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Saturday, November 28, 2015
Reading List: The Dorian Files Revealed
- Outzen, James D., ed. The Dorian Files Revealed. Chantilly, VA: Center for the Study of National Reconnaissance, 2015. ISBN 978-1-937219-18-5.
- We often think of the 1960s as a “can do” time, when technological progress, societal self-confidence, and burgeoning economic growth allowed attempting and achieving great things: from landing on the Moon, global communications by satellite, and mass continental and intercontinental transportation by air. But the 1960s were also a time, not just of conflict and the dissolution of the postwar consensus, but also of some grand-scale technological boondoggles and disasters. There was the XB-70 bomber and its companion F-108 fighter plane, the Boeing 2707 supersonic passenger airplane, the NERVA nuclear rocket, the TFX/F-111 swing-wing hangar queen aircraft, and plans for military manned space programs. Each consumed billions of taxpayer dollars with little or nothing to show for the expenditure of money and effort lavished upon them. The present volume, consisting of previously secret information declassified in July 2015, chronicles the history of the Manned Orbiting Laboratory, the U.S. Air Force's second attempt to launch its own astronauts into space to do military tasks there. The creation of NASA in 1958 took the wind out of the sails of the U.S. military services, who had assumed it would be they who would lead on the road into space and in exploiting space-based assets in the interest of national security. The designation of NASA as a civilian aerospace agency did not preclude military efforts in space, and the Air Force continued with its X-20 Dyna-Soar, a spaceplane intended to be launched on a Titan rocket which would return to Earth and land on a conventional runway. Simultaneous with the cancellation of Dyna-Soar in December 1963, a new military space program, the Manned Orbiting Laboratory (MOL) was announced. MOL would use a modified version of NASA's Gemini spacecraft to carry two military astronauts into orbit atop a laboratory facility which they could occupy for up to 60 days before returning to Earth in the Gemini capsule. The Gemini and laboratory would be launched by a Titan III booster, requiring only a single launch and no orbital rendezvous or docking to accomplish the mission. The purpose of the program was stated as to “evaluate the utility of manned space flight for military purposes”. This was a cover story or, if you like, a bald-faced lie. In fact, MOL was a manned spy satellite, intended to produce reconnaissance imagery of targets in the Soviet Union, China, and the communist bloc in the visual, infrared, and radar bands, plus electronic information in much higher resolution than contemporary unmanned spy satellites. Spy satellites operating in the visual spectrum lost on the order of half their images to cloud cover. With a man on board, exposures would be taken only when skies were clear, and images could be compensated for motion of the spacecraft, largely eliminating motion blur. Further, the pilots could scan for “interesting” targets and photograph them as they appeared, and conduct wide-area ocean surveillance. None of the contemporary drawings showed the internal structure of the MOL, and most people assumed it was a large pressurised structure for various experiments. In fact, most of it was an enormous telescope aimed at the ground, with a 72 inch (1.83 metre) mirror and secondary optics capable of very high resolution photography of targets on the ground. When this document was declassified in 2015, all references to its resolution capability were replaced with statements such as {better than 1 foot}. It is, in fact, a simple geometrical optics calculation to determine that the diffraction-limited resolution of a 1.83 metre mirror in the visual band is around 0.066 arc seconds. In a low orbit suited to imaging in detail, this would yield a resolution of around 4 cm (1.6 inches) as a theoretical maximum. Taking optical imperfections, atmospheric seeing, film resolution, and imperfect motion compensation into account, the actual delivered resolution would be about half this (8 cm, 3.2 inches). Once they state the aperture of the primary mirror, this is easy to work out, so they wasted a lot of black redaction ink in this document. And then, on page 102, they note (not redacted), “During times of crisis the MOL could be transferred from its nominal 80-mile orbit to one of approximately 200–300 miles. In this higher orbit the system would have access to all targets in the Soviet Bloc approximately once every three days and be able to take photographs at resolutions of about one foot.” All right, if they have one foot (12 inch) resolution at 200 miles, then they have 4.8 inch (12 cm) resolution at 80 miles (or, if we take 250 miles altitude, 3.8 inches [9.7 cm]), entirely consistent with my calculation from mirror aperture. This document is a management, financial, and political history of the MOL program, with relatively little engineering detail. Many of the technological developments of the optical system were later used in unmanned reconnaissance satellite programs and remain secret. What comes across in the sorry history of this program, which, between December 1963 and its cancellation in June of 1969 burned through billions of taxpayer dollars, is that the budgeting, project management, and definition and pursuit of well-defined project goals was just as incompetent as the redaction of technical details discussed in the previous paragraph. There are almost Marx brothers episodes where Florida politicians attempted to keep jobs in their constituencies by blocking launches into polar orbit from Vandenberg Air Force Base while the Air Force could not disclose that polar orbits were essential to overflying targets in the Soviet Union because the reconnaissance mission of MOL was a black program. Along with this history, a large collection of documents and pictures, all previously secret (and many soporifically boring) has been released. As a publication of the U.S. government, this work is in the public domain.
