Second Scramjet Successful

Here's the Link.

Australian scientists have developed an advanced supersonic jet engine that could profoundly revolutionize warfare and jet travel. The Sydney Morning Herald reported Monday that a University of Queensland team headed by Professor Allan Paull launched their HyShot program -- a two-stage Terrier-Orion rocket carrying their innovative supersonic scramjet -- skyward more than 200 miles to a height of more than 180 miles before it crashed as planned into the desert 250 miles down range.

Scramjets use atmospheric oxygen to burn hydrogen fuel. If such engines were fitted to commercial aircraft they could eventually cut the traveling time between Sydney and London to two hours.

Within a decade. Think of the economic impact of that one!

It Must Be Art

... If So Many People Get Hot Under The Collar
Brittney Spears didn't pose nude for sculptor Daniel Edwards. She didn't even know this was going on.
Now that the sculpture has been unveiled, it's a furore amongst the Wowser set.

US artist Daniel Edwards has described the aim of his sculpture in its title Monument to Pro-Life: The Birth of Sean Preston.

"This is a new take on pro-life. Pro-lifers normally promote bloody images of abortion. This is the image of birth," said Edwards, quoted by AP.

Spears did not pose for the sculpture and is yet to comment on the subject.

A press release by the Capla Kesting Fine Art gallery in Brooklyn, which will display the sculpture next month, described the sculpture as showing Spears tugging on the ears of a bearskin rug "with water-retentive hands".

It said the sculpture "is purportedly an idealised depiction of Britney in delivery. Natural aspects of Spears's pregnancy, like lactiferous breasts and protruding naval, complement a posterior view that depicts widened hips for birthing and reveals the crowning of baby Sean's head".

The release said that the sculpture "celebrates the recent birth of Spears's baby boy, Sean, and applauds her decision of placing family before career".

"She was number one with Google last year, with good reason - people are inspired by the beauty of a pregnant woman," Edwards said in the release.

"A superstar at Britney's young age having a child is rare in today's celebrity culture," gallery co-director Lincoln Capla said.

"This dedication honours Britney for the rarity of her choice and bravery of her decision."

Edwards's exhibit also includes anti-abortion materials provided by the Manhattan Right To Life Committee.

The gallery denied the sculpture was developed from a rumoured bootleg Britney Spears birth video.

However AP reports that when some bloggers heard about the exhibit the gallery was inundated with about 3000 emails from around the world in just a week, offering angry opinions from all sides.

"We also got calls from Tokyo, England, France. Some people are upset that Britney is being used for this subject matter," gallery co-owner David Kesting told AP.

"Others who are pro-life thought this was degrading to their movement. And some pro-choice people were upset that this is a pro-life monument."


Edwards told AP the aim of his sculpture was to stir up debate about a difficult topic that "is greater than the issues presented by either pro-life or pro-choice advocates".

When asked whether he was absolutely against abortion, he told AP, "You nailed me. I'm not saying that I am. I wouldn't march with either pro-life or pro-choice advocates. This is not meant to be political."

You sort of wonder about a world that can work up such a steam about a sculpture featuring a nude pregnant woman. It's only art and pretty non-political art at that. It's not like it's protraying a pregnant Jesus. It's hardly blasphemous, it's only Brittney Spears, folks!

I think the work reveals a sure-handed technique from the sculptor which goes with the cool texture of the surface. The coolness in turn represents Brittney Spears as a Heideggerean shining surface of stardom/celebrity in maternity. She is authentic in her maternity itself in this moment that is portrayed.

Clearly, the bear skin rug with the bared teeth represents death and her pregnancy and imminent represents life, so the underlying synthesis is as old as a medieval painting. If anything the work seems like a hagiography of contemporary stardom.

Global Warning Coverage In Time Magazine

It's This Week's Cover Story
The last time Time covered the topic was 5 years ago, which is to say, 1000years in the magazine business. Five years ago, there was no 9/11 yet, and therefore no wars in Afghanistan and Iraq; I even had a regular job and a mortgage, and many, many, many things just didn't look as grim as they do today.

So just for posterity, before the article disappears behind the paid content wall I thought I'd quote large chunks of it:

By JEFFREY KLUGER
No one can say exactly what it looks like when a planet takes ill, but it probably looks a lot like Earth. Never mind what you've heard about global warming as a slow-motion emergency that would take decades to play out. Suddenly and unexpectedly, the crisis is upon us.

It certainly looked that way last week as the atmospheric bomb that was Cyclone Larry--a Category 4 storm with wind bursts that reached 125 m.p.h.--exploded through northeastern Australia. It certainly looked that way last year as curtains of fire and dust turned the skies of Indonesia orange, thanks to drought-fueled blazes sweeping the island nation. It certainly looks that way as sections of ice the size of small states calve from the disintegrating Arctic and Antarctic. And it certainly looks that way as the sodden wreckage of New Orleans continues to molder, while the waters of the Atlantic gather themselves for a new hurricane season just two months away. Disasters have always been with us and surely always will be. But when they hit this hard and come this fast--when the emergency becomes commonplace--something has gone grievously wrong. That something is global warming.

The image of Earth as organism--famously dubbed Gaia by environmentalist James Lovelock-- has probably been overworked, but that's not to say the planet can't behave like a living thing, and these days, it's a living thing fighting a fever. From heat waves to storms to floods to fires to massive glacial melts, the global climate seems to be crashing around us. Scientists have been calling this shot for decades. This is precisely what they have been warning would happen if we continued pumping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, trapping the heat that flows in from the sun and raising global temperatures.

Environmentalists and lawmakers spent years shouting at one another about whether the grim forecasts were true, but in the past five years or so, the serious debate has quietly ended. Global warming, even most skeptics have concluded, is the real deal, and human activity has been causing it. If there was any consolation, it was that the glacial pace of nature would give us decades or even centuries to sort out the problem.

But glaciers, it turns out, can move with surprising speed, and so can nature. What few people reckoned on was that global climate systems are booby-trapped with tipping points and feedback loops, thresholds past which the slow creep of environmental decay gives way to sudden and self-perpetuating collapse. Pump enough CO2 into the sky, and that last part per million of greenhouse gas behaves like the 212th degree Fahrenheit that turns a pot of hot water into a plume of billowing steam. Melt enough Greenland ice, and you reach the point at which you're not simply dripping meltwater into the sea but dumping whole glaciers. By one recent measure, several Greenland ice sheets have doubled their rate of slide, and just last week the journal Science published a study suggesting that by the end of the century, the world could be locked in to an eventual rise in sea levels of as much as 20 ft. Nature, it seems, has finally got a bellyful of us.

"Things are happening a lot faster than anyone predicted," says Bill Chameides, chief scientist for the advocacy group Environmental Defense and a former professor of atmospheric chemistry. "The last 12 months have been alarming." Adds Ruth Curry of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts: "The ripple through the scientific community is palpable."

