SpaceX Hires NASA's Former Chief of Human Spaceflight

A bit of “inside baseball” that might prove to be very important in the next few years.  SpaceX has confirmed the report by CNBC today that they've hired NASA's former chief of human spaceflight William Gerstenmaier.  He has joined the company as a consultant as it prepares to launch astronauts for the first time, probably before June.  Ars Technica reports:

...it is difficult to overstate the influence Gerstenmaier has over human spaceflight both in the United States and abroad. He led NASA's space shuttle, International Space Station, commercial crew, and exploration programs for more than a decade.

He immediately brings credibility to the company's safety culture. Former Space Shuttle Program Manager Wayne Hale, who now chairs the human spaceflight committee of NASA's Advisory Council, told Ars last summer, "Bill was recognized by everybody as being technically well-grounded and very astute. He was known to listen carefully and to make his judgments based on good technical reasons."

Ars reports that NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine demoted Gerstenmaier last July 10th because he felt NASA's exploration programs weren't moving forward fast enough. It was said at the time that this decision shook some of the agency's partners, who were comfortable with the long-time leader of NASA's human spaceflight program.

In his new position, Gerstenmaier is reporting to Hans Koenigsmann, the vice president of mission assurance at SpaceX. Although the role is officially a consultancy, it is expected to become a full-time position. SpaceX is poised to launch the first crewed mission of its Dragon spacecraft by June of this year. Gerstenmaier will play a key role in ensuring the safety of those missions and helping SpaceX secure certification for the Crew Dragon vehicle. 

The hiring could have longer-term implications as well. Few people in the global aerospace community have as much gravitas as Gerstenmaier or as much understanding of how to build coalitions to explore space. As SpaceX seeks partners—including NASA—to work with it on developing Starship to take humans to the Moon and Mars, Gerstenmaier is well-positioned to offer advice, stitch together mission plans, and open key doors.

It has been reported that both the Crew Dragon capsule and the booster designated to carry it to orbit are en route to Cape Canaveral now.  The capsule is nearly ready to go once it arrives but until the review of last month's In-Flight Abort test is complete and the signed paperwork outweighs the launch vehicle, the possibility of changes remains. 

"We have some subsystems that are in the vehicle that we think might need to be re-engineered with different kinds of metal, we have a tungsten incompatibility in one of the areas that we want to replace with different kinds of tubing," NASA's current chief of human spaceflight, Doug Loverro. "It's not major, but it's something that has to be done along the way." 

SpaceX is working toward a tentative May 7th launch date.  Initially, NASA had planned to dock the capsule to the space station for about a week before the astronauts assigned to Spacex, Doug Hurley and Bob Behnken, returned to Earth. Now it wants to extend that mission so the pair of astronauts can do more work on orbit.

Later this spring, after NASA astronauts Jessica Meir and Drew Morgan return to Earth, only Chris Cassidy will remain on board the station. NASA would like to minimize the time Cassidy remains the lone US astronaut on board the orbiting laboratory, so there is discussion of extending Hurley and Behnken's mission to six weeks, or even three months. If that happens, then the two astronauts would need some more space-station related training. Specifically, NASA would like Behnken to be capable of conducting a spacewalk if the need arises. Behnken has conducted six spacewalks over two shuttle missions, but the last was in February, 2010. He will need some spacewalk proficiency training if the Dragon mission is extended. (Hurley, a pilot on the shuttle, never performed a spacewalk.)

Bill Gerstenmaier in a 2013 talk.  NASA photo.

It seems in retrospect that among Gerstenmaier's more important decisions as chief of human spaceflight was his 2014 decision to keep SpaceX and Boeing in competition to develop the ability to carry crews to the ISS.  Boeing, of course, wanted an exclusive contract and was lobbying hard.  Today, SpaceX is poised to beat Boeing into space by months, if not years, at 50 percent less cost.

This Will Appeal to Ham Radio Geeks and Science Geeks

I've written a few times about radio propagation aspects, like sporadic E, and transequatorial propagation to mention two.

Both of these modes tend to be limited to upper HF and VHF bands, and bring life to dead-sounding bands.  They're also not well understood; that article on transequatorial propagation is unique in showing some research that might help explain it; at least certain incidents of it.  As for sporadic E, it has been known to hams since the early days of radio but with the exception of some associations such as being more common at certain times of the year, or sometimes over the tops of thunderheads, not much is understood about mechanisms.

It turns out a probe sent to Mars may be helping in understanding sporadic E, although learning about radio propagation was not part of its mission.

The MAVEN mission, an acronym for Mars Atmosphere and Volatile EvolutioN has observed sporadic ‘layers’ and ‘rifts’ in the ionosphere of Mars. Honestly, I didn't know Mars even had an ionosphere!

The reality of studying the E layer of the ionosphere is that it's very difficult to get instruments there and keep them there.  At about 60 miles altitude, the air is too thin for an aircraft but it's also far too thick for any orbiting satellite; the density of the air is enough to de-orbit any satellite.  The E layer has been investigated with sounding rockets, generally small rockets that can get to that altitude, but those rockets have mere minutes to gather data before falling below the important region. 

Although the article doesn't mention exactly why they can be observed by a satellite around Mars, I assume its because Mars' atmosphere is even more tenuous than ours, and that allows these layers to be observed from orbital heights.  As opposed to Earth's sporadic E layer density increases, the layers on Mars are more constant and seem to correspond to certain locations.  In addition, MAVEN has detected areas where the plasma seems to be ripped apart and none exists.  This might also occur on Earth and could help explain why the phenomenon is so hard to predict.  After all, if there's no plasma it doesn't sound different than any time the sporadic E isn't occurring.

One of the mission principle investigators for MAVEN is Dr. Glyn Collinson, a researcher at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, the University of California, Berkeley, and the Institute for Astrophysics and Computational Sciences at the Catholic University of America.  Dr. Collinson put it this way:

“The layers are so close above all our heads at Earth, and can be detected by anyone with a radio, but they are still quite mysterious.  Who would have thought one of the best ways to understand them is to launch a satellite 300 million miles to Mars?”

Dr. Collinson and colleagues analyzed MAVEN data from the dayside ionosphere of Mars and identified 34 sporadic ‘layer’ candidates.

Contrary to expectations from Earth, in addition to the expected sporadic ‘layers,’ the spacecraft also encountered numerous ionospheric density voids consistent with sporadic ‘rifts.’

Like the name MAVEN itself, you know the people who come up with the names for some of these instruments had something they wanted the name to say - or got close to a word and pushed on it until they got a word.

At each event, the abrupt change in the density of ionospheric plasma was recorded by three MAVEN instruments: the Suprathermal and Thermal Ion Composition (STATIC) instrument, the Neutral Gas and Ion Mass Spectrometer (NGIMS), and the Langmuir Probe and Waves (LPW) instrument.

Preliminary results appear in Nature Astronomy, “Constantly forming sporadic E-like layers and rifts in the Martian ionosphere and their implications for Earth” - like virtually all Nature articles it's a paywall of some sort, but you can read the abstract. 

