Monthly Archives: September 2011

View 692 Friday, September 16, 2011

If you ever doubted the truth of the Iron Law of Bureaucracy, perhaps this will make you believe.

NASA revealed its new design for its next-generation heavy-lift rocket today (Sept. 14), unveiling a giant booster that will eventually carry astronauts on future deep space missions.

The new rocket, called the Space Launch System (SLS), will include hardware and technology that are legacies from the space shuttle and now-defunct Constellation programs. The $10 billion booster will use liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen fuel, and will have solid rocket boosters for initial tests flights, agency officials said.

"The next chapter of America’s space exploration story is being written today," NASA administrator and former space shuttle astronaut Charles Bolden said during a news briefing held today in Washington to unveil the new rocket design. "In combination with the crew capsule already in development, extension of activities on the International Space Station, fresh focus on new technologies, the new Space Launch System is key to implementing the plan laid out by President Obama and Congress in the bipartisan 2010 NASA Authorization Act."

http://www.space.com/12941-nasa-unveils-giant-rocket-space-launch-system.html

It proves that NASA has learned nothing and forgotten nothing, and the purpose of NASA is to provide work for NASA employees. Given the task of coming up with a new national space program now that the Shuttle has eaten much of the dream, NASA comes up with a giant expendable that uses hydrogen fuel, Shuttle Recoverable (Solid Fuel) Boosters – SEGMENTED Shuttle Recoverable Boosters – monopropellant boosters on a giant expendable rocket. This bird is optimized for employing the NASA standing army.

The Shuttle was enormously successful. I think of no other large project that so thoroughly did the work it was designed to do – which was to employ a large standing army of development scientists, engineers, and technicians, and give them plenty of meaningful work to do.

Now the poor design of Shuttle wasn’t all NASA’s fault. A misconceived idea of making Shuttle relevant to the military got the Air Force involved, and the Air Force mission given for Shuttle was one that caused an enormous complication in the system design and was ultimately responsible for the Columbia disaster. There was also the political requirement that the Shuttle use solid boosters built in Utah, which required that the SRB be segmented, which was responsible for the Challenger disaster. NASA didn’t choose those primary hampers. Even so, the whole purpose of Shuttle was to employ the oversize crew of development scientists, engineers, and technicians brought about by Apollo. Apollo was run in the military manner like D-Day. It was a Cold War operation. Of course we had won the race to the Moon by 1967, but no one knew that yet, and by then it was too late anyway. We had created the standing army that needed employment after Apollo. They designed Shuttle to keep that standing army employed. The fact that the basic design was fatally compromised did not keep Shuttle from completing that primary mission.

The Standing Army Full Employment Program

The SLS rocket will incorporate technological investments from the Space Shuttle Program and the Constellation Program in order to take advantage of proven hardware and cutting-edge tooling and manufacturing technology that will significantly reduce development and operations costs. It will use a liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen propulsion system, which will include the RS-25D/E from the Space Shuttle Program for the core stage and the J-2X engine for the upper stage. SLS will also use solid rocket boosters for the initial development flights, while follow-on boosters will be competed based on performance requirements and affordability considerations. The SLS will have an initial lift capacity of 70 metric tons. That’s more than 154,000 pounds, or 77 tons, roughly the weight of 40 sport utility vehicles. The lift capacity will be evolvable to 130 metric tons — more than 286,000 pounds, or 143 tons — enough to lift 75 SUVs. The first developmental flight, or mission, is targeted for the end of 2017.

 
This specific architecture was selected, largely because it utilizes an evolvable development approach, which allows NASA to address high-cost development activities early on in the program and take advantage of higher buying power before inflation erodes the available funding of a fixed budget. This architecture also enables NASA to leverage existing capabilities and lower development costs by using liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen for both the core and upper stages. Additionally, this architecture provides a modular launch vehicle that can be configured for specific mission needs using a variation of common elements. NASA may not need to lift 130 metric tons for each mission and the flexibility of this modular architecture allows the agency to use different core stage, upper stage, and first-stage booster combinations to achieve the most efficient launch vehicle for the desired mission.

http://www.nasa.gov/exploration/systems/sls/sls1.html

Now what’s wrong with this picture?

