A Nitrous Crouton

Inane Construction Supply Marquee ‘Truism’ of the Week: ‘Wisdom comes with age. Sometimes age comes alone’.

Last week went by surprisingly fast. It is the height of allergy season in Southern California, and it was affecting me quite a bit and crippling my energy levels. Somehow, I don’t think I can blame that for spontaneously creating a ‘mash-up’ in my head of “These Boots Were Made for Walking” and “Secret Agent Man” on my morning commute. No idea.

Putting “Another Load of Quality” on your cargo truck would have been clever before Dilbert became well established. Now, you just get the feeling it was coined by some PHB who just didn’t see the ironic aspect.

Sci-fi is rarely done well in the medium of television. For every modern “Battlestar Galactica” there is a “Starhunter” or “Andromeda”. While the genre may be a bit passé now, it was always kind of surprising that no one ever took a stab at the cyberpunk/Blade Runner dystopian realm. Until now. Enter Charlie Jade. When trying to conceptualize a show of this type, I never envisioned one involving three parallel universes and set in South Africa. But it makes perfect sense, is unlike anything I’ve seen, and it may never air in the US. Figures.

Yes, the last three weeks have been bereft of blogging. The first week was due to a severe case of the blahs. The second week was due to an abnormally hectic schedule getting an Alpha milestone out the door. The third week was slacking off due to habit.

However, I’m sitting on a three-day weekend with no pressing demands, so I have no excuse. The taxes were finished and filed last weekend. I owed, but got it very close on my estimated payments. For the first time ever I did an experiment and used a tax program (TurboTax) and e-filed. Up until this year I had still been doing everything by hand and mailing in the return. The big question to answer is whether or not enough time and hassle was saved to make the hundred bucks for software plus e-filing fees worthwhile. Now that I’m done I’ll have to answer yes, it was worth it. The whole process only took me five or six hours, and that included wrangling all the receipts and records for my business expenses. My taxes are pretty simple, however. Schedule C aside, I still just take the standard deduction and don’t have any out of the ordinary income or adjustments or credit eligibility. I anticipate doing my taxes the same way next year.

The unexpected kick-ass event of the week occurred Wednesday when I was out at lunch. I was in the right place and at the right time to see a B-17 coming in for a landing at John Wayne Airport.

It has now been three weeks since the maiden flight of the SpaceX Falcon 1 rocket. Sadly, the initial launch attempt was unsuccessful resulting in the loss of the vehicle and payload. While the investigation is still in progress, it looks likely that the failure was not because the rocket itself failed, but due to a technician leaving something disconnected, leading to a fuel leak and fire that disabled the engine. Talk about frustrating and heartbreaking.

I’ve been an unabashed fan rooting for SpaceX since I first heard about them a year or two ago. Space has always been a major interest of mine, and NASA did indeed eat the dream. It has been interesting watching the flack and criticism they’ve received. The brainchild and financier of the company, Elon Musk, definitely did serious professional recruiting to staff the company. While the proof is always in the pudding, and your credibility will always ultimately rest on successfully and reliably flying vehicles, I never understood or agreed with the skepticism about technical capability.

One aspect where scorn and derision did seem appropriate, if not deserved, was in the area of timetables. The time span between Musk founding the company and the inaugural, unsuccessful flight was under four years. I’m willing to bet the company has its first successful flight before it turns five. That’s really pretty incredible for starting and assembling a team from scratch, designing from a blank piece of paper and a capital outlay of under $100 million. It is something for SpaceX to be proud of, which makes it a bit perplexing why starting out they anticipated launching 18-24 months from inception, which always seemed absurd and gave their critics ammunition with each delay. I can only surmise the attitude was something like “Lets be optimistic and take the adage of ‘everything takes longer than you think, everything is harder than it looks’ as it comes”. That perhaps shouldn’t have been communicated externally in the form of prospective initial launch dates.

Following the launch failure, and the preceeding aborted launch attempts, SpaceX is coming under a lot of professional and armchair scrutiny in regards to their operations procedures. I can’t help but wonder if in contrast to having stacked the deck with experience in designing and building a vehicle, they didn’t build a deep enough pool of seasoned operations people to actually fly the vehicle. SpaceX is simultaneously very open and secretive. The latter is often due to regulatory (ITAR) concerns as much as proprietary information. Tidbits leaking out such as the steady growth of the launch checklist through multiple revisions and their teething troubles with the remote launch site at Kwajalein, the revelation that the fuel leak could have been detected from telemetry, and the technician error all point towards a long process ahead for SpaceX to nail down their operations procedures. Watching the debacle of the CLV/CEV makes me root for them all the harder.

I have my own goals to see accomplished in the aerospace realm. Sadly, I still lack the very, very, very substantial amount of capital acquired to pursue them. Even sans NASA and Boeing/LockMart rocket science is still expensive stuff. I am, however, determined.