The Making of the Boeing 777

One of the biggest and riskiest ventures in Boeing's history was the decision to develop the 777 (pronounced "triple seven"). Shortly after that airplane reached the market, PBS aired a documentary on the decision, development, test, and production process in taking the 777 from concept to machine. The first segment of that documentary is here:

The rest of the program (all five hours of it) can be viewed here. Boeing was a different beast back in those days. After the preliminary design on the 777 began in 1990 the Soviet Union collapsed and most of the great aerospace companies of the Cold War merged for survival. What were once North American Rockwell and McDonnell Douglas are now parts of Boeing, and the commercial air transports riveted and bonded together in Renton and Everett are a smaller slice of the total pie now.

It's astonishing how successful the 777 has been since entering service in 1995. It's safer, more reliable, and more efficient than anything else flying. More than a thousand have been delivered since then and only two have been lost to accidents (and only one of those was carrying passengers at the time). No passengers or crew have ever died because something on a 777 failed. This record is unlikely to last forever, but it's a testament to how far commercial aviation has come over the last century and how refined that design and build process has become. With luck, the 787 will do all the 777 does well even better.

Vanilla

Other connotations of the word "vanilla" aside, the flavoring derived from the vanilla vine was one of the major drivers of early trans-Atlantic trade and remains, pound for pound, the second-most expensive spice that's commercially grown (after saffron). You can read more about it here:
Vanilla

400 years ago the nations of Europe were willing to invest in sophisticated and expensive exploration programs to transport goods like vanilla, which only grows naturally in tropical Mexico, to the east. The modern corollary would be if large quantities of easily-obtained oil existed on the surface of Mars. Just as Mars is another world today, America truly was a new world, distant, wild, and wonderful. It would be centuries before the chemical industry would find the makeup of vanillin and begin producing it in quantity, and until then the thought of associating the simple pure beauty of its flavor dancing on the tongue with ordinariness would've been unthinkable. I'm an optimist when it comes to technology, but it pains me to see the way dullness seems always to nip at the heels of enlightenment.

Also the etymology of the word "vanilla" is interesting. Shockingly, this SMBC comic isn't too far off from the truth.

Kelvin-Helmholtz Instability

Cloud formations like those pictured above happen in real life. They're uncommon on Earth, but are ubiquitous on the outer gas giant planets, and are driven by velocity shear between dissimilar fluids or streams within a fluid. This results in an instability that was first described by Kelvin and Helmholtz, and you can read more about it here:
Kelvin-Helmholtz Instability

As interesting as the fluid dynamics aspect of this is, the real reason I'm posting this is an excuse to route people to pictures of pretty clouds and computer models. Seriously, run the numerical simulation video at the Wikipedia page. Your retinas will be glad you did.

Sometimes the universe is just pretty.

Operation Eagle Claw

Oscar season aside, almost everything associated with the Iranian hostage crisis was humiliation at best and tragedy at worst for the United States. The lowest trough came when eight American troops lost their lives in a bungled attempt to land Delta Force commandos by way of helicopter and CIA trucks into Tehran. You can read more about that here:
Operation Eagle Claw

Eagle Claw was a disaster every bit as much as the Candian Caper was a success. The tremendous complexity of the plan provided many opportunities for failure, and failure came knocking early and often. The fixed-wing transports clipped their wings on landing, dust in the wind turned the air opaque, hydraulics in the helicopters failed, and finally two aircraft blinded by dust plowed into each other on the ground, starting a raging fire in the middle of a deeply hostile country. Along with that time he was chased by a killer jackrabbit in a swamp, this was surely one of the darkest days in Carter's presidency. Argo fuck yourselves, indeed.

Limerence

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Our language always seems incomplete in some way when we talk about love. There are so many coupled emotions, desires, and states of mind that it's hard to untangle the mess into something coherent. The concept of limerence comes from attachment theory as an attempt to isolate the state of romantic attraction and desire for reciprocity from the general mish-mash of agape and eros. You can read more about it here:
Limerence

I'm not a sociologist, so I can't say much for attachment theory's utility to understanding more about human relationships. I do find it interesting, though, how the most intimate and powerful experiences people have can also be so alien and slippery when we try to lock them down with unchanging definitions. Maybe there's a lesson here, that human experiences don't really work that way, or maybe we just haven't hit on the right ideas yet. I'm not a guru or a Bodhisattva either, so I couldn't say.

