Engineer

Highly accessible and memorable

Revisado: 09-08-16

This story has a lot of memorable vignettes solving each of several major challenges involved in getting to and establishing the survivability of space.

It tells the story of a bunch of, initially, idealistic starstruck German amateurs in their continuous voyage of improved rocket capability (gyroscopes, shapes, more reliable liquid fuel engines, etc) in the context of their being coopted into the military, which was then taken over by the Nazis, whom then used slave labor to built their rockets with which to bombard London rather than space. They were finally exported to the US, wherein Von Braun, their most noted engineer, was the later architect of the Saturn 5, which got us to the moon.

It tells the story of the man high project, whereby humans were carried, with life support, in high altitude balloons to the threshold of space. It tells the story of a crazy air force doctor who stopped himself in a rocket cart with a deceleration of over 45 g to prove that extreme accelerations are not necessarily lethal.

It also involves interesting discussions of how the speed of sound was broken in manned craft for the first time (by modeling them off of the shapes of rockets; placing models on rockets; dropping rocket planes from conventional planes).

All in all, one of the best books written about a NASA-related subject on audible. I wish it were longer.

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Complexity conquered at great expense

Revisado: 09-08-16

The Curiosity rover was incredibly ambitious. Consequently, it was incredibly risky and from a budgetary perspective perhaps a failure: it cost too much and it took too long to manufacture. The space industry is plagued by the conflicting desires to be innovative, state of the art, and consistently successful in the production of distinct missions/spacecraft launched only once or twice. Thus, every contingency must be thought of, tested for, and troubleshot while operating at least partially novel systems.

Nevertheless, much is conserved between missions. This is why Opportunity and Spirit were cheap - their landing method was largely derivative of pathfinders. The curiosity rover required a new landing method (a la 7 minutes of terror), a more precise landing (accomplished via aerobraking), and a much greater variety of state of the art instruments. This was predictably hard, expensive, and time consuming - and thus predictably coincided with management pulling its hair out at the thought of failure, cost overruns preventing other missions from launching, and and the uncompromising deadlines of celestial transit windows (the planets align optimally only once every 2 years). A single error in a complex, mass impoverished (and thus back up limited), system can ruin the whole mission.

This is primarily what the book is about. And, unfortunately, to land people they will need to invent a new landing method yet again, probably using retrorockets. Hopefully spaceX will implement that system with its 2018 mission.

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Mostly esoteric, but fun

Revisado: 09-08-16

Jim Bell is a planetary scientist, not an engineer, so the book mostly focuses on the discoveries made by the Voyager spacecraft rather than the laborious design and troubleshooting process involved in ensuring that the crafts survive and fulfill their objectives. Thus, one could contrast this with Rob Manning's book on the Curiosity rover (of which he is the chief engineer).

What the voyagers discovered was a lot of strange and alien geology, about which we are still largely ignorant owing to the great cost, diversified focus, and thus rare visits of/by subsequent missions. This is cool, per instance apparently different temperature regimes and local volatiles ensure a great variety of different volcanos in the solar system - those of water, methane, and ammonia.

These new worlds are very far away and are the focus of scant attention compared to Mars. Since voyager, we haven't even gone to Uranus or Neptune with probes. It will be a long time before people travel to them, if they ever do, so learning about them is sort of reminiscent of science fiction.

The most significant near-term influence they could have on our culture is if life were discovered on Enceladus or Europa or Titan or another of the numerous candidate worlds. But without an increase in budgets or a decrease in costs, it seems unlikely we will do in depth surveys any time soon.

Aside from that, there are also pretensions to communicating with aliens via the famed golden discs that are virtually immortal. Bell thinks we are more likely to recover the discs than are aliens, and i'm inclined to agree.

One of the greatest achievements of the Voyagers is that they, objects from the 70s that are over 10 billion miles away, are still functioning.

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A Surgeon's Illness

Revisado: 09-07-16

Compared to Emperor of All Maladies, this book was more people-oriented. It is also more surgery-oriented because heart disease tends to be caused by mechanical defects amenable to surgical interventions. Drugs mostly play a supporting role - dissolving clots and reducing cholesterol. Cellular/molecular details of the illness are mostly neglected as they feature less prominently and more recently.

My impression from both books is that surgeons are, as you would expect, the jocks of the medical profession. Some of them are wonderful humanitarians, but many are also or primarily competitive or even grossly selfish. And as is typical of applied medicine, and especially of applied innovations in medicine, they require a strong stomach. No matter how good a doctor for a frequently terminal illness is, some of his patients will die due to his mistakes, and he or she has to live with that while remaining productive.

The surgical innovators of this book have it even worse than the normal practicing surgeon because they are learning on living subjects. Although these subjects were generally terminally ill, the innovative surgeon may be the immediate cause of many deaths before he perfects his procedure. Further, given the risks and initial outcomes involved, prior to success, he or she is likely to be a pariah to his peers.

Heart disease is a big deal - it and cancer each kill about 600,000 Americans a year. Forrester is optimistic that it will be overtaken by cancer as the leading cause of death in the near future. Maybe so, but the longer we live, the harder it is to treat or prevent such illnesses - hence success may have to be defined by modest improvements in longevity and eliminating young deaths. We are not, after all, immortal.

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