3 Laws Safe Doesn't Help If You Aren't Human

Cold War Rocket Science

As an engineer, I don't really find it all that mysterious how Eisenhower's military-industrial complex got started. The Cold War meant that enormous sums were spent on secret projects far beyond the cutting edge of technology. It was a great time to be an engineer.

Maybe not quite as good in Russia as in America. Today in the New York Times we see the obituary of Boris Chertok, second greatest rocket designer in all of the Russias. His boss, Sergei Korolev, propelled the Soviets to first place in the space race until his untimely death in 1966. Chertok's and Korolev's accomplishments are all the greater, given that the US literally stole all the researcher and researchers it could out of Nazi Germany, even in the Soviet occupation zone. Operation Paperclip wisked German scientists and their families away from the Soviets, and then gave them more acceptable backgrounds so they could get security clearances in the US.

The most famous of all German rocket scientists is Wernher von Braun, and he benefitted immensely from surrendering to the US instead of Russia. The Germans who were captured by the Soviets lived in scientific labor camps along with men like Korolev. These were not gulags, but they were still prisoners. Braun clearly knew what he was doing.

But for all that, the Russians really had something going! Korolev beat von Braun with far less money and expertise. The Americans had someone who already had achieved rocket flight, and lots of money, but Korolev studied the rockets he found and managed to orbit the first satellite with that knowledge. Russia produces some amazing engineers.

Freefall

Jerry Pournelle recently recommended Freefall, and this is my favorite web comic of the moment. It may have been slow going waiting for it to come out originally, but I breezed through the first couple of years of comics already. This is definitely engineer humor, but it can also make you think.

There are nice little science tidbits scattered throughout, but also some fun ruminations on political philosophy, ethics, and common sense. From the point of view of a genetically engineered dog. =)

I also still think of the WWF as the World Wrestling Federation.

The True Complexity of Civilization

I found this article some time ago, and I just rediscovered it by accident. 

So. I ask: how many people does it take, as a minimum, to maintain our current level of technological civilization?

I'd put an upper bound of about one billion on the range, because that encompasses basically the entire population of NAFTA and the EU, with Japan, Taiwan, and the industrial enterprise zones of China thrown in for good measure. (While China is significant, more than half of its population is still agrarian, hence not providing inputs to this system).

I'd put a lower bound of 100 million on the range, too. The specialities required for a civil aviation sector alone may well run to half a million people; let's not underestimate the needs of raw material extraction and processing (from crude oil to yttrium and lanthanum), of a higher education/research sector to keep training the people we need in order to replenish small pools of working expertise, and so on.

Galileo

No, not that one.

Galileo from Ghislain Avrillon on Vimeo.

Project Azorian Book Review

Project Azorian

By Norman Polmar and Michael White
$29.95; 276 pages

Hughes Glomar ExplorerI had heard of the Hughes Glomar Explorer before. The kind of science books I read as a kid often featured engineering feats such as the HGE, I can still remember the blurb about the ship being built for seafloor mining of manganese nodules. For reason or another it never worked out, but these books never said why.

It turns out it was all a lie. The Hughes Glomar Explorer was really one of the most ambitious gambits of the Cold War. The HGE was constructed for the singular purpose of clandestinely recovering a sunken Soviet submarine from the bottom of the Pacific.

The ballistic missle submarine K-129 sank on March 8, 1968 1,500 miles northwest of Hawaii. The American underwater sonophone network discovered that something had happened, and the position was triangulated. The USS Halibut was sent to locate the wreckage, and was able to accurately locate the wreck and take photographs.

Using this information, the CIA decided to try to recover the submarine, and the HGE was commissioned under the codename Project Azorian.  The CIA contacted Howard Hughes and he was more than happy to provide a cover story for the mission and laundering of the money to disguise the true ownership of the ship. His many companies and eccentric reputation made both of these things possible. The cover story was so good that some universities began to offer programs in Ocean Engineering to prepare students for the seafloor mining boom.

The Soviets were fooled as well. They never discovered the true purpose of the ship until after it had already been used. The HGE was constructed in public, but the critical recovery vehicle codenamed Clementine was built inside a submersible barge to prevent anyone from realizing the ship was not actually equipped for mining.

