Quotulatiousness

January 31, 2020

Why The US Military Made GPS Free-To-Use

Filed under: History, Military, Space, Technology, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Real Engineering
Published 16 Jun 2017

Get your Real Engineering shirts at: https://store.dftba.com/collections/r…

Patreon:
https://www.patreon.com/user?u=282505…
Instagram:
https://www.instagram.com/brianjamesm…
Twitter:
https://twitter.com/Fiosracht
Website:
http://www.RealEngineering.net

Thank you to my patreon supporters: Adam Flohr, darth patron, Zoltan Gramantik, Henning Basma, Karl Andersson, Mark Govea, Mershal Alshammari, Hank Green, Tony Kuchta, Jason A. Diegmueller, Chris Plays Games, William Leu, Frejden Jarrett, Vincent Mooney, Ian Dundore, John & Becki Johnston. Nevin Spoljaric

Once again thank you to Maeson for his amazing music. Check out his soundcloud here: https://soundcloud.com/maeson-1/tracks

January 24, 2020

From a Canadian perspective, “NORAD … is more important than NATO”

Filed under: Americas, Cancon, History, Military, Space, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

The American government has once again expressed a strong desire to update the 1957 North American Air Defence Commmand arrangement between the US and Canada for defence of the North American continent. It’s a Cold War relic to some (particularly some in the Prime Minister’s Office and cabinet), but it has a very real value to Canada, as Ted Campbell explains:

In 1957 Canada and the USA agreed to create the North American Air Defense Command. It is a “combined” command, American and Canadian people, civilian and military, work together, in combined headquarters, to conduct an active aerospace defence effort over the continent we share. Americans and Canadians work side-by-side managing the airspace, detecting intruders and identifying and intercepting them and so on.

NORAD, I would argue, is more important than NATO.

First, it is about defending our own homeland.

Second, it is about defending the US strategic deterrent, which has, arguably, done more to keep global peace than all the efforts of the United Nations, combined.

NORAD modernization and expansion should be at the top of Canada’s defence policy agenda. Specifically:

  • First, billions of dollars, likely tens of billions of dollars are going to be needed to upgrade the surveillance and warning system. We need new radars, terrestrial and space-based, and upgraded control systems to do the job properly;
  • Second, Canada needs to buy enough (85+ is just the very barest of bare minimums) of the right new fighter jet; and
  • Third, Canada needs to join the American ballistic missile defence system.

I believe that this issue: the shared defence of our, shared, continent and, therefore, the defence of the American heartland and of America’s strategic deterrent is a key, perhaps even the key element in our most important foreign relationship. […] The knowledge that Canada is doing a full and fair share of defending our shared continent, of defending America, is not lost on admirals and generals, diplomats and senior civil servants, representatives and senators in the US Congress, pundits and political leaders in waiting in the think-tanks and senior staff in the White House, even if Donald J Trump is not impressed … IF we are doing a full and fair share.

Right now, we are not.

An orbital analyst tracks the Kosmos 1402 spy satellite in orbit in the Space Defense Operations Computation Center, North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) on 18 February, 1983.
NORAD photo by Master Sergeant Hiyashi via Wikimedia Commons.

December 28, 2019

QotD: The “missing” mass of the universe

Filed under: Humour, Quotations, Space — Tags: — Nicholas @ 01:00

For something to exist, it has to be observed.

For something to exist, it has to have a position in time and space.

And this explains why nine-tenths of the mass of the universe is unaccounted for.

Nine-tenths of the universe is the knowledge of the position and direction of everything in the other tenth. Every atom has its biography, every star its file, every chemical exchange its equivalent of the inspector with a clipboard. It is unaccounted for because it is doing the accounting for the rest of it, and you cannot see the back of your own head.*

Nine-tenths of the universe, in fact, is the paperwork.

* Except in very small universes.

Terry Pratchett, Thief of Time, 2001.