Big Bang Nucleosynthesis

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Not all the atoms that surround you and compose your body came from stars. A small but nontrivial portion of them were forged shortly after the Big Bang, when the entire universe acted like an endless thermonuclear reactor. You can read more about that here:
Big Bang Nucleosynthesis

Carl Sagan wasn't telling the whole story when he said "We are starstuff." When the universe cooled off sufficiently for energy to crystallize into the humdrum particles that compose ordinary matter there were only protons and electrons, the stuff of hydrogen, at first. Within a few milliseconds those particles started bonking into each other and rearranging into the heavier stuff of helium, lithium, and beryllium, and this continued until the reaction was too cold to continue a few minutes later. While the scales of energy and mass are beyond all hope of human comprehension early in the universe, the timescales are easily understood in terms of ordinary life, somewhere between the blink of an eye and a clip from Top Gear.

I don't know very much about quantum physics, and I confess that much of the nuances of nuclear physics in the article are lost on me. Protons, neutrons, and heavier aggregates collide. Sometimes they merge, sometimes they split, sometimes soaking up energy from their surroundings and sometimes releasing it in the electromagnetic sea. I understand that this happens, but can't give a good explanation for what really drives it and its odd quirks. Why is helium-4 so inert and deuterium so ready come apart? Why does tritium glow with radioactivity while her daughter helium-3 is so quiet? Why are there no easily-formed stable nuclei between beryllium and carbon? The one part that makes perfect sense to me is that almost no carbon was formed in the Big Bang. The triple-alpha process requires three helium nuclei to arrive at the same place at almost exactly the same time, an event of such serendipity I'm amazed it ever happens at all. But happen it surely did, over thousands of years, in the stars that came after. The stuff of airships is still harmonizing into the stuff of diamonds today in stars close to the end of their main sequence lives.

As simple as many of the basic physical laws of the universe seem to be, the complexity of the way they come together to compose the forms around us is the stuff that awe is made of. Bizarre as it all is, Big Bang and stars and planets and comets and all that, the system does seem to work. We're here, after all.

"The Ghost Inside"

Christina Hendricks, of Mad Men and Firefly fame, also starred in the music video for one of the songs from Broken Bells's debut album. More on that here:

About half the songs on Broken Bells are mediocre, and the other half are shockingly good. "The Ghost Inside" is one of the good ones, and Ms. Hendricks's presence makes the music video that much more delightful. Seriously, what other effect could it have?

The video has a camp factor that's off-scale-high and I've never much cared for Broken Bells's lyrics. That said, the sweet percussive melody of the song is lovely, and Christina Hendricks is like a work of art. File this under "interesting but why?"

Rationality and Fideism

It wouldn't make sense to turn this blog into a compilation of blog posts that I find interesting. The premise of this place already has a vague clip-show feel to it, and something seems uncomfortably meta about just re-blogging old things that make me think differently than I did before. That said, perspective-changing insight can come just as well from the musings of people who write on blogger as it can from esoteric corners of Wikipedia and Ted. Your mileage may vary, but I think this example of Orthodox Yale debate nerd replying to atheist Yale debate nerd meets that standard:
Tristyn Bloom on crypto-fideism

As an aside, I have no idea how I wind up on such random parts of the internet.

Christianity has had such a privileged and overwhelming influence on our society over the centuries that the signal of orthodox Christian philosophy has been garbled by the noise of society. In the public sphere in the United States, Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam, and Tao seem exotic and countercultural, while Christianity seems bland and antiseptic. The ideas Ms. Bloom discusses are hardly bland, and seem at odds with much of the folk beliefs that are casually associated with mainstream Christianity. The message is that legalism is as dead a philosophy as relativism, and if the other way, that of following Christ and the saints based on some very sketchy writings that have survived the millennia, seems too murky for comfort, well, that's just part of growing up. I have a very different perception of what Christianity is and what its real teachings and insight are now than I had before moving away to college, and conceptions like these are much of what's driven that development.

There's more to those vanilla ideas than you think there is. Take a step back, clear your mind, and take a look.

