Giggitty. Launch is at about 29 minutes, landing happens at about 37 minutes.
Jan 142017
Jan 142017
I trust I need not delve into the details of “goldenshowergate.” I also trust that I need not spend to much effort explaining that I’m not a big fan of “conspiracy theories.”
However, sometimes it’s amusing to speculate. So, here are some possibilities to explain the origin and purpose of “goldenshowergate.”
- Trump is behind this. Purpose: get Buzzfeed and other news media outlets to run slanderous, scurrilous nonsense because… well, remember Gawker? I’m sure Hulk Hogan and his newfound millions remembers it. Trump is always on the lookout for new sources of income, so perhaps suing some of the more gullible media outlets into bankruptcy might be a way to go.
- Trump is behind this. Purpose: get the Big Scandal out of the way right out of the gate. It seems reasonably certain that some *real* scandals will come down the pike sooner or later; if the media has shot their wad with this nonsense, anything that follows will either be disbelieved (“oh, there they go again with more #fakenews”), or people simply won’t care. Scandal inoculation, I suppose.
- Some essentially random schmoe produced the “dossier.” Purpose: did it for the lulz, just trolling the media.
Any others?
Jan 142017
Well, 2017 is off to a rollicking start…
A Woman Was Killed by a Superbug Resistant to All 26 American Antibiotics
She was seventy and busted her leg in India where she got initial treatment. The particular bacteria in question was not found elsewhere in the US hospital where she died, so it was likely something she picked up in India (or developed within herself), but chances are that this was not a one-and-done incident. We’ll see more of this.
Jan 132017
Some years ago there was a docu-drama called “Day After Disaster.” This begins with a ten kiloton terrorist nuke going off in Washington, D.C. It trashes the Capitol building, the National Air and Space Museum, the Library of Congress, and a whole lot of people. The show then goes on to describe the aftermath, both in trying to pick up the pieces in D.C. and in continuity of government.
While there is much to consider in that scenario, there’s one philosophical point that has occurred to me many times over the years: the destruction of *stuff* is always considered of less importance than the lives lost… but is it *really*?
It is easy to say that lives cannot be valued in dollars. And yet… life insurance. Lawsuits. Kidnapping ransoms. Disney just collected $50 million after the death of Carrie Fisher. Like it or not, lives *can* be valued in terms of dollars.
But, ok. Dollars are fungible commodities. If a billion dollars vanishes from the economy as a whole to save one life, it’s straightforward enough to argue that the money can be replaced while the life cannot. But what about physical objects that are *not* replaceable? Let’s say someone steals the Mona Lisa or the original copies of the declaration of independence, the Constitution, the Magna Carta. Or they plant a sub-kiloton nuke in the National Air and Space Museum. Or they surround the Washington Monument or Eiffel Tower or the leaning tower of Pisa with truck bombs powerful enough to bring them down. And the demand is simple, straighforward and right out of bad fiction: they will push the button unless, say, some random twelve-year-old child is beheaded on live television.
Yeah, yeah, it’s a silly scenario. But just go with it.
Assume for the sake of argument that the Bad Guys have demonstrated adequately that they have the ability to carry out their evil deed. Their nuke is a recently stolen, known device and they’ve broadcast images of it properly set up for detonation with all the relevant serial numbers visible. They are sealed in adequately that no conceivable SEAL or Delta Force strike team could possibly get to them before they could push the button, and they have a demonstrated willingness to die to get the job done.
The Bad Guys have given a deadline a sufficient number of hours down the line that the region can be safely evacuated. Nobody except the Bad Guy sitting on the button need die. Or, the innocent child could die, and the bomb will be deactivated (let’s somehow assume that we for some reason trust the Bad Guys to actually back down if their demands are met).
Is the NASM, Eiffel Tower, Mona Lisa worth a single life? The easy answer is “it’s just stuff, and human lives are more important.” That sounds great… but it’s verifiably false. Humans have died for “stuff” for as long as we’ve been making “stuff.” Workers killed building bridges and buildings and dams. Miners dead digging up the coal used to make the paint used to create that masterpiece. Farmers mangled in agricultural equipment, auto workers mashed in car factories, test pilots splattered across the landscape. Now, in these cases those who die are essentially anonymous. And they have chosen to put themselves at risk. In contrast, the Bad Guys want someone who is not responsible, not involved and not willing. This someone will very quickly become non-anonymous. And *somebody* will have to help facilitate this sacrifice.
So is “stuff” worth a single life? I suspect that most people, after reading the preceding rambling gibberish, will continue to say “no.” But consider this: let’s say this exact scenario had occurred 300 years ago with the Mona Lisa… it had been stolen and unless one innocent life was sacrificed it would been burned. And that sacrifice had been made, and so we have the Mona Lisa today. Who would even give that one life a second thought today? Or what if the Library of Alexandria could have been saved if only one poor schmuck had been taken out? Would we say that that life lost so long ago to provide a cultural boon today was not worth it?
Hmmm.
This is the sort of thing I think of when I see a docudrama about D.C. getting nuked. The narrator says that the Mall and the Capitol are destroyed, with everyone in ’em… I shrug. But then the narrator says the LoC and the NASM are trashed, and that gives me a sad.
Jan 132017
So I got this email this AM…
Boy, it sure looks official. Pretty sure the United States Postal Service sends ZIP files from Russian email addresses just all the time.
