I have a fascination with hidden, forgotten and deserted places. Sometimes, one can find them even in the busiest of places. Here is a picture of an abandoned railroad track in the middle of Los Angeles. I accidentally found this site by following some stray cats in a park. Not far from this place are residences, freeways and traffic jams.
Railroad Tracks. Photo: Reinhard Kargl, 2009. Click to enlarge.
This stock footage was shot in the 1940s.
One of my American heroes, Benjamin Franklin was a keen (and occasionally obsessive) chess player. He even wrote about the game and its implications. Franklin published the following essay in 1786 (drawing on material from earlier drafts of 1732, Philadelphia and 1779, London).
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The Game of Chess is not merely an idle amusement; several very valuable qualities of the mind, useful in the course of human life, are to be acquired and strengthened by it, so as to become habits ready on all occasions, for life is a kind of Chess, in which we have often points to gain, and competitors or adversaries to contend with, and in which there is a vast variety of good and ill events that are, in some degree, the effect of prudence, or the want of it. By playing at Chess, then, we may learn:
1st: Foresight, which looks a little into futurity, and considers the consequences that may attend an action, for it is continually occurring to the player, “If I move this Piece, what will be the advantage or disadvantage of my new situation? What use can my adversary make of it to annoy me? What other moves can I make to support it, and to defend myself from his attacks?”
2nd: Circumspection, which surveys the whole Chess-board, or scene of action, the relation of the several Pieces, their situations, and the dangers they are repeatedly exposed to, the several possibilities of their aiding each other, the probabilities that the adversary may make this or that move, and attack this or that Piece, and what different means can be used to avoid his stroke, or turn its consequences against him.
3rd: Caution, not to make our moves too hastily. This habit is best acquired by observing strictly the laws of the game, such as, if you touch a piece you must move it somewhere, and if you set it down, you must let it stand.
(Updated 08/31, 2011).
In a tweet, astronaut Leroy Chiao (@AstroDude) called today’s crash of the Russian cargo transport to the ISS a “big damn deal”. My take: no, it aint. Or at least it shouldn’t be.
Just launch another one. (Better yet: always have at least another one on standby, preferably at a different launch site).
I know I am simplifying, but: the loss of Progress M-12M (44P) is the first loss after 43 successful supply flights to the ISS, and after a total of 134 successful flights of this vehicle. Nobody was hurt in the crash, and the launch complex and gantry remain fully intact. A failure rate of under 1% should be acceptable for unmanned ships. Even with occasional misfirings like this, a disposable launcher is still a lot cheaper than the shuttle.
To me, this demonstrates why unmanned transports remain the way to go. Had this been a manned shuttle, an accident would have meant a disastrous loss of life. And the shuttle fleet would have been grounded once again. Years would have to go by for the accident to be fully investigated, and for design and procedural changes to be worked out and implemented. Employing astronauts as cargo truck drivers was an absurd idea to begin with. (Wernher von Braun knew this before the shuttle was even flight ready — I wish NASA had listened).
By contrast, an unmanned supply ship is basically a throwaway device anyhow. Yes, it’s not nice to have rocket parts falling down somewhere. This can seriously spoil the day if you happen to be at the impact site. But flight routes and launch facilities can be chosen to minimize the risk of someone actually getting hurt. Basically, one can write off the vehicle as a loss and launch another one.
However Chiao is completely right about it being a huge blunder to rely on only one vehicle for ISS cargo. NASA made another mistake here. Delta IV and Atlas V should have been purposed for cargo flights a long time ago, but those vested in the shuttle project always understood how to derail such proposals. (Interestingly, the military made the right decision by abandoning the shuttle a long time ago; the military space program has completely switched to reliable throw-away rockets instead).
Fortunately, ESA’s Automated Transfer Vehicle (launched on European Ariane V) is practically ready to assume full operations. The ATV happens to have three times the cargo capacity of Russia’s Progress.
And let’s not forget SpaceX. Its second test launch of the Dragon capsule is scheduled for November. Things went so well the first time around that the second flight has already been is expected to be cleared to go to the ISS.
This is all great news. We all know what happens when there is competition.
Still, the Progess crash spells potential trouble for the ISS. The reason points to another NASA blunder. For safety reasons, Soyuz capsules must remain docked to the ISS at all times. This is so that astronauts can evacuate in an emergency. But these capsules are only certified to remain reliable for 200 days, after which they must be used or replaced. Because the Soyuz launch vehicle (which also launches Progress supply ships) is now suspended pending the investigation, no new Soyuz ships can be launched at the moment. This means that the ISS may have to be evacuated, because the scheduled Soyuz replacements are disturbed.
