Jason's Bloglet - Saturday 9 July 2005

So my phone number at HQ was recently used by one of the main media connection guys here. I've gotten some strange phone calls...one was from a movie studio that was looking to do some work with a NASA center. The one today, however, was the strangest of all, I think. I got a phone call from Jim McDivitt, Apollo astronaut. You see, all of the Apollo astronauts were promised a moon rock if they found a good place to have it displayed. Jim McDivitt has been working with the University of Michigan, and has obviously found a good place to put the rock, so he called my phone number to start the process of getting the rock.

I called Jim (Commander of Apollo 9 and Program Manager for Apollo 12, 13, 14, 15, and 16) and told him that I would find out who was the right person to talk to and have them call him, so that he doesn't get the run-around. What an odd phonecall to get on a Saturday. :) _
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12:27:49 PM, Saturday 9 July 2005

Well, I have an interview today. There are some folks here at HQ who want me to stay for at least another year, and maybe longer. I'm not sure that I will stay even if I am offered a job, but the opportunity to help affect the direction of NASA is interesting. I can't really describe the job yet--it's not yet clear what it would be--but it appears to be doing somewhat independent analyses that go across the science, human exploration, and other directorates; checking these directorates' self-analyses; and other work for the Program Analysis & Evaluation group (PA&E homepage)

...what does everyone think? _
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08:00:10 AM, Wednesday 6 July 2005

http://www.spaceref.com/news/viewnews.html?id=1040

Um...I can't comment on that link other than to say that people outside of NASA like Keith Cowing don't have good access to data from within NASA.

Of course, the study isn't done, and I don't know where he got his information, and his reporting on NASA Watch is often incomplete, so take this as you will. _
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07:22:39 PM, Friday 1 July 2005

http://www.iht.com/articles/2005/06/29/news/shuttle.php

What do you guys think about riskiness for astronauts? I see two choices, but I'm probably incomplete in my thoughts here:

1) risk is an acceptable side effect of exploration; it should be minimized, but we understand that things go wrong

2) we've been doing this for 40 years, why can't we get it right? we shouldn't fly humans if we can't make them safe.

Any thoughts? _
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10:45:03 AM, Wednesday 29 June 2005

One concept that it takes a while to get used to with space systems is "gear ratio" -- this is the concept that it takes a certain amount of feul to lift something out of a gravity well. For instance, the gear ratio to lift something into Low Earth Orbit (LEO) is about 10-1: it takes about 10 kg of feul to lift 1 kg of mass to LEO. The ratio to bring something to the surface of the Moon and then return it, it takes about 40 kg of feul for every kg of mass that lifts off of the Earth, travels to the surface of the Moon, then lifts off of the Moon and travels back to the surface of the Earth.

That's why Apollo left the Command Module and the Service Module in Low Lunar Orbit; leaving that mass in orbit means you don't have to lift it out of the Moon's gravity well. This is exactly why there's almost no "launch vehicle" needed to lift the astronauts back off the Lunar surface, whereas you have to have a Saturn V to lift everything off of the Earth. _
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12:52:44 PM, Tuesday 28 June 2005

http://www.nasa.gov/offices/pae/home/special_studies.html

I'm on the ESAS team, so there's the official description of what I'm doing. (Finally.) _
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04:01:07 PM, Wednesday 22 June 2005

Desiging things for space is HARD.

For instance, you might think that we could use regular computers. In fact, the astronauts do use regular computers, but they are inside the area that is protected from radiation. Outside of the radiation shielding, regular computer gets a hit from a cosmic particle, it can crash. The boot up time can be so long for a windows machine that in some radiation environments it will crash again before it finishes booting up.

To fight this, there are special ways of isolating the circuts by puttling little tiny wells of sapphire on the silicon wafers; it's very expensive, and there is little demand for it, so the computer technology for satellites lags about 3 years behind commercial electronics. So the computers on Cassini are the equivalent of what we had on our desktops more than 10 years ago.

