Pad-Aborted SpaceX Flight Rescheduled

The Falcon 9 that had the T=0 abort Sunday morning has been rescheduled for no earlier than (NET) 8:21 am EDT (12:21 UTC) on Wednesday, March 18th.

Like most modern boosters, the Falcon 9 has monitors and telemetry for everything on board that an engineer could imagine wanting to know about, and all of those signals have go/no-go limits assigned.  The vehicle takes over the countdown on its own at the T-60 second mark in the countdown.

This is mainly done to allow the vehicle to simultaneously analyze thousands of channels of telemetry far faster and more reliably than humans ever could. During today’s launch attempt, that meant that Falcon 9 saw something it didn’t like just milliseconds before it was scheduled to command the release of the pad’s hold-down clamps and lift off.

Per one of SpaceX’s on-console engineers, the specific issue Falcon 9’s computer flagged was an “engine high power” alert. Soon after, SpaceX provided an update on Twitter, stating that the abort was “triggered due to out-of-family data during [an] engine power check” – putting the blame more on the sensors and software used to determine engine thrust than the engine hardware itself. An actual hardware or software failure that caused one or several booster engines to exceed their design limits could have potentially damaged B1048’s Merlin 1Ds, likely requiring weeks of repairs or a full swap with a different booster.

The last time a Falcon booster did this sort of abort was in February 2016, just over four years ago.  Considering that they've only been launching the Block 5 F9 since May of 2018, that was either a Block 4 or 3, which means it was a different launch vehicle in many details.

This is a noteworthy launch because it will be the fifth use of booster B1048, and the first launch with a complete fairing made of two recovered halves from previous flights.  The Block 5 Falcon9 was designed with the idea of flying 10 times with minimal reprocessing between launches; none has flown more than four so far.  If a booster can fly 10 times, that opens the door to replacing progressively more parts on it, or perhaps a major refurbishment every 10 launches.  Could we see tens of launches by the same booster?  100 launches on an F9?  It's an intriguing thought.

Now, according to Next Spaceflight, pathfinder Falcon 9 booster B1048 is scheduled to launch for the fifth time in support of Starlink L6 – a bit less than four months after it became the first SpaceX rocket to cross the fourth-flight milestone. Just days ago, SpaceX President and COO Gwynne Shotwell revealed that Falcon boosters might never need to fly more than ten times. Given that Falcon 9 Block 5 boosters were first and foremost designed to launch no less than ten times each, B1048 is now on the brink of reaching the halfway point of one SpaceX’s most ambitious Block 5 design goals.

If B1048 (and B1049 shortly after that) can prove that Falcon boosters can successfully launch five times, it’s hard to imagine any technical showstoppers that could prevent SpaceX from achieving its self-imposed ten-flight milestone. With SpaceX likely to attempt anywhere from 10-20 more Starlink launches this year, there will be no shortage of opportunities for Falcon 9 to continue pushing the envelope of reusability.

If you're interested in watching the retry, https://www.spacex.com/webcast goes active around 10 to 15 minutes before launch and they always have some commentary by SpaceX managers during the mission.

Sunday Hash

Leftover odds and ends.

If you haven't read Borepatch's piece today, Corona Virus and the Illusion of Science, I want to point out a couple of things.  First off, go read.  Borepatch excerpts and gets the important points from a piece by Vystavil Luboš Motl at The Reference Frame piece.  But I think the original source that Luboš links to at Medium, Don’t “Flatten the Curve”, stop it! by Joshua Bach is even more worth the time to read.  If you only have the time for one, read this last piece. 

Do you have a tendency to think that perhaps suddenly shutting down all of civilization might be a little bit of an overreaction?  Everyone has seen this curve - as printed in Vox or the NY Times - or something similar too it.  The argument is that by social isolation the peak of the outbreak can be pushed out in time and lowered in impact (amplitude).  The critical horizontal line represents the capacity of our health care system, and the argument made visually is that by cancelling all conferences, sporting events, NBA, college March Madness tournament, and more, we can keep the Kung Flu from overloading our health care system at the simple cost of staying home more. 

The problem is that this graph is conceptual, not hard numbers based on measured data.  To begin with, just a cursory look shows no numbers on the graph.  Are those curves supposed to represent the same total number of cases?  They sure don't look equal. Bach starts out his piece on Medium by saying:

These suggestions are dangerously wrong, and if implemented, will lead to incredible suffering and hardship. Let’s try to understand this by putting some numbers on the axes.

Then he goes through the exercise called “bounding the problem” in order to try to put realistic limits to numbers on the axes.  All in all, his arguments seem rather reasonable.

What is the capacity of the healthcare system?

This is a difficult question and cannot be answered in a short post like this. The US has about 924,100 hospital beds (2.8 per 1000 people). California has only 1.8. Countries like Germany have 8. South Korea has 12. (Their hospital system got overloaded nonetheless.) Most of these beds are in use, but we can create more, using improvisation (for instance using hotels and school gyms) and strategic resources of the military, national guard and other organizations.
...
More important is the number of ICU beds, which by some estimates can be stretched to about a 100,000, and of which about 30,000 may be available. About 5% of all COVID-19 cases need intensive care, and without it, all of them will die. We can also increase the number of ICU beds somewhat, but the equipment that we need to deal with sepsis, kidney, liver and heart failure, severe pneumonia etc. cannot be stretched arbitrarily between them.

I won't go into everything he has, but he assigns numbers to a whole host of variables to try to turn this conceptual graph into one with real numbers.  It looks very, very different.

The peak of the flattened curve, where we just barely touch the capacity of our healthcare system is about 2500 to 2600 days out.  That's around seven years.  Worse, the time to almost no cases stretches out nearly 4500 days; over 12 years.  Can you imagine living in the current state of the last self-isolating, toilet paper-hoarding week for 12 years?  Seven years? 

Bach also says, and this is very important so don't miss this:

My back-of-the-envelope calculation is not a proper simulation, or a good model of what’s going on either. Don’t cite it as such!

Go read!

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While on the subject of the COVID-19 emergency, you should also look at Willis Eschenbach's piece on Watts Up With That, “The Math of Epidemics.”  Willis' main point is that when we talk about exponential growth of the pandemic, that can't happen - or it least it can't happen for very long.  The supply of new people to get infected can't support that growth for much time.  The real growth curve is the one I showed 10 years ago and re-posted a few weeks ago, the Logistic Function.  Willis uses a name I'll confess to having never heard, the  “Gompertz Curve.”  Then he goes on to plot some data from various measurements against the Gompertz Curve.  This one is the total deaths from the Wuhan Virus in China.

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As a By The Way, there was to be SpaceX Starlink launch again this morning of another 60 satellites.  The launch aborted at T=0 in the count, which means the controlling computers saw something they didn't like and shut the engines down.  The vehicle was safe - nothing blew up on the pad or anything dramatic like that, it just shut down.  As of now, there's no announcement of what went wrong and when they plan to retry.  Since it's Sunday, I expect all the usual sources are self-isolated. 

Double BTW, remember the SpaceX Starship SN01 tank blowing up on February 29th?  They had started on building SN02 before that happened, and tested it last Monday night, March 9th.  The test was a success, with no repeat of the problems from SN01. 