Graphic illustrating NASA’s MAVEN spacecraft encountering plasma layers at Mars. Image credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center / CI lab.

Space Force

A story that has hardly gotten wide attention even here, under the SW to NE approach to Patrick Air Force Base, is that the base will be renamed as Patrick Space Force Base, or, Patrick Space Base or something like that in the coming weeks.  The announcement last Friday said the name change would be within 30 days.

"It's exciting, but it is kind of fast. But it's been good," Brig. Gen. Douglas Schiess said. He said Space Force leadership was making sure "we are an agile service without a lot of bureaucracy to be able to get after what the nation needs us to do in continuing to be a space power."

Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, which has overseen the majority of the nation's rocket launches since the 1950s, soon will be renamed Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Schiess said. Patrick is about 20 miles south of Cape Canaveral Air Force Station and helps support operations at the station.

As most of you know, launch activity has picked up quite a bit in the last couple of years.  The 45th Space Wing, based on Patrick AFB, has demonstrated that it can handle a pace of one rocket launch per week and even support two launches in one day. In 2018, the installation handled 24 launches, and 48 are scheduled for 2020, so far.  Space Force bases, in addition to the two here, will include Buckley, Peterson and Schriever Air Force bases in Colorado, along with Los Angeles and Vandenberg Air Force bases in California.

We're looking forward to tonight's 11:03 PM (EST) launch of an Atlas V carrying the European Space Agency’s Solar Orbiter mission.  Chances of acceptable weather are up at 90%.  Later this week, we could be having the next SpaceX Starlink launch.  Teslarati reports:

The fourth launch of upgraded Starlink v1.0 satellites and fifth dedicated launch overall, SpaceX’s next Starlink mission – deemed Starlink V1 L4 – is currently set to lift off no earlier than (NET) 10:46 am EST (15:46 UTC) on February 15th. As usual, the mission’s Falcon 9 booster will attempt to land aboard drone ship Of Course I Still Love You (OCISLY), while SpaceX recovery ships Ms. Tree and Ms. Chief may attempt to catch both Falcon payload fairing halves for the third time ever.

Work on the Space Launch System (SLS) booster has passed another milestone with positioning the booster vertically for test at NASA's Stennis Space Center in Mississippi.  In addition, last week four RL10 engines were delivered to Stennis for testing and integration into the Artemis upper stage.  The RL10 is well-established engine, but the tests will verify the integration of the engine into the Exploration Upper Stage.

NASA infographic

Ends and Odds

Why is it always written the other way?

Some things that are too small to fit otherwise.

Strawberry ice cream substituting freeze-dried strawberries for the chopped fresh berries.  Since the problem with the fresh berries was the texture of the berry pieces being roughly the same as an ice cube, I figured freeze-dried has no water so no ice.  Worked great.  We had a #10 Mountain House can of freeze dried strawberries.  I made a half cup into a powder to spread the flavor, and another half cup broken up a little to add the visible berries you see on top.  Note - they're not on the Mountain House website now, so we'll have to find another source when these are gone.

And strawberry ice cream is good match to a nice rib eye. 

Lifted from The Blog.  I probably wouldn't have thought this at first glance.

A little motivational poster:

Our Other Annual Hamfest - Orlando Hamcation

Over the year, Mrs. Graybeard (also a ham) and I usually only go to two hamfests, Melbourne and Orlando.  This weekend is our 38th annual visit to Orlando, and like every year since I retired, we went over today rather than the most crowded day (tomorrow).  This time, I forgot my camera, so you'll get recycled photos from other years (it doesn't change that much year to year).  Unlike last year, when these pictures were taken, a cold front went through in the early morning hours and it was cool and windy until late in the day.  I think it warmed up to 64 today.

As I've said before the Orlando HamCation (real name) is now commonly referred to as the second largest in the country only behind Dayton's Hamvention (which is only Dayton in name - it's held in Xenia, Ohio).  Dayton tends to be the one where major products are announced.  I was aware of only one product's first showing of a radio in US: major manufacturer Icom had a working prototype of their latest incarnation of a DC to 450 MHz, low power transceiver, the IC-705 on display.

Like virtually all hamfests, there's space for sellers indoors and outdoors.  Outdoors is always referred to as tailgate space, although most sellers bring tents, tables, and other things rather than sell out of their trunks.  Next year, I'll know this is a recycled photo because I only saw one guy dressed like this today (probably Canadian or Minnesotan).  90% of the crowd was wearing a jacket or windbreaker and long pants.  Plus, the sky never got that blue.

A table of old, vintage radios in one of the tailgate areas.  It's 100% certain some of those models of radios were on sale back in 1982 when we went to our first Orlando hamfest.  Heck, it's possible one or more of the radios on that table or others around the hamfest were on sale there on that day in 1982.  See those big black boxes in the left front?  Those are Collins Radios, a favorite among collectors, and the second one from the left says "75A-2 Receiver".  According to this site, the model was introduced in 1950 so one could have been sold many times.   

Another thing you see lots of besides old radios is used computers.  This seller was there today.

Yes, I recognize him.  Just kidding.  It's possible, but I'm not sure. 

This trip focused on learning about a couple of possible station replacement radios that I'm interested in, plus looking for another little SDR I've heard great things about, the Airspy HF+ Discovery.  I should have read that nobody sells the Airplay except them.  I got to get my hands on two radios that seem to be where ham radio is going, a very configurable software defined radio from FlexRadio Systems, the 6400, and a less configurable, less dependent on external software radio, an Icom IC-7610.  I was able to find enough information to drown in.  Being fairly early on Friday morning, both sales managers were more than happy to show me all their bells and whistles.

Edit 1942 EST 2/8/20:  Entered the wrong name for the Airspy HF+.  The link was correct, but I typed a competitor's name.  Bad Zut!  Naughty Zut!

Boeing's Starliner Contained a “Catastrophic” SW Bug

Boeing's mid-December launch of their crew capsule, the Starliner, intended to take US astronauts to the ISS seems to look worse the closer you look.  A few weeks ago, I posted a story about issues with thruster performance during the flight.  Today, Ars Technica reports that a potentially catastrophic software bug was found and corrected during the flight, a bug that could have led to loss of the spacecraft.

The software issue was identified during testing on the ground after Starliner's launch, said panel member Paul Hill, a former flight director and former director of mission operations at Johnson Space Center in Houston. The problem would have interfered with the service module's (SM) separation from the Starliner capsule.

“While this anomaly was corrected in flight, if it had gone uncorrected it would have led to erroneous thruster firing and uncontrolled motion during SM separation for deorbit, with the potential for catastrophic spacecraft failure,” Hill said during the meeting.

This story was revealed at a quarterly meeting of NASA's Aersopace Safety Advisory Panel meeting last Thursday, however Ars space reporter Eric Berger reveals he was told about this issue in January.

However, as part of reporting on a story about Starliner software and thruster issues three weeks ago, a source told Ars about this particular problem. According to the source, Boeing patched a software code error just two hours before the vehicle reentered Earth's atmosphere. Had the error not been caught, the source said, proper thrusters would not open during the reentry process, and the vehicle would have been lost.

