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X Prize News: Will It Fly?

The thing about the da Vinci Project is … people are skeptical it will work. Just after my story was published Thursday about how the volunteer X Prize team had found an angel sponsor and will do its balloon-and-rocket-to-space launch in October, I got an email from a reader: “$20 bucks says the guy torches on re-entry, … assuming the airborne launch even works.”

Is that just a Nascar crash fantasy at work? Or a well-informed doubt?

People following the X Prize have seen Burt Rutan’s SpaceShipOne craft fly, know that it has a deliberate testing history, and that it comes from a team guided by a very smart, capable guy and funded by a very rich one (Microsoft billionaire Paul Allen). When it comes to da Vinci and its Wild Fire spacecraft, there’s none of that history and consequently none of the confidence that at least it’s not a crazy stunt.

Last week, Rutan asked Brian Feeney at the X Prize press conference in Santa Monica whether da Vinci would do any “envelope expansion” flights before launching for space. In other words, would there be a program of deliberate testing before committing to a full-on launch? Feeney’s answer to me when I asked a similar question at the end of June was that there is no way of really doing a full system test because of the balloon-launch element. He seemed to suggest it was too complex practically to do a complete test. Thursday when I interviewed him he told me the team wouldn’t disclose details of any upcoming tests for competitive reasons.

Here was his exchange with Rutan:

Rutan: Do you mind if I ask a question? Or do I have to go down there [with the media attending the conference]? Are you going to fly a spaceflight on your first flight, or are you going to do envelope expansion?

Feeney: Yeah, Burt, actually you asked me that question about two months ago here when were out to dinner. The X Prize got together a group of twelve competitors a couple of months ago and we talked about all our various efforts. But the second night we were at the Cafe Del Rey and I happened to be sitting opposite Burt, and over fine wine and dinner for about four hours we kept bantering back and forth about rockets, and I think we asked each other 12 different ways and gave each other 12 different answers about when and how we were gonna fly. Um, now we, uh, it’s generally our intent to go to space on our first flight. We have a ballistic rocket. It’s not a — I’ll call SpaceShipOne a space plane — it does not have wings. We’re launching at such a high altitude, 80,000 feet, that we’re well on our way. We do not have — it’s a a standing start, so things like wind shear that are, maybe have complicated the past SpaceShipOne flights, are not a factor for us. We’ve got 1.2 million pound seconds of total impulse on board, which doesn’t mean much to most of you but it’s one hell of a lot of energy, and that’s going to take us out there. So yeah, we’ll … we’ll … short of something else that occurs in the meantime, we’ll go for it.

To be fair, Rutan asked a simple enough question, and Feeney answered it. But the question was loaded, too: Are you doing testing to prove what your ship can do? And if not, why not? The assumption underlying the spoken and unspoken question is one all of us who grew up in the space age are familiar with: If you’re going to do something crazy like light off some explosives and shoot yourself into space, it makes sense to be very, very sure you know what you’re doing. Go a step at a time. Expand the envelope. Push to discover unexpected problems and resolve them. Especially if you’re going to put someone’s life on the line.

In his reply, Feeney addressed the loaded part of Rutan’s query. But look at what he said. Is there really a straight answer there? The first Wild Fire shot will be to space. Because the ship will be launching from so high up. Because it has such a powerful rocket motor. Because Wild Fire should be easier to fly than SpaceShipOne. Those are all factors that Feeney is counting on to get him to space, and computer modeling probably shows him that it’s all going to work out fine. But none of that adds up to a reason for foregoing a full test of how all the pieces of the da Vinci Project’s system work when they’re integrated and used under the stress of real-world conditions.

Outsiders can only guess why Feeney has chosen not to do more extensive testing and to report it publicly. It probably comes down to a simple matter of not enough money on one hand and not enough time to test and still have a shot at the X Prize.

That sense that something is going off half-cocked is what leads to the feeling expressed by the Wired News reader that Feeney’s headed for a disaster. I’m not going to take that bet. I’d hate to see that happen, even if promoters of the new space race (and the experience of the old one) show that disasters are just part of reaching for the stars.