Spring Cleaning & Summer Preparations – Part 3 – Lightning Grounds

A really fundamental idea that underlies the entire discussion about shunting lightning to ground is just what ground is and how to get effective grounds.  It’s really a broad discussion because there are safety grounds for AC power, circuit grounds for the equipment, and lightning grounds.  They can all be the same thing, but they don’t have to be.  In some parts of the world, this is called earthing, but that word is now being co-opted by people who think walking barefoot on the ground will heal every health issue they have. 

It’s no secret I come from the world of commercial aviation electronics – avionics – and that I’m a radio frequency (RF) designer.  The fundamental difference between being an RF designer and a “plain old” analog designer is that we have to think of everything in terms of its electrical length; the proportion of the size of anything to a wavelength.  Anything means anything; wires, traces on circuit boards, component sizes, anything we deal with.  Let me tell you the world’s worst-guarded secret: nothing on an airplane has an earth ground.  No aircraft spools out miles of wire to a ground rod stuck eight feet in the ground.  Since a ground that’s farther than about 1/10 wave away isn’t really effective as a ground anyway, virtually everything on the airplane uses the concept of electrical common as ground.

When an airplane gets hit by lightning, the entire body changes potential with respect to Earth when the electrons in the lightning go into the body.  Since everything electronic onboard is referenced to that common potential, they stay the same amount above that potential.  I don't have hard numbers, but commercial airliners are hit around once every thousand hours of flight, once a year on typical routes but more often in the tropics, and generally aren't damaged.

If we're going to talk about lightning in RF terms, what’s the wavelength of lightning?  Since wavelength is just another way of describing frequency, and many people would say, “it’s DC, how can it have a frequency?” I should address that.  Here’s a question to answer that question: if it’s DC why do you hear it on your radio?  The voltage and current of the strike over its duration goes from nearly zero to full 10s of thousands of volts in a time interval that’s fast to a person but glacially slow to electronics. 

Lightning has been studied as long as people have been on this planet, and the measurements have gotten more refined with technology.  For the purposes of trying to have common science to base designs on, there are common models for lightning.  In the aviation world, the industry has agreed to specifications that they’ll require equipment work through.  Take a look at these sample pulses that electronic assemblies on a commercial airliner are tested to.

The rise times have been characterized as ranging from 100 nanoseconds (1/10 of microsecond) to as long as 120 microseconds, 1200 times the shorter duration.  However, these aren’t periodic signals, like a radio carrier; these are impulses that appear a small number of times and then are gone.  To really grasp their wavelengths, we need to perform an operation called a Fourier Analysis – the common digital algorithm used for this is usually the Fast Fourier Transform.  A useful rule to recall is that the narrower the pulse, the broader the spectrum the signal uses, so there’s no unique wavelength to cite.  It’s simply not realistic to assign one frequency to lightning events, with the only exception being the top right plot which is a decaying sine wave.  Lightning is a low frequency phenomenon with its energy primarily below the AM broadcast band, often in the “few hundred” kilohertz range, which is why you can hear it on an AM radio.  You hear a combination of the harmonics of the fundamental frequency of the lightning and the broadband noise resulting from the impulse.  The decaying sine wave (upper right) doesn’t show the timing of the wave, but it’s a broadband signal that presents energy as high as 10 MHz.  The other waveforms are regarded as lower than 2 MHz. 

The caveat is these waveforms come from studies of the effects of the cabling on an airplane, which reduces the peak voltages or currents and spreads the pulse out over time.  It's arguable that the decaying sine wave at upper right isn't something seen in a strike, and is the effect of the cable itself.  Since the electrical length of a higher frequency is shorter than that of a lower frequency, anything designed to handle the higher frequencies will work for lower frequencies.

Another important point about grounds is You Can’t Have Too Much Ground.  Consequently, instead of one ground rod for the entire house, like the electrical code says, one of the standard plans for grounding a tower is to have three 8’ ground rods equally spaced around the legs of a tower (virtually all towers are three-legged).  Think of this as a minimum.  This is a rendering of that concept with a model of my tower installation.

Since my tower cranks over, when I put the system in, I used the steel pole that the held the winch as the left one of those grounds.  Like all steel does around here, that rusted and I replaced it with an aluminum pipe in ‘16 – which ended up even farther to the left in this image.  That pipe is connected as one of the grounds.

Remember how I said you can’t have too much ground? An effective addition to this layout is to run wires from each of the ground rods a few inches below the surface in the soil. Bare wire is best. Two or three wires from each rod with perhaps 60 degrees between them is probably all you’d be able to run.

It’s true that a wide copper strap is better than wire, but wire is more convenient to obtain and I've never seen enough hard numbers to justify going for it.  My tower legs are connected to the copper ground pipes by #8 stranded copper wire.  As part of the spring cleaning, I renewed all those connections so I started with shiny copper and aluminum, coated everything with the anti-seize compound and replaced the old wires.  This is the side closest to the house, and you’ll notice a second wire, red, heading out of the picture.  This goes to another ground rod, directly below where the cables enter the house.



You’ll notice I said copper pipe and not a typical copper-coated steel ground rod; this might be another “do what I say not what I do”  because I'd be pretty sure what I did doesn't meet code.  It’s my calculation that the copper contributes far more than the steel does to the conductivity to ground.  Copper is 40x more conductive than good steel, much more than 40x better than some kinds of steel. It's my belief that the steel is just there for mechanical reasons; the steel makes it easier to pound into the ground.  With our (mostly) sand soil, I can jet water from a garden hose through the pipe into the ground and sink it so fast that sometimes it’s almost like it’s falling into the ground. 

How long can the ground wires be?  The fundamental relationship of wavelength and frequency is that when multiplied together, they equal the speed of light so wavelength equals the speed of light divided by the frequency (be careful of your units here).  We’d like to make our grounds shorter than 1/20 of a wave.  That decaying sine wave that we looked at above presented energy at 10 MHz.  I'm going to cut that in half, to 5 MHz, and still think we'll never see anything that high.  One wavelength at 5 MHz is 60 meters, and 1/20 of that is 3m or 9.8 feet – call it 10’.  This doesn’t mean that no wire in the station can be longer than that.  First off, both the cutoff frequency I used and the 1/20 wave are a bit arbitrary.  I could have just as easily said 1 MHz, making that 49’, and covered all but some very rare lightning strikes.  But in the case of the tower, those black wires (one on each leg of the tower) are not even one foot long to ground.  The gap from these two grounds to the one closest to the house is about 8’.  The distance from that third ground to the radios inside the house is less than 5’. 

What I’m trying to say here is “don’t let perfect be the enemy of good enough.”  If your distance to ground is 11 feet, it will never make a difference.  Some people say 1/10 wave instead of 1/20.  I’ve said it myself many times but the only times I’ve seen 1/10 vs. 1/20 make a difference was with high powers and lightning is nothing if not high power.

It is possible to design radio installations to survive a direct lightning strike.  Cellphone towers get hit all the time.  Broadcast radio and TV stations do, as well as virtually all public service radio systems do as well.  Tons of remote stations do.  Will mine survive?  I don't know.  Once again, I refer to the ARRL book I mentioned in part 1, “Grounding and Bonding for the Radio Amateur” by H. Ward Silver, N0AX.  This week's update was to fix a weak spot I had overlooked before.  A sobering reality is that the commercial radio services I just described get taken out by lightning, too, and that's partly because lightning strikes don't come off an assembly line.  “Like snowflakes, no two are exactly alike.”

