Author: Pat Chiles

An expatriate Southerner in the Midwest, writing about writing and whatever dadgum else interests him. Author of the science fiction thrillers FROZEN ORBIT, FRONTIER, and ESCAPE ORBIT, published by Baen Books.
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Thursday Brain Dump

Once again, not much time for anything else so ya’ll line up at the trough…

Rand Simberg weighs in on the likelihood of Golden Spike’s commercial lunar missions. From someone who knows of which he speaks.

Aerospace companies at increasing risk of industrial sabotage from the Chinese. Don’t say I didn’t warn you!

Following that train of thought: European research into hypersonic suborbital airliners. Well, a guy can dream, but this looks like more EU BS. Studies are fine; research is necessary. But why pretend like they’re ever going to get serious about actually building something?

And for something more down to earth: Airline veteran turns the tables on obnoxious passengers. Takes two to tango.

End of the world watch: “QE3: This Time, It’s Personal!”: Stepping on the accelerator as we head over the cliff. Apparently the old “I can’t be broke, I still have checks!” line is a joke to some and a guiding philosophy for others. I don’t really care what your politics are, just know that this will not end well unless we can somehow grow the economy at a rate that will eventually surpass the Fed’s money-printing velocity. And let’s face it, pro-growth policies are not exactly flowing out of Washington these days. Our only real hope is the domestic energy boom underway in the Appalachians and Dakotas, which so far are not hamstrung by a need to access Federal land. If the EPA can be kept from strangling that baby in the crib, we may have a fighting chance. Better hope so, because otherwise an inflection point is coming and reality will not be denied for much longer.

What’s really infuriating about all this political theater is that those of us who’ve tried to learn History’s lessons are going to suffer from the foolishness of those who refuse to (or believe they’re smarter than their forebears). In the end, human nature is what it is. There is nothing new under the sun.

 

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Daily Brain Dump

Since I’m in the middle of a big push to finish Terminal Velocity, there won’t be a whole lot of blog pontificating going on here for the next several weeks. Sorry, but there’s only so much time in the day.

To fill the void, I’ll be posting links to stories that catch my interest. Hopefully they’ll catch yours as well. If something really interesting happens, I might even comment on it (surely the suspense is killing you).

I can hear it now: “Nope, it’s not killing me, and don’t call me Shirley.”

So here’s what’s going on in our world today…

Giant killer asteroids to barely miss Earth tonight. Sleep well, kiddies.

Robert Ballard finds evidence of Noah’s Flood. In case you ever thought wayward asteroids were our only problem.

Elon Musk on Mars and Interstellar travel. Nope, he’s not building a warp drive anytime soon.

Michigan becomes a right-to-work state, predictable hilarity violence ensues. Seriously? If your little club is so friggin’ awesome, why do you need the force of law to retain dues-paying members? Welcome to the free market, beeches.

Behind the yoke of Boeing’s new 787 Dreamliner. Yeah, I’d take one.

Why going to the trouble of hiking and camping is worth it. Because nature rocks.

How little we really know about dinosaurs. And by extension, our own world. What might we imagine present-day animals to be if they had to be reconstructed from the same available fossil record? Hint: tree-climbing goats. But no sharks with frickin’ lasers…again.

Wrath of Khan character officially revealed for Star Trek Into Darkness!   Sadly, it’s not the one we’re all hoping for. Yet.

Nope. Not today.

P.S. And if you’re looking for some good holiday reading, Perigee is only 99 cents this week!

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Working On The Railroad

Funny, it doesn't LOOK golden...For those of you not familiar with the American history of Westward expansion (that wasn’t summed up in popular lore by an old Iron Maiden song), the “golden spike” refers to the completion of the first Transcontinental Railroad. It signified the opening of the West, and allowed us to transition from pioneering to something more permanent.

The railroad made life easier for settlers who before could only live off the land, and allowed more people from “Back East” to head West. A century later, this all provided rich fodder for Clint Eastwood movies, but that’s another story.

Today, “Golden Spike” also refers to a new company intent on getting people back to the Moon by the end of this decade.

