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The Brotherhood of Speed

Posted 14 October 2007

About 150 miles northeast of Los Angeles the small town of Rosamund slumbers on the edge of the Great American Desert. At this altitude the air is thin and cold and the smog behind you in the LA basin lies like an orange-tinted coverlet between the high peaks of the Sierra Nevada and ceaseless breakers of the Pacific Ocean.

Look ahead eastwards though, and you will see some of the strangest terrain in the world. Vast areas of desert that have been smoothed to a surface that looks like glass. These are playa lakes, shallow depressions in the desert that in the winter fill up with water that then blows back and forth, back and forth until they have the surface of a billiard table. Here in December shrieking seagulls pour in from the Pacific wheeling and screaming as they search for the shrimps that wriggle from this primordial ooze. It may look like a place from the dawn of time but in fact it is one of the most significant aviation arenas in the world, for it was here, above these colossal natural runways, that the space race was forged.

In the last two weeks the attention of the world has focused – appropriately - on the fiftieth anniversary of the launch of Sputnik, the first Soviet Satellite, but what is less well known, is that only ten years before, the barrier that proved that humans could survive the colossal accelerations and speeds of space travel was finally breached.

In the aftermath of the Second World War the US Army had discovered that they were lagging both the Nazis and their European allies in the development of jet aircraft. Amongst the wreckage of Nazi Germany US investigators found evidence of an airplane that had reached speeds of 596 miles per hour, while in England the Brits had come up with the Gloster Meteor, an airplane that had raised the world aviation speed record from 470 to over 600 miles an hour in a single day.

The next milestone – shattering the sound barrier - was clear to everyone, and America considered it crucial that they should do it first.

The sound barrier – the speed at which sound propagates through air - had been predicted by the great German physicist Ernst Mach to be a physical hurdle that would have to be overcome in the race for speed in the sky. The speed of sound varies with altitude, temperature and wind speed but is approximately 760 miles an hour at sea level and 660 miles an hour at 40,000 feet, or slightly above the cruising altitude of a commercial jet-airliner. Glance today at the seat-back readouts on a modern plane about two hours after take-off you will find that you are doing something like 98% of the speed of sound. But in the 1940s the sound barrier was an invisible demon that lived in the sky. It was impossible to test for it in the laboratory: wind tunnels and propeller aircraft encounter horrendous problems when operating near these speeds. Wind tunnels eventually choked out and anyone flying a propeller aircraft near these velocities would buy 'the farm' after their airfoil controls froze.

And so the US Army Air Force (these were the days before the USAF) had taken it upon themselves to assault the dreaded sound barrier and find out once and for all if it was a farm you could buy in the sky, or a natural barrier that could be outwitted by human technology and ingenuity.

The danger and uncertainty of the project was the reason that the huge natural airfield of Muroc (later to be named Edwards after the doomed pilot of the fabled 'Flying Wing') was chosen for the project. There was literally thousands of miles for error above its vast playa lakes and, with the velocities being contemplated, this was nothing less than a real-estate requirement.

Under an army contract Bell Aviation built a small, rocket power plane based on the design of a 50-calibre rifle bullet named the X-1. The bullet shape was important since this was one of the few objects that was known to go supersonic smoothly. The pilot selected to fly this tiny, swallow-shaped beast was a man with a name perfectly suited to the endeavour – Slick Goodlin. The X-1 dropped from beneath the belly of a B-29 bomber, the pilot peeling it away from the aircraft before igniting its four rocket chambers. The propellant - liquid oxygen and kerosene – was not so much a fuel as an explosive and the beast was normally 'topped off' miles from the few tattered shacks that those - with a sense of humour - referred to as Muroc's 'facility'.

But Goodlin was a civilian and was paid large bonuses for the work that he undertook. Naturally it was to his advantage to raise the ante at every possible stage and a few days before the assault in Mach 1 itself the figure of $150,000 began to be mentioned. At this point the Army's sense of humour failed and it decided to use one of its own pilots, somebody who would follow order for less than three hundred dollars a month.