EDIT 3/15/20@1715 EDT:  Commenter Eaton Rapids Joe raised some questions about the middle of the post, where I discuss the wavelength of lightning.  To be honest, I looked at it with fresher eyes and really thought I did a bad job with that.  There are substantial edits to the middle of the piece (paragraphs 5&6 as seen here) to improve the accuracy, and numerous "word smithing" changes that I did to try to reduce chances of misinterpretation. - SiG

Spring Cleaning & Summer Preparations - Part 2 - Fixing a Gap in My Protection

Lightning protection is a sub-specialty of transient protection.  Transient protection has become a major sector in commercial or industrial electronics as operating voltages in many solid state systems have dropped over the years.  In a way, being incredibly large makes lightning more straightforward to handle than smaller transients that might damage your systems.  Because a direct strike (and they vary quite a bit) will be tens of thousands of volts and amps, shunt spark gaps that lightning will jump and go to ground, but which operating signals can’t jump can be effective.  Many commercial lightning protectors, like one I mentioned as I was troubleshooting my station, are simply spark gaps.  I've seen old antenna designs recommend using a car's spark plug attached to the antenna feed.  In the case of the induced voltages my station faced, it’s hard to come up with planning numbers, but it’s safe to say if it’s above the expected voltages at that point in the circuit, you want to get rid of it.

There’s a handful of electronic components to choose from to help get rid of a surge from lightning.  Diode rectifiers, zener diodes and special transient suppressor diodes are all widely used.  One of the most widely used devices is an MOV (pronounced “em oh vee” not mauve) short for Metal Oxide Varistor.  Varistor is a term for a variable resistor of any kind, and chances are you own some MOVs right now, built into something else you own, perhaps as a surge protected AC power strip.  What makes MOVs variable is that as the voltage goes up, their resistance goes down.  Because of that, they can dissipate that excess voltage as heat.  That means they will eventually wear out and fail, so it’s best to construct the protector in a way that the MOVs can be removed and replaced (if it's not expected to be thrown out).

MOVs are usually two-leaded disks, made of a layer of Zinc Oxide with conducting terminals on either side.  They are bidirectional, meaning they’ll react to pulses of either polarity, and the most common way to connect these is simply to put them in shunt to ground.  There are six wires in my rotator control cable, all the voltages are DC and less than 25V, so I should be able to shunt the six wires to ground through six MOVs.  MOVs can be paralleled to get more power handling capability.

Here’s a “do what I say not what I do” moment.  MOVs should be chosen based on the operating conditions and not because you have some – which is what I did.  This website, from industry giant Littlefuse, can help you choose an MOV, (that's a specific page in multi-page document) as can
this article from industry publication Electronic Design.

If you’re doing design for a living, you'll be paying attention to those selection criteria.  For hams, the simplest Rule of Thumb (I like those) is to choose an MOV rated at 20% higher voltage than the normally expected voltage.  In my case that would be above 30V.  It so happens I have about hundred surplus 75V MOVs, which is three times my expected voltage and still very far below the anticipated lightning surge.  The ones I have are rated at 2500 Amps on an 8/20 microsecond pulse (reaches peak in 8, declines to 50% at 20) or 12W for 2msec. 

I simply need a way to break my cable and connect an MOV from all six wires to ground.  That should be a robust ground connection. 

For convenient way to break out the six wires, I chose a terminal strip from an eBay seller.  It’s a six terminal connector meaning that there are six pairs of screw-down terminals with each pair connected across the strip.  I would use one side to connect the MOVs to ground and the other for the wires.  I’d cut the cable, crimp a terminal to all 12 wires and connect both ends of the wire (same color) to the other screw terminal.  It ended up looking like this right before I mounted it.

Those two big holes on the right are how the metal plate local ground gets connected to the system ground: a stainless U-bolt with anti-seize compound.

Whenever you’re designing something like this, it seems to be an encouraging thing to discover that there’s a commercial product that does almost exactly the same thing.  I found out midway through the design that amateur radio supplier DX Engineering has a product that’s conceptually identical to this, their Rotator Control Line Protectors, DXE-IS-RCT.

The major difference between theirs and mine is that they have two banks of four wire connections because some rotators have eight wires and theirs is a partially sealed box.  Other differences are that I used stainless steel washers and cap screws for the MOV ground connections, although the terminal strip hardware isn’t stainless, and DX Engineering uses a more “professional” ground connector.  Since I have an aluminum tower, I’m more concerned about dissimilar metals in contact than someone with a galvanized steel tower.    

It's mounted to the tower with the stainless and aluminum interfaces smeared with an anti-seize compound that is also somewhat conductive.  The ends of the cable I cut to expose those 12 wires, though completely insulated wires, and pretty much everything was coated with an outdoor, non-corrosive, RTV silicone rubber.

I will eventually have to replace this, and it's going to be a massive pain.  It might be good to have some extras built and ready to swap out.   

EDIT 3/14/20 2045 EDT: to lengthen the title.  I'm going to search for this some day and the original title just isn't useful enough

Spring Cleaning & Summer Preparations - Part 1 - Overview of my Lightning Protection

It's that time of year when spring cleaning and other outdoor tasks must be done.  I'm not done, but I think I can see the finish line.  A large part of what I've been working on for several weeks is to improve the resistance to lightning surges.

Last fall, I had several posts about the lightning strike we suffered (first post - last post).  It wasn't a direct hit on the antennas, the tower or the house itself and it took quite a while to understand what happened.  A lot of postmortem investigation went on to the best of my ability.

Allow me to present what I think the important points are:

• We saw direct evidence that the lightning hit one of our palm trees located about 25' from the tower and 13' from the front corner of the house.  The bark of the tree was split and falling off.  Within a month the damage was apparent and within two months the tree was obviously dead.
• There were no blackened spots, no burned or etched spots on the tower or antennas.
• I have four radios attached to a coax switch that eventually ends up at the antennas.  The switch has a gas-filled lightning protection tube.  None of those four radios had any detectable change to their receivers or transmitters.  That would have come through that switch.
• Things on this desktop, in the middle of the house, around 45' from the tree, were blown up if they had a long cable.  The cable modem, WiFi router, and other things, were killed immediately.  Eventually Mrs. Graybeard's PC degraded to the point where it wouldn't run. 
• The most damage in the radio room was to my amplifier, which was plugged into a 240V outlet without a surge protector.  The outlet was installed by a "real" electrician within the previous 10 or 12 years, but it's possible that the power line run to that end of the house was lying loose in the attic.  Worst case would be lots of wire piled up.  
• This leads to the conclusion most of the damage was due to the strike's large currents creating electric and magnetic fields that induced secondary voltages in other wires around the house.  For example, the central air conditioner thermostat was connected by a few light wires to the indoor unit around 20' away.  The thermostat was blown.  The indoor controller for our water heater also died, followed by the water heater itself in November (probably the last thing that failed).
• The only damage to a radio was to the USB interface chip on my main station radio.  That was apparently caused by high voltage induced into my rotator controller cable by the strike.  The surge then blew out the rotator serial port card I'd added to the controller box.  That, then blew up the serial port card in the PC connected to it, somewhere in there it put too much voltage on the USB cable to the radio, blowing out that USB chip and then blew out the power supply in that PC. It is conceivable to me that the computer or the rotator box may have allowed voltage spikes onto the AC power lines.

