Wednesday, July 30, 2008
Vote of Confidence?
SPACE.com [AP] -- NASA Engineers Work on Alternative Moon Rocket
When I posted earlier about the "DIRECT" proposal for an alternative next-generation manned spacecraft system to the Ares/Orion/Constellation which NASA has determined to use, I obviously didn't appreciate the full extent of the irony in this situation. Engineers working with NASA on the preposterous Ares/Orion mess during the day have been "going under cover" to work on the DIRECT alternative program on their own time. There can't be a much more "direct" indication of just how bad Ares/Orion/Constellation is doing than the complete lack of confidence of the engineers working on it.
There is a much more sinister implication to the story, though. Michael Griffin's "new NASA" is still the management-heavy agency that gave us Challenger and Discovery, where politically powerful people of critically limited vision still rule the engineers and scientists---who have to make things that actually work---by intimidation:
"A spokesman for the competing effort, Ross Tierney, said concerned engineers at NASA and some contractors want a review of the Ares plans but can't speak out for fear of being demoted, transferred or fired."
NASA, for its part, dismisses the DIRECT effort as "a napkin drawing", preferring its own ideas:
Thrust Oscillation: Parasorber and Thrusters lead Ares I options - NASA SpaceFlight.com
This is the first artist's depiction I've seen of the "Active Pulse Thruster" concept. This belongs on the Comedy Channel, not a manned spacecraft. The "Parasorber" idea is apparently some monkey-business with the first stage recovery parachutes acting as counter-oscillating mass dampers, which seems unlikely to have enough "throw weight" to counter the expected oscillation. Then there are foreshadowings of putting the crew in special shock-absorbing seats....for ascent!
"These oscillations are capable of rendering the astronauts incapacitated, or worse."
NASA asserts that the suborbital flight with a dummy capsule/service module on a 4-segment solid booster scheduled for next year demonstrates the maturity of the Ares/Orion concept. The biggest problem they may have to look forward to is where to find a supply of people foolish enough to get into these things.
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Sunday, July 27, 2008
The Church of the Boiled Frogs
Opportunities for communication have become rare---my one regular contact with the pastor of our Church usually includes several other preachers from various churches in the same room, and a non-conforming comment from a layman is made obviously unwelcome. I think at this point I'm traditionally supposed to nail something to a door somewhere, but I'm going to try this medium first.
It has been growing gradually over the years---someone comes in to perform a psychoanalysis of our Spiritual gifts, or we are encouraged to use special "breathing techniques" while reading the Psalms. There have been special get-togethers that included prayer labyrinths. Many sermons for several years have included long quotations from Roman Catholic scholars (there are a fairly large number of former Catholics in our congregation). More recently, our pastor has concluded several powerful messages containing important truths about the Word, Salvation, Faith, and the Holy Spirit with brief quotes from the Koran, Buddha, and others. When present in services---I'm under a lot of stress already, and I'm afraid of what I'm going to hear next---I especially grind my teeth in anticipation of the weekly "other great religions moment". I suppose in future weeks, we can look forward to seeing the Word and the Truth conversationally placed alongside the Veda, the Dallas Cowboys playbook, perhaps a brief discussion about Krishna, just in case we got the pronunciation wrong....
As well as I can figure these things out, our Church is well along the road to "emerging". Even if these citations were merely comparative cultural references, they will confuse the more impressionable children in the family (Galatians 1:6-8). The recent extractions from Catholicism I've spoken to, for example, have residues of their former beliefs ranging from simply preferring our childcare, to sincere confusion about genuine Christian doctrine. No one will benefit from this provocative mingling of the Word with the dross of other religions.
Sooner or later, this road the Church is on is going to lead to a collision. The God Who Actually Exists will have His Church back, or will find a replacement.
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The Church of the Boiled Frogs
Opportunities for communication have become rare---my one regular contact with the pastor of our Church usually includes several other preachers from various churches in the same room, and a non-conforming comment from a layman is made obviously unwelcome. I think at this point I'm traditionally supposed to nail something to a door somewhere, but I'm going to try this medium first.
It has been growing gradually over the years---someone comes in to perform a psychoanalysis of our Spiritual gifts, or we are encouraged to use special "breathing techniques" while reading the Psalms. There have been special get-togethers that included prayer labyrinths. Many sermons for several years have included long quotations from Roman Catholic scholars (there are a fairly large number of former Catholics in our congregation). More recently, our pastor has concluded several powerful messages containing important truths about the Word, Salvation, Faith, and the Holy Spirit with brief quotes from the Koran, Buddha, and others. When present in services---I'm under a lot of stress already, and I'm afraid of what I'm going to hear next---I especially grind my teeth in anticipation of the weekly "other great religions moment". I suppose in future weeks, we can look forward to seeing the Word and the Truth conversationally placed alongside the Veda, the Dallas Cowboys playbook, perhaps a brief discussion about Krishna, just in case we got the pronunciation wrong....
As well as I can figure these things out, our Church is well along the road to "emerging". Even if these citations were merely comparative cultural references, they will confuse the more impressionable children in the family (Galatians 1:6-8). The recent extractions from Catholicism I've spoken to have residues of their former beliefs ranging from simply preferring our childcare, to sincere confusion about genuine Christian doctrine. No one will benefit from this provocative mingling of the Word with the dross of other religions.
Sooner or later, this road the Church is on is going to lead to a collision. The God Who Actually Exists will have His Church back, or will find a replacement.
