An evening pause: Not only is the flying amazing, including some stunts under structures (which is usually forbidden in most cities), the music, a piece called Celestial by Audio Network, is great too!
Hat tip from both Edward Thelen’s, father and son.
In a contest to pick the name of Russia’s proposed new manned capsule to replace the Soyuz the public has so far picked “Gagarin” as its favorite.
The choice is entirely fitting and appropriate. The problem is whether the Russians will have the cash to build it.
An evening pause: On this anniversary of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, we should listen to President Franklin Roosevelt’s entire speech to Congress on December 8, 1941. He came before Congress to ask them to declare war on Japan.
For those of us who remember President George Bush’s speech after 9/11, the differences are striking. Bush aimed his ire at one element in the Islamic world, al-Qaeda, while ignoring their numerous allies in Iran, Gaza, the West Bank, and elsewhere. He also made it clear that the military would be asked to do the work, not the entire nation. “Be ready,” he told them, while suggesting to everyone else that they need do nothing themselves to join in the battle. Bush did not demand a nationwide commitment. In essence, he asked Americans to just continue shopping.
Roosevelt instead said this: “No matter how long it may take us to overcome this premeditated invasion, the American people will win through to absolute victory. I believe that I interpret the will of the Congress and of the people when I assert that we will not only defend ourselves to the uttermost, but will make it very certain that this form of treachery shall never again endanger us.”
The entire nation was now at war, and the goal was total victory so that Japan would never be able to do it again. For the next three and a half years that was the goal. And not just against Japan. The goal was to destroy Japan as well as all of its fascists allies. And to do it as fast as possible.
Had Bush responded to 9/11 as Roosevelt had to Pearl Harbor, the nation would have not just invaded Iraq and Afghanistan, it would have continued into Syria, Pakistan, and then Iran. In addition, there would have been no gentle treatment of Saudi Arabia. They are as complacent in the Islamic War against the west as is Iran, and must either change, or be changed wholly.
Instead, Bush gave us a weak and partial victory that accomplished nothing, and allowed more violence and terrorism to raise its ugly head again, aided and encouraged by the even weaker and wimpier leadership of Barack Obama (illustrated by his own absurdly weak speech just yesterday). The result has been the attacks in France, Benghazi, and California, and increased violence in Israel, Iraq, and Syria. And the rise of a terrorist nation called the Islamic State.
Anyway, watch and see how a real leader responds to evil:
Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter has located the impact site for the Apollo 16 rocket booster that, like four other boosters, had been deliberately crashed on the surface so the Apollo seismometers could use the vibrations to study the Moon’s interior.
The other impact sites had been found already, but Apollo 16 was harder to pin down because contact with the booster had ended prematurely so its location was less well known.
An evening pause: Having left Brooklyn last night, let’s take a look at what New York City looked like to the first documentary filmmakers. I myself am struck by two things immediately: First, how much the city really still looks like this. The buildings might have changed, but New York is still crowded, packed with buildings and people. Second, how much change also occurred in a very short time. The streets went from horses and carriages to street cars to automobiles in just a few decades, quickly, and with relatively little difficulty. Today such changes are hard, slow, and very expensive, mostly because of the introduction of an unending number of regulations.
Jeff Bezos today personally delivered to the Seattle Musuem of Flight the restored remains of two Apollo Saturn V engines that his company recovered from the ocean floor in 2013.
Over the course of two and a half years, the experts at the museum worked to stabilize the F-1 engine parts, halting the corrosion caused by the salt water. The engines were not restored, however. Rather they were conserved in their “as found” condition to preserve their full history, from the sky to the sea.
In the process, the Cosmosphere was able to reveal and research the parts’ serial numbers and identify the flight history for most of the large parts. The conservators were able to tie the components to the Apollo 11 and Apollo 12 missions in 1969 and to Apollo 16 in 1972.
The Apollo 11 components will be donated to the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum in Washington.
Link here.
The writer outlines the history of English and how the many different languages that contributed to it caused it to be so different from most other languages. Some of the oddities he notes are quite fascinating because we English-speakers take them so much for granted. He only hints, however, at what is probably the English language’s greatest gift — its gigantic vocabulary resulting from its remarkable ability to absorb new words — which probably comes from that same polyglot history.
