10 Years of Babble

This post marks my 10th year of the blog!

If you want to be technical about it my very first real post was on February 21, 2010, tomorrow's date, but that's when most readers will find this post so it works out.  I've tended to let the timing on this post drift around a few days over the years.  I was playing around with the new colors and format, then realized I couldn't save it for tomorrow; it was either update it or do it over tomorrow.

As always, I thank you for stopping by.  According to the stats engine on Blogger, my number of views hasn't changed much in years; I get about 15 or 1600 per day.  The way those stats are provided makes it pretty much impossible to tell what people come here to read, or if they end up here by accident. 

As I said in the very first post, “I have no idea how long I'll be here, but here's to the ride!”

SpaceX Eying Water Tower Assembly for Better Ways to Build Stainless Starship

SpaceX is nothing if not a disruptive force in the aerospace industry.  From the hi-tech company model of prototype as soon as possible, fail early and correct quickly to the industry leading recovery and reuse of boosters, they seem to be always innovating and always pushing forward.  To borrow the cliche', they're always thinking outside the box.

I admit to missing this story on the 6th when Teslarati published it, but in the effort to improve the manufacturing of their stainless steel Starship, they're looking into the machines that build water towers to find ways to make the assembly faster and higher quality.  The first revision of this article included the following text:

A SpaceX engineer says that the company wants to adopt commercially-available manufacturing equipment that could allow its Boca Chica, Texas team to build Starship tank parts in minutes and nearly-complete rocket bodies in a matter of days.

Originally created to meet the needs of a variety of different companies – typically oil and gas related – that need efficient, affordable, and standardized storage tanks, a small but growing niche exists for semi-automated tank production. While there is some clear uncertainty given that the quality and consistency required for oil and gas needs or even simple water storage likely isn’t the same needed to meet strict spaceflight margins, SpaceX has already acquired several production tools from existing contractors and is working around the clock to prove that those same tools can be used to build large, reusable rockets.

The gamble is simple: if it turns out that off-the-shelf (COTS) equipment can become an almost turnkey solution for manufacturing high-quality Starship spacecraft and Super Heavy boosters, SpaceX may have found a shortcut to orbit, avoiding the huge expense of finding and building its own custom production solutions. But is that COTS tank fabrication hardware truly up to the task?

In response to that final question, Elon Musk replied to the Teslarati team with a lot of detail.  It now leads the article off.

This isn’t quite correct. An orbital rocket needs precision that’s 3X to 4X better than a water tower, so super precise parts, fixtures & welding are needed. Suborbital is much more forgiving.

That said, although substantial capital & engineering is required to achieve extreme precision, marginal production cost of the primary structure should actually be *less* than a water tower, because it’s built inside a factory in volume.

Unmodified water tower machines do not work well for orbital rockets, as mass efficiency is critical for the latter, but not the former. Hopper, for example, was made of 12.5mm steel vs 4mm for SN1 orbital design. Optimized skins will be [less than] 2mm [thick] in places across a 9000mm diameter. [Note: everything in square brackets my edits -SiG]

An interesting problem is how to support these 9 meter diameter steel skins that are 2 mm thick.  That's close to .080" thick across 29-1/2 feet diameter.  It ought to behave like an overgrown piece of paper with those dimensions.

The fact that SpaceX engineers are studying how the oil and gas industry gets tanks fabricated and how to modify those welding machines for the higher precision they need for spaceflight is interesting enough in itself.  If a solution to a similar problem already exists, it's generally cheaper and easier to adapt the old tool to the new problem than to invent an entirely new tool.

SpaceX's second test tank made it to about 50% higher pressure than it was required to survive, demonstrating that it's safe enough for manned space flight.  This was all hand-welded by very skilled welders on fixtures SpaceX developed.

Michael Flynn's New Attorney: FBI Actions 'Worse Than Entrapment’

Attorney Sidney Powell has taken on the case of Lt. General Michael Flynn, who served as President Trump's first National Security Advisor and was - by all accounts - railroaded into a guilty plea for lying to the FBI even though none of the agents who had spoken with him thought he was lying.  You might have seen her on TV if you watch lots of news; I recognized her instantly although I didn't really know her name or who she was.