The 1700 Cascadia Earthquake

The last time there was a megathrust earthquake in the contiguous 48 states was January 26, 1700, when a thousand-kilometer long stretch of the North American plate slipped 20 meters just off the coasts of Washington and Oregon. You can read more about that here:
1700 Cascadia earthquake

Megathrust earthquakes are an ordinary part of the background noise of Earth's geology, but they're bad news bears for civilization. When large parts of Earth's crust slip beneath the lithosphere in a matter of minutes the planet's axis shifts, days perceptibly shorten, and tsunamis wander across oceans. There have been three megathrust earthquakes in the last decade, one near Sumatra, one in Chile, and one near Honshu. That kind of frequency is rare, geologically speaking. The last one before the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake was 40 years earlier, in Alaska. Interestingly, the date of the 1700 Cascadia earthquake is known so precisely because it was powerful enough to send large tsunamis to Japan later that day. The Japanese kept better written records than the Chinook back then.

Big earthquakes are less common in Cascadia than they are in Japan, Alaska, and the South American west coast, but they're no less hazardous. The fault that caused the Tohoku earthquake of two years ago is almost identical to the fault off our northwest coast. There's no sense worrying about it unproductively, but it's something to be respected and prepared for from Crescent City to Victoria.

Operation Bongo II

In 1964, a joint FAA-NASA-Air Force program intentionally caused 1,253 sonic booms of increasing frequency and intensity over Oklahoma City in experiment to study the social effects of supersonic air travel. You can read more about the program here:
Oklahoma City Sonic Boom Testing

The thrust of the experiment was to see how annoying and disruptive repetitive airplane-generated shock waves would be on the general population. For context, it's important to remember that the mid-1960s was a time when environmental concerns were just starting to become a major consideration in the choices made by engineers and large organizations, and nobody knew how bad was too bad in terms of noise pollution. In theory, the maximum overpressures generated (about 2 pounds per square foot) were too weak to shatter glass, but it soon became clear that glass was in fact shattering, often, and that hazardous work like surgery and construction was being seriously disrupted. Oklahoma City was chosen because it was thought that the city's population would be more amicable to testing than others, dependent as their economy was on a major FAA center and Air Force base. The booms were unacceptable there, the experiment said, and by extrapolation anywhere else on land.

In the end it was the drag caused by pressure waves, not their noise, that doomed the economics of supersonic transports. Still, Bongo II certainly didn't help the case Boeing and NASA attempted to make that flight faster than sound was the way of the future for the masses. Only the Concorde would fly passengers regularly in significant numbers, and only for a time, as a prestige project for the French and British governments. Time will tell if this is an idea whose time may come again, but I'm not holding my breath for it.

The Canadian Caper

When the American embassy in Tehran was stormed by angry students in 1979, six Americans made it out of the embassy and onto the streets of Tehran without notice. After several months in hiding at the Canadian ambassador's house, a joint US-Canadian operation successfully retrieved them from Iran by pretending to be a film crew on a location shoot. You can watch Ben Affleck's Argo for the entertaining drama-y version, or read Wikipedia for the drier truth-ier version:
The Canadian Caper

Sometimes dramatic license helps to make a good story. Even though the premise of the Canadian Caper has a stranger-than-fiction vibe to it from the start, Affleck downplayed the Canadian role in the operation and accentuated the nearness of failure to streamline and spice the story. Mark Lijek's account on Slate tells the faithful, though less melodramatic story of what really happened. It's still quite exciting, even if it's not quite ready to be Oscar bait.

This is one of those rare spy stories where everyone won. The fugitive six posed no threat to the Iranians, but had they been captured, the revolutionaries would've had to do something awful to them out of suspicion. Far better for them simply to never know the six were there until they were being celebrated back on American soil. It was good for America, good for Canada, good for Iran, and good for Ben Affleck. I'd wager that very few things in history have satisfied those four conditions.

Ship Gun Fire-Control Systems

Ships have a tendency to accelerate, turn, pitch, and roll, often unpredictably while at sea. Assuming your ship has a good reason to fire upon another ship (say, it's staffed by the baddies), this can make successful targeting difficult. The problem of how to make friendly shells hit enemy ships more often was one of the key drivers behind the revolution in computational speed in the 20th century, and you can read more about it, and its solutions, here:
Ship gun fire-control systems

Given the crash pace of computer development during the 1930s and '40s driven by the need to converge on better targeting solutions faster at war, it's no surprise Heinlein chose to make Mike the self-aware Lunar governing computer an overclocked, massively upgraded ballistic calculation computer. It's easy to forget how different the manufactured world is now than it was a century ago, when automation was rare and often as much a nuisance as a help. As late as World War I, when sailors had to do almost all the work themselves to target enemy ships, 3% of shots reaching their targets was considered excellent accuracy. Now that the machines we make work so hard to help us, we can manage a fair bit better.