First, there’s not even a discussion of an alternative to developing a large expendable booster. There is not even a hint that reusable spacecraft would work better. OK, concede that we need a huge expendable. There is no reason for this one. It makes use of Shuttle Main Engines. Those were developed to be reusable, and they are expensive because of that. They are in fact magnificent engines and thoroughly reusable if operated at 90-95% of rated capacity; it’s not their fault that they had to be run at 103% and above to fly Shuttle. But they were developed to be reusable, and that adds greatly to their cost.

The primary goal of the SSX program we proposed to Vice President Quayle in 1988 was not just reusability: it was also SAVABILITY. A properly designed operational ship ought to be savable. After all, the payload (human or instrumental) is worth more than the rocket. The goal ought to get that payload up or get it back. The implications of savable designs reach insurance, operations risks, and a number of other factors. None of these seem to have been considered in the NASA proposal.

The system proposed by NASA uses hydrogen. Hydrogen is an awful fuel. It’s great for exhaust velocity but it has a lot of operational problems, some of which were amply demonstrated in the DC/X program. You don’t want hydrogen. Kerosene and LOX, or propane and LOX are operationally a lot simpler and easier and the performance cost is low compared to the operations gain. Apollo was a single mission, and the goal was to do it before the USSR. If you want to build a spacefaring capability, you need to to pay attention to operations, because you are going to be doing this a lot.

If we need a big expendable there are better models to begin with. Starting with Saturn, which put one whack of a lot into Low Earth Orbit. There are other models to start with. Not that I concede the need for reusable systems as opposed to expendables.

The NASA proposed system uses SEGMENTED Recoverable Boosters. You don’t want recoverable solid rockets in the first place. The operations are a nightmare, and the design has to be compromised so that the impact on the water does not destroy the thing, and it has to float. All that changes the design and affects performance. There is no good reason ever to recover a solid booster, which is, after all, a big sewer pipe stuffed with guncotton and leached with nitroglycerine. It’s a mono-propellant, which is another name for very high explosives, and the operational difficulties of dealing with such stuff are not small.

Even if you want recoverable solid boosters, you sure as heck don’t want SEGMENTED solid boosters. The only reason we ever came up with any notion as mad as a segmented solid booster was that the SRB had to be made in Utah because of political constraints. If you make a booster that size in Utah it has to be segmented because you can’t ship it by rail or on the highway – the curves are too sharp and the tunnels are not big enough. You would have to make it in Michoud Louisiana and ship it by barge to Canaveral. That is possible but Louisiana isn’t Utah. Apparently the new NASA design is worried about the Utah Senatorial votes to this day.

There are other reasons why this is a far cry from an optimum design, but we don’t need any more.

The goal is an operations driven rather than performance driven system for exploring and exploiting the universe. There is no evidence that NASA has any goal in mind other than employing NASA workers.

The best way to get a payload up would be to contract it: you don’t get paid until you deliver the payload. The aviation industry was driven by among other things Air Mail – the government provided a market for air freight service. Private industry did the rest. That’s the way to develop space, too, now that we are not in a Cold War race.

NASA has other ideas.

NASA today told industry partners it would abandon the use of Space Act Agreements in the next phase of the program developing commercial crew taxis, despite many companies’ preference for them.
"We’ve made our decision and we recognize that not everyone will agree with it, but we’re at the point where we had to make one and move forward,” Brent Jett, deputy director of the Commercial Crew Program office, said during a meeting at Kennedy Space Center.
Space Act Agreements have guided the relatively low-cost development of rockets and spacecraft that SpaceX and Orbital Sciences Corp. will use to fly cargo to the International Space Station.
They’ve also been used in the first two rounds of the Commercial Crew Development program, or CCDev, which this year split $270 million among four companies.
But NASA says a more traditional contracting arrangement must be entered into when it awards another round of funding next summer for an "integrated design phase."

http://space.flatoday.net/2011/09/commercial-crew-program-shifts.html

It’s the same old Iron Law NASA, and the only cure for this is to declare most of NASA redundant and eliminate it. This is another Full Employment Ploy from the Old NASA.

