Rocket Scientist

Yep, I said I had a bunch.  Feel free to add a favorite of yours or write your own!

A file that big?
It might be very useful.
But now it is gone.
– David J. Liszewski

The Web site you seek
Cannot be located but
Endless others exist.
– Joy Rothke

Errors have occurred.
We won’t tell you where or why -
Lazy programmers!
– Charlie Gibbs

Chaos reigns within.
Reflect, repent, and reboot
Order will return.
– Suzie Wagner

ABORTED effort:
Close all that you have worked on.
You ask far too much.
– Mike Hagler

Yesterday it worked.
Today it is not working.
Windows is like that.
– Margaret Segall

First snow, then silence.
This thousand dollar screen dies
So beautifully.
– Simon Firth

With searching comes loss
And the presence of absence:
“My Novel” not found.
– Howard Korder

The Tao that is seen
Is not the true Tao until
You bring fresh toner.
– Bill Torcaso

A crash reduces
Your expensive computer
To a simple stone.
– James Lopez

Three things are certain:
Death, taxes, and lost data.
Guess which has occurred.
– David Dixon

You step in the stream,
But the water has moved on.
This page is not here.
– Cass Whittington

Out of memory.
We wish to hold the whole sky,
But we never will.
– Francis Heaney

Having been erased,
The document you’re seeking
Must now be retyped.
– Judy Birmingham

Serious error.
All shortcuts have disappeared.
Screen. Mind. Both are blank.
–Ian Hughes

Server: poor response
Not quick enough for browser
Time out, plum blossom.
– Rik Jespersen

Rather than beep
Or a rude error message:
These words: “File Not Found”.
– Len Dvorkin

The code was willing!
It considered your request,
But the chips were weak.
– Barry L. Brumitt

Everything is gone.
Your life’s work has been destroyed.
Squeeze trigger? (yes/no)
– David Carlson

No keyboard present
Hit F1 to continue
Zen engineering?
– Jim Griffith

This site has been moved
We’d tell you where, but then we’d
Have to delete you.
– Charles Matthews

Printer not ready.
Could be a fatal error.
Have a pen handy?
– Pat Davis

Logon incorrect!
Only perfect spellers may
Enter this system!
– Jason Axley

Stay the patient course.
Of little worth is your ire.
The network is down.
– David Ansel

Ten thousand things
How long do any persist?
Explorer is gone.
– Jason Willoughby

Seeing my great fault
Through darkening blue windows
I begin again.
– Chris Walsh

This site uses frames
And yet your browser does not.
One of these will change.

For a new PC,
Center of my universe,
I abandon all.

Sometimes it amazes me.  Just as something triggers a train of thought in my brain, like the response to yesterday’s blog, the New York Times (or a blog or something else) will spit forth something that goes along with what I’m thinking.  In this case, it was the New York Times again with this article . 

 But what was I thinking, you might ask (unless, of course, you know by now that I’ll tell you whether you ask or not).   I was thinking about people noting that Wikipedia is fallible, that you have to take some of what you read with a grain of salt, that you can’t take everything you read at face value.

Granted.  But, then, shouldn’t we do that all the time? Skipping, for the instant, religion and religious texts (where I find the advice still applicable, but I don’t intend to tell anyone else what to do or believe), what source is so authoritative, so infallible, so incontrovertible that you shouldn’t read it critically?  Seriously.  And, yes, that includes me.

Newton was a genius.  Do you think he never made a mistake?  Or Einstein?  Or Gallileo?  Gallileo struggled, in fact, because the notions and logic of Aristotle (or Archimedes - some Greek with a name that started with A) were considered definitively true and, therefore, couldn’t be challenged.  Even though they were wrong.  It should be noted that being wrong doesn’t mean you’re not bright or brilliant or intelligent.  (Refusing to acknowledge you’re wrong even when data presents itself may be a different matter but that is another blog post.)  Everyone gets stuff wrong.  

However, you’ll get a lot less wrong if you don’t forgo your own thinking.  Give it the sniff test.  Sure, so-and-so is an expert or has been write about X before, but is he right now? And this is where the article came in.  It’s all about exercises in a book called Guesstimation: Solving the World’s Problems on the Back of a Cocktail Napkin where guesstimation exercises (as Enrico Fermi used to impose) are provided to help you learn to guesstimate big things.  They’re more than just an exercises in math, though, they’re exercises in doing quick and dirty calculations that can give you a quick sense of whether something makes sense or not.  Ok, ok, so math isn’t everyone’s bag, but the concept isn’t just about math.

Where I work, I call it the sanity check.  Someone makes an assertion and my first reaction is to double check it in my mind.  In some cases it might be validating an analysis - I do a ballpark estimate and, if they’re pretty close, I know it’s probably fine.  If they’re off by a decimal place, I need to look closer because one of us is likely wrong (and, yes, I’ve caught other people’s errors that way - and many of my own).  But it applies to logic.  If someone asks for funding because their current model is underpredicting risk (as compared to actual damage), but then the new improved model comes out and it says the risk is half what was originally predicted - that should send up flags.  Something doesn’t smell right.  (And, yes, I’ve seen that happen too - and I’m the only one it bothered).

We’ve grown too lazy, willing to put off our thinking to someone else.  Politics is one of the worst.  I’m mostly liberal, but I have some conservative tendencies.  Why?  Because I decide for myself what I believe is best on each individual issue.  No one decided for me.  I did.  I like Obama, but I don’t assume he’s always right or infallible.  No one is.  We agree on some topics, but not on others.  I don’t have a problem with someone else disagreeing with him either, but I do have a problem with someone regurgitating tired arguments (that have been readily disproved) or making unsubstantiated allegations with no basis.  I would feel the same if someone did it to Sarah Palin.  People, in my opinion, are entitled to any opinion they want, but I won’t waste my time arguing with someone who hasn’t bothered putting thought behind it nor will I respect it.

If we thought for ourselves, we would realize that interest only loans and adjustable rate mortgages were too good to be true.  If we think for ourselves, we can understand the difference between our rights and a moral imperative to impose our beliefs on others.  We can listen to an expert or a scientist or a skeptic without ignoring the small voice inside our own heads that says, “that doesn’t sound right.”  If it doesn’t sound right, find out more.  Your view on the world might change or you might realize that a lot of things that sound authoritative really are nonsense dressed up like something meaningful.  