Why wasn't this in the January Ars report?  Berger says that he questioned Boeing about the issue, but they downplayed the seriousness of the bug and he accepted their explanations.

NASA's Aersopace Safety Advisory Panel was not as accepting or forgiving.

But the public remarks by Hill on Thursday appear to underscore the seriousness of the issue, and the safety panel recommended several reviews of Boeing. "The panel has a larger concern with the rigor of Boeing's verification processes," Hill said. "As a result, the panel recommends that NASA pursue not just the root cause of these specific flight-software anomalies but also a Boeing assessment of and corrective actions for Boeing's flight-software integration and testing processes."

The safety panel also recommended that NASA conduct "an even broader" assessment of Boeing's Systems Engineering and Integration processes. Only after these assessments, Hill said, should NASA determine whether the Starliner spacecraft will conduct a second, uncrewed flight test into orbit before astronauts fly on board. (Boeing recently set aside $410 million to pay for that contingency).

Finally, before the meeting ended, the chair of the safety panel, Patricia Sanders, noted yet another ongoing evaluation of Boeing. "Given the potential for systemic issues at Boeing, I would also note that NASA has decided to proceed with an organizational safety assessment with Boeing as they previously conducted with SpaceX," she said.

Boeing, NASA, and U.S. Army personnel work around the Boeing CST-100 Starliner spacecraft shortly after it landed in December.  NASA/Bill Ingalls photo

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Last Wednesday's launch of 60 Starlink Satellites for SpaceX proved a little rougher on the landing than we usually see.  Teslarati reports that the booster is probably reusable but shows an interesting picture: the same booster after its previous flight (left) and this one. 

The difference jumps out at you simply by looking at the height of the black-painted section of the booster.  Assuming those guys are around 6' tall, it looks to me that it's 2-3 feet lower.  Notice the landing legs are also at a lower angle.  Something bent? 

Taken from almost identical perspectives as the drone ship passed through the mouth of Port Canaveral, the difference in the booster’s height and stance are hard to miss, with B1051’s engine bells and the black ‘belt’ of its heat-shielded engine section clearly sitting several feet lower after Starlink V1 L3.

While subtle, the most important difference is near the tips of each visible landing leg’s telescoping boom, visible in the form of a final, smaller cylinder on the left (earlier) image. On the right, that cylinder has effectively disappeared. This is actually an intentional feature of Falcon 9’s landing leg design: known as a ‘crush core’, the tip of each leg boom holds a roughly 1m (3ft) long cylinder of aluminum honeycomb, optimized to lose structural integrity (crush) only after a specific amount of force is applied. In essence, those crush cores serve as dead-simple, single-use shock absorbers that can be reused as long as a given booster’s landing is gentle enough.

Whether that landing was “gentle enough” or not will require more thorough inspections than looking across a few hundred yards of water from Jetty Park in Port Canaveral.  Exactly why the booster landed hard enough to crush those crush cores hasn't been released - if it's known.  It could have been caused by the drone being at the bottom of a swell or an anomaly with the booster’s landing engine. 

We'll try to keep up with whether good old booster B1051 flies again or gets totaled out.

A Little Shop Update

My internal combustion engine has ground to halt as I try to make sure I can fit the piston into the cylinder.  So far I haven't been able to and I'm looking at making the cylinder larger in diameter. 

The piston is an intricate little part, with both exterior and interior features cut into it. 

That makes it difficult to rework should it be a little big since the work holding tool (vise or lathe chuck) has to grab a finished piece which runs the risk of marring it.  The piston outside diameter is supposed to be 0.873" and the cylinder inside 0.875".  A difference of .002" (two thousandths of an inch) is too loose for getting engine compression and the solution for that in pistons everywhere (your car, your lawnmower...) is to use piston rings - split metal rings that in this drawing fit in those two grooves on the left end of the left figure. 

In order to test the fit of the piston, I decided to turn a handle onto it and not machine those internal features just yet.  I thought I'd get the piston to fit and then do the interior work.  That turned out to be a bad decision, for a reason I'll get to in a while.

The drawings come with the size needed and a link to a small business the designer knew would provide those.  I bought two and prepared the piston according to the drawing.

This is the piston on the lathe.  The tool cutting the groove isn't cutting, it's just posing there.  On the left, in the jaws of the chuck, you can see the handle.  The thin white layer is an old business card cut and wrapped around the handle so the paper protects it a little.

Getting the rings on a piston like this is nerve wracking.  It involved thicker oil (like SAE 30 car engine oil) pressing the piston onto the ring while it was on my mill table (that is: big, heavy, iron) and working the ring onto the piston until it could slide along the outside of the piston, then sliding it further by hand until it snaps into the groove.  The other ring is slipped on from the bottom end entirely by hand.  (The handle, the smaller diameter in this picture, is the bottom end)

This is where I've been stuck for a while.  I either make the piston a little smaller or the cylinder a little bigger.  Remember I mentioned testing everything with the piston rings was a bad decision?  That's because I don't think I can get those rings off the piston without ruining them and buying another pair ($15) so I can't machine the piston to any degree.  That means I need to make the cylinder larger diameter, which means I need to measure the cylinder to see how much metal I need to take off.  If I take off too much metal, the cylinder becomes scrap. 

The problem is that until this point, I was afraid the cylinder was too big rather than too small. 

So I'm putting myself back through measurement school.  More precisely, I'm repeatedly telling myself to do measurement practice, but other things keep interrupting that.  I'll be the first to say I don't know what I'm doing, which means I'll be learning lots on this engine.

Near Billion Dollar Solar Power Station Fails

The Crescent Dunes solar power plant in Tonopah was begun some 10 years ago and financed in part with a $737 million federal loan guarantee.  The state of Nevada added another $119 million, Crescent Dunes was another Concentrated Solar Power facility, like I've written about before, started with the intent to demonstrate ways to drive down the cost of solar power to be competitive with conventional (fossil fuel or nuclear) power generation technologies.

Crescent Dunes has bellied up.

It was expected to produce in excess of 500,000 MWh (MegaWatt*Hours) per year over 25 years, or 12,500,000 MWh, of fully dispatchable (or sort of) electricity at a cost of 0.08 $ per kWh.  This chart of the resultant power output shows it came close to 420,000 MWh produced spread over four years.

David Boaz at the Cato Institute adds a couple of important numbers.

The plant’s technology was designed to generate enough power night and day to supply a city the size of nearby Sparks, Nev. (population 100,000), but it never came close. Its power cost NV about $135 per megawatt‐​hour, compared with less than $30 per MWh today at a new Nevada photovoltaic solar farm, according to BloombergNEF, which researches fossil fuel alternatives.  [Note: for comparison, costs for electricity will vary around the country, but the utility I have here in east Central Florida gets in the vicinity of $8 to $9 per MWh, less than 30% of the $30 quoted for the new photovoltaic farms]

Say hi to your tax money:

Remind anyone of Solyndra? 

