Plasma Wind

Handy Quotations

It’s handy to have some quotable quotations as quips.  Here are some of my own creation:

“To be considered a genius by one’s contemporaries is a sure sign that you’re not one”

“I’d rather be approximately right, than exactly wrong”

Here’s some that I use a lot, but can’t take credit for:

“Artificial Intelligence is better than none”

-?-

“Be in the world, but not of it”

-Ed Bateman (well, maybe his Mom)-

“It takes an awfully good spouse to be better than none”

-?-

“Claim a weakness, and it becomes yours”

-?-

“Claim a strength, and it becomes yours”

-?-

“That which you are seeking, is also seeking you”

-Richard N. Bolles- (Author of What Color is Your Parachute?)

“The place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet”

-Fredrick Buechner-

Specific Information

Matter can possess various thermodynamic properties, which are observable and measurable.  Some are familiar such as temperature, pressure, and density.  Other thermodynamic properties are not so familiar: enthalpy, entropy, fugacity, specific heat, et al.  Thermodynamic properties can be classified into two general groups: properties that are intensive, and properties that are extensive.  Intensive properties are thermodynamic properties that are independent of the mass of the matter under consideration, whereas extensive properties are thermodynamic properties that are not independent of mass:  intensive – independent;  extensive – dependent. 

To test whether or not the thermodynamic property of some matter is intensive or extensive, you simply chop the matter into two equal pieces.  Thermodynamic properties that stay the same are intensive properties.  Properties whose magnitudes get reduced by half are extensive properties. 

 Pressure, temperature, and density are intensive properties.  Chopping the matter into two pieces doesn’t affect its pressure, temperature, or density.  Mass, volume, and enthalpy are extensive properties.  If we reduce the amount of matter, we reduce the magnitude of these properties.

 Now it turns out, that you can convert any extensive property of some lump of matter into an intensive property by simply dividing that property by the mass of that lump: i.e. you make the extensive property the numerator, and the lump mass the denominator. You transform that extensive property into an intensive property.

 For example, consider the volume of some lump of matter.  The volume is an extensive property.  Chop the lump in half, the volume of each half goes down.  But what if you divide the total volume of that lump by its mass?  So now you’ve defined a new property, the volume per unit mass.  Now when you divide the matter in half, the volume of each half goes down, but so does the mass. Thus, the volume per unit mass doesn’t change, and you’ve got yourself an intensive property.  So, you can turn any extensive property into an extensive property by dividing by its mass.

 When we transform an extensive property into an intensive property, we also add a prefix word to the extensive property’s name, and that prefix word is:  specific.  Thus, when we divide the extensive property of volume by its mass, it now becomes the intensive thermodynamic property specific volume.  This is where the term: specific heat comes from.  It is also (more or less) the source of the term used in rocketry known as the specific impulse (abbreviated Isp).  The specific impulse is the impulse that a rocket delivers, divided by the unit of mass that created that impulse. 

 But now I want to extend this concept to another area, and that’s the area of information storage.  Anytime we store digital information in a permanent way, we have to store it using some form of matter.  A hard drive is made of a ferromagnetic material coating on an aluminum or glass platter.  A flash drive uses semiconductor-based flash memory to store binary information.  A CD uses millions of bits of reflective material to encode zeros and ones.  Each of these devices has a finite amount of storage capacity, which we usually quantify in terms of the number of bytes (or bits) of information.  Because the information is stored using matter, this means that the amount of information on the storage device is an extensive property.  It is dependent on the mass of the storage media. 

 But each of the storage devices has another property, and that is the mass of the device itself.  As we’ve seen before, if we want to transform the extensive property to an intensive property, we divide by the mass.  So if we divide the amount of information storage capacity on a storage device by the mass of the device, then the resulting intensive property would rightly be called the specific information of the storage device. 

 Since we can know the mass of any particular storage device, and we can know its storage capacity, we can therefore compute the specific information of that storage device.  I’ll provide some examples in future posts.  Readers are encouraged to determine the specific information of their favorite storage device by weighing it (actually massing it), then dividing its storage capacity by it mass.  Obviously, some of the mass might be extraneous to the device’s storage functions. Such things as a plastic case, lock/unlock switches, anything that could be stripped away and not cause the storage device to cease being able to store information. 

 The units of specific information would be in bits per kilogram (or gram, or pound, slug, troy ounce, scrupulum, or whatever mass unit you wish.  My personal favorite is the carat).

 It’s worth noting that the specific information of a storage device is not the same at the storage device’s storage density.  The storage density is the amount of information (bits or bytes) per unit volume of the storage device. 

 So, what is the utility of knowing the specific information of a particular storage device?  Well, one can see the trend in increasing specific information as technology improves.  One could also make some predictions on the highest possible specific information that could be achieved. 

 One other interesting thing is that using the concept of specific information, you can compute the mass of code.  One doesn’t normally think of code as having any mass whatsoever.  But given the fact that code has to be stored somewhere on something that does have mass, then the mass of some piece of code would be the number of bytes of the code divided by the specific information of the storage device upon which the code resides.  Voila; the code’s mass.

