Bureaucracies never die

This may be common knowledge for you folks, but just in case it ain’t…

This made me smile…

Michael Friedlander

The US standard railroad gauge (distance between the rails) is 4 feet, 8.5 inches. That’s an exceedingly odd number.

Why was that gauge used? Because that’s the way they built them in England, and English expatriates built the US railroads.

Why did the English build them like that? Because the first rail lines were built by the same people who built the pre-railroad tramways, and that’s the gauge they used.

Why did ‘they’ use that gauge then? Because the people who built the tramways used the same jigs and tools that they used for building wagons, which used that wheel spacing.

Why did the wagons have that particular odd wheel spacing? Well, if they tried to use any other spacing, the wagon wheels would break on some of the old, long distance roads in England, because that’s the spacing of the wheel ruts.

So who built those old rutted roads? Imperial Rome built the first long distance roads in Europe (and England) for their legions. The roads have been used ever since.

And the ruts in the roads? Roman war chariots formed the initial ruts, which everyone else had to match for fear of destroying their wagon wheels. Since the chariots were made for Imperial Rome, they were all alike in the matter of wheel spacing. Therefore the United States standard railroad gauge of 4 feet, 8.5 inches is derived from the original specifications for an Imperial Roman war chariot..

Bureaucracies live forever. 

So the next time you are handed a specification/procedure/process and wonder ‘What horse’s ass came up with it?’, you may be exactly right.

Imperial Roman army chariots were made just wide enough to accommodate the rear ends of two war horses. (Two horse’s asses.)

When you see a Space Shuttle sitting on its launch pad, there are two big booster rockets attached to the sides of the main fuel tank. These are solid rocket boosters, or SRB’s. The SRB’s are made by Thiokol at their factory in Utah . The engineers who designed the SRB’s would have preferred to make them a bit fatter, but the SRB’s had to be shipped by train from the factory to the launch site. The railroad line from the factory happens to run through a tunnel in the mountains, and the SRB’s had to fit through that tunnel. The tunnel is slightly wider than the railroad track, and the railroad track, as you now know, is about as wide as two horses’ behinds.

So, a major Space Shuttle design feature of what is arguably the world’s most advanced transportation system was determined over two thousand years ago by the width of a horse’s ass. And you thought being a horse’s ass wasn’t important?

Ancient horse’s asses control almost everything…

END

Making solar power sexy

Here’s a very sexy commercial for space-based solar power:

Predicting the Rocket Future

Its 6:30 in the morning, when words flow like buttter….sort of.

Its been a busy week for the private space travel movement. Virgin Galactic unveils the White Knight two carrier plane , the first part of two part system for sending tourists into space. Then at the Oshkosh air show, XCOR Aerospace flew the Rocket Racing League’s first rocket powered aircraft. Finally SpaceX launched the Falcon 1 rocket. Unfortunately they had a second stage separation problem.

I am now convinced that the old multi-stage rocket method of getting into space is a royal pain in the ass and should be replaced. We know airplanes. We know how to fly really large and heavy things with them. We know how to drop something out of them. It just works. Even rocket powered airplanes are viable.

I was saddened to witness the anticipation and the failure of the Falcon 1. Friends and family were there at the SpaceX rocket factory, all ready for a good show. But delays kept postponing the launch. THe sadness in their eyes after the rocket’s failure, especially in Elon Musk’s, was heart-wrenching.

So let’s put my futurist hat on. I predict that Scaled Composites/Virgin Galactic will have a near monopoly in human space transportation for a few years. XCOR will be second, as they get more funding to build bigger, more reliable rocket powered aircraft. I would not be surprised that Scaled hired XCOR for a future generation Space Ship X vehicle to fly under a White Knight X. NASA, desperate to keep the space station going after the shuttle retires (they have already destroyed the repair facility in Palmdale, and are breaking down other infrastructure in other places), will at first waste another few billion taxpayer dollars on a human launch system, and fail. They will then consider Scaled/XCOR as a viable Plan B, since outside of the Russians, they are the only American game in town. This happens in less than 15 years.

Virgin Galactic will lease a habitat from Bigelow Aerospace to create the first true space hotel, albeit it will be more of a log cabin or a hostel in its first iteration.

It may take twenty years before a competitor appears to go up against Virgin/Scaled. Burt Rutan has 30 years aircraft experience to support him, and it will be hard to beat that fact.

Falcon 1 launches well, fails at second stage seperation

It was a bittersweet day at SpaceX. The private rocket company has high hopes with building cheaper and more reliable vehicles than its government-sponsored competitors. But like all rocket science, it IS rocket science, and that means complicated challenges to resolve.

I was fortunate to be chosen to photograph the launch event at SpaceX’s rocket factory headquarters in Hawthorne, near Los Angeles LAX Airport. Tension was high in the flight control trailer as multiple delays in fueling and pressurization postponed the flight of Falcon 1 rocket.

After several delays due to loading Helium pressurization. (cold gases on a very hot day in Kwajaleen), SpaceX finally went to countdown. The clock went to zero and nothing happened. Some computer alert stopped the launch 1/2 sec to go.

After a fifteen minute hold, the clock was cycled back to ten minutes. The countdown resumed, and the launch was perfect. The event was friends and family only. Myself and a videographer were the only media-like folks allowed to document the launch. The family members were really excited when the rocket flew. But the employees knew the show was not over. For about five minutes, the stage one firing was perfect. We saw the rocket cam images of the Earth falling away. Then second stage separation… and the video cut out. A minute of uncomfortable silence, then the SpaceX webcast hosts came online and and said something happened to the second stage separation. Ten minutes later Elon Musk walked out of the Command Trailer and to the front of the audience area.

He explained the rocket was lost. Three of the four separation bolts fired. The Second stage engine ignited while the first stage was still attached. You can guess the rest. Elon re-iterated that the failure does not stop flights 4 5 or 6. SpaceX received extra funding to guarantee it. Work continues.

There is a recovery ship tracking the GPS signals of the rocket stages. It will try to rescue the rocket when it crashes to the ocean.

These separation bolts have been used successfully a hundred times, one engineer said. So an investigation begins.

There was a lot of anticipation and high hopes yesterday. Things are pretty quiet now, but everyone is going back to work.

Friends and family were allowed at the event. No media. The exception was myself and a few other chosen videographers to record the event. The actual Falcon 1 rocket was 2100 miles away, on a sliver of land on the Kwajaleen Atoll, one of a series of US owned islands in the South Pacific.

Alternating between the audience, the makeshift media booth hosted by two telegenic members of SpaceX’s marketing team, and the flight control trailer, I got to see this amazing place in detail. A Rocket Factory!!! How cool is that? Falcon 1 rockets and mockups were on display or in various stages of construction. The massive tank that is the Falcon 9 first stage was so large, yet in this voluminous building the sense of scale was deceiving.

The flight control trailer reminds me of another launch, and another trailer, fifteen years ago. This year is the anniversary of the Delta Clipper Experimental (DC-X) flights. For those who do not know of the DC-X, it was military-funded project to build a fully reusable rocket ship. It flew. Twelve times. Over three years (1993-1996). The success of the DC-X program inspired so many people and projects that the list boggles (the X PRIZE, Pioneer Rocketplane, Kistler Aerospace, Kelly Space, Rotary Rocket, XCOR Aerospace, Blue Origin, Armadillo Aerospace, Masten Space Systems, and TGV Rockets and so on.) A combination reunion of the DC-X team and a space conference is happening in Alamogordo, New Mexico in two weeks. Check out the DC-X Project website for details. I’ll be there… showing off my photos from DC-X Flight 8 mission.