Why is this a NASA blunder? Because NASA has failed to come up with an alternate return capsule before the shuttle’s retirement. (Projects have been in the works, but faced delay after delay as NASA was concentrating on keeping the shuttles spaceworthy. There were also proposals for emergency return vehicles, which could have been launched via shuttle or by disposable rockets, but NASA decided not to proceed with these programs).
So we arrive at the current status: No way for people to fly to the ISS or back at this time, except on Russian Soyuz vehicles! And these are grounded at the moment.
Update 2011-09-06:
It now appears that should the ISS really have to be evacuated, the SpaceX flight to the ISS might have to be postponed, since docking Dragon with an unmanned station is not an option. Instead, an approach and flyby at the unmanned ISS would be conceivable, but SpaceX considers this to be a waste of time and money.
A book I am currently reading. Great insights into the man, the moon and one of mankind’s greatest journeys.
Post Industrial. Photo: Reinhard Kargl, 2011. Click to enlarge.
America is suffering from a heat wave this summer. No wonder.
Americans are completely addicted to air conditioning. According to a 2010 piece in the Washington Post, the energy required to air-condition American homes and retail spaces has doubled since the 1990s. Stan Cox, the author of “Losing Our Cool: Uncomfortable Truths About Our Air-Conditioned World” and “Finding New Ways to Get Through the Summer” is offering interesting views on why this trend is harmful.
In much of the United States, air conditioning is one of the greatest power hogs. It needs so much electricity that every time there is a heat wave, utility companies and the power grid do not even manage to keep up with the demand. Power shutdowns, service reductions or full outages are frequent and make the situation even worse. Because in many buildings, it is not even possible to open the windows.
Utility companies are now asking (or forcing) Americans to “conserve power”. This reminds me of Third World countries. (In Pakistan, they even have a term for it: “Load shedding”. They do this at scheduled intervals — and I suspect, more frequently in the poor areas where only “unimportant” people live).
The greatest problem with air conditioning is that is has enabled poor planning, wasteful policies, speculation with otherwise worthless land and dreadful architecture. Many areas in the American Southwest (such as Las Vegas or the San Fernando Valley of Los Angeles) would never have grown to their unsustainable size, had it not been for air conditioning. Insult to injury: the power consumption of these places is subsidized by utility rate payers who live in more temperate areas.
The continuing idiocy in urban planning is hard to fathom. Knowing what this has led to — why are still allowing developers to erect massive housing projects in areas way too hot and too dry for human comfort? And why do we continue to allow gigantic hotels, retail- and office projects without opening windows, balconies, patios and natural air circulation?
Yet at the same time, we are good at window dressing. We are forbidding incandescent light bulbs, which consume only a tiny fraction of residential power. And when consumers save energy, some developer builds another air conditioned outlet malls in the desert. Or adds another megahotel in Las Vegas.
As long as this is rampant, power conservation by consumers makes little sense.
I remember watching the first space shuttle launch on TV. I was still a boy living at my parents’ house. The date was April 12, 1981 — and I was very excited.
I was holding my breath during liftoff. After Columbia had reached orbit and the TV station switched back to its normal programming, I stepped outside into our backyard. It was a warm and beautiful spring day, a blue sky broken up by gorgeous cumulus clouds.
Somewhere up there, I imagined, John Young and Robert Crippen would soon pass overhead. These guys were the epitome of coolness. For many years thereafter, I dreamed of being an astronaut or a top engineer launching rockets and spaceships to faraway places.
Today I was watching the shuttle’s last launch. No longer on TV, but via NASA’s media stream on the Internet. Imagine that! While the shuttle has hardly changed in three decades, the world has moved on profoundly.
Let’s face the truth. The shuttle demonstrated what was possible 30 years ago. If this still impresses you, I hope you are not working in today’s space program.
Cellphone inventor Marty Cooper introduced the mobile phone before the first shuttle flight. Are you impressed with it?
At its first launch, there was no World Wide Web. No live streaming. No digital social networks connecting people from all over the world. Hardly anyone had a computer. There were no cellphones, no digital cameras, no digital music downloads. No Internet chats and no video calls. You could not carry your entire music library with you. Or tens of thousands of images.
You could not simply pull up information when you needed it. I remember being fascinated with my first digital watch at about the same time. A miraculous new invention, the Compact Disc was introduced to the public in the same year.