And it's not just scientists who are taking notice. Even as nature crosses its tipping points, the public seems to have reached its own. For years, popular skepticism about climatological science stood in the way of addressing the problem, but the naysayers--many of whom were on the payroll of energy companies--have become an increasingly marginalized breed. In a new TIME/ ABC News/ Stanford University poll, 85% of respondents agree that global warming probably is happening. Moreover, most respondents say they want some action taken. Of those polled, 87% believe the government should either encourage or require lowering of power-plant emissions, and 85% think something should be done to get cars to use less gasoline. Even Evangelical Christians, once one of the most reliable columns in the conservative base, are demanding action, most notably in February, when 86 Christian leaders formed the Evangelical Climate Initiative, demanding that Congress regulate greenhouse gases.

A collection of new global-warming books is hitting the shelves in response to that awakening interest, followed closely by TV and theatrical documentaries. The most notable of them is An Inconvenient Truth, due out in May, a profile of former Vice President Al Gore and his climate-change work, which is generating a lot of prerelease buzz over an unlikely topic and an equally unlikely star. For all its lack of Hollywood flash, the film compensates by conveying both the hard science of global warming and Gore's particular passion.

Such public stirrings are at last getting the attention of politicians and business leaders, who may not always respond to science but have a keen nose for where votes and profits lie. State and local lawmakers have started taking action to curb emissions, and major corporations are doing the same. Wal-Mart has begun installing wind turbines on its stores to generate electricity and is talking about putting solar reflectors over its parking lots. HSBC, the world's second largest bank, has pledged to neutralize its carbon output by investing in wind farms and other green projects. Even President Bush, hardly a favorite of greens, now acknowledges climate change and boasts of the steps he is taking to fight it. Most of those steps, however, involve research and voluntary emissions controls, not exactly the laws with teeth scientists are calling for.

Is it too late to reverse the changes global warming has wrought? That's still not clear. Reducing our emissions output year to year is hard enough. Getting it low enough so that the atmosphere can heal is a multigenerational commitment. "Ecosystems are usually able to maintain themselves," says Terry Chapin, a biologist and professor of ecology at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks. "But eventually they get pushed to the limit of tolerance."

As a tiny component of our atmosphere, carbon dioxide helped warm Earth to comfort levels we are all used to. But too much of it does an awful lot of damage. The gas represents just a few hundred parts per million (p.p.m.) in the overall air blanket, but they're powerful parts because they allow sunlight to stream in but prevent much of the heat from radiating back out. During the last ice age, the atmosphere's CO2 concentration was just 180 p.p.m., putting Earth into a deep freeze. After the glaciers retreated but before the dawn of the modern era, the total had risen to a comfortable 280 p.p.m. In just the past century and a half, we have pushed the level to 381 p.p.m., and we're feeling the effects. Of the 20 hottest years on record, 19 occurred in the 1980s or later. According to NASA scientists, 2005 was one of the hottest years in more than a century.

It's at the North and South poles that those steambath conditions are felt particularly acutely, with glaciers and ice caps crumbling to slush. Once the thaw begins, a number of mechanisms kick in to keep it going. Greenland is a vivid example. Late last year, glaciologist Eric Rignot of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., and Pannir Kanagaratnam, a research assistant professor at the University of Kansas, analyzed data from Canadian and European satellites and found that Greenland ice is not just melting but doing so more than twice as fast, with 53 cu. mi. draining away into the sea last year alone, compared with 22 cu. mi. in 1996. A cubic mile of water is about five times the amount Los Angeles uses in a year.

Dumping that much water into the ocean is a very dangerous thing. Icebergs don't raise sea levels when they melt because they're floating, which means they have displaced all the water they're ever going to. But ice on land, like Greenland's, is a different matter. Pour that into oceans that are already rising (because warm water expands), and you deluge shorelines. By some estimates, the entire Greenland ice sheet would be enough to raise global sea levels 23 ft., swallowing up large parts of coastal Florida and most of Bangladesh. The Antarctic holds enough ice to raise sea levels more than 215 ft.

FEEDBACK LOOPS

One of the reasons the loss of the planet's ice cover is accelerating is that as the poles' bright white surface shrinks, it changes the relationship of Earth and the sun. Polar ice is so reflective that 90% of the sunlight that strikes it simply bounces back into space, taking much of its energy with it. Ocean water does just the opposite, absorbing 90% of the energy it receives. The more energy it retains, the warmer it gets, with the result that each mile of ice that melts vanishes faster than the mile that preceded it.

That is what scientists call a feedback loop, and it's a nasty one, since once you uncap the Arctic Ocean, you unleash another beast: the comparatively warm layer of water about 600 ft. deep that circulates in and out of the Atlantic. "Remove the ice," says Woods Hole's Curry, "and the water starts talking to the atmosphere, releasing its heat. This is not a good thing."

A similar feedback loop is melting permafrost, usually defined as land that has been continuously frozen for two years or more. There's a lot of earthly real estate that qualifies, and much of it has been frozen much longer than two years--since the end of the last ice age, or at least 8,000 years ago. Sealed inside that cryonic time capsule are layers of partially decayed organic matter, rich in carbon. In high-altitude regions of Alaska, Canada and Siberia, the soil is warming and decomposing, releasing gases that will turn into methane and CO2. That, in turn, could lead to more warming and permafrost thaw, says research scientist David Lawrence of the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder, Colo. And how much carbon is socked away in Arctic soils? Lawrence puts the figure at 200 gigatons to 800 gigatons. The total human carbon output is only 7 gigatons a year.

One result of all that is warmer oceans, and a result of warmer oceans can be, paradoxically, colder continents within a hotter globe. Ocean currents running between warm and cold regions serve as natural thermoregulators, distributing heat from the equator toward the poles. The Gulf Stream, carrying warmth up from the tropics, is what keeps Europe's climate relatively mild. Whenever Europe is cut off from the Gulf Stream, temperatures plummet. At the end of the last ice age, the warm current was temporarily blocked, and temperatures in Europe fell as much as 10°F, locking the continent in glaciers.

What usually keeps the Gulf Stream running is that warm water is lighter than cold water, so it floats on the surface. As it reaches Europe and releases its heat, the current grows denser and sinks, flowing back to the south and crossing under the northbound Gulf Stream until it reaches the tropics and starts to warm again. The cycle works splendidly, provided the water remains salty enough. But if it becomes diluted by freshwater, the salt concentration drops, and the water gets lighter, idling on top and stalling the current. Last December, researchers associated with Britain's National Oceanography Center reported that one component of the system that drives the Gulf Stream has slowed about 30% since 1957. It's the increased release of Arctic and Greenland meltwater that appears to be causing the problem, introducing a gush of freshwater that's overwhelming the natural cycle. In a global-warming world, it's unlikely that any amount of cooling that resulted from this would be sufficient to support glaciers, but it could make things awfully uncomfortable.

