Pat Chiles

November 3, 2013

Skunked

Sweet ride. Somebody should write a book about it…

In the “it’s about @#$&! time” department, Aviation Leak & Classified Technology reminds us that the Skunk Works has still got it:

In a detailed report in the Nov. 4 edition of Aviation Week & Space Technology, Senior Editor Guy Norris lifts the wraps on the SR-72’s cutting-edge design, including a propulsion breakthrough that would allow the aircraft to fly twice as fast as the Blackbird — six times the speed of sound — but still take off from and land on a runway like a conventional aircraft. Lockheed Martin and partner Aerojet-Rocketdyne have been working in secret for seven years on the concept, which centers on integrating an off-the-shelf turbine with a scramjet to power the aircraft from standstill to Mach 6.

To which I say: AWW YEAH!

It remains to be seen if they can actually get the funding to build this thing. According to the linked article, LockMart has done about all they can do without securing a contract to start cutting metal. Or baking plastic. Whatev…

Now if past history is any indicator, this story could just as easily be a red herring and they’re much further along than indicated. The U-2, SR-71, and F-117 had all been flying for several years before there was any public acknowledgment of their existence.

They also seem to believe we’re at the end of the road for low-observable technology, so “speed is the new stealth.”

There were a lot of rumors about stealth development back in the ’80s and a great deal of speculation as to what a “stealth fighter” might look like. Anybody remember this?

The F-19 “Stealth Fighter”, by the top-secret Testors Skunk Works.

But as is often the case, fantasy looked a lot better than reality:

The real Stealth Fighter, brought to you by the geniuses at Lockheed Martin’s Skunk Works.

The F-117s became public knowledge after a couple of CFIT (controlled flight into terrain) accidents in the late ’80s. At the time, I remember it being reported that they were part of a test and evaluation squadron of 50 to 60 aircraft. And that’s when I knew they were operational: 50-odd aircraft isn’t a squadron, it’s an air group. Nobody buys that many airplanes for “test and eval.”

My hope (and that’s all it is, blind hope) is that LockMart’s tossing this out there as cover for a more mature program. The real breakthrough for this is the turbine-based combined cycle (TBCC) propulsion, in which a jet turbine and ramjet share common inlets and exhaust. That’s not as simple as it sounds, thanks to the complexities of managing the shockwaves that want to bounce around inside the inlets and the rapidly rising temperatures as it passes Mach 3. Jet engines don’t generally take well to superheated air, and cooling that hot air rapidly enough to feed the compressor stage without icing up at the same time is a real trick. This is the same phenomenon that Reaction Engines UK has been working on for the SABRE rocket-based combined cycle engine. They’ve likewise claimed a major breakthrough recently, but whatever the Skunk Works came up with for heat exchangers, they’re keeping it close.

As to this fantastic machine being flown by an actual person? Sounds like that ship has sailed:

The path to the SR-72 would begin with an optionally piloted flight research vehicle (FRV), measuring around 60 ft. long and powered by a single, but full-scale, propulsion flowpath. “The demonstrator is about the size of the F-22, single-engined and could fly for several minutes at Mach 6,” says Leland. The outline plan for the operational vehicle, the SR-72, is a twin-engine unmanned aircraft over 100 ft. long…

There’s a lot of talk that the next generation of fighters will be essentially be flown by gamers sitting in an air-conditioned van. I can only imagine how the current crop of up-and-coming military pilots feel about that. Even though I’d never have a snowball’s chance in hell of flying it, a part of me shares in their presumed impotent frustration. If I ever have the privilege of seeing such an aircraft in service, it’ll be a lot less exciting knowing that there isn’t someone inside of it experiencing the ride of a lifetime.

October 23, 2013

Taming the Beast

Via Behind the Black, a harrowing story of steely-eyed missile men that arrives just in time for the 30th anniversary of that space-age classic, The Right Stuff: Debugging a Live Saturn V.

As we got closer to the Saturn V it was shrouded in a white cloud of venting gases which relieved the pressures building up inside the vehicle fuel tanks.

