Spaceman, Mike Massimino

https://www.amazon.com/Spaceman-Astronauts-Unlikely-Journey-Universe/dp/1101903546

A book that I suspect only relatively hard core space junkies will enjoy. There are some really interesting sections on the Hubble, spacewalking, the process of getting to be an astronaut, etc **IF** those things are of signficant interest to you.

Of most interest to me were:

• How much flying time riding as a back-seater in T-38s was REQUIRED even if you were a mission specialst that is never going to pilot anything -- psychological training!
• How strong the astronaut sense of community is and how heavily Christian oriented it is. When you you fly on a spacecraft, you are ready to go and ready to GO (permanently).
• How much less "star power" there now is in being an astronaut or ex-astronaut. Massimino is a professor at Columbia now, one of his astronaut buddies is a commercial airline pilot and another flies for FedEx. 
• "Experience vs Knowledge". Mike is orbiting at the Hubble spacewalking, looks around and EXERIENCES the billiant light of the stationary sun as the earth rotates out of darkness ushering in a new 90 min Hubble "day". Mike EXPERIENCED the fact that the sun is stationary (relative to earth) and the day and night are caused by the rotation of the earth. Of course he "knew" that, but experience is much more. Telling someone about being a grandparent is not the same as being a grandparent. 

Mike was a long shot for space -- somewhat weak qualifications considering the competion and very marginal eyesight for an astronaut. Good "never give up" motivational example.

Through a number of twists and turns, personality/connections and certainly some good fortune or "fate", he flew two missions to repair the Hubble that sits at a higher orbit than the ISS, 350 miles vs 250 miles, so the view is better, you see the whole earth "blue marble effect". His first flight was STS-109, which bumped STS-107 so that they had to wait. 107 was the last flight of Columbia, broke up over TX due to insulation damage to the wing on takeoff. Spaceflight is dangerous, and your number can come up, or you can just be "close". 

LOTS and LOTS of detail about spacewalking, Hubble, the difficulties of doing repairs, the expense but huge payoff in exploration of the Hubble. I enjoyed it quite a bit, but unless you are a significant space / engineering junkie, you are not likely to make it through. 

Dark and Stormy Carrier Landing

http://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/3559/how-to-land-a-fighter-on-an-aircraft-carrier-on-a-stormy-night?xid=srfeb&sr_source=lift_facebook

A little change of pace. A good article full of details about the incredible capability of the only nation on earth able to carry out night all-weather carrier ops.

Even if we don't lose this preeminate position as we lost our spacefaring capability, there will be a time in the not too distant future when the computers do the landing, and then shortly a time when the only thing flying are drones. My guess is that in the next war, the carrier goes the way of the battleship, but part of life is appreciating the miracles of today.

To consistently put jet aircraft on the deck of a carrier at night and in stormy weather is a feat that ranks at the very top of individual and group operational skill. Greatness is not a right -- it is EARNED. We were once a nation that went to the Moon ... even in our decline, we still have men who can work together to accomplish incredible feats as "part of the job".

Bitchin' Betty Retires

"Bitchin' Betty" Says "Goodbye" | All Things Aero:

The real lady that recorded the voice for tghe F/A-18 Super Hornet retires. "PULL UP!!!!"

'via Blog this'

Jimmy Buffett's Plain Plane Buffet

Jimmy Buffett's New Toy The ICON Aircraft | All Things Aero:

I'm not a Parrot Head, but I do like some Jimmy Buffett. He is a big airplane guy and a major league environmentalist. He feels the rest of us need to get rid of our SUVs. The video in the attached shows him trying out a new plane and lists the planes currently in his stable.

I DON'T hate the guy at all -- it helps me realize what dealing with liberals is all about. Many of them are talented very happy and well meaning people who have not one single wisp of the concept "consistency", let alone any interest in dealing in any of it. I'm convinced it is one of the ways to be happy -- at least if your brain lets you compartmentalize well enough.

I wrote about his book "A Pirate Looks at 50" on my 50th birthday a decade ago. My seemingly wonderful life was about to fall into the abyss in less than two years from that post.