PC serial port expansion card (left) and rotator serial port card (right).  You can see the physically blown parts on both.

Let me begin by saying that I am not a registered professional engineer, a certified electrician, or anyone that you should take advise from.  I'm going to talk about some things I've done that I believe are going to help the situation for years to come.  I believe I have solid backing for what I'm doing but I have not asked a professional to evaluate it.  My station was designed and put together in about 1990.  What I'm doing to it is modest changes to improve it, not rebuild it from scratch.  Some changes won't involve the station at all.  As I understand the rules about electrical inspections, things I don't touch don't need to be brought up to the most recent electrical code, but new installations do.

If you're new to this field or a new ham, I can highly recommend the book “Grounding and Bonding for the Radio Amateur” by H. Ward Silver, N0AX and available from the American Radio Relay League at that link. It's a very well written introduction to these important things, it explains why as much as what, and talks about legal aspects we may need to know. 

Since the radios' antenna inputs were well protected by their lightning gas discharge tubes, and most of the things in the house that were plugged into surge protected strips were protected, the task seems to be to protect things with long cables attached.  The longest is the 60 or 75 feet of rotor cable that started the path to blowing out my PC and radio.

Next time, a simple way to protect the rotator cable, almost completely built from things I already had.


EDIT 3/14/20 @ 2046 EDT: to lengthen the title.  I'm going to search for this some day and the original title just isn't useful enough.

I Was Born For This

Got started on a story that's resisting efforts to tell it.  So... cartoon!

XKCD of course, for March 5th. 

I was watching the news the other day and they were talking about someone put into solitary confinement.  I thought, “that's not so bad... give me a stack of books... or a pen and some notepads.  It would be fine.”  Then they pointed out these prisoners were not allowed to have books and certainly not pens and notepads - they could use the pens to Epstein themselves.  They're completely cutoff from everything except their thoughts. 

Then I thought, “that's a question.  Have books and be exposed to prison population or no books and no prison population?  I guess I'd still have to go with the solitary confinement.”

Voyager 2 - Alone in the Night

I've written several pieces about the Voyager program in my decade here, including that I think the exploration of the Solar system by Grand Tour of the Voyager program stands with the greatest achievements of mankind.  It's a one way shot into deep space, of course it's unmanned, but I think it stands with Apollo 11 as a contender for Peak of Western Civilization. 

Of course, to slowly glide out of touch with humanity was always the fate of the Voyagers, it just got a lot more real.  There's only one deep space communications dish on Earth that can transmit to Voyager, although others can hear the spacecraft, the Canberra Australia station with its 70 meter (230 feet) diameter dish.  Earlier this month, NASA announced that the station needs to be shut down for repair, refurbishment and enhancement.  The station will be shut down for 11 months.

For approximately 11 months – until the end of January 2021, when the repairs are expected to be complete – Voyager 2 will be totally alone, coasting into the unknown in a quiescent mode of operation designed to conserve power and keep the probe on course until DSS–43 comes back online.

"We put the spacecraft back into a state where it will be just fine, assuming that everything goes normally with it during the time that the antenna is down," explains Voyager project manager Suzanne Dodd from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

"If things don't go normally – which is always a possibility, especially with an ageing spacecraft – then the onboard fault protection that's there can handle the situation."

Some of you probably heard that Voyager 2 experienced "an anomaly" which triggered her autonomous fault protection routines and took the spacecraft out of expected communications.

The malfunction meant the spacecraft failed to perform a scheduled flight manoeuvre on January 25. Painstaking assessments from NASA engineers on Earth ultimately fixed the issue, with controllers having to wait 34 hours for each single response from Voyager 2, given the 17-hour transmission time for signals to travel to and from the distant probe.

Rectifying the problem involved turning five key scientific instruments off and turning them back on again – something that reportedly had never been done before – but luckily the reboot worked a charm.

The universal software fix: they turned it off and back on again.  It just took over 34 hours with the 17 light hours to the probe.

For perspective, the Canberra 70 meter dish has been operational for 50 years.  Taking the station out of service for repairs is like taking the car you drive everyday, a 1970 car, into the shop for upgrades.  It's never a great time, but it's better to do it by planning: on your time rather than having it break down in service and leave you with no alternatives.

Reality is that the Voyagers are in their 40th years of a 5 year mission.  Their Radioisotope Thermal Generators (RTGs) are expected to keep the few instruments that can run alive until 2025, but that could change with the random failure of any one of thousands of components.  Either way, eventually the RTGs will no long be able to power enough of the instruments to get data to send back.  Eventually, first one Voyager then the sister spacecraft will go silent.  More eventually, they'll cool to almost absolute zero.

If we're lucky, some day a ship from Earth may find her and bring her back to whatever serves as the equivalent of the Smithsonian in those days.

In all probability, she will simply follow the Newtonian laws of motion, cool to a couple of degrees Kelvin and glide away forever, all alone in the night.

(image credit to (NASA/JPL-Caltech))

There's a Push For a Private Space Station

If you recall seeing Arthur C. Clarke's novel 2001 made into a movie, you'll recall that space was privatized in a lot of ways.  A pivotal early scene takes place on a space station, spinning to create simulated gravity as they always were in the movies, with a prominent Hilton name on the promenade.  After the main characters step off a short-winged space plane (that could be mistaken for a space shuttle ancestor) emblazoned with the Pan American Airlines (Pan Am) logo. You'll note that under the Hilton name in the upper left, it says, “SPACE STATION 5.”

Science fiction has long been talked about as predictor of science fact, and this may be another case.  I learned today that SpaceX has signed a contract with Axiom Space to provide launches for space tourists to the International Space Station using their Crew Dragon capsule, perhaps as early as a year from now.  These will be private citizens flying a private company's spacecraft, a world's first.  The first flight of Crew Dragon carrying NASA astronauts to the ISS for the agency is still looking to be No Earlier Than early May.  This comes less than three weeks after SpaceX and another company, Space Adventures, revealed tentative plans to launch space tourists on a record-breaking Crew Dragon flight, using the Crew Dragon to take tourists to orbital heights only surpassed by a small number of flights in the Gemini and Apollo programs.  

Then I learned that Axiom has been talking about creating a private space station for years - that article is dated 2017.   Their plans aren't a completely independent station the size of the ISS, that would mean raising billions of dollars, but a module that could become part of the ISS, and that would be leased to anyone who had work they need that can best be done in space.

Rendering of the first Axiom Space module (lower right, wrapped in body-mounted solar panels) docked to the International Space Station (ISS). This module would use one port when docked to the ISS but will provide three additional ports.  (Image: © Axiom Space)

It's worth noting that the ISS is only planned to be in service through 2024 and there are already plans to decommission and deorbit the $100 Billion dollar habitat.  NASA officials are hoping to maintain funding through 2028; that would be 30 years after the first modules were placed on orbit.  That pretty much guarantees that the annual maintenance costs for the ISS are going up (I have a 40 year old house - DAMHIK).  Axiom is trying to get into that mix somewhere.  

A private space station "is likely an idea whose time has come," said Dylan Taylor, a leading angel investor of private space endeavors.

"There are several revenue streams that are near and present that could support a private space station," Taylor said, "including in-space manufacturing, microgravity research and tourism — for both individuals and sovereign nation astronauts — and in-space supply logistics."
...
"If international governments do not vote to extend the life of the ISS, then a commercial substitute will be needed," said Derek Webber, author of the newly released book "No Bucks, No Buck Rogers: Creating the Business of Commercial Space" (Curtis Books, 2017).

