Alexis Dahl – How to ship 800 billion pounds of rock fast
On Christmas Eve 1968 three Americans became the first humans to visit another world. What they did to celebrate was unexpected and profound, and will be remembered throughout all human history. Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8, Robert Zimmerman's classic history of humanity's first journey to another world, tells that story, and it is now available as both an ebook and an audiobook, both with a foreword by Valerie Anders and a new introduction by Robert Zimmerman.
The print edition can be purchased at Amazon or from any other book seller. If you want an autographed copy the price is $60 for the hardback and $45 for the paperback, plus $8 shipping for each. Go here for purchasing details. The ebook is available everywhere for $5.99 (before discount) at amazon, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. If you buy it from ebookit you don't support the big tech companies and the author gets a bigger cut much sooner.
The audiobook is also available at all these vendors, and is also free with a 30-day trial membership to Audible.
"Not simply about one mission, [Genesis] is also the history of America's quest for the moon... Zimmerman has done a masterful job of tying disparate events together into a solid account of one of America's greatest human triumphs."--San Antonio Express-News
On Christmas Eve 1968 three Americans became the first humans to visit another world. What they did to celebrate was unexpected and profound, and will be remembered throughout all human history. Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8, Robert Zimmerman's classic history of humanity's first journey to another world, tells that story, and it is now available as both an ebook and an audiobook, both with a foreword by Valerie Anders and a new introduction by Robert Zimmerman.
The print edition can be purchased at Amazon or from any other book seller. If you want an autographed copy the price is $60 for the hardback and $45 for the paperback, plus $8 shipping for each. Go here for purchasing details. The ebook is available everywhere for $5.99 (before discount) at amazon, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. If you buy it from ebookit you don't support the big tech companies and the author gets a bigger cut much sooner.
The audiobook is also available at all these vendors, and is also free with a 30-day trial membership to Audible.
"Not simply about one mission, [Genesis] is also the history of America's quest for the moon... Zimmerman has done a masterful job of tying disparate events together into a solid account of one of America's greatest human triumphs."--San Antonio Express-News
Great video! Thanks Wayne as usual!
It is simple system and easy to maintain. Let gravity do the heavy lifting. Another case of “Necessity is the mother of invention. ”
One thing Miss Dahl omitted from the video. How to unload the ships fast: https://youtu.be/mIPYTkrrtG8?si=3iF-Ab73DSlhrqj1
I have only two issues with her presentation: her environmental rant and her sponsor.
Even with recycling, our needs for steel insatiable. You need steel to make power cables, your cars, and it is in everything. Guess what Miss Dahl? Steel is strong and cheap. You still need power and coal (coke) to make it.
The second issue is that so called AI sponsor to make your papers. I fight with young engineers and contractors who use ChatGPT or other programs to make papers. I consider it a form of cheating. Lots of these students do this now and do not know how to do research themselves.
I recently had a customer send me a specification citing an IEEE standard. I downloaded the standard, read it, and pointed out that his spec was wrong. He told me that he used ChatGPT to generate it. If you make someone or some program generate a spec or work for you, it must be reviewed. Blindly using these so called AI programs will cost you in the long run. Trust, but verify.
Both of my children have been crew on freighters going to that ore dock.
Not only are the docks old, but many of the freighters carrying the cargo are decades old. The ship they both did their cadet sea term on was launched in 1959.
By comparison, most oceangoing freighters are in the scrapyard at less than half that age.
commodude
There was a single such ore dock in my Upper Peninsula hometown when I was a boy. It was of wood, not concrete, construction as were the, now-long-vanished, predecessor docks at Marquette. Two large ore freighters could be accommodated at once. It was taken down and replaced with a low-profile conveyor belt-based facility when I was a teen.
The old, steam-powered lake freighters with their forward bridges were, indeed, built to last. They have been largely replaced with diesel-powered ships with bridges at the rear that look like smaller versions of ocean-going bulk carriers. I have heard that these are less durable than their predecessors but I have not made a study of the issue.
There are a number of reasons other than – by your implication – deficiencies in design or construction that ocean-going ships tend to have shorter service lives than do those that sail exclusively on the Great Lakes. Over the last four or five decades the most important of these has simply been rapid economic obsolescence as all classes of ocean-going commercial ships have gotten larger. Bigger ships can carry more cargo but need only about the same crew sizes. The race to gigantism appears to have ended some time ago for crude oil tankers, but it continues unabated for ship types as divergent as container cargo freighters and cruise ships, both of which are now routinely significantly longer and heavier than a US Navy CVN. Smaller ships built as little as 10 or 15 years ago are no longer economical and are sent to the breakers well before they are worn out in service.
Great Lakes freighters have not seen similar size growth because, for decades, they all had to be able to fit through the locks at Sault Ste. Marie. When larger locks were built there, it caused a one-time size increase in lake freighters. That was also about the time that the rear-bridge diesel designs appeared.
10% of all the iron mined is used in comminution.
Interlake Steamship Company: “American owned, operated, and crewed.”
-They operate 11 vessels on the Great Lakes, the oldest is the M/V “Lee A. Tregurtha,” originally built as the USS Chiwawa (hilarious!) as an oiler in 1942, served in the Atlantic & Pacific, retrofitted to ore-carrying in the 1950’s.
They also run the Soo Locks Tour boats, and the USS Badger, the last actual coal steamship on the Great Lakes.
Their newest ship (ore carrier) is the M/V “Mark W. Barker,” constructed entirely in Wisconsin, christened in 2022.
Meet the Ship: “Mark W. Barker”
https://youtu.be/mzBkq_wAZzU
2:28
Canadian National Dock 6 in Duluth, Minnesota
https://youtu.be/0YjUwKRxwac
4:46
Dock #6 is formally the “DM&N/DM&IR Ore Dock No. 6 Approach,” at 1.1 miles in length, is still active and used for loading Mesabi Iron Range Taconite onto US ore-carrier’s. Currently the largest active dock in the world, Dock #6 has a capacity of 153,600 tons of ore.
Thanks for the unloading video, too. That was the first question that came to mind when I saw the holes in the top of the ship: How do they get it out again?
This is also a good hint as to why “reshoring” is slow and expensive: We’ve let a lot of infrastructure decay, if not outright ripped it out. Building a dock such as that is not something that happens quickly or cheaply, if it can be done at all.
“Sixteen Tons”
Tennessee Ernie Ford
(Live on the Ford Show; June 27, 1957)
https://youtu.be/hjmdEBgsu_g
4:53
Jay, I too was disappointed by the Presenters qualification about having mixed feeling about mining. I have no mixed feelings at all about mining. A while ago a Mining Association here had an advertisement featuring a family on their front verandah with a repeating voice over of ” without mining…” as various things around the family slowly disappeared. Until they were standing in dirty rags in a field being bitten alive by insects.
On the topic of lakers’ longevity, part of the secret is that the lakes are, of course, fresh water. Chemically, that’s far less harsh than the oceans.
It’s worth noting that quite a few planes lost in Lake Michigan while training carrier pilots during WWII (the training carriers operated out of Chicago) have been fished out of the lake after a half century and made airworthy. Not the majority, as I understand it, which only get cosmetically repaired for use as displays, but still.
Miners never had representation since they were never a donar class. CEOs looked down on them and girls like the presenter think more of some snail darter than they do jobs.
Aquatic news–new seahab called Vanguard
https://phys.org/news/2025-10-underwater-human-habitat-scientists-surface.html