What made me think of this topic, though, was operating computers in a vacuum. High temperatures kill computers--so you would think that operating in space would be great, right? Wrong! There is no air to cool the chips All the electronics that will be exposed to a vacuum (like the LEM in Apollo, which was depressurized during astronaut walks on the moon) have to be specially plated to radiate heat into space instead of being air cooled like our computers are. Strange, how many things to think about when designing spacecraft. _
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12:12:57 PM, Wednesday 22 June 2005

The most interesting part about designing spacecraft, from my perspective in the first part of my career when I had an outsider's perspective, is the constant concentration on what can go wrong. Since it's very difficult to fix things once they're in space (one of my textbooks said that we don't have screwdrivers that are long enough), we have to think about how to make everything completely robust and reduce risk. For instance, if you can get every mission to the same basic reliability, say 95% chance of success (not a bad assumption for going to the Moon), then the way to calculate overall chance of success is to take 0.95 and raise it to the number of missions involved.

Apollo, for instance, had 12 missions. If they were all at 95% reliability, then the chances of losing a mission would be 0.95^12 = 0.54, or an 54% chance of complete success. Apollo had two failures, Apollo 1 and Apollo 13, so that number seems about right to me. (This analysis is actually a bit oversimplified, but it's a good first approximation. Real statistics would tell us the chances of losing two missions, but I don't want to look up the equation.) (grin) _
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10:48:02 AM, Monday 20 June 2005

The engineering design process is really interesting. The first thing that you do is figure out how much money you have. Then you design something that will do what you want. After that's done, you do your best to figure out how much it will cost. If you're within your available budget, you're done. If not, then you adjust your design and do another cost estimation and repeat until you're within the budget.

The thing is, that you're never sure that you've gotten the best answer, you just know that you've found an answer. If you're interested in finding out how much better you could have done, then you have to do another design and see how the performance compares. Designs cost money to do, and so there's a limit to how many you can do. What we do to try to find the best possible solution is to model reality at a very coarse level of detail. You can then run dozens of computer runs to try to find the right direction to go.

For instance, what happens to a rocket's performance if it carries more feul? Well, on a very simple level, you can find that out quickly: more feul=less payload but possibly launched further out from the Earth. The problem is that to really understand that design, you should figure out how much the feul tanks weigh, where they will go in the ship, how they will be connected to the engines, etc., etc. ad nauseum.

The real challenge to something like an engineering study (like the one I'm involved in) is to figure out what level of detail to go to to make things believable, yet still be simple enough to do enough design trades to be sure that you've found a good design. We're going really really fast, but seem to have a good level of design...I'm glad that computers are around. _
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11:57:23 AM, Thursday 16 June 2005

Back in DC. My cats were really lonely and loving while I was home and it was horrible to have to leave them again. I have someone coming to stay at my house starting this saturday, so hopefully they won't be too lonely. I think that my next vacation will be me staying at home and cuddling with the cats for a week. _
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09:32:07 AM, Wednesday 15 June 2005

Well, it wasn't a large one, but I was actually here for an earthquake! Woo! It freaked my cats out a bit, but other than that everything in Pasadena is fine, I'm sure. Here's a link to the USGS courtesy of Serena: http://pasadena.wr.usgs.gov/shake/ca/STORE/X14151344/ciim_display.html _
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12:04:22 PM, Sunday 12 June 2005

Well, I'm headed home for the weekend. My cats will be happy. :) _
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09:32:01 AM, Friday 10 June 2005

One of the complexities that I naturally forget about is what it takes to make a human flight successful. I mean, really, it's been said that after a mission the inside of the Shuttle has a film of bio material on it that has to be scrubbed off. That's gross. Human beings are 'wetware' that flies the hardware with the software on it.

One of the great complexities of human flight is the space suit. There's a great site on space suits at (of course) Johnson Space Center's website: http://vesuvius.jsc.nasa.gov/er/seh/suitnasa.html

The funny thing about the Apollos suits is that, while 'it is very cold in space' (name that movie quote!) the problem is actually heat rejection, not retention! There was a special network of tubing that was the first layer of the suit that helped keep the 'lunarnaut' cool. While this is weird on first thought, it becomes obvious at second thought--the astronauts are in direct sunlight without an atmosphere, with the lunar surface reflecting light onto them from every direction.