I'm pretty sure I've said here before that in the Apollo years, I thought the drive would continue and that by Y2K we'd have permanent colonies on the moon, perhaps extending to Mars.  It was a widely held belief.  It's starting to look as though the critical mass of people who want to see it has been reached and there are enough people with ideas meeting enough people with capital so that we just may see humanity as a space-faring population.  Why?  For the same reason that people take boats far from shore, or climb that mountain.  Because it's there.

Florida Held Hostage by US Senate - Day 728

I think it's day 728, but it's around that for sure.  In March of 2018, the Florida legislature passed a law making the twice-yearly shifting of the clocks by an hour a thing of the past.  Unlike other states that have plotted an exit strategy from Daylight Saving Time, Florida was going to stay on DST all year round.  Why not stay on standard time?  Apparently the tourist industry thought that shifting the time to put sunrises and sunsets at a later hour would sell better to people coming down here in mid-Winter.  That aspect was opposed by PTA groups who are concerned about it putting kids en route to school during dark winter mornings.  I wrote at the time:

All reports say that after his signing, we would require permission from the Fed.gov to enact it.  Assuming the Fed level at this time is inclined toward letting states do what they want in such minor things, the bill is supposed to take effect this summer, meaning this morning's clock resetting will be the last of those.

As far as I can tell, that's where it still stands.  I did a little search engine research and found the Jacksonville Times Union updated this story just this past Thursday.  Apparently it turns out that the fact the new Florida law that doesn't put us on standard time all year long is the issue and that if we had gone for standard time instead of staying on DST, we wouldn't have to wait on the Feds.  Nobody seems to ask the question here: why does the Federal Government have authority over whatever any state decides it wants to make its time.  Why does the Fed.gov Nanny have to approve this? 

While state lawmakers in Tallahassee approved a bill in 2018 that would allow Florida to remain on daylight saving time year-round, it only works if Congress amends U.S. code to allow it. 

Sen. Marco Rubio reintroduced the so-called Sunshine Protection Act in 2019 in an effort to end the twice annual time changes and has picked up notable cosponsors, including Tennessee Republican Lamar Alexander and Sen. Patty Murray, D-Washington. Sen. Rick Scott, R-Florida, is also a co-sponsor. A matching bill in the U.S. House is sponsored by Rep. Vern Buchanan, R-Sarasota.
...
According to Buchanan, seven states have passed bills to move to daylight saving time permanently.

For now, however, the only power individual states have is to opt out of daylight saving time, putting them on standard time permanently, such as what is practiced by Arizona, Hawaii, Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands.

It goes on to say that entrepreneur Scott Yates, who runs a website called #LockTheClock, says that seven states have passed similar laws and they're all hung up in the Senate.  He's trying to coordinate a petition drive to bring Rubio's Sunshine Protection Act before the Commerce Committee.  The petition is on Change.org  Fair warning - they will ask you if you'd like to donate to help cover their expenses.  I'll feel better about not dropping a contribution in their basket if you'll click on that link to the petition.  Yes, I am watching.  (Just kidding - that's not possible).

It may be a bit melodramatic to say the clocks are killing the people, but there are some well-documented side effects of the "jet lag" people get from the time changes: more car accidents, more accidents at work, higher rates of heart attacks and strokes, and more. 

As I said two years ago, if I wrote such legislation, I would have made Standard Time the standard time.  Solar noon is when the sun is on the meridian, that line that goes from north to south passing directly overhead.  With DST, solar noon occurs at 1PM, not 12.  Maybe I'm anal-retentive, but having solar noon at 1PM forever is just wrong.

Launch Watching

We were treated to spectacular visuals on last night's SpaceX launch to bring cargo to the ISS.  This was a record launch for SpaceX in a couple of ways: their 50th successful booster recovery and the final flight of the first Cargo Dragon capsule.

At 11:50 pm EST (4:50 UTC), a flight-proven Falcon 9 booster and twice-flown Cargo Dragon spacecraft lifted off from SpaceX’s LC-40 Cape Canaveral Air Force Station (CCAFS) launch pad, sending the Dragon 1 spacecraft on its third and final orbital launch. Things went as planned and the booster nailed its second landing, coming to a rest at Landing Zone-1 (LZ-1), while Falcon 9’s second stage successfully placed Dragon in orbit and deployed the vehicle. Now safely in orbit with both solar arrays deployed, Cargo Dragon will use built-in maneuvering thrusters to tweak its orbit, ultimately rendezvousing with space station no earlier than the morning (EDT) of March 9th.

Hopefully wrapping up a decade of success, the CRS-20 mission will be SpaceX’s last under NASA’s Commercial Resupply Services (CRS) Phase 1 contract, marking Cargo Dragon’s 20th successful space station rendezvous and 19th operational resupply mission. Over those 19 CRS missions, SpaceX – once CRS-20 has safely berthed – will have delivered nearly 45 metric tons (100,000 lb) of cargo to the space station and returned another 31 metric tons (>70,000 lb) to Earth, remaining the only operational spacecraft capable of doing so. While Dragon 1 will cease operations after capsule C112’s planned reentry and splashdown sometime next month, the vast wealth of expertise SpaceX has derived has already been funneled directly into Crew Dragon (Dragon 2), its successor.

This is the launch I first mentioned last Saturday - during a pre-launch test, an anomaly was discovered with the Falcon9's second stage and SpaceX just swapped the second stage from another booster they had on hand.  The phrase “just swapped the second stage from another booster they had on hand” is just about nonexistent in the language of any other launch provider.  

There are times I think to myself that my Space coverage seems weighted to SpaceX, but then I realize it's because they're doing so much more than the other companies I can read about.  

Our view of the launch was different last night.  First off, it was crystal clear.  Secondly, the plan was to return the booster to Landing Zone 1 on Cape Canaveral instead of landing on their drone barge (OCISLY) hundreds of miles offshore.  Because of that, it was visually spectacular.  We got an excellent view of the long burn before landing - rather close and very bright.  The landing pad is about 35 miles north of us, so the actual landing is well below the horizon - all we'd see is the sky lighten up.  When they land on the drones far off shore not even that's visible.   When they land, they do two long burns of one of the booster's nine engines.  The engine burn we saw was still miles up and burns 20 seconds.  After coasting another 40 seconds, they do a longer final burn that slows it to almost zero speed to land.  A UPI photographer got this composite shot for a similar launch a couple of years ago.  It appears to be from the Titusville area north of here.

The total exposure here is around 8-1/2 minutes long.  The Falcon 9 is the main arc stretching right of center up and to the left.  Around the peak of that arc, about 2:20 (minutes and seconds) into the flight, the booster shuts off and then is let go of.  There's a dark gap there and an area of bluish white fuzz just past this, which is a short boost back burn of the first stage to get it started back to the landing zone.   The view of this is spectacular looking from the first stage itself in the SpaceX mission video.  The longer, straighter burn trail is what we watched from the backyard.  It starts about 6:40 into that video and runs about 20 seconds.  Another 40 seconds later the final burn starts - that's essentially invisible from here so we don't stay outside to try to see, opting to come into the house and watch the landing on the SpaceX live stream. 