Raising Sand

Robert Plant makes good music. Proof by selected examples.

Alison Krauss makes good music. Proof by selected examples.

When Krauss was an infant, Plant was working on Led Zeppelin's preternaturally good fourth (and untitled) album. They're musicians of different generations, working mainly in different genres, with very different vocal styles, so naturally they decided to release a duet album in 2007:

I think it turned out well, but your mileage may vary.

The Tunguska Event

The largest well-documented impact event between a near-Earth object and Earth in recorded history occurred near the Podkamennaya Tunguska River in Siberia in 1908. The explosive energy released by a comet fragment striking Earth's atmosphere was equivalent to the largest American thermonuclear weapon ever detonated, and you can read more about it here:
The Tunguska event

Fortunately very few people live in this region today, and even fewer lived there a century ago. The cataclysmic scale of the blast wasn't muted by the lack of human presence, of course, and a circle of forest 50 kilometers in diameter was leveled when the shock wave reached the surface. Due to the site's remoteness, little was understood of what happened until a Soviet expedition was launched to investigate 20 years later. Things moved slowly in trans-Soviet Russia.

Today's meteoric explosion over Chelyabinsk was only around a hundredth the size of last century's event over the Tunguska, but it was by far the biggest impact event on Earth since. Asteroid and comet impacts are random things, so the odds of an impact event tomorrow are independent of what happens today. Still, it's unlikely that a larger impact event will occur in the lifetime of anyone now alive. It's unfortunate that the Urals are more populated than the Siberian outback, and that hundreds were injured by flying glass and collapsed walls when the shock wave rained down on Chelyabinsk like a hammer from space, but at least we can be thankful that no one was killed. If we do nothing about asteroid defense, we might not be so lucky next time.

And I don't mean to be a downer, but there will be a next time.

Valentine's Day

If the preceding video by the internet's collective crush, Laina, doesn't get you in the proper mood for Valentine's Day, I don't know what will. Laina is brilliant and adorable, but my favorite Valentine's thing is still, without question, this classic from Homestarrunner:

This was actually a very good Valentine's day for me. I got a mattress, and the girl I sent flowers to seemed to enjoy them well enough. Still, it's been a while since I shared a Valentine's Day with the woman I love. I can't help but wonder if Bill Nye took the magic of being a Boeing engineer with him when he went to star on Almost Live, and my luck with the fairer sex will fare like this guy's for some time to come:


Happy Valentine's Day, y'all.

Chuck Yeager

Today Charles Elwood "Chuck" Yeager turns 90. Yeager is best known for being the first person to travel faster than Mach 1, the speed of sound in air, but had a long and distinguished career in the US Air Force. You can read about that and his other exploits here:
Chuck Yeager

Mr. Yeager nearly got himself killed several times, first during his service in Europe during World War II, then flying high-performance experimental aircraft over the desert of southern California. It's truly remarkable that he's lived his current age given the risk inherent in his line of work. His colleague Scott Crossfield, for example, died 7 years ago after flying a Cessna into a convective shear front after a long career of riding rocketplanes. He did several remarkably stupid things during his flying days that aren't all discussed in Tom Wolfe's hagiography The Right Stuff, and managed to live to tell his own, invariably self-serving, version of the tale every time.

One of the biggest mistakes Philip Kaufman made in adapting The Right Stuff was truncating the end of the story. The movie closes with great fanfare amid Gordon Cooper's successful Mercury flight. The book moves past this, to the days when the rocketplanes of Edwards were phased out and NASA's human spaceflight program moved briskly ahead. In the book's final scene (some version of which happened in real life), Yeager and an up-and-coming ex-Navy test pilot named Neil Armstrong set out after a monsoon thunderstorm to inspect a backup lakebed runway for usability. Their airplane became stuck in the mud after landing, and Armstrong and Yeager had to wait for a transport aircraft equipped with mud tires to fetch them. Alone in the desert, Yeager vented his rage at Armstrong, while Armstrong simply sat dispassionately and waited for help to arrive. Yeager must have felt at the top of his game at that moment, chewing out the newbie he was stranded with, but Armstrong's game wouldn't peak for another decade. I can't think of a better way to end the story Wolfe set out to tell.