So I guess my point is that not only are spacecraft complex, but there are facets of complexity that are unexpected, like having to clean the inside walls of the Shuttle or astronaut cooling being tough while they're in a vacuum on the moon. :) _
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07:37:02 AM, Tuesday 7 June 2005

So, when I first looked at going to St. John's, I went out to Santa Fe to visit the campus there. There are a bunch of displaced Tibetan monks who came to Santa Fe when China took over Tibet. There was a small Tibetan shopping lane where there were 4-5 stores that sold Tibetan goods like coats, clothes, books, buddhas, and other things. I was particularly interested in a "meditation bowl," a metal bowl that had a stick wrapped in leather that went with it. One is supposed to hold the bowl in one's hand and rub the edge of the bowl with the stick, and the bowl rings like a crystal glass does when the glass is rubbed with a finger. I didn't have the money at the time, so I didn't buy one of those bowls. That was in 1996, and I haven't ever seen one of those things again...

...until today, when I was walking through DC from one meeting in a hotel to another in the HQ building and there was a "Tibetan souveniers" table just sitting in L'Enfant Plaza. I found a nice bowl with a nice ring and with Tibetan symbols on it. The writing is for healing and well-being, the lotus flower symbol symbolises purity of body, speech, and mind, the conch shell symbolises spreading of teachings and awakening from ignorance.

Isn't that neat? I probably paid twice what it was worth, but hey, I figured it'd be another 9 years before I saw another one again... _
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04:48:32 PM, Friday 3 June 2005

Well, I hope that everyone in Pasadena has a good time celebrating my birthday this weekend. Thank you for the excellent wish for a manned mission to the moon, Bobak! That's very sweet. :)

This week has been totally exhausting. Today I got to leave early, after only 9 hours of work! I'm so excited to have some time that I might actually celebrate my birthday yesterday by having some forbidden sweets. It's "dessert night" at the hotel, where they provide all sorts of sinful things instead of a very cheap and bad dinner.

What we've been working on so hard this week is getting consensus in our "needed technologies" team on a process for identifying and ranking the needed technologies for going back to the Moon.

For instance, to handle the high heat load of reentering the atmosphere, there are a few different strategies that you can take: 1) you can use an ablator (a material that changes state, or 'boils off' of the ship to absorb the heat energy) like Apollo did; 2) you can use heat-resistant materials like the Space Shuttle; 3) you can slow down, like Burt Rutan's Space Ship One did. There are problems with all three, let's look at them in reverse order for the sake of chiasmus:

3) slowing down a ship that weighs as much as Space Ship One does, from a suborbital (fairly slow) speed, is feasible; slowing down a 10-ton vehicle that is at lunar return velocity is not easy. Also, having mechanisms on a ship increases the possible failures that you can have. This isn't feasible right now.

2) The Shuttle's ceramic tiles are easily damaged. If a piece of foam damaged those tiles hitting at a speed of about, say, 1500 kilometers/hour, imagine what a piece of rock the size of a quarter would do to the ship if it hit the Shuttle at orbital velocity, which is about 7.5 kilometers PER SECOND. Now, imagine how fast the lunar return will be--I don't have data so I'm not willing to guess--the internet says that is about 11.5 kilometers per second, or about 40,000 km/hour--what would a piece of space debris do to the vehicle at that speed? Well, NASA has to plan for that. There's a reason that the Shuttle flys 'backwards'--it turns itself around so that its engines, the most durable part of the spacecraft, face towards any oncoming debris. The lunar ship may not have that luxury.

1) We used an ablator for Apollo, but that hasn't been made for 30 years, and, even if it had been, it is apparently environmentally not allowed any more. So, if we went with an ablator, then we would have to find a material that was suitable and do testing to find out how thick it needed to be.

My group is involved with determining the possibilities for 200+ technical needs like this one that have been spotted so far; gathering data from experts about the possible solutions to these needs; and presenting that data to the decision makers at Headquarters in a way that they can understand what the needs are, what the solutions might be, and what impact those solutions might have on fulfilling the President's vision of putting humans on the planet Mars.

