Why SpaceX's New Contract to Launch 3 Satellites Might Be A Very Big Deal

I saw a headline in my morning scanning that SpaceX had signed a contract to launch three satellites for a little company called Launcher Space and didn't think much of it.  When I first found out that the launches are to be on their dedicated rideshare launches like the Transporter 1 through 3 missions, I started to think of it as more of a "that's nice, but NBD" (No Big Deal).   When I started looking a little farther I began to see that this could really be a game changer for orbital access.  It'll take a few paragraphs to explain.

Let's start here: the single biggest impediment to doing anything or going anywhere in space is the cost to orbit.  That's where Starship and SuperHeavy are supposed to be the big game changers; unfortunately, they have yet to go to orbit and the Fed.gov in the embodiment of the FAA seems to be slow-rolling approval to launch.  Given that, and the fact that it will a few years before Starship is fully developed, let's look at the current world and the prices to orbit in the current fleets.  

Most importantly, thanks to the unprecedented affordability of its Falcon 9 rocket, SpaceX has allowed rideshare customers to reap a great deal of the benefits by charging just $1M per 200-kilogram (440 lb) ‘slot’ and a flat $5,000 for each additional kilogram. [NOTE: $1M for 200 kg is exactly $5,000/kg - SiG]  To anyone unfamiliar with the cost of spaceflight, that might seem obscene, but it’s extraordinarily affordable and far cheaper than every advertised alternative. Astra Space, the cheapest dedicated smallsat launch provider, sells a Rocket 3 vehicle capable of launching about 50 kilograms (110 lb) to a similar orbit for ~$3.5M – equivalent to $70,000 per kilogram. Rocket 3 has only completed one successful launch, however. Rocket Lab’s more accessible Electron rocket costs at least $7.5M for ~200 kilograms to sun-synchronous orbit (SSO) – a price of $37,500/kg.

Editor's note:  Astra Space's last two attempts to launch Rocket 3 ended in aborts, both Saturday and Monday.  I would consider the $70,000/kg number to be "aspirational" because I think we don't know exactly what their final configuration will be.  My guess would be that number might not go up much but it almost certainly won't go down.  Electron is at clear disadvantage at over 7x the price per pound as a Falcon 9, so Astra's 14x the price has got to be a real handicap. (I have seen no numbers on how Rocket Lab's new Neutron booster may affect costs.)

Before I leave that topic, the cost to orbit for Starship and SuperHeavy has been calculated to be $35 per kilogram.  That's 0.7% of the best cost we have here on the page of $5,000/kg.  Game changer? 

This being essentially nothing but physics, there's bound to be a "gotcha" and in this case it's that all rideshare missions go to essentially the same orbit but not all customers will want their satellite to go to that same orbit.  There's a couple of solutions to that, the easiest being if customers can be grouped by the orbit they want to go to, they can be grouped into one mission and the costs should stay in that $5,000/kg area.  But let's assume that there will always be satellites that want to go somewhere else.  

The answer would be a small, efficient little power pack that could go into the rideshare launch and modify the satellites orbit with its own thrusters.  It turns out that is exactly the business that Launcher Space, the company that signed to contract to fly three satellites on the Falcon 9 rideshare launches, is in. 

Rendering of the Launcher Orbiter releasing a pair of Cubesats.  From Launcher Space. 

Meet Launcher Space's product Orbiter.  Orbiter will use pressure-fed, 3D-printed, thrusters fed by ethane and nitrous oxide stored in 3D-printed tanks. The company has already begun printing and hot-fire testing multiple thrusters, photos here and video here.  They've received the first set of avionics, solar panels, and seem to be making solid progress.  I can see a synergistic relationship here, with SpaceX providing a lift into a preliminary orbit and Launcher Space providing the lift into the desired final orbit.  The next couple of Transporter missions are full already, and it appears the first Launcher ride will be No Earlier Than October, the first of the three they've signed for.  

Again, because it's physics and there ain't no such thing as a free lunch (TANSTAAFL) the people who want to use the combination will pay more than just the cost of launching their satellites because they have to pay the per-kilogram price for the Launcher Orbiter, too.  Eric Ralph at Teslarati dove into this a bit. 

Additionally, Launcher is actually publicizing pricing for the stage. Bought outright, each Orbiter will cost about $400,000. Using its full 400 kg (880 lb) payload margin, a Falcon 9 launch with Orbiter – enabling precise orbital targeting – would cost a prospective customer about $3.5M – less than $9,000/kg. For a 200 kg (440 lb) payload, a Falcon 9 + Orbiter launch might cost less than $7,000/kg (~$2.5M). For Orbiter rideshare missions, Launcher will charge between $8,000 and $25,000 per kilogram – multiple times cheaper than alternatives at the low end and still competitive at the high end.

I don't see whether it's possible to rideshare on the Orbiter as well as on the Falcon 9.  In the event two satellite owners want to go to the same orbit, it seems a natural.  Oh, by the way.  Launcher Space's webpage shows they're headquartered in Hawthorne, California, which just happens to be where SpaceX is headquartered.  Just like the other hi-tech startups north of them in the Silicon Valley all over again.

 

    

Adventures in Learning my new CAD System

I'm going to skip calling this an update on the 1 by 1 engine because its only relationship to the engine is to use the CAD to create the drawings of parts that go into the engine.  

As I said last time, I've been plunging into the new CAD program, Alibre Atom.  The program comes with links to handful of exercises and lessons, but nothing that really says "do this, then this."  So I dove into a 196-page tutorial that creates an assembly out of four parts.  Along the way, I kept stumbling over some issues I couldn't find a way around; not terribly big issues, but ones that affect usability. 

The bigger of the two issues was that the mouse didn't behave how the tutorial says it should in a couple of important areas: panning the model around on screen to allow better looks at some areas, and zooming in and out.  Like most (all?) modern software there are multiple ways to get the job done and I was able to use those, but it was always a puzzle why the mouse didn't behave like the tutorial said.  

The second issue was using the "UNDO" command, or CTRL+Z, as pretty much all standard Windoze apps do.  Sometimes it did nothing while other times it did what it was supposed to.  

I ignored those issue and pressed on through the tutorial, completing it last Friday.  The final thing you do in the tutorial is something my current CAD program can't do.  I grabbed a video of my computer screen doing it.   

What's happening here is that I "grab" the end of the dark blue handle and move it around the screen as if I was turning the handle myself.  The model moves exactly as the model should move in real life.  The advantage is that it allows you look for clearances where parts might bump into each other - with the disadvantage that it can't change the feel of the mouse so you're still looking for places where part images overlap by tiny amounts. 

This is something Rhino could never do.  It would allow me to move one part, or one group of parts, but the members of the groups were fixed in relation to each other and there was no such concept as an assembly drawing.  

After this, I asked for help over on an owner's forum and found that there's a way to configure the mouse if you want it to behave differently from the documentation.  I had never changed it but taking it off "Preset 1" and setting it to "Alibre Classic" fixed the mouse issues.  