Though scientists have not yet identified it, the piece of space junk discovered last month in an unusual orbit with a predictable moment of decay has burned up over the Indian Ocean,
Estimated to measure 1–2 metres across, WT1190F had circled the Earth–Moon system since at least 2009, says independent astronomy-software developer Bill Gray, who has been working with NASA to track the debris. It most likely came off a recent lunar spacecraft, but it is not out of the question that it could have dated to the Apollo era.
In at least one case, scientists were able to image the object as it burned up. The data from this will allow them to determine its chemical composition, which in turn might help them identify it.
This week Diane and I are in Mexico with friends doing some sightseeing. As is my habit, I can’t just enjoy the sights I have to ask a lot of questions while trying to get an impression of the place, its culture, its environment, its atmosphere, and its politics. Not surprisingly, the answers to some of those questions pointed me upward beyond the surface of the Earth. To understand why, read on.
Today we toured the inner parts of Mexico City, both on foot and by bus and subway (or the Metro as they call it here). I have spent considerable time in many of the world’s major cities, growing up in New York and visiting at length Moscow, Kiev, Prague, London, Chicago, Los Angeles and others. Mexico City has many of the same features you’d expect for this kind of big city, lots of people, lots of traffic, lots of buildings packed tight together, and lots of wealth and poverty sitting side-by-side.
Mexico City however to me seemed to be most crowded and the most packed of any city I have ever visited or lived in. Its size and population probably rivals that of the entire New York metropolitan area, but somehow the traffic and crowds and architecture seemed more piled on top of each other with far less breathing room.
First was the traffic. Everywhere we went it was wall to wall vehicles. The major highways were never quiet, even at night. Nor could I see much difference between midday and rush hours. The picture on the right shows us heading from in from an outer neighborhood where we were staying to take the subway into the center of the city. Not only was it bumper-to-bumper, but if you look out in the distance the road is bumper-to-bumper as far as the eye can see. My host Alfonso added at one point that in order to avoid this traffic many people routinely leave for work before 5 am and come home after 8 pm. Schools have multiple shifts, including ones at night.
A side note: The tall rectangular structures in the foreground are not buildings. This is a work of art, five several hundred foot tall cinderblock structures supposedly forming a hand pointing up, with the thicker yellow tower in the front representing the thumb.
» Read more
An evening pause: The amazing thing about this song is that it was written in the 1960s and does a good job of describing the insanity today. In the 60s it was actually exaggerating the chaos a bit. Today, it probably understates it. The only thing about the song that I objected to then, and now, is its eventual pessimistic view of humanity. We ain’t perfect, but we ain’t all bad either. In fact, I think there is probably more good than evil in most of us. We just need to listen, think, and choose. Chaos happens when we don’t, and instead act like mindless instinct-driven animals.
Hat tip Tom Biggar.
The Apollo-era prototype lunar rover that had been thought lost when it was sold for scrap has been found and is actually possibly going to go up for public auction.
An early test prototype of the Apollo lunar rovers, apparently parked in an Alabama backyard for decades, was sold for scrap and lost when the estate of its owner was liquidated.
“It has come to the attention of the Marshall Space Flight Center historian that you may be in the possession of a prototype of a Lunar Roving Vehicle,” NASA wrote to the buggy’s owner in an August 2014 letter requesting that the LRV be turned over. “Returning the vehicle to the Marshall Space Flight Center would allow MSFC to restore [it] so it might be used for historical and educational purposes.”
Unfortunately, the letter arrived too late. “Upon contacting the current owner,” NASA’s Office of the Inspector General reported in December, “we learned the LRV had been sold for scrap after [redacted] had passed away.”
The first digital RAM computer memory chip to fly in space is up for auction and you can buy it.
As part of its Space Exploration Signature Auction, Heritage Auctions is taking bids for a vintage random access, non-destructive readout 4,096 bit memory plane that flew on Gemini 3. This ferric memory unit was an integral part of the Gemini Spacecraft Computer, which was the first computer installed in a manned space capsule.
