Month: September 2024

Hidden Figures

Posted on by Cheryl Rofer

Today the (male) NASA adminstrator, Bill Nelson, accepted Congressional Gold Medals from the (male) Speaker of the House, Mike Johnson, on behalf of

  • Katherine Johnson, in recognition of her service to the United States as a mathematician
  • Dr. Christine Darden, for her service to the United States as an aeronautical engineer
  • In commemoration of the lives of Dorothy Vaughan and Mary Jackson, in recognition of their service to the United States during the space race
  • In recognition of all the women who served as computers, mathematicians, and engineers at the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics and NASA between the 1930s and the 1970s.

Legislation was introduced by Rep. Eddie Bernice Johnson on Feb. 27, 2019, H.R.1396 – Hidden Figures Congressional Gold Medal Act – was signed into law later that year. I don’t know why it’s take five years to actually award the medals.

One might have thought that the House of Representatives or NASA might have found descendents of those women to accept the awards. Five years would be plenty of time.

Nelson mentioned one woman in the audience as part of his couple hundred words.

We continue this legacy, as one member of the audience here with us does every single day – the remarkable Andrea Mosie.

Andrea, who has worked at NASA for nearly 50 years, is the lead processor for the Apollo sample program. She oversees the Moon rocks and lunar samples NASA brought back from Apollo, 842 pounds of celestial science! These samples are national treasures. So is Andrea.

Whew. Now the men can get back to work.

Cross-posted to Lawyers, Guns & Money

Photo: NASA research mathematician Katherine Johnson is photographed at her desk at NASA Langley Research Center with a globe, or “Celestial Training Device,” in 1962. Credit: NASA / Langley Research Center

Kamala Harris Gets It

Posted on by Cheryl Rofer

In light of my post yesterday, this stood out (gift link):

During the administration’s first year, the briefer was presenting a classified personality profile of a female foreign leader Harris would be meeting. The briefer was a woman, but Harris thought some of the language she was using was gender-biased. Rather than just voicing her discomfort, Harris requested an intelligence community internal review.

The result, never previously reported, was an internal assessment by the intelligence community of whether analysts had routinely used gender-biased language in intelligence reports. The review examined several years of analytical reports, comparing how often certain words had been used about women and men. Harris was so concerned that she asked intelligence agencies to train their analysts to avoid any such bias in the future. She also requested more reporting from the intelligence community on gender issues and sexual violence around the world.

Gender issues make a difference in how intelligence is interpreted. Here’s an example.

Good for David Ignatius for reporting this without a sneer.

Cross-posted to Lawyers, Guns & Money

A Perceptual Black Hole

Posted on by Cheryl Rofer

The day after the debate, Marcy Wheeler asked why the pundits didn’t listen to Kamala Harris the several times before the debate when she said what she was going to do. She notes that they paid attention to Donald Trump’s comments about the debate. The easy answer is that she is an Indian and Black woman and he is a white man, so of course sexism and racism are in play. That’s not wrong, but I think we can narrow in on further understanding. Here’s Marcy’s answer:

Journalists missed the Vice President’s clear intent because they treated Donald Trump as the protagonist of this story.

And why would that be? I have an answer, but it requires a setup. I am not talking about the gutter-variety sexism and racism that issue from Trump’s or JD Vance’s mouths every time they open them. Nor am I talking about elite media disdain for reality. I am talking about something much subtler but widespread. It is a factor in the coverage of abortion rights and other “women’s issues” in the news. It is a factor in the election.

I am going to start from my experience of something I might call a black mental hole. Some subjects simply cannot be comprehended by some people. They may be able to read the words and even parrot some ideas, but then the ideas drain out of their heads, beyond the event horizon. It is not a denial of those ideas or argument against them. It comes before those mental processes. The subject simply does not exist in their universe.

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More On Burevestnik

Posted on by Cheryl Rofer

Last night, Decker Eveleth, who identified a possible Burevestnik launch site, asked me about a quote. I was in the middle of watching the Harris-Trump debate, so I said I’d post something later. This is that something.

First, the quote:

The primary issue with this discovery is that a nuclear-powered cruise missile is hardly possible, with the main obstacle being physics. A nuclear reactor cannot be light-weight and compact enough to fit on a missile with all the cooling and control systems necessary to provide sufficient power for both a missile engine and onboard equipment. This would mean that the Kremlin is either conducting a strategic psychological operation to convince the West that it has developed disastrous nuclear weapons other than intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs), submarine-launched ballistic missiles (SLBMs), and old-fashioned strategic bombers, or it believes in these mythical technological theories and is spending Russia’s limited intellectual and financial resources on their research and development—good news for the West if true.

This is from an article by Pavel Luzin that Eveleth says also makes no sense about its interpretation of the site.

In my previous posts, I haven’t gone into detail on the necessary tradeoffs to design a nuclear rocket, although I might have done a bit of that in my large 2018 post. I’ll do that here.

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The Return of Burevestnik

Posted on by Cheryl Rofer

Decker Eveleth and Jeffrey Lewis have identified a launch site adjacent to a nuclear weapons storage site as possibly being for Russia’s Burevestnik nuclear cruise missile. Jonathan Landay wrote about it and quoted me, among others.

I wrote about the history of flying nuclear rockets, mainly the Rover and Tory reactors, in 2018. Nothing in the science or my opinion has changed since then. The design of these rockets is heavily constrained by the requirements of both a nuclear reactor and the rocket propellant, and those constraints result in a design that will have inherent weaknesses, one of which is the tendency to tear itself apart.

The US researched a nuclear-powered cruise missile, driven by the Tory reactor. It never flew. A followon was the Rover reactor, planned for use in space only, not in the atmosphere. Rover tests were somewhat more promising, and the idea has been resurrected recently, although it seems not to have been followed up.

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