Man of Science, Man of Faith

I don’t know exactly who out there reads my blog. I’m sure there are random folks out there somewhere who stumble upon it, read, and move on about their lives. Welcome to you.

I principally maintain the blog for old friends, just to reassure them I’ve not fallen off of the face of the Earth. They never seem to comment, so either they never read or simply don’t feel compelled to say hello, good to see you’re still alive, etc. Welcome friends, I miss you. This is why my blog was imported into Facebook.

There is apparently a small group of people who read, waiting to sensationalize and gossip about the slivers of life I share. This is why my blog will no longer be imported into Facebook and also why some posts will be privatized.

At the moment, I know of just one person who falls into that last group and they should feel this directed squarely at them. I don’t know you and you don’t, contrary to what you may believe, know me. What I do with my life and who I do it with is none of your business, so don’t worry yourself over it. I know you have gone out of your way to keep an eye on me but I can not, for the life of me, figure out why.

As a public service, I’d like to line out some of the finer points of masonry technology. The basic building block of modern masonry products is portland cement.  It is the component that, when mixed with water, causes concrete and mortar to set up. As soon as water is added, it begins to cure. Portland is available as a singular component to allow mixing of your own cementatious products.

Mortar is made when portland is compounded with sand of various grades. It is used to join brick or block. It can also be used to set tile and other, for lack of a better term, stuff.

Concrete is a mixture of portland, sand, and aggregate. The aggregate is usually stone of various and sundry sizes. It’s the stuff you see driving around in ready-mix trucks.

So next time you go shopping for this stuff at your local big-box home improvement store,  do us all a favor and make sure you know what you want.

You may or may not have heard the good George W. talking about two energy-related topics recently: the “Hydrogen Economy” of the future and ethanol, the goal of both being to wean America from its foreign oil dependence. Both have huge problems and I’d like to point them out for you here and now. First, let’s talk hydrogen.

Hydrogen makes an incredibly clean fuel. You burn it with oxygen and you get water – no carbon emissions there. It also happens to be the most abundant element in the universe. Super. Here on earth, though, practically every last red hot atom is locked up. We do have plenty of water here on terra firma that we could break up to get hydrogen and that is the plan. Take a little water, apply a little electricity and blammo; you’ve got hydrogen and oxygen. The catch is that you have to spend about twice as much energy to split water apart than you get out from recombining the hydrogen and oxygen. Where will that energy come from? If we use our current infrastructure, it will come from coal and natural gas. In this scenario, we have not only moved the emission of carbon dioxide from tailpipes to smokestacks but we’ve increased the amount we’re spewing. The upside is that it is easier to capture and deal with the carbon dioxide from big point sources like power plants than it is to capture it from several hundred million cars.

This isn’t to mention the difficulties of distribution and storage of hydrogen. Hydrogen is a tiny molecule that is very good at slipping through tiny cracks – think welds on tanks and connections in plumbing. Leaky pipes aren’t really a huge danger as hydrogen likes to float up and away, but losing gas from your parked car overnight could be annoying. Also, volume for volume, fuels liquid at normal temperatures have way more energy in them. A 16 gallon tank of highly compressed hydrogen wouldn’t even begin to get you as far as a 16 gallon tank of gasoline. Oh – and we have absolutely no large-scale distribution systems for hydrogen. Bummer. Let it go George.

How does ethanol stack up? In 2006, 1/5th of the 105 billion bushel U.S. corn crop – the third largest ever – went to making 5 billion gallons of ethanol. George W. wants to replace 15% of gasoline with ethanol by 2008. Meeting that goal will take 35 billion gallons of ethanol which will take 147 billion bushels of corn. Estimates indicate that it will take an additional 80 million acres of corn to do that. We also have to remember that corn has to feed us and our livestock. Already increased demand for corn has doubled prices from $2 a bushel to $4. The chicken industry has been saddled with $1.5 billion in extra feed costs. The cost to produce a bottle of soda has jumped $0.06. Ultimately, consumers eat the cost.

Ethanol also has its share of problems as a fuel. It carries less energy than gasoline meaning that you can’t go as far on equal amounts of each. It also attracts water like nobody’s business so every last steel component in fuel storage and transportation systems has to be replaced with stainless steel. Plants also don’t just grow and harvest themselves, either. The production of energy from plants – especially corn – takes energy, currently making the whole process nearly a wash. Fortunately, we are very close to being able to produce ethanol from cellulose. Instead of having to use the corn kernels, we could use the stalks. There are also very beneficial perennial prairie grasses that carry the most promise. They are native and actually improve the soil where they grow. But pushing corn as our main ethanol source is stupid and short-sighted, so stop it GW.

