- Chertok, Boris E.
Rockets and People. Vol. 2.
Washington: National Aeronautics and Space Administration, [1999] 2006.
ISBN 978-1-4700-1508-4 NASA SP-2006-4110.
-
This is the second book of the author's
four-volume autobiographical history of the Soviet missile
and space program.
Boris Chertok
was a survivor, living through the Bolshevik revolution, the Russian
civil war, Stalin's purges of the 1930s, World War II, all of the
postwar conflict between chief designers and their bureaux and rival
politicians, and the collapse of the Soviet Union. Born in Poland in
1912, he died in 2011 in Moscow. After retiring from the RKK Energia
organisation in 1992 at the age of 80, he wrote this work between 1994
and 1999. Originally published in Russian in 1999, this annotated
English translation was prepared by the NASA History Office under the
direction of Asif A. Siddiqi, author of
Challenge to Apollo (April 2008),
the definitive Western history of the Soviet space
program.
Volume 2 of Chertok's chronicle begins with his return from
Germany to the Soviet Union, where he discovers, to his dismay,
that day-to-day life in the victorious workers' state is
much harder than in the land of the defeated fascist enemy. He
becomes part of the project, mandated by Stalin, to first
launch captured German V-2 missiles and then produce an exact
Soviet copy, designated the
R-1.
Chertok and his colleagues discover that making a copy of
foreign technology may be more difficult than developing it
from scratch—the V-2 used a multitude of steel and non-ferrous
metal alloys, as well as numerous non-metallic components (seals,
gaskets, insulation, etc.) which were not produced by Soviet
industry. But without the experience of the German rocket team
(which, by this time, was in the United States), there was no
way to know whether the choice of a particular material was
because its properties were essential to its function or
simply because it was readily available in Germany. Thus,
making an “exact copy” involved numerous difficult
judgement calls where the designers had to weigh the risk of
deviation from the German design against the cost of standing up
a Soviet manufacturing capacity which might prove unnecessary.
After the difficult start which is the rule for missile projects,
the Soviets managed to turn the R-1 into a reliable missile and,
through patience and painstaking analysis of telemetry, solved a
mystery which had baffled the Germans: why between 10% and 20% of
V-2 warheads had detonated in a useless airburst high above the intended
target. Chertok's instrumentation proved that the cause was
aerodynamic heating during re-entry which caused the high explosive
warhead to outgas, deform, and trigger the detonator.
As the Soviet missile program progresses, Chertok is a key
player, participating in the follow-on
R-2
project (essentially a Soviet
Redstone—a
V-2 derivative, but entirely of domestic design), the
R-5 (an
intermediate range ballistic missile eventually armed with nuclear
warheads), and the
R-7, the world's
first intercontinental ballistic missile, which launched Sputnik,
Gagarin, and whose derivatives remain in service today, providing
the only crewed access to the International Space Station as of
this writing.
Not only did the Soviet engineers have to build ever larger and more
complicated hardware, they essentially had to invent the
discipline of
systems engineering
all by themselves. While even in aviation it is often possible to test
components in isolation and then integrate them into a vehicle, working out
interface problems as they manifest themselves, in rocketry everything
interacts, and when something goes wrong, you have only the telemetry
and wreckage upon which to base your diagnosis. Consider: a rocket ascending
may have natural frequencies in its tankage structure excited by vibration
due to combustion instabilities in the engine. This can, in turn, cause propellant
delivery to the engine to oscillate, which will cause pulses in thrust, which
can cause further structural stress. These excursions may cause control actuators
to be over-stressed and possibly fail. When all you have to go on is a ragged
cloud in the sky, bits of metal raining down on the launch site, and some
telemetry squiggles for a second or two before everything went pear shaped, it
can be extraordinarily difficult to figure out what went wrong. And none of this
can be tested on the ground. Only a complete systems approach can begin to
cope with problems like this, and building that kind of organisation required a
profound change in Soviet institutions, which had previously been built
around imperial chief designers with highly specialised missions. When
everything interacts, you need a different structure, and it was part of the
genius of
Sergei Korolev
to create it. (Korolev, who was the author's boss for most of the years
described here, is rightly celebrated as a great engineer and champion
of missile and space projects, but in Chertok's view at least equally
important was his talent in quickly evaluating the potential of individuals
and filling jobs with the people [often improbable candidates] best
able to do them.)
In this book we see the transformation of the Soviet missile program
from slavishly copying German technology to world-class innovation,
producing, in short order, the first ICBM, earth satellite,
lunar impact, images of the lunar far side, and
interplanetary probes. The missile men found themselves vaulted from
an obscure adjunct of Red Army artillery to the vanguard of Soviet
prestige in the world, with the Soviet leadership urging them on to
ever greater exploits.
