Monthly Archives: April 2023

April 20, 2023 · 23:34

Odds & Sods, April 20th

Unless you’ve been under a rock, you heard that SpaceX launched its SuperHeavy booster and Starship spacecraft. You also heard that it blew up.

There are lots of folks who aren’t fans of money spent on space programs, either private or government, and a lot of folks who aren’t big fans of Elon Musk. They’re all having a field day making  jokes and declarations that the day was an epic failure.

It was far from a failure. This was a first test flight of something so cutting edge that it’s never even been fantasized about by any other space program. I ranted a bit about what an eventual success of Starship will mean for the world, humanity, the future of mankind, blah blah blah.

For something this revolutionary, never tried before, the first flight is truly a “test” flight. They’ve done tens of thousands of hours of simulations and systems tests and static fires and wet dress rehearsals. Now it was time to push the big red button, light those 33 engines, and if they all light (or at least most of them) then you can get off the ground and see what actually happens. That was today.

Now there’s going to be months of analysis. They’re going to have to figure out why those couple of engines didn’t light. They’re going to have to figure out why the stages didn’t separate. They’re going to have to rebuild big chunks of the pad and figure out how how to keep it from getting chewed up on the next launch.

Disappointment? Sure, it would have been really cool to go off flawlessly. But that’s not the real world.

They’ll figure it out. Be patient.

Speaking of disappointment, I got the news today that not one, but two houses that I’ve been lusting after got sold. We’ve been looking at houses for a couple of years, if by “looking” you mean “looking at thousands of houses on Zillow.” It will be a big move, but renting sucks.

One house outside of Champaign-Urbana, Illinois we went and saw last summer when we were in Chicago. I had serious house lust, the place was glorious, huge, majestic, and incredibly low priced compared to the LA real estate market. However, I was alone in those feelings.

The other house was up in the High Desert about three hours away, two hours outside of Los Angeles. It wasn’t spectacular, but it was very functional, good sized, lots of storage, a decent neighborhood, and reasonably priced for the LA real estate market. We’ve been meaning to take a trip up there to take a look but the schedule never worked out. Now it’s gone.

Disappointment? Sure, it would have been really cool to get one of them. But that’s not the real world.

I’ll figure it out. Be patient.

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Filed under Castle Willett, Space

April 19, 2023 · 23:28

Medium Lizard

Yesterday I had pictures of a large fence lizard, something on the order of 10-12 inches long, involved in some territorial displays of his bright blue belly and push ups. The reason he was being so demonstrative was a smaller, younger, medium-sized lizard that was horning in on his spot in the sun along the 6×6 railroad ties at the edge of the yard.

The big guy is over to the right about four feet. The usurper came sneaking up over the top to one of the good spots.

Smaller, nice pattern but much less color – note the green diamonds all over the big guy from yesterday, as well as the blue belly.

He’s also got some weird circular ridges along side of his neck on both sides, just above his shoulders.

He scurried past the big guy, annoying the hell out of him. As soon as the medium guy had come up on the beam the big guy had started his dominance display.  When the medium guy made his run along the beam, then down onto the dirt just as he got to the big guy, then back up onto the beam as soon as he got past him, the big guy scurried under that plant with the purple flowers. Do you see him?

Here you can see the medium-sized guy doing his own push ups, but with no color on his belly showing yet. I’m guessing (I’m no herpetologist) but I suspect that means he’s younger.

The big guy was having none of that challenge. He came whipping out from under that bush, charging at the medium guy, driving him down the beam until he had no choice but to bail over the edge.

Large Lizard – 1, Medium Lizard – 0

But they both live to fight another day.

“This yard ain’t big enough for the two of us!”

Chill, dude! It actually is. Really.

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Filed under Critters, Photography

April 18, 2023 · 23:45

Large Lizard

There are a range of lizard sizes around the place. There’s an alligator lizard that I’ve seen a handful of times that I think lives in the garage – it’s close to two feet long. Probably a cousin of his that showed up in the toilet at the old house a few years ago. These guys I refer to as “Fredzillas,” they’re huge and will get your attention if you stumble across one. They’re harmless.

A size down from the humongous alligator lizards are the full-sized fence lizards. Like this guy.

