Tag: history

Kingston Trio – They’re rioting in Africa

6:01 pm

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.

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Early Apollo rover prototype sold for scrap

9:00 am

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.”

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Buy the first computer to fly in space!

8:51 am

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.

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The Okinawa missiles of October

11:42 pm

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.

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Mysterious piece of space junk to hit Earth

8:34 am

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.

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The coming dark ages

5:00 pm

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

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R.I.P. George Mueller

8:32 am

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.

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Yale makes available online 170,000 photographs from WWII period

9:34 am

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.

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Apollo lunar samples crumbling to dust

9:08 am

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.

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