The man selected was Charles E. 'Chuck' Yeager, a natural born stick-and-rudder man who would later be anointed with 'The Right Stuff' – in Tom Wolfe's classic book of the same name.

The date scheduled for the assault on the sound barrier was October 14th 1947, a Tuesday. But when Yeager showed up on the flight line that morning he was slightly the worse for wear. Two nights before he had been thrown by a horse near the local bar - 'Pancho's Fly Inn' - and had broken two ribs. Knowing that the base aviation doctors would never have let him fly he mentioned his dilemma to his flight engineer Jack Ridley. Ridley's solution was to saw twelve inches off a janitor's broom. Yeager could then use this to gain enough mechanical advantage to shut the X-1's almost impossibly tight-fitting door.

It was an unconventional piece of additional flight hardware but nevertheless Yeager went aloft with it. At 40,000 feet he, accompanied by good-ole' Ridley, made his way down to the fully-fuelled beast that hung - sweating liquid oxygen - beneath the B29's belly. After he slid into its microscopic cockpit, Ridley handed him the length of broom handle and Yeager whanged the door home. A few moments later the B-29 dropped him.

For a few eternal seconds he hung, suspended in the dome of space between the ancient playa lakes below and humanity's next frontier above, before firing off all the rocket chambers simultaneously. The shock and the acceleration flung him back into his seat, while his home-made flight-helmet – cannibalised from a leather football helmet – thudded remorselessly against his head rest. The vibration was so intense that the instrument dials splintered in front of his eyes but then, unbelievably, it was as though he had spun out from a waterfall onto a mill-pond. His vision cleared and the X-1's stabilised as, far below on the desert floor, a new sound split the world - the long, hollow, bass rumble of a sonic boom, exactly as predicted by physicist Theodore von Karman many years before.

Yeager had split the sound barrier, in the process proving that the human exploration of space, destined to start just a decade hence, was possible.

Harvest Home

Posted 5 October 2007

Yesterday I was privileged to take part in one of the things that make Great Britain great; a simple harvest festival, conducted by Hanborough Manor School at the local Parish Church of St Peter and St Paul in Church Hanborough.

It was a glorious autumn's morning and as I cycled down to the church I encountered a happy, chattering crocodile of schoolchildren all simply enjoying a change from the daily regimen of their daily lives in the warm rays of the Indian Summer we are currently enjoying. Seeing me Susie waved and called “Hi Dad”. Of such simple things are a father's joy made.

The morning sun cast lambent beams of buttermilk through the old elm trees that surround the ancient church and inside, to my surprise, I found it packed. I was amazed that so many parents had taken the time and trouble to turn out – although surely I should not have been – many in Long Hanborough, like me, long ago took the decision to abandon the rat race and the choked A40 into Oxford for a quieter life in the Oxfordshire countryside where the money may be worse but the quality of life is immeasurably better. One of the most important factors is that we get to spend more time with our children: If I had missed today I would have been spiritually poorer for it - and I would never have known.

As I took pictures with my mobile phone I marvelled at the technology that I used so lightly. I said as much to my neighbour, a member of the Governors at my daughter's school and a pillar of our village community. His reply was simple. “If it terrifies you, imagine how it feels to me. When I was born, we didn't even have electric light.”

For a few moments more I chatted with this supremely and serenely civilised man. He is now a Great-grandfather and did not need me to tell him how lucky we were to be in that dignified old church, full of happy schoolchildren, on that warm autumn morning. It was an honour to meet him.

So, thanks to a mobile miracle of modern technology that many of us take for granted, I captured those peaceful scenes of the ebb-and-flow of life in the village that I am privileged to call home.

In the early 21st century, life in Long Hanborough is good.