Michael Flynn's attorney, Sydney Powell

She has come out with metaphorical guns blasting, according to this article from Free Pressers.  The first salvo she fired was in a private letter to Attorney General William Barr.

In the first paragraph of a private letter she sent to Barr, “Powell requested an outside auditor not associated in any way with former special counsel Robert Mueller’s team,” Rowan Scarborough wrote in a Feb. 16 report for The Washington Times.

“She argued that Mueller’s lawyers threatened Flynn’s son with prosecution to persuade the retired officer to plead guilty to lying to the FBI.”Powell wrote in the letter to Barr: “We request the appointment of new government counsel with no connection to the Special Counsel team of attorneys or agents to conduct review of the entire Flynn case for Brady material that has not been produced and prosecutorial misconduct writ large.”

“Brady material” is exculpatory evidence that both sides in a trial are obligated to provide for each other.

The letter apparently had the desired effect, as AG Barr has opened an independent investigation of the prosecution of General Flynn.  Mrs. Powell pointed out many facts about the investigation of General Flynn that's a collection of “things that make you go hmmm.”  Even casual consumers of news will recognize enough that just ain't right to question everything.

For one, she said, the FBI officially put Flynn under investigation in August 2016 in its Russian election interference probe but didn’t tell him during two encounters over six months.

An agent visited the Trump presidential campaign under the guise of a defensive briefing on Russian interference. In fact the agent was there to surreptitiously investigate Flynn, according to a report by Justice Department Inspector General Michael E. Horowitz.

Six months after opening the probe into Flynn, two FBI agents, including Trump antagonist Peter Strzok, on Jan. 24, 2017, visited Flynn at the White House under the guise of a friendly chat about national security. At that point, the FBI had no evidence of a Trump-Russia conspiracy outside of the Christopher Steele dossier, which Republicans say turned out to be a Kremlin hoax.

During the presidential transition, the U.S. had intercepted calls between Flynn and the Russian ambassador in which they talked about sanctions.
...
Inside the Obama Justice Department there was talk of investigating Flynn for violating the Logan Act, a 1799 law barring civilian interference in foreign policy for which no one has ever been convicted.
...
In her June letter to Mr. Barr, Ms. Powell recited her version of events. She said prosecutor Brandon Van Grack later acknowledged that the Flynn call was “perfectly legal.” It did not violate the Logan Act, which appeared to be the basis for the FBI visiting Flynn that day.

“There was no ‘Logan Act violation,’ and everyone knew it,” Ms. Powell wrote. “Yet General Flynn was illegally unmasked by the Obama administration and his call leaked to explode the ‘Russia collusion’ narrative in the press. The FBI interview was worse than ‘entrapment.’ He was led to believe he was having a casual conversation with friends about a training exercise from a day or two before, when in truth, it was a set-up-tantamount to a ‘frame, manipulated by Yates, Comey, Strzok, McCabe, and others to take General Flynn out of the administration. [Mueller team] then used it to pressure him to try to take out President Trump.”

It's a bit of a long and convoluted story, and I recommend you read the whole piece at the Washington Times because it goes into the parallel attacks against Carter Page and George Papadopoulos. 

Yesterday, Townhall Columnist Kurt Schlichter put up a piece called, “Burn Down the DOJ and Start Over” arguing it might well be too corrupt to save.  The only alternative is to burn it to the ground, salt the earth, and start over elsewhere. 

I want you to tell me, without bursting into laughter, that I am still supposed to respect our federal law enforcement institutions. I keep hearing about these wonderful keepers of norms and rules and stuff deserve our awe, and then I see the tawdry, self-serving and scummy way they operate, and gee – there’s a disconnect. A big one. If the price of our society is submitting to these corrupt and incompetent people of garbage, well, then I say burn it all down.

The more I read about things like this case, the more I agree with Kurt. 

SpaceX Launches 300th Starlink Satellite, But Muffs Booster Recovery

This morning, SpaceX successfully launched their fifth load of 60 Starlink satellites, reaching 300 satellites on orbit.  The only bad part of the mission was that the booster missed the recovery drone ship OCISLY (Of Course I Still Love You) and hit the water just off screen to the right of where the stationary cameras on the drone are aimed.

Screen capture from the SpaceX video coverage moments after the booster hit the water - the circled area is the cloud of water it threw up - a few seconds later, some of those droplets show up on the camera.  