This morning, J.Kb at Miguel's Gun Free Zone posted a piece called, “Why Bernie Sanders won and the lesson the Republican party needs to learn from it.”  His point was that Bernie is appealing to people who hear about corruption like this plant or Solyndra and are enraged by it; that Bernie is appealing to people who see “banksters” - that combination word of banker and gangster - getting away with sucking all of the money out of corporations like a mutant mosquito sucking all the blood out of an animal.  Bernie is selling to rage.  The problem is the cure is going to be worse than the disease. 

I've said this so many times, I don't know how else to say it: raging against the machine is fine, but they're raging against the wrong machine!!!  The problem isn't the billionaires, the problem isn't the “vulture capitalists,” the problem is the government.  The government is infected with corruption from top to bottom, making the government bigger is feeding the monster.  Obligatory disclaimer that of course it isn't everyone and there are good people trying to unscrew things. 

Everything in our world has been structured to set this up for at least the last hundred years.  It's not capitalism that's causing the problem, it's the lack of capitalism.  We have a system in which a bunch of central bankers issue money that’s worthless, backed by nothing but thin air, and manipulate every single aspect of the economy.  If one “too big to fail” bank – or one “vulture capitalist” – is stupid and gets over extended, instead of facing the consequences of their actions, the central bankers create another few billion bucks out of nothing and bail them out. It’s pure central control – that other word for socialism/communism. We have a revolving table of regulators going to work in the industries they just regulated, and people from those industries going to be the regulators. You think that’s a free economy? That’s what you get when government gets bigger.
 
The problem is the government is making all of this worse, and putting someone in charge who's going to make the government bigger is going to make all of the problems worse. 

Barbecue 101 Again

I've done a lot of experimenting with sous vide and barbecue together, which I've been calling Barbecue 401.  Since last summer, I added comments on indirect smoking in my Weber kettle grill.  This time was a return to real simplicity.  Smoking for a couple of hours in my thermostatically-controlled Masterbuilt electric smoker. 

Pork Belly Burnt Ends

In the barbecue world, burnt ends are usually made from the more tender and fatty portion of a beef brisket called the point. The point is removed from the other portion (the flat) after the two have been smoked (around 12 hours, maybe more) cut into cubes, rubbed, coated with barbecue sauce and smoked some more. The dish is considered a delicacy.

Jeff Phillips, who runs the Smoking Meat Forums as a side to his business selling barbecue rubs, cookbooks and such, put out a recipe that I based this on.

1 pork belly - 3 lbs mine was about that with another pound in skin trimmed away.
1 cup G Hughes sugarfree barbecue sauce
1/2 cup Diced, pickled jalapenos (or to taste)
approx 1/4 cup Lea & Perrins Worcestershire Sauce
approx 1/4 cup Wine vinegar
Swerve brown sugar subsitute
Granulated garlic
Smoked paprika powder

Step 1: Remove the Thick Skin

My preference is to purchase them already prepped and ready but the one I had came with a lot of belly skin still in place.

If you've never taken the rind or skin off of a pork belly then you might want to watch a video or two from YouTube to familiarize yourself with how it's done.  While it's basically like filleting a fish, it was much harder.  The skin was thick and hard to separate from the muscle, so I got an uneven trim.  Too much fat (if there is such a thing) in places, too lean in others. 

Step 2: Slice Into Strips and Cube Them

Strips about an inch wide cut into one inch long pieces.  Very approximately.

Step 3: Rub

I made a rub consisting of salt, pepper, garlic, Swerve brown sugar swerve and smoked paprika powder.  Hard to figure quantities so I just dumped stuff until it looked good, and when I ran out, made some more.  If you have a favorite pork rub, use that.

Step 4: 1st Smoke

Place the cubes in a grill basket so that fat can render out and melt into a pan underneath the basket.  Smoke at chamber temperature 225, for about two hours.  The object is a good bark.  I used apple, but use your choice of hardwood.

When I pulled the cubes, they had rendered a lot and the internal temperature was about 180. 

Step 5: Prepare barbecue sauce

This is really "to taste".  Started with half a bottle of G. Hughes sugar free barbecue sauce because it's what I had.  Added about 1/4 to 1/2 cup each of Lea & Perrins Worcestershire sauce and wine vinegar.  Added about a tablespoon of Swerve brown sugar.  Then 1/2 cup diced, pickled jalapenos. 

Step 6: Second smoke.

Pour the sauce into an aluminum or other solid baking dish that will fit in the smoker.  Add the pork belly cubes.  Roll them around to get them well covered in sauce.  Then back into the smoker, still at 225, for one more hour.

I got two of these pans after all that.

The source of the idea, Jeff Phillips, is sort of a “one note symphony chef.” Everything he makes is based on sweetness. I tried to subdue that with wine vinegar, and white vinegar in the jalapeno chunks, but it’s a bit sweet. I need to find a way around that should there be a next time.

In A 4Chan World...

I have a crackpot theory.  Ordinarily, I don't publicize my crackpot ideas, but, hey, we're all friends, right?

Earlier today, I ran into a link on WUWT to this little article on Russia Today on an impressive fireball seen over there.  Mostly interesting to people, like me, who like to sit out under a night sky.  Perhaps with a telescope and perhaps just watching.

That's not why I'm here now.

The video was OK, but the comments were full of flat earth stuff.  Which reminds me that I've been meaning to look into my crackpot idea: the flat earth stuff was started as an inside joke, like the way the weaponized autistics at 4chan made the centuries old OK hand sign into a racist White Supremacist hand sign.

Dated almost 3 years ago, I'd say the only thing that didn't work was the last paragraph about making the leftists dig so deep down into their lunacy that “the rest of society ain't going anywhere near that shit.”  The media and some big organizations just seem to have run with the idea that the OK hand sign really was for white supremacy.

One day, it occurred to me that so many people who seem otherwise capable of moving around in life; working for a living, navigating a city in their car, and otherwise functioning adults, couldn't possibly be believing Flat Earth Theory.  I just can't take it seriously.  So I did a search on “4chan AND flat earth” with Duck Duck Go.  I found a page on Quora - must be it.  Uh, no.  The question was “what 4chan post started the flat earth movement?”  The answers uniformly don't credit 4chan.  Several answers attribute the Flat Earth movement to one started in the late 1840s by a guy named Samuel Rowbotham.  Several answers imply that it's done to get YouTube clicks and other hard-to-isolate sources of income for someone.  Unfortunately, flat earth fanatics get into the answers and make it hard to take the page seriously.

Here's where I have to admit that I can't handle the stupidity.  I just shake my head and go look at something more interesting.  I have a hard time believing anyone could actually make the statements I read.  “If space is a vacuum, why doesn't it suck all the air off the planet?” or as one of the comments on RT said, “This incredible power called 'gravity" , holding trees, planets, people, buildings and oceans down, and yet a little simple kid's balloon full of helium will defy this thing and rise as far as the eye can see.”  Confusing weight with buoyancy.  This can't be a functioning adult being serious, right?  This is either someone crying out for attention, or someone trying to direct clicks to a video or webpage, right?  RIGHT?? 