'via Blog this'

Air France 747, Goodbye To An Icon!

Stunning! This Is How You Say Goodbye To An Icon | All Things Aero:

A video that I enjoyed watching on the link. I used to watch the contrails from the farm as a kid, and on the rare occasions that I got to see a big city airport I always dreamed of getting on a 747.

It wasn't until my first over the pond business trip to England in late '80s that I rode one of the iconic double deckers from Minneapolis to Gatwick outside of London. The "ship of the skies" ... a slow and stately takeoff roll, a pretty level deck angle on climb. DC-10's of the era flexed and shook, with typically one or more overhead bins popping open. The 747 was solid, quiet and calm.

Sometime in the early '90s I read "Wide-body: The Triumph of the 747" a superb book. Remember, they built this beast prior to much in the way of computing power being available, and it was a REAL technological and business stretch. The book is also full of a lot of stories of the history of Boeing, including how the swept wing planes have a tendency to "Dutch Roll" which if not dampened can become violent.

On a customer acceptance flight, the customer pilot miscorrected and the roll became so violent that 3 of the 4 engines were thrown from the plane. It crash landed killing a high level Boeing exec and I believe their chief pilot -- 4 survived, largely because he was able to get the plane to the ground in a semi-controlled manner. "Bugs" in planes are often more costly than bugs in computers!

I definitely recommend the book if you have an interest in this industry changing jet.

'via Blog this'

Germanwings 9525, Technology, Incrementalism, Trust

Germanwings 9525, Technology, and the Question of Trust - The New Yorker:

This article jumps a bridge too far relative to safeguards on aircraft. The plane doesn't need to COMPLETELY fly itself, it just needs to add more "self preservation" ... which the fly by wire craft like the Airbus already have -- as do most cars now. Rev limiters, lock-outs to prevent shifts to reverse,  not starting in gear, etc. My Gold Wing won't stay running in gear with the kickstand down, thus preventing driving off and being up-ended by turning with it down.

Current planes limit the ability to pull up too fast on takeoff, fly over-speed, damage the engines, etc  -- all these elements have good and bad points. A fairly recent slide off a runway was caused when a plane had not settled enough on the gear to allow the thrust reversers to be used. There was a way to override that, but they could not find that switch fast enough.

There are ZERO systems that are "foolproof", "suicide proof" or will not have unintended side-effects as the hardened cockpit door added as a result of 9-11 did in this case. The systems analysts game is a game of odds -- prevent the big failure, weed out anything "common". First do no harm.

Current nav information DEFINITELY allows the planes systems to know where it is relative to ground and where airports are at. There is really not much of an excuse for an autopilot to accept a command to fly the plane into terrain. Such a command ought to require two pilots to type in an override code at a minimum if it is even allowed -- I fail to see a scenario where flying a jet into terrain is "the best alternative available".  It damned well better be in a landing configuration --  below 150mph, flaps deployed, etc, etc before the automation lets it get to say "1000 AGL" (Above Ground Level)

Our technology is not ready to allow commercial planes to go fly routes on their own, but it is clearly at the level where a plane ought not to allow a pilot to destroy it without putting up a very good  battle!  Certainly there need to be overrides and ways to "shut off most of the automation" -- because ALL systems can fail, but those overrides can be 2 man decision points.

Some of the more thoughtful may be saying, "Yes but, what if the other pilot is incapacitated" ... etc, etc. Again, this is about ODDS -- what are the ODDS that you not only need to disable all the automation, but ALSO the other pilot is incapacitated? Even that is possible to get around -- perhaps a flight attendant has a third code to cover that eventuality. I'm not doing a full design here -- it just ought not be as easy as it apparently was to allow one pilot to instruct a $70M plane to fly into terrain with a load of passengers.

The choice is NOT "remove the pilots" or just go on with the same risks. There are LOTS of incremental steps that can, and I'd argue ought to have been taken already given EXISTING navigational and programmed automation capabilities to make flying a modern aircraft into off-airport terrain an act that is nigh on impossible to execute.

