JamesCronen.com

Today is a historic day in space flight. Approximately two hours ago, Space Exploration Technologies (SpaceX) successfully launched its Falcon 1 into Earth orbit. It was the fourth attempt for the Falcon 1, the three previous attempts ending in failure.

This is tremendous news.

NASA has been the leader in space flight for more than fifty years. Originally created fifty years ago, its purpose was to guide America into space. And while we’re going there, we might as well go fast — our mortal enemies, the Soviet Union, surprised the heck out of us by putting Sputnik 1, the first man-made satellite, into Earth orbit before we even had a clue what was going on.

Much of the early work in space flight was done for the purpose of national hubris. There was no real need to go into space, other than for national defense. Weapons in space hadn’t been outlawed (until 1967), and leaders of both nations recognized that it was real easy to attack the other from directly overhead. This fear propelled both nations to work incredibly hard at their space programs.

President Kennedy famously promised in 1961 that America would put men on the moon by the end of the decade. This mandate provided a meaningful goal (on a very tight time schedule).

As you already know, we did it. Six times, in fact. The Soviets never managed to pull it off. That was about it for the space race — the Americans were superior.

The Space Shuttle program was begun in the mid-1970s to produce a reusable vehicle that could be used to reach orbit. The Space Shuttle has been a great success. While there have been two notable accidents, there have also been about a hundred successful flights. Some Shuttles are nearing 30 years old and are in need of retirement.

NASA’s done a great job in getting us into space, but it’s not without its problems. The Challenger disaster in 1986 has been blamed primarily on political pressure to get the Shuttle off the ground at all costs. Engineers who felt the boosters’ shrunken O-rings should have been inspected were silenced. Columbia’s 2002 breakup on re-entry was also due to management — a few engineers had debated the problem, but were eventually convinced by superiors that the problem of foam breaking free of the external tank was not a serious problem.

NASA has suffered the same plight of any other governmental organization — politics. Politicians have tried to use NASA to further their political causes; either to its ultimate benefit (Pres. Kennedy and Nixon, most notably) or to its detriment (our current President). Currently rumors abound that NASA is being censored by the Bush administration because some the key tenets that scientists know are true are at direct odds with fundamentalist Christian beliefs that the Earth is only 6,000 years old.

NASA is expensive. All those checks and balances needed to be completely and absolutely sure that NASA isn’t wasting taxpayer money? Yeah, they cost taxpayer money.

NASA can’t be risky. A government project can’t afford failure. Bush mentioned a few years back that it should be NASA’s goal to put men on Mars by 2020. But why is this necessary? Manned missions are dangerous and exceptionally costly. When lives are at stake, no one can afford failure. Bush’s insistence of sending men to Mars is reckless, and severely disturbs NASA’s priorities. We’ve had rovers basically doing the work of men on Mars since Sojourner in 1997. Rovers are effective because the missions were (relatively) simple — get off the ground, land on Mars (admittedly the hard part), deploy the rover, beam data back to Earth, go out for celebratory drinks. Rovers don’t require life support or a vehicle to return home, so the missions are inherently much less complex. Requiring that men travel to Mars is unnecessarily dangerous and detours NASA from more attainable goals that will benefit more people.

Besides, what’s wrong with failure? So long as lives are not on the line, failure is an acceptable (and necessary) part of any large-scale project. Organizations learn a lot from failure. Any entrepreneur will tell you that she has failed multiple times on the road to success. Business can allow this failure; government programs cannot. Government progress must therefore be slower and much more expensive than business’ so as not to allow failure in any way.

NASA has had its day, but there’s got to be a better way to do all this. Why does each shuttle flight cost a billion dollars? Can’t we do it more safely for less money? Of course — privatization. Have companies compete and see who can do the best job for less.

Privatization of space travel is important. Companies can take risks that lead to cheaper rockets and more daring design decisions. Corporations can bargain for deals on parts in the way that the federal government can’t. Companies don’t have to impress politicians, administrators, and citizens — only their owners. Finally, companies can afford to hire top talent without being restricted to a government salary scale. The laws of supply-and-demand are in full effect.