This Gives Me Hope

There are few ideas I've repeated more often than a first step to downsizing the Fed.gov is to shut down the Federal Department of Education (here's an example from the second year of the blog).  There are many important, simple truths about the Feds involvement that show why.  First and foremost is the easily shown fact that education results are independent of what gets spent on education.  It's another truism that the Federal DoE is a relatively new department, formed in 1979 under Jimmy Carter and standardized test scores are unchanged since its inception.  A common saying is that the Federal DoE hasn't educated one, single, student.

As you know, cutting a dime of Federal Spending is damned near impossible.  The people who benefit from that spending scream like they're being dissected alive.

From a Friday article in FEE, I learn about how Vermont is handling towns that aren't big enough to have public schools.   There are 93 towns in Vermont too small and sparsely populated for a traditional public school.  In a rare display of sense, the state legislature decided to send the tax money that would be spent on public school to the parents in those towns and let them decide how to spend the money.  These “tuition towns” end up setting the example for how to get education done right.  To begin with, the schools are cheaper than Vermont public schools.

So how much money are we talking about? As far as income distribution, Vermont looks a lot like the national average. The per-student expenditure of $18,290 is high by national standards (only New Jersey, New York, Connecticut, and DC spent more). But independent, tuition-driven schools spend $5,000 less, on average, than public schools in the area, which is near the national average. [Bold added: SiG]
...
A variety of schools has arisen to compete for these tuition dollars. A spectrum from centuries-old academies to innovative, adaptive, and experimental programs competes for students from tuition towns, just as for the children of independently wealthy families.

Eligibility for tuition vouchers actually increased home values in towns that closed their public schools. Outsiders were eager to move to these areas, and the closure of public schools actually made at least some people already living nearby significantly wealthier as their home values rose, according to real estate assessments.

The secret sauce is the Free Market.  Those schools catering to the Tuition Towns are under economic pressure to impress the parents; to prove they're the best place to send their children.  In doing so, the schools prove they're a better place to spend the Vermont Taxpayers' money than the Vermont department of education establishment. 

A common argument public schools (and their unions) make is that because they have to take everyone, they can't turn out as good results as those private schools.  A short example is worthwhile.

The Compass School, nestled on the New Hampshire border, enrolls 80-100 high school students from three states and a mix of demographics. Forty percent of students qualify for subsidized lunch (the school system’s proxy for poverty), and 30 percent have special learning needs.

Nearly any public school in the country with Compass’ student population (considered mid-poverty) would be aspiring to a 75 percent graduation rate and a 60 percent college-readiness rate. Compass has a virtually 100 percent graduation rate, and 90 percent of graduates are accepted to college. And still, Compass achieves these results with $5,500 less funding-per-pupil than the average Vermont government-run public high school.

That blows the old public school pitch out the window.

While I know that shutting down the public schools overnight is too difficult to sell or do, this presents a really good example of how the mess could be reformed.  Home schooling is still probably the best alternative, but at least as far as this goes, this compromise sounds pretty good.

Remembering NASA's (and Our) Worst Week in Spaceflight

We're almost at the end of the worst week of NASA history.  It's a peculiar coincidence that every accident that took the lives of the crew and destroyed the vehicle took place in the space of one calendar week, although those accidents are separated by decades.

Monday, January 27th, was the 53rd anniversary of 1967's hellish demise of Apollo 1 and her crew, Gus Grissom, Roger Chaffee and Ed White, during a pad test, not a flight.  In that article, Ars Technica interviews key men associated with the mission and provides, for the first time I've seen, the audio of the test.  In the early days of the space program, one of the larger than life names we all came to recognize was Chris Kraft, who had become well known as the Flight Director who had directed all of the Mercury flights and many of the Gemini missions.  He was widely recognized for this masterful control.

Half a century later, the painful memories remain. “I was on console the day it burned,” he explained, sitting in his second-floor den, just a few miles from the control center that now bears his name at Johnson Space Center.

“I heard their screaming voices in the cockpit of the spacecraft,” Kraft recounted. “I heard them scream that they were on fire. I heard them scream get me out of here. And then there was dead silence on the pad. Within minutes we knew they were dead, and we were in deep, serious trouble. Nobody really said anything for 15 minutes, until they got the hatch open. We were sitting there, waiting for them to say what we knew they were going to say.”
....
There was plenty of blame to go around—for North American, for flight control in Houston, for technicians at Cape Canaveral, for Washington DC and its political pressure on the schedule and its increasingly bureaucratic approach to spaceflight. The reality is that the spacecraft was not flyable. It had too many faults. Had the Apollo 1 fire not occurred, it’s likely that additional problems would have delayed the launch.  [Note: North American refers to North American Rockwell, the prime contractor for the Apollo capsule. - SiG]

“Unless the fire had happened, I think it’s very doubtful that we would have ever landed on the Moon,” Kraft said. “And I know damned well we wouldn’t have gotten there during the 1960s. There were just too many things wrong. Too many management problems, too many people problems, and too many hardware problems across the whole program.”

The ARS article is worth your time. 

The next day, January 28, is the anniversary of the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster.  Shuttle Challenger was destroyed 34 years ago in 1986, a mere 73 seconds into mission 51-L as a flaw in the starboard solid rocket booster allowed a secondary flame to burn through supports and cause the external tank to explode.  It was the kind of cold day that we haven't had here in some years.  It has been reported that it was between 20 and 26 around the area on the morning of the launch and ice had been reported on the launch tower as well as the external tank.  O-rings that were used to seal the segments of the stackable solid rocket boosters were too cold to seal.  Launch wasn't until nearly noon and it had warmed somewhat, but the shuttle had never been launched at temperatures below 40 before that mission.  Richard Feynman famously demonstrated that cold was likely the cause during the televised Rogers Commission meetings, dropping a section of O ring compressed by a C-clamp into his iced water to demonstrate that it had lost its resilience at that temperature.

There's plenty of evidence that the crew of Challenger survived the explosion.  The crew cabin was specifically designed to be used as an escape pod, but after most of the design work, NASA decided to drop the other requirements to save weight.  The recovered cabin had clear evidence of activity: oxygen bottles being turned on, switches that require a few steps to activate being flipped.  It's doubtful anyone survived the impact with the ocean and some believe they passed out due to hypoxia before that. 

Finally, at the end of this worst week, Shuttle Columbia, the oldest surviving shuttle flying as mission STS-107, broke up on re-entry 17 years ago tomorrow, February 1, 2003 scattering wreckage over the central southern tier of the country with most debris along the Texas/Louisiana line.  As details emerged about the flight, it turns out that Columbia and everyone on board had been sentenced to death at launch - they just didn't know it.  A chunk of foam had broken off the external tank during liftoff and hit the left wing's carbon composite leading edge, punching a hole in it.  There was no way a shuttle could reenter without exposing that wing to conditions that would destroy it.  They were either going to die on reentry or sit up there and run out of food, water and air.  During reentry (a detailed account of the break up), hot plasma worked its way into that hole, through the structure of the wing, burning through piece after piece, sensor after sensor, until the wing tore off the shuttle and tore the vehicle apart.  Local lore on this one is that the original foam recipe was changed due to environmental regulations, causing them to switch to a foam that didn't adhere to the tank or stand up to abuse as well. 