So, no pressure, right? :) _
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05:55:25 PM, Thursday 2 June 2005

It's my birthday! What do you think the chances are of me getting to go home after 8 hours today? :) _
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07:47:15 AM, Wednesday 1 June 2005

Why is it so hard for NASA to consider going to the Moon, when we went there over 30 years ago? One of the greatest engineering mistakes of all time...

In 1971, NASA had the most amazing launch vehicle that ever existed, the Saturn V. With five F-1 engines on board, it was capable of producing 7.5 MILLION pounds of thrust. However, NASA didn't understand the political situation that it was in. There was no longer a space race; it was no longer seen as part of the national security to fund NASA. In 1972, the Apollo program ended, and NASA decided to design and build a reusable launch vehicle, the Space Shuttle.

The budgetary problems began immediately. During Apollo, NASA was given nearly 4% of the total government's budget. That began to decline. Today, NASA has 0.7% of the budget. (For comparison, the military gets 30% of the budget before considering veteran's benefits and the interest on borrowing money for the military in the past.) So, in terms of real dollars, we are giving NASA less than 1/4 of what we gave them during Apollo. Add to this the unexpected complexities of the Space Shuttle, and you've got yourself a serious problem. The Shuttle is more expensive than anyone ever dreamed it would be. The Standing Army that it takes to keep Shuttle functional costs about $4 billion dollars a year. That's about 1/4 of NASA's overall budget. If we launched 12 times per year, as was envisioned, then the launch costs would be very small--it doesn't take much money to fuel the shuttle in comparison to what it costs to maintenance it.

Then there is Station. The International Space Station is unbelievably expensive, and doesn't have the functionality that was envisioned. I don't know the exact number, but I believe that it is about the same as the Shuttle, another $4 billion dollars a year. This means, of course, that Shuttle and Station take approximately half of NASA's budget every year.

Shuttle is not the most reliable of vehicles, but let's face it--ANY vehicle that involves millions of pounds of propellant (1.1 million pounds for each of the two solids and another 1.5 million pounds of liquid propellants in the main tank) is inherently unsafe. The real problem with the Shuttle is that there is no effective way to get the astronauts away from the propellant. In a vertical stack, the explosion happens below the astronauts; in the Shuttle, the explosion happens next to the astronauts.

So, NASA's challenge is: with half of their 1/5 of the Apollo budget already spent, and hundreds of millions of dollars in congressional 'earmarks' (money that must be spent in the way that a congressman wishes) on the rest of their budget, and another billion (less than that now) going into aeronautics, to do amazing, inspiring space science and space exploration with what's left.

Today's technology does help, but it doesn't make up for the fact that what NASA did in Apollo took some $100+ billion of today's dollars and they have about $6 billion per year to spend on space science, robotic missions, and things other than Shuttle and Station. Shuttle and Station are here until 2010 and 2016, respectively, which is why the President's vision of sustainable exploration takes until 2020 to ramp up. That frees up another $8B/year to develop the launch vehicle that will be necessary to launch the Crew Exploration Vehicle, another vehicle that needs to be designed before it can be built or flown. Plus a landing module will be needed. The CEV will have to take over for Shuttle or something else will have to be figured out to go to station. Plus, if we want to go to Mars, we'll pretty much have to prove that fuel can be made at Mars, since it's probably too expensive to launch from Earth all the fuel needed for the return trip, even if you leave the return fuel in orbit around Mars, thus avoiding carrying it down into and back out of Mars's gravity well, you'd have to carry it all the way there and back, which is terribly inefficient.

It's a pity that we can't just go and build another Saturn V, but to do that would require a whole ot of businesses to still be in business that aren't, blueprints that we don't have, and computers that haven't been made in 3 decades. Sure, we could replace the computers with new ones, but then we have to redesign the vehicle at that point. Plus, new engines are available, which means that we could do better, but any change in an engine requires a redesign of at least the structural area around it. Finally, we used a different type of propellant for most of the vehicles in Apollo, called hypergolics. Hypergolics are fluids that ignite upon contact--very good for reliability, but very poor for efficiency. Again, to change to something more efficient requires an intelligent redesign. I have had profesors say that it would cost $100 billion dollars to design a new Shuttle. Mike Griffin, NASA's new administrator, has said to congress that he thinks a heavy lift launch vehicle of about 2/3 the power of a Saturn V would only cost $3 billion and take 3 years to design, if it's based on the Shuttle parts we already use. I think he's probably underestimating the costs, but he's a smart person who knows more than I do, so maybe he's got it right.