He was out on the back wall this weekend, at the same time I was taking pictures of one of the “small” lizards. (I shared those pictures yesterday.) If yesterday’s lizard was a small, this guy’s a large. Tomorrow I’ll share pictures of a medium-sized lizard who popped up onto this same wall a couple feet away.

This big guy was well aware that I was there, but as long as I stayed five or six feet away and didn’t make any sudden moves, he was okay.

Then the medium-sized lizard showed up and the big guy went into his territorial display. When he did, lo and behold! His bright blue underbelly showed up. He puffed up his belly to display, got up on all four legs as tall as he could, and puffed up his chin.

Then he started doing “push ups.” I’ve talked about how I’ve seen this from time to time, but I don’t think I’ve ever photographed it. To see it, first save this photo, or load it into a photo viewer…

…then do the same for this one. Now flip back and forth between them quickly. Up! Down! Up! Down!

The medium-sized lizard charged at him, but then chickened out and scurried off of the wooden beam, onto the dirt, around this guy, then back up onto the beam on the other side about ten feet away. I guess that’s a win?

Then, after settling for a minute or two in the shade of this flowering plant, I had to move to see him. Between me moving and the smaller lizard just annoying him, he took off.

He chased the medium-sized lizard off of the wooden beam and over the side, then took one final opportunity to turn around, do a couple of push ups, and glare at me.

SORRY!!

 

 

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April 17, 2023 · 23:37

On The Edge Of Sunlight & Shadow

Not too hot, not too cold.

This guy has lived through the “popcorn” phase to be big enough and old enough to have a favorite spot.

A little more cool shade if you scooch back, a little more sun if you scooch foreward.

It’s the Goldilocks spot for this dude.

Stretched out along this board, even his belly gets warm with time.

Lizard paradise!

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April 16, 2023 · 23:05

Sunset – April 16th

Sunset is an interesting benchmark for our human brains. While our lives are run by clocks these days, most of the measures that we’ve created to mark the passing of time hae something to do with astronomical events and values. 24 hours to a day. 12 hours (sort of) of day and 12 hours (sort of) of night. 28 days to a lunar cycle. The starting dates for the four seasons. 365 days (sort of) to a year.

Sunset is often a time to think back on the day that’s ending and look forward to the day that’s starting with sunrise. That looking forward, that foreboding, that anticipation is weighing on me tonight.

Tomorrow morning, if all goes well, about 08:00 CDT (13:00 UTC, 06:00 PDT) we may see the first launch of SpaceX’s Super Heavy booster and Starship spacecraft. And that could be a HUGE next step to make tomorrow’s world significantly different that tonight’s.

In tonight’s sunset sky, up in the upper right, is Venus. Let’s take it as an example.

Right now there are no spacecraft orbiting it or exploring it. We have had an orbiter there and it gave us a treasure trove of data. The US has never put a robot spacecraft on Venus’s surface, although the Russians have. However, due to the hellscape of monstrous atmospheric pressure and heat, those probes only sent back a handful of pictures and data, surviving only a couple of minutes.

There are proposals and new projects on the US slate. But with the current state of human launch capabilities, interplanetary probes are rare and expensive. Every gram of weight is incredibly precious, so spacecraft have to be optimized as much as possible, which means they’re expensive to design and expensive to design. And researchers and engineers typically get one chance to get it right, so everything has to be perfect.

In this case, sending something to Venus, even to do a limited set of tasks or carry a set of a dozen or so instruments and experiments, is something that happens every couple of decades and costs hundreds of millions of dollars.

Because it’s so expensive to launch. Because launch capabilities are so limited.

What if those restrictions were gone?

SpaceX’s Starship is designed to be reuseable the way that a 747 is reuseable. If every 747 took one flight and then was destroyed, flying on an commercial aircraft would be incredibly expensive and rare. But a 747, while costing hundreds of millions of dollars to build, has a lifetime of thousands of flights, usually several a day. So Boeing doesn’t build one from start to finish and then start on the next one – they rolled one off of the assembly line every couple of days, dozens a month, hundreds a year. And they all fly almost constantly, so it’s cheap enough to use them to bring planeloads of bananas from Central America and winter apples from Chili and FedEx packages from all over the world so that you and I could have those things the next day.

Let’s do that space.

If SpaceX builds Starships to fly dozens, hundreds, thousands of flights and builds hundreds and thousands of them and can launch each one multiple times a week, let alone multiple times per day, then getting into low Earth orbit (LEO) gets dirt cheap by today’s standards.