Asking someone to do our thinking for us is a dangerous proposition, for two reasons if no others.  First, because those with the most definitive and authoritative voices often have a vested interest in getting you to think they way they want you to and, secondly, because you will have to live with the end result, whether you trusted someone else’s thinking or your own.

Update:  Speak of the devil, here’s a perfect example.  I don’t object to the joke but I do object to the yahoos who swallow it without thinking.

Once again, the editorial pages of the New York Times have provided me food for thought.  And, when I get to thinking, I try to put it on my blog so you all can share it.  In this case, it was it was Kristoff’s column on the experts who were apparently caught flat-footed by what, in hindsight, was the inevitable economic meltdown we’re all dealing with right now (some more severely than others).   It actually wasn’t really the column that caught my eye so much as the Dr. Fox effect and the findings of a Philip Tetlock of the University of California Berkeley who studied 82,000 predictions by some 284 experts (and described it in his book:  Expert Political Judgement ).

The Dr. Fox effect was the way of describing an experiment where an actor was paid to present himself as an expert (Dr. Fox) and give a completely pointless and nonsensical presentation to a group of professional educators.  The presentation was presented well (with jokes and likely excellent power point slides, perhaps animation) and left the educators by and large impressed, which either meant that they were too intimidated to admit they didn’t understand or were too amused to protest that it was garbage.  Believe me, I’ve seen the Dr. Fox effect in action.

But I found the results of Mr. Tetlock’s study even more fascinating.  Apparently, if one examines the predictions of “experts” and compares them to reality, he discovered that their predictions vs. actuality were accurate only slightly better than random.  Think about that, not slightly better than, say, the general public, slightly better than “chimps throwing darts at a dartboard.”  This was true regardless of the area of expertise, education or years of experience.

In fact, the only differentiation was fame and not how you might expect.  The more famous the “expert” the less likely they were to be accurate.   The reason Mr. Tetlock decided, was that the media prefers folks that give a definitive answer without codicils or signs conditionals.  But I think it’s possible that people feel pressured to give definitive answers when in front of the camera as well.

However, this just reinforces one of my own litmus tests when it comes to scientists (or really an expert):  the less open they are to question or adamant that their view is the only view, the less likely they are to really know what they’re talking about.  In other words, no real scientist refuses questions or belittles people who disagree.  A real scientist understands the limitations of his own knowledge and welcomes anyone who wants to understand.  A “bad” scientist thinks that his expertise should quiet all dissent.  That’s someone who cares more about appearing right than the truth - which is the antithesis of a real scientist in my opinion.  I guess that applies to more than science.

Well, it’s always nice to get data to back my opinion.

For those of you that jumped the gun with my last post to jump from exploring the moon into making a colony: .  Smarties!  And I bet you’ll have no problem guessing whether I’m all for it or not.  That’s right, I am.

Hava noted that making a colony on the moon, a real long-term self-sustaining facility, is no easy matter, despite what we’ve read in books or seen in movies.  She ain’t lying.  Making a self-sustaining colony on the moon is a complete pain in the whatsit.  Everything we need (air, water, food) will either have to be brought from here and 100% recycled or made from unpromising natural ingredients.  Power will need to be generated but, more than that, propulsion will have to be devised in order to make coming and going viable for the long run.  (Some of you might note that these same technologies and capabilities could be damn useful right hear on the planet, too.)

Do I see it likely within my lifetime?  Honestly, no.  Bits and pieces of what you’d need for a long term commitment, maybe, but not all of it.  But we don’t have to succeed soon to make pursuing  the goal of a self-sustaining colony worthwhile today.

Why?

Because I do believe that human exploration is more important that climbing Mount Everest because it’s there.  I don’t know what’s in our future, on this planet, and I know that getting to where we have other options if something cataclysmic would happen is going to be a long and painful road.  I don’t know if we’ll ever need it, but I’d much rather have the option and not need it than find out we need it in thirty years, but the path to escape is fifty years long.  But it’s more than that.

I believe that, if we are ever to do real exploring outside our solar system, we’d better know our way around space, we’d better know how to live on little or nothing and how to make the most of whatever natural resources we can find because we aren’t going to just stumble (conveniently) across dilithium crystals nor can we count on friendly (or touchy) natives to supply our wants.  And I think that should be our goal.  Our planet is precious and beautiful and wonderfully nurturing; I love the Earth.  But I dream of exploring elsewhere, finding more places, more people, more systems than I can imagine today.  I want that, if not for my children, for my children’s children.

The moon, as it was as an exploration test bed, is a perfect place to learn how to survive on very inhospitable land, how to use the resources we have to the fullest, how to grow food and create a living ecosystem out of very very little.  All within easy reach of earth, in case of setbacks, but under some of the harshest terms.  There is no welcome on the moon.  To stake a permanent claim, we’re going to have to be brilliant and creative and resourceful, just as we’re going to need to do to travel beyond our sun’s influence.  And, if we can beat her, we will not only have perfected any number of necessary steps that will set the foundation for future exploration, we’ll have proved that it’s possible, that man need not be fettered to this planet for all eternity.

Every day we wait or refuse to set our feet upon that path, success retreats at least one more day away.

Not that I’m opinionated or nothin’.

This comes up a lot when people talk about space exploration - why go back to the moon?  (For those that don’t think manned spaceflight is a worthwhile endeavor - as I do - you can see my reasoning here and here )  Why not skip the moon and go straight to Mars?  What’s the value? 

I’m here to tell you, I think it’s very valuable, very worthwhile, even essential.  The moon is like a specially made test bed we can get our feet wet with, test our theories and our hardware, learn our lessons (even the hard way) before the really tough stuff happens.  It has no atmosphere, no life.  If we want to live on the moon, we’re going to have to make our own habitat, find our own opportunities, make the most of the forbidding landscape.  If we want to conquer the moon, we’re going to have to deal with dust and temperature extremes and low gravity (which isn’t always a good thing) and meteors and radiation and everything else that is part and parcel of moving outside our magetosphere, going outside of earth’s orbit.  We’re going to have to learn to recycle like never before and get blood (or something useful) from stone.

If we can beat the moon, we can beat Mars or any other planet or moon even marginally friendly.