So, the answer to "Why can't NASA do what it did 40 years ago" wraps up to one item, really: money. Bush and Griffin would like to have a sustainable space exploration, but it's got to cost something on the order of $8B/year, do cutting-edge exploration, world-class science, and, above all else, be able to be continued and sustained over multiple presidencies. If Kerry had won the presidency, we would have immediately gone back to putting the Shuttle up and not gone forward with the effort to enter a true golden age of NASA; I voted for him anyway, but it was with a bit of frustration that he had publicly stated that he wasn't interested in going beyond low Earth orbit. _
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04:14:03 PM, Saturday 28 May 2005

If anyone wants to see about how complex spacecraft are, there is a good series of articles about what made Apollo a Success, by various people on the Apollo program. It was written before Apollo 13, I think.

It can be found at: http://history.nasa.gov/SP-287/contents.htm _
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01:53:32 PM, Wednesday 25 May 2005

So, I would like anyone who is reading this to click on the "Respond?" link below and tell me what your answer to the following question is:

Why do we explore?

Fine I turned off the stupid emphasis tag, are you happy now? :) _
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08:41:53 PM, Tuesday 24 May 2005

Astronauts are people too.

I walked over to Don Pettit and asked him if he thought it would be safe to have four astronauts on the moon and have two teams of two doing EVAs (Extra-Vehicular Activities) simultaneously, leaving nobody on the ship. His response was very interesting to me, he said that it wasn't really a safety issue; that's why you have teams of two in the first place. He said it was an *effectiveness* issue. For instance, when you're on orbit at the spadce station doing maintenance, you might have a proceedure to follow that is too long to remember. Rather than having you write it all down and carry a list with you, your partner inside the vehicle will communicate to you while reading a reference, thus making things a bit more efficient.

Well, the whole point of this was that I just walked up to him with a question that I was curious about and he spent about 5 minutes explaining to me patiently what his thoughts and experiences have been.

This is more important than normal, as tomorrow we're not just briefing an astronaut, we're brifing one of the 12 people in the history of humankind who has walked on the moon. Woo! His name is John Young, and his bio can be read at:

http://www.jsc.nasa.gov/Bios/htmlbios/young.html _
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04:00:45 PM, Monday 23 May 2005

Something for me to think about:

"After two years in Washington, I often long for the realism and sincerity of Hollywood."

- Fred Thompson

Seriously, though, it seems like NASA's new administrator means business. People all over the web are talking about him. NASA Watch (http://www.nasawatch.com/) has a couple of people saying good things about him (i.e., a Glenn Research Center (GRC) employee was quoted as saying: "Mike Griffin was at GRC on Monday for a town hall meeting. I think NASA finally has a leader.") and a couple of people saying bad things about the administrator. (Scientists all over are panicked that Griffin is going to stop doing science in order to get to the Moon. Science and exploration aren't *quite* mutually exclusive, but the more exploration costs, the less money that will be available for science-only missions.

I think that Griffin is doing what needs to be done to save the Agency. Yes, I think the Agency is actually in danger. I went to lobby congress when I was a student at MIT; it was a citizen's lobby group where citizens actually walk the halls of the house and the senate and talk to mostly staffers to put in their 2 cents worth about what's going on. The staffer that I talked to were ambivalent about the space program. It takes a lot of money and doesn't really produce anything for the US other than prestige. If prestige is NASA's goal, it's not to be found with the International Space Station--a project that has cost 2 or 3 times as much as it was supposed to and is a juggernaut sucking up a ton of funding--nor is it to be found with the Shuttle.

