Category: SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY

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Armstrong vs Aldrin

     The first and second men to land and walk on the moon in 1969 performed their mission with a level of symbiotic teamwork that rivalled the great explorer teams of history, such as Lewis and Clark, Fremont and Carson,  and Rutan and Yeager.  Time and distance however have brought them to a significant point of division as to where America’s space program is best served in going forward.   The last space shuttle flight is scheduled for next year, and President Obama’s announced framework for America in space enlists no NASA  directed manned flights for the next decade after. 

     It is hard to envision the leader in manned space exploration earthbound, but after 50 years of Mercury, Gemini, Apollo, Skylab, and the Space Shuttle, there is no immediate road map for America maintaining a space presence. This has lead essentially every former astronaut and flight director from America’s space exploration glory years to express their disappointment and concern with America’s direction -except one telling exception -Buzz Aldrin, second man on the moon and Armstrong’s teammate on the the July 20th, 1969 Sea of Tranquillity moon landing.  The two astronauts have now staked out dramatically different positions on the future of America in space and have gone public with their disagreement.

     In truth, the American space program has been in a vision funk for nearly four decades since the last moon landing of Apollo 17 in December, 1972.  The American public’s appetite for spending for projects of manned space exploration decidedly waned after the initial moon successes and a relatively rudderless policy  space flight has resulted.  The space shuttle’s 1970s technology and its overblown premise of “cheap and safe” reusable spacecraft were exposed in the 1986 Challenger and 2003 Columbia disasters. The nation’s leaders have struggled since 1990 in defining a vision of directed and goal oriented logical programs that the public would see as worthwhile and appropriate for investment.  The first President Bush envisioned a Mars landing as a goal by 2020, the second President Bush staged the process in a more coherent strategy of improved rocket design, return to the moon with moon basing, followed by the Mars mission, reflected in the 2004 Vision for Space Exploration.  This required the development of two new craft, a manned vehicle the Orion, and a new heavy payload rocket, the Constellation,  for gravity escaping deep space lift not capable with the Shuttle rocketry.  As typical of complicated engineering concepts, these projects have developed behind schedule and over budget.

     President Obama made the public announcement of a dramatic re-thinking of the space vision process on April 15th, 2010, with the elimination of the Constellation project and the re-directed development of the Orion as a “rescue” vehicle only for the International Space Station. For the next ten years American astronauts would “rent” seats on Russian Soyuz craft when  travelling to the space station, and America’s engineering energy would be redirected to sub-orbit travel through private space programs such as SpaceX and other unnamed and yet undeveloped concepts. Long term, America would re-enter the manned deep space process with potential asteroid missions or a Mars project by 2030.  This multi-directed and non-specific future is what has lead to the schism between Aldrin, a proponent of President Obama’s vision and Armstrong, a decided supporter of the previous 2004 plan.

     Who is correctly articulating the future of America in space?  Why do two heroes of exploration have such vastly different views of what America’s role should be in space?  My opinion tends to lean toward the Armstrong view.  As previously articulated in this blog, America has lost its way in the capacity to develop and complete big ideas.  President Obama has again extended the timeline and blurred the focus of the timeline and goals such that the cynics among us feel it is simply another dodge in the process of standing behind, or letting go, of America’s leadership in manned space exploration.  The Russians and Chinese have no such conflict; though of more limited means, they have much sharper and better articulated strategies.  As Armstrong suggests, the larger damage of the new vision is the loss of the years of accumulated know-how and experience of the engineering community that once disbanded, will prove very difficult to reconstruct at some future, undescribed later date. 

     As with so many other of President Obama’s articulated visions, you are just going to have to accept a world where America is just another country on the world map,  and vision lies in the ethereal world of dreams, not the right stuff of realization and getting it done.