The Undo/Redo problems are due to the structure of the program.  In the middle of that video, the three Cartesian planes are defined (XY, XZ, YZ).  To create a 3D part, you first start out on one of those planes in a 2D drafting subprogram.  You end up switching back and forth between 2D and 3D modes as you build up the parts and the Undo stack is forgotten when you change in either direction.  If I go into the 2D drafting, change some aspect, go back to 3D and find I made a mistake in my change, Undo from that 2D change isn't available in the 3D drafting side.  Confusing?  Yeah.  It will take some getting used to. 

Now that I'm not totally at zero on the skills-o-meter, I might be ready to try to import that first part, the connecting rod that I showed last time. 

The conventional wisdom is that with such a simple part, I should just create it from scratch myself.  I might try that.  Alibre has an option for tracing lines in a drawing, which should make it easier than drawing from basic shapes.  If I can get the drawing imported. 

The Splintering of Society Gathers Steam

If there's any company in the country that best embodies the concept of "we don't depend on the government, we help each other when need be," it would be - or it should have been - GoFundMe or GFM (nope,  no linkies from me.)  By now, just about everybody has heard the story of how they decided, apparently based on rumors from one or two sources, that they were going to confiscate all the donations from everyone who had donated to the Canadian truck drivers and give that money to places people never intended it to go.  If you haven't seen it, there's a good summary with a ton of comments on Irish's blog.  

It was a fast changing story and continues to be.  It's rumored their legal department quickly told the asshole who made that pronouncement that they couldn't do that - it violates many laws.  Within hours it turned into, "donors who want a refund should request one" and then apparently turned into, "we'll just refund everyone's donations."  As of 2PM this afternoon, Florida's Attorney General Ashley Moody announced her office has begun criminal investigation into GFM, as have the Attorneys General of Georgia, Missouri, Texas, West Virginia and Louisiana.  So far.  I bet by Monday afternoon it will be a majority of the states, not just the "Red states."  

Like most people, I've donated through GFM several times, most recently to help Mike of Cold Fury.  I won't go back to GFM until I see some sort of statement, as close to ironclad as can be, to never, ever change donations over to something other than pledged.  And then only if I believe it.  

As I see it, GFM is responsible for this whole thing, so they should return their 2.9% handling fee and reimburse card holders for any expenses from their credit card companies.  They should refund any expenses donors incurred.

If the government of Canada wanted to outlaw people giving the truckers money, I don't see how that could be legal - what's the difference between sending a guy $20 via PayPal instead of handing him a $20 bill? - but IANAL and that's especially true for Canadian law.   Even if Canada somehow forbade the donations, there shouldn't be a nanosecond of GFM giving anything to Black Lives Matter or anyone else.  The payment should be refused, the donation page should be shut down and they shouldn't get remotely near the corner they've painted themselves into.

Meanwhile, the free market does what it does best: there are alternatives to GoFundMe.  The group or groups that are requesting the funds seem to have moved to GiveSendGo, which calls itself the #1 free Christian crowdfunding site in the top banner on the page.  I know nothing about them.  There's absolutely no reason for anyone in the crowdfunding business to encourage or prefer donations in any political direction.  It would be like them saying, "we can't host your fundraiser to help your grandmother battle cancer unless she swears she never votes Republican."  No sane person should ever think or say that, but GFM has obviously violated it.  

Biden Nominates Yet Another Radical Leftie

Another month another couple of leftists nominated for critical jobs. Back in early November when a public rising began against Biden's nominee for Comptroller of the Currency, Saule Omarova, I passed on the word.  

I've started to hear about another couple of nominees and names to pass on.  Biden has nominated two women to the Federal Reserve Bank, each with their own stories, and the corporate media is already laying the tracks to attack anyone who opposes them as sexist, racist and all the usual chatter.  As always. 

The one I want to focus on as possibly being the more radical and more damaging is Dr. Lisa Cook, a professor of international relations and economics at Michigan State University.  Dr. Cook has an extensive history of supporting “race-specific” financial compensation “because the injury was race-specific,” Fox Business reported. Cook was nominated on Jan. 14 to serve on the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System.  

In case you missed it, “race-specific financial compensation” is code for reparations.  While there are no numbers that I can trace to her, the estimates for reparations run from half of the US GDP for one year up to our complete GDP for 150 years.  

• William Darity Jr., an economist at Duke University, estimates that reparations would cost the U.S. government roughly $12 trillion.  (US Debt Clock shows the US GDP at just under $24 trillion). 
  
• While the mayors didn't address the cost, one study by a small group of college professors has suggested it could reach $6.2 quadrillion. For those people who aren't familiar with the word: a quadrillion is a thousand trillions or a million billions, so that's $6,200 trillion.
  ...
  It's worth noting that's quite a bit more than "all the money on earth." Wikipedia tells us that the Gross Domestic Product of the world for 2019 was about $88 trillion, making the reparations about 70 years worth of all the money in the world, assuming zero growth in world GDP and 100% of the world GDP going to the American descendants of slaves. Of course, there have been no slaves in the US since the 1860s unlike today's middle east or lots of other countries. The US produces 2/3 of the world's GDP, so since we'd be the only country paying this, it consumes our entire GDP for 105 years.

Dr. Cook, of course, doesn't address how any number would be arrived at, obtained or distributed.  She obviously is historically illiterate enough to believe that only black people were slaves, only in the US and only from the nation's founding until slavery was outlawed. 

My main objection to Cook, surprisingly, isn't this.  It's that she has never published one single paper on any of the critical fiscal policy issues that would constitute her day-to-day job.  She's completely, categorically, unqualified.   She's being criticized in the committee for being a loud-mouthed, liberal loonie, eager to engage in partisan political fights.  I expect that, although maybe she is worse than usual.  I expect her to blame everything in the world on the Stupid Party while supporting "defund the police."  Her lack of a single qualifying skill for the job that she has been appointed to bothers me more.  

If you go searching for "Biden Fed nominees" expect to find less about Dr. Cook than another appointee, Dr. Sarah Bloom Raskin.  Dr. Raskin is a Distinguished Professor of Law at Duke University.   Unlike Dr. Cook, Raskin has actually been on the Board of Governors of the Fed and in the Treasury department, so she is actually qualified.  Her only issue is the loonie left agenda she backs.

If you've heard of financial companies trying to enforce climate change regulation through methods that are outside of written law, though, this is her emphasis.  Called ESG scores for Environmental, Social Justice and Governance categories, it's a way for banks (and the Federal Reserve is nothing if not the biggest private bank in the country) to force companies to do things without having to pass laws.  If mutual funds and other stock-buying companies are required to meet certain ESG scores, they can demand no end of goofy regulations.  This is how Exxon ended up getting people on their board of directors dedicated to getting them out of the petroleum business.  