Like everyone else in the space-nerd corner of the blogosphere, I’ve been eagerly awaiting today’s announcement (no, not the one for the new Trek movie – but hey, that works too). I hadn’t posted anything on it because recent rumors suggested that one of the company’s investors happens to be a gentleman whom I work for.

Sadly, it now appears those rumors aren’t true – because you’d better believe I’d have been all up in his office looking for a foothold in the new company.

Though it does appear to have signed up some serious investors and human spaceflight experts. It’s also nice to see that they’re pushing a framework along the lines of what I’d been holding to for a long time:

That is, rocket science ain’t exactly rocket science anymore. 

In particular, there are ways to get to the Moon that don’t necessarily demand a Saturn V-class launcher. If these guys are serious about a “cislunar superhighway”, then that presumably means they’re serious about orbital depots, reusable landers, and maybe even Aldrin cyclers.

Aldrin cyclers are – surprise – named for the second man to walk on the moon, Buzz Aldrin. He earned the first PhD in Orbital Mechanics from MIT, years before there was even a manned space program. His doctoral thesis in orbital rendezvous became NASA’s standard, especially after he and Jim Lovell were forced to prove the concept when their radar on Gemini XII failed.

Dr. Aldrin proposed a system of reusable spacecraft that would semi-permanently orbit between two bodies: in this case, Earth and Moon. They would be on long, low-energy orbits, maybe two weeks each way (recall that Apollo missions only took 3 or 4 days each way).  The idea is they would be constantly shuttling people and stuff between the two, and could be met by other spacecraft at either destination.

So instead of a crew needing a big one-way booster to lunar orbit, maybe they’d only need to get up to a high Earth orbit with their stuff and dock with the Cycler while it’s swinging by.

Of course nothing lasts forever up there, which is where the fuel depots come in. If that technology could be mastered (and a lot of really smart people think it could be, rather soon) then it opens up all sorts of possibilities: namely, smaller and more frequent launches. Reusable landers. Semi-permanent cyclers.

If it sounds like I’ve been thinking about this a lot, it’s because I have been. All of this cislunar-infrastructure-stuff (say that three times fast) is an integral part of the Perigee sequel, working title I Have No Freaking Idea What to Name This Book Yet. But I’m still leaning towards Terminal Velocity or maybe Farside Down.

In the meantime, I hope this group can put together enough money to actually do something but there’s a long, sad history in this business of people with grand ideas and no money. It’s certainly more plausible than just five or six years ago, and one encouraging aspect of today’s announcement is that no one’s laughing them out of the room: major newspapers, networks, and magazines are all featuring this story today.

That’s because Musk and SpaceX have shown us how it can be done. If they can drive down launch costs as much as they’re hoping for, then Golden Spike has a realistic chance to move this project beyond PowerPoint. Unless at least a few billionaires sign up to bankroll a flight, all of this is just neat-looking vaporware until they start putting money down for someone to bend metal.

No bucks, no Buck Rogers. Or so I’ve heard…

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Cool Your Jets

Reaction Engines in the UK seems to be excited about something:

The Biggest Breakthrough in Propulsion Since The Jet Engine

Can you tell they might think this is a big deal? I for one hope they’re not exaggerating because this does have the potential to be a generational leap in engine technology.

If their pre-coolers can be made to work outside the lab, then the concept of airbreathing rockets (or rocket-based combined cycle, RBCC) isn’t so farfetched anymore. And cooling a fast-moving mass of air by over 1,000°C in a hundredth of a second ain’t no small potatoes.

Take a look at this cutaway view of their SABRE engine: the heat exchangers are those baffled rings between the inlet spike in front and the compressor in the middle. It’s meant to function like the intake of a normal jet engine – but at hypersonic speeds, temperature becomes more limiting than just about anything else (presumably the inlet spikes are managing the shock waves that are just itching to bounce around inside that engine while it’s moving through the air at Ludicrous Speed).

So anyways, air tends to get kind of hot when it’s being pushed and squeezed at high velocities. And when air gets really hot, jet intakes tend to not work very well. That was a big reason the SR-71 was limited to around Mach 3.5 (or so they say). For a combined-cycle engine, precoolers are pretty much ball game.

