Given that greatest hits list, it sounds like animals, advanced space concepts, plane crashes, failure, and spy stuff are popular topics. Should I write more about these things? I mean, I can write about whatever I want, but presumably I do this for a reason. Feedback is appreciated, especially since the comboxes on this blog are typically pretty quiet.
The idea when I first started this blog was that I'd post daily, or as close to daily as feasible. That's probably not very realistic, and my actual on-base percentage was closer to 40%. That seems reasonable, and my objective for next year is to achieve something close to that but more evenly-spaced throughout the year. Thanks to everyone who's read this space so far, and I hope to see y'all back in 2014.
Over the last two decades about 10% of the electricity generated on the American power grid came from decommissioned bomb material produced by the Soviet Union during the Cold War. The program to convert Russian bomb-stuff into American power-stuff was officially known as the "Agreement between the Government of the Russian Federation and the Government of the United States of America Concerning the Disposition of Highly-Enriched Uranium Extracted from Nuclear Weapons," but its unofficial title had a catchier ring to it. You can read more about the program here: The Megatons to Megawatts Program
Less than 1% of natural uranium on Earth is useful for unleashing nuclear power. Some reactor designs can get by with the natural scarcity of fissile uranium, but most require the ratio of (fissile) uranium 235 to (fertile, but non-fissile) uranium 238 to be artificially enriched to about 5% to run. Bombs require enrichment to 90% U-235 for the explosive chain reaction to work, and during the Cold War the Soviet Union stockpiled an enormous quantity of highly enriched uranium (HEU) as a precursor to the manufacture of nuclear and thermonuclear bombs.
What the Soviets actually planned to do with all this uranium isn't exactly clear. By the breakup of the union, Russia had a stockpile of 500 metric tons of HEU, enough to build at least 20,000 nuclear warheads. Short of fending off a fleet of invading alien starships, it's difficult to conceive of any possible justification for that much firepower, and weapons-grade uranium sitting inert in a warehouse wouldn't have done much good strategically or tactically had the Cold War ever gone hot. Since evil invading aliens don't seem to be on the way, American diplomats proposed downblending the weapons-grade stock to reactor-grade uranium, and consuming the converted explosive material in reactors across the United States. Isaiah wasn't far from the mark when he talked about beating swords into plowshares. For the last 20 years Americans have been lighting our houses with the weapons that were meant to destroy them.
Earlier this month the last shipment of downblended reactor fuel arrived from Russia. Since about half of the nuclear industry's supply of low-enriched uranium since 1993 has come from the Megatons to Megawatts program, another source of uranium will need to be found soon to keep the price of nuclear fuel from climbing. A small amount of the American stockpile of HEU has been converted into reactor uranium since the end of the Cold War, but much of it remains the stuff that makes mushroom clouds and fallout rather than the stuff that runs lightbulbs and air conditioners. Both sides of the former Iron Curtain still have hundreds of tons of plutonium, used in the primary stages of thermonuclear weapons, and this has potential for power generation as well. For now, there are many more swords in the arsenal that would better serve us as plowshares.
Once nuclear chain reactions were understood and harnessed for bombs and ships, nuclear engineers on both sides of the Iron Curtain turned their attention to the mundane but practical task of making electricity. Most nations adapted their submarine engines to the task, but the British found a different solution. 15 of the UK's 16 commercial nuclear power plants use high-temperature carbon dioxide rather than water to cool the reactor's core and heat its steam generator. You can read more about that here: Advanced Gas-cooled Reactor
...A nuclear reactor must be treated as a heat source which differs from a chemical heat source in that no oxygen is required and the heat does not have to be removed from gaseous combustion products which possess poor heat-transfer properties.
Most nuclear reactors in the United States, France, Japan, and the former Soviet Union (the largest producers of nuclear power) use water to channel the immense heat released when uranium atoms split to engines that convert some useful fraction of this heat into electricity. Liquid water is conductive, stable, nontoxic, and abundant where most (but not all) nuclear reactors operate, and its ability to absorb tremendous amounts of energy per unit volume lends compactness to any design using water as a coolant. Since most reactors used for commercial power share a heritage with ship and submarine propulsion systems, where space and power are precious things, much of the nuclear world gets its power from pressurized- and boiling-water reactors. The British decided to go a different route.
All else equal, the hotter a heat engine runs, the more efficient it is. Though water-cooled reactors are compact, they suffer a major problem here since water boils at a temperature well below the allowable temperatures of the structural metals that reactors are made of. Steam is far less dense than liquid water, and is impractical for use inside the reactor's core, so the boiling temperature of water imposes an upper limit on how hot water-cooled reactors can run. Increasing coolant pressure (standard practice in the pressurized-water reactors that make most American nuclear power) delays water's boiling to higher temperatures, but there are practical limits to this approach as well. The British technique of using carbon dioxide as coolant allows the reactor to run at much higher temperature and efficiency than can be achieved by the American, Russian, and French water-cooled designs. The AGRs are bulkier than their water-based cousins, but that poses little issue for powering the grid.
An interesting design feature of the AGR is that it outputs steam at exactly the same temperature, pressure, and power as previous coal-fired power plants built in the UK. This allows the generator-driving turbine to be agnostic to its power source. Heat from uranium is indistinguishable from heat from coal, but you'll breathe a little easier without all that soot in the air. If only someone would remind the the power that be in London of this...
On August 22, 1976, a Soviet robotic sample-return spacecraft landed on the surface of the Moon. As of this writing this is the most recent time that a human-built craft landed on the Moon, and you can read more about it here: Luna 24
Luna 24 was the last in a long, distinguished, and problematic series of missions for the Soviet Union. The missions saw the far side of the Moon, touched its surface, and landed gently there for the first time. The early Luna program was a source of tremendous pride and achievement for Soviet science despite the frequent failures, but later it became clear that the Soviet space program would be unable to compete with NASA's effort to send astronauts to the Moon by the end of the decade. Since no cosmonauts would be going there anytime soon, a program of robotic rovers and sample return missions was launched in the late-1960s and early '70s.
Like the early Luna probes, most of these larger and more sophisticated landers failed. The Soviets knew their trade better in 1976 than they did in 1959, but there's a lot more that can go wrong when the mission entails collecting a sample and sending it back to Earth rather than simply crashing into the Moon. To be sure, shipping 170 grams of lunar regolith to Siberia is an impressive achievement, but the scientific return of the late Luna missions was dwarfed by the hundreds of kilograms of carefully-picked rocks imported by astronauts during the Apollo program. Fortunately the Apollo haul has been quite a lot to work with, since there have been no trips to the lunar surface, even robotic ones, since the last of the Lunas.