Raskin is said to be wanting to emphasize this to force oil and natural gas companies to work to the green agenda.  

Raskin's opponents have particularly keyed on to a May 2020 article in which she opposed the Fed's emergency pandemic lending facilities supporting the oil, gas and coal industries.

Until the (very recent) introduction of ESG scores, companies had an incentive to please their customers (and stockholders if they're publicly traded).  Yes, they had to manage their credit and be a good customer to the banks, but customers were first.  With ESG scores, the incentive moves over to pleasing the government and the woke mob because bad ESG scores can  financially cripple a company.  

Dr. Cooke - Screenshot/YouTube/Minneapolis Fed - from the Daily Caller

From the Department of Not Really News

The rollout and first launch of NASA's Space Launch System (SLS) and its maiden (unmanned) flight have slipped again.  Pretty much as expected.   

Until this week, NASA had been publicly targeting a February 15 rollout date, when a mobile tower would ferry the SLS rocket from the Vehicle Assembly Building to its launch site at Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Tom Whitmeyer, deputy associate administrator for exploration systems development at NASA Headquarters, said the agency is now targeting "mid-March" for the rollout, but he did not want to set a specific date.

As recently as last October, NASA had expected to complete the wet dress rehearsal in December, now over a month ago.  That's when I wrote:

A launch date will be set after the completion of a wet dress rehearsal currently scheduled for December.  February '22 is likely to be the earliest the SLS could launch.

Now it's looking like the earliest rollout date is around March 15th.  A full, wet dress rehearsal (WDR) is nothing to take lightly, it's a tremendous accomplishment in the journey from early design sketches to operational rocket, as it tests all of the flight and ground systems short of actually lighting the engines.  As a general concept, it's not unheard of for the WDR on a new system to find unknown problems.  

Just by adding the few months late that they already are, if the WDR is late March instead of late December, add those three months to "the February of '22" earliest SLS launch date I speculated on and it's late May.  Eric Berger at Ars Technica continues to predict a summer launch date for SLS.  

In reality, NASA has held to virtually no published schedule since the SLS program began 11 years ago, with an initial launch target of 2016. So there is no reason to expect that situation to change. Assuming a relatively smooth wet dress procedure, therefore, NASA would feel pretty good about targeting a launch window from May 7 to May 21. But if there are issues that need to be addressed after the wet dress test on the launch pad, which seems likely, a summer launch of the Space Launch System is probably in the cards.

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SpaceX's Starlink launch yesterday put a couple of interesting touches on the performance we've been seeing.  Unless I missed the count somewhere along the way, I count 11 launches since December 1st, or more than one/week. Eric Berger at Ars Technica writes that the Falcon 9 may now be the safest rocket ever launched.  

As of yesterday, there have been 140 Falcon 9 launches.  Of those, one mission failed, the launch of an International Space Station cargo supply mission for NASA, in June 2015. Not included in this launch tally is the pre-flight failure of a Falcon 9 rocket and its Amos-6 satellite during a static fire test in September 2016; it's not included because it wasn't a launch.  The only in-flight incidents, where the flight didn't go as desired, were some failures to land the first stage, but those didn't affect the satellites delivered to orbit.  The recovery of the booster was always emphasized as something they wanted to do, but that wouldn't come at the customer's expense.  

Last month, the number of Falcon 9 launches exceeded the number of Space Shuttle launches; there were 135 of those, out of which 133 were successful.  In 2020, the Falcon 9 took the title of most experienced booster in the US inventory away from the Atlas V.  Since the Amos-6 satellite static firing failure, there has been a continuous run of 112 successful missions.  

[Russia's] Soyuz-U had a run of 100 successful launches from 1983 to 1986. This happens to be the exact same number of consecutive successes by the Delta II rocket, originally designed and built by McDonnell Douglas and later flown by Boeing and United Launch Alliance. Overall the Delta II rocket launched 155 times, with two failures. Its final flight, in 2018, was the rocket's 100th consecutive successful mission.

So the Falcon 9 has now exceeded both the Soyuz-U and Delta II rockets for consecutive mission successes, and apparently its low flight insurance costs reflect this.

As all SpaceX watchers have undoubtedly heard, Falcon 9 might well be superseded by Starship in the coming years, if all the design goals work out.  Starship and Super Heavy will revolutionize the space industry.  Even at a generous one flight/week, that's only 52 flights a year, so it will take long time to equal the total number of launches of some vehicles, notably Soyuz.  Across the dozen versions of the Soyuz, it has amassed over 1900 launches going back to 1957.  That milestone is probably not going to be reached.  

Falcon 9 will fly for the foreseeable future, though.  To borrow a closing line from Eric Berger at Ars:

That is because it now provides the only means for US astronauts to get into space. And while NASA's deep-space Orion vehicle and Boeing's Starliner spacecraft should come online within the next couple of years, the Falcon 9 rocket and Crew Dragon spacecraft will very likely remain the lowest risk, and lowest cost, means of putting humans into orbit for at least the next decade.

The launch of the Crew-3 mission on the morning of November 12th, last year.  That's a Crew Dragon Capsule on a Falcon 9.  NASA has come to see the numbers from booster re-use and accepted experienced boosters for even manned flight.  As a result, this was the ninth mission for this booster, and the mission went without a hitch.  The booster landed on recovery drone Just Read The Instructions NE of the Cape.

 

 

The Day Got By Me Again

Thursdays tend to be busy for us and today ended up being more so than usual.  So, as I always try to do, I'll post something that struck me funny.  A poll with an obvious Canadian angle from the usually thought-provoking Vlad Tepes Blog.  In particular, this entry that was on the first page this morning.

I'm not one of the 83 votes, but I would have voted for the Bee, too. 

 

A New National Debt Milestone

I wasn't watching closely enough to tell you day, hour and minute this happened, but within the last month, the national debt of the US exceeded $30 trillion for the first time.  The number as I write is the upper left box in the biggest font; for those who think seeing all the numbers conveys the size better than just saying "the T word." From our friends at US Debt Clock.

When I saw the headline, I thought, "Gee, didn't I post on the debt going over $20 trillion in the blog?"  Yes, I did and quite a bit more recently than I thought: it was in September of 2017.  That feels recent to me because it's since I retired, on last working day of 2015.  We went from $20 to $30 trillion in around four years and four months.  Another way of looking at that is it took from the founding of the country in 1789 until 2017 - 228 years - to build up $20 trillion in debt and only four years and four months to build up 50% more debt.  

Does that seem overwhelming?  We hit $15 trillion on November 17, 2011, which says the first $15 trillion in debt took 222 years and the second $15 trillion took 11 years.  Yeah, I'm leaving out details on the months here.  I don't know about you but that makes me feel worse, not better. 