By the way, although I do live in the area that calls itself the Space Coast and watch just about every launch, by no means are we the only part of the state that gets to see launches.  Checkout McThag's experiments with photographing last night's launch.  I don't know where he lives, but I know he talks about locations on the west coast of Florida, and I know from driving there that it's in the vicinity of 120 miles from here.  As a rough guess, while I'm 35 miles from the launch pad, he's probably closer to that 120 miles.

Another Startup Rocket and Launch Company Just Misses a DARPA Challenge

On Monday, Astra, a startup rocket and launch services company, came within 53 seconds of meeting a 17 year old DARPA challenge for flexible and responsive launch services.  Their rocket was to launch from Kodiak Island, in southern Alaska.

With less than a minute to go in the countdown, a sensor delivered some data about the rocket that Astra's chief executive, Chris Kemp, said "really concerned us."

Despite the prospect of losing out on a $2 million check from the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, and potentially $10 million more later this month, Astra engineers halted the launch attempt. They thought the problem may lie with a faulty sensor, as bad data was intermittent, but they weren't sure.

The DARPA Launch Challenge has been around since 2003 in a couple of forms.  No company has successfully achieved the goals.  In this latest version, Astra was the last survivor of 18 companies that originally qualified for the Challenge.

DARPA gave Astra essentially a month's notice to prepare a rocket and launch it from Alaska.

The company moved quickly, shipping its small booster to the launch site and setting up the location in less than two weeks. A combination of poor weather over the weekend and the technical issue on Monday scuttled the chance. "We were very sorry not to hand over a big check today," said Todd Master, manager of the launch challenge for DARPA.

The object of the Launch Challenge is to go from zero to launch in a defined short amount of time.  The challenge dates back to brainstorms in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks.

Back in 2003, DARPA created the Falcon—Force Application and Launch from CONtinental United States—program. The Falcon program had two separate goals. The first involved development of a hypersonic weapon, and the second was a low-cost launcher that could deliver at least 1,000 pounds to orbit for $5 million per launch. In addition to giving the military a new launch capability, DARPA hoped this would stimulate a stagnant US aerospace industry.

In one big way, the program did succeed. As DARPA began to solicit bids from industry for the small rocket program in May 2003, it eventually received 24 responses. The military awarded nine grants worth about half a million dollars each for design studies. While some awards went to established companies, such as Lockheed Martin, the majority were given to smaller firms like SpaceX. Ultimately, SpaceX and AirLaunch, which aimed to drop its rocket from a C-17 aircraft, emerged as finalists. Only SpaceX ever made it to space, but the [Launch Challenge] program had been canceled before that happened.

I have to give all proper respect to Astra.  The company has never launched anything into orbit, and yet they succeeded in getting within 53 seconds of something no other company has done.  They got a liquid-fueled, orbital rocket from factory to launch pad, and were ready to go, in a month.  They could have attempted the launch while not 100% comfortable with the sensor readings they had, but anyone in the launch business probably would have scrubbed the launch. 

From the way they talk about it on their blog, they intend to launch this rocket soon, and have an ambitious program to make it to orbital flight in three tests.  And DARPA will continue to work the Launch Challenge. 

The Role of Overregulation in COVID-19 in the US

This morning, Peter Grant at Bayou Renaissance Man ran an in-depth piece on the virus.  What struck me, because it's one of the things I always harp on, was a comment by reader Ray - So Cal on the role of Fed.gov overregulation in the situation we find ourselves in.  He linked to an article on City Journal by Roger Klein, MD, JD; both Medical Doctor and Juris Doctor - lawyer.

Dr. Klein starts by discussing some of the situation in King County, Washington, where COVID-19 has been confirmed in the coronavirus-related illnesses of ten residents—six of whom have died—and who may have infected more than 50 residents and staff.  The virus has been confirmed in more people in various places around King county, and the data led investigators to hypothesize that the coronavirus had been circulating in the state for six weeks.  It's troubling this wasn't confirmed sooner.

It turns out that at the root of this is something we talk about regularly on these pages, overregulation.

Overregulation of diagnostic testing has played a major role in this delay. For weeks, the CDC operated the nation’s sole diagnostic laboratory for coronavirus, while testing in the rest of the world proceeded apace. Test protocols using the polymerase chain reaction (PCR) were publicly available shortly after Chinese researchers published (or described) the sequence of the virus in mid-January. The World Health Organization (WHO) used a freely available German procedure to create a test kit, shipping 250,000 tests to 159 laboratories worldwide. Since early February, the WHO has facilitated specimen transfer to referral laboratories.

In China, labs have tested thousands of patients each day. By February 23, the Chinese government had approved ten test kits, and production capacity reached 1.65 million tests per week. Meantime, South Korea has more than 500 testing sites and has screened over 100,000 people, reportedly testing 10,000 individuals per day and pioneering “drive-through” testing facilities. This enhanced testing capability is a key reason why the country has reported over 5,100 cases—the second-largest, outside China—including larger numbers of patients with mild illness, as reflected in a case fatality rate less than 1 percent. As of March 3, the U.K. had tested nearly 14,000 cases.

By contrast, the U.S. had performed a paltry 472 tests by March 2. Further, CDC testing criteria have precluded recognizing community spread because of requirements stipulating recent travel to China or exposure to an infected person. Adherence to these guidelines delayed testing in the first probable case of community transmission, in Northern California, by four days. [BOLD added: SiG]

Despite the widespread availability of tests in China, South Korea and so on, the US would not allow those test kits into this country.  It took until February 4th and Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Alex Azar’s declaration of a public-health emergency before the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) would issue an Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) to the CDC, allowing it to distribute its own test kits to designated public-health laboratories.  Test kits from other countries were still prohibited.  The CDC began shipping their kits the next day, February 5, but laboratories couldn't use the kits because they contained a defective reagent.  These test kits contain a “negative control” intended to yield a negative result when tested, and which protects against false-positive results from contamination or other issues.  The negative controls in some kits tested positive, invalidating tests done with them and saying the test kits were bad. 

In light of the defective test kits from the CDC, the FDA could have authorized test kits produced by commercial laboratories but the agency has prohibited what they call Laboratory Developed Tests (LDT) in the US.  In contrast, over in Europe, several companies, including at least one that's U.S.-based, are approved to sell test kits.  When time is critical, as it clearly is in the early days of a building epidemic, the FDA has what's called “Enforcement Discretion,” through which they can essentially look the other way and allow the sale of LDTs in the US.  They chose not to exercise that discretion, adding further delay.

Stephan Hahn, the FDA commissioner, predicted that U.S. laboratories will be able to perform “close to 1 million” tests by the end of this week, and former commissioner Scott Gottlieb estimated that public-health laboratories “will be able to test 10,000 samples a day, with as much as an additional 10,000 a day from academic labs.” Even if true, these optimistic predictions are likely too late to reverse a crisis that might have been averted.  [Note: to save you the effort, 20,000 tests/day (10k each from public health and academic labs) is 140,000 tests/week, far short of commissioner Hahn's “1 million tests” by the end of the week]

In a situation where timing can be everything, the FDA's slow motion action is undoubtedly going to lead to more people being identified with the disease.  More interestingly, it seems likely that as tests start being spread dramatically that the number of confirmed cases is going to skyrocket.  That doesn't necessarily mean it's spreading faster, it just means people who have had the virus already will be identified for the first time.  Most viruses present differently depending on differences between people; it's entirely possible there are people walking around who had what they thought was the flu but was really COVID-19 and shook it off, or went to bed for a few days but never to the doctor.  People who never went to the doctor will never be tested so we'll never know if the virus is less serious than is being reported. 