'via Blog this'

The SR-71 Blackbird, The Titanium Spirit That Was America

The Thrill of Flying the SR-71 Blackbird:

This is one of those articles well worth just ignoring my words and reading in it's entirety.

This was the America that I was privileged to grow up in and enjoy most of my adult life in. The exceptional nation, and undisputed in that exceptional nature for those that cared for freedom vs the tyranny of the socialist system of the USSR. Even with the rise of godless socialists in this country during the sick 60s and the malaise of the '70s, we went to the moon, Reagan defeated the USSR, and we had unmatched audacious technology like the SR-71 that was undefeated. Enemy attempts, 4000, enemy success, ZIP! 4K to zip, American stats! Plus, in this rare case, we never lost anyone even in the ejection cases! Incredible for an aircraft that operated in the environment and mission of this one!

The Author of the article, Brian Shul is also the author of the book "Sled Driver", which thanks to thoughtful friend an autographed copy of which  has set on my shelf and been frequently read / admired for years, but now needs to move to my fireproof safe -- the non-autographed copies are worth $315!

Shul was shot down in Vietnam, assumed to never fly again, but with great personal effort came back and flew over 500 hours in the SR-71, or "Sled" as the pilots often referred to her as.

Just a sample from the article if you didn't take my advice! It is in reference to their penetrating Libyan airspace to assess damage after Reagan's '86 bombing of Libya:

It is a race this jet will not let us lose. The Mach eases to 3.5 as we crest 80,000 feet. We are a bullet now - except faster. We hit the turn, and I feel some relief as our nose swings away from a country we have seen quite enough of. Screaming past Tripoli , our phenomenal speed continues to rise, and the screaming Sled pummels the enemy one more time, laying down a parting sonic boom. In seconds, we can see nothing but the expansive blue of the Mediterranean . I realize that I still have my left hand full-forward and we're continuing to rocket along in maximum afterburner.

Some links:

The definitive SR-71 site which includes a list of SR-71s now on display which made me realize that the one that sat up at the MN Air National Guard Museum at the airport in the cites was "stolen" to sit at the CIA HQ in DC! I've seen that one before it moved, the one on the Intrepid in NYC, the trans-US speed record holder at 64min, at Smithsonian, the one at the US Alabama Museum in GA and the one at Wright Patterson ... so doing pretty well!

As this once great nation descends the path of Rome and Britain before her into the "ash heap of history", the SR-71 remains a symbol of what we once were. When we believed in God, I believe this battle with decline is one that "God would not let us lose" -- we abandoned him, he never abandoned us.


'via Blog this'

Apollo, Murray and Cox

I had to read a nice thick detailed Apollo book in the past week as my way of celebrating the 40th anniversary of the moon landing tomorrow. Excellent book, it ought to be on the top of the list for anyone interested in the engineering, planning, procedures and management that were responsible for one of the milestones of human history. Vietnam, Kennedy, MLK and much more will be forgotten, but "Man Walks on Moon" is one of those milestones for humanity that will be remembered as long as humans exist.

The book is loaded with detail and anecdotes about the people that dedicated a decade or more of their lives to the quest for the moon. The challenges of getting the F1 engines in the mammoth Saturn V to be stable ... 2 tons of LOX and a ton of kerosene into each of the 5 F1s in each second producing 1.5 million lbs of thrust each.

A lot of details on some folks that had a lot of responsibility but were far from household names -- Joe Shea being one. He took a lot of personal responsibility for the building of the Command Module, and strangely, would have been in the capsule below the astronauts feet if they could have gotten a com plug for him the night that Apollo 1 burned. He was devastated by the loss of the crew and always felt personally responsible, but he lived on with the pain and had a pretty successful life.

There is a lot of focus on the decision to do "Lunar Orbit Rendezvous", which was originally seen as "off the wall risky", but eventually came to be seen as the only reasonable way to do it.

Most of all, I'm struck by the fact that we haven't been back to the moon since '72. I liked this quote:

A new all-purpose political truism entered the language: "If this nation can put a man on the moon, then it should be able to ..." Cure cancer, stop crime, end poverty. All it would take, many seemed to think at the time, was the same kind of money and commitment that the US had lavished on Apollo.