Getting back to the current $30 trillion number, The Peter G. Peterson Foundation points out that the total debt is bigger than the economies of China, Japan, Germany and the United Kingdom added together.  When people talk about the Chinese funding our national debt, there's a little bit of truth there; I mean they have some amount of US bonds but no nation can buy more debt than their own entire GDP, they can only buy a few percent of it as bonds.  In fact, China, Japan and the European Union are the biggest holders of our treasury bonds except for one buyer.  

The biggest buyer of the bonds to fund our government is ... us.  More precisely, the Federal Reserve Bank, which creates the money to finance our debt out of (thin air, unicorn farts, whatever words you'd like).  This would be like you writing yourself a check to double your pay and putting it in your checking account every payday.  Except for the part about that one you wrote would bounce to the moon and you'd end up in deep trouble.  And if you listen to the economic geniuses running the country, like AOC or Dr. Stephanie Kelton, it's perfectly fine for a government to print all the money it wants. 

Listen, I've posted on this topic many, many times, and I'm as tired of writing about it as I'm sure most people are of hearing about it.  Let me just put some brief highlights here:

• Yes, deficits and debts as commitments matter.  We borrowed real money from real people both here and in foreign countries, and we promised to pay it back.  They expect and deserve to be paid back with real money that's worth something.  If the Fed inflates the dollar to worthlessness, don't you think the Chinese, Japanese and the rest of the world would be mad at us?  Perhaps they'll abandon use of the dollar?  Perhaps they'll just never buy another US bond?  What if they demand something of value for their worthless currency, like maybe a national park?
  
• The government can't tax their way out of this.  To heck with taxing the "richest 1%", if they confiscated, not taxed, the entire net worth of the 20 richest billionaires in America, they'd get $1.08 trillion.  With spending at $6.9 trillion, the money would be gone in less than two months.  In my opinion, the talk about "taxing the rich" they float is just to inflame class hatred and envy. 
• Hauser's Law may be a really counter-intuitive thing, but it has been true for a long time.  No matter what tax rates are, the tax revenues are roughly 19% of GDP.  We just can't spend more than that consistently. 
• No country with a Debt to GDP ratio much beyond ours has ever survived it as anything other than a walking corpse.  Most have undergone economic collapse.  
• If we truly intend to reduce that national debt, we not only need to cut out deficit spending, we need to run surpluses as far as the eye can see.  Our great-grandchildren can think about deficit spending.
• No one in government has proposed spending cuts like we really need.  Candidates in primaries have: Ron Paul proposed shutting down whole departments of the fed.gov hydra.  Candidate Rick Perry proposed capping spending at Hauser's Law, which is more definitive about cutting spending.   
• It truly is the spending. 

Most people don't understand exponentials.  We are in a phase that is exploding toward infinity.  It simply can't continue, that's mathematically impossible.  Worse yet, large segments of society howl like they're being fed into a wood chipper if the fed.gov simply doesn't give them more every year, let alone actually cutting their free sh*t. 

And this is why I think an economic collapse is inescapable. 

 

 

A Little Space News Roundup

Just a few little items that caught my eye - once my searches for them turned up answers.  

First, the Falcon 9 Starlink 4-7 mission that had been originally scheduled for today has a launch date.  This has been scheduled for a week as being "the day after " yesterday's COSMO-SkyMed 2nd Generation mission.  Practically, that means every delay of that mission delayed this one.  I had today's launch time in last night's post until the final proofing when I found it had yet another delay.  

The launch time as of this afternoon is Wednesday afternoon, February 2nd, at 4:51 PM EST or 2151 UTC.   These Starlink launches all seem to have an instantaneous launch window, meaning it either goes on time or it goes another day.  That's roughly 90 minutes after the Falcon 9 launch of NROL 87 from Vandenberg Space Force Base at 3:18 PM EST or 2018 UTC (12:18 PM PST).  In fact, at 93 minutes after the Vandenberg launch, it's fastest SpaceX has ever launched another mission. 

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The launch I've been trying to pin down all year is the first Astra Rocket 3 launch from Cape Canaveral.  The last I heard was on January 22nd that they had a successful static firing (video).  That was followed by a statement that they'd release the launch date once the launch had been approved.  

The Astra launch is currently scheduled for Saturday, February 5th, a 1:00 PM EST (1800 UTC) with a three hour window (1:00 to 4:00).  The payloads include the BAMA 1 CubeSat, the Ionospheric Neutron Content Analyzer, QubeSat, and a mission called R5-S1. The CubeSats were selected for launch by NASA through the agency’s Venture Class Launch Services program; it's a NASA mission.  

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Finally, a story that made me laugh.  I'm just going to quote the paragraph directly from Ars Technica's Rocket Report that came out last Thursday.  It concerns a pending acquisition of Aerojet Rocketdyne by industry giant Lockheed Martin - known far and wide across the "Space Coast" as Lock-Mart, your 24 hour defense shopping superstore.  Flashing blue light special now on cruise missiles!

FTC sues to block defense merger. The Federal Trade Commission on Tuesday filed an antitrust lawsuit that seeks to block Lockheed Martin's planned $4.4 billion purchase of Aerojet Rocketdyne, The Wall Street Journal reports. The federal agency argued that the deal would harm rival defense contractors and lead to unacceptable consolidation in markets critical to national security and defense. "Without competitive pressure, Lockheed can jack up the price the US government has to pay, while delivering lower quality and less innovation," said Holly Vedova, director of the FTC's bureau of competition.  [Bold added: SiG]

"Lockheed can jack up the price... while delivering lower quality and less innovation??"  Are you serious, Holly?  I thought that was Lock-Mart's whole business model!!  I know they aren't particularly involved with SLS but I'm not sure I can think of a better example of "jack up the price while delivering less innovation" than SLS, and its engines are already Aerojet Rocketdyne's RS-25 engines.  Those are also known as the Space Shuttle Main Engines or SSMEs.  These are the engines that NASA is paying $146 million/each for as part of SLS.  They're a good design, but it's an engine designed to be reusable for the shuttle program that will now be disposed of after every use.  

Oh, yeah.  I know it's difficult to say this with inflation and all, but when the Shuttles were flying, the SSMEs cost $40 million each as reusable engines.  Now that we're "dropping 'em in the drink" they're over 3-1/2 times the cost.  

An RS-25 (SSME) from SLS in 10/19.  Note the name on the yellow lifting machine, top right.  

Fourth Time is the Charm

This evening at 6:11 PM, SpaceX was able to launch the Italian COSMO-SkyMed Second Generation, or CSG 2, radar surveillance satellite.  The launch was originally set for last Thursday, scrubbed due to weather and moved to Friday, scrubbed and moved briefly to Saturday, then to Sunday, and then today.  The first three scrubs were due to weather which has been a bit unusual around here.  Yesterday's fourth scrub was due to one of the cruise ships out of Port Canaveral going into the Launch Hazard Area, which has been a public Notice to Mariners since before last Thursday.  

There's no truth to the rumor that the Navy was authorized to torpedo cruise ships.  I know there's no truth because I just made that up.  By contrast, it is well known among people who worked on the Space Center that the guards in the guard houses at all of the entrances to the Kennedy Space Center would take out tires of people trying to run past them onto the base.  