I will say it one more time: if we want to explore space, determine what we think that’s worth and put up prizes. A $5 Billion prize for a reusable craft that goes to orbit and returns 11 times in 12 months, nothing to be paid until someone does it. A $12 Billion prize for putting up a Lunar Colony of 31 Americans to be kept alive and well on the Lunar surface for three years and a day, again nothing to be paid until the task is accomplished. If no one does it, there is no cost to the taxpayers. If someone claims the prize the world will cheer. But of course neither of those courses will employ the NASA standing army. The Iron Law Prevails. http://www.jerrypournelle.com/reports/jerryp/iron.html

I have been a bit under the weather for the week and plagued by minor but time consuming dental stuff. I’ll get a new Mail up tonight. Apologies.  If you were thinking of subscribing or renewing, now would be a good time to do it.

The President’s Jobs Program isn’t very interesting, even to him. I note that there has been no rush to have a Democrat (or establishment Republican for that matter) Congressman (it’s a money bill, so it has to originate in the House) introduce it so that it can be voted on. I doubt it is anything but a campaign ploy.

And I note that the President’s approval rating is below the magic 43% everywhere but in California, and it’s below 50% even there.  I told you that despair is a sin.

Those of you interested in what’s happening in the publishing world may find http://kianadavenportdialogues.blogspot.com/2011/08/sleeping-with-enemy-cautionary-tale.html worth reading.

View 692 Wednesday, September 14, 2011

Kick off the slippers and get to work! President Obama apparently liked the image of kicking off the slippers and putting on work shoes so much that he used it again in a speech this morning. Of course he does not mean to imply “All you people out there sitting around in your pajamas and slippers should get the lazy off and get to work!” He was speaking in support of his Jobs Act, which seems no different from measures that Congress refused to pass even in the full flush of enthusiasm following the Inauguration in 2009. It is full of permanent tax increases tempered with temporary tax relief – moratoria, actually – and the usual support for Green Jobs. I haven’t been through it all, but so far I have found nothing new, and I doubt that this will even pass the Senate. The White House strategy appears to be to propose that which can’t be enacted, then blame the Republicans for the Obama Depression. That may beat National Malaise as a reelection strategy, but the results of yesterdays by-elections do not bode well for the President.

Charged with making political speeches in the guise of appeals to national unity, the President rather petulantly said “This isn’t about me! This is about jobs.” Apparently he has discovered that there are not enough jobs in America, and it’s all the Republicans’ fault. Stay tuned,

Meanwhile New York lost a seat that hasn’t gone Republican in a hundred years, and the winner explicitly made it a referendum on Obama. The spin is that it was all local, but the fact remains that a pro-life Roman Catholic has won the seat formerly held by the liberal Jewish Weiner. The winner explicitly said the only real issue was satisfaction with Obama. The Democrats marshaled the big guns including President Clinton in a frantic effort to hold the seat.

Even CNN notes that this was a referendum on the President.

In California President Obama’s approval rating is 46%, below 50% for the first time in several years.

It has long been a political truism that no one with an approval rating below 43% ever wins reelection – at least it was when I was active in political management. It’s an empirical observation, not any kind of law, of course; but it’s suggestive. Obama cannot count on Brooklyn and Queens, even when the Democrats bring in the big guns like President Clinton. Now he has to worry a bit about California.

I told you that despair is a sin.

A barbarian is beating a woman. A citizen intervenes so that the woman gets away. Everyone goes home. Sometime later the barbarian returns and slaughters two of the citizen’s toddler age children, wounds his pregnant wife, and generally takes satisfaction for being disrespected, before going back into his enclave.

Had this happened at the edges of the Roman Empire, the local Auxiliary garrison would have understood the situation and evaluated what must be done to preserve civilization at the fringes of the Empire. Perhaps nothing: the garrison was not strong enough, and there were no Legions available. The local Auxiliary commander would have had to explain to the citizen that the Empire just didn’t have the resources. Civilization is crumbling, and we are doing our best with what we have. The old Centurion would have hung his head in shame.

Of course it did not happen at the Roman limes in the Third Century. It happened yesterday in San Bernardino, California. A local radio commentator is saying that it makes you think about what risks you can take in today’s world. “I have a wife and family, and I’m responsible to them.” He is, after all, a responsible citizen; he is also a husband, a father—and a realist.