However, probably the most interesting utility of the specific information as an intensive property has not yet been identified yet.  I’m betting you readers will come up with some good ones, so I’m looking forward to your comments.

For the Love of Technology

We love technology (from the Greek, literally “know-how”). It’s so…so… American.  We’re a culture evolved from all the do-it-yourselfers, early adopters, pioneers, independent thinkers that left Europe a few centuries back, so its only natural that we want to know how to do something better, easier, or maybe so that we can make a buck, or maybe just because we like knowing how to do something that other people can’t.  This is something we seek out and embrace.

 But the implementation of new technology is a different story.  New technology faces the challenge of displacing the incumbent technology.  When people are faced with this decision, they make a reasonable assessment: does the new technology and its claimed benefits outweigh the difficulty and risk of replacing the old technology, especially when the incumbent way is working, making money, is can be counted on?  (Way) More often than not, the incumbent wins, and the new technology is not implemented. The difficulty of implementing new technology and innovations is well-documented and analyzed in Clayton M. Christensen’s books, The Innovator’s Dilemma, and The Innovator’s Solution.  Christensen basically shows that new technology has to enter “from the bottom up”, by providing innovation for the needs of customers that aren’t being served by the incumbent. 

 Recently, considerable discussion has arisen from John McGowan’s article in the Space Review regarding technological innovations that might make cheap access to space possible.  I think the significant contribution of McGowan’s article is the reiteration of the fact that technological development requires many trial-and-error attempts in order to work out all the kinks. 

 I provided some comments to the article, in an attempt to shed some light on specific approaches to technical innovations for low cost space access.  In my opinion, there is almost no better reference to this issue than John London’s seminal book, LEO on the Cheap, which can be downloaded here.  London points out that simplicity and design choices can radically alter development and operational costs, and that there are cultural issues involved as well. He provides excellent examples as well as recommendations.  Col. London (ret) is a rather amazing person, and is one of the few people I know to have served in the Air Force (as an officer), and in NASA and the DoD (as a civilian), and has remained a tireless supported of the "New Space" Industry.  Not too long ago this was considered fringe territory, and it was John who coined the term the "radical rocket underground".  So he's not just talking out of his hat, he's been there, done that.

 LEO on the Cheap essentially provides a roadmap on how to develop low cost space launch systems.  And in fact, many of his recommendations and observations have found their implementation in some of the current space launch systems, such as SpaceX, Armadillo Aerospace, XCOR, and others.

 Finally, I think its worth noting, as I did in my comments to McGowan, that we may eventually rediscover the advantages provided by spaceplane-type launch vehicles which take off from a runway, fly an envelope-expansion type flight, and then return to land. Despite their larger dry mass fractions, aircraft-type flight operations allow incremental flight testing, and hence, many more trials for a given development budget.

 But the question remains as to why this has taken so long.  This is not a simple question to answer, because there have been, in my opinion, quite a number of contributing factors.  But, my best attempt at putting it in a sentence or two goes something like this:  the Space launch industry emerged largely as the product of post-World War II industrial practices and the success of large, government-led projects.  Subsequently, the aviation and aerospace industries were largely usurped by cold war imperatives.

 Further discussion and explanation of what I mean above will require additional posts, which I’ll provide later.  But the upshot of this, at least for Americans, is that launch vehicle design, development, and the selling of launch services got wrapped up with only one customer, the U.S. Government.  The U.S. Government became the incumbent, and it’s taken a long time to create and find markets for these alternative launch services.

 I have to remind myself that new markets have to be created.  They are created when there is an exchange of things between someone who wants and/or needs something, and someone who has something to offer.  Usually, when someone wants something that doesn’t currently exist, creative people scramble around to provide that something.  However, if a creative person has something that they are offering, and no one wants it at the moment, then it sometimes takes a while to find someone who does want it, and sees its value.  Oftentimes, people don’t even know what they want except more/better/faster/cheaper of what they currently have. 

 How does this apply to our current launch markets?  We have people who need launch services, and we have people who provide those launch services.  The people who need launch services want more/better/faster/cheaper launch services than they have now.  Incumbents, like Boeing, LockMart, Orbital, have the advantage.  This is the innovator’s dilemma.  New launch providers, SpaceX, Blue Origin, TGV Rockets, et al, are seeking ways to “enter from the bottom up” by providing lower cost services to customers who aren’t being served by the incumbents.  This is the Innovator’s Solution.  And I think it’s going to be successful beyond our wildest reckonings.

Lessons from Space Camp

Well, my youngest son graduated from Space Camp Friday.  When you live in Huntsville, Alabama, going to Space Camp at the end of fifth grade is simply part of the curriculum. The fifth graders are divided into several teams, and then are assigned roles for a subsequent shuttle mission simulation.  There are CAPCOMs, ground controllers, mission specialists, just like a real shuttle mission.  My boy got assigned as pilot, which was the position he was seeking (schweet!), I was way proud.  If I had been in fifth grade going to space camp, that would have been the assignment I would have wanted. 