While the mission is to put the 60 satellites in orbit, the booster (B1056) was a big part of the story for this mission.  First off, the booster last flew 62 days ago, making this a SpaceX record for the fastest turnaround to flight for a used booster.  A footnote to that record is that if they had successfully landed the booster it would have been their 50th successful booster recovery.  That milestone will have to wait.  Plus, that was B1056’s fourth launch in 10 months, which is unheard of with any other orbital-class rocket in existence.  The typical orbital class rocket still has a life of one use.

Since this was 1056's fourth launch, with a design lifetime of five launches, they're probably not going to try to drag it back into Port Canaveral from 390 miles offshore and spend the money/effort to refurbish it.  It would be worth knowing what the failure's cause was and especially if it was a result of deficient or defective work during that record 62 day turnaround. It's possible the reason is in data transmitted down during the flight and will be found by review of telemetry. 

Recovery of the fairings was another stated goal of the mission, but since I can't find mention of it anywhere I'll assume they were unable to catch either half with their two recovery ships. 

Another new thing in this mission was the launch profile.  Until today, the launch of these satellites followed a pretty standard template.  They launch and burn the second stage until they reach a spot in orbit where they turn the engines off and let the system coast upwards, gaining altitude for some time.  At the right time (I believe at the farthest point - or close to it), they fire the second stage again and circularize their orbit.  For this mission, they released the satellites into an elliptical orbit at a lower point for check out.  Once that's complete, small ion thrusters on the satellites will put them in their final circular orbits at 340 miles altitude.  This was said to require more out of the first stage booster and make recovery more difficult.

Eric Ralph at Teslarati has some good stuff here:

Based on the fact that B1056 kicked up visible sea spray just a few hundred feet from OCISLY’s deck, as well as the distinct lack of an obvious explosion, it looks likely that the Falcon 9 booster suffered some kind of navigational failure. It’s possible that it experienced the same hydraulic failure that disabled B1050’s four grid fins, but a new kind of failure – like anomalous GPS readings, a broken laser altimeter, failed Merlin 1D engine thrust vectoring, or something more complex – could be the ultimate source of the missed landing.

Regardless of whether parts or the entirety of the booster can be recovered, SpaceX will almost certainly learn a lesson (or several) from Falcon 9 B1056’s premature demise, hopefully allowing future rocket landings to avoid the same fate. Most importantly, today’s primary objective – placing 60 new Starlink satellites in orbit – was a flawless success, even if B1056’s loss is still a blow. SpaceX’s next Falcon 9 launch is currently scheduled no earlier than (NET) March 2nd and is unlikely to be delayed by today’s events.

My 2 cents worth: this mission was more visible than the last Starlink launch, but enough scattered clouds in just the wrong places to restrict it to maybe 20 seconds out of the 2 minutes or so we can see well.  Then I came in to watch the booster recovery and the near miss.

Is Trump Peparing To Really Go After the Deep State?

Last week, the story got out that former White House Communications Director Hope Hicks would be returning to the White House, in a different role; to serve as a counselor to the president and senior adviser.  She will report to Jared Kushner. 

(Via Politico) […] White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham confirmed, calling Hicks “one of the most talented and savvy individuals I have come across.” Hicks departed the White House in March 2018 after working as communications director for Trump. She then moved to Los Angeles to work in a senior communications role at Fox Corporation.

[…] Hicks’ return to the White House gives Trump an ally who’s adept at translating his wishes to the broader staff.

Hicks was always well-liked among the communications and press staff, getting along well with the competing factions from the 2016 campaign and the Republican National Committee.

It's also being reported that John McEntee is returning to the West Wing after being fired in 2018 by then-White House Chief of Staff John Kelly.  McEntee is described as a “loyalist.”

In his post-acquittal initiative to finally clean the federal government of Obama holdovers and “never-Trumpers,” President Donald Trump has appointed a trusted loyalist to head up the Presidential Personnel Office, reports say.
...
McEntee is reportedly very close with White House senior policy adviser Stephen Miller from their days on Air Force One and the 2016 Trump campaign.

Administration officials told Axios that the president “feels he’s surrounded by snakes and wants to clear out all the disloyal people. Trump sees McEntee as the ultimate loyalist, and he has assigned him the powerful role of picking personnel across the federal government.”