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X Prize News 08.05.04

Well, Toronto’s da Vinci Project just announced it will launch October 2, three days after Burt Rutan’s SpaceShipOne. But the most amazing part of the story to me — setting aside the fact there’s a guy who’s going to climb onto a largely untested launch system and try to go to space — is the sponsorship: GoldenPalace.com, an online casino which operates from an Indian reservation near Montreal, pumped in several hundred thousand dollars to make this thing happen. Their angle: They get to be the first casino in space. In fact, they’re going to give da Vinci Project astronaut Brian Feeney a laptop so he can gamble online while he’s up there. More details later.

Update: Wired News posted my story (which was filed before I wrote the message above, by the way) by noon PDT, which actually made it competitive with Space.com, MSNBC, and other outlets. Yay.

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Good Candidate Hard to Find

So, the Illinois Republicans are so hard up for a candidate in the U.S. Senate race — the GOP’s primary nominee got blown up by a sordid sex bomb that had been hiding in a sealed divorce-case file — that they’re close to naming Alan Keyes of Maryland to run against Democrat Barack Obama. The reasons: He’s black, like Obama; he’s known, like Obama; and unlike Obama, he’s conservative. (And there is another hopeful: Andrea Grubb Barthwell, a doctor who used to be with the Office of National Drug Control Policy. She’s also black, which is suddenly a quality the Republicans seem to value quite highly.)

But back to Keyes: Some of the Party of Lincolners say that the fact he’s a nonresident is a nonissue, pointing to the Bobby Kennedy/Hillary Clinton precedent in New York state. Well, there’s one big difference: Running for the Senate in their newly adopted state was their idea, at least; they didn’t have a lot of desperate party hacks with a ballot vacancy to fill begging them to run, please run.

One fun detail from the Trib’s story on Tuesday’s GOP ballot confab:

Three men who showed up unannounced were allowed to speak to the committee as was a 32-year-old Florida man wearing an 18th Century powdered wig. The only person who said he wanted to speak to the committee but wasn’t allowed to enter was a protester standing on the sidewalk outside the club wearing lederhosen.

Bummer for the lederhosen guy.

And this late update: The candidate-deprived Republicans have asked Keyes to accept the party’s nod — even though I’ll bet he can’t find Kankakee on the map. And Keyes says he’ll think about running and let them know his answer this weekend. The Sun-Times quotes him as saying, “If I do step forward to accept this challenge, I will be laying it all on the line.” Whoa! He’s going to lay it all on the line! Get ready for the fur and family values to start flyin’.

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This Land (Revisited)

NPR’s “Talk of the Nation” talked to Arlo Guthrie on Monday about the copyright flap that has arisen over a campaign parody of his dad’s “This Land Is Your Land”:

Neil Conan: Your father was a political musician. What do you think he would have said about people using his music for political purposes?

Arlo: Well, you know, I really can’t speak for him. I can just tell you that when I saw it a few weeks ago, I thought it was one of the funniest commentaries, if not one of the most directly inspired–I mean, I called my sister, I called my friends, I sent everybody a link to the site so that they could go see it and we’ve all been laughing about it since then. I don’t think that was–I think my dad would have absolutely loved the humor in it.

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Gulf of … Whatever

Not that we ever learn anything from history, except how to repeat it, but this week is the largely unremarked 40th anniversary of the Gulf of Tonkin “incident” that precipitated the Johnson administration’s escalation of the Vietnam War. NPR had a long audio report from Walter Cronkite on Monday that gave a detailed account of the incident itself and how it played out inside the White House. It’s history, or maybe just journalism, with a real feeling of immediacy and insight. One can’t help but wonder how many years it will take to hear/see something similar on Iraq.

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The Commander

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A few weeks ago, Kate and I were walking someplace in the neighborhood and she suddenly exclaimed, “Look, there’s the Commander.” Yes: a well-known local character. It’s a wreck of an old RV spruced up with red paint. It patrols the greater North Berkeley flatlands in search of parking places where the neighbors won’t raise a stink. It graced our street and others nearby last December. Then on Christmas Eve I saw the Commander chugging slowly away; I thought it looked kind of sad; but maybe it was off on an Xmas mission, delivering its own Yuletide treat to a soon-to-be-surprised homeowner.

Now, with winter long behind us, the Commander, which apparently hails from a Canadian RV maker, has migrated back to our block. Not all the neighbors are pleased with its reappearance. The police have been called. The Commander has been ticketed and towed. One guy up the street says he had an angry face-off after following the Commander’s commander to try to figure out where he lived (the owner doesn’t live in the RV, apparently, but ventures out from a more conventional domicile and moves his vehicle from place to place). Tensions run high in a place where some people have a deeply proprietary feeling about their native asphalt and others just can’t give up the romance of the open road. (Though now that you ask, no, I wouldn’t be especially thrilled to have this thing dumped in front of my house, either).