December 26, 2019

The Origins of the Christmas Star?! – December 25th – TimeGhost of Christmas Past – DAY 2

Filed under: History, Religion, Science, Space — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 06:00

TimeGhost History
Published 25 Dec 2019

What did Mark Twain have in common with Genghis Khan and William the Conqueror? And how is this all tied into a Christmas Miracle? Well, much of this can be answered by a bright bulb of light, that astronomer Johann Palitzsch observed on Christmas Day 1758…

Join us on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/TimeGhostHistory

Hosted by: Indy Neidell
Written by: Rune Væver Hartvig and Spartacus Olsson
Directed by: Spartacus Olsson and Astrid Deinhard
Executive Producers: Bodo Rittenauer, Astrid Deinhard, Indy Neidell, Spartacus Olsson
Creative Producer: Joram Appel
Post-Production Director: Wieke Kapteijns
Research by: Rune Væver Hartvig
Edited by: Mikołaj Cackowski
Sound design: Marek Kaminski

Colorizations:
Julius Jääskeläinen – https://www.facebook.com/JJcolorization/

Sources:
King William I (“The Conqueror”), courtesy of National Portrait Gallery
Comet Halley and the Milky Way, courtesy of ESO (https://www.eso.org/public/images/com…)

Soundtracks from Epidemic Sound:
Howard Harper-Barnes – “A Sleigh Ride Into Town”
Leimoti – “The Christmas Thieves”

A TimeGhost chronological documentary produced by OnLion Entertainment GmbH.

December 14, 2019

History of Space Travel – Guided by Starlight – Extra History – #6

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Government, History, Space, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Extra Credits
Published 12 Dec 2019

What happened after we touched down on the moon? And where are we going in the future? While we may have lost the glitz and glamor of the Space Race, we have continued to make incredible progress in reaching the stars. We’ve come together to build space stations while in space, create the international space station, and started developing new technologies that could take us to Mars and beyond.

Start your Warframe journey now and prepare to face your personal nemesis, the Kuva Lich — an enemy that only grows stronger with every defeat. Take down this deadly foe, then get ready to take flight in Empyrean! Coming soon! http://bit.ly/EHWarframe

December 7, 2019

History of Space Travel – One Small Step – Extra History – #5

Filed under: History, Russia, Space, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 06:00

Extra Credits
Published 5 Dec 2019

Start your Warframe journey now and prepare to face your personal nemesis, the Kuva Lich — an enemy that only grows stronger with every defeat. Take down this deadly foe, then get ready to take flight in Empyrean! Coming soon! http://bit.ly/EHWarframe

The United States was losing the space race. A number of unfortunate missteps and mistakes had hindered their progress. But the United States had also structured its space program entirely differently from the USSR. Instead of being helmed by the military, the National Aeronautics & Space Administration was created by Eisenhower with an emphasis on exploration and research. And in the end, the later but more advanced satellites will collect the data required a dream firmly placed in the American consciousness by JFK. A dream to place a man on the moon.

From the comments:

Extra Credits
19 hours ago
The plaque still gives me goosebumps in the best way possible. Hopefully one day we can live up to its promise of peace. Be good to one another. ❤️

And thanks to Rebecca Ford (the voice of Lotus) for voicing space mom at the end of each of these episodes. They’ve been a blast to make and we hope that you all have enjoyed this trip to the stars.

November 29, 2019

History of Space Travel – Red Star – Extra History – #4

Filed under: History, Military, Russia, Space, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 06:00

Extra Credits
Published 28 Nov 2019

Start your Warframe journey now and prepare to face your personal nemesis, the Kuva Lich — an enemy that only grows stronger with every defeat. Take down this deadly foe, then get ready to take flight in Empyrean! Coming soon! http://bit.ly/EHWarframe

While rockets had been proven to be indispensable to the Second World War, the idea to send people up into orbit was still seen as fantasy. Space was important only as a method to further the range of missiles meant to land oceans away from their original launch point. But a man named Korolev will change all of that, with work so secretive, he will be referred to as Chief Designer for nearly his entire life. But we all know the name of his first project into space: Sputnik.