As good as the Shuttle is, it was compromised from the beginning. To make the Shuttle fly, NASA had to change designs. The Shuttle's original design was a 2-stage, fully reusable vehicle for humans only. It was not meant to fly cargo. However, to be able to get the funding for the project, they had to fly cargo for the military. The shuttle is are largest launch vehicle, it can take 23.5 tonnes to low earth orbit. Then congress found out that the shuttle had been designed to have the lowest total cost, but there was an architecture that had a lower initial cost, and so they made NASA switch to that architecture to save money up front instead of in the long run. This meant reusing only the orbiter and not the fuel tank/first stage. A new design had to be done and that's what we have today.

Interestingly enough, the original design didn't use solid rockets, nor did it use foam, so BOTH Challenger and Columbia would not have been lost if the original, overall cheaper, design had been funded. _
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10:52:29 AM, Sunday 22 May 2005

A quick story while I'm waiting for Mike to call to come pick me up. The fist day that I was here, I went out to the grocery store to pick up some stuff. I grabbed a couple of bags of groceries and was heading home when a kind of a tall guy wearing decent clothes, but who gave off a weird vibe, came up to me. In a bit of a frustrated voice, he asked me where the grocery store was; I told him. He then thanked me and walked off. He paused, turned around, and asked me where I was staying. I was a bit shocked by this...I mean, did he mean my house, or did he somehow know I was on travel or something. Being a nice guy and knowing that telling him my hotel wouldn't tell him my room #, I told him. He acknowledged this and went on to the grocery store.

Well, after thinking about it on the way home, I finally realized that it must have been Don Pettit, astronaut extraordinaire! I had met him earlier that morning, and he recognized me later on even though I was wearing different clothes. I am a bit shocked that he would recognize me after having seen me for only 10 minutes at most, but he is a pretty amazing guy. You can read about his recent adventure while returning from space here: http://host.planet4589.org/space/jsr/back/news.499 _
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11:06:15 AM, Saturday 21 May 2005

Well, my first week is done. We've managed to get a bunch of things read, and today we managed to hack out a final schedule of activities and general flow of what data will be needed when, what will be generated when, and what will be reviewed by when and by whom. Not too bad for a week's work; now we just have to actually do what we've planned!

I wanted to say that I am working with some of the most amazing individuals that I have ever met. A couple of people are astronauts; others have been with the Agency for 30 years.To call them "intelligent" doesn't do any of them justice. It's pretty amazing.

Another amazing thing is how politically charged every decision becomes when there are billions of dollars behind each decision. I guess what I'm saying is that I'm waaaay out of my league, here. Thank goodness I'm not being asked to make these decisions! _
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02:51:07 PM, Friday 20 May 2005

Well, I�m currently sitting in security trying to get a HQ badge for the duration. Despite the effort from the top for �One NASA� as opposed to a bunch of loosely connected NASA centers, it appears that we are still a bunch of loosely connected NASA centers. Because JPL is technically run by a contractor (Caltech), my JPL badge isn�t good enough to enter HQ--I had to go through a full background check, including fingerprinting all fingers twice, to get a badge to work here for the next ten weeks.

Other folks who come from true NASA centers are a bit better�they can come in without having to get a HQ badge, but only during the weekdays. If they want to work on the weekend, they have to get a special proximity card in advance.

Of course, nobody has any computer access. There are a very few yellow cables intended for guests, and I�ve been sneaking into our main conference room to make these posts and to do any email.

We�re not working weekends yet, but it will happen soon. Some people are coming in this weekend because we have an early �greybeard� review on Tuesday, so the group is trying to get these proxcards for everyone on the team right now. At least the proxcard will get me into the gym here at HQ after hours. _
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03:16:01 PM, Wednesday 18 May 2005

Well, I got up at 3:30am my time, was at work by 5am my time, and worked until 3:30pm my time. Not too bad.

It turns out that I probably cannot get comp time for working extra hours (I'll give it a shot, but it's doubtful,) so I am going to baseline working from 7:30 to 6pm, that's only 10 hours a day with a half hour for lunch. If and as it becomes necessary, I'll work a bit more. _
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06:32:53 PM, Tuesday 17 May 2005

He he...my expected work day is from 6am to 8pm. They are justifying this by saying that we have weekends off until we need to work them...

So far so good, it's been a fun slightly less than 1/2 of a day!