"The big worry is that the whole climate of Europe will change," says Adrian Luckman, senior lecturer in geography at the University of Wales, Swansea. "We in the U.K. are on the same latitude as Alaska. The reason we can live here is the Gulf Stream."

As fast as global warming is transforming the oceans and the ice caps, it's having an even more immediate effect on land. People, animals and plants living in dry, mountainous regions like the western U.S. make it through summer thanks to snowpack that collects on peaks all winter and slowly melts off in warm months. Lately the early arrival of spring and the unusually blistering summers have caused the snowpack to melt too early, so that by the time it's needed, it's largely gone. Climatologist Philip Mote of the University of Washington has compared decades of snowpack levels in Washington, Oregon and California and found that they are a fraction of what they were in the 1940s, and some snowpacks have vanished entirely.

Global warming is tipping other regions of the world into drought in different ways. Higher temperatures bake moisture out of soil faster, causing dry regions that live at the margins to cross the line into full-blown crisis. Meanwhile, El Niño events--the warm pooling of Pacific waters that periodically drives worldwide climate patterns and has been occurring more frequently in global-warming years--further inhibit precipitation in dry areas of Africa and East Asia. According to a recent study by NCAR, the percentage of Earth's surface suffering drought has more than doubled since the 1970s.

FLORA AND FAUNA

Hot, dry land can be murder on flora and fauna, and both are taking a bad hit. Wildfires in such regions as Indonesia, the western U.S. and even inland Alaska have been increasing as timberlands and forest floors grow more parched. The blazes create a feedback loop of their own, pouring more carbon into the atmosphere and reducing the number of trees, which inhale CO2 and release oxygen.

Those forests that don't succumb to fire die in other, slower ways. Connie Millar, a paleoecologist for the U.S. Forest Service, studies the history of vegetation in the Sierra Nevada. Over the past 100 years, she has found, the forests have shifted their tree lines as much as 100 ft. upslope, trying to escape the heat and drought of the lowlands. Such slow-motion evacuation may seem like a sensible strategy, but when you're on a mountain, you can go only so far before you run out of room. "Sometimes we say the trees are going to heaven because they're walking off the mountaintops," Millar says.

Across North America, warming-related changes are mowing down other flora too. Manzanita bushes in the West are dying back; some prickly pear cacti have lost their signature green and are instead a sickly pink; pine beetles in western Canada and the U.S. are chewing their way through tens of millions of acres of forest, thanks to warmer winters. The beetles may even breach the once insurmountable Rocky Mountain divide, opening up a path into the rich timbering lands of the American Southeast.

With habitats crashing, animals that live there are succumbing too. Environmental groups can tick off scores of species that have been determined to be at risk as a result of global warming. Last year, researchers in Costa Rica announced that two-thirds of 110 species of colorful harlequin frogs have vanished in the past 30 years, with the severity of each season's die-off following in lockstep with the severity of that year's warming.

In Alaska, salmon populations are at risk as melting permafrost pours mud into rivers, burying the gravel the fish need for spawning. Small animals such as bushy-tailed wood rats, alpine chipmunks and piñon mice are being chased upslope by rising temperatures, following the path of the fleeing trees. And with sea ice vanishing, polar bears--prodigious swimmers but not inexhaustible ones--are starting to turn up drowned. "There will be no polar ice by 2060," says Larry Schweiger, president of the National Wildlife Federation. "Somewhere along that path, the polar bear drops out."

WHAT ABOUT US?

It is fitting, perhaps, that as the species causing all the problems, we're suffering the destruction of our habitat too, and we have experienced that loss in terrible ways. Ocean waters have warmed by a full degree Fahrenheit since 1970, and warmer water is like rocket fuel for typhoons and hurricanes. Two studies last year found that in the past 35 years the number of Category 4 and 5 hurricanes worldwide has doubled while the wind speed and duration of all hurricanes has jumped 50%. Since atmospheric heat is not choosy about the water it warms, tropical storms could start turning up in some decidedly nontropical places. "There's a school of thought that sea surface temperatures are warming up toward Canada," says Greg Holland, senior scientist for NCAR in Boulder. "If so, you're likely to get tropical cyclones there, but we honestly don't know."

WHAT WE CAN DO

So much for environmental collapse happening in so many places at once has at last awakened much of the world, particularly the 141 nations that have ratified the Kyoto treaty to reduce emissions--an imperfect accord, to be sure, but an accord all the same. The U.S., however, which is home to less than 5% of Earth's population but produces 25% of CO2 emissions, remains intransigent. Many environmentalists declared the Bush Administration hopeless from the start, and while that may have been premature, it's undeniable that the White House's environmental record--from the abandonment of Kyoto to the President's broken campaign pledge to control carbon output to the relaxation of emission standards--has been dismal. George W. Bush's recent rhetorical nods to America's oil addiction and his praise of such alternative fuel sources as switchgrass have yet to be followed by real initiatives.

The anger surrounding all that exploded recently when NASA researcher Jim Hansen, director of the Goddard Institute for Space Studies and a longtime leader in climate-change research, complained that he had been harassed by White House appointees as he tried to sound the global-warming alarm. "The way democracy is supposed to work, the presumption is that the public is well informed," he told TIME. "They're trying to deny the science." Up against such resistance, many environmental groups have resolved simply to wait out this Administration and hope for something better in 2009.

The Republican-dominated Congress has not been much more encouraging. Senators John McCain and Joe Lieberman have twice been unable to get through the Senate even mild measures to limit carbon. Senators Pete Domenici and Jeff Bingaman, both of New Mexico and both ranking members of the chamber's Energy Committee, have made global warming a high-profile matter. A white paper issued in February will be the subject of an investigatory Senate conference next week. A House delegation recently traveled to Antarctica, Australia and New Zealand to visit researchers studying climate change. "Of the 10 of us, only three were believers," says Representative Sherwood Boehlert of New York. "Every one of the others said this opened their eyes."

Boehlert himself has long fought the environmental fight, but if the best that can be said for most lawmakers is that they are finally recognizing the global-warming problem, there's reason to wonder whether they will have the courage to reverse it. Increasingly, state and local governments are filling the void. The mayors of more than 200 cities have signed the U.S. Mayors Climate Protection Agreement, pledging, among other things, that they will meet the Kyoto goal of reducing greenhouse-gas emissions in their cities to 1990 levels by 2012. Nine eastern states have established the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative for the purpose of developing a cap-and-trade program that would set ceilings on industrial emissions and allow companies that overperform to sell pollution credits to those that underperform-- the same smart, incentive-based strategy that got sulfur dioxide under control and reduced acid rain. And California passed the nation's toughest automobile- emissions law last summer.