From the comments:

Extra Credits
1 day ago
We weren’t able to fit her into the episode, but the other famous first cosmonaut in space is Laika, the Soviet space dog. She was a stray who was taken in by the program to test the Sputnik 2 and some of its life support features (like a coolant fan). Unfortunately, Laika did not return from her mission alive but she’s still regarded highly in the history of space flight and has become a symbol for the space race and animal testing in general. Look her up!

I remember reading in Robert Heinlein’s Expanded Universe of the day on his tour of the Soviet Union in 1960 when he and his wife were told by a group of Red Army cadets of a Soviet rocket launch carrying a human into orbit for the first time. The story was officially denied and the capsule was said to be unmanned after all. Wikipedia says:

According to Gagarin’s biography, these rumours were likely started as a result of two Vostok missions equipped with dummies (Ivan Ivanovich) and human voice tape recordings (to test if the radio worked) that were made just prior to Gagarin’s flight.

In a U.S. press conference on February 23, 1962, colonel Barney Oldfield revealed that an uncrewed space capsule had indeed been orbiting the Earth since 1960, as it had become jammed into its booster rocket. According to the NASA NSSDC Master Catalog, Korabl Sputnik 1, designated at the time 1KP or Vostok 1P, did launch on May 15, 1960 (one year before Gagarin). It was a prototype of the later Zenit and Vostok launch vehicles. The onboard TDU (Braking Engine Unit) had ordered the retrorockets to fire to recover, but due to a malfunction of the attitude control system, the spacecraft was oriented upside-down, and the firing put the craft into a higher orbit. The re-entry capsule lacked a heat shield as there were no plans to recover it. Engineers had planned to use the vessel’s telemetry data to determine if the guidance system had functioned correctly, so recovery was unnecessary.

November 16, 2019

History of Space Travel – Kill Devil to V-2 – Extra History – #3

Filed under: Germany, History, Military, Russia, Space, Technology, USA, WW2 — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 06:00

Extra Credits
Published 14 Nov 2019

Start your Warframe journey now and prepare to face your personal nemesis, the Kuva Lich — an enemy that only grows stronger with every defeat. Take down this deadly foe, then get ready to take flight in Empyrean! Coming soon! http://bit.ly/EHWarframe

Early flight started as a utopian dream but quickly became the military’s top priority: first as reconnaissance vehicles, and then as weapons in their own right. After WW1, the threat of German aircraft led to the Treaty of Versailles banning Germany from having an airforce at all. But the Germans also found a loophole: rockets didn’t count as an airforce. Enter Werner Von Braun & the V-2 rockets.

November 11, 2019

Addressing the real extinction-level environmental threat

Filed under: Science, Space, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

In the latest edition of the Libertarian Enterprise, L. Neil Smith points to what he thinks will be Donald Trump’s signature achievement: the United States Space Force.

The biggest nuclear weapon ever detonated on Earth, Tsar Bomba, was 50MT. The Chicxulub impact was, at these numbers, 2 million times as powerful as Tsar Bomba.
Image and caption from Stephanie Osborn’s “Incoming: The Chicxulub Impactor, Part 3 — The Impactor & Effects” at https://accordingtohoyt.com/2019/10/31/incoming-the-chicxulub-impactor-part-3-%e2%80%95-the-impactor-effects-by-stephanie-osborn/

Many thoughtful observers believe that the most significant thing that Donald Trump has accomplished so far is his appointment of dozens of federal judges who share his philosophy of governance and I, amateur historian that I am, am inclined to agree with them — with one exception, that is, a little item that just might prove to be a thousand times, a million times, a billion times more important than anything else the Donald — or anybody else, for that matter — has ever done.