Knocking off the jokes completely, we haven't heard that SpaceX has any ability in place to bill the cruise ship line for the cost of running the countdown down to T-30 seconds and recycling.  

This morning, Teslarati noted:

While just a part of rocketry, this scrub was particularly annoying because it came on a day with near-perfect weather after three consecutive weather-related scrubs. The US military’s 45th Space Wing had also explicitly warned boaters and the general public of the unusual southerly launch trajectory and encouraged them to double-check exclusion zones. Further, had Falcon 9 been able to launch, perfectly clear skies and a liftoff scheduled about 15 minutes after sunrise could have created a spectacular light show visible for one or several hundred miles in every direction as Falcon 9 rose back into direct sunlight. The weather forecast on CSG-2’s backup window (6:11 pm EST, Jan 31) still predicts excellent conditions but clear skies are never guaranteed.

Author Eric Ralph refers to liftoff "scheduled about 15 minutes after sunrise" but fumbled that.  It was after sunset, not sunrise (and about 10 minutes after sunset).  However, when he went on about how it "could have created a spectacular light show visible for one or several hundred miles in every direction" he was exactly right. It was spectacular and beautiful.  As with the Return to Launch Site landing a couple of weeks ago, we were able to see the first stage separate, turn itself around and commit its engine burn to get it started back to the landing zone on Cape Canaveral.  We were able to see the first stage firing its cold gas thrusters to help keep it optimally positioned on the way back to land; we've only been able to see that a small handful of times of all the Falcon 9 launches we've been able to watch.  A couple of minutes later, we were able to watch the booster do its landing burn that concludes just about a minute before the engine starts for the final 30 seconds to reach zero velocity at zero height and set the booster down gently.  That's below our local horizon so we watch that on the video feed. 

The speed of 40 km/hr visible in the lower left indicates it hadn't quite achieved both when I did the screen capture, but five seconds later it was zero velocity.  I didn't time it, but a minute or so later, we got house-shaking sonic booms from the booster coming back for the landing.  

Speaking of those sonic booms, the last time I wrote about that, I made a serious mistake about the booms.  I said, 

And a minute or so after that heard the sonic booms of the booster slowing down below the speed of sound.

In the comments later, TwoDogs took me to task for that, saying, 

You seem to believe that a sonic boom is caused by an object transiting between subsonic and supersonic and vice versa. This is incorrect, and I thought you would know better. An object travelling supersonic generates a sonic boom as long as it is supersonic. A subsonic object does not. Spend a few minutes in the pits at a military rifle range and you'll have all the proof you need.

As I said in response, when I read his remarks, "I thought, "I said what??" but sure enough that sentence sure implies that, if not stating it in those exact words, doesn't it?"  It's hard to justify a mistake like what I wrote, but I recognized it was wrong.  The only reason I can possibly think of for having said that is that for almost the entire Shuttle era, newscasters would say something like that during a landing on the Cape, implying that the sonic boom was from the supersonic air separating from the Shuttle's nose and tip of its tail. It doesn't work that way, and yes, I know that.  I think it's a sign of simply rushing too much to get a post done and not paying enough attention to what I was writing.  Mea culpa.

With that out of the way, and today's launch successfully in the log, SpaceX is planning two more Falcon 9 launches this week.  The next launch is being shown as a spy satellite mission, NROL-87, from Vandenberg Space Force Base at 12:18 pm PST (2018 UTC) or 3:18 PM EST on Wednesday February 2nd.  Until a few minutes ago, the mission called Starlink 4-7, another load of Starlink satellites, was being discussed as launching tomorrow from Pad 39A on the KSC, but now I'm reading, "later this week." 

  

 

Weekly Update on the 1 by 1 - Part 22

The work on the engine this past week has all been here in the house on this computer with zero out in the shop.  I'm preparing the connecting rod for the piston.  The piston isn't worth putting into CAD because all the critical things I'll do will be by hand on my big lathe.  

Connecting rods are fiddly little pieces with lots of design features that tend to make us need to use several setups for machining.  I always look at them and wonder why there's so much complexity to them.  I think some of the small features are necessary for clearance and others are just because "that's the way they should look".  This is a lift of the pdf drawing for this engine's rod with a lot of the dimensions removed because they get in the way of seeing what the part is supposed to look like. 

I took out the various radii at the small and large ends.  The small end will hold the pin (a wrist pin) that goes in the piston and transfers the force pushing or pulling the rod onto the walls of the piston.  The big end goes on the crankshaft I made back in September/October (and that tried to to take off the end of my right index finger).   See that taper to the rod from the big end to the small end?  Why is that there?  Other than to make it look better, probably to ensure the rod clears the piston adequately.

The whole reason for importing the drawing into CAD is to make a solid model of it so that I can cut the intricate features with my CNC mill.  The solid model, without the holes seen in the bottom (big) end looks like this:

If you look in the big end you'll see a line that's some sort of line (?) artifact.  I didn't really notice that until I was getting the render ready to post.  The line shows up in this view, but none of the ways of selecting that in the CAD software shows that there's actually something there.  Experience says delete the whole thing and start over.  

There's a big complication here.  I've been using a 3D CAD program called Rhino 3D since I got started with it at home, back around 2005, and while it's full-featured, it has been expensive for a retired hobbyist.  I bought a copy of version 5 in '13 and that stayed current until a few years ago.  The new version (6) received a lot of hoopla for all the the new stuff it does, but the things they emphasized - both prettier rendered drawings and a programming language to create programmable shapes - really didn't mean anything to me.  Last year, they updated to version 7 but I essentially "slept through" the period where I could get it at a big discount.  

I've been trying to learn what the options to replace Rhino are for much of '21 and one that I had a favorable impression of, called Alibre Atom, had their lowest cost option on sale for Black Friday and I took the bait.  There's one big hitch.  Alibre's interface is completely different from Rhino's, which means I'm starting over learning CAD.  Rhino's interface is much like AutoCAD, one of the original CAD programs and probably the best known.  Alibre is said to be more like Solidworks, which I've never really seen.  Whatever the interface is like, it's nothing like Rhino.

Long story abridged, I have some lessons in a book and I'm slogging through it.  This is probably going to initially be a translation effort ("how do I say cylinder?" - or "box?" or any of the commands I use frequently).  After some period of slogging my way through it, things will suddenly become much more clear.  

A saying from school, all those decades ago, comes back to me.  Some of you will grok this in fullness.  "A good Fortran programmer can program Fortran in any language."  That's what I'm waiting for.

NASA's (and Our) Worst Week in Spaceflight

We are two days into the annual reminder of the worst week in the history of American spaceflight.   It's a peculiar fact 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 span 36 years.

January 27th, was the 54th 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.

“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 on January 28, 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.  The vehicle would have been colder than that iced water.  