Gemini 3 was the first manned Gemini mission and completed 3 orbits on March 23, 1965. The auction goes through November 3, and bidding is presently at $2,000.
Though the story is not confirmed, it appears that in 1962 the Air Force base at Okinawa came mere seconds from launching its nuclear missiles during the Cuban missile crisis.
The most frightening part of the story is this:
According to Bordne’s account—which, recall, is based on hearing just one side of a phone call—the situation of one launch crew was particularly stark: All its targets were in Russia. Its launch officer, a lieutenant, did not acknowledge the authority of the senior field officer—i.e. Capt. Bassett—to override the now-repeated order of the major. The second launch officer at that site reported to Bassett that the lieutenant had ordered his crew to proceed with the launch of its missiles! Bassett immediately ordered the other launch officer, as Bordne remembers it, “to send two airmen over with weapons and shoot the [lieutenant] if he tries to launch without [either] verbal authorization from the ‘senior officer in the field’ or the upgrade to DEFCON 1 by Missile Operations Center.”
Read it all. Quite fascinating, and chilling. A hat tip to Shane Rollin, my web guy, for sending this to me.
A piece of unidentified space junk, discovered in a long elliptical orbit going out far beyond the Moon, has been calculated to hit the Earth over the Indian Ocean on November 13.
WT1190F was detected by the Catalina Sky Survey, a program aimed at discovering asteroids and comets that swing close to Earth. At first scientists didn’t know what to make of this weird body. But they quickly computed its trajectory, after collecting more observations and unearthing 2012 and 2013 sightings from telescope archives, says independent astronomy software developer Bill Gray, who has been working to track the debris with NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.
WT1190F travels a highly elliptical orbit, swinging out twice as far as the Earth-Moon distance, Gray says. Gray’s calculations show that it will hit the Earth at 6:20 UTC, falling about 65 kilometres off the southern tip of Sri Lanka. Much if not all of it will burn up in the atmosphere, but “I would not necessarily want to be going fishing directly underneath it,” Gray says.
What makes the object interesting is that they don’t know when it was launched or how it got in the orbit it is in. It could even be something from the Apollo lunar missions.
I decided today, after one of my readers, John Harman, sent me a link to a very blunt but accurate piece describing the sad state of modern American culture, that it was necessary to explain why I had posted nothing here on Behind the Black on Thursday, even though I was home all day doing what I usually do, scanning the web for interesting stuff.
To begin, you might want to read the essay that John sent me, entitled Wimp Nation: Poised to Fall. It sums up the cultural situation quite nicely.
The United States has become a nation of weak, pampered, easily frightened, helpless milquetoasts who have never caught a fish, fired a gun, chopped a log, hitchhiked across the country, or been in a schoolyard fight. If their cat dies, they call a grief therapist. Everything frightens Americans.
Read it all.
You then might want to read this story about Hillary Clinton’s testimony and questioning on Thursday in front of the House Benghazi committee. Here too the author captures the sick intellectually dishonest nature of America’s political culture.
What we discovered is this: The White House and Clinton apparently knew that the Benghazi attack was the premeditated work of Islamic terrorists before the bodies were cold. She and the administration nevertheless proceeded to propagate a falsehood that advanced the president’s preferred political narrative just six weeks before a tightly-contested national election.
As I noted to John, Hillary Clinton’s testimony wasn’t news, it was a joke. What did we learn? She is a liar? That’s news? What was worse, as the author of the article noted, were the reporters willing to make believe this wasn’t so.
Then there are these two stories:
» Read more
One of the most important managers during the 1960s and 1970s at NASA, George Mueller (pronounced “Miller”) has passed away at 97 after a short illness.
NASA and sources close to Mueller’s family confirmed his passing on Thursday (Oct. 15).
Mueller, as associate administrator, headed the Office of Manned Space Flight at NASA’s Washington headquarters from 1963 through 1969. During that time, Mueller brought together NASA’s three human spaceflight centers under a common management system, introduced an approach to testing that made landing a man on the moon by the end of the decade possible, played a key part in the design of the United States’ first space station and advocated for a reusable space transportation system that became known as the space shuttle.