The article linked above at Free Pressers gives their summary in the title, “No More Mr.Nice Guy.”  They believe Trump is going to surround himself with loyal people like Hope Hicks and John McEntee in an effort to start getting rid of Obama-holdovers and “Never-Trumpers” on the inside who have opposed him and slowed him down. 

Axios reported that “Trump has been asking for names of people he should fire. Many on the outside are more than happy to oblige.”

It's about damned time!

Red State offers this perspective:

Unlike a George Bush (either of them), Donald Trump arrived in Washington, D.C. with no connections to the DC policy establishment. In fact, he arrived after a bruising primary and general election that left him alienated from the GOP establishment. The GOP establishment might not have called his supporters “a basket of deplorables” but they nodded their heads and chuckled when they heard it. The same establishment had gotten rich and fat off illegal immigrant labor and outsourcing American jobs to wherever. They were used to keeping the GOP base in line with promises and crumbs (George W. Bush had GOP majorities for 6 of his 8 years, how much did they accomplish in regards to slowing illegal immigration or reducing abortion?) while delivering zero. When Trump arrived in Washington he was reliant upon the very same people who had opposed his election to staff his administration.  [Bold added: SiG]

Don't look now, but the left has tied the president in knots since he walked in - quite obviously planned from before the election.  Andrew McCabe was let off the hook last week.  Yeah, Trump was acquitted in his impeachment trial, but they're starting right back in and going after Attorney General Barr as well.  The entrenched deep State is winning.  Barr and Durham are two guys against thousands in the deep state.  What chance do you think there is it can be cleaned up? 

President Trump and Hope Hicks when she left the White House two years ago.

Predictions About the Future Are Almost Always Wrong

But they can be kinda fun. One of the staple trade magazines in my old line of work is Microwaves & RF magazine (RF = radio frequency); one of their longtime editors is Lou Frenzel.  Lou has been in various trade magazines since 2005 and I've been aware of his work for most of that.  Lou writes a piece this month called “Perfect Vision - Predictions for 2020” and I thought his views on what's going on in the wireless 5G industry might be interesting.

I'll claim fair use and reproduce it here:

2020 clearly seems to be the year that critical mass is achieved, making it possible for the 5G wireless business to begin a growth spurt. Limited 5G service started in 2019. 5G has clearly won the all-time hype contest with continuous enthusiastic, over-the-top pandering, and untested declarations that may not be fulfilled. A rollout will take years, of course, but there has been a push by parts vendors, cellular operators, and consumers who want faster downloads of 8K movies and 24/7 cat videos to their iPhones. Here’s just a sampling of what to look for:

• Fragmented and limited 5G cellular service in selected cities in the U.S. All major U.S. carriers will offer 5G services mostly in some of the major cities with a unique mix of both low-band (below 6 GHz) and high-band (above 6 GHz) services.
• China will continue to dominate the 5G movement with an enormous number of users. The battle over the ban of China’s Huawei base-station equipment for security reasons isn’t completely settled in the U.S. and continues in Europe.
• Initial smartphones will probably not have full coverage of both 4G and 5G bands, limiting their use mainly to local services. Some 5G phones may only cover the low bands and not the millimeter-wave (mmWave) bands. Others will cover both but will be far more expensive. Furthermore, you will need a new phone if you change carriers, as their operational bands aren’t the same. These phones will also continue to include the popular, more widely available LTE low bands. Connections over the mmWave bands may be spotty unless a user is close to one or more small cells that will make up the 5G infrastructure.
• Fixed broadband 5G wireless service will be offered to consumers in competition with cable TV and DSL companies. Self-installed modems can produce up to 1-Gb/s data rates under ideal line-of-sight conditions.
• ABI Research reports that subscriptions to video-streaming services are predicted to hit 91 million over the next five years. The speed of 5G will facilitate that trend. ABI also indicates that a looming major issue is the significant increase in energy required to provide 5G service. Who would have thought?  [Besides everyone - SiG]
• The T-Mobile-Sprint merger, which appears to be getting the green light, could go either way. Combining both companies would produce a bigger enterprise that could more directly compete with AT&T and Verizon. However, if it does happen to still fall through, Sprint with take a downward spiral and eventually the assets will be acquired later, while T-Mobile will continue but remain a smaller third competitor.
• Spectrum will remain a key issue in expanding 5G, but the FCC is working on the problem with auctions (C-band), spectrum swaps, and band sharing (3, 5 GHz). Initially 5G will mostly use spectrum below 6 GHz. A few mmWave systems will emerge. Some predict that carriers will phase out current 3G spectrum faster than the 2G shutdown to make way for more 5G bandwidth.
• A growing consensus feels that 5G will be essential for two key technologies—the Internet of Things and self-driving cars. With the growing number of IoT products and installations, 5G will have the capacity to handle the massive amount of data. Autonomous vehicles are expected to need the much lower latency that is reportedly available with 5G.