As important and memorable as that moment was, engineers such as Roger Boisjoly of Morton Thiokol, the makers of the boosters, fought managers for at least the full day before the launch, with managers eventually overruling the engineers.  Feynman had been told about the cold temperature issues with the O-rings by several people, and local rumors were that he would go to some of the bars just outside the gates of the Kennedy Space Center and talk with workers about what they saw.  The simple example with the O-ring and glass of iced water was vivid and brought the issue home to millions. 

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 they 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 15 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, 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 midway through 7th grade 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 stayed in the engineering lab and watched it on a NASA feed.  Mrs. Graybeard had just begun 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 in 2019 from Reddit (via Pinterest) 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 the list is legible or not is a different question.  Probably not.

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.  

 

 

A Private (?) Chinese Rocket Company's Projected Product Line

The CEO of a supposedly private Space startup in China called OrienSpace granted an interview to a reporter on Twitter whom Ars Technica's Eric Berger considers a "go to source" on the Chinese Space industry.  

[R]eporter Andrew Jones shares some information from an interview conducted with OrienSpace chief executive Yao Song.  The Chinese startup launch company—seemingly one of dozens—is planning a series of rockets beginning with Gravity 1, which combines a liquid core with solid rocket boosters. Intended for a first flight in 2023, the rocket would have the capacity to lift 3 tons to low Earth orbit.

OrienSpace provided this graphic to, and the descriptions that follow are from Twitter by Andrew Jones.  

The descriptions start from the left.  

The launch firm's "Gravity-1" solid-liquid combo (1st for Chinese commercial firm) launcher is slated for 1st flight in 2023 capable of lifting 3 tonnes to LEO. 1/5

Gravity-2 will be 50m long and also be solid-liquid combo and debut in 2024. Gravity-3 will be liquid and capable of recovery at sea, planned to fly for the first time in 2025. In 2030, Yao plans to start experimenting with commercial crew vehicles & explore space tourism... 2/5

possibly including point-to-point travel... Yao sees space resources as first come, first serve, noting from history Western countries exploring the Atlantic and the globe while the Ming Dynasty turned inwards following Zheng He's voyages. 3/5

As we know, the firm raised 400 million RMB (US$62.5m) in April. It has established a Beijing HQ, engine R&D center in Xi'an & will also establish a solid rocket assembly plant in Yantai, which is an hour or so away from the new Haiyang space port for sea launches. 4/5

You'll note there are no descriptions for the two on the right, which I'm assuming are Gravity 3 and Gravity 4.   Eric Berger adds this:

Wait, that looks like a ... But what caught my eye were the renderings of Gravity 3 and Gravity 4, shown in the image at the top of this article. Gravity 3 is intended to be entirely liquid-fueled and capable of recovery at sea. The company also hopes to experiment with commercial crew transport. And call me crazy, but doesn't Gravity 3 look a lot like a Falcon 9 with a Crew Dragon? And Gravity 4 sure looks a lot like a Falcon Heavy, right down to the landing legs. The Gravity rockets are not the first time we've seen something like this.

I thought the most striking thing about the resemblance to the Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy was how both have what appears to be painted areas that resemble the landing struts on those two vehicles.  For a little fun, I modified the drawing a little, adding a couple of line drawings of the F9 and FH between them.  Scaled to come close to matching the sizes fairly closely.  The resemblances between the platforms are rather close, aren't they?  To be clear for the Extremely Anal Retentive, this is neither OrienSpace's or Andrew Jones' work; it's mine.  The starting points are OrienSpace's graphic and one on the history of the Falcon that I've long since lost the attribution for.  I believe it's from SpaceX themselves.

The grid fins on both of the OrienSpace vehicles are very evident and clearly patterned after the SpaceX models.  

With SpaceX apparently looking at 50 to 60 launches this year, lifting SpaceX's ideas seems like a good way for OrienSpace to bootstrap themselves.  With China, a country that doesn't share the concept of intellectual property, we've seen ideas being purloined wholesale. 
 

Not Past Its Expiration Date

I regularly run a cartoon or two before the "Best Used By" date - after I've had them on my drive for a while.   

This one is much fresher.  As in yesterday's.  From Margolis&Cox.

The age of meritocracy is formally over.  Everything will now be intersectionality.  

SpaceX's Navy Being Deployed for the Next Few Days ... Wait ... Their Navy?

I never thought of SpaceX of having a navy, but if you count nine vessels as a navy, it's fair to say they have one.  Eric Ralph of Teslarati describes it all:

Continuing what appears to be SpaceX’s preferred pace of activity in 2022, several ships in the company’s navy have deployed to support two Falcon 9 launches scheduled later this week.

A fourth ship will likely head into the Pacific late this week or early next for a third launch, a fifth ship will depart for a different fairing recovery mission near the Bahamas, and a sixth SpaceX ship is sailing back to Florida’s East Coast after recovering a Dragon spacecraft from the Gulf of Mexico. Had all three of the Falcon 9 launches planned over the next week required a drone ship for booster recovery, almost the entirety of SpaceX’s navy – eight of nine SpaceX-leased/owned ships and up to two tugboats – might have simultaneously been at sea by this weekend.

Instead, the rare back-to-back alignment of two commercial missions that will both allow SpaceX to perform return-to-launch-site (RTLS) Falcon 9 booster landings will only require the deployment of one drone ship and up to six ships total within the next few days.

As far as I can tell, tomorrow evening's launch of the Italian COSMO-SkyMed Second Generation, or CSG 2, radar surveillance satellite is still scheduled.  The time will be 6:11:50 PM EST, or 2311:50 UTC, and the launch trajectory will mimic the January 14th mission that gave us such beautiful views. This one won't.  Our forecast is for high cloud cover and scattered rain.  A map from Twitter expert @Raul74Cz may help you visualize it. 

Starting at the top, the green tinted area is the launch hazard area that's kept clear of planes and boats.  The red line and then red-tinted, oblong, asymmetric pentagon east of the Miami-Dade County area and northwest of Grand Bahama island is the emergency dumping area where the uppers stage and payload will be crashed in case of boostback/Second Engine Start-1 failure.  Farther south and connected to the Cape by a light green line is an orange-tinted circle.  This is where the fairing halves will be recovered. There's a thin black line that is part of the light green trajectory until it takes a turn to travel down the SSW line of the coast.  That's the trajectory of the second stage and CSG-2 satellite.  

The booster, B1052, will return to the launch area landing pads on Cape Canaveral Space Force Station.

On January 25th, SpaceX drone ship A Shortfall of Gravitas left Port Canaveral behind tugboat Zion M Falgout and are headed about 650 kilometers (~400 mi) southeast, farther to the east (right) of the edge in this picture, to recover a Falcon 9 booster scheduled to launch Starlink 4-7 as early as 3pm EST (20:00 UTC), Saturday, January 29th. The tugboat is almost certainly the support ship for the booster recovery crew.  