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The Power of the Universe

      Sixty five years ago,  on August 6, 1945, the power of the universe was revealed for all to see, and for all to be in awe.  At 8:15am at 1900 feet above  the quiet port city of Hiroshima, Japan , an explosive cap drove 9 projectile cylinders of Uranium 235  down a gun barrel into a waiting target of  6 Uranium 235 rings.  In one micro-second, 600mg of the combined uranium product achieved nuclear fission, and proved Einstein’s theorem of the exponential conversion of mass into energy, E=mc2. 

     6 hours previously, Captain Paul Tibbets and his  crew had taken off from the island of Tinian in the Enola Gay, a recently commissioned B29 Superfortress with a specially designed bomb bay , housing a 9000 lb bomb nick-named “Little Boy”.   They flew with a light escort for defence, as Japan’s air defence capacity was by this time minimal, and extent of power of the special package known only to a few.  The responsibility for a successful mission was in the hands of Tibbets, who shouldered the responsibility for the moment of impact and its consequences with a serene spirit for the rest of his life.  At 815am on August 6th, 1945, he was 30 years old.

     At 815am, on August 6th, 1945, the sun was brought close to earth.  An instantaneous blast wave of 4000 degrees Celsius vaporized all objects within reach of the 12oo foot fireball and the pressure wave anything within one mile.  The explosive power of 600mg of unstable uranium converted into energy measured over 18 ooo pounds of TNT.   For a two mile diameter the city of Hiroshima ceased to exist, as well as the 80,000 people estimated to have been caught in its inferno.

     The power of the atom was exposed one more time in anger and retribution on August 9th, 1945 in Nagasaki, Japan, and the war, which had claimed over 60 million lives, was suddenly over. Though the power of current thermonuclear fusion devices dwarf the capacity of these two events in their destructive power, the example of Hiroshima and Nagasaki have proved sufficiently ominous to this point to have prevented an further use of nuclear power as a means of achieving war aims. The obvious danger in history as one gets farther and farther from the event experience has always been the capacity of the world to repeat history’s most telling lessons.
     One can only hope that the understanding of the immense power of the universe to provide unlimited energy for man’s good use remains the solitary expression of what was achieved in 1945, and the message to those who would forget such lessons, the words of J. Robert Oppenheimer, the director of the Manhattan Project upon seeing the the first nuclear fission explosion, quoting the Bhagavad-Gita,   ” Now I am become Death,the destroyer of worlds “.

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Climate Change – Making Nature a Political Weapon

      The world’s climate has been in flux since the creation of climate with the stabilization of atmosphere and emergence of oceans and continents over a billion years ago.   Man devined the ability to exist in various climate eras, and with the retraction of the glaciers of the last ice age harnessed the power of climate to produce crops and conquer the variences of topography and weather.  The pecularities of weather have always held a facination for man, but the underlying forces of climate were always assumed to be eternal and immutable.  

     The past twenty years, however insignificant in the timeline of the existence of earth and its living character, has been a period of significant turmoil in the understanding of man’s role in the climatic forces that effect his environment.  Climate study has taken a dominant position in academic centers in these past two decades on the basis of the emerging belief that scientific evidence is overwhelming that man has a direct and deleterious effect on the enormous forces at work in climate.  In particular, the cause celebre’ is – anthropomorphic global warming.

     The obvious advantages to political leaders in converting social policy to conform to the narrative of man caused global warming became apparent and many made it the tool to achieve power and prominence.  The narrative has been a powerful one for conversion of previously unacceptable concepts of societal dogma into acceptable ones – the evil of the carbon molecule in providing man energy resources for economic progress, the need to “punish” developed nations by demanding a redistribution of wealth to underdeveloped nations to make up for developed nations’ contribution to the global climatic effects, the need to demand of individuals a conversion of  their lifestyle to living with a reduced”carbon imprint” for the betterment of the world.   These political forces came together in the perfect storm of the protocols of Kyoto in 1995 which devised a strategy of permanently institutionalizing the theory of global warming on all functions of developed nations on the basis of “settled” science,  and progressively made opinions to the contrary a religious heresy.