There is a tremendous amount of detail here—so much that some readers
have deemed it tedious: I found it enlightening. The author dissects the
Nedelin disaster
in forensic detail, as well as the much less known
1980
catastrophe at Plesetsk where 48 died because a component of the rocket
used the wrong kind of solder. Rocketry is an exacting business, and it is
a gift to generations about to embark upon it to imbibe the wisdom of one who
was present at its creation and learned, by decades of experience, just how
careful one must be to succeed at it. I could go on regaling you with
anecdotes from this book but, hey, if you've made it this far, you're probably
going to read it yourself, so what's the point? (But if you do, I'd suggest you
read Volume 1 [May 2012] first.)
As with all NASA
publications, the work is in the public domain, and an
online
PDF edition is available.
A Kindle edition is available which is perfectly
readable but rather cheaply produced. Footnotes simply appear in
the text in-line somewhere after the reference, set in small red
type. The index references page numbers
from the print edition which are not included in the Kindle
version, and hence are completely useless. If you have a
workable PDF application on your reading device, I'd go with the
NASA PDF, which is not only better formatted but free.
The
original
Russian edition is available online.
- Gelernter, David.
America-Lite.
New York: Encounter Books, 2012.
ISBN 978-1-59403-606-4.
-
At the end of World War II, the United States bestrode the world like
a colossus. All of its industrial competitors had been devastated
by the war; it was self-sufficient in most essential resources; it
was the unquestioned leader in science, technology, and medicine; its
cultural influence was spread around the world by Hollywood movies; and
the centre of the artistic and literary world had migrated from Paris
to New York. The generation which had won the war, enabled by the
G.I. Bill,
veterans swarmed into institutions of higher learning formerly
reserved for scions of the wealthy and privileged—by 1947,
fully 49% of college admissions were veterans.
By 1965, two decades after the end of the war, it was pretty clear to
anybody with open eyes that it all had begun to go seriously wrong.
The United States was becoming ever more deeply embroiled in a land
war in Asia without a rationale comprehensible to those who paid for
it and were conscripted to fight there; the centres of once-great cities
were beginning a death spiral in which a culture of dependency spawned
a poisonous culture of crime, drugs, and the collapse of the family;
the humiliatingly defeated and shamefully former Nazi collaborator
French were draining the U.S. Treasury of its gold reserves, and
the U.S. mint had replaced its silver coins with cheap counterfeit
replacements. In August of 1965, the Watts neighbourhood of Los
Angeles exploded in riots, and the unthinkable—U.S. citizens
battling one another with deadly force in a major city, became the
prototype for violent incidents to come. What happened?
In this short book (just 200 pages in the print edition), the author
argues that it was what I have been calling the “culture crash”
for the last decade. Here, this event is described as the “cultural
revolution”: not a violent upheaval as happened in China, but a
steady process through which the keys to the élite institutions
which transmit the culture from generation to generation were handed
over, without a struggle, from the WASP (White Anglo-Saxon Protestant)
patricians which had controlled them since Colonial days, to a new
intellectual class, influenced by ideas from Continental Europe, which
the author calls PORGIs (post-religious globalist intellectuals).
Now, this is not to say that there were not intellectuals at top-tier
institutions of higher learning before the cultural revolution; but
they were not in charge: those who were saw their mission in
a fundamentally conservative way—to conserve the grand tradition
of Western civilisation by transmitting it to each successive generation,
while inculcating in them the moral compass which would make them worthy
leaders in business, the military, and public affairs.
The PORGIs had no use for this. They had theory, and if the facts
weren't consistent with the theory and the consequences of implementing it
disastrously different from those intended, well then the facts must be
faulty because the theory was crystalline perfection in itself. (And all of
this became manifest well before the cognitive dissonance between
academic fantasy and the real world became so great that the intellectuals
had to invent
postmodernism,
denying the very existence of objective reality.)
The PORGIs (Well, I suppose we can at least take comfort that the intellectual
high ground wasn't taken over by
Corgis;
imagine the chaos that would have engendered!) quickly moved to
eliminate the core curricula in higher learning which taught
Western history, culture, and moral tradition. This was replaced
(theory being supreme, and unchallenged), with indoctrination in an
ideology unmoored to the facts. Rather than individuals able to
think and learn on their own, those educated by the PORGIs became
servomechanisms who, stimulated by this or that keyword, would spit
out a rote response: “Jefferson?” “White slaveowner!”
These, the generation educated by the PORGIs, starting around the mid
1960s, the author calls PORGI airheads. We all have our own “mental
furniture” which we've accumulated over our lives—the way we
make sense of the bewildering flow of information from the outside world:
sorting it into categories, prioritising it, and deciding how to act upon it.
