Come fly with me (4/11/06)

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Determined to prove to myself that good sense remains forever beyond my grasp, I set off again the other day to climb the nearest minimountain on my bicycle in midninetydegree heat, and, after a lengthy pause for rehydration at a scenic overlook [marked, as these things for some reason always are, by the roadside notice “Scenic Overlook”] which does indeed provide an excellent perspective on this city of carnal policy, took a minor detour on my way back down the hill to cut through my old neighborhood [one of my twenty or thirty old neighborhoods] and check out a movie shoot which some enterprising location scout decided to drop this week in Boulder. Finding an impressive armada of trailers, trucks, lighting apparatus, cables, generators, etc., in evidence but no cameras deployed, I took a couple of minutes to chat up an assistant assistant assistant director who was stuffing his face at a buffet table set, on the evidence available, by very upscale caterers, and discovered that, sure enough, everyone was At Lunch, and not due to return to work for an unspecified period. Meanwhile half the Boulder police force was hanging around trying to look like Security, awakening that sense of unease we of the lesser breeds feel in the presence of The Heat, and deciding me against the lengthy stakeout which might have satisfied a few of my remaining points of curiosity about major motion picture productions, e.g., does the focus puller get to ride on the dolly like the camera operator during a tracking shot, or does he have to run alongside? [Surely that wouldn’t make sense, but there are, after all, class issues involved.] So I passed on my chance to leer at Jennifer Garner and taunt her with her memorable line from Dude, Where’s My Car?, i.e., “You guys are sucky boyfriends”, and no doubt get her to autograph my ass with her foot, and continued on my way. — Only later did I discover that she too was on the Tom Cruise hit list, perhaps before even Scarlett, certainly before the hapless Katie. — And did I mention the bombshell Spanish maid from Big Trouble, Sofia Vergara? Was there anyone Cruise missed?


After this there was a really bad all-Latin afternoon on the jazz station and I reverted to classical listening. Well, I’m fickle.


Perhaps you noticed the recent op-ed piece in the Times on the history of payola. I found it interesting, if not exactly surprising, that this has been a universal practice roughly since the dawn of time, and was unaware [not having given the matter much thought] that the famous scandal of the Fifties was mainly a kind of show-trial exhibition designed, with malice aforethought, to club to death the infant Rock and Roll in its cradle and advance the cause of cleancut whitebread artists like Pat Boone. [I guess this antedated Pat’s metal period.] — The main moral you carry away from this analysis, as from so many others, is that the music industry [so-called] consists for the most part of an army of middlemen who seize upon every opportunity to line their own pockets at the expense of both producer and consumer. No wonder they’re all terrified by the digital revolution: their days, obviously, are now numbered. And good riddance.


The Island was silly but amusing; I haven’t had the stomach for FF. Mainly I seem to be waiting in vain on stuff I can’t realistically expect to come to the multiplex: The Aristocrats; Wong Kar Wai’s 2046; Mr. Herzlinger’s documentary about his Quixotic effort to try to get a date with Drew Barrymore. [What a curious genre Michael Moore has pioneered.] — Terry Gilliam’s interpretation of The Brothers Grimm opens in a couple of weeks; this might not suck.


Looking over the proposals reported in the Times, it is somewhat reassuring to see that under the pressure of repeated public humiliation at least some of the NASA guys finally seem to understand where they went wrong with the shuttle, and now grasp the essential elements of a solution: a heavy-lift unmanned booster [with nearly the payload capacity of the old Saturn 5, and using a variant on the original engine] based on proven technology, and a separate manned vehicle which reverts to the old well tested idea of sticking a [cheap and essentially disposable] capsule on top of the rocket where ice, foam, stray bolts, pocket change, etc., can’t fall on it and accidentally force a billion-dollar writeoff. Unstated but probably playing a significant role in these decisions is the embarrassing realization that the Russians [who as I heard it long since either stole the plans or reverse-engineered the design, built a prototype, assessed its cost effectiveness, laughed hysterically, and stuck with what they had already] did the right thing in passing on the expensive giant-spaceplane idea, which is why at the moment they can fly to this ridiculous space station we insisted on building and we can’t. — The guy quoted states the essential point exactly: the shuttle is an impressive piece of engineering, but way the hell too complicated ever to be reliable. — Whether or not NASA can now run their operation as cheaply as the Russians do [three hundred million a year, no more than twenty or thirty million to build each capsule] is of course doubtful, but at least this novel lurch toward sanity marks a step in the right direction.