With luck, that will soon change. Earlier today the China National Space Administration launched Chang'e 3, a solar-powered robotic rover toward Sinus Iridum. If successful, it will be the first time China's landed a spacecraft on another world, and the first time any nation has done so on the Moon in 37 years. It's about time.
Due to concerns about the potential military applications of the American Space Shuttle program, the Soviet Union developed a reusable spaceplane during the 1970s and '80s with similar capabilities. The program was called Buran, Russian for "Snowstorm," and you can read more about it here: Buran
At one time the Space Shuttle was intended to replace every expendable launch vehicle in the United States' rocket stable and perform every government satellite launch by the time it was up to its full launch cadence. To handle the traffic, three launch pads were prepared: two at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida to handle eastbound launches to geosynchronous orbit and other low-inclination orbits, and one at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California to handle southbound launches to polar orbit. Since polar orbits cover all of Earth's land area they're preferred for reconnaissance satellites, allowing them to snoop on adversaries, frenemies, and outright enemies wherever they might roam. What delighted the White House and concerned the Kremlin was that the Space Shuttle had the capability to retrieve spacecraft as well as deploy them. In theory, a Shuttle could launch from Vandenberg at just the right moment to snatch a Soviet spy satellite over Antarctica, then return to land in California after a single orbit. Presumably the American president would then claim to know nothing about why a Soviet spacecraft just disappeared without a trace.
Diplomatic absurdity aside, the Shuttle's large payload bay and high reentry maneuverability (required to enable single-orbit aborts after polar launches) made such missions technically feasible. Cold War logic being what it was, the Soviet military establishment eventually decided that if a NATO power was going to have such a capability, the USSR had to have it, too. The Soviet space design bureaus were then told to copy the Shuttle as best they could, and so Buran was born.
At the time it was built, and possibly to this day, the Space Shuttle was the most analyzed engineered system ever built by human hands. Its mission requirements called for a significant amount of aerodynamic maneuverability and good handling qualities across speeds ranging from about 200 miles an hour at landing to over 17,000 miles an hour at the start of reentry. To guarantee that the vehicle could perform as intended, thousands of hours of wind tunnel tests were conducted at subsonic, transonic, supersonic, and hypersonic speeds across a range of gas densities and temperatures to simulate the full-scale Shuttle's launch and entry environments. Knowing that the Americans had done this, and wanting to save money wherever possible amid the stagnating communist economies of the post-Brezhnev years, the Soviets elected to just duplicate the shape of the American Shuttle rather than repeat any of this work. Given the obvious brilliance of the Soviet human spaceflight heritage, this is a bit of a disappointment.
The most significant divergence between Buran and the Space Shuttle was its propulsion system. The American aerospace industry invested heavily in solid rocket motor technology during the Cold War to perfect its ballistic missiles, while the Soviets were mostly happy with the workings of liquid rocket engines. As a result, the American Space Shuttle leveraged big solid motor know-how by including two massive solid rocket boosters in the Space Shuttle's launch stack, while the Soviets used kerosene and oxygen-burning liquid boosters in their place. While liquid rocket engines tend to be more expensive than solids, this choice makes sense for a launch vehicle. Unlike ballistic missiles, launch vehicles don't need to be ready to fly at a moment's notice, so it's okay if it takes hours to fuel the vehicle before liftoff. Since liquids can launch more payload per pound of propellant and can be shut down benignly in the event of launch trouble (once lit, it's very difficult to stop solid rocket motor combustion), they're a more appropriate choice for a reusable launch vehicle. Since the hydrogen-powered main engines were mounted to the core propellant tank onthe Buran stack, it had the flexibility to launch large payloads (like, say, space laser battlestations) as the semi-reusable launch vehicle Energia.
Soviet industry was strained to the breaking point by the catch-up defensive programs of the 1980s. By the end of the decade, the Communist Bloc was bankrupt and the west was declaring victory in the Cold War. Buran was one of the most expensive programs the USSR ever embarked upon, even with all the cost-cutting and corner-cutting measures in its development, and it surely played a significant role in the fall of the Soviet Union. In the end it only flew once, unmanned, before being mothballed and destroyed when the hangar housing Buran collapsed in 2002. But fly it did:
For almost a century, once a year students at Texas A&M University take it upon themselves to assemble a large stack of wood, douse it with jet fuel, and light it on fire. You can read more about that here: Aggie Bonfire
Robert Gates, who at various points in his career served as Director of Central Intelligence, Secretary of Defense, and President of Texas A&M, once said of the university that "From the outside looking in, you can't understand it. From the inside looking out, you can't explain it." The former Agricultural and Mechanical College of Texas is an institution rich in tradition and ritual, and has a cult(ure) that must seem often baffling to outsiders. Among other things, upperclassmen can insist that those in newer classes do push-ups in exchange for saying certain privileged words, and are typically taken seriously while doing this (at least during football season). By comparison, the value of setting lots of stuff on fire is obvious.
For all of the 20th Century and the first decade of the 21st, A&M's chief athletic nemesis was a certain university in Austin, and the tradition of Bonfire quickly became an annual rallying cry against the Longhorns. Few parts of the university's history better show the ferocious ambition of the Aggies than the almost Kurzweilian growth in the Bonfire stack's height in its first half-century. By 1969, while men from Earth walked upon the face of the Moon, the Bonfire reached a height of 109 feet, in what remains a record for bonfires anywhere. Surely history has shown the 1960s to be a decade ahead of its time. Cooler heads prevailed after that, and the university administration imposed clear limits on height and diameter out of concern for students' safety and the surrounding buildings' fire-suppression capabilities.
The administration's endorsement of Bonfire came to a painful, jarring halt in 1999 when the stack collapsed in the early-morning hours a week before its scheduled ignition. 12 students were killed and 27 injured when the joints holding the 5,000 logs together buckled and failed in what hopefully will remain the most traumatic single event in the university's history. An investigation revealed inadequate engineering of the structure, a lack of meaningful management accountability, and unsafe work practices to be contributing factors, and since then no Bonfire has burned on the A&M campus.
Four years after the tragedy of 1999 an independent Bonfire burned once again, this time far from campus proper, and under the supervision of professional structural engineering. A year after that a memorial was erected on the site of the collapse, and it's as much an introduction to that nebulous-but-meaningful Aggie Spirit that Gates was trying to talk about as it is a monument to the senselessness of what happened. The Aggies and Longhorns no longer play football each year, but Bonfire burns on, and the memories stay with us, and, hopefully, we learn from our mistakes.