Our goal was to enter this two level hermetically sealed, all welded steel coffin called the Mobil Launcher Base topped by a fully loaded 363 ft. high Saturn V, weighing 6.2 million pounds, and the permanently attached 380 ft. high Umbilical Tower, weighing 500k pounds. We finally stopped and left our van to walk up and into the second level of the Mobile Launcher Base. About this time, it came to my mind that during one of our training sessions we were told that one of the fully fueled prototype S-II rocket stages had been exploded out in the desert. The results showed that all buildings better be at least three miles from the launch pads – which they are. We were now within 25 feet of this 363ft tall bomb that sounded like its giant fuse had been lit, and we were soon going to get much closer.

…

As we climbed up the last step prior to opening the sealed submarine type entry door that led into the second level. We slowly opened the heavy steel hatch-type pressurized door it was like stepping into the jaws of a huge steaming dragon. The nitrogen fog, used to suppress fire, and the dim red glow from the emergency lights of level A made it look like a hollywood swamp scene. We started making our way through the 21 compartments to find our Relay Rack as the noise took on a more penetrating tone that seemed to bounce from wall to wall.

Read the whole thing.

October 23, 2013October 23, 2013

Got Grammar?

So I guess this is for real:

Idiocracy has arrived. Behold your future and weep.

Darwin might argue that we’d all be better off in the long run if douchebags like these WEREN’T insured. Weed ’em out now before it’s too late!

There’s so much WRONG in here it’s hard to decide where to begin, but here’s a helpful hint for all you “bros”: if you have medical bills to pay, you had damn well better be tapping your beer money before you expect the rest of us to pay for it.

American culture is now at the point where satire is no longer possible. “Do you got insurance?” REALLY? Grammar much?

We are so screwed.

October 6, 2013October 7, 2013

Free Falling

Went to see “Gravity” this afternoon, and, well…HOLY CRAP IF IT ISN’T THE BEST $%#@!& SPACE MOVIE EVER.*

What’s really great about it is this isn’t science fiction…it’s just highly realistic fiction in a spectacular setting.

I don’t know what else to say except “stunning”. If you’re thinking about seeing it, don’t think. Just GO. And don’t even question whether or not you should kick in the few extra bucks for 3D: don’t see it without 3D. You’ll be catching your breath more than once.

Space nerds will have a few minor squawks, namely that the Hubble and ISS are in vastly different orbits. That was my only gripe; I’d have handled it differently but last I checked nobody’s paying me to write scripts. Yet.

I was surprised to see some criticism of the triggering event, namely a debris shower in orbit that initiates all this destruction and grows exponentially worse as more stuff is hit. It’s called an ablation cascade, also referred to as the Kessler Effect.

There was some fear this would happen a few years ago when the Russians tested an anti-satellite missile by blowing up one of their old spy birds in orbit (which not coincidentally is exactly the premise of Gravity). We’ve done it too, but in this instance there was no warning or coordination–they just did it.

How to clean up all that crap is of course the bazillion-dollar question. And it begs the question of what might happen in the aftermath of an actual space war: and I’m not talking Star Destroyers, all it would take is the destruction of a few satellites to put everything in their orbit at risk. Fortunately there are some smart people thinking about that.

More on the hazards of spaceflight (which we need to start figuring out how to mitigate as the commercial age begins) at Popular Mechanics.

*At least until someone buys the rights to Perigee.

October 6, 2013October 6, 2013

Obamaha Beach

From the halls of Montezuma, to the cesspool of DC…

The Marines who took Iwo Jima were not about to be turned away by a bunch of silly barricades and the asshats who tried to keep them out.

Just when you thought Shutdown Theater couldn’t get any more absurd, President Dronekiller decides that he has the authority to shut down open-air monuments, close off public highways, blockade the open seas, and eject property owners from their homes. Which he’d have if we were say, fighting off an invading enemy. Which this ain’t. This is about intentionally disrupting the lives of private citizens to the maximum extent possible just to show who’s boss. It’s also a pointed lesson in the kind of thuggish behavior that erupts among individuals who harbor those tendencies when their Dear Leader signals his tacit approval.

I am so incandescently pissed off right now I can barely put words to it, and am only mildly shocked at how quickly this situation has morphed from absurdity to menace. So yeah, it’s time to show who’s boss: we are.