SABRE engine. Credit: Reaction Engines UK

A functioning SABRE engine would enable the kind of suborbital spaceplanes that I wrote about in Perigee. In fact, Reaction’s ideas were used extensively in my mental world-building while the story took shape. I’m a big believer in the potential for suborbital point-to-point airline service – if you’d be willing to spend a quarter-mil for a 30 minute joyride on Virgin Galactic, wouldn’t you spend that much to actually go somewhere?

Yes, I’m kind of excited about this. Could it eventually lead to a single-stage-to-orbit spaceplane like they propose with Skylon? Maybe. The energy needed to make orbit is exponentially greater than that needed for a 6,000 mile hop at Mach 10.

Skylon spaceplane. Credit: Reaction Engines UK

So my answer would be, “beats me, ask a real engineer.” I just play one at work. But hanging those heavy engines out on the ends of the wing strikes me as not being a real good idea. Any twisting moments (which will happen in atmospheric flight) would just be amplified. Which means beefier wing structure, which adds weight, which increases minimum runway, which also requires more power from the engines, etc…this is the kind of circular reasoning that is otherwise known as a “trade study.” Every decision about one aspect of a system’s design affects all sorts of other stuff in the system. This is especially true in aeronautics.

But perhaps the biggest hurdle to overcome (in my view) is the apparent operating assumption that a passenger-carrying version of Skylon wouldn’t have a pilot aboard. They’d just pop in a passenger cabin, program the airplane, and send it on its way. There has been a tremendous amount of progress in the UAV world, but I have a hard time seeing how people would pay big money for an inherently risky ride with nobody up in the front office to deal with stuff when it all goes sideways. I have an even harder time seeing how FAA or EASA would ever certify such a bird to carry passengers (and that’s coming eventually, we can be certain). Unexpected bad stuff will happen, you can bet on it: flying is hours of boredom interrupted by moments of sheer terror. Thus shall it ever be.

11/30 UPDATE: io9 has more, but it sounds like they’re confusing Skylon with another Reaction proposal called LAPCAT.

12/01 UPDATE: Wired is on the case as well.

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Warped Minds

NASA’s latest project under construction. You wish.

Maybe Elon Musk isn’t thinking big enough?

A few months ago, physicist Harold White stunned the aeronautics world when he announced that he and his team at NASA had begun work on the development of a faster-than-light warp drive. His proposed design, an ingenious re-imagining of an Alcubierre Drive, may eventually result in an engine that can transport a spacecraft to the nearest star in a matter of weeks — and all without violating Einstein’s law of relativity.

I’ve heard about this kind of research off-and-on for some time, and have to admit I thought it was nuts. But if it’s actually within reach of current technology (namely, enough energy to power such a thing) then, yeah. That’s the sort of out-there R&D that NASA ought to be working on, because new technology pretty much always starts with a lab experiment:

What White is waiting for is existence of proof — what he’s calling a “Chicago Pile” moment — a reference to a great practical example.

“In late 1942, humanity activated the first nuclear reactor in Chicago generating a whopping half Watt — not enough to power a light bulb,” he said. “However, just under one year later, we activated a ~4MW reactor which is enough to power a small town. Existence proof is important.”

Once the underlying science is understood, it becomes an engineering problem. And that’s where the really cool stuff gets done.

11/29 UPDATE: Warp Drive goes all respectable-like in the Atlantic Monthly.

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Told You So, Part 2

Elon Musk is serious about going to Mars:

Musk’s $500,000 ticket price for a Mars trip was derived from what he thinks is affordable.

“The ticket price needs to be low enough that most people in advanced countries, in their mid-forties or something like that, could put together enough money to make the trip,” he said, comparing the purchase to buying a house in California. [Photos: The First Space Tourists]

He also estimated that of the eight billion humans that will be living on Earth by the time the colony is possible, perhaps one in 100,000 would be prepared to go. That equates to potentially 80,000 migrants.

Musk figures the colony program — which he wants to be a collaboration between government and private enterprise — would end up costing about $36 billion. He arrived at that number by estimating that a colony that costs 0.25 percent or 0.5 percent of a nation’s gross domestic product (GDP) would be considered acceptable.