It's interesting how complex engineered systems can seem to develop a personality without any conscious design intent. Sometimes automated obscenity filters develop an adorable combination of prudishness and boneheadedness, blocking perfectly normal (though sometimes awkward) proper nouns that contain letter strings that would be obscene on their own. You can read more about that here: The Scunthorpe Problem
The phenomenon is named for the town of Scunthorpe in North Lincolnshire, England. In 1996 AOL blocked Scunthorpe residents (Scunthorpians?) from registering accounts due to a certain four-letter string toward the beginning of their town's name. Take a good long look at the word and see if you can find what I'm talking about.
Years later the same problem arose, and was eventually corrected, in Google's language filter. The problem is by no means limited to eastern England, of course, and individual users like Craig Cockburn (Wikipedia helpfully suggests this is pronounced "coburn") and Herman Libshitz (no such help this time, alas) ran into trouble registering accounts with various email services due to a lack of specificity in the obscenity filters' scrutiny.
The must puzzling case is that of Linda Callahan, who was unable to register an account with Yahoo! for some time due to the presence of "allah" in her family name. I'm not quite sure what the world is coming to when the Arabic word for the God of Abraham and Isaac is considered obscene. Oh, well, at least Ms. Callahan was eventually able to check her email in peace.
Nuclear fission reactors are not exactly a human invention. Under the right conditions naturally-occurring fissile ore can spontaneously begin a nuclear chain reaction. You can read more about that here: Natural nuclear fission reactor
The Wikipedia article specifies that it refers to natural nuclear fission reactors, presumably to contrast the concept with the large number of natural nuclear fusion reactors (i.e. stars) in the universe. You could just as easily refer to the fission reactors as such and the stars as thermonuclear reactors (since fission can happen at any temperature while fusion requires obscenely hot places to work), so I left out the "fission" part out of this post's title. Whatever they're called, the basic idea is that whenever a sufficient amount of rich uranium ore gathers in a place with minerals that can moderate the speed of the reaction-sustaining neutrons without absorbing them completely, a self-sustaining nuclear reaction will begin. That's just how physics seems to work in this universe.
While stellar thermonuclear reactors abound in the cosmos, only one natural nuclear reactor is known to have existed on Earth. Nearly two billion years ago, in what's now west Africa, all the conditions were right for the Oklo reactor to begin reacting. ThisScientific American article provides a good overview of the fascinating details of Oklo's discovery and history. It looks like the reactor complex operated in an on-off cycle for a few hundred thousand years, running while groundwater seeped into the sandstone encasing the uranium ore, until the temperature rose enough to boil the neutron-moderating water away. Eventually fission products poisonous to further reactions built up until the reactor shut down for good 1.7 billion years ago. Surely this wasn't the only place this happened, but only at Oklo did the scene remain undisturbed until uranium miners came along in the mid-20th Century.
The numbers at Oklo give some insight into the tremendous energy that heavy atoms pack. Since the reactor complex wasn't designed for power, geologists and nuclear physicists estimate that it averaged about 200 kilowatts during its life, or about 270 horsepower in the deeply awkward and inconsistent units of the Imperial system. That might not sound like much, but consider that during Oklo's active life it consumed about five tons of uranium, converting it into lighter fission products like neodymium and ruthenium. Five tons of nuclear fuel sustained a power equivalent to a reasonable sports car engine at full throttle for hundreds of thousands of years. Oil might be the backbone of our energy economy for now, but it ain't got nothin' on uranium.
Carl Sagan famously said that people are starstuff contemplating the stars. His point was that the atoms are not now as they've always been, and that stars are the furnaces that churn the light atoms that emerged from the Big Bang into the heavier stuff that composes the planets and the creatures of Earth. This is how it usually works, but it's not always so. As we've seen before, the whole universe once made heavier atoms like the inside of a star, and some of the matter of our planet is only made when blindingly fast particles from deep space slam into Earth's atmosphere and surface. You can read more about that here: Cosmic ray spallation
There's a lull in the periodic table of the elements between helium and carbon. Helium was made in tremendous quantities during the Big Bang and by several generations of stars before the solar system came into being, and an efficient process exists in large stars to convert helium into carbon. Lithium, beryllium, and boron, the elements between helium and carbon in atomic weight, don't fit neatly into these standard creation stories, though, and are quickly burned up in stars and converted into more mundane stuff like carbon, oxygen, and neon.
As rare as these elements are, they still clearly exist on Earth. Without lithium batteries, cell phones would still be the size of bricks. Without beryllium, emeralds (beryllium ceramics with a hint of chromium) would be nowhere to be found. Without boron, the green flash of triethylborane igniters (pictured in a SpaceX Falcon 9 test above) would look much more mundane. The reason Earth is graced with their presence is because space is full of violent explosions that create particles that fly through the cosmos at close to the speed of light. When these small nuclei collide with each other, or with the atoms in planets and interstellar dust, they blast the atoms apart, and small fragments, the stuff of a boron atom, say, are left behind. It doesn't happen often enough to compete with the output of the stars, but it does happen often enough that emeralds aren't as rare as platinum, at least in the Earth's crust.
Not everything made by cosmic ray spallation is built to last. A small amount of radioactive carbon is constantly coming into being in the upper atmosphere when neutrons generated by cosmic ray collisions knock protons out of the nitrogen atoms that surround Earth. The neutrons take the protons' places, and the nitrogen is transmuted into carbon-14, which is chemically identical to the ordinary carbon-12 that makes everything from proteins to airplanes to diamonds, but radioactively decays with a half-life of about 5,700 years. To put that in perspective, the pyramids at Giza have about a millennium to go before they've been around for a carbon-14 half-life.
About one in a trillion carbon atoms on Earth is radioactive, and since the supply is constantly being replenished living things have the same amount of carbon-14 in their tissues as long as they keep breathing and eating. Once the mortal coil is shuffled off, though, the carbon decays without replacement, and by measuring the ratio of radioactive to ordinary carbon the time of death can be established with decent precision. Radiocarbon dating, as it's known, has become a staple of archaeology since the physics here was first figured out. Several other radioactive isotopes are also made by cosmic ray spallation, and provide a range of dating scales for similar work. As odd as it sounds, the afterglow of far off worlds gives us some of the best clues about how things work here at home.