Most of us have become aware of the way that a relatively small piece of rock — an asteroid approximately the size of Manhattan Island or the Matterhorn — changed the course of life-history on this planet. It struck the Earth at 40,000 miles and hour, hitting what is now the northern coast of the Yucatan, generating a titanic explosion that ignited every plant standing above the ground, raising a tidal wave that swept over most of North America, and opening a chain of deadly volcanoes on the other side of the world, near India. The esteemed Bob Bakker to the contrary, the late, lamented dinosaurs, I believe, died from smoke inhalation.

Three quarters of all life on this planet, plant and animal, land and sea, was brutally exterminated by this “Cretaceous-Tertiary Event”, and apparently not for the first time. There was a much worse die-off between the Permian and the Triassic eras. The important fact, for you and me, is that there are thousands, if not millions of other lethal asteroids still out there, with which our vulnerable little blue marble is still playing a murderous game of roulette. It is only a matter of time before another “extinction-level event” occurs, possibly wiping out every last living entity on Earth. We can see plenty of evidence of that kind of phenomenon, that magnitude of destruction, elsewhere in the Solar System.

Take your precious carbon footprints and stuff them where the sun don’t shine, Greta. It is Donald Trump who has made the historic first move to prevent this very real cataclysm, and probably to extend the life of the human species indefinitely (an idea environmentalists hate), by calling for the organization of a United States Space Force. At this moment it still isn’t clear exactly what methods will work best to destroy or divert asteroids that threaten our home-world (I mention possibilities in my 2010 Ngu Family Saga novel Ceres), but it is something that must be done, sooner or later, probably by manned spacecraft.

The other important task for which we need a Space Force is to clean up the tens of millions of items of orbital debris that NASA and other agencies have very sloppily left circling over our heads. Remember when the Gemini astronauts simply threw those expensive Hasselblad cameras out the door? These objects range in size from particles of dust to cast-off booster stages which endanger satellites and spacecraft. A hunk of junk the size and shape of a small screw can damage solar panels, pressurized living and working spaces, as well as helmeted individuals in spacesuits, to whom that flying screw would be like a bullet through the head.

November 9, 2019

History of Space Travel – Revolutions – Extra History – #2

Filed under: History, Science, Space — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 06:00

Extra Credits
Published 7 Nov 2019

Start your Warframe journey now and prepare to face your personal nemesis, the Kuva Lich — an enemy that only grows stronger with every defeat. Take down this deadly foe, then get ready to take flight in Empyrean! Coming soon! http://bit.ly/EHWarframe

As the Renaissance breathes new life into Europe, Copernicus develops mathematical proofs for the sun resting in the center of the universe. And from his works, a new world is born. The scientific world gets faster and faster. Revolutions of all kinds begin to set off chains of events that reshape human history. And as science improves, so do the tools of war. Both will be necessary to propel humanity to the stars. Join us on this race through the scientific works between the Renaissance and the Industrial Revolution.

Copernicus’ publishing really came down to the wire! Legend has it that he was given the final printed pages on his death bed. When they presented him with the book, he awoke from a coma, saw his life’s work and finally passed away in peace. Or so the story goes.

November 6, 2019

How Did The Saturn 5 Rocket Work? | James May: On The Moon | Earth Lab

Filed under: History, Space, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

BBC Earth Lab
Published 3 Jan 2017

James May meets Harrison Schmitt, one of the last men to ride Saturn 5 and learns a bit about the science behind a rocket with six million components.

Taken From James May: On the Moon

Welcome to BBC Earth Lab! Here we answer all your curious questions about science in the world around you (and further afield too). If there’s a question you have that we haven’t yet answered let us know in the comments on any of our videos and it could be answered by one of our Earth Lab experts.

November 2, 2019

History of Space Travel – Looking to the Stars – Extra History – #1

Filed under: History, Science, Space — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 06:00

Extra Credits
Published 31 Oct 2019

Start your Warframe journey now and prepare to face your personal nemesis, the Kuva Lich — an enemy that only grows stronger with every defeat. Take down this deadly foe, then get ready to take flight in Empyrean! Coming soon! http://bit.ly/ECWarframe

What do Ptolemy and ancient Chinese rockets have in common? Without either of these things, space flight wouldn’t be possible! In order to understand how we started traveling amongst the stars, we have to talk about how we started studying stars in the first place. Since the very first civilizations we’ve always looked at the night sky with wonder & curiosity but also as a way to try and understand the future and time itself.