I want to chat about my favorite disaccharide, sucrose, also known as table sugar. Since the development of high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS), every food and beverage producer that could replace sugar with HFCS has, but why? It turns out that the US government has imposed steep tariffs on sugar imports since the Civil War. On top of the tariffs, the USDA sets limits on the amount of domestic sugar that may be sold annually, creating an artificially limited supply. This keeps US sugar prices two to three times above free-market prices.

It should come as no surprise that hard candy manufacturers – who have to use real sugar – have moved out of the country to avoid these troubles. The domestic sweetener industry isn’t losing sleep over any of this, though. For sugar growers, they get a great deal. Because the government helps prop up prices and sets production limits, they don’t have to work hard to compete in the sugarcane market. Also benefitting are corn growers since all of the HFCS comes from them.

Big consumers of sugar – candymakers and soft drink producers to name two – have grown tired of this system and are pushing to ditch the tariffs and production caps. I’m taking their side. I prefer things sweetened with sugar over those sweetened with HFCS.

An article in BusinessWeek got me started on this tirade. I’d link you to it, but you have to register and possibly buy something, so nevermind on that. You should also check out the Wikipedia article on HFCS. Pay special attention to the part where normal corn syrup is run through a process with alpha-amylase, glucoamylase, glucose isomerase, liquid chromotography, back-blending and plenty of ion-exchange. Not that sugar production is chemically uninvolved, but production of actual raw sugar is pretty simple: boil sugar juice. Bleaching the sugar to make it nice and white is a bit disturbing, but not too bad. Anyway, let your local congress critter know that sugar tariffs aren’t cool.

Had I not voted today, my vote probably wouldn’t have been missed in the grand scheme. Sadly, there seem to be a great many folks who probably don’t vote because of that “my vote doesn’t really matter” mindset. It is true that one vote among many doesn’t matter much, assuming a wide margin. It is exceedingly true, though, that a country full of people with that mindset won’t have much of an election. The relative few who do vote will determine who is in charge.

I won’t claim that the upcoming figures are exact, but it looks as if only 26% of West Virginia’s population voted. A minority of people decided what is right for the majority. Granted that in the statistical world a random sample of sufficient size yields an accurate result. Assuming the votes were counted correctly, the roughly 418,000 votes cast in West Virginia yield an error of just +/- 0.1%. That is assuming, of course, that the views of the sample represent the views of the whole. They may not.

So the question I’d like to ask is, “What the hell happened to the other 74% of you?” Was it too much to ask for you to take ten minutes to go vote? Couldn’t get to a polling place, you say? Well you can vote early, but you do have to go to the courthouse. Well, alright, I see your point. But “I just don’t care” isn’t an excuse that’ll fly with me. You care. You complain about Iraq, you’ve certainly got feelings on terrorism, and you certainly have a stance on gay marriage, abortion and stem cell research. If you didn’t go vote, don’t expect me to listen to you complain about the way your representative at whichever level of government is handling it. You had your chance.

Honestly, though, I can see where it would be difficult to get to your polling place. For the last 220 years, we have had to make sure people vote at their designated polling place simply because we couldn’t tell if they had voted somewhere else previously. With the advent of the internet being available practically everywhere, there is no reason that we shouldn’t be able to vote at any polling place, whether it be your local school, the fire station two blocks away, or the hotdog cart outside your office at lunchtime. I’m not just talking locally, either. This should be a nationwide system. For that matter, it should be worldwide. If you’re out of the country on election day, you ought to take a quick trip to the US Embassy, show your ID and cast your ballot.

I heard a story on NPR’s All Things Considered about the election in Nicaragua. Toward the end of the story, there was an interview of former President Jimmy Carter. The Carter Center acts as a thrid party to monitor elections in developing or unstable democracies to make sure they’re fair. When asked about upcoming US elections, Carter had this to say:

“It would not qualify at all for instance for participation by the Carter Center in observing. We require for instance that there be uniform voting procedures throughout an entire nation. In the United States you’ve got not only fragmented from one state to another but also from one county to another.”

Wow. That’s not a bit damning at all. Check out the story, though. It’s interesting, especially President Carter’s comments. And go vote next time you can.

The Space Shuttle fleet has been flying now for about 25 years. In that time, there have been, unfortunately, two losses of crew and craft. Without question, both could have been prevented. A good number of folks – in government and not – combine that record with the cost of flying the shuttle and question why we continue to fly it. They also look at NASA’s post-Columbia culture and see numerous delays and safety-related scrubs and claim that the shuttle fleet is unsafe, unreliable, and generally wasteful. If you look at the direct costs involved with each launch, the shuttle costs about $60 million for each launch.