There is some possibility of getting comp time (basically vacation time) at the rate of 1/2 hour of comp time for every hour worked over 40 every week. If they do that for me, then I'll get 150 hours of comp time, or almost 4 weeks of pay, for being part of a really fun project...of course, 14 hours a day is insane! Good thing I'm already crazy, eh? _
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02:17:14 PM, Tuesday 17 May 2005

Well, I'm in DC, and the hotel really is right across the street from HQ. My commute will remind me of walking from Campbell to McDowell...

The room, through what must be a mistake of fate, is wonderful. It's almost as large as my flat at home, and it has more bathrooms. I have a full bath and a half bath in the very spacious living room. I have a private balcony that looks out at the capitol building. My guess is that there wasn't anything else left, so NASA has to pay for a nicer room. My room rate goes down on the second half of the trip and so my room won't be as nice, I'm sure.

Off to work tomorrow, I'm quite excited! We'll see how it goes, but I think it will be a lot of fun! I like short projects like this, I thrive on change. _
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09:06:58 PM, Monday 16 May 2005

I am still kind of shocked about this. I'm not really important enough to be on this committee. They really wanted a lot of greybeards/subject matter experts on this thing. I'm happy that they asked me, and I hope that I'll be helpful, but does 2 years of work in a field qualify someone as a subject matter expert? I don't know that there are a lot of people doing this anywhere else, but still...Maybe they just like my enthusiasm? I'm not quite sure that I get it. _
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11:24:04 AM, Saturday 14 May 2005

Well, it's been a crazy 35 hours.

I leave at 10am on Monday, everything is arranged. I've decided not to take a car while I'm there, it would cost something like $3,500 for the two months and I just can't justify that, the trip is already costing soOOooo much...it's important, though, so I guess that's okay.

I'm staying at the Residence Inn at 333 E. Street SW. I guess that's about 4 blocks from the capitol. Egads and little fishes, as my father used to say.

I don't quite know what I'll be doing for the next 10 weeks or so, but it's going to be interesting. My new boss sent me about 30 emails (no kidding) of "sensitive" material, obviously I can't discuss that here, but it will keep me occupied on the plane, I'm sure.

I just realized that I'm something like 4 steps from the gov't right now: the president suggested and Congress approved Michael Griffin to be NASA Administrator, who hired Doug Stanley to form this committee, who hired Jay Falker to work on technology optimization, who called me. I am a little fish in a big pond, but at least I feel needed. :) _
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09:24:06 PM, Friday 13 May 2005

Okay, this will likely be a long post, but worth the read if you're interested in NASA.

A little over a year ago, the President tasked NASA with a return to human solar system exploration, beginning with the phase-out of the Space Station and Shuttle systems and the creation of a new "Crew Exploration Vehicle." Over the past 14-15 months, much of NASA has worked on defining the characteristics of this vehicle, and the details of how we will return to the Moon and then perhaps continue on to Mars. (Before you comment about how long this is taking, please remember that these things are immensely complicated; after studying about spacecraft for two years, and working in the industry for another two, I still don't really understand how complicated they are. Every time that I think I understand how complicated they are, someone shows me another entire facet of complexity I hadn't considered.)

Now I see this presidential vision of returning to human exploration of the Moon as a kind of a "throw down the gauntlet" move. It both inspired the populace and kind of gave NASA a heads up, a kind of a "if you can't do this then why are you really here" sort of warning. I don't know if that was intended, but that's the feel that I got for it.

Anyway, after about 12 months or so, the administrator, Sean O'Keefe, resigned. A new guy, Michael Griffin, is now at the head of NASA...and he means business. I've been very peripherally involved in this effort. Griffin announced, about a week ago, that he was stopping much of this effort to form a small (about 15 people) team who will review everything that's been done and make reccomendations. This team will have 60 days to complete its work. If anyone from this team calls you and asks you to help out, you're supposed to help out unless you're working on Shuttle's return to flight. Griffin's 60-day study team basically made 2/3 of my work go away because I was working on things related to their study; now we have to wait for the results of the study to do meaningful work...

Except that I've been identified by the team as someone to help them out. I was called by one of the members of the team and asked if I can spend the next couple of months at HQ as his right hand man. Independantly of him, another person on the team identified me as a person to help out another portion of the 60-day study.