And we’re lucky because we have the opportunity to do so within relatively easy reach of earth.

We can test engines on a smaller scale for a lander on the moon than we’ll need on Mars.  We can address dust mitigation techniques on the Moon where resupply and rework is a relatively easy thing.  We can figure out what upmass is REALLY required to make even a temporary home on another planetary surface before we commit to 3 year trip where there will be no rest stops along the way, no chance to recover if something we really needed, but didn’t know we needed, is safely on earth instead of with our Mars explorers.

Truth is, space exploration in orbit is a risky business, but we can get up there quickly if we need to.  We can escape quickly if we need to.  Someone gets a hot appendix on the Moon, we can get him back on earth before it’s too late.  That beautiful sphere that lights the night sky has a thousand lessons on her we don’t have to learn on Mars where there’s no chance for rescue or resupply.

Should we go to the Moon?  We’d be damn fools if we don’t.  Believe me, in our lifetime, someone will walk her dusty hills again.

I love the Moon .  I love the crescent moon, slicing a bit of silver through the diamond-studded night.  I love the full glow of the moon when it’s heavy and round in the sky, sometimes silver, sometimes gold, sometimes copper, depending on the vagaries of orbital mechanics and our own atmosphere.  I love it when it’s growing or shrinking, shining on us.

I love it veiled in clouds, sometimes just a misty glow behind the dense cover, sometimes just slightly out of focus behind the diaphanous fingers of cirrus.

I love that having that gorgeous chunk of  celestial beauty is within reach, is hanging so close that it affects the tides, that it’s so in sync with us that it always shows us the same face.

It awes me that we walked there, set foot on another celestial body (and, yes, we were there).  It awes me that it’s taken so much damage and looks on us with it’s scarred visage, undaunted and undone.

So, yes, I’ve been painting a copy of the moon on my hallway wall.  And I can’t do justice to it with my own pictures (sorry), although I recommend anyone interested in beautiful and interesting pictures of the moon to check out Black Holes and Astrostuff - Bob takes and shows superlative images, often taken in the (literally) breath-taking cold.

As I keep painting, I’ll probably talk about the moon a bit more.  And, when I start on other planets, I’ll do more.  Do check out the moon link above.  It will take you to The Nine Planets , a great source for finding out more about our solar system.

That’s right, I am.  It’s my turn to speak my mind on the discussion of the bonuses for employees of the companies that have accepted billions of taxpayer dollars.  The general public is outraged.  So am I.  Some reporters have noted that this is just a blip, a distraction from the big picture.  The public has not agreed.  Neither do I.  It’s a matter of principle.

When I read stories in the New York Times about business leaders complaining that taxing or retracting  those bonuses, making wild (and utterly unconvincing) predictions of losing masses of “brainiacs” and “talent” (and doom predictions that their knowledge would be destructive when they were “snapped up” by someone else), that companies will have nothing to do with government run businesses, that they have no choice legally but to provide those bonuses, I have to call BS.  Then, when that was ineffective, they started in on how those employees, facing the loss of million dollar bonuses, came into their bosses office “in tears”.  Boo hoo.  To face the loss of their unearned gain at the taxpayer’s expense when millions of people have faced job loss as a result of their incompetent/greedy/dishonest behavior?  Let me tell you how sad I am for them.  The individual with a $25 million bonus (Merrill Lynch) has already spent his bonus on a $37 million dollar apartment.  Boo hoo.  Just like hundreds of thousands of people in this country who face the loss of their homes, and have done less to deserve it.

Yeah, I’m with the outraged public.  I always thought a bonus was all about a reward for going above and beyond the expected, the normal.  It bothers me already that we give restaurants leave to short their wait staff on salaries because it’s expected we’ll happily cough up an additional 10-25% tax  so they don’t have to pay them even minimum wage.  Instead of being an indication of gratitude for extraordinary service, it’s an obligation or an opportunity to indulge in a little malice at the waiter’s expense.  Likewise, bonuses have been come obligations instead of what I believe they were originally intended to be:  a reward for exceptional service, over and above the original job one was hired to do.  For a company to go tens or hundreds of billions of dollars into the hole over a year and then think that millions (or, like Merrill Lynch, billions) of dollars of bonuses are justified just demonstrates how far from realities these “brainiacs” really are.

But it’s more than just the bankers.  I’d like to see this carried forward into government contracts in general.  It is disheartening for someone who loves and believes in the space program to see contracts written in such a way as to reward failure.  To get the contract, a company often drastically underpredicts how long a task will take, what they can deliver and what it will cost - and they can do so confident that if things run somewhat over or somewhat long or not what was asked, the government usually responds by pulling out its checkbook.  I’ve seen a major contractor deliver hardware that notably didn’t meet well established requirements, only to be provided beaucoup more money to fix the deficiencies.  I’ve seen sole source contracts awarded to companies because “only” they have the expertise to do a particular job in a particular timeframe, only to see them complain after the award how they can’t deliver what was asked and demanding requirement changes (and let’s not forget delivering it late and over budget).  I’ve seen companies with abysmal ratings from the government who still walked away with 90% of the “award” fee, effectively a bonus over and above the contract itself.

In the “real” world, accountants who mismanage your money are liable, perhaps criminally.  In the “real” world, people who contract to perform a service will go out of business if they don’t deliver what they promise, not only not getting paid, but not getting future business. 

As a taxpayer, I don’t mind paying for a space program or to assure our economy doesn’t take a nosedive, for the good of all, but I still deserve to get value for my investment.  My interest in space or the economy (or defense or any other program for the good of all) should not be used as a windfall with nothing in return. 

I’m hoping the government takes on the role of a discerning customer and begins to demand value.  I know we can deliver if only we are held to it.  I look at our history and I see how we’ve accomplished so much when so much has been demanded of us.  Here’s another opportunity if we only take it.

Sometimes I never see where these blog postings are going until I get there.

Talking about the orbital debris situation usually brings us back around to talking about environmental issues.  Unfortunately, while some environmental issues are well accepted, others which threaten the status quo (and the lucretive energy market) are still hounded by whispers of doubt and accusations of the impossibility of change.