As the infomercials say, "but wait!  There's more!"  Handing the mike back over to Eric Ralph:

On the West Coast, SpaceX ship NRC Quest or GO Quest will likely depart Port of Long Beach on January 30th or 31st to recover a third payload fairing after Falcon 9’s planned February 2nd launch of the National Reconnaissance Office’s NROL-87 spy satellite(s). After launching NROL-87, Falcon 9’s first stage boost back to Vandenberg Space Force Base (VSFB) and land at SpaceX’s Landing Zone 4 (LZ-4) pad.

Meanwhile, SpaceX has as many as four more Starlink missions – three out of Florida and one out of California – potentially scheduled to launch in February 2022.

 

 

The News is Focusing on the Wrong Biden Quote

As usual, I suppose.  

Everyone is fussing over the exchange where Biden called Fox News reporter Peter Doocy a "Stupid son of a bitch."  I wasn't aware until I read that article on a link from Divemedic's Area Ocho of what should really be the story there.   First, from that article linked first here:

After Biden complained that all the press questions were about the military buildup around Ukraine, Doocy shouted, “Will you take questions about inflation? Do you think inflation is a political liability ahead of the midterms?”

Thinking his microphone was turned off, Biden responded sarcastically, “No, that’s a great asset. More inflation.”

He added: “What a stupid son of a bitch.”

A bit later in the day, another link led me to this alleged Tweet from the White House that essentially says the same thing except with trivial word substitutions.

Considering the almost 100% agreement between the two reports, it appears that the deliberate inflation that everyone is suffering through is being maintained not just because of the Central Idiocy that is Central Banking, but because the moron in chief thinks inflation is a good thing for him and his party.  I've heard of (but not directly heard) him saying he'll make the minimum wage $15 without passing a law through congress.  

As is always the case with inflation, nobody "benefiting" from the new pay is a penny wealthier from it and very likely gets hurt by it. 

I've done this analogy many times before, but maybe let's do it again for your friends or others who really think they're doing better because their paycheck is bigger.  

Imagine for the moment that what I'm describing is legal instead of something that could get you put in jail.  Imagine you could take a really "Magic" marker and just by doubling the printed value on the bills in your wallet, you actually made them double the "value."  A $1 bill becomes a $2 bill.  If you had a $2 bill it becomes a $4 bill (I know there is no such thing, but work with me here), a $5 becomes $10 and so on.   

What I've always emphasized was the aspect that everyone else has the same marker and everyone else now has the same wallet, so relative to everyone else in the country your position hasn't changed even the littlest bit since everyone else doubled their income, too. 

The unmentioned part is that every single expense in your life gets the same treatment because everything you buy is affected by the same doubling of costs.  You make twice as much money but your food costs twice as much, your housing costs twice as much, everything has doubled.  Has doubling the dollars you make improved anything in your life?  Nope.

Those of us who were working adults during the crazy inflation of the 1970s know well that it can seem like everything just stays out of your reach as your pay goes up every time you're eligible for a raise.  The last number I saw quoted for inflation over the past year was 7%.  Shadowstats' calculation based on the same rules used in the Jimmy Carter days shows the year over year inflation to be 15% or 2.1 times the official 7%. 

The Federal Reserve has said many times that they're committed to maintaining some inflation, basically because they're terrified of deflation, which they think will severely hinder the economy.  They believe no one will buy anything other than essentials if they think it will be cheaper in the future.  The unspoken corollary to that is nobody will save anything for the future if the money they save will be worthless in the future because of inflation, but they never seem to think that.

In my little analogy, you've just done conceptually exactly the same thing the Federal Reserve Bank has done; you've doubled the number of dollars everyone has and yet no one or nothing is better than before.  In effect, you've reduced the buying power of the dollar in half.  The Fed hasn't done a simple doubling of dollars, but they've been doing it since the Fed was created in 1913, 108 years.  This chart of the buying power of the dollar is dated from 2007, but the trend downward has continued.  It just needs to either be bigger, or use a logarithmic scale on the Y (vertical axis).  

This says the buying power back in 2007 was less than a 5 cents in 1913 money.  When people talk about gold or silver going up or down, they're thinking backwards.  If gold is the "standard" the dollar is getting more or less valuable just like in that graph - although it has been a long time since the dollar went up in value, even briefly.  I think it goes without saying, but I'll say it anyway, the price of precious metals is set on an open market, which inevitably means the price is a function of how much buyers value it.  I'm not aware of a country in the world that actually uses a gold or precious metal backing for its currency.   

It's worth asking who benefits from inflation?  Let's say you have loans for a fixed amount of dollars, like a mortgage.  If you have more dollars in five years because of inflation, your mortgage takes a smaller bite out of your pay.  To the bank they're not losing money, that's budgeted income and as long as it comes in all is well.  Any effects of inflation tend to be offset by new loans and other things (they sell mortgages to other companies all the time).  The banks, and especially the bigger banks, benefit because they get those freshly created dollars before they have an inflationary effect on the market. 

Finally, the ones who get the most benefit are the Federal Government.  They sell bonds to finance all their expansionist crap and if they pay them back with inflated dollars, those are paid off.  Their tax revenues, in numbers of dollars, go up if the revenue goes up by inflation.  All of those promised payments they say they'll make (social security, medicare) that are tied to rate of inflation incentivize the Fed.gov cheating on the way they define inflation, which is why Shadowstats has calculations using the 1980 method and the 1990 method.  For years, people have said that the only way our national debt will be paid off would be by inflating our currency.  It seems to be a consensus that the debt is too big, and collapse is going to happen.  Is going to be by fire (hyperinflation) or ice (death spiral into depression)?  I've been writing about that since 2013 (second of two pieces by the same name).  The Great Reset seems to play into what's going on, too.

James Webb Space Telescope Has Made it to L2

A full 30 days after its Christmas launch, the James Webb Space Telescope made it to its target, today, slipping into a large orbit around the L2 Lagrange point, around 900,000 miles from Earth.  

The geometry of the orbit is hard to visualize, especially when it comes to figuring out what Webb is going to be able to observe.  With that large heat shield that has to always face the sun, as the satellite orbits the L2 point, it will essentially be able to trace out a swath of the sky perpendicular to the direction to the sun.  Over the course of six months, it will be able to view every part of the sky, it's just that the motion is peculiar.  This video helps show what the paths look like.

The progress of the ten billion dollar observatory has been nothing short of reassuring that these groups can do amazing things.  But the telescope isn't ready yet and one of the most daunting tasks lies ahead, optical alignment or collimation.  If you've looked at any pictures of the telescope, you've seen that it has a very obvious hexagonal pattern on the big, primary mirror.  