Bruce Lancaster of Wilson Electronics indicates that as 5G rolls out in 2020, the current LTE network will stay in place to serve 5G until the more advanced network is available. He believes that its primary use will be the expected voice and data services. The “killer app” for 5G has not emerged. Customer capacity will grow. The low-band spectrum will dominate (e.g., 850 MHz from AT&T and 600 MHz from T-Mobile) initial systems. A major move to mmWave bands will come later. Mr. Lancaster feels that even as 5G comes on line, Wilson’s line of repeaters or range extenders will still be needed to ensure more reliable connections, especially in buildings.

There you have his take.  Is this absolutely likely to be how it turns out this year?  I doubt it's exactly right, but I wouldn't be shocked if he ends up 80% right.  Most of these problems are pretty well known, but the 5G hype is everywhere. 

My take is that 5G is going to be a big nothing for most people who buy the shiny, expensive new phones.  8K videos?  I'm going to go out on a limb and guess there's 100 8K videos in existence in the world, and most people will be interested in watching a couple.  If their cat videos or social media loads faster, the novelty will last an hour or two.  If the network is good, 4G LTE can do over the Gigabit/second barrier now, supposedly 5G speeds, but only newer phones with better hardware can do it.  4G LTE just doesn't have the buzz behind it. 

But, after all, industry is already laying the groundwork for The Next Big Thing, 6G, to roll out in about 10 years.

“5G??  Dude, those are power lines!”  Ah... yeah, but if you look closely just left of and below center, you can see what looks like a cell tower. 

Dropping a Perfectly Good Space Capsule Out of an Airplane

I'm sure everyone has heard that skydiving joke about jumping out of a perfectly good airplane. Teslarati reports that SpaceX is just about done with a round of tests of the parachute systems that will be put onto the Crew Dragon manned capsules, and could have just two tests left.  The tests began last October in response to several major failures that occurred during drop tests both in 2019 and 2018.  These failures led SpaceX and their contractor, Airborne Systems, to redesign the parachute system.  These sorts of tests are intended to test the parachute system at its worst case limits - better to fail being pushed out of a C-130 with no one in a box than with astronauts on board.  The tests appear likely to be completed before the end of March. 

Most recently, SpaceX has been aggressively testing the latest Mark 3 (Mk3) parachute variant with great success and has completed some two-dozen consecutively-successful drop tests since October 2019. Now, NASA and SpaceX are working together to settle on a design for two final Crew Dragon parachute tests, the results of which will almost certainly determine when the spacecraft’s astronaut launch debut will occur.

They go on to report that SpaceX has “quite literally been pushing the envelope of parachute engineering and the immensely complex physics behind their behavior during deployment.”

In response to the additional testing and analysis NASA required after a recent April 2019 chute failure, SpaceX has essentially been forced to push the state of the art of parachute design and modeling to new levels. NASA says that SpaceX has begun to model certain conditions and newfound failure modes in ways that “provide a better understanding of parachute reliability” and have forced NASA to reevaluate its own standards and certification processes. Shown in the video above, SpaceX recently completed a successful parachute test identical to the attempt that failed in April 2019, a major step towards confirming that the new parachute analysis and design have mitigated prior faults.” 

The Teslarati reporters say that SpaceX says they've completed no less than 24 successful Mk3 parachute tests, ranging from single-chute and chute-out tests to the full-fidelity spacecraft launch and recovery that followed Crew Dragon’s January 19th, 2020 In-Flight Abort (IFA) test.