     Late last year, the final conversion to a new world order predictated on climate was scheduled for codification in the World Congress on Climate scheduled in Copenhagen.   On November 19, 2009, an anonomous internet hacker stopped the coronation of global warmists and the redistribution of trillions of dollars in its tracks.  The University of East Anglia in England, the mothership of global climate research, had its e-mail traffic hacked and the internal musings of its leading climate scientists put under the microscope.   Suddenly the “settled” science on many levels began to unravel and the prima facia evidence of man’s perceived effect on global temperature over the last three decades, a “hockey-stick” shaped graph of a sudden and alarming increase in world temperatures accompanying an dramatic increase in world economic development and carbon use over the last three decades, exposed as shaky and possibly fabricated science.  A process of computer modelings showing an alarming acceleration of world temperatures by  the year 2100.

This was predicated on a computer models that utilized tree ring data to estimate world temperatures for the the thousand years prior to 1960, and when the data no longer fit the expected models, surface temperature assessments thereafter. The further the evaluation of data processing was investigated, the more it became clear that climate scientists, under enormous pressure to conform to the dogma of anthropomorphic global warming and with significant funding advantages to science that supported the dogma, increasingly  warped results to maintain the narrative as extensive data over the last decade began to confuse the pristene understanding of the science as “settled”.

     In the middle ages, the religious dogma of sin and absolution dominated man’s understanding of his place in creation and ideas to the contrary were severely punished.  It took the development of the objective philosophy of scientific method – the submission of the hypothesis on gathered evidence and the critical evaluation of its capacity to withstand analysis through increasingly sofiscticated and reproducible measurement – to lead to the age of enlightened understanding of our universe and  the coupled progress of the individual to his current sence of self value and quality of life. It is a tragedy that political motives have returned us to the concept of unquestioning faith that selected and elite “others” know what is good for us and our future together, and that our questioning of them and their motives, again a heresy.

     Whatever the eventual understanding of the complex nature of climate and man’s interaction with it turns out to be, we have an unknown computer hacker to thank for pulling us back from the edge of destroying our way of life,  before we know whether its destruction will have any effect what so ever on the world to be.

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From Tesla to Today

     The genius came from Central Europe and quietly ended, nearly penniless, in a small hotel room in New York.  A genius the world has almost all but forgotten.  Every day we use the fruits of his endeavors without a second thought.  We run our microwaves, our Flat screen TVs and even use his inventions to fight our nation’s war on terror at our airports.  However, none of his inventions have been met with more scrutiny than the simple ideas he tried to bring to fruition in a small laboratory in Colorado Springs, Colorado.  The most revolutionary idea…transmit electricity to the world by spreading it 80 km into the Earth’s ionosphere.  The idea was simple in thought, but more difficult to bring to reality.  The genius?  Nikola Tesla (1856-1943).  Nikola spent 9 months in Colorado Springs to fully research and test his grand ideas.  According to some accounts he was able to transmit power up to 10 miles away from his small, barn-like lab.  Ecstatic and charged with enthusiasm, Tesla took his research observations back to New York, where he had first began his epic life in America.

(Tesla’s Electricity Transmission Tower)
     After much salesmanship, he was awarded some funds to turn research in to reality.  In order to do so, he had to build an enormous tower and an equally enormous coil to spread the electricity far enough to transmit power to the masses in the surrounding area.  He was granted $150,000 for his efforts which really required more in the neighborhood of $1,000,000.  Unfortunately, with the nation’s economic troubles and focus on the new invention called the Radio Telegraph, Tesla began losing ground for the financial support needed to keep his research alive.  The radio’s inventor (who will not mentioned out of respect for Tesla) had stolen several of Tesla’s patents and gained the nations gratitude and funding.  Tesla’s dream had mostly withered away.  Mostly forgotten.  That was in the early 1900s.
   