Charles Darwin

204 years ago today, Abraham Lincoln and Charles Darwin shared their birthday. Darwin is best known as the co-originator of the theory of evolution by natural selection with Alfred Russel Wallace, but he had a long career full of accomplishments as a naturalist. You can read more about that, and Mr. Darwin in general, here:
Charles Darwin

What I find most interesting about Darwin's story is the way he seemed to ascend to the top of everything he sought to do. He made an astonishing variety of observations on his way around the world with the HMS Beagle in his early 20s, covering the gamut of biology, geology, and natural history. His descriptions of the natural world lent much support to the ideas that were just starting to gain traction in the early 1800s that described an Earth much more ancient than anyone had previously imagined. Darwin was the first biologist to form a coherent explanation for how coral reefs form, and the first to attack the problem of how earthworms move. His career showed brilliant turns as a theorist, experimenter, and observer, a combination of elements that seems to happen only a few times a century in science. /Whatever the future path of human events may be, Darwin's life is sure to be an inspiration to up-and-coming scientists of all stripes for centuries to come.

Papal Resignation

Earlier today Pope Benedict XVI announced his intention to resign from the papacy of the Roman Catholic Church effective the end of this month. This happens very rarely, and you can read more about this type of event here:
Papal resignation

The last time a pope resigned was in 1415, when Gregory XII stepped down to help resolve the Western Schism. Schisms are a rare thing these days, within the church at least, but it's possible that Benedict XVI's resignation will set a precedent for future popes of departing the office before death for health reasons. Whatever the implications, today's announcement is certainly a rarity in the church, and it will lead to only the second papal election in my lifetime. It'll be interesting to see what happens now.

The Windscale Fire

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In 1957 the fuel in an air-cooled tritium production reactor in England caught fire in what remains the worst nuclear disaster in history outside of the former Soviet Union or Japan. You can read more about it here:
The Windscale fire

So much went wrong at the Windscale pile it's hard to find anywhere in the chain that's blameless. The reactor never should've been making tritium in the first place; it was designed to produce plutonium and was reconfigured to run at the higher temperature needed to convert lithium into helium and tritium without an adequate design review. The fuel powering the reactor was metallic uranium, not the chemically inert uranium ceramic used in modern reactors, and hot metallic uranium in an air-cooled reactor is an obvious fire hazard in retrospect. To increase their confidence that they could run the reactor beyond its original redline, technicians installed a temperature-monitoring system that didn't adequately monitor temperature. There was no containment building around the pile. Nobody knew what the reactor was doing when it caught fire, except that it was running hotter than its designers intended and that there was no easy way to put it out. In the event, the fire raged for days, releasing large amounts of radioactive dust, before fire hoses were able to drown it.

There was at least one good decision made in this entire kerfuffle: Physicist John Cockcroft's insistence on putting a filter atop the reactor's exhaust chimney. As it was, the amount of radioactive iodine released resulted in about 240 additional cancer cases in the Cumbrian countryside. Had those filters not been in place, the damage would surely have been much worse. When designing something complex and dangerous, the lesson seems to be, listen to the worryworts.

IceCube

The largest neutrino telescope in the world was completed in 2010, covers a cubic kilometer of ice deep in the Antarctic interior, and is called IceCube. You can read more about it here:
IceCube Neutrino Observatory

Neutrinos are odd things. They have mass (but very little) , no charge, and a cross-sectional area so small that they hardly ever interact with the "ordinary" matter that people can easily comprehend. "Ordinary" goes in quotation marks here since most of the mass-energy balance of the universe is dark to us.

Because of these bizarre properties, neutrinos are very difficult to see, and IceCube aims to do better than just register their presence. The idea is to characterize where high-energy neutrinos from deep space are coming from, and that requires lots of mass to get in the way. The Antarctic ice sheet beneath the south pole suits this task well. Its amazing the things people can do when they put their heads (and wallets) together.

The Ikea Effect

Which is more valuable, a complete, ready-to-use product, or an incomplete one that requires assembly on arrival? The answer might surprise you. Wikipedia's article on the Ikea Effect is a stub, but NPR did a nice report on it here:
The Ikea Effect

As it turns out, most people are bad at predicting what really makes them happy. Acquiring stuff is necessary to some degree to get by, but feeling useful and competent is a harder itch to scratch than the ones for food, water, and shelter. I've never felt more useless and incompetent than I did after completing a year in a highly theoretical master's program in aerospace engineering. I've now moved on to my current job and a new apartment, and put together my first Ikea lamp last night. Some of the stupid flimsy plastic anchoring tabs snapped when I tried to follow the unintentionally-hilarious wordless guides, but I made a lamp, dammit. I can't be completely useless, right?

