Tag: history

The Falcon Heavy vs the Saturn 5

9:01 am

As SpaceX prepares for what it hopes will be the first static fire test of its Falcon Heavy rocket today, this article provides a nice detailed comparison between the new heavy lift rocket and the Saturn 5, the biggest rocket ever built and successfully launched.

But where the Falcon Heavy comes out ahead is in economy. The estimated cost of a Saturn V launch in today’s dollars is a whopping US$1.16 billion. Meanwhile, the upper estimate for Falcon heavy is US$90 million. That’s million with an “M.”

So, which rocket comes out ahead? In terms of sheer numbers, the Saturn V wins hands down, but the contest is a bit unfair. Saturn V was a Cold War project with a main objective to put a man on the Moon as part of the struggle to prove the superiority of the Free World over the Soviet Union. It was a cost-is-no-object machine intended to win a bloodless battle for world supremacy.

Falcon Heavy, on the other hand, is a business venture. Its job is to make a profit for SpaceX’s investors and its development always had one eye on the ledger at all times. Its design is different, its function is different. To compare it with the Saturn V is a bit like comparing a nuclear strike carrier with the Queen Mary 2. Beyond a certain point, the exercise becomes meaningless.

Read it all. The comparison is quite fun, especially if you are an American and proud of our country’s history in space. To date, no one has built a rocket that truly compares with the Saturn 5. And now, today, an American company is proving that such rockets can be built in the future, for an affordable price.

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An illicit visit to two abandoned Soviet space shuttles

6:01 pm

An evening pause: Hat tip John Harman. This video has been around for awhile, but I hadn’t ever actually watched it until now. What it shows is very cool, but sad in so many ways. As a government project the whole Soviet space shuttle program was generally a dead end waste of resources (as was our own shuttle). Yet, it was possibly one of Soviet Russia’s greatest technological achievements — which they have allowed to rot away in these abandoned hangers, rather than opening them up for their citizens to see and admire and learn from.

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R.I.P. John Young 1930-2018

8:33 pm

John Young, the ninth man to walk on the Moon and the only man to fly a Gemini capsule, an Apollo capsule, and the space shuttle, passed away yesterday at the age of 87.

Young was the only spaceman to span NASA’s Gemini, Apollo and shuttle programs, and became the first person to rocket away from Earth six times. Counting his takeoff from the moon in 1972 as commander of Apollo 16, his blastoff tally stood at seven, for decades a world record.

He flew twice during the two-man Gemini missions of the mid-1960s, twice to the moon during NASA’s Apollo program, and twice more aboard the new space shuttle Columbia in the early 1980s.

His NASA career lasted 42 years, longer than any other astronaut’s, and he was revered among his peers for his dogged dedication to keeping crews safe — and his outspokenness in challenging the space agency’s status quo.

Young captained the first shuttle Gemini flight and the first space shuttle flight, and also flew twice to the Moon, landing once.

God speed.

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Two for a Penny – The Grapes of Wrath

6:01 pm

An evening pause: To help start out a new year, a scene from the 1940 John Ford classic, The Grapes of Wrath, based on John Steinbeck’s novel. While the movie tended to make government a saintly hero, which bothered me from the first time I saw it, it also captured the heart and generosity of the American spirit, as certainly existed in the previous century. Even if you are poor and desperate, if you insist on paying your fair share and don’t ask for a hand out, Americans immediately rally around you, in a quiet unassuming way, without wishing credit or accolades.

Hat tip Wayne DeVette.

Note that I am in need of suggestions for evening pauses. If you have made suggestions before, you know where to send them. If you haven’t and want to, leave a comment here and I will email you. Don’t include the link to the pause, however, as I want to schedule it, and that will blow the punchline.

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R.I.P. Rose Marie

6:35 pm

Rose Marie, best known for her role on the Dick Van Dyke show in the 1960s, has passed away at 94.

Diane and I recently rewatched the entire Dick Van Dyke show, and they come off as fresh and as funny as when they were made more than a half century ago. If you want to see adult comedy at its best, not the modern obscene and shallow adolescent humor that dominates today’s culture, you must see this show.

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Scientists catch a big volcano eruption on Io

9:12 am

Scientists reviewing twenty year old data from the Galileo orbiter that studied Jupiter and its moons in the 1990s have identified the most intense volcanic eruption yet found on Io.

While looking through the NIMS temperature data, Davies and his colleagues spotted a brief but intense moment of high temperatures that cooled oddly quickly. This signal showed up as a spike in heat from a region in the southern hemisphere called Marduk Fluctus. First, the researchers saw a heat signal jump to 4–10 times higher than background, or relatively normal, levels. Then just a minute later, the signal dropped about 20%. Another minute later, the signal dropped another 75%. Twenty-three minutes later, the signal had plummeted to the equivalent of the background levels.

