Saturday Science Special
Once again there have been fatalities in the pursuit of manned space flight and I mourn the loss just as everyone does.
But you know folks, they call it Rocket Science for a reason and even after a century of development (I personally date it from the work of Robert Goddard which is terribly parochial of me, some would date it from the work of Konstantin Tsiolkovsk in 1903) it’s still an extremely dangerous undertaking.
A century you say? Well, two of Goddard’s patents, those for liquid fuel and multiple stages, were granted in 1914.
His 1919 monograph A Method of Reaching Extreme Altitudes is considered one of the classic texts of 20th-century rocket science. Goddard successfully applied three-axis control, gyroscopes and steerable thrust to rockets, to effectively control their flight.
Although his work in the field was revolutionary, Goddard received very little public support for his research and development work. The press sometimes ridiculed his theories of spaceflight. As a result, he became protective of his privacy and his work.
Even way back when (1920) the Grey Lady often missed the point-
A Severe Strain on Credulity
As a method of sending a missile to the higher, and even highest, part of the earth’s atmospheric envelope, Professor Goddard’s multiple-charge rocket is a practicable, and therefore promising device. Such a rocket, too, might carry self-recording instruments, to be released at the limit of its flight, and conceivable parachutes would bring them safely to the ground. It is not obvious, however, that the instruments would return to the point of departure; indeed, it is obvious that they would not, for parachutes drift exactly as balloons do. And the rocket, or what was left of it after the last explosion, would need to be aimed with amazing skill, and in a dead calm, to fall on the spot whence it started.
But that is a slight inconvenience, at least from the scientific standpoint, though it might be serious enough from that of the always innocent bystander a few hundred or thousand yards from the firing line.
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[A]fter the rocket quits our air and really starts on its longer journey, its flight would be neither accelerated nor maintained by the explosion of the charges it then might have left. To claim that it would be is to deny a fundamental law of dynamics, and only Dr. Einstein and his chosen dozen, so few and fit, are licensed to do that.
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His plan is not original
That Professor Goddard, with his “chair” in Clark College and the countenancing of the Smithsonian Institution, does not know the relation of action and reaction, and of the need to have something better than a vacuum against which to react-to say that would be absurd. Of course he only seems to lack the knowledge ladled out daily in high schools.
Umm… bright boy, action reacts against the body providing the action (thrust), not against the density of the medium being traveled. If anything it’s easier because you don’t have to account for drag and, not that I’m a math whiz or anything, when you study Newton in basic Physics a vacuum is always assumed because it makes the equations so much simpler.
While I like to imagine myself a brave revolutionary who’d tell The New York Times to piss up a rope (usually messy but theoretically possible given a rope with the right kind of capillary action) in fact I’d probably do what Goddard did and skulk away reclusively, muttering imprecations under my breath.
To their credit The Times did retract, one day after the launch of Apollo 11 and a mere 24 years after his death-
A Correction
Further investigation and experimentation have confirmed the findings of Isaac Newton in the 17th Century and it is now definitely established that a rocket can function in a vacuum as well as in an atmosphere. The Times regrets the error.
I thought it especially magnanimous that they recognized that they had misunderstood Newton’s equations, which were after all published in 1687.
There is no getting around the fact that spaceflight is inherently dangerous. Just getting to orbit is basically like shoving a stick of dynamite up your butt and hoping for good things to happen, let alone the difficulties of a hostile environment and a high speed fall (I think jumping off buildings is fun, don’t you?).
That Richard Branson is marketing this as “Adventure Tourism” seems the height (heh, he said height) of irresponsibility to me though I can’t wait for the day when (your least liked celebrity, arrogant asshole capitalist, or corrupt politician here) burns up in a Stratospheric fireball.
I’ll be sad. Of course I will.