There's film from inside Columbia until the moment the vehicle is ripped apart by the aerodynamic forces.  I suspect the forces ripped apart their bodies just as fast.  

January 27 to February 1 is 6 days.  Not quite a full week.

On a personal note, I remember them all.  I was a kid living in Miami when Apollo 1 burned.  I was living here and watched Challenger live on satellite TV at work.  Instead of going outside to watch it as I always did, I watched it on NASA Select.  Mrs. Graybeard was working on the unmanned side on the Cape, next door to the facility that refurbished the SRB's between flights, and was outside watching the launch.  It took quite a while for the shock to ease up.  I saw those spreading contrails everywhere for a long time.  Columbia happened when it was feeling routine again.  Mom had fallen and was in the hospital; we were preparing to go down to South Florida to visit and I was watching the TV waiting to hear the double sonic booms shake the house as they always did.  

I found out last year via Reddit that there's a memorial on the moon to the astronauts and cosmonauts who died in the line of duty trying to make it to the moon.  No person has seen it since the Apollo 15 crew left it in 1971 when this picture was taken.  Has it survived?  Most likely.  There well may be micrometeoroid impacts, but probably nothing big.  The moon gets a meteor impact big enough to be seen from Earth on occasion; I'll bet that if they knew the Apollo 15 site had been hit, we'd have been told.  Whether it's legible or not is a different question.  

The failure reports and investigations of all three of these disasters center on the same things: the problems with NASA's way of doing things.  They tended to rely on "well, it worked last time" when dealing with dangerous situations, or leaned too much toward, "schedule is king"; all as a way of gambling that someone else would be the one blamed for delaying a mission.  Spaceflight is inherently very risky, so some risk taking is inevitable, but NASA had taken stupid risks too often.  People playing Russian Roulette can say, "well, it worked last time", but having worked doesn't change the odds of losing.

TDS May Be Reaching Into Space

Ars Technica reports that Last Friday, a US House of Representatives Committee released H.R. 5666, called the ‘‘National Aeronautics and Space Administration Authorization Act of 2020’’.  This is a regular occurrence in DC, and bills like this neither require the agency to do anything, nor do they fund anything.  They're sort of a summary of what the particular committee would like to see, the “sense of the House” in this case.

Ars sums it up that House legislators want to hand NASA’s human spaceflight program over to Boeing.

The big-picture takeaway from the bipartisan legislation is that it rejects the Artemis Program put forth by the Trump White House, which established the Moon as a cornerstone of human exploration for the next decade or two and as a place for NASA astronauts to learn the skills needed to expand toward Mars in the late 2030s and 2040s. Instead, the House advocates for a "flags-and-footprints" strategy whereby astronauts make a few short visits to the Moon beginning in 2028 and then depart for a Mars orbit mission by 2033.

I suppose that I start by saying I have no allegiances to Artemis, NASA, Boeing or anyone, it's just that the opposition doesn't make sense to me.  What I think is good about Artemis is a handful of things that can most succinctly be summed up by saying spaceflight has changed tremendously since the Apollo days.  Private companies now are setting the standards for spaceflight and I honestly think they will be putting crews on the moon for various missions whether or not NASA is involved. 

Artemis recognized that spaceflight has changed in 50 years. The Artemis program included new players in the industry, such as SpaceX and Blue Origin, as well as up-and-coming companies like Maxar, along with the established aerospace giants like Boeing and Lockheed Martin. NASA's plans, essentially, invited everyone to the table. Over time, the companies that provided the most reliable services at the lowest costs were likely to get more contracts.

Much as NASA doesn't have a monopoly on lifts to orbit any more, Artemis also emphasized that NASA wasn't going to be the only customer.  The more companies and, yes, countries involved in spreading out into the solar system, the more sustainable the effort will be.

[Artemis] placed an emphasis on private investment in rockets and spacecraft—asking contractors to put more skin in the game. By opting for fixed-price contracts for the Human Landing System instead of cost-plus deals, the Artemis Program attempted to obtain services at lower costs while also giving contractors incentive to deliver on time.

For readers who have not been involved in the world of government contracts, cost-plus contracts are those for which a contractor would be paid documented costs plus a guaranteed margin (profit).  This started out in recognition of the fact that when a company is doing something that has never been done before, they're likely to not be able to include every expense in their bid.  The bidding company submits  their best estimate (sometimes called Best Available Guess at the Time of Estimate (BAGATOE)) and then keeps meticulous records of every cent spent and why.  They're then paid based on those costs plus the guaranteed profit.  A firm, fixed-price contract is what its name implies; the company will sell NASA rides on a rocket capable of getting them to the moon in compliance with a mission NASA specifies.  NASA buys that ride for X dollars and if it really costs more than they're paid, the seller eats the cost.

It might not be immediately apparent that there's a built-in incentive in cost-plus contracts for the contractor to be inefficient.  They get paid for hours worked so if the employees have a hard time getting anything done the company still gets paid and actually gets a bigger profit.  When I started in government contracting, engineers had bare bones computers while secretaries had the latest, fastest machines.  If it took a long time to run a circuit simulation, that was fine.  They got paid for the longer time waiting.  The same goes for time spent getting 500 approvals for the smallest expense. 

Over to Eric Berger at Ars Technica for the summary:

The House authorization act, which will now be considered in committee before going before the full House, rolls a lot of this back. Its proposed Human Landing System, which will take astronauts from lunar orbit, offers the prime example of this. The bill states that:

• The United States should retain "full ownership" of the Human Landing System, and unfettered insight into its design and development. In other words, it must be let under a cost-plus contract
• The lunar plans should utilize "the Orion vehicle and an integrated lunar landing system carried on an Exploration Upper Stage-enhanced Space Launch System for the human lunar landing missions.
• The Gateway to Mars shall not be required for the conduct of human lunar landing missions.

The net effect of this is to shut down all potential competition and cost savings for the lunar lander. It is particularly telling that there is only one company—Boeing—that has proposed building an integrated lunar lander, has the contract for the Exploration Upper Stage, and is building core stages for the Space Launch System rocket. Boeing has also tried to minimize use of the Gateway.

With the House bill, legislators seem to be trying to take NASA's human exploration program and give it over to the Boeing Company, going back to an era of cost-plus contracting.

By extension, it goes back to bigger government control and less work for the private companies like SpaceX, Blue Origin and so on.  Wanna bet there's a version of the Campaign Finance Shuffle going on here, like with Planned Parenthood or the Service Employees International Union (SEIU)?  Congress gives tax money to the organization and the organization gives money back to the congress critters who gave money to them.

(source pdf)

In case I haven't been clear enough - this seems largely political.  I'm sure you'd bet with me that no matter what approach Trump's team came out in favor of, the House Donkeys would come out opposed to it.  H.R. 5666 comes out of the majority Evil Party House and will have to be reconciled by the majority Stupid Party Senate.  The Senate is free to create its own version of this sort of bill in a “sense of the Senate” equivalent. 

Further discussions will take place on February 10, when the White House releases its 2021 budget request, which will contain a five-year funding plan for Artemis along with a request for Congress to fund it.