First of all, we are no longer "this nation". The nation that put men on the moon had values, courage, faith and a spirit that is WAY different from the nation that we have become today. Could THIS nation put a man on the moon? I'm not so sure.

Of course, even if we could, going to the moon is primarily an ENGINEERING PROBLEM, and while it is a difficult problem, it can be done with known technology. It isn't primarily a "science problem", or a "social problem". Curing cancer requires massive invention, and there is a non-zero chance it is "impossible" (to do it and have a living patient with a reasonable quality of life).

The hubris of "if we can send a man to the moon ..." is unbelievable. Stop crime or end poverty? What would that mean? We don't even know what it would mean to do those things, let alone have any starting point as to how they might actually be achieved. It is very likely that the "cure" might end up being worse than the problem.

The moon was hanging in space for all of human history. We ALWAYS "knew what it meant" to go there. Once we had put unmanned landers on it, it was certainly "possible" to send a man there -- THEN, the issue was one of "merely" time, money, commitment, and the willingness to risk (and lose) human lives in the pursuit of the goal.

It is most often those who have accomplished the least that have the most to say about "if we can send a man to the moon ...", or "it seems to me it OUGHT to be done thus and so ...". Sadly, we now have a president that has accomplished nothing in his life save a couple good speeches and yet has huge confidence in his ability to do nearly anything. Knowing your limits as well as your abilities engenders "confidence". Being supremely confident you have no limits is hubris.

We once were a nation with the confidence to go to the moon, today we are a nation with the hu bris to believe that "we" (well, maybe the rich, the smart, the dedicated) could "do anything" -- if they would just get down to it.

We Came We Saw, We Lost Interest (Moon, Shuttle)

RealClearPolitics - The Moon We Left Behind

Just read it all. I'm half through "Apollo" by Murry and Cox that I'll Blog on later, but the lament of 40 lost years of the American and human spirit of exploration and conquest is a sad tale. In remembering and reading the histories of that era, we get some sense of the focus and passion that we lost.

The shuttle is now too dangerous, too fragile and too expensive. Seven more flights and then it is retired, going -- like the Spruce Goose and the Concorde -- into the museum of Things Too Beautiful And Complicated To Survive. 

America's manned space program is in shambles. Fourteen months from today, for the first time since 1962, the U.S. will be incapable not just of sending a man to the moon but of sending anyone into Earth orbit. We'll be totally grounded. We'll have to beg a ride from the Russians or perhaps even the Chinese.

Pay and Performance

Pilots' low pay, long commutes probed in air crash - Yahoo! News

BO and the Fascists are hot on the trail of deciding what level of pay it is that everyone is worth. As near as I can understand their algorithm is that if you are smart enough to contribute to the Democratic party (Unions in general, Finance Industry, lawyers), then you deserve a high salary. Naturally, as with any good Democrat, this higher income will be "tax free" -- if you get in any trouble with the IRS, just contact BO, and he will appoint you to a cabinet position.

The old tired idea of "pay for performance", or "higher pay for higher capability / education / etc" has been replaced by "pay for votes", or as they like to say in Chicago, "pay to play". In a nation where only politics is important, why would people persist in some tired discredited capitalist ideas of income having something to do with some hard to compute concept called "value"?

Consider the difference between the pilots who crashed in Buffalo killing all aboard and "Sully" Sullenberger who dead sticked the Airbus into the Hudson for no loss of life. The horribly greedy Sully is reported to make about $140K a year, and moonlights as a consultant to make up for salary and pension losses down from at one time being able to focus on flying full time and make over $200K. Clearly, he erroneously believes that capability and experience are worthy of higher salaries, and he must think that he has some use for all those "riches". Why, if his wife works, he deserves to be punished with some BO tax increases for the "rich" just to show him how stupid it is to be making such "exorbitant sums"!!