Unlike the many government managers that followed him, Mueller’s goal was never to build an empire, but to get humans into space as quickly and as efficiently as possible. If only we had more people like him.
History: Yale University had posted online 170,000 Library of Congress photographs taken in the United States from 1935 to 1945.
The photos come from all over the U.S., and can be accessed with this easy-to-use inactive map. They also used the original captions, thus avoiding any editing for politically correct reasons and allowing the viewer to get an honest feel for the time period.
A Russian public relations specialist has raised by crowd-funding more than a million rubles to build a lunar-orbiting satellite to take high resolution images of the Apollo landing sites to prove they happened.
I like it, but recognize that a million rubles is only about $15k. He will need a lot more to get the satellite built and launched.
An evening pause: On this anniversary of one of human history’s darkest acts, instigated by madmen who enjoy destroying things, let’s watch some normal humans from a normal society build things.
Hat tip Phill Oltmann.
The uncertainty of science: A comparison between the average particle size of 20 Apollo moon soil samples has discovered that their size has decreased by more than half in the past 40 years.
The differences between the two datasets are stark. For example, the median particle diameter has decreased from 78 microns (0.0031 inches) to 33 microns (0.0013 inches). And in the original sieve data, 44 percent of soil particles were between 90 and 1,000 microns (0.0035 to 0.039 inches) wide; today, just 17 percent of the particles are that large.
The most likely explanation for the degradation is damage caused by water vapor, the scientists say. “Leaching by water vapor causes the specific surface area of a lunar soil sample to multiply, and a system of pores develops,” they wrote in the study, which was published online last week in the journal Nature Geoscience. “These structural changes may be attributed to the opening of existing, but previously unavailable, pore structure or the creation of new surfaces through fracturing of cement or dissolution of amorphous particles.”
I was surprised that in the article above the scientists made no mention of gravity as a factor. These particles were originally formed under lunar gravity, 1/6 that of Earth. I would have thought that their structural strength was partly determined by this, and once brought to Earth’s heavier gravity would have thus slowly deteriorated over time.
Either way, the study illustrates why saving these samples for future researchers was a foolish mistake. Time changes all things, and that change has made these samples no longer a good representation of the Moon. The NASA scientists and managers who decided to store these samples instead of distributing them all for immediate study forgot this basic fact.
The scientists who did this study appear to have not learned this lesson as well. They suggest future samples be stored off-Earth, in a place like ISS. I say, we should instead go to the Moon so often we don’t need to store any samples. When we want a sample, we go and get one.
This article, describing the 2007 flight of the first Malaysian in space, launched as a passenger in a Russian Soyuz capsule, is mostly worth reading because it goes into details on the Islamic religious rules the astronaut had to follow to practice the religion in space.
Muszaphar had to spend time going through an instruction manual on daily religious rituals provided by Malaysian mullahs. Vyacheslav Urlyapov of the Moscow-based Centre for Southeast Asia, Australia, and Oceania Studies, RAS Institute of Oriental Studies, sums up the cosmonaut’s experience: “The 11-day flight overlapped in part the holy month of Ramadan. Muslims had been in orbit before him, but it fell to Muszaphar to comply with the detailed instructions written for him by Islamic theologians (ulema) to remain a true believer in space, too.”
Muslims are required to face in the general direction of the city of Mecca while saying the mandatory – five times a day – prayers. But locating the tiny city from space is not an easy task, especially when you are hurtling around Earth at more than 17,000 km per hour. Also, in space there is no sense of direction – as we know it on land. The Malaysian cosmonaut was therefore all at sea during his first space flight.
Mercifully, Muszaphar was released from fasting, and was allowed to say shorter prayers and perform daily rituals according to Kazakhstan time. Plus, he didn’t have to face the constant ordeal of locating Mecca.
Kind of describes the problems when a medieval religion is thrust into the 21st century. The medieval religion has to change.
After 45 years of service, Boeing’s 747, the world’s first jumbo jet, is finally facing retirement as airlines consider more modern planes for their fleets.