On April 20, 1979, President Jimmy Carter was attacked by a large swimming rabbit in rural Georgia. You can read more about the incident here: Jimmy Carter rabbit incident
Seriously, go read that first sentence again and ponder this for a moment. White House press secretary Jody Powell had this to say about the incident: The President confessed to having had limited experience with enraged rabbits. He was unable to reach a definite conclusion about its state of mind. What was obvious, however, was that this large, wet animal, making strange hissing noises and gnashing its teeth, was intent upon climbing into the Presidential boat. Apparently many on Carter's staff were incredulous at his story at first blush, unwilling to imagine that rabbits could swim, or perhaps just unwilling to imagine that a rabbit could appear menacing to the leader of the world's biggest economy and second-largest nuclear power. Randall Munroe helpfully puts the event into its proper historical context here:
Indeed. Let us never forget the killer swamp rabbit of Georgia.
One of the most remarkable discoveries in the field of biology in the 20th Century was the recognition that coelacanths, lobe-finned fish eerily similar to land vertebrates in many ways, still roam hundreds of feet below the surface of the Indian Ocean. For a century, the fish was believed to be extinct since the time of the dinosaurs. The Intelligent Life piece referenced in the image credit has more to say on the matter (including the helpful pronunciation tip: "see-la-kanth"), and as is our custom, the Wikipedia article is here: Coelacanth
Among other things, the Intelligent Life piece contains such fun facts as the realization that lungfish have a genome 40 times longer than that of humans. This seems odd to me, but consider:
The notion that humans are somehow "more evolved" than other animals simply because our brains are complex is somewhere between nonsensical and silly.
Nature doesn't much care about what seems reasonable to us.
I haven't taken a biology class since 2007.
In any case, a heated debate arose in the mid-19th Century over whether the lungfish or the coelacanth was a more direct ancestor of modern terrestrial vertebrate life. As it turns out, genetic evidence suggests that the lungfish is closer to that branch on the evolutionary tree, but the coelacanth is still "more closely related to us than it is to a salmon or a shark." Whatever the lineage, it's a fascinating creature to watch, and our oceans are surely richer for having the coelacanths around:
The only metal-skinned airship ever flown was built at Grosse Ile, Michigan in 1929, and was operated by the US Navy until her scrapping in 1941. You can read more about the ship here: ZMC-2
Aerospace aluminum alloys are immensely strong and not very dense, which makes them ideal for applications where strength without (much) weight is essential. Unfortunately many alloys, particularly early in the history of metal aerospace structures, suffer from corrosion problems over the service life of an aircraft. Pure elemental aluminum has fantastic corrosion resistance, not because it resists oxidation, but because a thin layer of aluminum oxide (or corundum if you're into fancy mineral names) quickly forms on any exposed aluminum surface, and this coating is chemically identical to the stuff that sapphires and rubies are made of. Rather than flaking away as rust, weakening the structure as iron oxide does to steel, a little corundum goes a long way to protecting aluminum from the elements. Given the strength of aluminum alloyed with elements like copper, magnesium, and silicon, and the corrosion-resistance of pure aluminum, metallurgists developed a method in the 1920s to place a thin aluminum layer atop alloy plate without leaving behind a weak bondline. The result was alclad, and ZMC-2 was the first full-scale demonstration of an aircraft built with this technique.
In addition to the innovation in the material that composed her, ZMC-2 broke new ground in her structure. The orthodox way to build a zeppelin was to place bags of lifting gas in a metal frame, then cover the frame with fabric. ZMC-2 did away with that complexity by making the aluminum skin airtight, sealing in 200,000 cubic feet of helium without need for a separate structural truss or helium vessels. As long as the structural material is light enough, this simplicity ought to decrease vehicle weight, although installing the 3.5 million fluid-tight rivets must have been a pain in the ass. Today a less laborous technique like friction-stir welding would probably be used instead.
The most fascinating part of ZMC-2's story for me is the drama that ensued when she became buoyant for the first time. Blimps and conventional zeppelins fill flexible bags that can be evacuated of air with lifting gas in order to make lift, which is a relatively straightforward process. Since ZMC-2's helium vessel was rigid, engineers needed a way to extract the nitrogen and oxygen within while replacing it with helium, all while the gases were vigorously mixing at room temperature. Since helium was and remains rare and expensive on Earth, minimizing the loss of lifting gas was critical. Replacing the ambient air within with (cheap) carbon dioxide, which mixes more slowly with helium, seemed an elegant solution at first, until, as Wikipedia puts it, "a bright young engineer" pointed out that the ship would be many tons heavier when filled with carbon dioxide, stressing the structure unacceptably. Once the necessary sections of ship were reinforced the helium purge proceeded without apparent incident, and modern engineers are left hoping we can be so clever and observant when the time arises.
The deepest point beneath the Earth's surface created by humans is an experimental borehole drilled by the Soviet Union between 1970 and 1989 in the Kola Peninsula in northwest Russia. You can read more about it here: Kola Superdeep Borehole
The deepest spur of the borehole, labelled "SG-3" by the project's geophysicists, bottomed out after 19 years of on-and-off drilling at a depth of 12,262 meters (40,230 feet for those who don't like moving decimal places to convert units). This is short of the original depth goal of 15 kilometers, first due to mechanical problems with the drill and then from unexpectedly high temperatures in the well. In 1984 a 5-kilometer-long piece of drill string failed and was abandoned in the central hole. The project was forced to backtrack the length of the broken drill string and start drilling again off a side borehole, but when the temperature in SG-3 reached 180 degrees Celsius further progress was deemed unfeasible and the project fell into disarray amid the collapse of the Soviet Union and the painful depression that followed.
Propaganda value was part of the reason why the Soviets chose to dig so deep at Kola, since there was no equivalent western program that could claim to reach deeper into the Earth. That said, a good deal of geophysical knowledge came from the Kola borehole during its prime, including a better understanding of the transitions that happen in rock structure deep within the Earth's crust and the discovery of large amounts of water and hydrogen sequestered far below the surface. It's a shame an earlier American program to reach deep under the oceanic crust faltered due to a lack of funds.
Nowadays the deepest wells beneath the surface are drilled for profit rather than science. Before its horrifying and public demise the Deepwater Horizon platform drilled to within a mile of the depth of the Kola borehole to extract oil lurking beneath the Gulf of Mexico. Drilling technology has advanced so quickly that getting the oil out of the ground wasn't anywhere near as difficult as stopping it once it the flow was started. The era of herculean effort to sip petroleum won't last forever, though, and hopefully this technology will be applied to exploration in the open-ended sense once again. After all, something seems odd about a people who have touched the Moon but never reached very far under their own feet.