The initial contract for the Shuttle program was awarded early in the 1970’s. Construction on the first Shuttle airframe, Enterprise, began in June 1974. Designs for the vehicle had been in development since the late 60’s. Yeah – that’s right: the 60’s. We’re flying to space in a vehicle whose basic design is nearly 40 years old. The technology is, of course, quite a bit newer. Instruments and equipment have been upgraded and the airframe modified where necessary.

The design lifetime for each orbiter is 100 flights. Discovery, first launched in 1984, has recorded 32 flights. Atlantis has done 27 since its first flight in 1985. Endeavor, the newest, has done 19 since 1992. If the airframes are capable of really lasting to their design life, there is easily a lot of life left in the fleet.

Discovery is due for retirement in 2010.
Atlantis is due for retirement in 2008.
Endeavor is due for retirement in 2010.

Basically, they’re just being kept around to haul up pieces for the International Space Station and people to put them together. So, you might be asking, what then? What will, as our good President Bush has tasked us to do, take us to the moon and to Mars? Answer: the Orion. Think overgrown Apollo. Sort of.

Orion is basically two vehicle systems. There is a two-stage booster to lift a crew module (CM) and a service module (SM). The lift vehicle for this stack is called the Aries I. For a first stage, it will use a 5-segment solid booster derived from that currently used on the Shuttle. The second stage will be powered by an Apollo-derived J2X engine fuelled with liquid hydrogen (LH2) and liquid oxygen (LOX). While the solid booster may be recovered, the second stage is a throw-away.

The service module will provide propulsion, power and life support to the crew module. Only the CM returns to Earth. All of the equipment in the SM – an engine, solar cells, life support equipment – burns up in our atmosphere. Since the vehicle will be solar powered, there is no need for fuel cells (hydrogen + oxygen = electricity and water). However, this isn’t the savings it seems: no water out of the fuel cells means that every drop of water that goes will have to be carried along and recycled. The CM will parachute back to the surface, this time on land rather than sea as the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo missions did. I guess you have to have something to differentiate.

Notice that there is no lunar lander mentioned above. If you go to the moon, you need a lander. That will be launched in the Aries V. It will be powered by 5 RS-68 engines fueled with LOX and LH2 assisted by two solid boosters. It has a second stage similar to the Aries I.

Let’s tally. For a moon mission, you’ll be using 3 solid boosters, 5 RS-68 engines, 2 J2x engines, a Delta II-derived second stage engine on the SM. That’s just engines. You’ve also got tons of stuff that doesn’t ever come back. You can’t inspect things that failed. They’re gone.

A few facts.
The projected design life of the CM is 10 flights. It has an ablative heat shield that must be replaced after each flight.
The Shuttle was designed for 100 flights. It has a ceramic tile heat shield that is inspected with tiles replaced as necessary.

Each of the RS-68 engines is projected to cost $20 million. That’s $100 million for each launch.
The Shuttle’s engines cost $50 million each. They are designed to last 30 flights. That works out to $450 million for 90 flights. The engines are torn down, inspected and repaired after each flight.

The Orion CM is projected to accommodate 6 crew in about 545 cubic feet of space in one area. It is about 2.5 times larger than the Apollo CM.

The Shuttle has 2,325 cubic feet of space spread essentially over two decks and can accommodate 7. And that is with the airlock inside. Move it to the cargo bay and you’ve got 2,625 cubic feet. It also can carry 53,000 lbs to low Earth orbit in a cargo space 15 feet wide and 60 feet long. Then it can play with it using a robotic arm.

The Orion has no airlock. And no cargo capability.

The longest Apollo mission was just over 12 and a half days in duration.

The Shuttle’s longest mission was just over 17 and a half. 13 day flights are routine.

I don’t know that the shuttle could get us to the moon, but I’d like to believe that with a bit of Yankee ingenuity, it could. It could carry a lunar lander in the cargo bay with, I presume, enough room for the extra fuel required to perform a trans-lunar flight. And I don’t know about you, but I wouldn’t want to spend two weeks crammed into a tin can with 5 other people while traveling to anywhere. Longer missions are also possible with the shuttle; currently, Endeavor is undergoing a refit to allow extra provisions to be “jacked” into its current systems.

So let’s build 4 or 5 new shuttles using all that we’ve learned in the last 30 years and take them to the moon. The basic design appears to be as sound today as it was 40 years ago. Orion is just a step backward. That’s my take boys and girls. What’s yours?