And if THAT happens, and you want to explore Venus, you don’t need to build billion dollar spacecraft that are relatively tiny and perfect with a limited suite of instruments. You can build a dozen, a hundred, a thousand spacecraft for a couple hundred thousand dollars each and flood Venus with orbiters, landers, rovers, balloons – whatever you can think of. And when you learn critical things from the first few, then you build better and cheaper and more capable spacecraft in the second round. It’s a positive feedback loop.

Do I expect Starship to launch tomorrow? Maybe, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it takes a few tries and a few days. No one’s ever done this before and rockets are hard.

When they do launch, do I expect the first mission to go perfectly? Probably not. Remember, rockets are hard! But do I expect them to figure it out and keep trying and succeed in a few months? Yes, no doubt.

For our example, do I expect to have a hundred spacecraft in and around Venus in two years, or five years? No, obviously not. In ten years? Not a hundred, but maybe a handful, ideas that are just proposals now, fighting amongst each other to get that one golden ring from NASA for that one-in-a-decade slot. In twenty or twenty-five years? No doubt.

Tonight, at sunset, I look at Venus and there’s no way to scatter the planet with orbiters and landers and rovers and blimps.

Tomorrow, at sunset, we might be a LOT closer to the day that we can. And that day might be well in my lifetime.

Good luck tomorrow, Starship!

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Filed under Photography, Space, Sunsets

April 15, 2023 · 23:28

Late Night Launch From 100 Miles Away

If you’re a regular here, you’ve seen the western view from my front yard a few hundred times as I’ve shared sunset pictures of conjunctions and moonsets and planets and comets and, well, sunsets. For reference:

Last night about 23:48 SpaceX launched a Falcon 9 rocket with a few dozen smallsats and cubesats and microsats and a couple of bigger satellites. They’re launching out of Vandenberg pretty regularly these days, but most are during the day and unless you know exactly where to look, you’re not going to spot that tiny, reasonably faint little dot in the bright sunlit sky. Or it will be cloudy.

But at night…

For reference, those dimly lit vertical lines are those palm trees in the center of the sunset picture and the tops of the neighbors’ trees can be seen at the bottom center and right. Vandenberg is at about midway between those big Italian cypress trees on the right, over the horizon. The rocket comes into view right about at the right base of Castle Peak, just to the left of the far left Italian cypress, headed up and to the left.

As the rocket rises it’s tail gets longer while the air pressure is dropping with increasing altitude. This is the first stage booster firing, nine Merlin engines, about 100 miles away, west of Santa Rosa and Santa Cruz Islands.

Just a few seconds after this (all very visible to the eye, not so much to the cell phone camera) this flame trail cut off at MECO (Main Engine Cut Off). The first stage booster separated and the second stage engine ignited. There was a cloud of gas and exhaust visible dimly (nothing like the “jellyfish” effect you get with a sunset launch) and the booster relights a couple of engines for its “boosteback” burn, returning to land at Vandenberg to be used for an eleventh time in a few weeks. The second stage was visible all the way to the southern horizon until it disappeard over the Malibu Hills. By that time it was well south and still climbing, probably somewhere along the Baja Penninsula.

Next on the runway? Or the launch pad, in this case? The first Starship test flight, possibly as early as Monday morning about 07:00 CDT (05:00 PDT). That’s way early for an olde phart like me, and my Monday schedule is a bit packed. But one of my earliest memories is my Dad dragging me out of bed waaaaaaaay before sunrise to watch Alan Shepherd ride the first Mercury suborbital flight, so I think I’ll be able to pull this off.

Isn’t that why God invented caffeine?

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April 14, 2023 · 23:37

Odds & Sods, April 14th

It was cloudy and foggy last night again and I didn’t get to see Spacex’s Transporter 7 launch out of Vandenberg just before midnight, because the weather sucked for them as well and they scrubbed. The weather is looking much better tonight, both here and there, so in twenty or so minutes (23:48 PDT) maybe we’ll get to see a launch.

SpaceX also got it’s launch license from the FAA today, the last step they needed before launching SuperHeavy Booster 7 carrying Starship Ship 24. They’ll probably try sometime after 07:00 AM CDT on Monday morning.