In the spring of 1943 the British Security Service MI5 launched a plan to place false intelligence documents in the hands of the Abwehr. The objective was to convince Hitler that Allied forces intended to invade Greece and Sardinia that summer, rather than their true objective of Sicily, and it succeeded spectacularly. Ben Macintyre wrote a wonderful account of the full operation, but more briefly you can learn about the plan and its execution here: Operation Mincemeat
Sicily was the obvious target of choice in the western European theater once the campaign in north Africa was concluded and the invasion of Normandy was not yet ready. To improve their chances of success Allied intelligence attempted to divert as much Axis resistance as possible through a systematic campaign to convince the Axis heads of state that Sicily was not going to be the next target, even though strategically that conclusion seemed inevitable. To help, a British Intelligence team lead by Charles Cholmondeley, Ewen Montagu (brother of table tennis enthusiast and Soviet spy Ivor), and Ian Fleming (yes, that Ian Fleming) enlisted the help of the espionage demimonde of neutral Spain, the submarine HMS Seraph, and the body of a Welsh vagrant named Glyndwr Michael, disguised as a Royal Marine officer. Spy folks have come up with some odd ideas over the years, but this stands out even among that crowd.
Michael died, possibly by accident and possibly by suicide, in London in January of 1943 after ingesting a lethal amount of phosphorous-based rat poison. Having no next of kin, no property, and few if any acquaintances, it was easy for the reality of Glyndwr Michael to disappear. MI5 agents crafted an elaborate backstory for a Marine Major named Bill Martin and assigned it, along with a briefcase full of official-looking documents outlining a planned invasion of the islands of the Aegean and Sardinia, to Michael's body. The plan was for the newly-minted officer to be placed just off the coast of Spain, floating face-down in a life jacket, providing a reasonable simulacrum of a drowned plane crash casualty. Hopefully someone would find him shortly thereafter and take him ashore for examination by Spanish and Nazi spies.
Once the plan's form was finalized and the documents made ready, the fabricated Marine was shuttled to the coast of Andalusia by way of the Seraph in an airtight capsule filled with dry ice for preservation. In the early morning hours of April 30, after some brief drama on the surface that involved rigging the seemingly-unsinkable capsule with plastic explosive to facilitate destruction of its evidence, Major Martin was sent on his one-way mission of deception. Later that day he was indeed found by local fishermen, and eventually worked his way to the Spanish authorities.
Mincemeat, as the operation was code-named, was a production that only made sense if you wanted to believe it anyway. Phosphorous poisoning doesn't look much like drowning, and after spending three months in a morgue, Michael's body was in poor condition to pass for a recent plane crash victim. Still, the Germans were eager for any news about Allied plans after their anxious retreat from Africa, and were willing to look past the parts that didn't fit together and see a coherent story behind Major Martin. The record seems to show that Hitler found the plant convincing, and even after the invasion of Sicily began he was convinced that it was nothing more than a diversion from a real, upcoming assault further east in the Mediterranean. Sometimes the most convincing lies come from those who don't speak at all.
The Wilhelm scream is a stock sound effect that's been used in over 200 films and television shows since its introduction in 1951. You can read more about it here: Wilhelm scream
If you've seen any of the Star Wars or Indiana Jones movies or almost any Disney movie made in the '90s, you've heard the Wilhelm scream. It's not, strictly speaking, a good effect, but it's become something of an inside joke in Hollywood. Quentin Tarantino, the guru of film-making pastiche, seems to have a deep affection for the Wilhelm scream, using it in many of his movies as well. This is probably the surest sign of the campy impact the effect has had.
To get a better sense of what I'm talking about, you may find the following video helpful:
On the fifth of November of 1605 a group of conspirators planned to destroy the British House of Lords, with the objective of assassinating King James and installing his daughter Elizabeth as a Catholic head of state of the United Kingdom. The plot failed when Guy Fawkes was found with 36 barrels of gunpowder after an an anonymous letter tipped off the authorities, and you can read more about it here: The Gunpowder Plot
To be honest, I don't know a whole lot about 17th Century British history, but since Hugo Weaving's character in V for Vendetta insists we remember the Gunpowder Plot, there you go. Clearly the conspiracy was part of the dark political-religious hypnagogia that Europe was in the middle of the last millennium. The ideas of Thomas Jefferson and Karl Marx, a political man aloof to religion and one hostile toward it, have so thoroughly embedded themselves in the public consciousness of the world today that it's difficult imagining people in the western world seriously contemplating blowing up buildings to install religious dictatorships. The worst acts of terrorism in our time seem to be more motivated by a rejection of foreign influence, or of any authority at all, rather than by a pragmatic will to change the guard.
But back then the Bishop of Rome also governed a significant part of what's now Italy and the Thirty Years' War, a savage generation-long conflict between Protestant- and Catholic-aligned states that was the single worst thing to happen to Europe since the Black Death, was nearly at hand. Christianity, corruption, and government were deeply mingled, and the Church was hemorrhaging in the bloodiest way that could then be imagined. No wonder America seemed like such an appealing place.
To celebrate the successful thwarting of the attack, a tradition emerged of lighting bonfires and fireworks on that day in the UK. This is reasonable, because bonfires are cool.
One of the closest and youngest neutron stars to Earth is a brilliant gamma-ray source 800 light-years away in the constellation Gemini. It turns out to be closely tied to the history and present makeup of the galaxy near the solar system and the recent history of life on Earth, and you can read more about it here: Geminga
Known as Geminga, the star baffled astronomers for two decades until it was found to send out faint pulses of X-rays four times a second with astonishing faithfulness, an unambiguous signature of a pulsar.Until that discovery what was known was that there was a very strong beacon of gamma radiation coming from Gemini that didn't seem to be connected to any physical object. The name its discoverers' chose was a clever double entendre, both a prosaic abbreviation of "Gemini gamma-ray source" and a clever adoption of a Milanese dialect word meaning "It's not there."
Geminga is there, and is close as far as stellar remnants go. It's also young, cosmically speaking. Its main sequence life ended in a spectacular supernova about 300,000 years ago. People more or less as we are now roamed the Earth back then, in Africa, the Middle East, and Europe, and since Gemini is close to the celestial equator people in both hemispheres would've seen an explosion bright enough to cast shadows at night and see in broad daylight. While they gazed at the sky and puzzled at what was going on, the supernova was so powerful it blasted away much of the interstellar medium around the Sun, and to this day the space around us bears the scar from Geminga's final days of stellar life. Meanwhile high-energy cosmic rays rained down upon the Earth, subtly altering the DNA of the Africans and the Neanderthals. As the Local Bubble bears the mark of Geminga, so do our genomes.