Mockingbird

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A team of engineers at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory proposed building a very small (ie pickup truck-size) single-stage reusable orbital launch vehicle in the mid-1990s. You can read more about that here:
Multiple Application Rocket Drone (MARD) Technical and Programmatic Overview

Some people seem to have obsessive personalities. Don Quixote insisted on fighting the imaginary beasts he saw in windmills. George Mallory was fixated on summiting Mount Everest. People kept watching Lost despite its tendency to sprout plotholes the way a damp field sprouts mushrooms. For me, the idea of low-cost access between Earth and low Earth orbit is one of the few things that seems worth such a level of obsession. It's physically possible with current technology and would revolutionize the way our civilization fits into the universe. The trick is just how to do it, and programs like Mockingbird tantalize the mind with the possibility of proving the concept of (relatively) cheap travel by rocket. Now if anyone would go fund this...

I'm not a spacecraft engineer by day, but I took some classes that are relevant back in school and used to work for one of the little startup space companies, so here are a few comments I have on glancing though the presentation:

-I get the argument for selecting hydrogen peroxide as an oxidizer, but high-concentration peroxide is so hard to get, expensive, and temperamental (it tends to set organic matter on fire when it drips, for example), that I doubt it's worth the trade to get a nontoxic, easily-igniting oxidizer. Better to go with liquid oxygen,which is cheap and high performance but cryogenic, or nitrous oxide, which is liquid at room temperature under pressure and has about the same specific impulse as peroxide. Good on the authors for not even talking about the traditional hypergolics like nitrogen tetroxide and the various flavor of hydrazine. They're liquid at room temperature and ignite on contact, but are so toxic and carcinogenic they belong nowhere near anything labelled "low-cost" or "green."

-The propellant-feed pump weighs more than the engine if I read the mass breakdown chart right. This won't do. Better to bite the bullet and pay someone a decent wage to make a custom turbopump for the job. It would be very light, and every gram counts on a single-stage vehicle.

-It's interesting that ascent heating is such a big issue for the vehicle. Granted, it's small, so drag and gravity losses will be high, but there must be some non-obvious physics going on to make an all-aluminum structure unacceptable for Mockingbird but just fine for the Space Shuttle external tank.

-Are the numbers on the thermal protection system weight even remotely believable? If so, the concept is feasible and exciting. If not it all falls apart and this is just words on paper. A robust, light thermal protection system is possibly the most important unsolved problem in making a low-cost reusable orbital launch vehicle, so I wish the authors had spent more time going into detail here.

File this under "Please revisit, decision makers."

Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe

When Errol Morris was trying to get some momentum going on his first documentary production, Gates of Heaven, Werner Herzog saw that Morris had promise and wanted to motivate him to make the project happen. Should Gates of Heaven ever be released, Herzog stated, he would publicly eat one of the shoes he was wearing at the time. When Morris's film debuted, Herzog made good on his bet here:

Mr. Herzog is generally notable as an acclaimed director, but my only prior experience with his work things claiming to be his work but having nothing to do with him was [t]his reading of the fine "children's" book Go the Fuck to Sleep:

Edit: So apparently the above video is not affiliated with Mr. Herzog in any way. Whoops. This is what I get for being excessively trusting on the internet sometimes.

To a Mouse

This is actually a picture of a rat, not a mouse. No blog's perfect.

After finding a nest full of mice one winter, Scottish poet Robert Burns was inspired to write the following:
"To a Mouse, on Turning Her Up in Her Nest with the Plough"

Make sure to check out the original Scots verse, which is more difficult to parse but much more exciting than the fully-English version.

The Mole and the Diamond

During the Cold War, the United States and the Soviet Union both experimented with the idea of manned orbital reconnaissance platforms. Nova produced a pretty good documentary on it here:
Astrospies

The American program was called Manned Orbiting Laboratory (MOL, pronounced "mole"), and proposed mounting a two-man Gemini capsule to the front end of a small space station equipped with a a large downward-facing telescope and plenty of high-quality film. A pair of astronauts (breathing a helium-oxygen atmosphere, presumably to save weight and spend more money) would spend some time flying over Soviet territory taking pictures of missile silos, air bases, ship formations and the like, then parachute into the Pacific, film in hand. As it turned out, the presence of the astronauts and their necessary life support system induced enough jitter into the telescope mount that the resolution advantage afforded by the larger mirror was nulled, and high-quality radio links did away with the need to return film in the first place. A team of astronauts was selected before the program was cancelled, though, and many of them went on to fly the Space Shuttle.

