Scientists have reached the giant sink hole (or whatever it is) recently discovered in Siberia (does anyone know precisely where? It’d be interesting to see it it appears on Google satellite imagery of the region).

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A brief video of a snake on a Vomit Comet. With nothing to wrap around and hold onto, it just sorta balls itself up and bounces around inside its enclosure.

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By a Russian “Buk” missile, reportedly. Fingers being pointed at the pro-Russian separatists. Plane had 295 souls on board, all dead now.

BBC: Ukraine airliner ‘crash’ updates

CNN: Report: Malaysia Airlines flight crashes in Ukraine

The “Buk” missile is a substantial weapon, launched from an armored vehicle. Somewhat akin to the Patriot missile the Buk is capable of reaching aircraft at an altitude of 25 km… well above the 33,000 foot cruising altitude of the jetliner.

UPDATE: Below is a twitter feed showing a number of photos of wreckage on the ground. Be warned, though… some of the wreckage used to be alive. The fall from 33,000 feet, and especially that sudden stop at the end, does the human body no favors. So if Ogrish and Rotten were your websites of choice back in the day, here ya go (not directly linking because, well, if ya want it, what, are your fingers broke?)

https://twitter.com/MatevzNovak

This one might prove to be a bit heartbreaking for a few hundred families:

UPDATED update: Another interesting Twitter feed:

https://twitter.com/StateOfUkraine

UPDATED UPDATED update:

Oh, it’s on now:

Reuters World @ReutersWorld · 22m

#BREAKING: Number of dead from crash of #MH17 more than 300, includes 23 U.S. citizen: Interior Ministry adviser, quoted by Interfax

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Pictured: Police find MISSILE in haul of illegal weapons at Dukinfield home

This is the hoard of firearms – including a missile – which were found at a home in Tameside.

Ummmm… firearms? Missile?

What I see here are a whole bunch of old, rusty, empty (and in some cases, sawed in half) artillery shells, some brass cases, what appear to be two fake missiles and a bunch of… well, crap. So, my questions:

1) How is any of this “firearms?”

2) How is any of this illegal?

Assuming that the artillery shells are indeed demilitarized, they are no more weapons than any other inert chunk of steel or brass. So are these things nevertheless illegal in Ol’ Blightedly?

The “Firefly α” (“Firefly Alpha“) is a proposed small expendable launch vehicle, payload 400 kilograms. What is supposed to set the design apart:

1) Methane for fuel

2) A plug cluster first stage engine

Methane has been repeatedly proposed over the decades for boosters, but it has never been used. It has higher Isp than kerosene and similar heavy hydrocarbons, but at the expense of low density and being cryogenic.

The plug cluster engine has also often been proposed. The idea: take a large number of small rocket engines and arrange them in a circle (well, as close to a circle as you can get with a finite number of points). Instead of pointing them straight aft, point them ten or so degrees inwards, and put a “plug” in the middle of them. The rocket exhaust then expands against the plug. What you end up with is a simpler version of a toroidal aerospike. The advantage is that you don’t have to develop a really big engine, just a number of smaller ones; and your booster engine now has automatic altitude compensation. This can be a serious issue for first stage boosters; they lift off at sea level and can fly virtually to the vacuum of space, and a rocket engines performance is driven in no small part by how well it compensates for the surrounding atmospheric pressure. If the rocket nozzle it optimized for maximum vacuum performance, this means that the pressure in the exhaust as it expands through the widening nozzles, drops below atmospheric pressure at some point. This can not only rob the nozzle of performance, it can also collapse, crushed like a beer can hooked up to a vacuum pump. A nozzle optimized for sea level, which has the exhaust reach sea level pressure more or less right at the exit plane, works fine all the way to space, but there is a lot of wasted impulse. An aerospike or a plug cluster automatically compensates, so a properly designed engine gets best performance all the way.