SpaceX Puts Another 60 Starlink Satellites In Orbit

After a few days of delays, SpaceX successfully placed another 60 of their Starlink satellites in orbit with a launch at 9:06 this morning Eastern time.  It was “one of those days” from my viewing site (the east side of my backyard); there were just enough clouds in just the right position that I didn't see even a glimpse of the launch.  Once it reached 1st stage cutoff and there was no chance of seeing anything, I came inside to watch them stick the landing.  This video should start just before the video switches to watch the first stage landing on their drone ship.



The video is one hour 15 minutes long, their entire launch coverage, so it includes all the milestones you'd want to see plus every minute of wait time (that you can fast forward through), if you're interested.

In addition, they continue to attempt to catch payload fairings with two recovery ships on the calculated target for the fairings.  Recovery vessel Ms. Tree caught one of the two payload fairing halves. Ms. Chief just missed the other one, the company said on its webcast.

Ars Technica reports this is the fourth flight of this Falcon 9 first stage and the successful recovery means they'll probably go for a fifth.  The design life is supposed to be five flights and I'm personally interested in seeing if they'll attempt a sixth launch of some booster.  My gut feeling is that they'll find a test mission or something without a paying customer and try a sixth. 

Finally, this mission contains a test of some new technology for the Starlink satellites.  The last time I talked about these, 18 days ago, I mentioned that there was growing concern in the astronomical community about reflections from the satellites ruining meticulously arranged photography.

In response, SpaceX has begun experimenting with darkening treatment and will consider other measures. SpaceX founder Elon Musk has said he is sympathetic to the concerns of astronomers and will take steps to ensure the fidelity of astronomical observations.

A darkening treatment, not exactly like Virginia Governor Jolson Klanrobe's blackface, but more like an optical black anodizing treatment.  It will be interesting to see how well that works.

Count Me as “None of the Above”

I ran across an interesting little article on Business Insider about the differences between generational groups in which brands they find the most trustworthy (H/T to FEE).

For a business, creating a brand that users trust is one of the most important goals they can have and, as a side note, why I can never understand it when companies decide to alienate their customers, as so many (*cough*Gillette*cough*Dick's*cough) do.  Given that...

Data-intelligence company Morning Consult conducted 16,700 interviews per brand for almost 2,000 brands. Each participant was asked "How much do you trust each brand to do what is right?" and given the options of "a lot," "some," "not much," "not at all," or "don't know." Morning Consult's website says its trust ranking "is determined by share of 'a lot' responses."

They then present the results.  The aim of the story is apparently to say “those crazy Gen Z kids trust different brands that those old Boomer farts!  Zomg!!”  Instead, I'll try to just present results.

The survey found that the youngest and oldest consumers diverge sharply when it comes to how much they trust brands — and which brands they trust. Gen Z shoppers have an average brand trust rating of plus 10; less than the average boomer rating of plus 21.

And when it comes to the brands that they trust the most, Gen Z gravitates toward tech, ranking Google, Netflix, Amazon, YouTube, and Playstation as its top picks. Those rankings have no common ground with those of the baby boomers.

For older shoppers, the United States Postal Service delivers the most when it comes to trust. The federal mail service is followed closely by the United Parcel Service, Hershey, the Weather Channel, and Cheerios.

For their part, the age groups sandwiched between Gen Z and the boomers favor a mix of those companies. Millennials most trust Google, UPS, Amazon, Paypal, and Netflix. Gen X puts a lot of stock in USPS, Google, Amazon, Hershey, and Paypal.

I don't align with any of those groups, call me “none of the above,” although by age I'm in the “older shoppers” group.  I agree that I respect both UPS and the USPS but have no use for Hershey, the Weather Channel or Cheerios.  I'd drop those three and add Amazon from other groups' lists, but that's about it.  I don't think Google is particularly noteworthy for doing the right thing under either its YouTube or Google names.  Despite the fact that the study summary (first indented paragraph up above) said they queried about 2000 brands, they only show about 25 on their summary page (by demographic groups).

If I had to pick the top five who most often do the right thing, I'd keep UPS, USPS, Amazon and then I struggle with who to pick for the other two.  Contenders would have to include Springfield Armory, Sig Sauer, Hornady, and Federal Premium.  But I could see other brands, too: Ryobi Tools, Bessey Clamps, Irwin tools, Mitutoyo measuring tools and on an on.  It would take some sitting down and working at it to come up with my top 5. 

I think the reality is that surveys like this are pretty meaningless.  If you have a company, it's only worth paying for a study like this if the survey participants include your customers, or people you're trying to reach. 

I'm sure if we went to people from any of those groups, we'd find others who say they don't match their age group.  It's one of my sayings around here that there's no such thing as groups.  There's only individual people. 

Fun fact: as you click through the group names on top, Amazon stays #3 until you get to Boomers and then it falls to #11. 

Have You Been Noticing Precious Metals?

The prices on precious metals have been a little gonzo lately, with the biggest WTFs going on over two of the lesser known metals, palladium and rhodium.

Both of these are white metals, like silver, and both have served as alternatives to silver.  The phrase, "cheap rhodium plated metal" comes to mind, but I don't think that was ever true.  I mean, both base metals and silver would be rhodium plated to give them a white luster that didn't get the black patina that sterling silver gets, but rhodium wasn't cheap.  It sold for many times the price of silver.  The only reason it had minimal impact on the price of jewelry was that tiny amounts of rhodium would be plated.  Rhodium's pricing has historically always been volatile, but at it's cheapest in the early 2000s, it would have been around $500/oz, and was frequently a couple of thousand dollars/oz while silver was in $5/oz range.  Today, rhodium sellers are asking in the vicinity of $10,000/oz.  Bidders are holding back from that, but we have to figure they're agreeing at some point, or there'd be no sales.

Palladium is another white alternative to silver that has always been several times the price of silver.  In that same period in the early 2000s that I was just referring to, palladium was “a few” hundred dollars/oz. - this was a period when I first started paying attention to precious metal prices and sort of had my financial awakening, so those numbers and relative prices are my reference points.  Today, palladium sellers were asking $2366/oz.  This Money Metals Exchange chart shows palladium's price in the last year.  You'll note that the chart seems to be divided in half horizontally, with the left half (until August) being little changed, but after that, the prices have been more steadily increasing. 

So what's going on?  Those of you familiar with precious metals as an investment might know this instinctively.  There are two main ways people invest in precious metals.  The most direct is to buy the metal and hold it; either at their home or in a safe deposit box in their bank.  The other way is by buying shares in a metal fund, frequently called an Exchange Traded Fund or ETF; that fund, in turn, will buy and hold the metal but the funds vary in how much and how often they buy the metals and how easily buyers can get metal.  There are advantages and disadvantages both ways, depending on your situation, but the story Money Metals Exchange is saying is the palladium funds have been claiming they have metal that they don't have.   Buyers are saying they want their palladium and the funds are having to pay more to get metal to deliver to their customers.

People have complained about this practice in precious metals markets for decades.

