billso.com

Sports: Major League Baseball : News: “What Piniella likes particularly about the streak is that it gives the team a point of reference for the future. The Rays have never had a lengthy period of success to fall back on during hard times. ‘Yes, this should help us when times get tough again,’ Piniella said. ‘We will be able to say, ‘We can work our way out of this because we know we can win. We’ve done it before.’ What you’d like to see (after the streak ends) is a period of .500 for a while and then set up for another hot streak. ”

Space: CNN.com - NASA: Astronauts�to�get putty�for small holes - Jun 18, 2004: “When space shuttle flights resume, the astronauts will have putty and other filler to repair cracks and small gashes in the wings, but they will not be able to patch a hole as big as the one that doomed Columbia, NASA said Friday. Michael Kostelnik, deputy associate administrator, said it is taking longer than expected to come up with a technique for wrapping a crater as big as the one gouged in Columbia’s wing by a chunk of foam last year. Engineers also are behind in designing a boom for inspecting the belly of orbiting shuttles and the undersides of the wings, Kostelnik said. NASA hopes to have the boom ready for the first post-Columbia flight, still on track for next March. Kostelnik said NASA has yet to decide what it will do if the boom is not ready by then.”

Space: Yahoo! News - NASA Ponders Shuttle Flight Without Two Key Changes: “NASA engineers are working on a repair kit that could fix a large hole in a shuttle wing’s leading edge. They are also trying to build a boom to inspect the orbiter’s underside. The tasks have proved challenging, so the space agency is considering whether it can launch the shuttles without those two upgrades.”

USA: TheStar.com - U.S. abuse may be war crime: U.N.: “The United Nations’ top human rights official says the mistreatment of Iraqi prisoners by U.S. soldiers may constitute a war crime, and he has called for the immediate naming of an international figure to oversee the situation.

Bertrand Ramcharan, acting high commissioner for human rights, acknowledged yesterday that the removal of Saddam Hussein represented ‘a major contribution to human rights in Iraq’ and that the U.S. had condemned abusive conduct and pledged to bring violators to justice.” Of course, the Bush administration has already rejected the notion that US citizens can be prosecuted for international war crimes…

Space: From the Washington Post, Board Urges Capability for In-Flight Repair: “The board investigating the Columbia disaster strongly urged NASA yesterday to develop a system to enable astronauts to inspect and repair ‘the widest practicable range’ of damage to shuttles while orbiting in space.”

I was calling the shuttle the “Space Porsche” back in 1983, as it spends much more time in the repair shop than NASA was willing to predict. Gregg Easterbrook’s 1980 article illustrated some problems that contributed to Columbia’s doomed reentry:

To truly grasp the challenge of building a space shuttle, think about its flight. The ship includes a 60-by-15-foot open space, narrow wings, and a large cabin where men must be provided that delicately slender range of temperatures and pressures they can endure. During ascent, the shuttle must withstand 3 Gs of stress — inertial drag equivalent to three times its own weight. While all five engines are screaming, there will be acoustic vibrations reaching 167 decibels, enough to kill an unprotected person. In orbit, the shuttle will drift through -250°F. vacuum, what engineers call the “cold soak.” It’s cold enough to embrittle and shatter most materials. During reentry, the ship’s skin goes from cold soak to 2,700°F., hot enough to transform many metals into Silly Putty. Then the shuttle must glide along, under control, at speeds up to Mach 25, three times faster than any other piloted aircraft has ever flown. After reentry, it cascades through the air without power; finally thunking down onto the runway at 220 m.p.h. The like-sized DC-9 lands, with power, at 130 m.p.h. Rockets are throwaway contraptions in part so that no one piece ever has to endure such a wild variety of conditions. The shuttle’s design goal is to take this nightmare ride 100 times.