The United States’ GDP in 2010 was $14.5 trillion; 0.25 percent of $14.5 trillion is $36 billion. If all 80,000 colonists paid $500,000 per seat for their Mars trip, $40 billion would be raised.

“Some money has to be spent on establishing a base on Mars. It’s about getting the basic fundamentals in place,” Musk said. “That was true of the English colonies [in the Americas]; it took a significant expense to get things started. But once there are regular Mars flights, you can get the cost down to half a million dollars for someone to move to Mars. Then I think there are enough people who would buy that to have it be a reasonable business case.”

Here’s a link to his full interview with the Royal Aeronautical Society (H/T Clark Lindsey’s NewSpace Watch). This bit is also interesting:

Musk also ruled out SpaceX’s Dragon capsule, which the company is developing to ferry astronauts to and from low-Earth orbit, as the spacecraft that would land colonists on the Red Planet. When asked by SPACE.com what vehicle would be used, he said, “I think you just land the entire thing.”

Asked if the “entire thing” is the huge new reusable rocket — which is rumored to bear the acronymic name MCT, short for Mass Cargo Transport or Mars Colony Transport — Musk said, “Maybe.”

Not sure why you’d want to land the whole thing on Mars, unless the booster can be used again for departure. That’s a bit of a departure from their earlier concepts, in which Dragon was designed as a true multi-purpose vehicle, up to and including Earth re-entry at Mars return velocities.

And did anyone else notice the MCT speculation? Hmm…

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Thanksgiving

Today I am thankful for many things: my family, my job, and my good health. I am thankful for a God who loves us and who has reconciled us to Him through the gift of grace. I am thankful for living in a free Nation that recognizes my right to believe, and to advocate for that belief. I am thankful for the men and women I served with, and who defend that Nation today.

I’m also pretty dang happy about this:

This will be my first attempt at smoking a turkey, so the family will all be especially thankful if Dad doesn’t screw the pooch.

Speaking of Thansksgiving pooch-screwin’, here’s a timeless classic that deserves its place in the holiday pantheon alongside Alice’s Restaurant and Charlie Brown:

Eat up and enjoy!

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Ding Dongs

Because simply calling them “economic illiterates” doesn’t quite get the point across harshly enough.

When the freaking Teamsters agree with management and accept concessions, shouldn’t that be an indication that hey, this is kind of serious?

Something like this happened with Eastern Airlines back in the late ’80s. Despite having their mechanic’s union steward holding a seat on the board of directors, it still didn’t satisfy them. If anything, their leadership used that privilege to just create more hate, discontent, and chaos. Labor strife got so intense that, near the end, company chairman (and Apollo 8 CDR) Frank Borman reportedly carried a concealed pistol in an ankle holster.

The end result? One union eventually drove a once-great airline into the ground. On purpose, to prove a point; never mind their thousands of colleagues who had no say in the matter and were dragged down with them.

I can’t imagine the fury such people at Hostess must be feeling right now. Why couldn’t anyone understand that 80 or 90% of something is far better than 0% of something? Take the deal, suck it up, and use the time you just bought to find a better job. And if you can’t find a better gig, be patient. Life sucks for a lot of people these days and it ain’t about to get any better.

The only explanation for this kind of behavior is greed, bound to a sense of entitlement, with a healthy dose of economic ignorance. I’ve never understood this notion that businesses are just sitting on enormous piles of cash with no better purpose.

Maybe they are, maybe they aren’t. Either way, it’s not like there aren’t other obligations. Just because a company has cash reserves doesn’t mean they should hand over all of it to their employees. What happens if they have a bad year? You’d kind of want those reserves on hand to cover your bills – which includes making payroll.

In other words, it’s the same principle we should all be using to manage our personal finances. If I get a raise (cough, hack…’scuse me, gagged on something there), it doesn’t mean my kids are suddenly going to see a big increase in their allowance. And I love my kids a whole lot more than our employers love us.