That makes no damn sense, though.  Whenever I’m told that, I remember the same song when we talked about cleaning air in Los Angeles or rivers in many parts of the nation, but air quality in Los Angeles has improved drastically and many many places that were a wasteland 30 years ago are coming back into their own.

I think a salutory lesson resides in the discussion of ozone depletion .  

Thirty years ago, CFCs were “perfect”.  Nonreactive, rarely toxic, wonderful thermal qualities.  A Dr. Lovelack (the biologist) did a self-funded study to measure CFCs in the atmosphere in the early 1970’s.  But it took the thinking of Frank Sherman and Mario Merino (1974)  to hypothesize that the nonreactive nature of CFCs could allow it to stay intact up to the stratosphere where, when it rose high enough, it could be disassociated by UV radiation and leaving a free chlorine ion.  A chlorine ion is murder on ozone because it works as a catalyst in turning ozone back into molecular oxygen, while remaining unchanged itself, free to convert again.

To say that this hypothesis was treated with skepticism would be putting it mildly.  Even if it were true, people argued, we were so dependent on CFCs that we would go through untold hardship if we were asked to give them up.  Economic ruin.  Impossible.  Besides the notion that we could affect the atmosphere that was preposterous!

Sure enough, some of the early NASA readings specifically to measure ozone seemed to put the notion of an ozone hole to bed.  Except, it turns out that an algorithm was discounting the measured readings because they were so far different from the expected values that the software for the measurement was throwing them out as errors.  When we got the real picture(1985), no one expected it to be as bad as it actually was.

Fortunately, the scientists who supported this were taken seriously even before 1985 and many countries were already reducing or eliminating CFCs (including the US).  Within the decade, nearly every country was doing the same.  And we’re seeing some improvements with the ozone layer despite the vast quantities of CFC that were still filtering upwards.  It looks like the damage will be undone within 40 years. 

And what was the impact on you?  Did you have to give up refrigeration?  Air conditioning?  Aerosal cans?  Nope, once we committed to change, we made it happen with minimal if any effect on regular folks.  Amazing what you can do when you put your mind to it. 

When I think of the difference in energy costs of the homes in Palm Desert, California , going from costing $1400/month in energy costs to $500/YEAR with city financed solar arrays (repaid via property tax), I know we can do more than we think we can.

For the second time in a week, the ISS folks are addressing what, if anything, to do about a close encounter with more space debris.  Last week (3/12/2009), ISS crewmembers camped out in the Soyuz for a few minutes as a “yo” weight from a PAM-D upperstage less than 5 inches across ventured into ISS’ vicinity.  Word that it was going to pass too closely for safety came too late to maneuver the ISS out of the way, so the crew waited in the Soyuz in case there was a critical impact.  Fortunately, there wasn’t.

Before anyone gets too critical of USSATCOM, which tracks our debris, for the late notification, they might want to realize how difficult it is to track something ~10 cm across.  Think about being able, from a ground station looking through the atmosphere, spot something whizzing by, several times faster than a bullet and hundreds of km above the surface of the earth. Now imagine it’s just five inches long.

Several factors combined to make this difficult.  First, it’s small.  Big honkin’ expended rocket boosters and stuff are easy to track, even without transponders, because, hey, they’re big and easy for radars to never miss.  As you get smaller, though, only your best radars can catch stuff.  Smaller yet, and they only catch stuff once in a while, say every third orbit or once or twice a week.  What that means is that there is more uncertainty in its position.  When you have lots of data on a debris item, i.e. you catch its position several times a day with several radars, you can be pretty sure you have a handle on its orbit and can predict well where it will be several days in advance with good confidence.  Something smaller, with only a few and diverse data points to work with, it’s not so easy and predictions are less exact.

Additionally, this was on a very eccentric orbit, dipping into space that is affected by atmosphere and then moving into a very high orbit.  That atmospheric friction changes the orbit, and, although that can be taken into account, it adds to uncertainty.  

Today, yet another smaller bit of debris, this time from a Kosmos 1275 that broke up for reasons we’ve never entirely nailed down, also in an unusual orbit, also ~10 cm, is being discussed by the ISS team, to see if they should move out of the way.  I believe, at this time, that they now believe it will pass by far enough away to preclude needing a maneuver, but, coming close on the heels of the other scare, it’s a pretty impressive reminder of the difficulties of hanging around in space cluttered with debris.  And, as the ASAT detritis and fallout from theIridium collision work their way down things will only get worse.

Update:  NASA did determine that the junk would be far enough away to be outside the danger zone and did not require a maneuver.

It occurred to me, as I watched the Shuttle preparing to launch this evening, that I’ve been watching Shuttle launches for some time.  I know, when the countdown restarts after all the “go-calls” at T-9 minutes, that, whether I can hear the commentator or not, that things are getting close when I see the main engines gimballing from null to each of their extreme positions and then back to null, hydrogen escaping in little plumes from the engine bells.  (For those that don’t know, the engine bells are cooled by liquid hydrogen that goes through pipes on the bells before being shunted into the bell for combustion.)

Next the vent hood is pulled back from the external tank.  The vent hood pulls any escaping oxygen and hydrogen away from the structure during the time the tanks are loaded but prior to lift off.  Time is getting short. 

We’re only seconds away when the noise suppression deluge begins, a flood of water that pours into a trench beneath the mobile launch platform (that hearken back to the Apollo years).  In addition to reducing the noise of our rockets as they go to full power for launch, they also provide the huge clouds of steams that you see during a launch.  Gotta love a night launch.  

Next, the sparks, an orange wall of fire that lights the main engines with their almost invisible red-blue flames.  The main engine bells swivel and it holds there for several seconds, even after engine light as the solid rocket boosters are lit, as the thrust overcomes gravity and slowly pushes the ungainly contraption up into the sky.  

For me, this is when I’m most anxious, watching the blurring long range video for plumes that don’t belong, for flashes of foreign object debris, for anything that might presage something bad.  Thankfully, tonight, as has happenedover a hundred times before, there was nothing immediately visible.  Each step after that, each milestone, is just one less worry.  Throttle down, where both the SRBs and the engines are throttled back to keep from putting too much dynamic load on the Orbiter.  Throttle back up, where they climb back out of the “bucket” and push the main engines to full power.  