This article followed on the heels, as it turned out, of my accidental discovery of a commissioned NASA history of the shuttle program buried in the stacks of that online equivalent of a musty usedbookstore, blackmask.com. Reading this study, which as the first of three volumes deals only with the prehistory of the project and its progress through the decision by Nixon to fund it, is a real revelation.

First [as actually I still remember from my childhood], most of the wishlist for manned space exploration was dreamed up by Von Braun in a series of articles in Collier’s in 1952 [the inspiration for Walt Disney’s television show circa 1954, and also for George Pal’s 1955 movie The Conquest of Space] — i.e., a space station, a fleet of shuttles, and expeditions staged from Earth orbit to the Moon and Mars — and [save for dropping the classic rotating-wheel idea] hasn’t changed since. In the meantime, however, the rationale that knitted the whole scheme together has vanished.

It was obvious from the outset, for instance, that radio retransmission would be, in modern parlance, a killer app. But when Clarke first described communications satellites in the Forties he took it for granted that they would require continuous maintenance, and would, therefore, have to be manned; mainly to have somebody on hand to change the vacuum tubes. [Von Neumann in “The General and Logical Theory of Automata” (1948) projected a practical upper bound for the size of an electronic computer of about ten thousand tubes, because they burned out too often to build anything bigger.] Even when Von Braun first described a toy [because unmanned] version of his space station in the early Fifties, he assumed that the effective lifetime of its electronics wouldn’t be more than a couple of months. But already by 1958 Vanguard managed to stay online for six years; so much for the need for a shipload of technicians with spare 6L6GCs and soldering guns.

Again, though it was always assumed that being able to look at the weather from orbit would revolutionize meteorology, it was somewhat less obvious [since television was in its infancy] that you wouldn’t need a meteorologist looking out the window to make the observations. And though everybody always wanted to put telescopes outside the atmosphere, nobody thought they could be automated. [Nor could anyone anticipate that outgassing, etc., make the vicinity of manned spacecraft a very bad place to operate a telescope, and that you want to put it in a cold quiet orbit all by itself.]

As for the military applications, these were at first supposed to include actually dropping bombs; but missiles assumed that function. The other obvious task was reconnaissance, but [as it turned out] this was also immediately automated, and the first spy satellites were orbited in 1958. [It took a dozen tries to get everything to work, but they got on the job right away.] Real film [recovered periodically by re-entry capsule] was, however, used for at least another decade, which made the idea of on-demand launch and recovery attractive to the Air Force — and, as it turned out, two critical parameters in the design of the shuttle as we have it today, the size of the cargo bay and the delta wings which present a large surface that must be protected by heat shielding, were determined by the perceived need to be able to launch and recover Big Birds and to be able to make single-circuit photoreconnaissance polar orbits and then veer a thousand miles off the established flight path to return to Vandenburg — not possible with the otherwise more practical small straight wings. So as it turned out the shuttle as it finally materialized had already been rendered obsolete by the perfection of the CCD array, sometime between the moment when the design was frozen and its actualization. Of course bureaucratic momentum carried it forward anyway.

As for what robotics has done for planetary exploration, all that is obvious now that we’ve all seen the surface of Mars and the rings of Saturn, but when Von Braun was dreaming everything up it wasn’t clear that you could even send Morse code across the solar system, let alone drive a rover by remote control and watch it on television.

So after all is said and done we end up orbiting astronauts to study the effects that weightlessness has upon them [and no need for that if you plan on spinning the spacecraft on a long mission, as even the op-ed columnist in the Times saw right away] and doing a bunch of silly high school science fair experiments that would hardly have filled an episode of Mister Wizard; who, however, didn’t piss away a billion dollars on every show.

In fact the only sensible rationale that remains for manned space flight, after everything else has been automated, is just the one that NASA most energetically resists, namely, tourism and/or adventure travel. [Why they should resist is an interesting study in institutional psychology, and rests, I think, on their fear of losing control of the narrative of space exploration; which is precisely what most pisses me off about the whole organization, but never mind that now.] — And in re this, apparently the Hilton chain, circa 1970, had plans to build an orbiting hotel as soon as the cost of putting cargo into orbit got down to five dollars a pound; a goal which at that time seemed within reach.