Jan 132017
The clickbaity headline:
Star on collision course with solar system to bring MILLIONS of asteroids towards Earth
The less clickbaity details: the star in question, Gliese 710, is currently 64 lightyears away and won;t make its closest approach for another 1.35 million years. But here’s the interesting bit: closest approach will be 77 light *days,* with a possibility of 38 light days. The authors estimate that the passage of Gliese 710 through the Oort cloud will send a shower of comets into the inner solar system at a rate of about ten per year over a span of about 3 to 4 million years.
Sounds like it’ll be a hell of a show. Pity about the wait.
Jan 122017
“We’re not in favor of the peaceful transition of power.”
Simply taking these people at their word would, in a rational world, squash the flawed stereotype that it is the Trumpists who are the violent ones. Sadly, this is a world where people actually give a damn about the Kardashians, so a rational world this ain’t.
Something I was surprised I didn’t see during the last election cycle: videos of these sort of people as part of major TV ad campaigns for the *pro* Trump side. Imagine the more unhinged elements of the Left spend the next four years throwing tantrums and firebombs, beating Trump supporters on the streets, torturing Trump supporters live on Facebook. What *better* advertisement could the Campaign to Re-Elect Trump possibly have?
Jan 122017
The Aerospace Projects Review Patreon rewards for January will include a reasonably massive Douglas report on the Saturn V-launched pre-Skylab “Early Orbital Space Station” and a scan of a reasonably gigantic diagram of the Boeing 2707-300 SST. These will be released before the end of January and will be available to all then-current Patrons. So if these items interest you, and/or if you are interested in helping the effort to find and preserve this sort of aerospace history, be sure to check out the APR Patreon.
And…
Jan 112017
U.S. Navy F/A-18 Hornets released a swarm of 103 Perdix semi-autonomous drones in flight.
The Perdix drone is an itty-bitty thing with only 20 minutes duration, but it seems to be capable of some interesting things when released as a semi-autonomous swarm. The swarm of drones starts off as a line, but they end up orbiting a single target at a radius of about 100 meters. Beyond the direct military applications of data gathering, this sort of thing would likely be *seriously* disturbing to enemy forces. The end of the video is shot from that central point as a hundred screaming things circle it like a school of hungry piranha-banshee.
Jan 112017
I caught “Hidden Figures” at the theater last Friday. Put simply: it’s a damn fine movie. Entertaining, well acted and uplifting. I understand some people see subtle hints of messages about race and gender in it, but what I saw was a fact-based story about three women who improve their own lots in life *and* make valuable contributions to society by not only hard work, but smart work in STEM fields. One is a mathematician, one an engineer, one a computer programmer (this was in an era when a “computer” was a person, someone who spent their days computing); all dedicated and skilled, and all working to put American astronauts into orbit.
The majority of the movie is set circa 1961 at NASA-Langley. It is thus *filled* with early 1960’s aerospace stuff… wind tunnels, adding machines, an early IBM computer that fills a room and requires boxloads of punch cards to program. Also included: lots of maps and plots and blueprints tacked to the wall of the Space Task Group room. Such as seen here:
See the two blueprints on the wall behind Kevin Costner? Those are Mercury capsule cyanotype blueprints I provided to the movies art department. Yay! This is, I think, the fourth time I’ve provided blueprints and diagrams to a movie or TV show to serve as props or set dressing; this is the first time where the scene didn’t get cut. So… huzzah! A few more of my blueprints appear in the flick, but these two were the standouts.
Now, if’n you’re like me, you’re an aerospace history nerd. Which means you pick movies apart like any other nerd, looking for the nitpicky continuity flaws (“Sulu wouldn’t push *that* button, he’d push *that* button!”). So, yeah, there are a few things that made the nitpicky nerd in me go “Heyyy…” A TV news reporter describing Alan Shepards first flight mentions that the sub-orbital Redstone rocket will go to “116 miles… per hour.” Shoulda stopped two words sooner, Ace. Though to be fair, it’s entirely possible that a reporter would flub their units like that. And in Al Harrisons (Kevin Costners) office, there are a number of bits of art, including a wooden display model of the C-5 Galaxy. Which would be a neat trick in 1961, given that the Galaxy wouldn’t be designed for another three years. Some stock footage of non-Redstone ballistic missiles going FOOM during testing, standing in for Redstone testing failures. And there’s a scene where Sheldon Cooper explains just what orbits are… to a room of NASA engineers who have been working on Mercury for a few years. Pretty sure they know what an orbit is. Of course, this scene was included not because it’s historically accurate, but because the *audience* might need to have the concept of an orbit explained to them (a damning indictment of the American edumacational system if ever there was one). But it still yoinked me right out of the moment.
But on the whole I found the movie to be terribly entertaining. The main characters are all well written and well acted, behaving with professionalism and dignity even when faced with some serious dumbassery by their co-workers and their segregated environment. It’s the first non-Star Wars/Avengers/Lord of the Rings movie that I can recall where a sizable fraction of the audience applauded at the end. The special effects are relatively few; the movie doesn’t focus on the astronauts or the space flights, but on the people almost always forgotten in these stories: the engineers and mathematicians back on the ground whose work actually made the flight possible. But the effects that are included are pretty good and serve the movie well.