"There are a whole series of things that demonstrate that people want to act and want their government to act," says Fred Krupp, president of Environmental Defense. Krupp and others believe that we should probably accept that it's too late to prevent CO2 concentrations from climbing to 450 p.p.m. (or 70 p.p.m. higher than where they are now). From there, however, we should be able to stabilize them and start to dial them back down.

That goal should be attainable. Curbing global warming may be an order of magnitude harder than, say, eradicating smallpox or putting a man on the moon. But is it moral not to try? We did not so much march toward the environmental precipice as drunkenly reel there, snapping at the scientific scolds who told us we had a problem.

The scolds, however, knew what they were talking about. In a solar system crowded with sister worlds that either emerged stillborn like Mercury and Venus or died in infancy like Mars, we're finally coming to appreciate the knife-blade margins within which life can thrive. For more than a century we've been monkeying with those margins. It's long past time we set them right.

Yep, that's what they're saying. TIME Magazine is part of the establishment in the USA. If it's putting a story like this on its cover and the Republican Congress still refuse to put through measured to limit carbon emissions, you have to shake your head and say Washington DC is sorely out of touch with the world.

You wish the issue wasn't ideologised by the political parties. If they weren't so keen to label issues as Left or Right (as unmitigateed Super-Morons like the Fatman love to do), then may be we might have been able to sensibly deal with the issue a long time ago. After all, the carbon molecules emitted don't vote and don't have political views about us.

It also has to be said that the political process which has been held hostage by industry, has made it nigh impossible to deal with the problem at all. Those in the pay-pockets of Heavy Industry have tried to bury this issue (as if that was going to work) or ignore it until future generations had to deal with it. Unfortunately, the future is now. No matter the expense, it's not an insurmountable problem. You'd think the idiots in elected office would do *something* about it.

Sick of Spam?

World's First Code To Crack Down On Spam
The Australian government is trying to set down new laws to filter out spam.

Dealing with unsolicited email or spam costs business and home internet users millions of dollars each year in wasted time and upgrading security systems.

But under the new code, ISPs will have to offer spam filtering options to subscribers and provide a system of handling complaints.

They will also have to impose reasonable limits on the rate at which subscribers can send email.

ACMA anti-spam team manager Bruce Matthews said the watchdog could seek penalties in the Federal Court of up to $10 million for a breach of an industry code.

But Mr Matthews said ACMA wanted to work co-operatively with the industry to eliminate spam.
"Normally ACMA would liaise with the company concerned about issues of non-compliance and would normally warn them before issuing a direction to comply," he told AAP.

Individual spammers also face penalties of up to $1 million under the Spam Act, which came into force two years ago.

The code will come into effect on July 16, after which ACMA plans to conduct compliance checks of the country's 700 ISPs.

"We will be taking action to ensure there is compliance," Mr Matthews said.

The rate of spam originating in Australia had fallen in the past 12 months from 2 per cent to 1 per cent.

For once somebody is doing something legislative about the problem of spam.

Scramjet Tests At Woomera

I always complain we don't have a proper space programme in Australia, but there's the scramjet research going on, which occasionaly surfaces in the headlines.

A supersonic jet engine known as a scramjet, which could dramatically reduce the time of air travel around the world, has been tested in South Australia's far north.

Seconds after the jet set off, there was a supersonic boom across the Woomera test range.

It travelled more than 300 kilometres into the air before crashing ten minutes later, 400 kilometres down the range.

The University of Queensland is heading an international team testing the scramjet technology, which travels up to 8,000 kilometres an hour - almost eight times the speed of sound.

Team leader Allan Paul says the flight went well but it will take several months to analyse the data they have collected.

He says the team is happy with the result so far.

"I haven't seen them on such a high for a long time," he said.

"It's been a hard couple of weeks, in fact it's been hard since Christmas, and the team has really responded well."

He says the launch went according to plan but there were a few tense moments.

"You're looking at it as it goes up, and you're worried if it's going to make it," he said.

"It's probably a very unnerving feeling actually."

Dr Paul says they should have some preliminary results by tomorrow.

That's kind of cool that the scramjet project is still going on.
What's really interesting is that JAXA have their own scramjet engine ready to be tested in Australia:

The test in Australia was the first of three flights planned for this year by the international Hyshot consortium.

Another Hyshot engine designed by the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency (Jaxa) will be next, followed in June by an engine capable of reaching Mach 10 designed by the Australian Defence Science and Technology Organisation (DSTO).

The success of the weekend's test spurred researchers from the University of Queensland to run a second scramjet test in South Australia this week.

Scramjets were first tested in 2001, but the trial failed as the rocket carrying the engine flew off course.

Hmm. That'ss interesting. I did see that Woomera was one of the places where JAXA did their experiments.

Fantasy Season Starts Soon

That's right. I'm returning as the Commissioner of 'The Jack Kerouac Memorial League', managing my team ''Combat Wombats'. Draft night went well and my squad consists of my trusty Captain DJ and a cast of the usual miscast types:

Catcher - Kenji Johjima
1B - Nick Johnson
2B - Chase Utley
3B - David Wright
SS - Derek Jeter
LF - Hideki Matsui
CF - Brian Giles
RF - Chad Tracy
Utility - Ryan Freel
Bench - Lyle Overbay & Placido Polanco
I'm worried about Johjima who is going to play in Safeco; it's not going to help his numbers at all.

SP - Johan Santana, Felix Hernandez, Jon Lieber, Esteban Loaiza, Brett Myers
RP - Mariano Rivera, Huston Street, Trevor Hoffman, Kyle Farnsworth, Scott Eyre, Rudy Saenez
...in a league that counts Saves, and Holds.

I feel good. I sort of need a big bat somewhere, or hope Matsui hits like 2004.

On top of that PJ of 'Remote Control Society' has signed me up to his Aussie Rules fantasy league. It's a league with a salary cap so you end up drafting scrubs but I'm looking forwards to this squad:

Backs: Luke Hodge, Chad Cornes, Dane Swan, Matt Egan, 4 scrubs
Centres: Kane Cornes, Ben Cousins, Nick Dal Santo, Chad Fletcher.
Rucks: Peter Everitt, Dean Cox, Jeff White, 1 scrub.
Forward: Warren tredrea, Barry Hall, Fraser Gehrig (I'm a Yankee fan, I can't pass up some goal-kicking guy called Gehrig!), Mark Williams, 2 scrubs and a future star called Mitchell Clark.

I know next to nothing baout these guys except Luke Hodge is a kind of A-Rod of AFL, if you get my drift. Oddly enough I think I'm in it with a chance.