This crazy idea almost worked. The submarine was successfully captured, but broke in half while being lifted to the surface. Only the bow was actually recovered. The Soviets actually watched this lift taking place, but did not know what had been done until the story was leaked in the American press in 1975. This leak scrapped plans to send the HGE back to recover the rest of the submarine, because the Soviets threatened war if an American ship returned to the site.

Project Azorian would ultimately cost $500 million, the same as a lunar mission in 1970. This project pushed the state of the art so far that the ship would not find another use for 40 years, when it was leased to Global Santa Fe for its stated purpose: seafloor mining. The American Society of Mechanical Engineering designated the ship an Historic Mechanical Engineering Landmark in 2006.

This is the second Historic Mechanical Engineering Landmark I have come across in a month. When I was touring the Johnson Space Center, my fellow associate asked me, "Why can't we make something like this?" We have vastly better technology as engineers. These guys worked on paper! However, I realize now that one of the things we are lacking is money. Project Azorian would cost $2.7 billion today. Not many people are willing to throw down that kind of money on something that will only be used once.

This book was a great read. I read the whole thing in two days while on vacation. The book is well-researched, with the explicit purpose of correcting the earlier mistakes of other books on the HGE and K-129. There are lots of fun asides about Cold War espionage and politics that situate the book in its historical context. Anyone interested in the Cold War, submarines, or just science and history should find this book engaging.

Johnson Space Center

I updated the Places I've Been section with photographs from the Johnson Space Center in Houston. The JSC is a shrine to mechanical engineering. There was a plaque set near the Command Module that designed the Saturn V a National Mechanical Engineering landmark. I didn't even know that designation existed!

A building has been constructed around the Saturn V because it was rusting in the humid Houston climate. The rocket itself has been repainted and restored, it was a sight to see. The Command Module was a bit rusty, but I was awed to think of the work that went into designing and building the machine that took man to the moon.

The War Dividend

I was looking up some information on PID controllers yesterday, and I discovered that the PID controller was originally invented to steer ships for the Navy. Well, not exactly steer, but rather keep them going in a constant direction given both random wave motion and steady breeze or currents. I can see how this works, but it is interesting how something that was developed for one purpose has become a worldwide standard for controlling just about anything, from chemical reactors to ovens to cruise control in a car.

The inventor was a man named Nicolas Minorsky, who was inspired by watching a helmsman steer a ship. He discovered that the way an experienced sailor steers a ship not only takes into account the difference between the current and desired headings, but also what the difference has been, and the current rate of change of the heading.

These observations also give the PID controller its prosaic name: Proportional Integral Derivative controller. Each term corresponds to the kinds of control Minorsky observed on the bridge. The proportional term corrects for the current error, the integral term corrects for the past error, and the derivative term corrects for the rate of change. Now these things are all implemented electronically, but originally these mathematical functions where implemented physically, whether pneumatically, hydraulically, or with gears.

Thinking of the development of the PID controller reminded me of another acronymed military project. I learned about it when I was looking into the career of Grace Hopper. The Semi-Automatic Ground Environment was a piece of Cold War technology that seems like it belongs in a movie. The system was created to track incoming bombers, and direct fighter planes to intercept them faster than a human could. It could even send instructions to the autopilots in some planes. The system even had an input device that allowed you to select a target on a screen by pointing at it, and a master display that showed everything that was currently being tracked. This was all done in the 1950s! It was crude, but the system did exactly what it was intended to, although its function was superseded by ICBMs.

SAGE continued to be used until the 1980s, but the real impact that most people feel from SAGE comes from a successor project SABRE. The technology that allowed the system to track so many targets and then send orders remotely was used by American Airlines to create an automated reservation system. It works very well, and today the system is still in use, and you might recognize its consumer interface: Travelocity.

So much of the technology of the twentieth century was originally developed by the American military for purposes not even remotely related to what we use it for now. NASA sometimes gets some credit for all this, but the bulk of government sponsored technology development was really done for military purposes.

Why I could never be a professional philosopher



Praise God for Technology

h/t The Last Psychiatrist