This signature resembled nothing Davies had seen before from Io. The lava flows and lava lakes are familiar: Their heat signals peter out slowly because as the surface of a lava flow cools, it creates a protective barrier of solid rock over a mushy, molten inside. Heat from magma underneath conducts through this newly formed crust and radiates from Io’s surface as it cools, which can take quite a long time.

This new heat signature, on the other hand, represents a process never before seen on Io, Davies said: something intense, powerful, and—most important—fast.

There’s only one likely explanation for what the instruments saw, explained Davies, whose volcanic expertise starts here on Earth. Large, violent eruptions like those seen at Stromboli are capable of spewing huge masses of tiny particles into the air, which cool quickly.

The article makes it sound like we’ve never seen this kind of eruption on Io before, which isn’t really true. Such eruptions have been imaged, but this is the first time that infrared data of their temperature spike was captured, thus confirming its nature.

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Ringo Starr to be knighted

5:36 pm

Ringo Starr, who grew up in the poorest of situations and was so sickly that he ended up getting almost no education, will be knighted by the Queen of England in the coming year.

The article paints a great picture of Starr, who always came off as the nicest and most endearing Beatle, and whose abilities on the drums in many ways cemented the band’s musical style. What makes my heart sing about this story however was how it demonstrates that it is still possible in the English-speaking world to come from nothing and rise to greatness. Starr’s poor background could have led to any number of bad ends, but he instead chose to play drums, and ended up helping to change the world’s musical culture.

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Benjamin Shapiro – Theme from Schindler’s List

6:01 pm

An evening pause: Performed live in 1996, when Shapiro was twelve years old. Note that this is that Ben Shapiro, the orthodox Jew and well-known conservative columnist whom leftists ignorantly love to call a Jew-hater and white supremacist. How they come to that conclusion can only be because they are willfully ignorant or so filled with hate and their ideology that they can’t look at reality with any honesty.

I think, during this holiday season, it is wise to also reflect on humanity’s tragic failures, one of the worst of which was the Holocaust during World War II.

Hat tip Jim Mallamace.

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A spot on Mars, as seen by different orbiters over the past half century

9:29 am

Mars as seen over the past half century

The science team of Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) have assembled a collection of images of the same location on Mars that were taken by different Martian orbiters, beginning with the first fly-by by Mariner 4 in 1965 and ending with MRO’s HiRise camera. The image on the right, reduced in resolution to post here, shows these images superimposed on that location, with resolutions ranging from 1.25 kilometers per pixel (Mariner 4) down to 50 meters per pixel (MRO).

This mosaic essentially captures the technological history of the first half century of space exploration in a single image. Mariner 4 was only able to take 22 fuzzy pictures during its fly-by. Today’s orbiters take thousands and thousands, with resolutions so sharp they can often identify small rocks and boulders.

The mosaic also illustrates well the uncertainty of science. When Mariner 4 took the first pictures some scientists thought that there might be artificially built canals on Mars. Instead, the probe showed a dead cratered world much like the Moon. Later images proved that conclusion to be wrong as well, with today’s images showing Mars to be a very complex and active world, with a geological history both baffling and dynamic. Even now, after a half century of improved observations, we still are unsure whether life there once existed, or even if exists today.

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Crowdfunding campaign to honor only cat to fly in space

9:27 am

A crowdfunding campaign has been started to build a 5-foot-tall bronze statue in honor of Félicette, the only cat to fly in space.

While the first dog in space, Laika, has a statue, and the first chimp, Ham, has a memorial, Félicette has close to nothing. There are some commemorative stamps honoring a mythical space cat “Felix.” But Felix’s portrait doesn’t look like Félicette and it has a male name, so this is not enough for Guy. If anything, he says, the stamps simply help erase the existence of female astronauts.

The French space program gathered 14 cats, implanted electrodes into their brains, and put them through training similar to the way that they train human astronauts. They ultimately chose Félicette to make the trip, either because of her docile personality, or because she had not put on too much weight, according to differing accounts.

She was launched into space from Algeria [in 1963], and made it nearly 100 miles above Earth. For five minutes, she was weightless. Félicette came back to Earth unharmed, parachuting down and being retrieved only 13 minutes after having left her home planet. She stayed at the program’s lab for two to three months, according to Guy, but scientists later killed her to study the effects of space travel on her body.

Seems to me to be the right thing to do.