The 49 year old captain on the Buffalo plane earned a way more respectable $55K a year, while his 24 year old co-pilot was earning a fairly spartan $24K and living with her folks because she couldn't afford a place of her own. Heil BO! Those are the kinds of "sustainable salaries" that Americans ought to be dreaming of!! The way I see it, "a pilot is a pilot", so what's the difference? I'm sure all those passengers aboard that Buffalo plane were much happier to have those low cost pilots right up to the point at which they had, shall we say, "higher considerations".

Put Sully behind those controls and they would have never been aware the plane had a pilot -- he would have never let his approach speed get low in the first place, absolutely nothing would have happened. But hey, salary is "immaterial" -- there is no difference in the kinds of people you attract with lower salaries than higher, other than the lower ones are BETTER PEOPLE!! -- many more of them vote Democrat, and that is all that counts!

Relative to wealth, two groups vote high percentage Democrat -- the really rich, because they can afford to, and the really poor (when they get out and vote) ... because they have given up hope. If you aren't really rich, it is a great time to pick up some hope for the next life, because your future in this one is a bit less bright than Colgan Air flight 3407 when the stick-shaker activated.

Seeing the Space Station

My recent quest to watch the ISS pass over was rewarded this evening on the 8:53 orbital pass. I found the time and likely magnitued on HeavensAbove walked out the front door at 8:50, and right on schedule, a nice yellowish bright object began rising in the W-NW. I was actually surprised that it wasn't faster, but then when I watch it on the satellite tracker on the web, it doesn't exactly race along the screen either -- even at 16,500 an hour, it takes over an hour for it to get all the way around, and it was visible for close to 3 min.

The listed magnitude was -2.5, which is brighter than the brightest star, and close to Venus (magnitude 4.0) ... I'd guess it was about that as it got to around 45 degrees, but I was surprised that it was already getting dimmer by the time it went over and when it got to like 70 degrees in the E-SE sky, it rapidly declined in brightness and winked out -- my assumption is that it went into the earths shadow at that point.

It is easy to see, so probably worth going out on a reasonable evening and seeing it.

International Space Station

I haven't watched it all myself -- it isn't all that "fast moving", but it gives a good idea of how big a station we have up there.

First Man

Reading has been a little lacking with the level of activity of late, but it started to pick up this past weekend and I suspect that it will be a major activity for the next 2=3 weeks. I just finished "First Man", the life of Neil Armstrong. It was an excellent somewhat scholarly book on the man that said "One small step for (a) man ... one giant leap for mankind". To those of us who lived through it, it is one of those times that you remember, and this is really THE one of national/world significance that is precisely remembered as good. (Kennedy being shot, Challenger disaster, 9-11, those go into the bad bucket)

Armstrong is a hero cut in the Lucky Lindy mode; not flashy, plain spoken, humble and appreciative of all the people that had a hand in the achievement of the the moon landing, very private and very unemotional. Much like the "strong silent type" American male of yore, you get the impression that he didn't "work to be calm and unemotional", he just was. Like all things, this provides upside and downside. In 1962, the Armstrongs lost their 2-year old daughter Karen to an inoperable brain tumor. It appears that Neil may have dealt with the pre and post death tradegy by throwing himself into his work, and it may even be that the event was the catalyst for him making the decision to be an astronaut.

The "mistakes" of the Armstrong flying career are clustered around the death, and it may well be that he was adversely affected (who could blame him?). He had an X-15 incident where the craft "skipped" on the atmosphere causing him to be hundreds of miles off course, and he narrowly made it back to the opposite end of the Edwards dry lake bed from where he was supposed to land. Supposedly he came over the last ridge under 100' above ground, but that may well be legend. Getting stuck on a "dry" lake bed that was wet with Chuck Yaeger in the back seat is more humorous than anything, and the "Nellis debacle" where Neil had a gear failure doing simulated X-15 landings in another plane certainly COULD have been serious, but turned out to be again more humorous than anything. If one is going to be adversely affected by a horrific life experience that destroys many who have to live through it, continuing to be a test pilot flying the highest performance craft of the day with only "incidents" to show as "failures" during the core of it it is the kind of makeup that one expects from the guy that did the first moon landing.