Welcome to the New America.

I think I am no longer a Firefox enthusiast. For reasons I don’t quite understand, Firefox is taking forever to load my site, and doing it in an awful way. Explorer has no such problem.  I have just restarted Firefox and that seems to have mitigated the problem, but somehow whenever they improve Firefox it gets crankier. This sort of thing has happened before. Someone new jumps in to take on Microsoft, comes out with an improvement, gets a number of people to defect from Microsoft. Microsoft continues to plod along, embrace and extend, plod along, and somewhere along the line the new guy discovers that resistance is futile. His improvements become less reliable. There are various thrashings. Meanwhile Microsoft continues to plod along…

I got accustomed to Firefox and I probably abuse it by keeping too many tabs open. I haven’t given up on it yet, but I keep hearing the call of the Borg Queen…

The barbarians are both inside and outside the gates.

Bodies hanging from bridge in Mexico are warning to social media users.

http://www.cnn.com/2011/WORLD/americas/09/14/mexico.violence/index.html?eref=mrss_igoogle_cnn 

If you are up to a picture, there is one here: http://www.johnandkenshow.com/ 

The report is that “Two posters left near the bodies declared that the pair — a young man and woman — were killed for posting denouncements of drug cartel activities on a social network…”

There is no indication of the nationality of the victims, and so far no one has claimed them. Some border incidents have involved known American citizens, but there have been no consequences. We no longer teach American Exceptionalism in the public schools. We do not want a single culture with the old Judao-Christian values. We prefer diversity. I don’t know what Mexicans prefer. We know what they have.

Wednesday September 14, 2011

The Democrats lost New York Congressional District 9 by a lot. Turner ran against Obama, and it was not a local issue. He wanted this to be a referendum on Obama. He won. Big. In a district that has not gone Republican for a hundred years. Turner is Catholic and pro-life and made no concessions on the subject.

Take heart. If NY 9 can go anti-Obama, so can the nation.

I have a dental appointment. Back this afternoon. I’ll have a new View rather than add to this one.

View 692 Tuesday, September 13, 2011

· The Debates

· The Vaccination Issue

· Ponzi scheme

Blitzer 2, Bachman 0

We need to examine the whole question of compulsory vaccination, but it’s not really an issue in a Presidential election.

What is important is that Michelle Bachman fell for Wolf Blitzer’s offer to assist her in political suicide, not only taking the bait hook, line, and sinker, but then coming back for more. Up to that point my impression of the debate was that Newt, as usual, was the most impressive on the issues but not as a candidate, while Cain and Bachman moved out of the field and up into the group of front runners. Cain stayed there. Bachman did herself considerable harm,

The harm is not her indignation about compulsory vaccination against a sexually transmitted disease. It’s her taking the bait from Blitzer, whose sole task up there was to try to get Republican candidates to slaughter each other and turn attention away from President Obama and the Democrats. If the issue is personal freedom and limited government, is there anyone left in the US who has doubts about which party is more trustworthy on the issue? The Republicans had their experiment with big government as the solution and were so thoroughly burned that they are apologetic about supporting government programs we had for generations. It won’t be Republicans who institute a national program of compulsory vaccination against cervical cancer, and it won’t be Republicans who decide that if girls must be vaccinated, then boys – who after all can get HPV – must be vaccinated as well. President Perry would be no more likely to implement a federal HPV vaccination program than President Bachman or President Cain or anyone else on that platform.

Surely Bachman knows that? But she let herself be goaded into an all-out attack on Perry without any attempt at discussion of the real issue of compulsory vaccination and state’s rights. She made it purely personal. She pounded on it again and again. And when Perry conceded the issue and in effect admitted a mistake, she wouldn’t let that go: she screamed and leaped, accusing him of trying to implement the policy because Merck gave him a $5.000 campaign contribution. Perry didn’t handle that one very well, but it’s pretty hard to think of what to say when someone accuses you of a felony. I thought he was pretty restrained.

Now why is any of this important? Neither President Bachman nor President Perry will ever face the question if elected. What this did show is the candidates’ abilities to be manipulated by a hostile press. Perry came off without great harm. I do not think Bachman did.

