Schierer Space

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Space-X, which has received mucho accolados (!?) from this blogger, has just announced that they have won a NASA contract for resupply of the space station after the shuttle’s retirement. This will make use of their really massive Falcon 9 booster which is yet to make it’s maiden flight. The first pieces of the first Falcon 9 are just arriving at the Cape now for launch early next year. Serious heavy lift capability with built in redundancy not seen since the Saturn boosters developed 40 years ago.

Edit: It’s worth mentioning that a similar contract for cargo services to ISS was also awarded to Orbital Sciences Corp. for the same period. This is another big success for commercial access into space.

I wanted to write an extended blog post on this pic which was sent to me by a coworker (hi Mike!), but I’ll just share it and a link to the Laurence Livermore National Labs.

The original copy of this image can be found from LLNL’s website, but this is a local copy to avoid bandwidth stealing.

US Energy Flow

Yes, this is the energy balance for the entire United States. This graph is circa 2002, so you can imagine hoe it might have changed in the last 6 years. Yes, the total is 103 exojoules. The sad part is that the overall efficiency is only 36%.

First off, I hope everybody had a great Thanksgiving! We’re visiting with my sister for the weekend and are having a great time. Joe (my bro-in-law) and I played in a traditional football game this morning, and then we all feasted on Heidi’s fantastic dinner. Finish off the evening with some games and it was a good day.

Of course, I haven’t gone to sleep yet because I’m trying to harvest some savings from the Black Friday deals online. After much hunting and searching I’m ready to make my purchases but it’s taking forever to process through the check-out pages. The e-Commerce sites are in serious need of some crowd control. Anyhow, I’ve been wathcing for a deal on a flat-screen display for some time, and I think I’ve settled on this one. Also, I’m picking up some 2G of fast CAS4 RAM ($9.99 after rebate)… Sorry John, I guess I screwed you over after all.

Another great deal I saw as I was plowing along was this one at RitzCamera. If you are in need for stocking up on digital media, this one is for you. SanDisk 4GB CF or SD for FREE after the mail-in rebate Snooze you lose.. Really. I was seriously tempted to get a few more cards… but I resisted… since I’ve already got more than I need.

Now if only my order will clear…

EDIT: 2:15AM: Woo-hoo! Cleared. Must sleep now.

SpaceX successfully completed a full mission test of their 9-engine heavy lift monster. You can watch a video of the test on their website, but I can’t say I recommend more than the first few seconds. Unfortunately, their sounds equipment isn’t up to the task of capturing the truly throaty roar that must produce.

The caption for the video was much more interesting:

Photo/Video Caption: The full mission duration test firing of the Falcon 9 rocket first stage lasted 178 seconds, nearly three minutes. Conducted at the SpaceX test facility in McGregor, Texas, the nine Merlin engines produced 855,000 lbs. of thrust and consumed over half a million pounds of liquid oxygen and rocket grade kerosene during the test.

That’s a lot of kerosene!! According to this example problem the stoichiometric equation for oxygen and n-decane (approximate for kerosene) is 15.5 moles oxygen for each mole of n-decane. That’s a fuel/oxygen ratio by mass of about 0.28. So half a million pounds of combustion material is about 400,000 pounds of kerosene. That’s almost 60,000 gallons!!^[1]

To put that in perspective, I fill up my car no more than once a week with 10-11 gallons of fuel or roughly 500 gallons a year. So that’s enough fuel (if cars ran on kerosene) to drive over 100 cars for a year. And those 9 Merlin engines burned that in 3 minutes. Now you know why satellite TV costs so much!!

1. Thanks Google Calculator. [↩]

We’ve been spending my work bonus lately on some nice-to-haves that hadn’t managed to make it to must-haves. Here’s a quick run down with a little story about each:

• Bigger Backups: As I’ve discussed previously, I’ve got a whole automatic backup system running. We protect our documents and important files, but the biggest hog is the tens of thousands of digital images. Anyhow, between K’s PC and mine, we finally exhausted the 250GB drives we had been using. We’re running at 750GB now (which I got at the bargain price of $99).
• Liquidation of Late Models: With the help of File Shredder, I was able to quickly and effectively clean the drives and sell them to coworkers for $50 each. I also sold an old graphics card for $50… so that one piece of closet junk went away and I got something for it.
• Dishwashing Delight: A new, quieter and -even better- EFFECTIVE dishwasher now resides in our kitchen. This was a mostly painless install except for the mysterious hole in the wall discovered behind the old dishwasher. It was as if somebody needed to open up the wall to access something…. except there wasn’t anything there. Actually, there was a drain pipe from upstairs, but there were no seams or other inputs that would explain the hole in the wall. It did explain why the cats were always starting at the bottom of the dishwasher. So, a chunk of drywall and some spackle later, another major rodent access point is removed. I must give a shout-out to the Kenmore dishwasher engineer who put the hex heads on the top of the threaded leveling feet so a socket wrench could be used to drive them up and down. Unfortunately, I must critique the access to the water inlet. The water line (copper tubing with compression fittings in our case) comes from behind the dishwasher and meets the inlet under the front left corner of the dishwasher. As the appliance is backed into the cabinet alcove, the tubing fits nicely around the pump/motor assembly to meet the inlet. Great so far. THe problem is the elbow on the inlet is now facing away from the installer (me). So I manage to thread the compression nut onto the fitting and start to tighten it… but I have to apply a wrench. The amount of clearance between the floor and the bottom of the dishwasher is such that I can get 1/12 of a turn from each stroke. Yes, 1/12 of a 6-sided nut. I have to turn the nut, remove the wrench, flip the wrench over, turn the nut, flip the wrench over and repeat. Good thing the crescent wrenches have an offset angle, huh (kudos to whichever engineer figured that out!!).
• Finally, a Phone: Yes, I have finally submitted to the wireless communication revolution. K & I did some math and showed that the increase to her cel plan to add another line was less than our average long distance bill. Now we will use the cellphones exclusively to make long distance calls. In addition, most of our long distance calls are at night when the minutes are free. We have NOT shut off the land-line, but are considering the trade-offs for the future. For now, we get our broadband via DSL, so that would require a double utility switch. If you want to add me to your phone, add 1385 to K’s cell number to get mine. I will not promise that it will be active at all times.

Inspired by all the new theme building that John has been asking me about, and the work K&I are doing for the church website, I’ve updated our theme again.

The difference is subtle, but significant. The entire page now scales with window size rather than being fixed width, so for the growing number of people with wide-screen displays, they can spread east and west to their heart’s content. I also put the side bar on all pages rather than just some of them. I’m not quite sure why I didn’t change that earlier.

Let me know if you have any viewing issues.

Shout out to my friend John who is taking on the inter-tubes with his very own blog and photo gallery (sound familiar?) titled The Manlius Formation.

Go click on that there link and show him some love.

Oh and John: You have now been officially added to the link list.

Edit: Just to make this an appropriate welcome to John, I’ve decided to add this photo:

4 minutes left on the countdown as I write this….

View the Webcast live!

7:15 Liftoff!

7:17 Max Q…

7:19 BEAUTIFUL staging. Kestral burning and glowing….

Fairing sep complete…

T+4 minutes…. some goofy little bits of something floating around the camera.

T+5 minutes… none of the oscillations in the earlier flights. Nozzle very steady and attitude looks good.

T+5:50… some visual changes in the Kestral (2nd stage) nozzle, and a small oscillation in the view of the Earth.

T+7:30… Little bits of ice or paint can be seen flowing past the camera then getting blasted by the engine wash.

T+8:29… Loss of signal…. announcer not sure if this is normal comm loss, or loss of the spacecraft.

T+9:22… Video reacquired.

T+9:33… engine shutdown. Falcon 1 first privately developed vehicle to reach Earth orbit from the ground!!!

CONGRATULATIONS! SPACE-X!!!

T+10:34… loss of signal (over the horizon).

500 people today, and only 6 years of history, damn. I am so looking forward to more companies doing this. This is what will make space access common place.

WOOOOHOOOO!!!

SpaceX is scheduled to try again to launch their Falcon 1 rocket into orbit. Here is the press release from SpaceX:

Posted September 27, 2008
Flight 4 of Falcon 1

Falcon 1 is currently cleared for liftoff sometime between 4 p.m. and 9 p.m. (California time) tomorrow, Sunday September 28th. Of course, if we see anything that requires investigation, the launch will be postponed, but we’ll let you know as soon as we know. As with prior flights, you can access the webcast from the SpaceX site: www.spacex.com

–Elon–