Those with a traditional (pre-PORGI) education, or those like myself and
the vast majority of people my age or older who figured it out on their own
by reading books and talking to other people, have painfully built our own
mental furniture, re-arranged it as facts came in which didn't fit with the
ways we'd come to understand things, and sometimes heaved the old Barcalounger
out the window when something completely contradicted our previous
assumptions. With PORGI airheads, none of this obtains. They do not have
the historical or cultural context to evaluate how well their pre-programmed
responses fit the unforgiving real world. They are like parrots: you wave
a French fry at them and they say, “Hello!” Another
French fry, “Hello!” You wave a titanium billet painted
to look like a French fry, “Hello!” Beak notched from the
attempt to peel a titanium ingot, you try it once again.
“Hello!”
Is there anybody who has been visible on the Internet for more than a few years
who has not experienced interactions with these people? Here is my own
personal collection of
greatest hits.
Gelernter argues that Barack Obama is the first PORGI airhead to be elected
to the presidency. What some see as ideology may be better explained as
servomechanism “Hello!” response to stimuli for which his mentors have
pre-programmed him. He knows nothing of World War II, or the Cold War,
or of colonialism in Africa, or of the rôle of the British Empire
in eradicating the slave trade. All of these were deemed irrelevant by the
PORGIs and PORGI airheads who trained him. And the 53% who voted for him were
made a majority by the PORGI airheads cranked out every year and injected into
the bloodstream of the dying civil society by an educational system almost
entirely in the hands of the
enemy.
What is to be done? The author's prescription is much the same as my own.
We need to break the back of the higher education (and for that matter, the
union-dominated primary and secondary education) system and replace it with
an Internet-based educational delivery system where students will have access
to courses taught by the best pedagogues in the world (ranked in real time not
just by student thumbs up and down, but by objectively measured outcomes, such
as third-party test scores and employment results). Then we need independent
certification agencies, operating in competition with one another much like
bond rating agencies, which issue “e-diplomas” based on examinations
(not just like the SAT and bar exams, but also in-person and gnarly like a
Ph.D. defence for the higher ranks). The pyramid of prestige would remain, as
well as the cost structure: a Doctorate in Russian Literature from Harvard
would open more doors at the local parking garage or fast food joint than
one from Bob's Discount Degrees, but you get what you pay for. And, in any
case, the certification would cost a tiny fraction of spending your prime
intellectually productive years listening to tedious lectures given by
graduate students marginally proficient in your own language.
The PORGIs correctly perceived the U.S. educational system to be the “keys
to the kingdom”. They began, in
Gramsci's
long march through the institutions,
to put in place the mechanisms which would tilt the electorate toward their
tyrannical agenda. It is too late to reverse it; the educational establishment
must be destroyed. “Destroyed?”, you ask—“These are strong
words! Do you really mean it? Is it possible?” Now witness the power of this
fully armed and operational global data network! Record stores…gone! Book
stores…gone! Universities….
In the Kindle edition (which costs almost as
much as the hardcover), the end-notes are properly bidirectionally linked
to citations in the text, but the index is just a useless list of terms
without links to references in the text. I'm sorry if I come across as
a tedious “index hawk”, but especially when reviewing a book
about declining intellectual standards, somebody has to do it.
- Chiles, Patrick.
Perigee.
Seattle: CreateSpace, 2011.
ISBN 978-1-4699-5713-5.
-
A few years into the future, while NASA bumbles along in its
bureaucratic haze and still can't launch humans into space, a
commercial “new space” company, Polaris AeroSpace
Lines, has taken the next step beyond suborbital tourist hops
into space for the well-heeled, and begun both scheduled and
charter service in aerospace planes equipped with a
combined-cycle powerplant which allows them to fly anywhere on
the globe, operating at Mach 10, making multiple skips off the
atmosphere, and delivering up to 30 passengers and cargo to any
destination in around 90 minutes. Passengers are treated to
a level of service and coddling which exceeds first class,
breathtaking views from above the atmosphere along the way,
and apart from the steep ticket prices, no downside apart
from the zero-g toilet.
In this thriller, something goes horribly wrong during a flight
from Denver to Singapore chartered by a coarse and demanding
Australian media mogul, and the crew and passengers find
themselves not on course for their destination but rather trapped
in Earth orbit with no propellant and hence no prospect of
getting back until long after their life support will be
exhausted. Polaris immediately begins to mount a rescue mission
based upon an orbital spacecraft they have under development,
but as events play out clues begin to emerge that a series
of problems are not systems failures but perhaps evidence of
something much darker, in which those on the front lines trying
to get their people back do not know who they can trust.
Eventually, Polaris has no option but to partner with insurgent
individuals in the “old space” world to attempt an
improvised rescue mission.