Fighting fascism, then and now.

October 3, 2013October 4, 2013

Into the Sunset

Anyone who’s read Perigee can probably tell that Tom Clancy was a major inspiration of mine.

I first discovered him in 1985 while still a cadet at The Citadel. After three years of mediocre-to-piss-poor academic performance, I was finally this close to making the Dean’s List my senior year…and I will forever blame Mr. Clancy for causing me to miss it by that much. All because my roommate handed me this little book called The Hunt for Red October right before final exam week.

Notice how I keep shifting blame there?

So yeah, that happened. The weekend before finals was spent holed up in my room wallowing in every word of that confounded book instead of Shakespeare’s tragedies or Milton’s Paradise Lost. My professors were unimpressed with my sudden infatuation. Some regarded this upstart insurance salesman-cum-author with even more derision than Steven King, which illustrates perhaps one of the biggest problems with literature today: eggheads who emphasize all of the wrong things about writing.*

Telling a good story is all that matters in the end. You can be a master of character study or mood setting or ingenious metaphor, with impeccable grammar and surgically precise sentence structure, but if it’s a lame story you’re only going to impress the literary Cool Kid’s Club. And for some authors, that’s exactly what they aspire to. Or so I’m told — beats me, I sure don’t read them.

Tom Clancy was criticized for a lot of things: too much pedantic detail, too one-dimensional, too right-wing. Whatev. Don’t care. His books rocked. His extreme attention to detail is what made them pop and stand out among other military or spy adventures. And his obvious love and respect for the people who put themselves in harm’s way on our behalf. Jack Ryan was a great character: easy to identify with, never straying too far from his own sense of “I can’t freaking believe this $#!+.” And when the unbelievable happened, he damn well did something about it which is precisely what a good literary hero is supposed to do.

Last year I was fortunate enough to find a used hardback of Hunt for Red October in the original Naval Institute printing. It now occupies an honored place on my writing desk. For all of his improbable, imaginative stories, Red October was the one that really lit a fire in me and it’s burned for a good twenty-five years. The combination of fly-on-the-wall realism, down-to-earth characters, and good old-fashioned intrigue was irresistible. It’s a tone I’ve tried to achieve in my own writing and I’m grateful to live in an age where spaceflight is no longer locked into the realm of sci-fi. He was an early supporter of commercial space ventures and I’d hoped he would dip his toe in those waters for at least one book.

His writing began to lose its edge after Executive Orders and I’d always assumed it was because the Cold War paradigm he thrived in had disappeared. But from what I’ve read recently, it appears that it may have had more to do with chronic health problems which have finally run their course.

Peggy Noonan’s eulogy in the Wall Street Journal spoke of him as a man who opened up to and encouraged new authors. I’ve never been afraid of contacting other established writers, and will forever regret not reaching out to the one who influenced me most.

RIP, Jack Ryan.

*It bears mentioning that only a few notorious Citadel professors were all that uppity about literature, most were in fact quite down-to-earth. One day I’ll have to tell some stories about one irascible old Lieutenant Colonel known as Trash Mouth.

October 1, 2013

Super Sunday

While the rest of us were laying around on our butts watching football, the geeks were busy inheriting the Earth…or rather the sky above us.

Orbital Science’s Cygnus cargo spacecraft docked with the International Space Station, making it the second commercial launch provider to do so:

Meanwhile, the first commercial operator to reach the ISS flew their upgraded Falcon 9R launcher out of Vandenberg AFB in California. This was a number of firsts for SpaceX: first flight of the 9R, first all-commercial payload, and first relight of a booster in a controlled re-entry:

That last bit is by far the most significant — it’s the key to SpaceX’s plans for reusable rockets, which is the key to lower launch costs, which is the key to the rest of us being able to afford a trip to orbit (or even farther) some day.

The goal is to eventually return the first stage of an operational Falcon 9 (and later, when it flies, the three cores of the Falcon Heavy) to the launch site, and reuse them.

Sunday’s flight test on an ostensibly operational mission was less ambitious. The goals were to see if 1) they could get the vehicle back into the atmosphere in one piece with the first burn (all previous Falcon 9 uncontrolled first-stage entries have been destructive) and 2) if they could gently drop it into the ocean with the thrust of a single engine, and recover it. The company has emphasized repeatedly over the past several months that this was not part of the primary mission goal, and that they didn’t have high expectations of success.