At least, that's how the story was told in my undergrad astronomy class. Apparently the consensus is now that a series of supernovae in the Pleiades is the more likely explanation for the dearth of matter near the Sun. Either way, we know more than we once did, and it's always stirring to know how we're connected to the cosmos around us.
From the beginning of the space age to the end of the Apollo program in 1972, the United States (and to a lesser extent the Soviet Union) took a serious look at using nuclear reactors for spacecraft propulsion. In the US, the program was known as Nuclear Engine for Rocket Vehicle Application, or NERVA, and resulted in a design deemed flightworthy by NASA before the program's cancellation. You can read more about it here: NERVA
Rockets work by adding energy to a propellant, then using a nozzle to harness this energy into momentum used to drive the ship forward. Thermal rockets start the process by heating the propellant up, chemical thermal rockets in a combustion chamber, and nuclear thermal rockets in a reactor. Less dryly, you can think of a nuclear thermal rocket as a very hot teakettle, powered by a nuclear reactor, with the spout replaced with a nozzle intended to shoot out steam as fast as possible. By "very hot," I mean hot enough to melt steel, and by "as fast as possible," I mean faster than satellites in low Earth orbit. Uranium and plutonium pack a big kick in a small package.
Why go to all the political and, potentially, environmental trouble of launching a nuclear reactor into space? The answer has to do with the materials used to build the nozzle, and the propellant exhausted through it. The hotter the propellant is, the faster its molecules are going on average, and therefore the more thrust it delivers per gram of exhaust. This is why hotter-burning engines are more efficient, but there's a maximum temperature any practical nozzle can reach before it weakens, melts, or does something else bad from an engineering standpoint. For the same temperature, molecules with lower molecular weight move faster, so ideally you'd use the smallest molecules available. For practical engines, that turns out to be molecular hydrogen.
Chemical rockets burn fuel and oxidizer, releasing energy and creating propellant in the form of the reaction's product in the same step. This means that a chemical rocket designer doesn't have direct control over the exhaust composition. Adding unburned hydrogen to the exhaust (a trick used on the Space Shuttle Main Engines) only buys a little bit of performance until the exhaust temperature decrease nullifies any efficiency increase from reduced molecular weight. Since nuclear thermal rockets keep the fuel (the reactor's uranium) and propellant separate, virtually any propellant can be used. For this reason, nuclear thermal rockets typically were designed with hydrogen in mind, but ammonia has also been considered due to its relatively low molecular weight and excellent heat transfer properties.
Most spacecraft propulsion strategies offer high thrust but low efficiency (like chemical rockets) or high efficiency at low thrust (like ion engines). NERVA's thrust couldn't quite match that of chemical rockets like the SSME, and its thrust per unit propellant (specific impulse, a good measure of mission efficiency for spacecraft engines) wasn't as good as an ion thruster, but it packed a combination of both that was nearly perfect for sending large payloads from Earth to Mars in a short amount of time. Since the most sensible program for such an engine was human exploration of Mars, extensive NASA study began on this subject in the late-1960s and early-1970s, with a goal of boots on the red planet by 1980 if the funding held up. In the event, the funding was axed, and NASA barely survived the development of the Space Shuttle, a programmatic consolation prize for the loss of people on Mars in the 20th Century.
Still, the physics of nuclear reactions and hydrogen through the nozzle haven't changed since 1972. NERVA, or an engine much like it, will almost certainly be involved when people finally do start crossing deep space to venture to the planets. Ideas that make sense sometimes get shelved for a while, but one day NERVA's true time will come.
Humans evolved as pursuit predators, so it makes sense that understanding the relationships between form, space, and physical objects is an essential part of the way our brains work. Geometry is such an intuitive human faculty, many people never give it a second thought, but the history of knowledge is full of profound insight lurking when the most intuitive assumptions are contemplated. The history of geometry is no different, and you can read more about what I mean here: History of geometry
Literally, geometry means "Earth measurement" in Greek, but since Earth is complicated, geometry typically starts with more primitive thing like points, lines, and arcs. It's difficult to define exactly what a point, a line, or an arc are, but we seem to have a reasonable grasp of these things even though they're difficult to define by themselves. As one of my math-major friends put it: "What is a point? Geometricians can't say, but the axioms describe how
they behave, and how they interact with lines, also undefined. You might as
well call them tables and chairs, or pips and peeps." Since the time of Euclid geometry has been built on the process of deriving theorems from each other and from fundamental axioms. Theorems are the children of axioms and the rules of logic, so they're transparent and well-insulated from mystery, but the rules and axioms themselves are a bit mysterious. They don't really come from anywhere but assumptions about reality. To clarify, let's talk about parallel lines for a moment. What does it mean for two lines to be parallel? Intuitively you might guess that two lines are parallel if they point the same direction, that if this is the case the lines never meet (or, more rigorously, meet at infinity), and that there ought to be a way to prove this from some more basic information about the construction of reality. Euclid and a small army of mathematicians who came after him for two millennia tried to do that and failed every time, having to accept that "parallel lines meet at infinity" is an axiom.
Since axioms aren't proved from anything, it's reasonable to ask what happens if you change them. What if parallel lines meet at a finite distance, or diverge forever at infinity? That seems nonsensical if you think of space as an infinite homogeneous grid, like a sheet of graph paper in every direction, but what if space curves and puckers like a hammock on a lazy afternoon?
In the 1800s geometers began seriously looking at what would happen in such a world. Surprisingly, such a world is counterintuitive but conceivable, and geometry where parallel lines bend toward or away from each other seemed to be fertile to new, consistent theorems. It was interesting, but many thought there was a touch of esotericness to these theories. Charles Lutwidge Dodgson went so far as to write a scathing critique of what he saw as a debasement of mathematical rigor among those working on non-Euclidian geometry. All this critiquing came to a screeching halt when the theories of Albert Einstein and the experimental confirmation that shortly followed showed unambiguously that we live in a world where straight lines ain't necessarily straight.
The history of geometry is a rich subject, and there's much more to it than knowledge of parallel lines. There's more than I could possibly hope to cover as a layman in one blog post, so here's one last story, as told by someone indispensible in any discussion of math, Vi Hart. Pythagoras, one of the giants of pre-Socratic philosophy and founders of geometry, may totally have murdered a dude over the square root of 2:
You might say that's an... irrational thing to do.