Beep

Posted 4 October 2007

Today it is exactly fifty years since the launch of Sputnik, the world's first artificial satellite that launched the space race and ultimately the communications revolution. My take on these momentous events, published this week in Physics World is to be found HERE.

Earlier this summer I wrote a piece on the Phoenix Mars mission. To read it click HERE.

Back on the Grid

Posted 22 September 2007

Greetings all! It has been a long time since I updated this blog. The reasons were personal. It has been a difficult summer. However, in amongst the problems I did manage to do a radio satellite tour in support of LIVES OF THE PLANETS and we will be updating these pages in the next week or so with new information and reviews of the book.

Matthew Parris, one of the most gifted commentators I have ever come across, makes this point cogently in this morning's TIMES

Back to the Future

Posted 7 May 2007

Earlier this year I wrote in THE WASHINGTON POST of the heroism of two groups of astronauts, the crew of Apollo 1 and the Challenger Space Shuttle crew. In just a couple of months we will be commemorating the twenty-eighth anniversary of Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin's epic landing on the Moon.

Last week I was enormously heartened to READ that there are already plans to return to the Moon by the end of the second decade of the twentieth century. This time though the impetus will not be the Cold War but will be science in the service of commerce.- the mining of helium-3 which is abundant on the Moon and which is almost certain to be a crucial component of clean, limitless energy in the second half of the twenty-first century. The idea is being championed by one of the last two astronauts - and the only scientist - to walk on the Moon: Harrison Schmitt

As I write in LIVES OF THE PLANETS (coming out next month) we are privileged to live in the most extraordinary era of planetary exploration. A return to the Moon is the obvious next step on our road to the stars and if the Americans, the Russians and the Chinese are competing to be the first to get there so much the better. It may make NASA raise its game.

A return of the pioneer spirit is what this tired world of ours desperately needs.

Hats off to Professor Schmitt for promoting it.

So, what is the secret of LIFE ON MARS?

Posted 11 April 2007

Have had a night's sleep and time to reflect on the LIFE ON MARS phenomenon. As I said last night what a wonderful series! But it has got me wondering why it is so wonderful and why it has crashed into the popular conciousness like a fishtailing Cortina in the back streets of Bolton (where many of the driving scenes were filmed). For years the '70s was the decade that time forgot; The Sweet, platform soles, flares, Abba, The Six Million Dollar Man, and yes David Bowie etc. And now all of a sudden the '70s are back with vengence and LIFE ON MARS is carrying the torch for the revival. Why?

Well surely one reason is simply generational. Middle aged adults today - the movers and the shakers, the bankers, the insurance executives, the media professionals, the writers, the plumbers, the electricians, the publicans - most are products of the '70s. It is our decade and no matter its faults, we love it. To anyone who might gainsay that as DCI Hunt would say, 'up yours'.

Another reason must surely be the ten years that the New Labour thought police have been in power. Goodness knows that political correctness was bad enough in the '90s but now it is off the clock. Almost every sentence uttered in private conversation - and certainly every sentence uttered in public - is now subjected to a subliminal PC filter that has been invidiously installed in our collective conciousness by a decade of New Labour spin and media manipulation.

The simple truth is that we ache to be like Gene Hunt and say exactly what is on our minds without fear of being sued by some agenda-driven pressure group with a fat whack of public funding supplied courtesy of New Labour's stealth taxes. The sooner those fairies in Whitehall are out of power and we regain the right to think and say exactly what we mean the better.

In the meantime we can secretly hug the memory of DCI Hunt to ourselves and revel in his fabulous political incorrectness. Team-building meeting getting you down? Health and Safety assessment taking too long? Bank manager on your case about the size of your overdraft?

'Oh, shut up you nancy-arsed fairy boy...'

Life on Television

Posted 10 April 2007

Just switched off from watching the final episode of LIFE ON MARS. Whatever Kudos are paying Philip Glenister it is not enough. What a terrific perfomance, chewing up the set and spitting it out like the dinosaur he is supposed to be. I have to confess that Kudos confounded my expectiations; I fully expected Tyler to go back to the future and find Cartwright as the Chief Constable of Manchester and DCI Hunt in a terminal care home for serial alcohol abusers - but hey ho.