Bringing up the second, rather depressing, point, that though I’ve seen a number of plausible postmortem analyses by disillusioned space cadets which blame the fact that everything ended up costing a hundred times the original estimates on the inefficiency/incompetence of NASA, they don’t say anything that wasn’t anticipated by the guys who wrote the specs for the shuttle in the first place. Commercial aviation was always their model, 24 hour turnaround was the seemingly attainable objective, and, after extensive analyses, they decided on reusable engines and recoverable boosters and reusable thermal tile protection [as opposed to some kind of replaceable ablative shield] for an aluminum airframe [as opposed to some more expensive combination of titanium and other exotic metals] because these choices were supposed to save money. And, probably most important, they saw that the combination of electronic sensors and computer monitoring should allow onboard checkout, and eliminate the need for the 20,000 technicians who attended each Apollo launch. Since the simplest way to estimate the expense of operating an aircraft is just to count how many support personnel are required for every flight [even for the SR-71 Blackbird, e.g., this was only about forty], it would seem that they started out, at least, with a grasp of the crux of the matter. — On the other hand, since I saw some manager quoted as boasting in re the safety issue after the Columbia disaster that it took a million signatures to get a shuttle flight off the ground, obviously they lost sight of it somewhere. [One must suspect with malice aforethought, since the simplest description of the raison d’etre of the shuttle program as it now exists is that it is a full employment program for flight controllers.]

How exactly they veered off the rails is an interesting question. Were they just wildly overoptimistic? Were they so blinded by enthusiasm that they lost sight of engineering reality? Are any of the shuttle design requirements actually attainable?

I don’t know the answers to these questions, but I suspect what happened was that they took a number of problems they thought they’d solved in isolation [reusable liquid-fueled engines did exist, e.g.], observed that there seemed to be no fundamental difficulties with scaling up the solutions separately [in running similar engines at much higher pressures, e.g.], and then assumed they could add them all together. But apparently something here is not linear.

[In fact it almost seems as though they looked at the X-15 program, which ran off a string of 200 successful tests on a fairly rigorous schedule, noted that it flew to 350,000 feet at speeds up to 4500 miles per hour, and then said, Well, all we have to do is multiply by four in each slot.]

With the benefit of hindsight reusability looks like a chimera, because maintenance becomes so difficult you end up practically having to rebuild the orbiter after every flight; it seems more straightforward to use simple disposable modules instead, in particular solid- not liquid-fueled boosters [on which there doesn’t seem to be any upper limit on practical size: motors with thrust equivalent to the Saturn 5 were tested successfully in the Sixties, and it was thought at the time that they should easily scale up at least another order of magnitude.][The size of the existing shuttle boosters was determined by the maximum diameter of cylindrical sections that can be shipped by rail, i.e. 13 feet.] — Also if you keep rebuilding something, there’s an opportunity for the design to evolve; and the only argument that justifies blowing so much money on this kind of thing [though you never hear it stated clearly] is as a sort of pure technological research — i.e., doing something outrageously difficult on the assumption that you will, as it were, derive useful corollaries in the process. [Thus the justification of the Apollo project, after the fact, was often said to be that it encouraged the development of integrated circuits, miniaturized computers, advanced materials, Tang, etc.] — Otherwise you end up trying to sell the idea that doing the same thing repeatedly is a sort of [dull] experiment in itself; which sounds a lot like what the justifications for the shuttle program have become. — The reductio ad absurdum being the space station, which is the grand gesture of postmodern science, an experiment with no subject save itself; and the latest shuttle flight, which has mainly been about studying the shuttle. [I assume not many will take interest in all the publications they’re generating for the Journal of Foam Insulation.] You might as well justify taking the same test over and over again on the grounds that you were learning valuable lessons about marking marks on paper.

Which brings us to the third and most dismaying point: if you read the history, which degenerates with alarming rapidity from a fascinating tale of engineers’ dreams into an endless repetitive nightmare of committee meetings, political maneuvering, and design decisions dictated by the OMB, you discover that all of the ideas you hear proposed as alternatives to the current system — the scramjet and its liquid-air variants, the littler spaceplane [aka Dyna-Soar or X-20], even the nuclear rocket engines on which any realistic expedition to Mars would have to be predicated — were proposed, designed, built, and tested in the Sixties, and then abandoned and forgotten. — Inevitably you’re overwhelmed by the sense that having passed through the Golden Age of the Sixties and the Silver Age of the Seventies, we are now arrived in a dismal Age of Brass; and there are destined to remain.