Posted at
22:36
Sunday, November 15, 2015
Reading List: What If?
- Munroe, Randall. What If? New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2014. ISBN 978-0-544-27299-6.
-
As a child, the author would constantly ask his parents odd
questions. They indulged and encouraged him, setting him on
a lifetime path of curiosity, using the mathematics and physics
he learned in the course of obtaining a degree in physics
and working in robotics at NASA to answer whatever popped into
his head. After creating the tremendously successful Web comic
xkcd.com, readers began to ask him
the kinds of questions he'd mused about himself. He began a
feature on xkcd.com: “What
If?” to explore answers to these questions. This book is
a collection of these questions, some previously published on-line
(where you can continue to read them at the previous link), and
some only published here. The answers to questions are interspersed
with “Weird (and Worrying) Questions from the What If? Inbox”,
some of which are reminiscent of my own
Titanium
Cranium mailbox. The book abounds with the author's
delightful illustrations. Here is a sample of the questions
dealt with. I've linked the first to the online article to give
you a taste of what's in store for you in the book.
- Is it possible to build a jetpack using downward firing machine guns?
- What would happen if you tried to hit a baseball pitched at 90% the speed of light?
- In the movie 300 they shoot arrows up into the sky and they seemingly blot out the sun. Is this possible, and how many arrows would it take?
- How high can a human throw something?
- If every person on Earth aimed a laser pointer at the Moon at the same time, would it change color?
- How much Force power can Yoda output?
- How fast can you hit a speed bump while driving and live?
Posted at
21:50
Monday, November 2, 2015
Reading List: Farside
- Chiles, Patrick. Farside. Seattle: Amazon Digital Services, 2015. ASIN B010WAE080.
- Several years after the events chronicled in Perigee (August 2012), Arthur Hammond's Polaris AeroSpace Lines is operating routine point-to-point suborbital passenger and freight service with its Clippers, has expanded into orbital service with Block II Clippers, and is on the threshold of opening up service to the Moon with its “cycler” spacecraft which loop continuously between the Earth and Moon. Clippers rendezvous with the cyclers as they approach the Earth, transferring crew, passengers, cargo, and consumables. Initial flights will be limited to lunar orbit, but landing missions are envisioned for the future. In the first orbital mission, chartered to perform resource exploration from lunar orbit, cycler Shepard is planning to enter orbit with a burn which will, by the necessities of orbital mechanics, have to occur on the far side of the Moon, out of radio contact with the Earth. At Polaris mission control in Denver, there is the usual tension as the clock ticks down toward the time when Shepard is expected to emerge from behind the Moon, safely in orbit. (If the burn did not occur, the ship would appear before this time, still on a trajectory which would return it to the Earth.) When the acquisition of signal time comes and goes with no reply to calls and no telemetry, tension gives way to anxiety. Did Shepard burn too long and crash on the far side of the Moon? Did its engine explode and destroy the ship? Did some type of total system failure completely disable its communications? On board Shepard, Captain Simon Poole is struggling to survive after the disastrous events which occurred just moments after the start of the lunar orbit insertion burn. Having taken refuge in the small airlock after the expandable habitation module has deflated, he has only meagre emergency rations to sustain him until a rescue mission might reach him. And no way to signal Earth that he is alive. What seems a terrible situation rapidly gets worse and more enigmatic when an arrogant agent from Homeland Security barges into Polaris and demands information about the passenger and cargo manifest for the flight, Hammond is visited at home by an unlikely caller, and a jarhead/special operator type named Quinn shows them some darker than black intelligence about their ship and “invites” them to NORAD headquarters to be briefed in on an above top secret project. So begins a nearish future techno-thriller in which the situations are realistic, the characters interesting, the perils harrowing, and the stakes could not be higher. The technologies are all plausible extrapolations of those available at present, with no magic. Government agencies behave as they do in the real world, which is to say with usually good intentions leavened with mediocrity, incompetence, scheming ambition, envy, and counter-productive secrecy and arrogance. This novel is not going to be nominated for any awards by the social justice warriors who have infiltrated the science fiction writer and fan communities: the author understands precisely who the enemies of civilisation and human destiny are, forthrightly embodies them in his villains, and explains why seemingly incompatible ideologies make common cause against the values which have built the modern world. The story is one of problem solving, adventure, survival, improvisation, and includes one of the most unusual episodes of space combat in all of science fiction. It would make a terrific movie. For the most part, the author gets the details right. There are a few outright goofs, such as seeing the Earth from the lunar far side (where it is always below the horizon—that's why it's the far side); some errors in orbital mechanics which will grate on players of Kerbal Space Program; the deployed B-1B bomber is Mach 1.25, not Mach 2; and I don't think there's any way the ships in the story could have had sufficient delta-v to rendezvous with a comet so far out the plane of the ecliptic. But I'm not going to belabour these quibbles in what is a rip-roaring read. There is a glossary of aerospace terms and acronyms at the end. Also included is a teaser chapter for a forthcoming novel which I can't wait to read.
Posted at
22:24