The Soviets actually put their system, Almaz (meaning diamond) into service. The early Soviet manned space program struggled after losing the race to the Moon with America, and few of the Almaz missions went well. Still, they proved the concept that people could do spy work in low Earth orbit, although it still didn't make much sense in the scheme of things. The military stations were phased out in favor of scientific outposts, which became relatively mature and almost uniformly successful during the Reagan years.

I have mixed feelings about this odd chapter of space history. So many people believe that there's no valid use for people in space, and it would be nice to point to such a practical program to counter this argument. That said, the utility of humans in space for research, repair, and exploration is obvious, and in a way it's nice that there are (so far) no real military applications of human spaceflight. For now it's strictly peaceful, and hopefully humans in space will stay that way for decades to come.

Rock Opera

A rock opera presents a story through multiple sections of music, like a regular opera, except it does so with music in the form of rock. You can read more about rock opera here:
Rock opera

The Who's Tommy is often cited as the first major work of rock opera. For bizarre reasons, Tommy was later produced as a film where Elton John sang the pivotal piece "Pinball Wizard." You can view that, if you must here:

Three years later, David Bowie would pen The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars. Mr. Bowie's particular flavor of glam can be viewed here:

Groundhog Day

In 1993, Bill Murray and Andie MacDowell starred in a comedy about existentialism, the eternal recurrence, and the Pennsylvania German tradition of Groundhog Day. The Wikipedia article on it is here, and I think this ambiguously-copyright-compliant video on Youtube captures the spirit of the film pretty well:

The basic premise is simple enough, and Murray's execution is delightful. You should see this movie if you have't already.

Fun fact on Groundhog Day (the movie): The Washington Post's Desson Howe wrote in his review "'Groundhog' [sic] will never be designated a national film treasure by the Library of Congress." As a matter of fact, in 2006 the Library of Congress did declare Groundhog Day to be just that. Critics, like groundhogs, should be careful in their prognostications.

Fun fact on Groundhog Day (the holiday): Some Orthodox Christians celebrate Groundhog Day on February 15 rather than February 2, since they insist on using the Julian calendar to this day. Because of course the Gregorian calendar is Catholic schismatic nonsense and the Julian date somehow has more bearing on weather than Earth's actual position and axial tilt. Traditions are interesting.

The Columbia Crew Survival Investigation Report

NASA conducted two investigations after the first spaceworthy Space Shuttle orbiter, Columbia, was lost with all hands over east Texas ten years ago today. The Columbia Accident Investigation Board's report quickly identified the root cause of the accident and recommended immediate changes to the program to return the shuttle to flight. A later exhaustive forensic investigation of how the disaster happened, and how to improve the safety of future spacecraft is online here:
The Columbia Crew Survival Report

Columbia was in a very bad place when she came apart. Air becomes a devilish thing at 18 times the speed of sound, even as thin as it is 200,000 feet above the ground. As former Space Shuttle Program manager Wayne Hale later recounted, the Challenger disaster showed that the orbiter's crew cabin was built to last. Even with the rest of the shuttle stack breaking up around it at rifle bullet speed in the thick of the lower atmosphere, Challenger's cabin rode it out and the kept her crew alive and working all the way down. Shuttle crews wore pressure suits and parachutes after that, to maintain some hope of survival as long as they breathed, but Columbia just wasn't built to take the punishment she received a decade ago.

The lessons from the crew survival report aren't all dreary and forensic. There are practical suggestions there, too. As brutal as the environment around a reentering vehicle is, there's nothing magical about it, and with the right preparation an accident like Columbia's could be escaped successfully. Nine and a half years after the loss of his wife aboard Columbia, Jonathan Clark (one of the authors of the report) helped Felix Baumgarter set a new record for the highest and fastest freefall by a spacesuited astronaut. It's a good start toward honoring Husband, McCool, Brown, Anderson, Chawla, Clark, and Ramon by making sure theirs is not the fate of those who come after.

Per aspera ad astra.