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Astronaut Richard Gordon, 88, has died

2:39 pm

R.I.P. Astronaut Richard Gordon, who piloted both a Gemini and an Apollo mission in the 1960s, has passed away at 88.

I described one of Gordon’s spacewalks during his Gemini 11 mission in 1966 as follows:

When he opened the hatch, both he and everything unfastened in the capsule was sucked toward space. Pete Conrad had to grab a leg strap on Gordon’s spacesuit to prevent him from drifting away. Later, Conrad had to pull him back using his umbilical cord. The arduous nature of the work caused both Gordon and his spacesuit to overheat, leading him to terminate the firs spacewalk after only 33 minutes.

On Gordon’s second and last flight on Apollo 12 he remained in orbit while Pete Conrad and Alan Bean went down to the surface, the third and fourth humans to walk on another world.

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Wisconsin students protest Lincoln because “he owned slaves”

9:34 am

The coming dark age: The American Indian student group at the University of Wisconsin-Madison is protesting a statue of Abraham Lincoln because “he owned slaves” and because there were Indian wars during his administration.

The activist group is now demanding a disclaimer be put up saying Lincoln was complicit in the murder of Native Americans.

Why would they be so angry about Lincoln?

“Everyone thinks of Lincoln as the great, you know, freer of slaves, but let’s be real: He owned slaves, and as natives, we want people to know that he ordered the execution of native men,” said one of the protesters.

For a college student to believe that Lincoln owned slaves is to illustrate an appalling level of ignorance. Moreover, the claim that Lincoln “executed” Indians is to also demonstrate an almost incomprehensible ignorance of the history of the American west. The author at the link gives an accurate though simplified history lesson:

During the war, Minnesota was in a state of chaos due to soldiers abandoning their posts and armies moving east to join the main war effort. On top of that, the Office of Indian Affairs was mired in corruption that was exacerbated by wartime negligence. As a result, money promised to the Sioux tribe in Minnesota in exchange for its land wasn’t coming through, and many of its people starved.

This led to a bloody uprising called the “Dakota War,” which the U.S. government eventually put down.

Over 300 Sioux were sentenced to death for connection to the rebellion. Lincoln saw this as extreme, however, and pardoned all but 38 of the alleged perpetrators, whom he believed were guilty of the worst crimes such as rape and murder.

It was the largest mass hanging in American history, but it could have been much worse if not for Lincoln’s compassion. He believed that the Sioux were getting a raw deal, but needed to ensure peace on America’s borders in a time when the future of the United States was seriously in question.

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Thomas Jefferson’s legal reading list going on line

3:24 pm

The almost four hundred legal books that Thomas Jefferson recommended all lawyers should read are about to go on line for everyone to read.

The book list goes back to the creation of the University of Virginia, a project Jefferson took on after he finished serving two terms as America’s third president. A voracious reader himself, Jefferson believed the school’s library would be the heart of the new university, which opened in 1825. So he drew up a list of about 7,000 books ranging in topic from agriculture to zoology that he believed the school should have in its collections. At the time, books were pricey, and Jefferson thought part of the duty of the university was to make great works available for study. “Great standard works of established reputation, too voluminous and too expensive for private libraries, should have a place in every public library, for the free resort of individuals,” Jefferson wrote of the list of works he drew up.

The books were the starting point for the university’s collection, but they didn’t last. Most were destroyed in an 1895 fire that gutted a historic campus building called the Rotunda, the same building that was the endpoint of an August torch-light rally by white nationalists whose demonstration in the city the following day over the removal of a Confederate statue descended into chaos.

It was a law librarian at the university who, 40 years ago, got the idea of re-creating the collection of law books Jefferson recommended. Since then, the university has collected 336 of the 375 legal works listed by Jefferson, a lawyer himself. It’s those works that are now being put online.

I guarantee that a reading of these books would also teach any lawyer about the philosophical foundations of western and British culture, based on individual rights, freedom, and the rule of law.

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I am looking for a library to donate my space history files

11:27 am

I am in the process of updating my will, and in the process I am searching for a library or university or archive that would be an appropriate place to leave my space history archives, collected during the past two and a half decades. This archive includes recordings of numerous interviews with Russian and American astronauts and engineers as well as numerous scientists. It also documents quite thoroughly the first half century of the space age.

I had considered giving this archive to the four year university here in Tucson, but it appears they really don’t want it. My last conversation with the head of their special collections was quite hostile, making me wonder if he might have glanced at my webpage and was triggered by it.