The oldest lighthouse on the coast of Maine is located at Cape Elizabeth, just south of Portland. It was commissioned by president-elect George Washington in 1787, finished four years later, and you can read more about it here: Portland Head Light
From the perspective of aesthetics the coast of Maine is beautiful, but from the perspective of navigation it's a nightmare out of the fiction of Lovecraft. Much of the coast was encased in kilometers of ice until just a few millennia ago, and when the glaciers retreated they carved deep jagged gashes into the bedrock from New Hampshire to New Brunswick. As the oceans warmed and expanded, the valleys turned to fjords and the hills into a vast field of islands and reefs. There simply hasn't been time for erosion to temper the sharp will of the land, so the lighthouses of Maine are an essential part of keeping ship traffic bound for Portland, Bath, and Bar Harbor afloat.
Lighthouses are charming in part because they're so practical. The need to not run your ship aground on a sharp piece of granite dictates function essentially the same way whether you pilot a clipper, a trawler, or the Queen Mary 2. There's thus little need to ever update a lighthouse's exterior, so even as the whale oil lamps are replaced with arc lamps, the house itself timelessly blinks on.
The past, as they say, is a different country. They do things differently there. Much of what happened in the late-1970s popular culture has fallen victim to an Orwellian kind of amnesia, which is probably a good thing for the most part when you consider what our pop culture is like today and assume that we live in a mostly ordinary time. Youtube has done much to rehabilitate some of the more wonderful iconography of absurdity from this time, though, and I'd like to take a moment to highlight some of the memories that I'm glad to see rekindled.
First, something that's a bit less like the rest because it came from the other side of the Berlin Wall. In 1976 a baritone vocalist named Eduard Khil sang what was supposed to be the ballad "I am Glad, 'Cause I'm Finally Returning Back Home" (as previously mentioned, the Russians have the best names for everything), but it came out as gibberish that would one day fuel an entire internet subculture of memes:
According to Wikipedia, the song originally featured lyrics such as: I'm riding the prairie on my stallion, a mustang as such, and my sweetheart Mary now knits a stocking for me, a thousand miles away from here Presumably something is lost in translation, but the fact that Khil would've been singing about riding "a mustang as such" had he stuck to the script just makes me fall in love even more.
Enjoy gibberish, but find Soviet nonsense too foreign and bleak? Perhaps this simulation (due to Adriano Celentano) of what English sounds like to non-English speakers will be more to your liking:
Listening to Celentano's lyrics feels a little like leaning over a precipice and never quite being able to fall. The phonemes and structure all seem to match the model of what English is supposed to sound like, but the puzzle pieces don't fit together in a way that makes sense. So I sit, always on the edge of an understanding that just eludes my grasp. Sometimes I'm tempted to say things like this, and then I remember that "OLL RAIGTH!" is a more appropriate response. To be honest, I don't have much clever to say about the next video other than "The Eurovision Song Contest is weird:"
In all fairness, I'm sure most Americans do seven things before breakfast equally baffling to those who tuned into the Eurovision '79 contest to see Dschinghis Khan's entry. Still...
Finally, here's Boney M., another band invented for Eurovision giving a surprisingly workable description of the bizarre final years of Grigori Rasputin's life:
The largest mountain by volume on the planet Earth is a shield volcano that extends from the abyssal plain between Japan and Midway to about two kilometers below the surface of the Pacific Ocean. You can read more about it here: Tamu Massif
Mauna Loa had long been thought to be the most voluminous mountain on Earth, and still seems to be the biggest with a peak above sea level. Though there are many places with peaks higher above sea level, the great shield volcanoes of the Hawaiian islands are much higher from base to peak than the Himalayas or the Andes. They just start out quite a bit lower. Mauna Kea reaches about 120 feet higher above the Pacific than Mauna Loa, but it's been much less active than its southern cousin in recent years, and as a result most of the bulk of the island of Hawaii is counted as part of Mauna Loa's mass. The mountain complex is in fact nearly the same size as Mars's Olympus Mons, but gravity is much stronger on here than on Mars, and Mauna Kea crushes the bedrock beneath it into a deep furrow in the Pacific Plate. On Mars, where gravity isn't quite so intense, the tops of volcanoes tower well above anything on Earth.
Tamu Massif can't compete with anything in Hawaii, or even the Maldives, when it comes to elevation above sea level, but the mountain is quite impressive when considered relative to the ocean floor. The massif measures over 14,000 feet from base to peak, comparable to the heights of the highest points in California, Colorado, and Washington, though its slope is far more gradual. With slopes rarely greater than one degree, it takes a base the size of New Mexico to reach such a height, and this gives Tamu its edge over Mauna Loa in girth if not in height.
Mauna Loa has been known to people since at least the 6th Century, and to Europeans since the 18th, but Tamu Massiff was not known to be a single mountain until this year. The deep ocean is a thoroughly hostile environment to people, and even at the peak's summit the ambient pressure is 200 times greater than that at the ocean's surface. This makes exploration of the oceans difficult, and it wasn't until significant drilling operations had been conducted throughout the region that the basalt of the massif could be shown to have a single source. Earth is much better explored and better understood than any other planet in the universe, but clearly we have a long way to go before we can say that our homeland is fully explored.
One of the distinguishing features of the Roman Catholic Church relative to other branches of Christianity is the Church's assertion that, under very limited circumstances, people are capable of speaking without possibility of error. You can read more about that here: Papal infallibility
In this case, the category of "people" is restricted to the Pope, and the limits of those circumstances are a bit more constricting than you might expect. The claim is that infallible statements only occur when the Pope speaks ex cathedra to define that a doctrine concerning faith or morals that must be held by all in the Church. One of my friends described speaking ex cathedra as "The Catholic equivalent of Super Saiyan;" more rigorous definitions exist in the Catechism and on Wikipedia.