That's not quite right, though.  The hexagonal tiles are the primary mirror, or at least they combine to become the primary mirror.  Each of the 18 tiles is a separate mirror and they need to be physically aligned very precisely to create one huge primary mirror.  The design and fabrication of multiple mirror telescopes like the Webb has been studied since the 1980s (at least) and before giant hexagonal mirror tiles there was a Multiple Mirror Telescope in Arizona that used six circular mirrors.   Since the MMT, the largest telescopes in the world have used primary mirrors like the Webb's.  The first were the William Keck telescopes #1 and #2, which at 10m aperture were the largest telescopes in the world, until recently. 

Like the Keck telescopes, each mirror in the primary of the Webb will have several actuators.  One will primarily move the mirror forward and backward, while others will tilt the mirror forward and backward along different axes.  In use the surface of the mirror tiles will have to be within 1/20 wave of light of the perfect curve, at shortest wavelength the telescope will be used for.  While Webb is designed for long wave observation (infrared), longer wavelengths than the Hubble Space Telescope, I believe it will be capable of some observations of short wavelength IR, implying every tile will have to be within about 1 millionth of an inch of its ideal position.

This afternoon's teleconference about Webb making it to L2 said that this process combined with simply letting the instruments on the "cold side" of the heat shield cool to as close to absolute zero as they'll get, and then taking calibration measurements with their various instruments, will take until June or July.  At that point, the Webb should start going through its program of observations to make.

Weekly Update on the 1 by 1 - part 21... with Bonus Pointless Content!

At the conclusion of last Sunday's post, I mentioned that the major work left was to add four holes on each end of the cylinder.  The end with the square flange gets a rectangular layout of four holes; that is, not in a square pattern with each hole the same distances from the nearest corner in X and Y.  Then there are four holes drilled and tapped for #5-40 screws in the other end to mount the cylinder head.  That one is a square pattern.  Both ends depend on the center of the bore being (0,0), so that if it's slightly oversized in some aspect, it won't move screw holes referred to those edges.  

The square flange end where you can see the rectangular pattern,

and the combustion chamber end. 

I have a tendency to tell myself "so you drilled eight holes and tapped four; that took you a week?"  Naturally, I did other things.  One of the things I wanted to do was to verify the numbers for inside diameter that I talked about in that post.  It took me a long time to get numbers I was comfortable with and I wanted to cross check on the completed cylinder. 

The big advantage is I can now use the telescopic gauge exactly the same way on both ends because I don't have to work from just the one end.  I measured both ends from the end shown in the bottom picture.  Now I can just turn the cylinder around and test from the other end. 

The numbers I got testing both ends matched the previous numbers.  

I need to point out that this isn't done, it's just being put aside while I work on the piston that mates with it.  To do those tests, I'll also need to make the connecting rod.  Plus, I need to order some hardware and the piston ring this engine specifies (a Vyton polymer ring).

I've been slowed down by a home project that has expanded, fixing some rotten wood in a door frame.  Like every time I've fixed some rotten wood on a boat, it's best to tell yourself "it's worse than you think" before you start, to minimize the disappointment.  This is a picture of the bottom of the door frame at the point where I removed all the wood that felt rotten.  The red rectangle shows the wood the area I started out expecting to work on.  The light yellow stuff on the right is a spray foam insulation all the contractors use.  I expect that to have zero strength.

This has been a cycle that started with cutting back the wood that felt too soft, applying wood putty, letting it cure, sanding back the wood putty, applying more over the sanded surface, letting that new layer cure, and repeating.  

It sucks up time and attention. 

How Strong Was That Tongan Volcano?

The world has been talking about the eruption off the island nation of Tonga early last Saturday (US mainland times) for the week now.  Every couple of days, I see a new story about how big this event was.  A friend sent me this story which seems to be well-sourced.  

Titled “A nuclear-test monitor calls Tonga volcano blast 'biggest thing that we've ever seen',” it reports that an international group that monitors for likely atomic detonations has reported that at every one of their sites around the world - 53 of them - the infrasonic wave from the Tongan volcano is the largest thing they've ever measured, even bigger than the Soviet Union's Tsar Bomba, the biggest nuclear detonation in history. 

This tweet by the World Meteorological Organization shows a graphic of the sound wave passing over to Slovenia, 15 hours after the eruption, at 10,500 miles from the volcano.  The article states it was heard by a monitoring station in Antarctica, at 10,000 miles. 

The WMO tops off their tweet with one of the most stupid things I've seen; "These facts are reminders that we all share the same atmosphere..."  A statement needed by only elementary school students and adults who forgot their elementary school science.  But let's ignore that.

The NPR article, though, includes a rather interesting fact I haven't seen anywhere else, though. 

Even now, days after the eruption, ... the network can continue to detect the faint echo of the shock wave as it circles Earth's atmosphere again and again.

The article is dated yesterday, the 21st, so let's be conservative and say the text was written the day before; that's still five days since the eruption and the echos are still circling the Earth.  

According to Ronan Le Bras, a geophysicist with the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty Organization in Vienna, Austria, which oversees an international network of remote monitoring stations,

... atmospheric measurements in Austria, roughly 10,000 miles from the eruption site, detected a shock wave that was 2 hectopascals in strength. By comparison, the largest nuclear weapon ever tested, the Soviet Union's Tsar Bomba, generated a shock wave of just 0.5-0.7 hectopascals in New Zealand, which sits at a comparable distance from Russia's nuclear test site in Novaya Zemlya.
...
Le Bras declined to predict just how big the volcanic eruption in Tonga was, citing the CTBTO's rules against estimating the size of nuclear detonations. But Margaret Campbell-Brown, a physicist at the University of Western Ontario in Canada who uses infrasound to study meteors as they enter the atmosphere, says she thinks it was at least as large as the 50 megaton Soviet test in 1961.

"A very rough back-of-the-envelope calculation suggests that the energy was around 50 megatons," says Campbell-Brown. "We haven't done the real analysis that it would need, but it doesn't seem like it would be smaller."

Other estimates of a how big an atomic blast would be comparable are very much smaller than the 50 megatons being talked about here; about 6-10 megatons, and the article talks about why that might not be a reasonable estimate. 

As reports begin to make their way out of Tonga, we've been reading of people rendered deaf by the sound from the explosion, which makes sense when they start talking about 50 megaton explosions.  The dry land portion of the volcano, called Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha'apai, is gone.  Nothing remains above sea level.  There are reports of ash covering much of Tonga itself, interfering with the availability of drinkable water.  To make things worse, although relief flights have tried to get in from Australia, the Tongan government has been afraid to allow more relief over fear of Covid.  We'll let you die of dehydration from no water, but we'll keep you from getting the virus!"

In some portion of your mind you have filed away that nearly 2/3 of the Earth's surface is underwater.  The vast majority of that is in the oceans.  That means the vast majority of volcanoes that could do this are under the oceans, too.  It might be that only a tiny fraction could create this sort of blast, which raises the questions of whether or not we know where they are, and if we have some way of monitoring to know if they're going to do this.

The volcano explosion as seen from space.  Credit: EPA, H/T to the Sun (US edition).