Let’s face it: work sucks. That’s why it’s called “work” and not “fun”. Sometimes we’re fortunate enough to land at good companies with good leadership; sometimes we’re working for the pointy-haired boss in the Dilbert comic. I’ve had both, and have never comprehended the strike mentality that tries so hard to squeeze more blood from the stone. If your gig blows that bad, then find another.

Perhaps I’m too harsh, but my heart goes out to the innocent bystanders in this mess. That includes the Hostess employees who were just cast into financial turmoil by a few boneheaded coworkers, and the rest of us who are now well and truly screwed when the zombie apocalypse finally arrives:

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The Stupid Party

Today’s vocabulary word is Charlie-Foxtrot: the phonetic abbreviation of military slang which rhymes with “monster truck.” If you need further explanation, you’re not going to find it on this blog.

CF aptly describes Romney’s utter failure of a get-out-the-vote (GOTV) plan. I use the word “plan” because “effort” or “organization” would suggest that actual work was being done or that someone, somewhere, knew what the hell was going on.

Judging by the stink-bombs being dropped around the internet today, it appears that in fact nothing was being done and that no one had a friggin’ clue as to what was happening on the ground, in the voting booths. This election was lost because three million fewer Republican voters turned out than for the listless John McCain in 2008.

Let that sink in for a moment. How can that be?

Romney was not my preferred candidate by a long shot, but he ended up being the best choice among a disappointing field of also-rans (Newt could’ve been devastatingly effective if only he showed more self-control, but that ship sailed years ago). I grew to appreciate the man as time went on and he grew more comfortable in his role. He projected an aura of capable, sober trustworthiness that should have prevailed over the Dem’s relentless negativity.

However, one must be willing to punch back when attacked. He didn’t, not until the first debate, and we all know how much the momentum shifted at that point. He also played it much safer than I would’ve preferred in the final debate – and let’s get real: he had a civic duty in my opinion to publicly call out Obama over the Benghazi fiasco since the press clearly wouldn’t.

Meanwhile, the other side ran a campaign expressly designed to frighten voters and suppress our turnout. Which they admit to. Which is fine. Politics ain’t beanbag, as they say. Romney’s people at least claimed to understand this, which is why they promised such a sophisticated GOTV program: determine who’s sitting this one out, in real time, and persuade them to come vote. It would’ve been brilliant if it had only worked.

Even if ORCA was hacked somehow (and at that point, it likely didn’t matter anymore), that’s exactly the sort of dirty trick one should expect…right? So long as they’re not actually rigging the vote (cough – Philadelphia – cough), it’s all fair game. If I were an IT nerd I’d probably get off on it – expect a denial-of-service attack, and defeat it.

GAME DAY IS NOT THE TIME TO BETA-TEST YOUR SCOREBOARD!!!

Holy crap on a cracker, how hard is that to understand? And I’m not even an IT guy, I’m just one more schlub out of millions relying on networked software every freaking day just to do my job.

Of course, this is only one big piece of a much larger puzzle. There’s more to this debacle than just misplaced trust in a software app (I’m looking at you, jackass Senate candidates). But it does explain something else that had been bugging me…I volunteered on two separate occasions to be a poll watcher but was never contacted. No email, no phone call, certainly no credentials or strike list. And don’t tell me they didn’t need all the help they could get in Ohio.

Jonah Goldberg nailed it, as usual:

If Romney had merely gotten as many votes as McCain he’d be president-elect now. Hell, Romney got fewer votes than George W. Bush did from — wait for it — Mormons! Seriously, did they appoint one of those Chinatown tic-tac-toe-chickens to run the turnout operation?

Constitutional and Libertarian principles, to the limited extent they were advocated, had their best chance to prevail in decades and our side blew it. Again. A candidate who appeared to be much better than 2008’s, who appeared to run a much better campaign, appears to have left millions of votes on the table. We lost because during the home stretch, his organization placed all of its faith in a software app that hadn’t been tested and didn’t work.

And there was no plan B.

Now we, as a country, are left with no plan B. Thanks again, GOP.

UPDATE: Was the whole campaign essentially a money-grab by soulless “campaign consultants” whose mouths were writing checks their brains couldn’t cash? RedState seems to think so.

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