As the solid rocket boosters run low of fuel,  pyro bolts fire and release them from the stack, to fall back to the ocean where they’ll be retrieved, refurbished, refilled for another flight.  The burn their last as they fall away.  

All that’s left is a little spot (the smoke you see during launch comes from the hypergolic fuel in the solid rocket boosters, not the clean-burning main engines) with the triangle brightness of the three engines.  Time ticks by as the milestones pass us.  Two engine TAL, where we could abort to across the ocean even if we lost an engine, then one engine, then we call out being able to make orbit losing one engine.  Then two.  But, tonight, all the engines burned well and we made it into orbit exactly as planned.

There are literally thousands of people who worked to make sure that flight worked, that the launch was successful, that everything worked as designed.  But it isn’t just their launch, it’s yours as well.  The Shuttle belongs to all us, here in America and, with the different crews going up of more and more different nationalities, to all mankind, at least to an extent.

Go STS-119.

So, once again it’s thieving Thursday and I was really wondering if I had any comments worthy, you know, of stealing.  Between being emotionally devastated on Tuesday and Roxy’s birthday yesterday, I figured my comments had been pretty nondescript.  Fortunately for everyone, Habitation Intention gave me my big break.  They showed a design submitted for a contest sponsored by NASA and SolidWorks .  Clearly the folks at Habitation Intention were taken with the spherical design and the notion that artificial gravity could be brought to bear by spinning it “on it’s X,Y, and Z axis.”  I noted that you can really only spin it on one axis and that rotating space stations are really a very old concept (as far as space technology goes).  Not that the idea isn’t interesting, or even worth pursuing, but space stuff is rarely as simple as that.

I mentioned a few things that might make this concept challenging to implement, not because they are insurmountable, but because it’s easy to lose sight of different aspects in space.  For instance, spinning anything in space adds considerable complexity to a space craft.  With all of the mass at the edges (rather than near the center of gravity), just moving around this sphere could really cause substantial oscillations.  Also unless you were at just the right place, the gravity gradients would be different and could very well wreak havoc with the inner ear equilibrium, making it perhaps perfect for some and vomit-inducing for others.  I suspect that’s one reason previous spinning space stations were generally in a ring as opposed to a sphere (which would be less complicated to control).  Docking with a spinning spacecraft is challenging and power generation and radiative cooling were not clear to me.  Again, this isn’t to say it couldn’t be done, just that there are some complexities that might give one pause.  Not that new ideas aren’t good to play with…

Naturally, of course, I went to go see if I could reassure myself that I wasn’t misremembering those early space station concepts and, sure enough, I wasn’t .  Actually, I had a great time reading about the many and clever ideas we’ve had in the past (and I say we like I was involved, but they were all before my time), though seeing the potential concepts (one as inexpensive as $100 mil which seems a bargain even by yesteryear’s standards) that came to nothing primarily for politics is a little disheartening.  There’s a lovely write-up of Langley’s attempts to address space station needs here and another write-up where Marshall touts their own space station history , including Skylab.  Astronautix.com (a must for any space history enthusiast) has a wonderful history of the different notions , concepts and plans for space stations the US has contemplated over the years. I’m including a few here from the one-man Mercury based “station” to the huge  “Space Base,” even stations that simulated gravity from the inflatable toroid of Von Braun to Langley’s hexagonal spinning self-deploying hexagon.

Fun stuff.  Oh, and one more picture from NASA (STS-119, which was delayed yesterday).  Isn’t that a cool picture?

I wasn’t going to write on this topic today.  I was innocently reading the New York Times when I stumbled upon a brief story titled “Who Forgets a Child in a Car?” which links an entirely different story in the Washington Post entitled “Fatal Distraction.”   The first article advocated reading the entire post article, down to the end and she wasn’t lying.  Every parent with small children should read it and I say it though it was probably the hardest thing to read I’ve ever read.  Not because it was poorly written – oh no – but because it hurt so badly.  Babies, left to die of heat related causes in cars, not by monsters, but by parents who loved them dearly.  (I wrote several weeks ago about the power of just a few words.  Think of the story and impact of this sentence when an expert is asked about the “worst” case:  “The child pulled all her hair out before she died.“  It haunts me now, hours later.)  For hours, today, I fought weeping (mostly failing) because, as an absent-minded but loving parent, I know this could happen to me (and I’m grateful that my husband is with me most times when I take my baby anywhere or I’d be much worse off).  And, folks, it could happen to you.  Not because you don’t love your children, but because it can happen to anyone.

It’s a specific problem, this hyperthermia, that has blossomed into a horrible fate almost unheard of before the mandate of rear-facing carseats in the back.  Thirty-five to forty children dead per year is better than the hundreds that likely died before carseats became mandatory, but that is small comfort to the parents that will live with this tiny mistake for the rest of their lives, for, though the act was not heinous (in most cases), but results were.  (And, yes, it is sometimes deliberate and sometimes a symptom of abuse/neglect or drug problems – but that’s not what I’m talking about here.  Most are accidental according to this and this .)  But it’s more than a question of location.  It’s a matter of distraction.

Day in and day out we are demanding more of ourselves, more demands on time and attention, stresses and problems, eating into our sleep and forcing us to constantly juggle a dozen different tasks at once.  Our kids are important to us, but they add to the load.  Add to that the distractions that are part and parcel of this day and age (that our parents and grandparents never had to contend with):  cell phones, PDAs, pagers, GPS, computers.  We twitter and chat and talk and IM and and… hopefully, not in the car, but all of that adds to the interaction and preoccupation in the brain.  Too much, too tired, too stressed, too busy, and our bodies go into automatic mode to where we can drive to work despite the distractions without ever realizing we forgot to stop at daycare and drop off the child.  After all, we’ve done it so many times, our mind can play it back like it actually happened if we think about it later.

Hell.  (Must stop crying)

There are steps we can take to improve this .  There are steps mentioned here and another site dedicated to kids and car safety well worth checking out.  I was surprised by the notion that there are technologically handy devices to prevent this that are all but unknown and not readily available and the reason why was striking.   The same reason many are quick to judge the parent in such a situation is the same reason why the devices that can preclude this are not popular:  people just don’t believe that they could ever do a thing like this.  And, because of this mindset, they make themselves vulnerable to it.