My son in Texas immediately asked if I would be getting there Saturday or Sunday. It’s with truly great sorrow that I had to acknowledge that I wouldn’t be making a last-minute, surprise trip. As I noted, being an adult sucks. “…For I have promises to keep, And miles to go before I sleep, And miles to go before I sleep.”

I randomly had two movies on cable on as background while I was working the other night, and didn’t think anything of it, but it hit me later how they both examine similar themes from radically different viewpoints. Things like what it takes to make us human and how we treat other sentient beings and what rights those beings might have. First it was “Ex Machina,” which has always been stunning visually as well as thought provoking. The second was “The Truman Show,” a philosophical horror show masquerading as a Jim Carrey comedy.

Are Eva and Truman all that different at their cores?

Time to try and go see a rocket launch!

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April 13, 2023 · 23:31

The Critters Return

I do love wandering around outside at night. There are the stars, for one. And the lights of the city, and aircraft overhead going out of LAX to parts unknown and into BUR from parts unknown. And the sounds of the critters out there.

The owls are back. They’ve never truly been gone, but they move around a bit, so I haven’t heard them in the last week or two. But tonight and last night I could hear them.

The bunnies are back. In the winter I often only see one every now and then, but they’ve apparently spawned. Tonight there was what looked like one adult and at least two, maybe three little ones.

No doubt what the owls are looking for, if you know what I mean.

And peepers! Down at the bottom of the hill is an area where a couple of streams come together and start Bell Canyon Creek. It’s filled with reeds and brush. We hear a lot of frogs and peepers down there, as well as a pack of coyotes, but now it seems some of the peepers have made it up the hill. I can hear several in our neighbor’s yard, and I swear I can hear one sometimes in the bushes in front of our living room.

Squirrels! Again, it might be time for the little ones to learn how to dodge hawks. (And owls!) Usually we just have the one who eats all of the bird seed, but today, while he was out there in the yard, there were two others up against the sliding glass door that leads out to the porch. Our regular guy ignores me most of the time, but the two peeking into the house were freaked out by my arrival and took off pretty quick.

Get bundled up and go outside late at night. It’s a whole different world.

And with luck, in about fifteen minutes, if the clouds clear just a bit, there will be a rocket leaving the planet behind in my world!

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April 12, 2023 · 23:40

Leaving The Planet

If you’re up in a few hours, there’s scheduled to be a huge launch out of French Guiana at 04:45 AM PDT, about five hours from now.

Tomorrow night, about this time (23:25 PDT), there’s a launch out of Vandenberg. (Weather permitting.) Right now we have fairly heavy overcast and fog moving in, so if it’s like that tomorrow we won’t see a thing from here. But maybe, if it clears a bit…

Sometime next week, maybe as early as Monday, maybe not, assuming the FAA issues a launch license, there’s a launch out of Texas. It will be the first launch of a full SpaceX Starship. They won’t try to go for a full orbit and they won’t try to recover either the booster or the Starship vehicle – both will splashdown in the ocean and be destroyed, the booster off of Texas and the Starship off of Hawaii after about 3/4 of an orbit.

About the same time next week, there’s a Falcon Heavy taking off from Florida with a satellite heading for geosynchronous orbit. Because of the launch parameters, all three of the cores will be expended. None will be brought back for landing and re-use.

On top of all of that, SpaceX is launching a Falcon 9 from either Florida or California better than twice a week.

And that doesn’t count any of the crewed flights, missions to the ISS, private and government. Or the Chinese space station. Or the upcoming trips to the Moon.

If you want to be leaving the planet in your rear view mirror, it’s a good time for it.

 

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April 11, 2023 · 22:33

Barren Tree & Bush Follow-Up

I was out re-filling the hummingbird feeders and there was something about the late afternoon light that really drew my attention to the big tree in the back yard.

A couple months ago this tree was unexpectedly almost leafless, which is unusual. Possibly caused by the drought and super dry summer, but it’s come back strong.

The bougainvillea bush back there was also surprisingly barren in mid February. It has come back a bit, but nowhere near as well as the big tree has. It’s at maybe 50% to 60% of normal. You can still see the gas meter back under there. (When we moved in it took me a major search to figure out where that meter was hidden because of how full and lush this bush was. Not now!) We’ll see what more sun does for it, as long as I keep it watered.

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Filed under Flowers, Photography