September 1, 2019

Gene Roddenberry was his own worst enemy

Filed under: History, Media, Space, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Ed Driscoll reviews the first of three volumes by Marc Cushman, relating the story behind the legendary original Star Trek TV series. Much of the first volume is apparently about the problems of getting NBC to let Gene Roddenberry back into their good graces after he humiliated the network over an earlier TV show:

Nichelle Nichols was born in Robbins, Illinois on December 29, 1936. She played Lieutenant Uhura the Communications Officer on the U.S.S. Enterprise in the original series, Star Trek. Nichols stayed with the show and has appeared in six Star Trek movies. Her portrayal of Uhura on Star Trek marked one of the first non-stereotypical roles assigned to an African-American actress. Before joining the crew on Star Trek, she sang and danced with Duke Ellington’s band.
NASA photo via Wikimedia Commons.

Gene Roddenberry (1921-1991) was a religious agnostic and left-leaning Texan who became a WWII Army Air Force B-17 pilot, then an LA policeman who wrote numerous scripts for the burgeoning television industry in the 1950s. Eventually, he graduated to producing his own TV show in 1963, The Lieutenant, purchased by NBC and built around Gary Lockwood, the future guest star of Star Trek‘s second pilot, and the co-star of another landmark 1960s science fiction achievement, Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey.

The Lieutenant was for the most part a formulaic “military procedural” about life at Camp Pendleton, and featured numerous future Star Trek guest stars and cast members. However, Roddenberry, as was his wont, eventually decided to push the envelope, and put into production an episode on racism in the Marines called “To Set It Right,” with guest stars Dennis Hopper, future Star Trek regular Nichelle Nichols and future Trek guest star Don Marshall. The episode lost the support of the Marines, and the good will of NBC. As Roddenberry later recounted, “My problem was not the Marine Corps; it was NBC, who turned down the show flat … There was only one thing I could do, I went to the NAACP and they lowered the boom on NBC.”

As Cushman writes, this did not endear himself with NBC’s executive suit. “Roddenberry had won the battle … but lost the war. Despite satisfactory ratings, The Lieutenant was cancelled.” And NBC’s executives would not forget being hung out to dry by one of their product suppliers.

Even before The Lieutenant‘s only season of production was complete, Roddenberry began crafting a television show he called Star Trek. He had somehow stumbled into the perfect format for an hour-long network television series. While he admired shows such as Rod Serling’s The Twilight Zone and its recombinant network rival The Outer Limits for their ability to comment on American society through the metaphors of science fiction and horror, these were anthology shows, introducing a new cast each week. He knew the most successful network series were those with a recurring cast, such the many westerns that aired during the 1950s and ’60s, such as the long-running Bonanza and Gunsmoke. Viewers treated these archetypal characters almost as their own family members, which in turn encouraged them to tune in each week.

Given the networks’ love of westerns in the 1960s, it’s no coincidence that Roddenberry’s first pitch to the networks used the phrase “Wagon Train to the stars” as a metaphor to describe the show. (As Cushman writes, veteran western and science fiction writer Samuel Peeples actually coined that phrase, the first of many bits of Star Trek lore that Roddenberry would eventually co-opt and take credit for.)

It’s also no coincidence that the show’s second in command was written by Roddenberry as “a mysterious female, slim and dark, expressionless, cool, one of those women who will always look the same between years 20 and 50.” As Cushman deadpans, “To be more specific: actress Majel Barrett, Roddenberry’s lover.” (Roddenberry was also having a tryst with Nichelle Nichols; she would find her way into Star Trek‘s regular cast as well.) While the pointed-eared alien Mr. Spock was also present, he was much more in the background in Roddenberry’s first draft of Star Trek.