But leaving children in cars is just part of it.  Children crawl out of garden gates or sneak out of doors, they hang out behind a door that can smack them or underfoot where they can be stepped on.  The phone rings at dinner time or bath time or any other moment and your eyes and attention aren’t with that baby.

And you don’t have to have children for distractions to be an issue.  Cars are a bad place for them (and it happens all the time, and cellphones are just one of the distractions).  It can happen with payments you forgot to make or critical directions you forgot to give.  It can affect construction where a construction worker is hurt or can leave something constructed poorly where someone else, years later, pays the price (don’t get me started on the slipshod installation of my attic access.  It’s a miracle it didn’t just drop out of the ceiling on us any time the past three years).  It can be a missed reading on a monitor at a secure facility, or a missed gauge reading at a nuclear facility.  It can be one of a thousand missed communications during manufacturing, building, testing or using complex (and dangerous) equipment.

Being pressed for time, feeling harried and stressed, pushing yourself to the limit (and who hasn’t heard this from everyone at one point or another) isn’t just inconvenient, it’s dangerous and, if we’re lucky, no one will pay the price for our distraction.  Not because we don’t care about quality or don’t want to do the job right, not because we don’t care about safety, but because safety is just one of the many many balls we have to juggle.

It’s not surprise that schedule pressure has been cited at both Shuttle accidents.  It’s a reason why I’m a firm advocate for having people devoted to safety and nothing else, not programmatic risks, not mission success, not budget, not schedule.

So, when you’re swamped and weary and stressed and frayed, when you’re struggling to juggle twenty more balls than you think you can, ask yourself, seriously, what you risk with your distractions and, what, realistically, is the worst case of one or more balls fall.  If we’re talking about hurting a child or a coworker or an astronaut, some of those balls are likely to look pretty darned unimportant.  Now, how do they compare with playing peek a boo with your tiny child.  Yeah, I thought so.

So, let the answering machine catch the phone.  Or let ‘em call back.  Skip the IM one night.  Get to work five minutes late.  Forgo sweeping this morning.  Make it a habit to open the door and check the car seat.  Spend an hour wrestling with a five year old or playing “point out the facial feature” with the baby.  Take the dog for a walk.  Remember that all those things you juggle are so you can enjoy life.  Don’t let the life pass you by because of it.

I’d write more, but I’ve got a movie night planned with my family.

Despite the nearly comatose nature of today (as it to be expected, rising in the middle of the night thanks to DST), today has mostly been a good day.  I got some breathing room financially.  My fence is done.  And, as almost never happens, I won–twice, first a Blu-ray DVD of Igor , which I’ve been meaning to watch as twisted stop motion is a favorite in our house and, from the same source, 80 Years of Oscar , which is chock full of wonderful movie stuff (and retails at $75).  I probably would never have been able to convince myself to purchase the latter, but I know I’ll get a lot out of it.  Both contests were offered by a clever and indepth little movie/TV blog called RU Screening , which is somewhat heads and shoulders above the nominal “I’ve-been-so-anxious-to-see-[insert movie name here]-and-I-did-and-it-rocks” kind of review site.  I find the reviews, even for movies I haven’t the slightest interest in watching, insightful, interesting and entertaining.  What I don’t understand is why there isn’t more notice of this slickly built little gem of a review site.  Or as much interest.  I mean, to enter these contests for free goodies, one only had to leave a comment on the review.  Only three left comments on Igor and I was the only comment for the exceptional (and expensive) book.  Anyway, if you’re interested in movies, some of them long released gems and some upcoming/current releases, it might be worth your while to check out RU Screening .

But, as opposed to that kind of meritless winning, I thought I’d mention another big winner.  Last month, during Black History month, I made a point to note some of the many contributions made to science and technology by African Americans.  This month is focused on women and today is International Women’s Day , and, by a strange coincidence, 2009’s Black Engineer of the Year is Dr. Wanda Austin , President and CEO of the technically prestigious not-for-profit Aerospace Corporation which operates “a federally funded research and development center for the US Air Force and the National Reconnaissance Office and support all national-security space programs.”  

Since I noticed this little tidbit, I just thought I’d pass on more reminders that technical know-how brains and excellence are notrace or gender specific, although I doubt any of my readers need reminding.

I read a very interesting article in the New York Times (yes, it’s the only newspaper I read daily).  In this article, about the book “Mothers and Others: The Evolutionary Origins of Mutual Understanding” by Dr. Hrdy, Dr. Hrdy contends that the glue behind our society, what makes humans really out of the ordinary is not our thumbs or our brains but our babies.  See, babies top the scale on charisma.

Duh! you might be thinking, so?  Ah, but according to the article/book, Dr. Hrdy thinks that this appeal to more than just a baby’s mother is the key to our society and our success.   See, in nature, babies of all different flavors come into the world with different levels of autonomy and different levels of risk.  In the insect/fish/reptile worlds, young are usually laid as eggs (some exceptions) and left to fend for themselves after hatching, often laid by the millions with only a few escaping the hungry mouths of predators (which in some cases, include their own kind).  True, there are some fish that look out for their young, often denoting a bit more brains that average (like octopi), and some insects that actively care for young, though these are often societal insects like ants, bees or termites.  But, for most insects, fish and reptiles, egg abandonment is the norm with the luckiest getting parents that at least leave them on a food source, like parasitic wasps and flies do.

Move up the chain a bit and birds and mammals generals expend some effort caring for their young, protecting them even at the cost to themselves.  However, in most cases, this dedication to young is limited to the parents in question.  You kill a mama bird or a mama bear, the babies will die from neglect.  Even social animals largely leave unclaimed children to die (with mothers unwilling to share their newborns) unless they have cooperative breeding like some species of birds and lions and wolves and handful of others have developed.  In a wolf pack, for example,  which is usually 2-20 wolves, all take care of a single litter of wolf pups at a time (usually the alpha male and female’s pups.  They are born helpless and generally stay with the pack until fully mature, say 2 years or so.  This is a contrast to chimpanzees and other primates where multiple mothers likely give birth and care for their young exclusively.

 Humans, however, are a pretty unusual animal, not just for the helplessness of their young but for how very very long the young are unable to truly care for themselves.  Humans are not really suited to taking full care of themselves  for a dozen years at least (and most of us with teenagers would say much longer) and, truthfully, one person is really not capable of watching a child (or actually children) 24/7 for every minute.  So, we need help.