As it turned out, they seem to have succeeded at their first test goal, but failed the second…

Despite the recovery failure, company founder and CEO Elon Musk seemed very optimistic about the results.

The above is clipped from Rand Simberg’s authoritative roundup at PJ Media. Interestingly, DARPA and McDonnell Douglas made some significant advancements along these lines 20 years ago with the Delta Clipper Experimental (DC-X). Made on the cheap with a good deal of off-the-shelf parts, they managed several successful flights until the project was transferred whole-hog to NASA:

DC-X, first hover landing

NASA agreed to take on the program after the last DC-X flight in 1995. In contrast to the original concept of the DC-X demonstrator, NASA applied a series of major upgrades to test new technologies…

The upgraded vehicle was called the DC-XA, renamed the Clipper Advanced/Clipper Graham, and resumed flight in 1996.

…Its next flight, on 7 July, proved to be its last. During testing, one of the LOX tanks had been cracked. When a landing strut failed to extend due to a disconnected hydraulic line, the DC-XA fell over and the tank leaked. Normally the structural damage from such a fall would constitute only a setback, but the LOX from the leaking tank fed a fire which severely burned the DC-XA, causing such extensive damage that repairs were impractical.

In a post-accident report, NASA’s Brand Commission blamed the accident on a burnt-out field crew who had been operating under on-again/off-again funding and constant threats of outright cancellation. The crew, many of them originally from the SDIO program, were also highly critical of NASA’s “chilling” effect on the program, and the masses of paperwork NASA demanded as part of the testing regimen.

NASA had taken on the project grudgingly after having been “shamed” by its very public success under the direction of the SDIO.

Read the whole entry at Wikipedia for a case study of what happens when a willingness to take risks is swallowed up by ass-covering bureaucratic inertia. Surprising? Sadly, no…but at least the commercial camel’s nose is now all the way up in NASA’s government tent and sniffing at their junk.

September 28, 2013

Why I Believe

Here’s a perfect example of why our government should be limited to the duties spelled out for it in the constitution:

Stimulus Funds Paid for Trees in High-Income Neighborhoods

Landscaping in Colorado, paid for by the other 49 states.

Now, I have nothing against high earners and fancy homes. I aspire to it. But this is what happens when Uncle Sam takes it upon himself to start spreading the wealth around. That is, it gets wasted on all sorts of stupid crap — such as landscaping for people who can afford it on their own. And it attracts parasitic cronies who are busily figuring out ways to skim it for their own benefit.

See this? It’s the entrance to our little neighborhood in small-town Ohio, USA. Know who paid for it? WE DID through our homeowners association (which, BTW, charges way too much for the services they allegedly provide but we haven’t been able to throw them out until all the lots were built). Nobody else’s hard-earned tax money bankrolled it.

Just one example of many. They’re not too hard to find, so expect this post to become the first in a series.

September 27, 2013

The Daily Awesome

THIS:

Now that’s a view. Here’s the story at Slate.

September 27, 2013September 28, 2013

Put Your Eye Out, You Will

Whether or not you’re a fan of Star Wars, I think we can all agree that lightsabers are just about the coolest sci-fi invention evah. In which case, be prepared to shriek like a little girl and soil your britches:

…I can’t decide if it’s more important researchers at MIT and Harvard have just managed to create a previously unobserved form of matter by getting photons to bind together into molecules, or the fact that the result is basically a real-life lightsaber.

It goes on to talk about how it could also lead to a breakthrough in quantum computing or solid crystals made of actual light. Blah blah blah, yeah yeah yeah…get on with it because I WANT A FREAKING LIGHTSABER.

“It’s not an in-apt analogy to compare this to lightsabers,” said Harvard Professor of Physics Mikhail Lukin in a news release. “When these photons interact with each other, they’re pushing against and deflect each other. The physics of what’s happening in these molecules is similar to what we see in the movies.”

WANT. Though I predict a corresponding surge in prosthetic limbs.

Read the whole thing at C/NET.