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Triathlete Guy

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Went up to Sonoma County yesterday to see our friend Pete compete in the Half Vineman triathlon. The event involves a 1.2-mile swim, a 56-mile bike ride, and a 13.1-mile run; all events half the distance of the established Hawaii Ironman distances. Anyway, here he is at the finish, 5 hours, 36 minutues, 3.4 seconds after he started out. Pete rocks.

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Now, back to reality

Bob Herbert has a decent column in the Times (registration required) that throws more than a bucket of cold water on the campaign-trail optimists:

There was no shortage of pretty words and promises at the Democratic National Convention in Boston last week. But there’s a big difference between the rigidly crafted reality at the heart of a political campaign and the reality of the rest of the world.

“Practical politics,” said Henry Adams, “consists in ignoring facts.”

The facts facing the United States as George W. Bush and John Kerry joust for the presidency are too grim to be honestly discussed on the stump. No one wants to tell cheering potential voters that the nation has sunk so deep into a hole that it will take decades to extricate it.

I think his basic thesis about how fundamental our problems are. The question he poses, without trying to provide an answer, is whether voters are up to hearing the truth.

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This Land

There’s a great story on Wired News (and elsewhere in previous days) about a copyright lawsuit against the two brothers who produced the brilliant “This Land” campaign parody. The people who own the rights to Woody Guthrie’s songs, the Richmond Organization, have demanded “This Land” be removed from the Net because the brothers stole Guthrie’s music. The Wired News story ends with this note on Guthrie’s reported wishes regarding the song’s copyright:

“According to various Internet sources, including the website of the Museum of Musical Instruments in Santa Cruz, California, Guthrie allegedly wrote, ‘This song is copyrighted in U.S., under Seal of Copyright #154085, for a period of 28 years, and anybody caught singin it without our permission, will be mighty good friends of ourn, cause we don’t give a dern. Publish it. Write it. Sing it. Swing to it. Yodel it. We wrote it, that’s all we wanted to do.’ ”

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John Brown’s Body

Oddest moments (for me) in tonight’s sporadic convention viewing:

–Kansas Governor Kathleen Sebelius, extolling remarkable Kansas citizens of the past, included John Brown, the abolitionist. I guess it was startling to hear the name of one of the most radical characters in U.S. history, and one generally held responsible for killing five pro-slavery farmers in Kansas, because the proceedings have such a carefully crafted moderation to them. But maybe I’m wrong and John Brown is on his way back as a hero of the New Democrats.

–PBS vs. MSNBC vs. Fox vs. C-SPAN:
PBS: Jim Lehrer looks like he’s sleepwalking through this thing. The New York Times’ David Brooks doesn’t seem to have much insight to add, and no one, Republican or Democrat, has done anything to deserve the torture of watching Mark Shields paw through the proceedings in search of meaning nuggets. We next switched to …
MSNBC: I thought I might be able to stomach Chris Matthews. I didn’t watch long enough to really find out, because of the jittery way he kept leaping from correspondent to correspondent after John Edwards’s speech. Next up was …
Fox: Tuned in while Brit Hume was holding court, and Kate insisted I refrain from switching so we could see what “the other side” is saying. It was surprisingly un-awful — in the context of how awful network news in general has become. Hume’s panel included Morton Kondracke, who termed Edwards’ speech 95 percent positive but took points off for his having uttered the “fiction” that there are two Americas with different levels of privilege; NPR’s Mara Liasson, whose startled looking (not to say bug-eyed) expression explains why she’s not on the tube more often, stuck to her guns in analyzing Edwards’ speech as effective; and the most damning thing conservative lion Bill Kristol could come up with was to say the speech was the most hawkish heard at a Democratic convention since John F. Kennedy was nominated in 1960. Hume’s most memorable contribution was a complaint about the volume of the Black-Eyed Peas performance after Edwards finished. Later on, Greta van Susteren took over and provided a frightening look at face-work gone bad. To recover from the Botox scare, we tuned to …
C-SPAN: Thank the deity, if any, for a channel that won’t get in the way of the Guam delegation’s long introduction (60 years since liberation from the Japanese, 100 years under U.S rule) to its vote.