More and more contracts have been sold, but inventories of actual physical metal have not kept pace. Price discovery is broken when the paper price of metal is detached from physical supply-and-demand fundamentals.

Today, there are hundreds of paper ounces floating around for every ounce of physical metal eligible for actual delivery.

As soon as a few contract holders lose confidence in their ability to redeem the paper for actual metal, the jig is up. The rush for physical bars will drain exchange vaults quickly and anyone still holding paper when the music stops will be out of luck.

That may be happening now in the market for palladium.

Palladium and rhodium are genuinely rare - the Money Metals Exchange page says palladium is about 1/30 of the occurrence of gold and 1/15 of that of platinum.  On the other hand the Wikipedia page on abundance of elements in the Earth's crust lists two sources who provide concentration in parts per million of mass; two sources that have very different numbers.  I'll copy the few metals here (you can read the decimal numbers as milligrams of metal per kilogram of crust):

• Metal         Source 1         Source 2
• Gold           0.0011            0.0031
• Platinum       0.0030            0.0037
• Silver         0.0700            0.0800
• Palladium      0.0006            0.0063 
• Rhodium        0.0002            0.0007 

Many things go into pricing a metal and while traders always complain the market is rigged, that can only be part of it.  The cost of extracting it and the need for that metal (instead of some other metal) are the biggest factors.  Palladium, for example, is used in automotive catalytic converters (as is platinum); the industrial demand has to be a large percentage of setting the price. 

---

Speaking of precious metals, I'm sure many of you have noticed that the Kitco spot silver price link on the top of the right sidebar is misbehaving badly.  Instead of updating almost in real time, it seems to update once a day at some random time.  I'm all but certain the problem is at Kitco.  I've gone through their options a few times, tried everything I could see and nothing improved.  I also looked elsewhere for a similar way to track prices from someone else and couldn't find anything.  

The Details on the Saturday Diversion

What made my Saturday unusual and led to the unplanned way of spending the day is that I watched an antenna cable joint fail due to corrosion essentially right before my eyes.  On Friday afternoon, it looked like it had every time I had used my antenna analyzer on it; by Friday night it looked weird and by yesterday afternoon, it was an entirely new level of weird I'd never seen.

Fixing joints, whether coaxial cable connectors or plug-in connections, is not a new thing.  There are whole product families of contact cleaners to fight this issue.  It's just the first time I've ever watched one go from working to failed in real time.

Two years ago this past week, I had started trying to think of ways of getting my lowest frequency antenna to work on the last band lower in frequency that hams are allocated.  It's called 160 meters after its approximate wavelength and its frequency limits are 1.8 to 2.0 MHz.  For the newbies, ham radio has a schizophrenic (but useful!) tradition of referring to their bands by a wavelength in meters instead of frequency.  Any frequency can also be specified by a wavelength; 160 meters exactly is 1.875 MHz   My lowest frequency antenna, a Cushcraft MA8040V, is an electrically short antenna for 3.5 - 4.0 MHz, 80 meters and 7.0 - 7.3 MHz, 40 meters.  My antenna is slightly shorter than 1/8 wave on 80 so around 1/16 wave on 160. 

The problem with electrically short antennas is that they tend to be low impedance and act like capacitors.  It's a law of RF design that optimum power transfer occurs when the source and load are the same impedance and one way of doing that is an external circuit that tunes the antenna to make it match 50 ohms.  I think it's fair to say there are no radios on the market today that are designed for something other than 50 ohms resistive.

Impedances can be thought of as series resistor/capacitor (RC) or resistor/inductor (RL) circuits.  Transmitters are designed for 50 ohms resistive.  My antenna was 2 ohms resistive at one frequency; at others it was close to 2 ohms in series with a capacitor while at one spot above the 160 band it looked like it was in series with an inductor.  In Smith Chart* format, it looked like this (red trace along the left circumference and table of values below the chart):

Matching an impedance ratio of 2 ohms to 50 (25x) brings trades and limits that are hard to deal with (have I ever mentioned that physics is a bitch?).  I decided to find an approach that would get me on the band, even if it wouldn't be broad enough to include the whole band.  That circuit is in yesterday's post. 

Over the course of a few days, I got an impedance transforming circuit to work but never really tried it out.  There's a handful of reasons, but in the last several months I've looked at this circuit and wondered if it was actually useful.  It's possible to transform the antenna into a reasonable load but still have crappy results due to other reasons (too much loss in the cable to the antenna, or problems with radiation angle from the antenna, for example).

When I installed the mandatory Windows 10 "upgrade" on the ham shack computer last week, it refused to allow the cable I used for the USB to serial port connection on my antenna analyzer.  After fighting that for a day, I surrendered and ordered a new USB to serial port cable.  That came Friday.  When I got it to work with the analyzer, I retook the same measurements I had taken on the antenna two years ago and got a very similar plot.  Not identical, but “within experimental error.”   The circuit sweep looked like this (just focus on the red curve - where it's lowest is the best).

As Friday afternoon turned into Friday night, I put my matching circuit inline with the radio, and found it didn't work.  I hooked up the analyzer again and the antenna as viewed through the circuit looked different.  “That’s weird.”  Then I tried the antenna on bands that I always use it on without this little circuit, 80, 40 and 30 meters, and some of those wouldn't work.   I thought it would be best to try experimenting on the antenna during the day yesterday.  Because these bands are busiest at night, I figured if I worked on it during the day I wouldn't interfere with other stations.

Yesterday afternoon, I swept the antenna again and this time it looked even more different.  In place of the three curves above were three lines sloping a bit downward to the right, but very flat.  The unusual appearance extended over the entire 1.7 to 10.5 MHz spectrum I tested.  That would be very hard to do deliberately.  More experimentation followed, and I eventually tested my two other antennas.  Those worked fine, which tells me whatever it was that went wrong, it was just this antenna.

Eventually, I sat down on a work stool at the 80/40 antenna and took the connection between my buried cable and the antenna apart, finding it was horribly corroded.  I cleaned it up with sandpaper, files, and a spray on contact cleaner, eventually getting it to look more normal.  Then I decided the prudent thing to do would be to replace the connectors and treat them as a new antenna.  When I retested the antenna, the new plot laid almost perfectly on top of the one with the formerly corroded connectors. 

I tried the antenna out last night around 9PM on 160m and found it seemed to work well.  There was a contest going on, which leads to lots of people calling CQ (contact with anyone) and lots of chances to see where you contact.  I worked a handful of states, from Arkansas up to New York, and two Caribbean islands: Aruba and Grand Cayman.  I didn't spend much time testing it out on the air, just about an hour.


* Looking back at the blog, I see I've never done a "meet Mr. Smith Chart" tutorial post to link to here, so I'm not quite sure where a good one lies.  Spread Spectrum Scene has a page with a lot of links that you might find useful.  One of the most useful freeware programs I've ever come across is SimSmith by Ward, AE6TY, where you can not only analyze and simulate circuits on the Smith chart but can do things like filter simulations.

PS - I know if I called this post “Putting the Cushcraft MA8040V on 160 Meters,” I'd get a whole different bunch of readers.  Maybe five or ten.