The CDC test kits with the defective negative control reagent.  CDC Photo from Science Magazine, AAAS. 

There are Few Good Parts to Being an OF

You'd think in a world that seems well balanced in so many aspects that we'd gain something for our years - besides worn out joints, stretched out ligaments, and frequent pain.  Everyone has heard the adages about age bringing wisdom; contrasted with “why are we too soon old and too late smart?”  Most gunnies have heard the one about “beware the old man - when he gets too old to fight, he'll just kill you.”

What I've noticed is that I've reached a point in life where 99 and 44/100% of everything I see or hear reminds of either a pithy quote or an old joke.  Personally, I'm happy with that.

That's a roundabout way of passing on a story I found at 90 Miles From Tyranny, “Vegan runner asks neighbors to close windows when cooking meat with 'offensive' odor.”  I bet you've met someone like that.  I know I have.  Someone that gets such an air of superiority from the food they eat that they feel the need to lecture the rest of the world to behave like they do.  I've been a runner, let me tell them how adults handle it: they keep running and forget about it.  The smell dissipates within a few seconds.

The story immediately brought a couple of jokes to mind.  For one example

• Question: You're in a room with vegan and a CrossFit® (workout) fan.  How do you find out which one is which?   Answer: Don't worry, they'll tell you first.  

I'll be the first person to say that not all vegans or vegetarians act this way, but jokes like this exist for a reason.  Enough people have run across someone like that to ensure the stereotype works.  

The article itself, linked on Fox News is kinda funny though.  (Insider's pro tip.  I've seen it on many blogs when I click on a link to Fox News; you click on the link and you get blocked.  I think the messages say something about you being unauthorized to look at the site.  Click on the URL and hit return.  It will load just fine.) 

A self-proclaimed "vegan runner" from Berkeley, California received backlash on Saturday after asking neighbors to close their windows when cooking meat because the smells were 'overpowering and offensive.'

The rant was posted to @BestNextDoor -- an account that houses neighborhood drama -- which showed the runner had requested nearby residents only barbeque vegetables because it's "always hard for me this time of year when the weather starts warming up."

"Several nights a week I'm out running around dinnertime and when people have their windows open I can smell what they are cooking," the request said. "I've noticed a sharp uptick recently in smells of folks cooking meat and it can be quite overpowering."

Unsurprisingly, it turned into a neighborhood squawk on @BestNextDoor.

"'I don’t want to be a stereotype' at the end of a multi-paragraph whine about how hard it is being vegan. This is performance art," a user concluded.

"As a carnivore bbq chef, it’s always hard for me this time of year when the weather starts warming up and vegan runners start running by my windows," another said.

"You know what else smells terrible? Runners. Have some respect, exercise indoors with all the windows locked," another wrote.

This aggrieved complainer is the personification of why I don't talk about diet or exercise unless something is noteworthy (this might be the only example).

I'll leave it there, but it struck me funny.  OTOH I've been told I can have a pretty strange sense of humor.

iStock photo of anonymous trim young woman running. Why?  First, I like having a picture here.  Second, it's the picture Fox News used so it was handy.  Third, it sure looks better than my mangy ass from that or pretty much any other angle.

SpaceX Shrugs off Weekend Failure, Hopes to Test New One “In a Few Days”

It's safe to say that by the nature of a proof test, SpaceX (in some sense) expected the SN01 fuel tanks to survive.  Nevertheless, here we are just over three days from the failure, SN02 is well into its manufacturing cycle and they're fairly certain they understand what went wrong.

Despite the apparent setback, it appears that SpaceX won’t have to wait long at all to continue its uniquely ‘hardware-rich’ Starship test campaign. With a workforce now several hundred strong and a great deal of hands-on and strategic experience gained from building Starships Mk1 and SN01, SpaceX is now practically churning out parts for future Starship SNxx prototypes. Most notably, Starship SN01’s predecessor is potentially just a few days away from being stacked into a finished tank section, hinting at the almost unfathomably speed that SpaceX is able to build full-scale vehicles even in early days of the program.

There’s a puck at the base that takes the engine thrust load. Don’t shuck the puck!

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) March 2, 2020

and then

We’re stripping SN2 to bare minimum to test the thrust puck to dome weld under pressure, first with water, then at cryo. Hopefully, ready to test in a few days.

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) March 2, 2020

The speed they proceed at is breathtaking.  Given that Musk already revealed that Starship SN02 would feature improved tank welds, it’s safe to assume that the prototype will also have an improved thrust structure (i.e. “puck”).  Musk also tweeted acknowledgement to welding supplier Fronius and spoke of a need to get a better finish on their welds by planishing.  Eric Ralph, the author at the Teslarati piece,comments that the SN02 design, “already appears to be a departure from SN01’s apparently unsuccessful iteration,” but with the exception of cleaner seams, the two sections don't look that different to me.  

Starship SN02 (top) and SN01 Thrust Pucks.  Both photos copyright @bocachicagal (Mary) and NASASpaceflight.com.  Both are available as much bigger jpegs at Teslarati. 

Final words to Eric Ralph:

Even if it takes SpaceX 5-10 SN01-class failures to mature its South Texas rocket factory into a reliable machine and get to a point of stability and confidence with suborbital Starship flights, the total cost of that trial and error is comically insignificant relative to almost any other rocket development program in history. To be clear, SpaceX might benefit from going a little slower and refining Starship’s prototype design, but it’s impossible to know from an armchair. For now, the best available advice is to simply enjoy the show and view each potential test failure as just another small step along the path to Mars.

---

At the end of the piece on Friday night's test failure, I mentioned the almost impossibly fast recycling of a cargo resupply mission to the ISS after a decision to swap out the second stage of its Falcon9 booster.  That swap has occurred and the stacked rocket with payload was tested on the pad with no evidence of the problem that led to swapping out the second stage.  The test is referred to as a wet dress rehearsal (WDR) as well as a static fire of the booster.  That launch is now scheduled for Friday night at 11:50 PM EST.  SpaceX is noting this is the third mission for this cargo vessel, Cargo Dragon capsule C112, and

If all goes according to plan, it will be the spacecraft’s third cargo mission to the ISS since February 2017, becoming the third orbital SpaceX vehicle to do so. Even more significantly, C112 is poised to crush Cargo Dragon’s own previous record for the shortest time between two orbital launches.
...
Back in June 2017, SpaceX became the first private company in history to successfully reuse an orbital-class spacecraft on its CRS-11 Cargo Dragon mission, itself the first private spacecraft in history to successfully rendezvous with the space station. Since then, all but one CRS mission has featured an orbit-proven Dragon capsule, making CRS-20 the ninth time SpaceX will attempt to launch a spacecraft into orbit for the second (or third) time.

In other words, nearly half of all of SpaceX’s NASA CRS missions have featured flight-proven spacecraft, while several have also launched with flight-proven Falcon 9 boosters. Still, while extremely impressive that SpaceX has managed to convince the risk-averse space agency to fly several dozen tons of critical hardware on flight-proven rockets and spacecraft, Cargo Dragon capsule reuse has always been a comparatively lengthy and complex process.

Can There Be "Free and Fair Elections" Today?