From The Phone Line

Hecklers Will be Punished
Pleiades called me to let me know of this one.
It appears Richard Neville set up a satire webpage of John Howard PM of Australia, which quickly turned into this fiasco. Neville has been a sort of professional heckler of sorts so maybe this is a sign thaat he's still in the big leagues o Australian cultural discourse. he should take it as a compliment.

THE MISSING LINKS

Owing to numerous complaints of “dead links” in our .pdf copy of John Howard’s disappeared speech, Reflections on the Situation in Iraq, these links have been re-activated below. Also included are new links which support the PM’s re-appraisal of the invasion’s aftermath. A link to the text version of the speech, with some background on its removal, is available.
STORM IN TEACUP

The domain name, johnhowardpm.org, is hosted by Melbourne IT. In less than 36 hours of its launch, following 10,500 visits to the site, the plug was pulled. By who? On what grounds? It took three days for Melb IT to make contact with me and help lift the veils of confusion. After receiving a phone call from Greg Williams of the People, Resources & Communications Division at the Department of the Prime Minister & Cabinet, Melb IT put the domain name on HOLD, where it remains. This domain cannot be transferred to another, more resilient host, for 60 days. In addition to the complaint from John Howard’s office, Melbourne IT said they had received calls from THREE Federal Police, and provided the name of an agent from the Australian High Tech Crime Centre. As far as I know, my passport has not met the same fate as my
domain name.
So, what is the crime?

The nasty tech term is “phishing”, pronounced “fishing”. A comment on whether this applies to jonhnhowardpm.org comes from one of hundreds of emailers: “For Melbourne IT to consider this a phishing site is ludicrous - phishing has to involve you deliberately trying to con people into giving up some sort of valuable personal information, not just stealing Johnny's traffic from Google. Phishing goes to identity theft, credit card fraud etc. and has nothing to do with satire - it is necessarily criminal in nature! Emulation is not in and of itself enough to constitute phishing.

There is a process that has to be followed if their is any contention over the intellectual property inherent in a domain name. You're entitled to be notified and to argue your case. Melbourne IT is bound to follow this process, and I suggest that you complain to ICANN. I think it's also pretty well established that you can't claim copyright in a person's name.
Furthermore if there's any debate over the actual content of the site being hosted and the intellectual property contained therein, that's a civil matter - a copyright matter - and has to be taken up through the courts. In other words the Attorney General would have had to send you a nice letter asking you to "cease and desist" because you had infringed a copyright vested in the Commonwealth”. Thanks for that.
I freely admit that johnhoawrdpm.org looked similar to the previously unknown site that hosts the speeches of the PM, and that this similarity was intentional. My purpose was to make the noble sentiments emanating from the mind of a troubled John Howard seem convincing, if only for a few hours. Without this visual reinforcement, the notion that our PM was being honestly self reflective about the human costs of invading to Iraq , and that he "was looking into his heart", even expressing doubts, etc, would have been dismissed.
An enormous number of people believed the mock speech to be true, - and were thrilled, they report - and many more wanted to believe it. On a second reading, however, or with a bit of playing around, it is obvious that johnhowardpm.org operated in a satirical zone. Would the real John Howard have linked to anti war sites? Or admitted that this claims about “improved infrastructure” were bogus? Or criticised the US treatment of prisoners, the killing of journalists, the bombing of hospitals?
Yes, johnhowardpm is similar to the PM’s site, just as The Chaser's ABC TV series CNNN, captured the tone and design of the real network. Would the site have been left standing if it was less like John’s Howard’s lonely, grey, un-noticed original? We’ll never know. Any first time visitor to the US parody site, http://www.whitehouse.org/ , would be alarmingly misled, although http://www.whitehouse.gov had yet to send in the Feds. You be the judge.

So much for John Howard's promise that comedians won't get targeted by anti-sedition laws.
I promised to stay out of politics this year, but you know, the bastards keep pushing. As the folks said in the '60s, "What a drag".

Taking A Bite Out Of Apple Profits

Conincidences Abound
Last night I was encoding my Beatles CDs onto my iPod. Yes, that's right I thought I really ought to have the entire Beatles song catalogue on my iPod because I do have it and rarely get around to listening to them anymore. May as well have them on standby when I'm searching for music on the road.

Today, I find this article.

IT IS the ultimate battle of the generations over an image of a half-eaten piece of fruit.

In one corner Sir Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr, the ultimate stars of vinyl who defined music in the 1960s. In the other, the creators of a small white box that has revolutionised the way we buy and listen to music.

This week the Apple Corps goes to the High Court seeking multimillion-pound damages against Apple Computer, the creators of the iPod, over their hugely successful iTunes Music Store.

Apple Corps, owned by the former Beatles and their heirs, still owns the licensing rights to Beatles’ products. It is claiming that the introduction of iTunes broke a $26 million settlement under which Apple Computer agreed to steer clear of the music business, for which the Beatles’ company retains the famous trademark. It is the latest clash in one of Britain’s longest-running corporate legal battles.

Any damages for this latest clash could amount to tens of millions of pounds because it concerns Apple Computer’s hugely successful iTunes Music Store and iPod digital music players.

The court will be treated to a demonstation of an iPod, but it is unlikely to play a Beatles song, as they have not been licensed for download and it would therefore be illegal.

The Beatles first used a logo of a Granny Smith in 1968 when they founded the Apple Corps to distribute their records and those of other artists they signed to the Apple record label. The records had a ripe apple on one side and a neatly sliced half on the reverse.

The Apple Records subsidiary is still active as the licensing agent for Beatles products.

Steve Jobs, chief executive of Apple Computer, founded his company in 1976 with a logo of a rainbow-coloured apple with a bite taken out of it. Apple Corps sued him five years later, accepting an $80,000 settlement and a promise that the computer company would stay out of the music business.

The companies clashed again in 1989 after Apple Computer introduced a music-making program. The computer company settled in 1991, for $26 million. Apple Corps was awarded rights to the name on “creative works whose principal content is music” while Apple Computer was allowed “goods and services . . . used to reproduce, run, play or otherwise deliver such content”.

Critically, however, the agreement prevented Apple Computer from distributing content on physical media. This was designed to cover CDs and tapes, but it is unclear whether it included later inventions such as digital music files or devices used to play them.

Apple Computer will argue that its music service, which has sold more than a billion songs since 2002, is merely data transmission.

The case is scheduled to begin on Wednesday at the High Court before Mr Justice Mann, a self-professed fan of music and computers. He is no stranger to the iPod, having inquired of both sides some time ago if he should disqualify himself from hearing the case because he owned one.

The owners of Apple Corps — Sir Paul, Ringo Starr, Yoko Ono and Olivia Harrison — will not attend the hearing, but witnesses will include Neil Aspinall, the company’s managing director and the former Beatles road manager; and Eddy Cue, head of internet services at Apple Computer.