The problem: that central plug gets *hot.* Hot enough that cooling is a major, heavy and expensive issue. Further: plug clusters only approximate true aerospikes. Performance can be kinda… meh. The illustrations of the FRE-1 engine look like the performance benefit of the central plug will be minor… the individual rockets have fairly substantial nozzles on them, while the plug only seems to contribute a fairly small additional amount due to its short length. A caveat: truncated plugs can benefit from “virtual” plugs, and that seems to be what’s going on here. If you inject a gas into the central portion of the plug, the rocket exhaust will pressurized said gas, pushing on the engine. The result is much as if you had an actual physical plug… but one you don’t have to worry about overheating. The way this is normally designed, the turbine exhaust from the pumps powering the engines is dumped into the center to for the gas-plug. A dandy way to use turbine exhaust gasses you were just going to dump overboard anyway. But the Firefly is a pressure fed system: the LOX and methane propellants are going to be allowed to boil in their tanks to provide the pressure needed to push the propellants into the engines. So… no turbine exhaust. No spare gasses at all, actually.

Also: autogenously pressurized system like this have another issue. By definition, the liquid propellants being pushed through the system are just a hairs breadth away from boiling. So when they pass through the rocket engin injectors and undergo a pressure drop… they boil. or simply flash straight to gas. If this happens in the combustion chamber… great! But the math shows that this wants to happen in the *injectors.* And what happens is that gas bubbles form in the tiny injector ports, mucking up the works. The easiest way to make sure this doesn’t happen is to carry along pressurant gas like helium. Most of the tank pressurization still comes from the cryogenic propellant boiling, but an additional few (dozen?) PSI are added by the helium. This gives the propellant just enough buffer to make sure it gets all the way through the injector before bubbles form.

One notion that was bandied about near the end of WWII was, if the Japanese didn’t see sense and surrender, to nuke Mt. Fuji until it went off. (This is a nonsensical idea… not because nuking a volcano can’t make it go off, but in order to physically wreck the volcano, you have to *penetrate* it, and early nukes were no good at that sort of thing.) Well… it may be that the 2011 earthquake might have set that in motion. Maybe.

Japan earthquake has raised pressure below Mount Fuji, says new study

From the early 1960’s. Very likely *not* representative of an actual design, rather just artistic license.

Fun story about the Ogalalla Aquifer, and how it’s going dry and taking Americas food production capacity with it:

The Last Drop: America’s Breadbasket Faces Dire Water Crisis

In short, for many decades farmers and others living in what used to be called the Great American Desert have been pumping ancient subsurface water to irrigate crops and water cities and such. And since the aquifer is to a large degree a fixed volume of water with few sources, it’s starting to go dry. The responses have been:

1) Switch to crops and farming techniques that require less water

2) La-la-la-la-I-can’t-hear-you-la-la-la….

It seems another option should be available, though. My favorite idea… terraforming!

OK, here’s the Ogalalla Aquifer:

I used this particular map for two reasons:

1) it’s one of the few that, on a quick GIS, shows the Ogalalla Aquifer compared to a good chunk of the CONUS

2) it shows it with the planned Keystone pipeline.

Why are these two important? Because here’s my plan. Refill the aquifer.

The norther part of the aquifer is only the width of Iowa from the Mississippi River. In recent years, there have been droughts that have lowered the level of the river to dangerous levels, choking off barge traffic. But then, there have also been times when that river has slopped over its banks something fierce. Well… rather than just letting the place flood, build a series of pipelines stretching from flood-stage Mississippi River western bank locations in Iowa and Missouri all the way west to boreholes in Nebraska and Kansas. Attach massive pumps to them, powered by new nuclear reactors. During floods, the reactors spool up, powering the pumps and using the floodwater for cooling; billions of gallons are drained from the river and passed west to refill the aquifer. During non-flood times, the pumps are shut down and the reactors go to “standard” power levels.

Sure, high pressure pipes ten feet in diameter stretching 400 or so miles would be an engineering feat. But again, note the Keystone pipeline: not as wide, but certainly far longer. The pipes could be either above or below ground, depending on the area; for below ground pipes, much digging would be needed. And here’s where the effort might actually pay for itself: restart something like the Depress-era Works Progress Administration. Take people currently drawing food stamps from around the country, bus them to Nebraska and Kansas, put shovels in their hands and away you go! Work gets done, unemployed get jobs and pay, the environment and agriculture and national security all benefit.