The hipsters using this computer before the shuttle's first flight must now be approaching retirement age. (I have a $20 watch with more computing power -- but shuttle operations did not get any cheaper).
For my generation, the most inspiring technological breakthroughs did not come from the space program, and certainly not from the space shuttle. Most of my generation looks at it as a 30-year old curiosity frozen in pre-historic times. Way before laptops and iPods. (The dark ages).
We will forever disagree on the question whether the shuttle was worthwhile or not. Personally, I don’t think so. I am not saying that the shuttle program lacked achievements — far from it. But I lament the greater achievements which would have been possible instead, for the same expense.
The program’s achilles heel wasn’t so much its cost in cash, but its cost on NASA culture. The complexity of the system, and its dangerous nature. This petrified NASA. Locked the agency and its subcontractors on an iron-clad course, which over the years became impossible to change. On this course, tens of thousands of highly qualified (and influential) people around the country built their entire careers. Many never did anything else — nor did they have to. Even today, it will be quite impossible to convince these armies of people that there may be better was of doing things.
WERNHER VON BRAUN WAS SHAFTED
I maintain that the biggest technological mistake the U.S. ever made with respect to space exploration was the sudden discontinuation of the Saturn system. Continued development of new Saturn variants (Wernher von Braun‘s team had plenty of ideas for this) would have achieved much more than the shuttle ever did.
Wernher von Braun posing at the business end of the 1st stage of Saturn V. He knew all along that the shuttle concept NASA settled on was not a suitable replacement for the Saturn rockets. Von Braun's reservations and warnings were dismissed. Click to enlarge.
With the Saturn V, the space station, in its current configuration, would have been technically possible 20 years ago. If the U.S. had followed another crucial recommendation of von Braun’s team (the development of nuclear propulsion for deep space missions), we could have people on Mars right now.
We often hear that the Saturn system had become unaffordable after the moon landings. This argument amounts to circular logic. The only reasons why Saturn was discontinued: to free up funds for the shuttle’s development — and because of internal politics.
I strongly suspect that von Braun (and his Huntsville team) had become too powerful and influential for some people’s taste and personal ambitions. I will say it out loud: After the success of Apollo, von Braun was shafted. (For the complete story, see Michael J. Neufeld’s biography, Von Braun, Dreamer of Space / Engineer of War, ISBN978-0-307-26292-9).
NASA estimates that each shuttle launch costs about $450 million. However, Roger A. Pielke, Jr. has calculated that the Space Shuttle program has cost about $170 billion (2008 dollars) through early 2008. This works out to an average cost per flight of about US$1.5 billion.[1]
By comparison, a Saturn V launch would cost about $1.1 billion in today’s money.[2]
The difference? The shuttle can lift a payload of 24,400 kg into low Earth orbit. But one Saturn V could haul 118,000 kg. In other words, one Saturn V can launch the same mass as five shuttle flights! (Even more would have been possible with the future Saturn variants von Braun had on the drawing board).
Imagine the kind of space telescopes, Mars rovers and space stations that would have been possible with the Saturn rockets instead of the shuttle!
Today, of course, is the shuttle’s last hurrah, and we should not spoil the party. Even to me, the shuttle feels a bit like a childhood friend. The people who worked on it deserve respect.
After Columbia has safely returned to Earth, the orbiters should land at museums. And we, having long outgrown our childhood friends, should finally launch into the future.
Perhaps we should start by re-reading the papers Wernher von Braun’s team presented back then. Back in the dark ages.
Dear Americans:
It gives me the creeps when you shamelessly violate and mangle the national anthem. Yes, going over one and a half octaves, it is a challenging song to sing. But it is the national anthem, and creative interpretations of its written notes are uncalled for. Altering it is as offensive as abusing the national flag to make a personal statement.
So here is a tutorial, inspired by bass violinist Jenny Hersch.
[Land of the] free is exactly the same note as [rock-ets’ red] glare! Look at the sheet, if you don’t believe it!
And both these words are about the same length! So for God’s sake, it’s not “freeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee”! No, no, no!!!! It’s simply “free”!
And one more thing: the lowest note is right at the beginning: [oh] say [can you see]. And it is the same note as gleam-ing and stream-ing and [whose broad] stripes [and bright stars].
If you are like me (not tone deaf but at the same time incapable of singing in tune) just do what I do: Stand with pride — but shut up.
In the name of those equipped with good ears but lacking a singing voice, I thank you.