While these tests complete over the next few weeks, Spaceflight Now reports that the Crew Dragon capsule slated to carry NASA astronauts Doug Hurley and Bob Behnken to the ISS arrived Thursday at SpaceX's facilities on Cape Canaveral.  The first manned SpaceX mission to the ISS is still slated for May 7. 

In a statement, NASA said the Crew Dragon will be the first spacecraft to launch astronauts from U.S. soil since 2011, when the space shuttle was retired.

“The SpaceX Crew Dragon spacecraft for the first crew launch from American soil since 2011, has arrived at the launch site,” NASA said in a statement. “NASA and SpaceX are preparing for the agency’s first flight test with astronauts to the International Space Station as part of the agency’s Commercial Crew Program.”

In 2014, NASA tapped Boeing and SpaceX with contracts valued at $4.2 billion and $2.6 billion, respectively, to develop, test and fly commercial human-rated spacecraft designed to ferry astronauts to and from the space station.

Hurley, a pilot on two space shuttle missions, will serve as vehicle commander on the Crew Dragon test flight, known as Demo-2. Behnken, also a veteran of two shuttle flights, will be the vehicle pilot.

If these last few test drops result in changes to the Mk3 parachute design, it's my bet the system can be fixed here in Florida rather than send the capsule back to Hawthorne (CA). 

 SpaceX photo.

Quarantined Cruise Ship in Japan May Now Be The Best Place to Study the Virus

The news broke today that the cruise ship Diamond Princess that has been in the news for being quarantined in Japan now has 175 confirmed infections from the 2019 novel coronavirus (2019-nCoV).  There are 39 new confirmed cases among passengers and crew members and one confirmed case in a Japanese quarantine worker.

Since the outbreak began in December, there have been over 45,000 confirmed cases of COVID-19 worldwide and at least 1,115 deaths. But while 2019-nCoV has spread to at least 24 countries beyond China, nearly all of the COVID-19 cases and all but one death have occurred in China.

According to the latest figures from the WHO, 44,730 cases are confirmed in China, while a remaining 444 are outside the country—including the 175 cases linked to the Diamond Princess. The tally is by far the largest outside of the outbreak’s epicenter; the country with the next-largest COVID-19 outbreak is Singapore, with 50 confirmed cases, according to WHO.

It's reported that the Japanese quarantine worker wasn't wearing highly protective clothing for high biosafety level areas, just wearing a mask and gloves.  He was handing out questionnaires and checking the health of passengers and crew members. 

Assuming passengers don't jump overboard and find ways to get back onshore (always easier at a dock than when miles at sea), this seems like a good opportunity to study the virus.  It could allow study of how long the virus survives on surfaces, and how effectively it spreads.  This is an isolated population, after all.  Patient zero, the first patient to contract the virus on the ship, is known:

Screening for COVID-19 on the ship began after a previous guest tested positive for the virus in Hong Kong on February 1. The man, who is from Hong Kong, boarded the Princess January 20 in Yokohama at the start of a 14-day round-trip voyage. The man sailed a leg of the voyage before disembarking during a stop in Hong Kong on January 25. Meanwhile, the ship sailed on. Upon news that the guest tested positive on February 1, the Diamond Princess returned to Yokohama a day early and has been quarantined ever since, with guests in isolation in their cabins.

It is still unclear when and where the man from Hong Kong became infected and how the virus has spread among people on the ship. It may be that the outbreak involved a so-called “super-spreader,” which means that a single infected patient sheds the virus extremely efficiently and infects an inordinate number of people. But again, it is unclear how many people may have brought 2019-nCoV aboard and how—or if—the 175 cases are all linked.  

I suspect that most of you have been reading what Aesop at Raconteur Report posts about the virus, like this one.  I sure have.  Having an isolated population like this might be a good way to study this virus and perhaps reduce the uncertainties that seem to apply to just about every characteristic.  There are 3,711 people on board the Diamond Princess; Reuters reports that roughly 80 percent of the passengers (over 2,900) are aged 60 or older, with 215 being in their 80s and nearly a dozen over 90. Those age groups have been among the most vulnerable demographics in the outbreak overall.  If those same percentages apply to the 175 cases and 80% of the cases (140 people) are over 60 years old, I'm afraid that will be where the largest number of deaths come from. 

The Diamond Princess at dock in Yokohama.  Getty Images photo.

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

---

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.