Now Neil Aspinall, there's a name I haven't seen in a long time. I think I last saw him on the credits for 'A Hard Days Night' when I watched the DVD about a year ago.

Hard To Do

...Rockets Of Any Size
After having seen the JAXA facilities and spoken to the folks who do rockets, I can appreciate how diffciult it actually can be to launch rockets. So when I noticed this, I thought it was worth posting.

March 25, 2006— The low-cost, built-from-scratch Falcon 1 rocket faltered a minute after liftoff on Friday, dashing the hopes of Internet entrepreneur Elon Musk that after four years and roughly $100 million, his creation would be spared the fate that awaits most debut rocket flights.

"We had a successful liftoff and Falcon made it well clear of the launch pad, but unfortunately the vehicle was lost later in the first-stage burn," Musk, the founder of California-based Space Exploration Technologies, wrote in a blog shortly after the 5:30 p.m. ET liftoff from a remote launch site in the Kwajalein Atoll in the Pacific Ocean's Marshall Islands.

The cause of the failure was not known. Claimed in the accident was a $750,000 science satellite built by U.S. Air Force Academy cadets that was to monitor how space plasma disrupts communications and navigation satellite signals.

Musk, who made his fortune designing and selling the electronic services firms PayPal and Zip2, had said many times prior to the launch that it would take more than one failure to derail his plans to build and fly a family of low-cost, mostly reusable rockets.

At least the man is willing to try.
The Falcon rocket is powered by Liquid Oxygen and Kerosene. It is multi-staged and this version was to have two stages. If you read the article, they discuss a nine stage model.
Looking at the photo above, the control facilities seem awfully close to the blast off area...

At The Top Of Their Game

It's been a long time coming for the Japanese baseball team, but they've finally reached the top of the world by winning the World Baseball Classic.

They started sending professionals to the Intercontinental cup in 1999 and still couldn't win.
In the Sydney 2000 Olympics, half the squad consisted of professional players.
It was perhaps the first time Team Japan got serious; and yet Ichiro would not participate then because he felt the Olympics were for amateurs. Daisuke Matsuzaka on the other hand, came out to Sydney and pitched his heart out he was possibly the most important pitcher in the entire meet. And the Cubans beat Japan narrowly.

In 2004, Japan probabaly played the best baseball at Athens behind Daisuke Matsuzaka, they even beat Cuba; but they got bushwacked by the Australians twice which meant they tearfully played off for a Bronze. It was sad. You should go back through the July 2004 archives of the Spacefreaks blog to see what that was like for Daisuke Matsuzaka and company. The lesson Team Japan took away from the Bronze medal was that it's not how you play in the pools but how you get through the semifinal and the final.

This time with the World Baseball Classic, Team Japan finallly enlisted Ichiro, because they were going to go up against the Major Leaguers. Hideki Matsui declined because he has been in the hunt for a World Series win with the Yankees for 3 years and is yet to accomplish that mission (more power to him). Kenji Johjima cited his rcent signing across the Pacific to the Seattle Mariners, and so he too declined. And thus began Sadaharu Oh's haphazard journey to the WBC.

When the dust settled, they were playing Cuba in the finals and in some ways, that is probably more fitting in the arena of International Baseball - Because if the nations that have seriously contested for the crown in the International Baseball were listed, the top 3 nations would be Cuba, Japan, and Korea.

Without dumping on the Koreans who also played an amazing series of games (without a single error, it might be said and probably deserved to be there just as much), this was a final that was truly befitting the title of 'World Baseball Classic'; it had to be Cuba, and it had to be Japan who have been chasing Cuba since 1992.

Well, they finally got their dues. So congratulations to Japan, but in particular, congratulations to Daisuke Matsuzaka, MVP of the Inaugural WBC, who finally reached the top of the world.



My mother is so proud of you... Now go and pitch for the Yankees, damnit! :)

UPDATE:
Here's what Jason Stark had to write about the final. It's quite nice:

SAN DIEGO -- Unbeknownst to most of North America, they've been playing baseball in Japan since the 19th century. Thankfully for North America, they've given us Nomo-mania and Ichiro and Hideki Matsui.

But in the long and glorious history of Japanese baseball, there has never been an evening quite like this one.

In a ballpark nearly 5,500 miles from home, men named Ichiro Suzuki, Daisuke Matsuzaka and the great Sadaharu Oh stood along the third-base line at Petco Park on Monday night, showered in confetti, as Bud Selig and Don Fehr hung gold medals round their necks.
All around them, flags waved, whistles filled the night and flash bulbs popped.

The World Baseball Classic was over. And the last team standing wasn't the United States or Venezuela or the Dominican Republic.

It was, instead, this team from Japan -- another one of those nations that has learned to love baseball more than we Americans do.

Off in the distance, the scoreboard spread the news: Japan 10, Cuba 6, in the WBC title game. And that term, "world champions," finally had a whole new meaning.

We know there are people out there -- lots of them -- who will say that this event proved nothing about who the best team in the world really is.

But "looking at today's results," smiled Japan's center fielder, Kosuke Fukudome, "I'd say it was Japan."

As it turned out, Japan lost more games in this tournament (three) than Korea (one) or the Dominican (two) -- but somehow, neither of those teams even made it to the finals.

The Japanese did, though. Somehow or other.

They got this far even though they actually had a losing record in Round Two (1-2).

And so it goes. There's also a Jim Caple article on Daisuke Matsuzaka.
This bit made me laugh:

Matsuzaka has been famous in Japan ever since an almost inconceivable performance in the country's important Koshein high school baseball tournament, which is the equivalent of our NCAA basketball tournament. Matsuzaka threw a 250-pitch, 17-inning complete game in the semifinal and then pitched a no-hitter in the final. He threw close to 400 pitches in two days.

And here's the really amazing part: Dusty Baker wasn't his manager.

Heh. Funny man.

What's Okinawa Like?

Driving In Okinawa
The bits of Okinawa I saw the most were the northern bits of the main island. There's the 'National Road 58' that runs length-wise and from Naha International Airrport, you can drive straight up that road through one of the most congested streets in Naha up to the northern area of the island.

The Aquarium is located about 2/3rds of the Island up so you drive north along the '58' and then you turn left at the town of Nago, drive through the town of Motobu, and you arrive at the coast where there's a national park and a bunch of 'resort' hotels. The funny thing about the '58' is that when you leave Naha, it says you have 50km to get to the National Park, but the speed limit is 50kph. So you think, "we'll get there in an hour..."
At about 30km out, the speed limit becomes 30kph. "and you think, "Darn, it's still 1 hour away..."
At about 20kms out, the speed limit drops to 20kph. "Hang on," you think. "That means the destination is about an hour away still..."
At 15kms out the speed limit actually dropped to 15kph.
This was getting to be a bit too much like Zeno's paradox; were we ever going to get to this damned place? In total it took 3 hours to get to our destination hotel.