After the graduation ceremonies, we had a chance to walk around the museum, the rocket garden, and the Davidson Center , which houses one of the last remaining Saturn V's.  Its familiar territory, and always interesting.  In one of those moments where the time is right to have a real conversation, when there’s no pressure to have a “teachable moment” or try to convey some gem of wisdom, we just talked about whatever was of interest right then, whatever was right up front in our thinking.  So we talked about rocketships versus spaceplanes, about being an astronaut versus being a pilot.  We compared launching vertically versus taxing out to the active runway, advancing the throttles and taking off.

Without no malice towards vertical launch vehicles, we were in agreement that flying a spaceplane into orbit, returning and landing on a runway was just way cooler than blasting off, then floating down on parachutes.  As the pilot of a spaceplane, you get the fly the thing, control its directions, experience the freedom that only piloting a ship can bring, as opposed to riding in a ship, to being a payload.  From that standpoint, the space shuttle gets full marks, even though it launches vertically.  The Space Shuttle is cool.  It is the one and only spaceplane around.  It is one rockin’ machine.  And this got me thinking about the STS: the Space Transportation System.

The Shuttle certainly has it’s warts.  It’s way too expensive.  There are a number of reasons for this, but that’s for another post.  Next, it’s got reliability issues.  Jokes about what the acronym NASA stands for aside (and again, for another post), there are a number of reasons for this, as well.  And then there’s the fundamental issue that the Shuttle is a government-owed/operated/governed/regulated space transportation system and the only one used by the US of A to transport people up into space.  This has a whole host of ramifications regarding its impact on the development of a commercial space industry.

Yes, the shuttle has many issues and shortcomings, many things have been a great disappointment to a lot of us that had hoped it would open up the space frontier, rather than delaying its emergence by decades.  But for all these laments, the STS has something fundamental going for it: it is flying now.  Not five or seven or ten years from the present, but now.  

That’s something my fifth grade son understands.  He piloted a simulated spaceplane mission for a vehicle that’s flying now, not some vehicle that may or may not make it through the funding vagaries of multiple administrations. 

The STS may indeed have it warts, but when compared to replacement systems currently under consideration, it is a thing of beauty.  It is infinitely more capable (Shuttle capability divided by proposed capability which equals zero, goes to infinity), and if we invest in shuttle improvements, we have high yields for our taxpayer dollars.  Maybe instead of starting from scratch again on a brand new vehicle design, we should learn to work with what we have now, and grow that capability.  That seems sensible.  Those fifth graders got it.  Are we as smart as fifth graders?

A Lexicon for Aerospace Vehicles

Let's define a spaceplane as a horizontal takeoff/horizontal landing (HTHL) aerospace vehicle that takes off from a runway, flys up out of the atmosphere and into Low Earth Orbit (LEO), reenters the atmosphere, then lands like an airplane.  I define a rocketship as a Vertical Takoff/Vertical Landing (VTVL) aerospace vehicle that launches vertically, flys up out of the atmosphere and into Low Earth Orbit (LEO), reenters the atmosphere, deploys parachutes and drops down onto the land or into the water. 

When you compare spaceplanes with Rocketships, sometimes it requires some translation between the two. Here then, is a little help chart for making that translation:

Spaceplane                   Rocketship

Pilot                             Payload

Take-off                       Blast-off

Landing                        Splash-down

Cargo                           Payload

Ejection System            Abort System

Landing Gear                Parachute

Crash                            Crash

As you get into the spirit of this lexicon, I hope you'll suggest other terms for translation.

So Blows the Plasma Wind

"Let it fall on Locksley Hall, with rain or hail, or fire or snow;
For the mighty wind arises, roaring seaward, and I go"

Alfred, Lord Tennyson

The last lines of Tennyson's cryptic poem, Locksley Halls, 
conveys the power of the wind. In the days of sail,the wind 
was of course a prime mover, and powered the great voyages 
of exploration and conquest. 

The names of sailing ships often contained the word wind: 
The Northwind, The Westwind, The Wind Rose, evoking the 
elemental power that made them move.

As we move out into space, we will be carried on new kinds of 
ships. These ships will be powered by a different type of wind, 
but a wind nonetheless. A wind moving at such speed and power 
that it becomes incandescent,and rippling with 
incongruous structures known as shock diamonds and 
Prandtl-Meyer expansion fans. This is the Plasma Wind. 
We will ride before this Plasma Wind,and it will take us out 
to where we will go.

An Introduction

After much consideration, I have decided that a weblog, a "blog", might be a good way to publicize things I'm working on, share tools, and perhaps most importantly to me, articulate ideas and concepts that I find important, and might perhaps be of interest to others.  Therefore, this blog, Plasma Wind, is my attempt at bringing these notions forth.

To quoteMarshall Savage, author of the Millenial Project, Colonizing the Galaxy in Eight Easy Steps,"I'm a simple man, whose interest extends no further than the Magellenic Clouds".  There is an infinite number of interesting things to comment on, to discuss, to consider, and even to act upon.  But we are finite, so we must choose what's important enough to spend time exploring. 

I hope you find my entries into this blog interesting enough to return, hoping for more.  It will be interesting to see whether my finite topic set, big though it may seem to me, has sufficient value to you to spend something of value to you, which is your time. 

Cheers!

JAB