Holy cow. _
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01:57:43 PM, Thursday 12 May 2005

So, here's a philosophical question:

I've been quite successful in my schooling and my career so far, but my main goal in life since I was 10 years old was to have a happy family. What happens if I'm not successful in finding someone? It doesn't work out for everyone and I have to admit that I feel like it's not going to work out for me. (I mean, really, Anastasia was allergic to me, that just doesn't happen!) :/

Should I be depressed because my main goal in life can't be accomplished? Should one ever be upset about a goal that requires another human being to choose in a certain way? One cannot control other people's actions, after all, so in some ways it's not my fault.

It seems cold comfort, at best, to say that I've been successful in almost all of my secondary goals. Okay, I haven't bought an Aston Martin yet, but if I wanted that to happen badly enough then I could get it done. :)

So, I guess I'm asking the question of how much do goals and accomplishments in life matter? Should someone really be upset that he or she hasn't fulfilled some needs as long as he or she is enjoying life?

Then again, I feel like many people (myself included) find it much more difficult to enjoy life when things don't work out as hoped for... _
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05:04:47 PM, Tuesday 10 May 2005

Well, it took a couple of days to get around to the drinking, but I succeeded yesterday...there was an excuse, it was "Victory in Europe" day, the 60th anniversary of the winning of WW2 in Europe. A few friends and I went out to a bar that has happy hour until 8pm and we were all pretty happy until around 8pm. :) On a related topic, my head hurts just a tiny little bit. :) _
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01:12:57 PM, Tuesday 10 May 2005

So this is totally unbelievable. I'm completely depressed about it.

I've dated a lot of women since Pamela (whom I still refer to in my head as "the love of my life") broke up with me 5 years ago, but nobody has really 'caught my interest' since her.

I finally found someone who really captured my interest. She had some serious allergies, like going into anaphylactic shock from nuts and coffee and chocolate. I was attracted to her on the first date, but really relaxed and had a great time on the second date. On the third date, we started kissing and having a good time...and she broke out in a rash.

She's allergic to me.

The first girl in five years that I could really have fallen in love with and she's allergic to me.

Somewhere, Loki is laughing. I'm going to go get drunk now. _
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12:14:42 AM, Monday 9 May 2005

Well, that's that for that. The contractor had two things to say:

1) I probably couldn't get an exemption for the widening of the road, and it would probably cost about $5,000 per foot of length of road to widen it, and it's about 100 feet of road to widen. $500,000.

2) there's a new law because of the heavy rains that says that any retaining walls must be 12' or less high. This would require 2 or 3 retaining walls to make a stepped hillside behind the house and not only would this cost a lot of money, but there's probably not enough land behind the building site to put the walls, since they have to be 15' apart. Bottom line: about $500,000 to build the basement and retaining walls.

so, $1,000,000 to construct a house that should be worth $500,000...I can think of better things to do with my time, really I can.... :)

So I'm starting from square one again. Whee! _
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11:32:50 PM, Monday 2 May 2005

I've spoken to the contractor, but only on the phone so far. I'm going to call him again today and try to make an appointment for tomorrow. _
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12:02:53 PM, Sunday 1 May 2005

I just called the city planner, and he had some interesting things to say...

First of all, he saw no problem with the dome aspect. That wasn't an issue. In fact, the geometry of putting the dome on the land wasn't even an issue. He said that there were two issues:

1) The city will have to approve the engineering of the dome itself. I don't see this as a problem, as I'm getting a kit that has been put up in this area before, so the engineering has probably already been approved.

2) The street that I would be going on, Sister Elsie, is a "non-improved" street, which means that I might have to pay for the widening of the street back down the hill. I can also file a petition to get relief from the fully improved street ordinance, but that takes time, has to be done by the property owner, and there is a chance that this might not be approved.

I'm just waiting now for the contractor to come back from his boat race. :) When he does, I'll get the estimate for the basement and retaining wall system, and also ask him about how much it would cost to widen the street for the 40' back to the other street. I can then figure out if I should buy the property or not. He comes back on Thursday. _
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03:03:50 PM, Monday 25 April 2005

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