Have you ever heard of Dr. Robert Epstein?  He's a Ph.D. psychologist, has been a university professor, and is an unabashed liberal.  Unlike many (most?) with his background, he doesn't want to see the country destroyed and values the US.  He's one of those rare Democrats who disagree about spending priorities but don't want to destroy the nation as Bernie and so many others do. 

Beginning in 2012, he started researching the effects of search engine and social media algorithms on voter behavior.  In particular, he has emphasized the subtle effects of biased search engine results, and especially Google's results.  The emphasis on Google is for two reasons.  The first reason is the obvious one: they're the 800 pound gorilla of the search engines although not as big as they once were.  Current numbers say they have about 73% of searches from desktop computers.  After all, nobody says to “Bing” this or “Duck Duck Go” that.  Google is the only search engine that has risen to being a verb.  Second and perhaps more subtle is that there was a video that showed a Google employee meeting soon after election day of 2016, in which the leader said, “we're never going to let this happen again.”  Excuse me?  “never going to let this happen again?” 

Regarding elections, Dr. Epstein has found in multiple studies that search rankings that favor a political candidate drive the votes of undecided voters toward that candidate, an effect he calls SEME ("seem"), the Search Engine Manipulation Effect. As a result, Dr. Epstein has called for the regulation and monitoring of search engines. Without equal-time rules of the sort that protect political candidates in other media domains, he says, biased search rankings exercise undue influence over voter's opinions - influence that cannot be counteracted by individual candidates but that can easily determine who will win a close election.

Dr. Epstein's landmark report about SEME, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) in 2015, can be downloaded here. As of January 2018, it had been downloaded more than 90,000 times from PNAS's website and was ranked by PNAS to be in the top 1 percent of all reports the organization monitored in all the sciences.

He claims that in his studies, search engine result manipulation has been shown to sway large numbers of undecided voters.  Since his initial publication of results of his studies, whistle blowers inside Google have confirmed to him that this is an area the company is working on.  They refer to the techniques as being undetectable because it would take special efforts to determine what search engine users were given.    

Because people have come to place enormous trust in high-ranking search results, results that are biased to favor one candidate can easily shift 20 percent or more of the votes of undecided voters toward that candidate - up to 80 percent of the votes in some demographic groups.

Dr. Epstein is essentially self-funded these days and is a principal at the American Institute for Behavioral Research and Technology (AIBRT); when he started pointing out how our new tech overlords can be rigging elections he found out how valuable tenure was.  He has made friends with Glenn Beck and appeared for a segment on today's show.  This edited version is worth the 11 minutes to watch.



Dr. Epstein believes big tech can shift 15 million votes with favorable search results and hidden bias.  I have to think that 15 million votes, spread among a few critical precincts in a few contested states in the country could swing the election. 

It has to make you wonder if voters really have free will and if it will even exist in the future. 

Another Blast From the Past

As the Democrat left keeps talking about the Green New Deal and Climate Change, it keeps reminding me of the times in the 10 years of this blog that I've posted about things that they just don't get right and just don't seem to understand.

They just don't understand the fundamentals.  Take renewable energy.  They say we need to replace fossil fuels with renewable energy.  No one mentions the world ran on renewable energy, burning wood, before fossil fuels were developed and petroleum has proven far superior to burning wood. 

They mean solar panels and wind turbines, maybe with some tidal power thrown in.  Why would anyone recommend wind turbines over nuclear when wind turbines kill incalculably more people than nuclear power?  Anyone who can look up some data online and run a calculator can show that renewables simply can't power the world.  It's not exactly secret it's just that it's hardly ever discussed openly.  In a rare exception, former Greenpeace president Patrick Moore had a wonderful Twitter response to everyone's favorite green twit, AOC, when she said “if you don't like my GreenNewDeal, put up your solution or STFU”:

Mentioning horses bringing food to cities reminded me of one of my all time favorite posts, from June of 2010...

When Gasoline Saved the World From Pollution

I used to get a trade journal called "The Industrial Physicist", a free publication for qualified subscribers by the AIP, who publish Physics Today.  I will always remember a handful of concepts I first encountered in those journals. 

The first one is that when gasoline powered automobiles first came out everyone thought they were saving the world from pollution. 

Before the invention of the car, transportation was largely by horse. There are a few problems associated with horse transportation that we don't think of today.  Horses produce large amounts of horse manure and urine, and by the end of the 1800s, American cities were drowning in them.  Horses would die and be left in the road, obstructing traffic.  Flies and other vermin were omnipresent, spreading disease, and the stench was overwhelming.  When it rained, streets turned into almost knee-deep swamps of wet manure.  When it was dry, the manure dust would cloud the lungs of city residents.  One New Yorker in the 1890s calculated that by 1930 the horse droppings would rise to Manhattan's third-story windows.  In 1894, the Times of London estimated that by 1950 every street in the city would be buried nine feet deep in horse manure. No one knew what to do.  The horse had been the basis of human transportation forever. 

Horses need to eat. According to one estimate each urban horse probably consumed on the order of 1.4 tons of oats and 2.4 tons of hay per year. One British farmer calculated that each horse consumed the product of five acres of land, a footprint which could have produced enough to feed six to eight people. Probably fifteen million acres were needed to feed the urban horse population at its zenith, an area about the size of West Virginia. Directly or indirectly, feeding the horse meant placing new land under cultivation, clearing it of its natural animal life and vegetation, and sometimes diverting water to irrigate it, with considerable negative effects on the natural ecosystem.  Horse food had to be transported to the cities, requiring extensive infrastructure to support the effort.  Trains ran on rails under steam power, but getting things to the trains and from them to their final destination required - you guessed it - horses. 

And what goes in must come out.  Estimates were that each horse produced between fifteen and thirty pounds of manure per day. For New York and Brooklyn, which had a combined horse population of between 150,000 and 175,000 in 1880 (long before the horse population reached its peak), this meant that between three and four million pounds of manure were deposited on city streets and in city stables every day. Each horse also produced about a quart of urine daily^*, which added up to around 40,000 gallons per day for New York and Brooklyn.  Vacant lots became piled high with manure; in New York these piles sometimes rose to forty and even sixty feet deep.

It was into this world that the miracle of the internal combustion-powered, gasoline-fueled automobile arrived.  In the span of two decades, the car eradicated a major urban nightmare that had strained governments to the breaking point, tormented the people, and brought society to the brink of despair.  Cities became much cleaner places. 

Now I'm not saying that cars don't bring problems.  I'm not saying oil exploration and gasoline production don't bring problems.  What I am saying is that we have lost the perspective of just how much cleaners cars and gasoline have made everything, and that the idyllic past was not as beautiful and unscented as we might want to believe. 

Much of the content in this posting is credited to a link that apparently can no longer be accessed - as of March 1, 2020.

Morris, Eric, "From Horse Power to Horsepower",  Access number 30, Spring 2007
http://www.uctc.net/access/30/Access%2030%20-%2002%20-%20Horse%20Power.pdf

^* In the only comment to this article in 2010, reader hbbill said that 1 quart of urine per day is a pretty low estimate.  I said they must have dropped a decimal point and meant 10 quarts a day - 2 1/2 gallons.  That would make the total 437,500 gallons of urine/day instead of 40,000.

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I've got to tell you, I'm finding it more entertaining than I thought to go through posts from nearly 10 year ago, as well as less old posts.