If someone has a suggestion, please comment here or email me. My main desire is that this collection should stay intact. I also desire that whichever university or library accepts it also agree to this clause:

It is my request however that these space materials, which cover the history of the first half century of space exploration by someone who witnessed it and thus will be of special interest to future residents not living on Earth, shall be transferred to the first university established on a world other than Earth that is willing to cover the cost for that transfer. Should such transfer occur, the [Earth-bound university/archive] will have the right to retain copies of all materials.

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The man who suited up astronauts during the 1960s passes away at 101

10:58 am

R.I.P. Joseph Schmitt, the man who suited up all the astronauts during the 1960s, has passed away at 101.

Schmitt put Alan Shepard into his Freedom 7 capsule for the United States’ first spaceflight in May 1961, and he was still suiting up astronauts more than 20 years later, making sure everything was sealed and connected properly. Before any flight, he would spend long hours in the testing laboratory with the astronauts, getting them accustomed to their suits and troubleshooting problems.

He wrangled suits through the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo programs and into the space shuttle era, a span during which spacesuits went from being, essentially, modified military gear to high-tech creations that could protect an astronaut on a spacewalk or on a stroll on the moon.

An important man, but invisible at the time. In Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8 I included pictures of the three Apollo 8 astronauts getting suited up, with one picture including an unnamed technician in the background whom I now suspect was Schmtt. Until now, I had never even noticed the technician at all. The focus was the astronauts, which though reasonable is also not really thorough. Everyone should always be credited for what they do, especially when what they do is hard, historically significant, and has to be done right. What Schmitt did was all those things.

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Death threats force journal to remove pro-colonialism paper

8:49 pm

The fascists win: Death threats have finally forced the academic journal Third World Quarterly to take down a paper that had expressed some pro-colonialism ideas.

In a “withdrawal notice” posted on the now-blank “Viewpoint” article page, publisher Taylor & Francis said the death threats were “serious and credible” and “linked to the publication of this essay.” It reiterated against contrary claims that the article had “undergone double-blind peer review.”

Gilley [the author] himself had asked for the article’s withdrawal following a coordinated international campaign to ruin his reputation and blacklist him from other journals, and to shame Third World Quarterly into removing it. Fifteen members of its editorial board resigned in protest of its publication.

What had Gilley said that was so terrible?

Research …often finds that at least some if not many or most episodes of Western colonialism were a net benefit…Such works have found evidence for significant social, economic and political gains under colonialism: expanded education, improved public health, the abolition of slavery, widened employment opportunities, improved administration, the creation of basic infrastructure, female rights, enfranchisement of untouchable or historically excluded communities, fair taxation, access to capital, the generation of historical and cultural knowledge, and national identify formation, to mention just a few dimensions.

He couched this statement with numerous caveats and politically correct expressions of doubt, in the hope the mob would not come after him for stating something that is simply not permitted in today’s modern fascist academic community. I should also note that as a historian who has researched this subject myself, his position is easily documented by numerous papers across the entire field. The colonialism movement of Europe had numerous bad aspects, but numerous benefits as well for the countries colonized.

None of this mattered. Gilley had blasphemed against the leftist anti-western ideology, and had to be destroyed, along with anyone else who even hinted at mild support.

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Timelapse photography of Fort Jefferson in Dry Tortugas National Park

6:01 pm

An evening pause: From the youtube webpage: “On a remote island hours away from Key West lies the largest masonry structure in the Americas: Fort Jefferson. Built with 16 million bricks, but never finished, the fort served as a prison during Civil War. In 1935, President Franklin D. Roosevelt, upon visiting the island, named it a National Monument, and in 1992 it became part of Dry Tortugas National Park.”

Hat tip Wayne DeVette.

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First Flight

9:21 pm

The last part in Doug Messier’s series on the commercial aviation/space history, First Flight, is now available.

Messier brings his history of Virgin Galactic up to the present, and then compares their efforts to build a reusable suborbital spacecraft with that of Blue Origin and its New Shepard design. For Virgin Galactic, the comparison does not reflect well upon them. While fourteen years have passed since the company began its so far unsuccessful effort to reach suborbital space, Blue Origin has already done it multiple times, with a reusable ship. And it took Blue Origin about half the time to make that happen.

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Rory Feek – Fifty Thousand Names

6:01 pm

An evening pause: The song is by George Jones. It speaks of those who died and are remembered at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington. Even though that particular war was somewhat misguided, the courage and bravery of those who fought it, and the fact that in the end it did serve to halt for a time the spread of communism and tyranny, should not be forgotten.

There’s stars of David and rosary beads
and crucifixion figurines
and flowers of all colors large and small
There’s a Boy Scout badge and a merit pin
Little American flags waving in the wind
and there’s 50,000 names carved in the wall.

Sadly, there are a lot of very wealthy athletes today who have forgotten this.

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