Armstrong was also the first astronaut to dock in space with Gemini VIII. I had never realized how close to disaster that flight came as a thruster on the Gemini became stuck and put the craft into a spin where the crew was on the edge of losing concousness at the point they were able to remedy the situation. Had they blacked out, there would have been the loss of a crew in space, and likely the moon landing would have been long delayed.

The book is highly detailed, early on with geneology that I wasn't particularly interested in, later with issues of simulation and crew dynamics that were more to my liking. I never saw a mountain until I was 20 years old, although I read a lot about them, heard people talk about them, and of course saw plenty of pictures. The experience is radically different. Much in the same way, it is clear that all the astronauts that went to the moon were changed by the experience of seeing the earth as a tiny blue marble in the blackness of space, and apparently even more so the onces that stood on the surface of that desolate world and saw their home hanging in the sky. For a number of years we had the wallpaper picture of "earthrise over the moon" in our family room in a previous home. It is an arresting scene, and I'm sure the effect of being there changes people for the rest of their lives.

For me it was a book well worth reading. It is so hard to believe that we are fast coming up on FORTY years since that landing, and except for the immediate missions in the very early 70's, we have never gone back. Space travel is one of those areas lik e "flying cars" where technology has fallen far short of what those of us alive in the 60's thought. Armstrong predicted that man would go to Mars in his lifetime, and to me, "2001 A Space Oddessy" looked almost "conservative", right down the the smart computer. I never imagined the Internet though. The future has a way of not being exactly what we expect.

Riding Rockets

For a bookworm, there are few joys to exceed finding a book that is so interesting that it keeps you up late at night and you want to get into it at the first opportunity the next day. "Riding Rockets" by Mike Mullane was such a find for me. Mullane is a 3-time shuttle mission specialist, and the fact that he is "unknown" lets us know that he space program has changed a lot since the days of Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo.

He was one of the first round of shuttle astronauts selected in '78. A West Point graduate that switched to the Air Force trying to get to space, but whose eyesight wasn't good enough to be a pilot, so he settled for flying over 100 missions in Vietnam as a "back-seater" on a Phantom. He picked up a masters in flight engineering after the war, and although he gave it at least his all, he was surprised to actually be picked to be an astronaut.

The book is loaded with a lot of ribald humor and practical jokes, as well as a lot of detail of how it "feels", sometimes in the physical sense of discomfort and pain even, to be an astronaut. He probably captures the end of one type of military culture, the "pre-women in everything" era, and of course takes part in a major part of the transition himself as one of the first astronauts to deal with women in that role and part of the missions to space.

It is hard to imagine someone being as open about his personal life and the lives of his loved ones, even telling about his wife's experience as an unwed mother as a young woman. There are plenty of parts of this book that some will say "that is more detail than I wanted to hear", and there are many things that it would seem could have been left out without detracting. However, this is clearly his book, and has the feel of "authenticity", it doesn't seem like any of the "sex and violence" is really gratuitous, this is just how he is, how he sees the world, and apparently part of how a fairly significant number of the astronauts of that period saw it.

Other than the "ethos", and 10's of great little stories about flights in T-38's, his 3 flights, training, the astronaut beach house, and many other details, the information about the Challenger was the most disturbing to me. It sounds like it is pretty clear that at least most of them were alive all the way down. A number of switches that would be related to trying to restore power and oxygen to the cockpit had been toggled in ways that made it clear that human hands had done it, and a set of auxiliary air source packs had been turned to the "on position". One of those packs was intact enough that it still contained air, but a little over 2 and 1/2 minutes of air was gone, the amount of time that it would take to fall from the point of the explosion to the water.

The point that he makes over and over is that these are a group of people that are so dedicated to spaceflight that the risks are really meaningless to them. Something like the explorers that sailed out on the unknown in small wooden boats, they are willing to take those risks to open the next frontier. At least many of them do know fear, although not all, his first shuttle commander was sleeping in the cockpit for a good nap during a pre-launch hold, so some are indeed cut from different cloth.

If you have a significant interest in the space program, this is an excellent book.