And that’s one reason why babies are so darned cute and giggly and googly and charming.  Even contankerous old men can be undone by that toothless grin.  Women completely unattached can be enticed by that baby smell and cute little baby feet (Don’t you just love baby feet?).  And mothers, unlike other primates, will let others hold and coo and play with their children.

Dr. Hrdy contends that it is this cooperative reproduction that led to our emotional maturity, that sense of something beyond oneself, not just one’s own progeny, but children in general.  It’s why we grieved for the broken bodies pulled from the Murray Federal Building in Oklahoma City and why we support school lunches and schools even when we don’t have children ourselves.

I’ve been talking about the big picture.  Look at my little Roxy.  That’s what I’m talkin’ about.  Roxy and children all over the world just like her.

I strongly recommend reading the article .  I found it very thought-provoking.

This hasn’t been the best month for space doings.  I’ve put off mentioning and discussing the February 10 Iridium-Kosmos 2251 collision because, well, I was hoping to wait until we got a better picture of the real implications of this space catastrophe (and yes, that’s how I see it).  It’s a huge deal, partially because both satellites were fairly large, partially because, since they hit at right angles, the relative velocity was very high (~11.7 km/s – note that’s *per second* not per hour; a rifle bullet is more on the order of 0.5-1.1 km/s for reference) and partially because it’s up on the high side of an already crowded low earth orbit.  Everything, of course, will be coming down and spending time (of relative lengths) at all the altitudes below, including Hubble’s altitude and the Space Station.  So far, they’ve counted upwards of 500 trackable pieces of debris from this, which means there are many thousand of smaller untrackable pieces.  Because there is no atmosphere where the collision happened, there’s no friction to speed their reentry, so we’ll be living with that debris a long time. 

Unfortunately, that’s not the end of the bad news.  Last night/this morning, the much-touted Orbiting Carbon Observatory launch failed, when a fairing failed to release (on the clamshell casing that held the satellite).  The added mass of the enclosure made it too massive for the existing fuel to propel it to orbit so the hapless satellite dropped into the drink near Antarctica.  The NASA program manager John Brunschwyler said, “We could not make orbit.… Initial indications are the vehicle did not have enough [thrust] to reach orbit and landed just short of Antarctica in the ocean.… Certainly for the science community, it’s a huge disappointment.”  *Sigh* It was the first flight for NASA with the Taurus XL, built by Orbital Science Corp.

It’s a timely, but costly, reminder that, as hard as it is to get something to function in space, getting something to space is still a nontrivial problem.

As someone deeply concerned about global warming and a scientist, I can’t help but be disheartened, but it’s not all bad news.  After all, the Japanese have already successfully launched their own Greenhouse Gases Observing Satellite that is performing a similar function now (launched in January).  This satellite was designed to measure methane and CO² in the atmosphere and this data will be shared with NASA and other space and scientific organizations around the world.  Kudos to JAXA (the Japanese Space Agency). 

On the one hand, as a human being and a rocket scientist, I can’t help but be gratified at the worldwide interest in space activities, from Shenzhou in China to the reliable workhorse rockets in Russia to the many and varied ESA activities to those activities by Japan and India to join in the space fraternity.  Still, I’m a little saddened that the US is not always at the forefront any more and that, in this country, that drive to explore and that dedication to our space efforts does not seem widespread among the populace.  Unfortunately, events like this failed launch will hardly make that better.

More links on the OCO launch failure:

http://enews.earthlink.net/article/top?guid=20090224/49a38ce0_3ca6_1552620090224-458764158

http://www.spacemart.com/reports/Satellite_mission_to_monitor_carbon_dioxide_fails_NASA_999.html

http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/oco/main/index.html

Note that my sister, Shakespeare, has added another writing exercise today .  Check it out!

Not, however, in that order.  My sister, shakespearemom , has a blog here on today.com and, truthfully, she and flit are the reason I started a blog at all.  She’s a Ph.D. in English and often has little writing how-to’s and exercises and I think it’s a real pity that her very excellent (but quiet) blog get so little attention, not just because I like it but because she has so much expertise readily available.  She’s also very responsive.  Yesterday, she put up an excellent exercise on the writing staple:  do don’t tell.  I urge everyone interested in character or writing to take advantage and check it out. I liked it so much, I’ll be stealing the idea for Thieving Thursday to do my own writing exercise.

Ironically, since both my inspirations (flit and shakespearemom) are directly involved in education and I’m not, I want to talk about education.  Truth told, education affects us all and our future.  If we can’t educate our children effectively, rocket science will be a thing of the past.

According to this editorial in the New York Times , students in college are now feeling entitled to high grades based on whether they do the reading and attend school, regardless of what they learn.  Students maintain that grades should depend on level of effort, according to this article as opposed to demonstrating knowledge, expertise, or understanding of the subject.  I didn’t see this article when it first came out, but I did read the letters to the editor on the subject today. There, too, some students seemed to feel that effort was sufficient.  Someone mentioned that parents put pressure on kids to make their own investment worthwhile with good grades.  Some parents apparently are more interested in what letter’s on the paper than what their kids have learned.

Let me explain why that just ain’t so.  See, college is more than a drain on a parent’s pocketbook and a place to practice drinking games; it’s also an opportunity to learn and a chance to prepare for what’s coming - i.e. reality.  And, folks, in the real world you don’t get an A for effort.

Oh, sure, you can shuffle through life in a nowhere job, just filling in time, but you won’t be rated an “A” by anyone involved.  And, in the real world, there’s no makeup tests when you screw up.  One screw up, a really good one, can kill it all.  Truth is, no one’s going to care how much effort you (an accountant) put on a tax return if the IRS comes after the client and finds they’re in arrears.  No one’s going to sympathize if you pulled an all-nighter with your buds and say, “No problem” when you remove the wrong kidney.  No one’s going to understand and give you another chance if your forgetting to torque down lugnuts gets someone killed.

In the real world, it doesn’t matter how hard you work on a design.  If it’s bad, no one will buy it or, worse, you’ll get someone killed.  If you just let one kid slide as a social worker, it could be the one that’s on the front pages the next day and on your conscience the rest of your life.  Pilots have to deal with the real laws of physics, not their bud who runs a flight school.