The Times Magazine on “machinema”: “Players’ relationships with constant, blood-splattering violence is a common subject in game art. Last year, the 31-year-old artist Brody Condon produced an unsettling film that consisted of nothing but shots of himself committing suicide inside 50 different video games.” — How remarkably Gibsonian. If only Kurt Cobain had had this means of expression.


Excepting only Ken Higgins, the guy I have known with the most quotable dreams was a graduate student in philosophy with whom I hung out in my university-janitor days who used to stagger into his work-study job every morning with a spectacular hangover and regale me with the latest bulletins from his remarkable party life. Since his quotidian reality [or at least — which says the same — the chemically-engendered delusions which formed the substance of his waking life] embraced excesses like Mazola parties at which drugaddled bimbos ripped their clothes off, lubricated themselves like greased pigs, and hosed all comers in a coke-induced frenzy, his fantasy life per se was relatively mundane, and ran to textbook examples of wish-fulfillment — e.g., the dream in which his dissertation committee ordered pizza delivered during a meeting, and, wanting more of it for himself, he’d killed all of them so that he wouldn’t have to share. — Realizing that I cannot measure up to this daunting standard, I offer nonetheless the following, which seems to have run through my head before waking the other day: I am taking an interview at Los Alamos. The first guy I am supposed to talk to walks me through the offices of his “differential geometry group”, where I recognize somebody I used to know in high school to whom I am too mortified to reintroduce myself, and then seizes some excuse to continue the audience “off campus” at a coffee shop, where, I discover, he intends that no one can overhear him as he denounces me and my bogus resume at the top of his lungs. Fortunately in the middle of this scene the Third World War breaks out and the citizens of the [curiously anonymous] city panic and start looting the shops and shooting one another. My interviewer, who was going postal anyway, tries to kill me, but I kill him instead in selfdefense, and, after an interpolated episode in which for some reason I turn into Bruce Willis and do an unmotivated shower scene with a fully-clothed depressive female, make my way across town with a shopping cart foraging for supplies carrying with me the severed head of my victim, like the head of Medusa, figuring apparently that this will either intimidate the mob or turn potential assailants to stone, I’m not sure which. [Sometimes, in a postmodern turn, I seem to be carrying a photograph of the severed head instead, but this is equally efficacious. Or does it seem like a photograph because it is like the reflection in the shield of Perseus? something I can look at directly, unlike the head itself. This might bear examination.] Escaping the city, I wander the highways a while in a purloined car, but make my way finally to a rendezvous with you at a motel, where it is by now the next morning and you are [against my protests] planning to go to work. You ask in all innocence how the interview went, and I begin to explain; but the effort of trying to remember something that happened earlier in a dream as usual awakens me, and I discover myself lying on the couch watching an ancient tape on the VCR on which Penn and Teller [the former, of course, doing all the talking] are introducing a movie, none other than Plan Nine From Outer Space. — Thus the deanimated living lead us by a convoluted passage to the reanimated dead.

[What is the problem with trying to remember something in a dream? I think the theory is that the mechanism that turns short- into long-term memories is shut off when you’re asleep, and turning it back on wakes you up. Of course this makes you wonder how dreams can be recalled at all, and suggests, as introspection seems to confirm, that the process of as it were linearizing the dream narrative is something that happens while you’re waking up afterwards; or, in the case of the Freudian’s patient, on the analyst’s couch.]


Carville appeared on the Imus show Monday morning and, in the process of conveying his stupefaction at Novak’s widely-publicized on-air meltdown, repeated the Judith Miller rumor with the following, typically neat formulation: she has not a First but a Fifth amendment problem. — He also suggested that there is much unrest in the Times newsroom over the code of silence, that a number of reporters may want to talk or leak, and that Fitzgerald may be planning on further subpoenas aimed at providing them with the opportunity. — Who are we supposed to be pulling for here?


Well, enough of this merry sport. — And off on a voyage to Girls Gone Wild Island! No rules! No parents! No clothes! — Where were all these sexcrazed coeds when we were in school?


Later.

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Nietzsche’s theory of the gangster movie (1/24/05)

Loathes sucky boyfriends.