The law that entropy always increases holds, I think, the supreme position among the laws of Nature. If someone points out to you that your pet theory of the universe is in disagreement with Maxwell’s equations – then so much the worse for Maxwell’s equations. If it is found to be contradicted by observation – well, these experimentalists do bungle things sometimes. But if your theory is found to be against the second law of thermodynamics I can give you no hope; there is nothing for it but to collapse in deepest humiliation.
–Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington, The Nature of the Physical World (1927)
Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo Crashes in New Setback for Commercial Spaceflight
By KENNETH CHANG and JOHN SCHWARTZ, The New York Times
OCT. 31, 2014
The pilots, who have not yet been identified, were flying the plane for Virgin Galactic, the space tourism company created by the entrepreneur Richard Branson, and Scaled Composites, the company that designed and built the plane.
One pilot was able to parachute from the plane and was taken to a hospital with “moderate to major injuries,” said Ray Pruitt, the public information officer for the Kern County sheriff’s office in California.
The test was the first time SpaceShipTwo had flown using a new, plastic-based rocket fuel.
It was the second major accident in a week for the commercial space industry, which has been widely promoted in recent years as an alternative to costly government programs. On Tuesday, an unmanned rocket launched by Orbital Sciences Corporation of Dulles, Va., which was carrying cargo to the International Space Station, exploded 15 seconds after launching.
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The list of would-be astronauts includes celebrities like Leonardo DiCaprio, Justin Bieber and Angelina Jolie.
Experts said it was too soon to tell when the effort would resume. “Virgin was out ahead of everyone else for space tourism,” said Michael Blades, the aerospace and defense industry senior analyst at Frost & Sullivan, a market research and consulting firm. “It will still happen, but it has been pushed way to the right.
“It is just like any kind of other new technology, especially when it comes to flight,” he continued. “You have your tests and you have your failures.”
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Marco Caceres, director of space studies at the Teal Group, a consulting firm, said that “in an age where it is very expensive to fly these vehicles, the pressure is to do the minimal amount of test flying.”
“So that may be something we have to take a look at,” he continued. “Everyone seems to be in need of more money to conduct more flights, so the pressure is to start operational flight too soon. Maybe we are being unreasonable here.”
Patricia Hynes, director of the New Mexico Space Grant Consortium, who organizes an annual symposium for people in the commercial space industry, said the accident “helps people understand why it’s never been done before.”
“This is a tough business,” she said.
Science and Technology News and Blogs
- Why would someone steal the world’s rarest water lily?, by Sam Knight, The Guardian
- The real-life Indiana Jones on the hunt for lost ancient Mayan cities in Mexico, by Jo Tuckman, The Guardian
- The Weather Channel officially endorses man-made climate change, by Lindsay Abrams, Salon
- Pope Francis declares evolution and Big Bang theory are real and God is not ‘a magician with a magic wand’, by Adam Withnall, The Independent
- China’s First Lunar Return Mission A Stunning Success (wide), by Morris Jones, Space Daily
- Does Uber-Ancient Earth Water Mean Life Started Earlier?, by Irene Klotz, Discovery News
- Could We Use Ground-Based Lasers To Propel Rockets Into Space?, by George Dvorsky, io9
- Aerial images shed light on the Middle East’s mysterious stone circles, by Fiona MacDonald, Science Alert
- First stage propulsion system is early focus of Antares investigation, by Stephen Clark, Spaceflight Now
- Low oxygen ‘delayed animal life on Earth’, by Melissa Hogenboom, BBC
- ‘Parallel universes DO exist’: Multiple versions of us are living in alternate worlds that interact with each other, theory claims, by Ellie Zolfagharifard, Daily Mail
- Has the key to Amelia Earhart’s disappearance in the Pacific been found in Kansas?, by BRIAN BURNES, McClatchy
- Net Neutrality May Extend Phone Regulations to Broadband, by Todd Shields, Bloomberg News
- Facebook Joins Tor, And The Dark Web Gets A Little More Useful (If A Little Less Cool), by Mike Masnick, Tech Dirt
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