The plane that so audaciously changed the shape of the world is now on the wrong side of history. Airlines are retiring older 747s – JAL no longer flies them – and Boeing’s attempt at catch-up, the latest 747-8 model, has had technical problems and is selling only very slowly. The air above my garden will not be troubled by 747s for very much longer.
The article gives brief but detailed outline of the 747’s history, and why passengers and pilots still love it. I love it because of this:
The 747 was America at its proud and uncontaminated best. ‘There’s no substitute for cubic inches,’ American race drivers used to say and the 747 expresses that truth in the air. There is still residual rivalry with the upstart European Airbus. Some Americans, referring to untested new technologies, call it Scarebus. There’s an old saying: ‘If it ain’t Boeing, I ain’t going.’
A comparison to the European Concorde is illuminating. The supersonic Anglo-French plane was an elite project created for elite passengers to travel in near space with the curvature of the Earth on one hand and a glass of first growth claret on the other. The 747 was mass-market, proletarianising the jet set. It was Coke, not grand cru and it was designed by a man named Joe. Thus, the 747’s active life was about twice that of Concorde.
An evening pause: Tonight’s pause is a challenge. Can you watch this 1940s industrial, describing the lumbering and milling of California redwoods, without feeling outrage or indignation against the work being described? Can you watch it with an open mind, recognizing that trees are renewable?
Or will the environmental brainwashing that our society has undergone since the 1960s cause you to shut your mind and refuse to consider the other side of this story?
Hat tip Phill Oltmann.
An evening pause: No music this time, only some history. Hat tip Tim Biggar, who notes “Couple of interesting things: The Fokker used a 9 cyl radial (clearly seen when they prime the cyls before takeoff). Unlike most modern designs, the crankshaft was bolted to the frame and did not rotate. The prop was bolted to the engine case and the entire engine case rotated. Lots of gyroscopic force made it hard to maneuver.
“The ‘flight suit’ and the gauntlets are worth noting.
“I think that may be Goering on the left (plain uniform with Iron Cross) at the 3:05 mark.
“At the end we see a Sopwith he shot down and the Brit pilot who lived.”
I note the sense of comradarie between these pilots at the end. In World War I there still was a sense of behaving civilly (as in civilization) even during war.
Archeologists have now linked four recently discovered skeletons at the first British North American settlement at Jamestown with historic individuals among the first settlers.
Skeletal remains buried beneath a historic church in Jamestown, Virginia, belonged to four prominent settlers of North America’s first English colony. The group included a minister, two military captains and the first English knight ever buried on the continent, a research team announced on 28 July at the Smithsonian Institute’s National Museum of Natural History in Washington DC. “These men witnessed the first three years of the establishment of the colony,” said James Horn, the president of the Jamestown Rediscovery Foundation.
Smithsonian anthropologists teamed up with archaeologists at Jamestown Rediscovery to identify the four incomplete skeletons, which were excavated in 2013. First, the researchers narrowed down the potential candidates by analysing a handful of surviving documents from the colony’s early years. Then they used chemical tests, genealogical records, digital analysis of bones and artefacts and contextual clues to make the final identifications.
Having studied the history of Jamestown in great detail for my own masters degree, I can say that this scientific work is spectacular. I would add that I hope that the researchers, having identified these remains, will now allow them to be buried again in peace.
If you want to be amused, you can also read Science’s short article on this discovery. As is typical of that politically driven journal, the article feels compelled to insert a comment about global warming, even though it has nothing to do with this particular research and the claim — that “some scientists think Jamestown (on the Virginia coast) could be overtaken by rising sea levels by the end of this century” — has not yet been proven and is in fact a very speculative assertion.
The competition heats up: Faced with the possibility that the Russians might eventually end their lease arrangement combined with a desire to make money, Kazakhstan is now planning to make the historic Baikonur spaceport available to tourists.
Why they haven’t done this years ago is baffling. But then, this is Russia and Kazakhstan, not the U.S.
An evening pause: Here is an fine example of a man following his dream and making it happen.
Hat tip Danae.
Take a look at this photo montage of the abandoned remains of the Soviet Union’s space shuttle program. They spent a lot of money just to keep up with the Joneses, for something they could not afford.