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Sunday, July 13, 2008
---Snow, DeBakey Dead, and Other Stories
FOXNews.com - Tony Snow, Former White House Press Secretary and FOX News Anchor, Dies at 53
My first impression of Tony Snow was back when he stood in for Limbaugh, back when I still occasionally listened to Limbaugh. Snow was generally calm, pleasant, and credible when a lot of people in Washington weren't. He finally succumbed to cancer Saturday morning.
FOXNews.com - Cardiovascular Surgeon and Pioneer Dr. Michael DeBakey Dies at 99
Michael DeBakey also died Saturday morning. He developed an astonishing array of medical procedures and devices, including the heart bypass. Reports only say he died of "natural causes", although he narrowly escaped death from a damaged aorta two years ago, at age 97.
House adds extra shuttle flight to budget - Space- msnbc.com
The U.S. House has approved funding for an extra STS mission beyond the scheduled termination of the Shuttle program, over Executive objections.
They are squabbling about the difference between 17B USD and ~20B USD. What tiny fraction of the DOD budget is the whole sorry mess? For example, how many B2's is that? If NASA's entire budget was returned to the U.S. Treasury Monday morning, would the effect on the U.S. budget deficit (the real one, not the "zero-based new-math" version they use in their publications) even be detectable with normal instrumentation?
To put it into perspective---admittedly a rather bizarre one---think back to John Hinckley, who tried to assassinate Ronald Reagan and managed to cripple Press Secretary James Brady for life. One of the things about Hinckley's alleged "personality" that sticks in my mind for some reason is that he was expelled by the U.S. Neo-Nazis for being too much of a loon. [No, I'm not making a direct comparison between NASA and Neo-Nazis, unlike some people I know. I'm not necessarily arguing with the point, either, just using it as the basis for a ridiculous metaphor. Some people just can't age gracefully.]
Now to put things into this metaphoric perspective, the U.S. Congress finds NASA's management of manned spaceflight so deficient that they are reluctant to throw large sums of other peoples' money at it!
FLToday: Hanley---More money likely won't close the "gap"
Speaking of money---another NASA official has had a attack of spontaneous candor---this time admitting that adding money to his budget wouldn't do anything! Like Administrator Griffin, he can probably consult with the Agency legal staff to find ways to act dumb and duplicitous enough that people will forget what else he said in time to avoid making NASA management look bad during the next budget cycle.
DIRECT_Summary_v2.0.1.pdf (application/pdf Object)
This is a widely discussed alternative idea to the Ares/Orion/Constellation program. It would convert the External Tank to a core booster with main engines from the Delta-IV (!?) and two SRB's to produce a single vehicle for the desired missions instead of the two vehicles envisioned---if that's the word for it---in the current NASA approach to ESAS . NASA, not unexpectedly, finds the DIRECT approach deficient in many ways:
FLORIDA TODAY: NASA Unveils Analysis Of Alternate Moon Rocket
The Direct approach seems at first glance to offer a more robust alternative to the melon-on-a-stick single-SRB approach NASA wants to use. But is it any more sensible to convert a giant fuel tank into a booster than to stack an oversized Apollo capsule on the end of an SRB? How long would it take to man-rate the Delta-IV engines? All of this cut-and-paste reassortment of 1970's hardware seems more likely to ingratiate the US Congress than to produce a viable, robust space program. Now as I think about it, that isn't really unexpected, either.
Oil billionaire Pickens puts his money on wind power - CNN.com
Amid all the extremely heavy-handed envirocommando rhetoric and high gasoline prices of the past few months, another proposal to build lots of windmills wouldn't ordinarily seem remarkable. This one, though, comes from T. Boone Pickens, together with a run of TV ads about America bleeding money to overseas interests. This won't work, either, but coming from a traditional oilman, it's remarkable all the same. It should probably serve as a warning about how bad things actually are about to get, if we couldn't guess for ourselves.
Phew! Spacewalkers remove explosive bolt- msnbc.com
While the American sat in the Soyuz listening to MP3's, two Russian cosmonauts performed the EVA mission that everyone tried to avoid before the second Soyuz-TMA in a row failed to re-enter properly. They exited the Pirs airlock and crawled out along the Russian Strela arm (which appeared to be whipping back and forth during the operation like a fishing pole---at one point I thought I heard one of the cosmonauts say that it whacked the side of the capsule), sawed through the multilayer insulation on the Soyuz utility/propulsion module, and removed one of the redundant explosive separation bolts for later inspection. Nobody got blown up or sliced open, and the bolt is in a small protective can for "eventual" return to Earth as part of the investigation into the Soyuz re-entry mishaps.
NVIDIA System Tools with ESA Support
I don't get it---I downloaded the new NVIDIA system tools for my NForce motherboard because they appeared to correct some deficiencies (how many times have I used "deficient" in its various forms in this posting?) in the old versions and the new System Monitor had a snappy new UI. The new NTune and System monitor somehow try to use some of the same files on installation, and the second one to be installed aborted itself as a result. I finally got past that somehow---I can't remember exactly how---and got them installed. The new System Monitor reported the temperatures of my dual-core AMD at somewhere between -3 and a little over 7 million degrees Fahrenheit, which seems rather suspect for some reason. I would really like to have better accuracy for my critical system operating parameters than that. I finally had to put back the old versions of both and give up on the upgrade.
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