Kids, I hope you’re never treated so dismissively that we confuse “being there” with learning.  I think the notion that people are entitled to rewards and adulation for “just getting by” is a factor in our high juvenile crime rate and in some kids who get through college completely unprepared for real life.  ‘Cause that real stuff is out there.

Oh, and parents, if you’re going to get angry over the high cost of college (which I absolutely agree exists), I’d be angrier at my kid getting an A in a class without absorbing any of the knowhow you’ve paid for.

Just my 2 cents.

So, who was wondering what I was doing when I disappeared last week?  No one?  Oh.

/Kicks dirt

Oh, well, I’m going to tell you about it anyway because it’s cool.  Not my part (which is mundane and completely down to the earth) but the equipment I’m doing my mundane work on.  See, I’m responsible for safety for the Instrument Suite on the Magnetospheric Multiscale (MMS) mission, basically the science part (AKA SMART, for “Solving Magnetospheric Acceleration, Reconnection, and Turbulence,”) of this ambitious set of four spacecraft.

You can find all kinds of good information on this mission at Southwest Research Institute and Goddard Space Flight Center .  Basically, it’s a mission to send four identical spacecraft, each attached to duplicate instrument suites, “that will use Earth’s magnetosphere as a laboratory to study the microphysics of magnetic reconnection, a fundamental plasma-physical process that converts magnetic energy into heat and the kinetic energy of charged particles.”  You probably want to know what that means.

Yeah, me too.  Fortunately for all of us, Wikipedia had an entry, too, which is written in more laymen terms.

Mostly, it’s a collection of instruments that measure magnetic and electric fields (on long booms), electron and ion plasma spectrometers, energetic particles, plasma waves, high temporal and spatial resolution and burst even recordings.

And, with all the cool stuff going on, clever computers, state of the art instruments, what do I do?  I look over everyone’s designs, procedures and make sure no one gets hurt.  Since most of this is heritage hardware and the mission is unmanned, safety is only a small part of a really cool whole.

Good stuff.

And, since this is an interesting topic and I’m not around much, I’ll include some other exceptional African Americans born before the Civil War who accomplished things despite the many obstacles before them.

Lewis Latimer (1848-1928) was born twelve years before the Civil War, but he spent the bulk of his years drafting and inventing with some of the finest minds of that period.  Born in Massachusetts to a former slave, he learned mechanical drafting working in a legal patent office.  He invented a toilet system for railway cars, did considerable work on incandescent lamps and carbon filaments, and was also the draftsman for Alexander Graham Bell’s telephone patent applcation.  He was the only African American as part of the Edison Pioneers, the team of exceptional long term inventors at Edison’s facilities.  In 1890 he published *Incandescent Electric Lighting*, a technical engineering book which became a guide for lighting engineers.  Did I mention he also painted, played the flute, wrote poetry and plays, taught mechanical drafting, English and drawing to immigrants?

I know, I know, you all thought I forgot it was Black History Month.  Well, I didn’t.  I get distracted here and there, but I don’t forget where we came from and all those who helped bring us to where we are now.  Today, I’m going to talk about some of the earliest African American scientists and inventors:  Benjamin Banneker and Norbert Rilleau.

Benjamin Banneker (1731-1806) was a freeman with an interesting history and a interest in reading the stars that may be traceable to his African roots.  His grandmother purchased a slave, Banneka, perhaps from the Dogon tribe, who was so useful that she freed and married him.  The daughter of that union bore Benjamin to a first generation slave who fled his owner.  

In between working on his farm, Benjamin took advantage of a school run by a local Quaker as well as his extensive library.  Farming curtailed the education, but not Benjamin’s tinkering.  It is believed that Benjamin Banneker built the a clock out of wood and using a borrowed pocketwatch as a model.  He completed the clock at the age of 21 and it worked until his death.  

 His knowledge of astronomy helped him help the team to survey the area where Washington DC now stands.  He also used his knowledge to predict eclipses in his ephemeris, published as a six year series of almanacs much promoted by abolitionist movements and showcasing other African American talent.

I also thought I’d include Norbert Rilleaux , another American freeman, born in Louisiana to a white plantation owner and a free blackLouisiana Creole named Constance Vivant (which is just fun to say).  His family was fairly well placed and his cousin was Edgar Degas.  His father was also an engineer and inventor much like Norbert was.  Norbert was well educated in local Catholic schools and then in France, where he studied physics, mechanics, and engineering and eventually taught at his own school, École Centrale, instructing in applied mechanics. 

Originally an expert in steam engines, he used his expertise to devise the mutiple effect evaporator that not only revolutionized the sugar refining industry but is also used even today for other applications where large scale evaporation is necessary.  He also devised a method to reduce Yellow Fever in New Orleans that was rejected for political reasons (though a very similar method was implemented at a later date).  Disheartened by the racism in America, Norbert eventually returned to France where he spent the bulk of his remaining life.  

 I will be out of town the next three days, so I can’t promise to update as often as I generally do, but I will put up what I can.

So, today, I’m doing double duty.First, as I was going through all the discussions on astronauts and NASA’s tragedies last week, two things occurred to me.  First, the astronauts we have owe so much to the pioneer aviators who first brought humans into the air.  Secondly, we are so much less blasé about the death of those we admire than we used to be.  This applies to more than space, of course.  It used to be parents had ten kids because only half would make it to adulthood.  I’m glad those days are behind us.

Bessie Coleman was not only the first African American to become an airplane pilot, she was the first American of any race or gender to hold an international pilot license.  How’s that for being some kind of wonderful?Born in 1892, she was a brilliant child, but her color and her circumstances limited her prospects - but didn’t limit her.  Cashing in on her flamboyant personality and obvious beauty, she got the backing of a newspaper to study abroad to become a pilot since both her color and her gender precluded getting a license in the states.  Training in France, she got her aviation pilot’s license as well as earned an international aviation license from the Fédération Aéronautique Internationale.  She needed more advanced training to become a stunt pilot (the only career really available for civilian pilots then) which she also obtain in Europe, then came back and wowed the audiences as “Queen Bess” in the airshows.

 Thanks, Ravyn, this was fun.  Let me know, anyone, if you’d like to be “interviewed” and I’ll send you some questions.