July 20, 2019

50th anniversary

Filed under: History, Space, Technology, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 11:41

Astronaut Buzz Aldrin, lunar module pilot, stands on the surface of the moon near the leg of the lunar module, Eagle, during the Apollo 11 moonwalk. Astronaut Neil Armstrong, mission commander, took this photograph with a 70mm lunar surface camera. While Armstrong and Aldrin descended in the lunar module to explore the Sea of Tranquility, astronaut Michael Collins, command module pilot, remained in lunar orbit with the Command and Service Module, Columbia. *This is the actual photograph as exposed on the moon by Armstrong. He held the camera slightly rotated so that the camera frame did not include the top of Aldrin’s portable life support system (“backpack”). A communications antenna mounted on top of the backpack is also cut off in this picture. When the image was released to the public, it was rotated clockwise to restore the astronaut to vertical for a more harmonious composition, and a black area was added above his head to recreate the missing black lunar “sky”. The edited version is the one most commonly reproduced and known to the public, but the original version, above, is the authentic exposure.

Bootprint in lunar dust created and photographed by Buzz Aldrin for the boot penetration (soil mechanics) task during the Apollo 11 moon walk.

June 26, 2019

“… what’s happening now is even better than Apollo”

Filed under: Space, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

At Popular Mechanics, Joe Pappalardo reminds us that the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 lunar landing is coming up next month, but that current developments in space are worth celebrating too:

Astronaut Buzz Aldrin, lunar module pilot, stands on the surface of the moon near the leg of the lunar module, Eagle, during the Apollo 11 moonwalk. Astronaut Neil Armstrong, mission commander, took this photograph with a 70mm lunar surface camera. While Armstrong and Aldrin descended in the lunar module to explore the Sea of Tranquility, astronaut Michael Collins, command module pilot, remained in lunar orbit with the Command and Service Module, Columbia.

Apollo was born of Cold War desperation: a political exercise that paid enormous scientific and technological dividends. After the launch of Sputnik in 1957, it became vital to beat the Soviet Union to the Moon, a geopolitical urge that created an enormous budgetary effort.

The problem with politically motivated — well, anything — is that the faucet of support can be closed just as quickly as it opened. It happened to Apollo, as follow on missions were cancelled and the focus shifted to a reusable craft to service low-earth orbit. This pattern of shifting space priorities and strategies whipsawed NASA, most noticeably when the Obama administration’s cancellation of the Bush-era Constellation moon program in 2010.

But multiple private companies pursuing their niches in space have an obvious redundancy. While companies may rise and fall, the very nature of a commercial effort isn’t as dependent on government funding. If it’s worth doing, especially if it makes money, space industry will endure political shifts. The objectives of a well-run company do not change that much every four years.

That leaves today’s NASA with a choice: Do it themselves and control everything (the traditional way), or fund private companies to develop the tech the agency needs and then allow them to sell their services to any nation, company, or individual (the new way). With those services on the open market, NASA would be one of many customers for a new U.S.-based space economy.

This debate is boiling over right now. The ongoing effort to return to the moon, called Artemis (after Apollo’s sister), is becoming a lesson in the advantages of the commercial model.

[…]

If only investment guaranteed results. For those who miss bloated, government-run spaceflight, there is already a NASA spacecraft mired in the old ways of thinking. The feds have sunk a lot of money into the Space Launch System, a mega-rocket built to NASA specs for deep space missions. It was supposed to fly in 2017, but we’ll be lucky to see a first flight in 2020 — and it busted the $9.7 billion estimated budget, now costing about $12 billion.

But something happened during these SLS delays: the commercial space industry started delivering on its promises. Most visibly, private firms have been delivering supplies to the International Space Station for years and (hopefully soon) will ferry astronauts as well. Blue Origin and SpaceX has started development of crewed spacecraft able to reach to the moon and Mars. Elon Musk even sold a moon trip to a Japanese billionaire.

« Newer PostsOlder Posts »

Powered by WordPress