Resort Hotels In Okinawa
They have many a resort hotel on the coastline. Some are big, some are small, but they all have magnificent views of the sea. The first hotel we stayed in had nice rooms, but no internet access whatsoever. The second hotel we stayed at had magnificent rooms, but no access to international calls and no internet access. They wouldn't even let a dial-up modem go through. That's how I found myself in an IT Blackhole for 2 weeks.

The business hotel in Naha rocked. Free wi-fi access, coming down the pipe at a rate faster than anything in Australia! I loved the 3 nights in Naha.

The People of Okinawa
It has to be said though, the people in Okinawa are really friendly. They are welcoming and want you to have a good time whether your visit may be for business or play. And that made working a lot easier. They are laid back, a bit like our own Aussies, and they are very generous with their time. It's a fantastic place to visit to unwind.

Funniest Thing I Saw In Okinawa


They have Asps in Okinawa. So they have this show here: The Asp versus Mongoose show, nightly at this restaurant. I don't know why it's so amusing but there it is in all its heavenly glory. They're a little hard-up for entertainment at the north end of the Island.

Americans
Okinawa is of course where one of the bloodiest campaignss were carried out between the Allies andd the Japanese; caught in the middle were the actual denizens of the island of whom 150,000 perished. The island was bombed to kingdom come as the Japanese military tried a scorched earth strategy, trying to inflict as much casuaalties on the Allies. Since the end of WWII, there have been US bases on the island and this has been the source of much trouble; Okinawa itself made it back to being part of Japan in 1972.

I asked the locals what he thought about it. he said, "I was still in primary school. We all thought it was good. Like, from now on it was actually going to snow in our winters. I don't know what we were thinking."

Anyway, it turns out some people have done very well out of the American occupation. particularly farmers and land owners who collect a stipend from the US government for the 'noise pollution' caused by the Air Bases. You don't see those people complaining about the bases. While international geopolitics dictates that the USA would like to keep a base in Okinawa. It's also true that it costs them a bundle. There are now moves to rationalise the troops and therefore the US presence on Okinawa by moving bases and this is causing even more political brouhahahas.
I will say this. it's really disconcerting to see a US marine in combat fatigues driving through civillian Naha.

Back From JAXA Part 2

Rocket Science Ain't Rocket Science
The old adage "it's not exactly rocket science" implies that Rocket Science is difficult. Well, it's Ballistics so it's not like the science of it is much harder than High School Physics. Even the engineering is something quite comprehensible. So why is rocketry so hard? It turns out that launching rockets is difficult because so many things have to be coordinatedd perfectly; so System Engineering as it is known is the bit in rocketry that is truly difficult.

Here's an example. The main engines of the HII-A rocket consists of Liquid Oxygen and Liquid Hydrogen engines. The explosive power is derived from controlled combustion of the LOX and Liquid H2, and this much is high school chemistry. The actual appartus of making and storing LOX and Liquid Hydrogen are also old chemical engineering problems. The fuels must be refrigerated to -150degrees celsius to keep them liquid.

The thing is, with rockets, the super-cooled liquid fuel has to be delivered to the fuel tank of the rocket on the launch pad without leaks and breakages. Organising it so that the rocket arrives for the launch window in time with the fuel in place to be poured in to the rocket's fuel tank takes a chunk of system enginnering, and in turn this is why you build a space center.

Tanegashima Space Center
The most remarkable aspect of the Tanegashima Space Center is how far from the centre of civilization it feels. If not for the constant references to the space center and its rockets, the township of Minamitane is one of the furthest outposts from Tokyo. The place is historic in its own way, forever linked ballistics as the place where the Portuguese brought the musket to Japan; and it is here ballistics gets a second breath in the story of Tanegashima.

Tanegashima Space Center houses the facilities where they do the final assembly of the rocket; do the launch; but also test engines and assemble satellites. It's a big sprawling complex built on one of the most beautiful shorelines.

Surprisingly, the staff at Tanegashima are young. If you're used to meeting middle-aged men running institutions in Japan, you will get a rude shock here. There are many young men and women involved in important tasks; they're not window dressing. They have their degrees in rocket engineering and they are filled with hopes and ambition for the space program. One gets a sense of dynamism and activity quite unlike the stodgy bureaucratic feeling one gets from dealing with the main JAXA office. These operatives mean business. At one point I felt I missed my calling - I should've done rocket engineering.

What Is JAXA Like?
This is strictly my experience and therefore my own observation:
JAXA as an organisation is still very young.
You talk to the PR department and mostly they are enthisastic. You talk to the people on the ground actually running the rocket systems and they are incredibly enthusaistic. Even the big boss of JAXA has a long term vision as to where Japan's space program should be going.

Alas the thing that lets JAXA down is the level of management that is still a holdover from NASDA. It's really hard to get them to understand how important Public Relations can be for a space program. So even with the help of the PR department, you end up hitting strange, arbitrary walls that are set up by people who would rather keep things simple in their own minds by saying 'no'. Unfortunately, that's not good enough when Discovery Channel is spending big bucks to give you a 50minute commercial of your wares.

Some departments are very happy to show you what they are worrking on> Others say irrational things like "we can show it to you but you can't shoot it."
Well, what's the good of that? It's that kind of weird response that makes you think, "how seriously do they take the media?"

Indeed , it's symptomatic of large organisations in Japan that they do really bad PR, so JAXA are not an exception when their PR department can't convince their department heads to show off their wares. While I sympathise with the actual PR people I encountered the long term outlook on it is not very encouraging. If anything, it seemed they were drawing the wrong lessons and conclusions.

Other than that, JAXA is a young, dynamic organisation doing amazing things.

World's Largest Acrylic Panel

What's This?
The reason I went to Okinawa in February is right here in the tank you see above. Churaumi Aquarium in Okinawa houses the largest acrylic panel window for an aquarium. It will be surpassed shortly by an aquarium in Dubai, but for now it is the largest panel in the world.

It is 7.5m high and 22.5 m long and 60cm thick. The actual panel is made up of 7 subpanels that are glued together, and each subpanel is made up of layers of acrylic panels that are glued together with an invisible glue. The whole thing has to withstand the pressure of a water tank containing 7,500tons of water, which is approximately the mass of a submarine. The trick is all in the glue created by Nippura, which makes these dirty big acrylic panels aaround the world.

The whale sharks contained within are 9m long. When they swim by, they have the languid motion of giant spaceships in George Lucas movies. The Aquarium itself is devised so that as you walk through its corridors, you go deeper and deeper into the sea. In turn the creatures contained represent the creatures that live around Okinawa. The four major environments of the shallow 'Inoo' reefs; the waters just outside the coral reefs; the Black Sea Ocean Current; and the Deep Sea Trench environments are all on display. You see some remarkable creatures, large and small. There's even a pair of gigantic gropers from Australian waters, given to the aquarium as a gift. The there's a shark room where a 27 year old bullshark swims around with other dangerous fish in a special shark tank.