     Today in 2010, we embrace Tesla’s dream…only on a smaller scale. Instead of massive towers overhead to power all of our glorious electronics, there will be coils hidden in our homes and in our offices.  The coils will power everything from our Plasma TVs to our cell phones.  No more wires. The new wireless power technology is closer that one may expect.  Many power pads are already on the market to charge a phone without “plugging in.”  Today’s wireless power technology, for a lack of a better term, is “coupled.”  Using near-field inductive coupling technology, where power is transferred from a “power pad” to a device.  The device still receives a steady flow of power, but the power is not sent over a cable, but through the air as Telsa had previously proven.  No more worrying about where to hang the TV because you need to reach a cord to a power outlet, or scurrying to plug in your laptop because it is almost out of battery power.

     Companies, like eCoupled, are bringing us this old technology in a new way.  This new technology, inspired by the labors of the past, will vastly improve the devices we depend upon today.  Using the same transmission ideas discovered more than 100 years ago, we will soon be a world with wireless power…cordless…free.  After all, we are a nation that thrives upon our freedom and cherishes its virtue.

Sometimes, we must remind ourselves of the past as we venture in to the future…

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The Eagle Has Landed

     July 16th is the 41st anniversary of the liftoff of three brave explorer astronauts from Cape Kennedy (now Cape Canaveral)  in the greatest adventure of our modern times.  It is hard to recall through the distant mirror of time the extent of the world’s focused attention, hopes, and unstated fears the crew of Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Michael Collins carried on their shoulders.  I was young, but can still recall my own rapture and profound pride over the incredible exploits over an 8 day journey.    To put its miraculous voyage in perspective, the challenge of putting astronauts on the moon  and returning them safely to earth had been articulated by President John F. Kennedy only eight years earlier, at a time when the concept of a man travelling on a rocket was less than a year old and the idea of converting from a brief near earth flight to the intricacies and equipment required for planetary travel bordered on ridiculous.  In the space of eight years, the United States developed three completely revolutionary space travel systems, learned to orbit, dock and walk in space, devised landing and take off systems for extraterrestrial travel, and survived crushing timetables and the disaster of first Apollo spacecraft with its launchpad fire and horrific deaths of three astronauts a mere 18 months before the successful culmination of President Kennedy’s dream in Apollo 11.   The extraordinary accomplishments in so short a period of time compares uncomfortably to our current fixation on a twenty five year old launch system in the shuttle without a single advanced concept of flight leaving the drawing board over that interval, nor,  with the scrubbing of the Constellation system, one in the identifiable future.

     The mission required lifting payload on a rocket behemoth called Saturn 5, a three stage rocket 363 feet tall  (36 stories!) filled with huge amounts of explosive fuel delivering 7.8 million pounds of propulsion thrust to escape the earth’s gravitational pull.  No machine compared with its combination of height, weight, thrust and payload., or has been built since.  No one whoever saw a Saturn launch failed to be forever changed by its immense beauty and power.

     The journey to the moon, the landing, and the trip back to safe splashdown on July 24th was filled with so many never before firsts in flight it awed the mind – and the “perfect” landing on the moon assumed by all proved in later historical accounts to have been a near catastrophe, with Armstrong manually flying a landing craft due to failure of the onboard computer ( a computer with a computer containing the hard drive computing power and memory of a hand held calculator),  Aldrin rapidly making navigation assumptions and  residual fuel estimates with a slide rule, the original “safe” landing zone missed approaching instead a field of house sized boulders as the inevitable landing target, and a landing decision past the point of feasible safe landing abort – a touchdown with only 13 seconds of fuel left to fly. We who were watching heard only  the mission control statement “you have a bunch of guys ready to turn blue here”, a understated description of the true emotions attached to the avoided catastrophe by those in the know.

     Many have remarked that the rush to the moon ultimately did little to change lives here on earth and spent too much money better used for other services.  I beg to differ;  programs such as Apollo are critical to the human experience and promote its deepest aspirations and creative instincts.  In a nation that has turned its back on the sky above it, a whole new adventure to bind us, thrill us, and renew us is worth every penny.