Germans in one of the David Drake books, you know, the Panzer guys.

Sigh...  pl

http://www.forbes.com/feeds/ap/2011/09/23/science-eu-breaking-light-speed_8697484.html

Fried Shrimp Heads

 
I went down to the Eastern Shore floating fish market in the Washington Channel on Maine Avenue.  Captain White's is my favorite place.  John "Duke" Anthony once told me that this one of the few places where you could still see the "old Washington."  He should know. I bought some of this and that.  A kilo of white head-on shrimp went in the bag.  I am marinating the shrimp bodies to cook on the grill tonight, an east Asian marinade.  My wife likes tuna steaks, so one of those for her.

I saw someone eating tempura shrimp heads on the tube a while back.  This looked great.  I saved those.  Does anyone have a favorite recipe?  pl

Mice lead the way to immortality.

"Stem cell injections boosted the leg muscles of mice and warded off the typical loss of muscle mass that comes with aging.

The discovery could be useful in treating humans with degenerative diseases such as muscular dystrophy, as well as help everyday people prevent at least some of the ravages of time, the researchers said."  Discovery

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I'll have some of those for Christmas and I would like them to start with the stenosis in my Lumbar vertebrae.  pl

http://news.discovery.com/tech/stem-cells-create-mighty-mice.html

"Traumatic brain injury leaves an often-invisible, life-altering wound" Davenport

 
"...once he got home, the problems really started. Barnes started drinking, then smoking pot and then inhaling gas from compressed-air canisters. He crashed his car four times."  Davenport

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Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI) is not a new thing.   Throughout the 20th Century soldiers have been subject to blast effects from artillery, mortar fire, roadside bombs and other load noises that produce a shock wave or weapons which actually drive hard objects into one's skull.

IED's were very common in Vietnam.  All roads in disputed territory had to be cleared every day and kept that way.  We rode around in wheeled vehicles that had the floors packed with sandbags in a probably futile effort to mitigate blast effects.

The point?  There are a lot of people out there with injuries like this from earlier wars. 

Maybe this will explain why Uncle Fred was always a little strange after the war.  pl

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/10/01/AR2010100106339.html?wprss=rss_metro

The Predators and the Ragheads

"The US government has known about the flaw since the US campaign in Bosnia in the 1990s, current and former officials said. But the Pentagon assumed local adversaries wouldn't know how to exploit it, the officials said."  CSM

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"That final sentence is a bit worrying, and reflects a common pitfall within the US and many other "sophisticated" armed forces: Officers and war-planners often make the mistake of assuming their enemies are dumb, and not particularly adaptable. "  WSJ

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Not a big deal? Maybe not except that a look at what your opponent is watching is ALWAYS useful.  You may also discover that what you are doing is more visible than you thought.

The question remains why this downlink was not encrypted to begin with.  I think that the CSM has it right in attributing this failure to what I would call the "Raghead" factor.  This is the tendency among Americans to assume that people who are culturally different from them are also primitive.  This frequently shows up as a factor in our foreign affairs and we never seem to learn.  We spent several billion dollars in Iraq trying to beat the ever shifting and evolving IED challenge and found that as fast as we devloped technical counter-measures or more sophisticated surveillance platforms, the insurgents developed new IEDs. They often bought parts for their new designs on the internet electronics market, disassembling larger gadgets if necessary to get the boards, etc., that they wanted.

This blind spot seems odd in a culture (ours) that is obsessed with levelling and the rejection of the idea of elites.  I suppose that the level that is sought is one that represents the lowest common denominator of US society? 

We actually DO have elites.  To see them, all you have to do is tune in "Morning Joe" in the AM on MSNBC to watch the elites of left and right preening in their splendid plumage.

Nothing will change.  We are sure that we are smarter, more virtuous, more ingenious, have better health care, etc., than anyone else.  pl

What are these rockets?

"OK, fake photo - showing four long- and medium-range missiles rise into the air..."  AFP

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OK.  Someone altered the photograph.  That is interesting but not the primary curiosity about these "long and medium range missiles."  To justify this description it would seem that they would have to be ballistic missiles of the Shehab series, probably Shehab 3b.

Is it not the case that ballistic missiles rise nearly vertically from the Transporter Erector Launcher (TEL) in the launch phase of flight?

This is a picture of the Shehab 3 on its TEL.  Does this look like the TEL in the doctored photograph above?

These are photographs of the Shehab 3 in the launch phase. 

I am not an expert in the field of missile technology, but the missiles in the faked photograph appear to be anti-aircraft ground to air missiles or artillery rockets.  The slanted attitude of launch speaks to that.  No?  Anti-aircraft missiles would be a threat to aircraft, not to Israeli cities.  Artillery rockets are a battlefield weapon.

If those missiles are not ballistic missiles, then several interesting questions arise:

1- Which governments are fooling around here?

2- If these are not ballistic missiles, why are the MSM propagating the implication that this photograph displays missiles that are a threat to Israel? pl

http://blogs.timesunion.com/editors/?p=913

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ballistic_missiles

String Theory

Go for it!

Pat Lang

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/String_theory

Mass Drivers

I first became interested in these about twenty years ago after watching a "Nova" production about  them.  They feature prominently in the old Heinlein novel "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress" as a cheap way to deliver the ore products of Lunar mining to target areas in the Pacific Ocean where they could be recovered.  If you are getting the idea that I am interested in space programs, you are right.

Pat Lang

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_driver

Space Elevators

I enjoyed the copnversation on "peak oil" so much that I am curious to see what this subject elicits.

Pat Lang

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_elevator

"A Loaf of Bread, A Jug of Wine" etc.

http://www.globalsecurity.org/wmd/world/iran/nuke.htm

http://www.globalsecurity.org/wmd/world/iran/missile.htm

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"..And Thou Beside Me In the Wilderness."  Omar Khayyam was always an odd Persian but I think he would have serious problems living with many of his present countrymen.  He was a scientist and mathematician as well as a poet, but his skepticism would not have been appreciated in the Islamic Republic of Iran.

What are we to make of Iran's nuclear intentions and capabilities?  Courtesy of my Alexandria neighbor, John E. Pike and the "Daily Telegraph" we have the materials shown above.

Shahab-6?  10,000 kilometers in range?  "Two to three years" to weaponization?"  If this is true, then Iran would hold English cities at risk.  When?  No one really knows how long that would take.  Three years?  Five years" Ten years?  Nobody knows really?  The Mullahs probably do not know.

Would they use the weapons?  This is actually rather unimportant.  As a consequence of Iranian nuclear weapons, the playing field would be leveled to a remarkable degree.  T. Friedman would begin to be right about something in his vision of the future.  Could we still crush Iran?  Certainly, but it would probably not come to that.  Rather, we would experience a marked diminution of US influence and leverage in the region, and an upsurge in the general willingness of crazies around the world to believe that we are weaker.  A perception of weakness on the part of one's enemies is a dangerous thing.  Saudi Arabia, Egypt and other "emerging" countries would feel encouraged or threatened (choose your term) into taking similar paths.  Would this danger drive these countries further into our arms?  It is impossible to say, but with my usual pessimism I fear the worst.

Obviously, diplomacy and persuasion should be played out to the end, but the reactions of the Iranian government thus far are not encouraging.

People will say that this is all "cooked up" by the neocons and Bushies.  I do not think that is true.

Pat Lang