The really special aspect of this aquarium is how it draws water dirctly from the ocean. There is an underwater pipe that goes out 300m and 20m deep and water is drawn into a complex labyrynth of pipes and filters, turning over the entire volume of the tank, 24 times a day. The techhnology reuired to acomplish is no mean feat. So naturally it makes for good television fodder for the Discovery Channel Asia, and that's why I went. Keep and eye for the program when it hits the wire. You'll even see me in it.

Back From JAXA Part 1

Here's that Photo Again...

33 Days On The Road - What Did I Find?
It was a tough little road trip, hopping from island to island, covering 2 documentaries for a very big documentary company. We went from Sydney to Narita to Okinawa (via Nagoya), then to Tanegashima (via Kagoshima) where they have the Space Center, then to Nagoya (via Kagoshimaa once more) and onto Tsukuba (via Narita), and then back to Sydney from Narita.

So Which bits exactly were JAXA? All of it except for Okinawa and Nagoya - Nagoya is where Mitsubishi Heavy Industries build rockets for JAXA. JAXA scatters itself widely across the Japanese archipelago. They have observations stations in Okinawa, and they have high altitude engine test-firing facilities, north of Sendai.

JAXA is what the old NASDA and a sundry bunch of organisations has been rolled into in ordert o be a more unified organisation. In the wake of the HII Rocket program being shutdown, a total re-organisation took place. Installled at the head of the organisation was Keiichi Tachikawa and theoretically, the whole organisation is meant to have unified into one big space development agency.

The Launch
The HII-A No. 9 launch we saw on the 18th of February represents a milestone accomplishment in many areas for JAXA. The No.9 launch delivered the largest payload into orbit, and it was part of a double launch that happened within a month of the 23rd January launch of the No.8 vehicle. In other words, it was the first time rockets were assembled parallel to one another in the big Vehicle Assembly Building and wheeled out to launch one after the other.

A lot of emphasis was made by the publicity people that what wass significant in this process was how two rockets were launched in quick succession; much more so than the issue of payload. Rocketry, it turns out is not comlex in its concept or in its component parts. If anything theey use tried and tested materials and parts. What is truly cutting edge about any rocket technology lies in the system engineering aspect, managing the diverse technological needs that go into successfully organising and assembling for launch. At the critical stages, at 270 seconds from laucnh the system goes into full automatic. People take shelter in the blockhouse or over 3.2 kilometres away.

The Rocket
The HII-A Rocket is the successor to the HII rocket. The HI Rocket was a rocket made mostly of imported technology. So the HII was developed during the 1990s with fully domestic Japanese technology. The problem was it turned out to be a very complex machine with too many parts, which in turn meant it was a very expensive machine to fire. This meant it was more vulenrable to failure and so when the HII program was cancelled, a concerted effort was made to streamline the cost of the rocket as well as reduce the number of parts. The result is the HII-A rocket.

The HII-A rocket has far fewer parts than its predecessor. The most important 'part reduction 'took place in the black ring you see in the above ph0to. A quick way to tell apart the HII and HII-A is the 'interstage section'. The HII had a yellow metal ring. In the HII-A, it has now been replaced by a composite black material that has 80% fewer parts.

The payload of the HII-A rocket is 10 tons for Low Earth Orbit and 4 tonnes for Geostationary Orbit. In the future, they are hoping to make the HII-B rocket with up to 16.5 tons of payload to Geostationary Orbit.

The HII-A rocket is a 2 stage rocket with a main drive using a Liquid Oxygen and Liquid Hydrogen drive. In addition to the liquid fuel are the Solid Rocket Boosters and the secondary strap on boosters that fire solid rocket at launch. What makes the HII-A interesting is how the second stage engine is turned off and on during its flight. The rocket itself weighs in at 285tons, but the combined thrust of the first stage liquid fuel engine and the boosters is in the vicinity of 500 tons. With the HII-A rocket, Japan's aerospace lift capacity matches that of the ESA's Arianne 5, and the USA's Delta. What's remarkable about it is the cost with which they achieve their lift-offs. However, I'll leave that discussion for tomorrow.

The SpaceFreaks Weblog

Re-Usable Launch Vehicles
Hi guys, I just saw this site http://www.skyramp.org/ , which talks about an interesting idea for re-usable launch vehicles. It's a modification of the old mass driver idea, whereby you launch your payload on a projectile that's launched by maglev, but these guys reckon they can side-step the large (currently) cost of maglev, by using either a rocket powered or pneumatic sled. When the sled is up to speed (they reckon less then 6G), then rockets on the vehicle mounted on the sled will fire.

From Nagoya

I Wanted To Design Fighter Crafts
That's right. At one point in my childhood was the dream job of being an aeronautical engineer for Mitsubishi Heavy Industries and designing Fighter aircraft. Do it where there was a tradition for it; do it where they did these things right. Of course that dream job got replaced by the dream job of slugging thirdbaseman for the Yankees, but that's another story. After all, Mistubishi was the company that designed this craft below, the famous Zero Fighter.



As part of the current shoot we visited the Oye Factory of Mistubishi Heavy Industries, which is of course the heartland of aerospace technology in Japan. This is the very factory where the Zero Fighter was designed. In fact, I got to go into the building that was erected in 1928 that houses the first wind tunnel in Japan. It's the very wind tunnel used to test the Zero Fighter, and it's still there in tact.

In fact, let me re-phrase that a little. The only reason I know about wind-tunnels is because I read about it in books about the Zero Fighter. So in a sense I had visited the ur-wind-tunnel of my childhood. It's a personal shrine, if you stop to think about it.

Unfortunately you can't take any photographs in there so I don't have any nice pickies to share with you; but I did want you all to know that I actually inadvertently stepped into the birth place of the Zero Fighter as we interviewed . It was exciting.



The pickie above is a photo of the great Jiro Horikoshi who wrote about his travails in designing the Zero Fighter. He made it seem like a truly heroic endeavour in his book. I asked the rocket engineers what it was like working as a designer for Mistubishi and they they said it was a workplace steeped in tradition. One of them worked with somebody who worked on the Zero Fighter way back when and he recounted being told the story of how the then young engineer would draw up a section and shot it to Jiro Horikoshi, the team leader. Horikoshi would just rip up the plan without even reading it.
"Horikoshi-san didn't even tell him what was wrong with it. He just tore it to shreds."
"Gee, that sounds more like a medieval apprenticeship than a team designing cutting edge aviation technology," I replied.
"Well, it was like that before the war, they say."
No wonder they lost, and maybe that wasn't the worst thing to happen to the Japanese workplace culture after all.