It seems to me that the production team at Kudos had a bit of the same problem that Patrick McGoohan had at the end of THE PRISONER - it was so good that they did not know how to end it. Hence the botched roof jumping sequence - which just didn't scan for me.

But who cares? Brilliant is brilliant and my eldest daughter has just told me that Glenister was interviewed today on the Paul O'Grady show as saying that there will be a 1980's spin off.

I can't wait!

Spinning our Spineless Navy

Posted 8 April 2007

It's obviously good to have our sailors back home but as is so often the case there are more questions than answers here. Being televised eating meals, smoking fags and playing chess having been in captivity for only a few days does not promote the feeling that our military personnel are a force to be reckoned with does it? And that in turn suggests strongly that there is something wrong with the military culture that these young people have been trained in. Being in the military is not like being in a conventional job. It is a high risk occupation which is why the pensions and fringe benefits are so good. In other words, if you choose to be in the military you have to be prepared for this kind of thing to happen. Next time it does - and there will be a next time while we pursue this policy of appeasement with violent and undemocratic regimes - can we at least pretend to show a bit of the spirit that our father's showed in the Second World War and not look like a bunch of reality TV pansies?

But the bigger issue is just what on Earth under-armed, poorly supported military personnel were doing seaching ships in the Shatt Al-Arab waterway in the first place? If we are going to enforce a peace we need to give our soldiers the means to do it. There is no doubt that our own naval command here is culpable and quite possibly guilty of negligence. We need a thorough review to make sure that this kind of shambles does not happen again. Next time it looks like our people are about to be kidnapped perhaps we could at least fire a warning shot? Would that be too much to ask? And if that fails could we at least try and put up a bit of a fight? At the moment we are the laughing stock of the Islamic and Western World and rightly so.

Instead of trying to spin a positive gloss onto the events which led to the release of the kidnappees - a release that was orchestrated by the Iranians for their own diplomatic ends - we should acknowledge it for the international humiliation that it is. It is time for our own military and political leaders to have a close look at themselves and try and summon up a little fighting spirit.

If our leaders were to show a little backbone, maybe our soldiers would learn to do the same.

The Kraken Wakes: A global warning about the global warming debate

Posted 4 April 2007

I had been watching with interest and some amusement as the global warming debate left the editorial pages of Science and Nature and started to invade the front pages of the broadsheets. However, that amusement is now rapidly turning to alarm as the proposition that mankind is rapidly altering the Earth's climate, meteorological meltdown is imminent, and anyone without a house above the hundred-metre mark should take up power-swimming becomes part of the political agenda. The attendant knee-jerk reaction from the public after they have been spoon-fed selected facts by journalist's whose closest encounter with the technical issues is a half-baked 'science communication module' in their media studies course is as entirely predictable as it is non-scientific.

The facts are these. There has apparently been a increase in average global temperatures of a couple of degrees over the last fifty to a hundred years or so. At the same time global carbon dioxide levels have been reliably documented as rising through sensors placed on Mauna Kea in Hawaii and elsewhere. The interpretation is this: human-induced carbon dioxide levels are causing the planet to warm and if left unchecked the planet will become uninhabitable with rising sea levels (see the image above inspired by John Wyndham's classic 1953 novel THE KRAKEN WAKES).

Oh my God! We're all going to die!

Give me a break.