The result is that infallibility is invoked very rarely, and if you encounter Catholics who believe that everything the Pope says is unquestionable (I haven't actually met any such people, but people on the internet claim this happens), they're probably confused. Pope Pius XII made the only statement that fits all the criteria of infallibility since the doctrine was rigorously asserted during the first Vatican Council in 1870, affirming the dogma of the Assumption of Mary in 1950. Before Vatican I, Pope Pius IX's definition of the dogma of the Immaculate Conception of Mary is the only teaching that Catholic theologians agree was infallible. As the current Pope Emeritus put it more recently, "The Pope is not an oracle..." Understanding how things work is hard. People have been working relentlessly for as long as we've lived on the Earth to find ways to discern truth in a universe that seems really weird and counterintuitive most of the time. The idea of Papal infallibility is that there's another avenue by which our minds' can be graced by truth about the reality we live in. Arguments whether or not it might be true are beyond the scope of this blog (though I sometimes touch on them at my other one), but I find the idea fascinating that humans can, through reliable but sometimes fallible methods of reasoning, reach a point where they can say in confidence that truth can, in some limited, intermittent way, shine clearly, and the optimism about humanity embedded in the idea is lovely. As usual, these are just observations (and some blatant reposting from Wikipedia). The real interesting argument is outside the scope of this post.
The most violent event ever observed in the solar system happened in Jupiter's southern hemisphere between July 16 and July 22, 1994. A series of 22 comet fragments known as Shoemaker-Levy 9 collided with the planet at 60 kilometers per second, about seven and a half times faster than the International Space Station orbits Earth, and left behind a series of impact scars and mushroom clouds each similar in size to the Earth. You can read more about the event here: Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9
Shoemaker-Levy 9 was initially about five kilometers across, comparable in size to the asteroid that caused the K-T extinction event that killed off most of the dinosaurs. Two years before the collision, the comet had approached, but just missed Jupiter, binding it gravitationally to the planet. Tidal forces from that encounter ripped the nucleus apart into a series of comet fragments that the discoverers likened to "pearls on a string." Because of this encounter, the comet wound up impacting Jupiter in a series of relatively low-speed blows rather than a single interplanetary-speed slam, but the total energy delivered to the atmosphere was still equivalent to about six trillion tons of TNT, on the order of 600 times the combined explosive energy of every nuclear weapon ever built by humans. Kinetic energy packs quite a punch at the speeds things move in space.
The string of impacts in July 1994 were tremendous not just for their awesome scale, but in their good timing. Even Jupiter, the most massive and bulky planet in the solar system, doesn't encounter an object so big very often. Shoemaker-Levy 9 was probably the first comet so big to strike any planet in the solar system since the beginning of civilization, and it came along just after the Hubble Space Telescope's flawed mirror optics were repaired, and the Galileospacecraft, five years along on her six-year voyage to Jupiter, had a direct view of impacts on the far side of Jupiter from Earth. Observing the impact of Shoemaker-Levy 9 is the kind of once-in-a-lifetime opportunity astronomers dream about.
Like the Tunguska Event of 1908 or the Chelyabinsk meteor of this year, Shoemaker-Levy 9 is a reminder that though the skies seem changeless on a human scale, we actually live in a dynamic and potentially hostile clime where every once and a while cataclysmic intersections of planets and mountain-size icebergs occur. We'd do well to heed the warning embedded in the messages we take in through our telescopes and spacecraft.
It's convenient to think of our senses as separate data channels, each delivering information of a different type faithfully to the brain. While that's true on a basic level, the picture of the world we perceive in our minds is actually quite a bit adjusted from what's taken in by the ears, eyes, skin, and organs, and it stands to reason that some of signals get mixed up in the processing. One of the most startling such cases is the McGurk effect, which you can read more about here: McGurk effect
Like the Matrix, though, the McGurk effect needs to be seen to be truly understood:
The world is complicated, and our minds are quite sophisticated as well. It makes sense that some odd quirks in the system emerge when we try to make sense of the universe using senses that are at best fallible and at worst downright kludge-y. Still, the McGurk effect is one of those illusions that pushes the envelope of the ways we're able to misinterpret what's happening.
I don't have much time tonight, so I'll be upfront about why I think The Chemical Brothers's 1997 Grammy-winning single "Block Rockin' Beats" is notable. In short, this video, one of the best that exists on youtube:
When Robert Heinlein famously said that Earth orbit is halfway to anywhere in the solar system, he was speaking more of the difficulty of permanently leaving the surface of the Earth than of the ease of voyaging across interplanetary space. Even the lowest-energy stable geocentric orbits require speed beyond easy comprehension, something Randall Munroe discussed on his indispensable "What if?" blog a few weeks ago. For this reason rocket makers have sought every assistance imaginable in bootstrapping their way toward space, and if at all possible launch eastward to gain a little nudge from the rotation of the Earth. Since launch sites closer to the equator maximize this boost, and also reduce the need for expensive plane change maneuvers in orbit, a consortium of Ukrainian, Russian, Norwegian, and American companies thought "Why not simplify matters by towing the launch site into the middle of the ocean?" You can read more about their joint venture here: Sea Launch
Sea Launch does exactly what you'd expect form it's name. The rocket (a Zenit 3-SL, an amalgam of former Soviet stages perfected by decades of sending reconnaissance spacecraft to spy on America's arsenal of weapons of mass destruction) launches from the sea, more specifically from a patch of remote Pacific Ocean far from shipping lanes and inhabited shorelines so the system can set its own schedule without concern for competition from rival launch services for range time or raids from pirates. Since most of the spacecraft carried by Sea Launch are bound for geostationary orbits, a launch site on the equator allows it to reach a pinpoint-accurate circular orbit with no inclination to the equator more easily and efficiently than rockets can from anywhere else in the world. The tradeoff is the need to operate two large ships and a three-stage launch vehicle far from civilization and a long lonely trip from any resupply, but the trade has proved sufficiently sweet to fetch 35 launches so far. Sometimes complicated ideas make life simpler in rocket science.
Sea Launch is based on rugged Cold War-era technology, but three of its launches have failed so far, two spectacularly. In 2007 one of the turbopumps on the first stage ingested a piece of debris not cleared from the propellant tanks during production, shutting the vehicle's propulsion system down a few seconds after launch. If nothing else, the failure validated Sea Launch's two-ship philosophy that evacuates everyone from the launch platform to an independent command ship just before departure:
Earlier this year, another Sea Launch Zenit failed in first stage flight, this time apparently due to faulty guidance:
Venturing into the cosmic ocean remains a difficult enterprise even today, more than half a century after the first human explorers ventured there, and even with a strong profit motive from the commercial telecom industry. Sea Launch shows that our ability to work here is growing in fits and starts, not monotonically, but at least we're growing. That humans do such baroque things, and actually seem to be reasonably successful at it most of the time, never ceases to amaze me.
.jpg)
,_%D0%B0%D0%B2%D0%B3%D1%83%D1%81%D1%82_2012.JPG)