This is a very interesting book, in that it does not read like
a space thriller so much as one of the classic aviation dramas
such as
The
High and the Mighty.
We have the cast of characters: a crusty mechanic, heroic commander, hot-shot
first officer, resourceful flight attendant with unexpected talents,
demanding passengers, visionary company president, weaselly subordinate,
and square-jawed NASA types. It all works very well, and as long as you
don't spend too much time thinking about mass fractions, specific impulse,
orbital mechanics, and thermal protection systems, is an enjoyable read,
and provides a glimpse of a plausible future for commercial space flight
(point to point hypersonic service) which is little discussed among
the new space community.
For those who do care about the details, they follow. Be warned—some
of these are major plot spoilers, so if you're planning to read
the novel it's best to give them a pass until you've finished
the book.
- In chapter 26 we are told that the spaceplane's electricity
is produced by fuel cells. This doesn't make any sense for
a suborbital craft. We're also told that it is equipped with
an APU and batteries with eight hours of capacity. For a
plane which can fly to its destination in 90 minutes, why would
you also include a fuel cell? The APU can supply power for
normal operation, and in case it fails, the batteries have
plenty of capacity to get you back on the ground. Also, you'd
have to carry liquid hydrogen to power the fuel cells. This
would require a bulky tank and make ramp operations and
logistics a nightmare.
- Not a quibble, but rather a belly laugh in chapter 28: I had not before
heard the aging International Space Station called
“Cattlecar Galactica”.
- In chapter 31, when the rescue mission is about to
launch, we're told that if the launch window is missed,
on the next attempt the stricken craft will be
“several hundred miles farther downrange”.
In fact, the problem is that on the next orbit, due to the
Earth's rotation, the plane of the craft's
orbit will have shifted with respect to that of the
launch site, and consequently the rescue mission will
have to perform a plane change as part of its
trajectory. This is hideously costly in terms of fuel,
and it is unlikely in the extreme the rescue mission
would be able to accomplish it. All existing rendezvous
missions, if they miss their launch window, must wait
until the next day when the launch site once again
aligns with the orbital plane of the destination.
- In chapter 47, as passenger Magrath begins to lose it, “Sweat
began to bead up on his bald head and float away.” But in
weightlessness, surface tension dominates all other forces and the
sweat would cling and spread out over the 'strine's pate. There is
nothing to make it float away.
- In chapter 54 and subsequently, Shuttle
“rescue balls”
are used to transfer passengers from the crippled spaceplane to the
space station. These were said to have been kept on the station since
early in the program. In fact, while NASA did develop a prototype of
the Personal Rescue Enclosure, they were never flown on any Shuttle
mission nor launched to the station.
- The orbital mechanics make absolutely no sense at all. One would
expect a suborbital flight between Denver and Singapore to
closely follow a
great circle route
between those airports (with possible deviations due to noise abatement
and other considerations). Since most of the flight would be outside
the atmosphere, weather and winds aloft would not be a major
consideration. But if flight 501 had followed such a route and have
continued to boost into orbit, it would have found itself in a
high-inclination retrograde orbit around the Earth: going the
opposite direction to the International Space Station. Getting
from such an orbit to match orbits with the ISS would require more
change in velocity
(delta-v) than an
orbital launch from the Earth, and no spacecraft in orbit would have
remotely that capability. The European service vehicle already docked at
the station would only have enough propellant for a destructive re-entry.
We're told then that the flight path would be to the east, over Europe.
but why would one remotely choose such a path, especially if a goal of the
flight was to set records? It would be a longer flight, and much more demanding
of propellant to do it in one skip as planned. But, OK, let's assume that for
some reason they did decide to go the long way around. Now, for the rescue
to be plausible, we have to assume two further ridiculously improbable things:
first, that the inclination of the orbit resulting from the engine runaway
on the flight to Singapore would match that of the station, and second, that
the moment of launch just happened to be precisely when Denver was aligned
with the plane of the station's orbit. Since there is no reason that the
launch would have been scheduled to meet these exacting criteria, the
likelihood that the spaceplane would be in an orbit reachable from the
station without a large and impossible to accomplish plane change
(here, I am referring to a change in the orbital plane, not catching a
connecting flight) is negligible.
The author's career has been in the airline industry, and this shows in the authenticity
of the depiction of airline operations. Notwithstanding the natters above behind the
spoiler shield, I thoroughly enjoyed this book and raced through it trying to guess
how it would come out.
- Rucker, Rudy.
Turing & Burroughs.
Manuscript, 2012.
-
The author was kind enough to send this reader a copy of the manuscript
for copy-editing and fact checking. I've returned it, marked up, and you
should be able to read it soon. I shall refrain from commenting upon the
text until it's generally available. But if you're a Rudy Rucker fan, you're
going to love this.