Primary debates ought to be about issues. There are no substantial issue differences between the Republican candidates. That leaves leadership and implementation. The purpose of the debates is to allow the candidates to show leadership. Of those on that stage, Cain and Gingrich have stood out as understanding the problems and focusing on solutions, not on belittling their supposed fellow party members. Those who value political office more than principle got us into this mess in the first place. I don’t have a great deal of confidence in candidates who do not seem to understand that.

The Vaccination Issue

Public health issues involving compulsory measures divide conservatives and libertarians. They have for a long time. Do you have the right to go out in public after you know you have TB? Does the government have the right to compel vaccination against smallpox? What about diphtheria? Do you have the right to keep a bucket of stagnant water in your back yard? What about a fruit tree that you keep “organic” and which is infested with Mediterranean fruit flies? Does the state have the right to spray your organic fruit tree?

These are not trivial questions. They aren’t going to be settled here. The Constitutional solution to this is the same as for abortion and many other such issues: leave it to the states. That’s the general answer for those who believe that governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed.

The vaccination issue has a long history. I do know that in Tennessee in the 1930’s every school child had to get vaccinated, boys generally on the left arm, girls often elsewhere in places we weren’t supposed to see. Whether that was a federal or a state program I don’t know. I vaguely recall there were a few kids whose parents had a religious objection to vaccination, but I didn’t know any of them and it was never thought of as a big deal. Everyone I knew had also been vaccinated for diphtheria, whooping cough, and tetanus, but I think that was privately done; and of course you always got a tetanus shot if you got a puncture wound. Then when we went into the Army there was a new smallpox vaccination and a whole battery of shots including a particularly painful one we called Japanese Beetle (Japanese Type B Encephalitis).

Over time things changed, and more and more vaccinations became mandatory. Just after my kids got past the age of vaccination – all done as I recall by our pediatrician who so approved of what I was writing that he was taking care of them for free – the list of mandatory vaccinations became so long that the whole process was being questioned. How many? All at once? At what age? All questions of importance.

While I was growing up there was no vaccination for polio, and every polio season was a season of mild fear. When Salk developed his vaccine I rushed to get it. One of the members of my fencing club in Seattle waited a year. The last time I saw him he was in an iron lung.

To repeat: These are not trivial questions. They aren’t going to be settled here. The Constitutional solution to this is the same as for many other such issues: leave it to the states. That’s the general answer for those who believe that governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed.

The argument for compulsory vaccination against polio and smallpox is one of public health. It’s less compelling regarding sexually transmitted diseases – depending of course on your beliefs regarding adolescent self control, guilt, and morality. Is it compassionate to require vaccination against HPV? Try this for a reasonable discussion: http://www.i-sis.org.uk/HPV_Vaccine_Controversy.php

Now what happens if we discover a vaccination for AIDS? Should that be compulsory as a condition of attending school? For everyone?

What I tell you three times is true: these are not trivial questions, and we are not going to settle them here. Good people can differ.

From Chesley Bonestell’s Imagination?

Jerry,

It seems that the Cassini spacecraft continues to channel Chesley Bonnestell!

Regards, Charles Adams, Bellevue, NE

Release & Picture:

A Quintet of Moons

http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/catalog/PIA14573

Ponzi schemes

A while back, libertarian Peter Schiff had one of the trustees of the Social Security program on his radio show. He asked him to describe the difference between the system and a Ponzi scheme. He couldn’t do it — http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ITMEZImvNio&feature=results_video&playnext=1&list=PL6610F55F8E810620

It’s an amusing listen.

Ed Armstrong

I think we have established that Social Security as configured at present meets all the criteria of a Ponzi scheme. The question now is how it can be fixed. Assuming that requiring compulsory savings is a good idea – and there is a lot to be said for that – the morality of transferring money from those who work to those who don’t work needs discussion. Supporting those who paid into a fund all their lives and now expect to be paid back is easy; supporting those who have been supported on disability all their lives and now expect to be paid after they reach the age at which they would have retired had they ever worked in the first place, by taxing those just joining the work force is perhaps another matter.

If Social Security were a real investment at compound interest it might be a different discussion, but the morality of taxing those who work to support those who don’t certainly needs at least discussion.