OK, let's get real. This planet is 4.5 billion years old (that's 4.5 thousand million years) and has probably had a functioning (though evolving) climate system since the end of the Late Heavy Bombardment period of Earth history 3.8 billion years ago. Mankind has been at the tool-user level of sentience for roughly the past twenty thousand years. Do we really think that the Earth's climate has just been hanging around, picking it's nose, and waiting for us to worry about it when we evolved to the right level? Of course not. The most cursory inventory of Earth history shows us that climate has changed continuously and by far greater amounts than that which we are currently worried about. For example, at the time of the dinosaurs carbon dioxide levels were eight times higher than they are today with global temperatures slightly warmer in the tropics and quite bit warmer at the poles. Sea levels were higher but that didn't stop an awful lot of land-dwelling dinosaurs from having perfectly good, productive lives and producing lots and lots of perfectly good healthy baby dinosaurs. So even if carbon dioxide levels do rise by eight times - from about 300 ppm to 2400 ppm (which they won't, current predictions are a doubling at most) so what? Life has been there before.

I am not advocating that we should not move to non-CO2 emitting energy sources. It makes sense to do so simply because hydrocarbon based fuels are becoming scarce and are polluting the environment with things far more dangerous than inert CO2. We now have the technology to move onto other, more efficient fuels; hydrogen and nuclear where appropriate. In short, what I am saying is that we need to retain a sense of proportion about the global warming issue.

At the moment we are in the hands of a media that needs to sell newspapers, being fed stories by political parties who want power, who in turn are being informed by a scientific establishment that needs funding. This funding is mostly delivered through themed pathways - of which global warming is a prominent strand - that are controlled by civil servants that are instructed by governments, which is to say political parties. This is not a healthy situation. The way that science funding in the western world is currently organised means that the threat of global warming becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Scientists are only human and what is more they - and their familes - need to eat. What would you do if your livelihood depended on you endorsing the threat of global catastrophe?

Quite.

Lives of the Planets: A Natural History of the Solar System

Posted 2 April 2007

LIVES OF THE PLANETS is completed! What an epic task that turned out to be. I could have made it four times as long but my editor Bill Frucht wisely decided that it should remain a readable length. I am happy with it - it takes the planets and explores them from the point of view of their historical discovery, their recent exploration by the latest planetary probes and also from the perspective of the planets themselves as biographical objects. It is also bang up to date, the latest from the Mars Exploration Rovers, the fate of Beagle 2, the demotion of Pluto and the hunt for extrasolar planets are just some of the topics covered. The publication date is set for June 25 in the United States and SIGNED COPIES will be available from me via the internet after that date. We now have facilities to accept payment by Paypal or by credit card. If you want a personalised greeting then simply let me know what it is and I'll be happy to oblige. If you want a copy, simply drop me a line here at Corfield Central and I'll get back to you. It goes without saying that my backlist - ARCHITECTS OF ETERNITY and THE SILENT LANDSCAPE are also currently available. Copies of ARCHITECTS are running low so hurry if you want one. I am still waiting to hear about the publication date of LIVES OF THE PLANETS in Japan where the rights have been acquired by Bungei Shinju.

I am delighted to be able to tell you that discussions about a TV version of LIVES OF THE PLANETS are advancing well. Watch this space.

With a bit more time on my hands now that LOTP is finished I have updated my other writing page with lots of new journalism CLICK HERE

Britain: A Toothless Bulldog

Posted 2 April 2007

Well, my goodness. It is difficult to know who is the more grotesque - the government of Iran or the government of Great Britain. The former has kidnapped fifteen British subjects in broad daylight. (kidnapped I said and kidnapped I mean - they were not in Iranian waters and so this is an act of international piracy on the high seas) and now is parading the kidnappees on TV. That alone would have earned Tehran a visit from a flock of helicopter gunships if the subjects had been American. But our government? Not a chance. Just more feckless bleating and impotent posturing while they ask the nice Iranians if they will kindly give back our people.

When will we learn? What's needed here is some old style British diplomacy. A request for their return while half a dozen gunboats with cruise missiles trained on Iran's illegal nuclear facilities stand just offshore.

Check out Niall Ferguson's excellent article on the subject in YESTERDAY'S TELEGRAPH

It's not rocket science, is it?

Richard

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