Congratulations to owner Elon Musk and SpaceX for their accomplishment. Today’s first step is a huge one in making privatized space flight a reality. The world and I wait anxiously as the next era of space flight begins.

A prominent local chain of dry cleaners has recently changed its name from Kem Cleaners to Greener Cleaners.

The company’s “story” says that they’ve been in business for over 60 years. That puts their founding just after World War II. Technology had won a long and costly war. “Better living through chemistry” became a catchphrase during this time, and as we look back, became an unofficial motto of the 1950s. New and exciting plastics were created and marketed during this time, and chemistry became the pathway to the future.

Chemists now seek to solve different problems. Rather than producing cheap consumables, companies need to produce sustainable products. Chemistry allows us to analyze the entire lifecycle of a product, not just find the cheapest way to manufacture it. Packaging using paper, cardboard, or even glass seemed antiquated in the 1950s. Now companies seek to find more environmentally-sound methods for packaging their wares.

And the association with chemistry, still in the minds of non-scientists as the dead-end road that “old chemistry” now is, could be a death-knell for a business trying to stay alive in a competitive climate.

A couple generations worth of enlightenment results in a tremendous change in viewpoint.

Let’s say that you were an alien and you were transported to Earth well before humankind existed. (Don’t you love how serious physics discussions usually start with a completely ridiculous supposition?)

Since we want to be able to measure everything around us, it makes sense that we should be able to quantify the amount of time that passes between events. But how?

For one thing, there’s an enormous change in one’s environment every once in a while. Namely, the Sun appears in the sky and then goes away. This happens fairly frequently. Let’s say you call this unit of time a “day”.

Being an astute observer, you then notice this other celestial body hanging up in the sky, which you call the “Moon”. The Moon appears variously as some fraction of a complete circle. Sometimes it completely goes away, and other times it is virtually a perfect circle. In between, it looks something like a crescent-shape. You call these shapes “phases” of the Moon. A Moon that’s 100% visible is called a “Full Moon”, while a Moon that’s completely gone is a “New Moon”.

Now you’ve been on Earth a while, and you’ve seen these patterns occur. And it dawns on you that maybe there’s some regularity to the Moon’s phases. Between two full moons you note that there are between 29 and 30 days. Perfect. Let’s call this unit of time, based on the moon, a “Moonth” (but we’ll shorten it to “Month” just because).

So, let’s start measuring time. You deem today to be an important day, since the moon is full, and so you call it “1/1″ — the first day of the first month. On “1/30″, the thirtieth day of the first month, there’s a full moon about halfway through the day. So the next day will be “2/1″, the first day of the second month. But now, since we’re already “ahead” by half a day, the moon will be full as of the end of “2/29″. (Remember, the last full moon actually occurred about halfway through “1/30″, not at the start of “2/1″.) There’s no need for a “2/30″ (since the moon is already full), and so the day after “2/29″ is “3/1″.

We can keep this up for a while, alternating 30-day and 29-day months. After twelve of these months, we’ll notice that the weather’s about the same, the crops are about in the same place of their development, and the Sun is about in the same point in the sky at the middle of each day. This is also a convenient marker, so we’ll call this amount of time a “Year”.

So to sum up, the year has six months of 30 days and six months of 29 days, which we add up to be 354 days. Days are a lot easier to keep track of than months anyway, so we’ll call 354 days our year and be done with it. Great, now we have our system of time!

Not so fast.

First of all, we would notice after a couple years that the date we call “1/1″ each year will have a slightly different climate. The Sun is not exactly at the same point in the sky each “1/1″. If “1/1″ is during the hot summer one year, then sixteen years later “1/1″ will fall on a cold winter day.

This might not bother some people. After all, dates are essentially just numbers. But now that you’ve been on Earth a while, you and your offspring and others’ offspring have begun to have governments and other civil structures such that it might be convenient to have the months line up with the same season each year.

So let’s take a step back and figure out how we need to add or subtract days to make the months match the seasons. After a little trial-and-error and a little astronomical surveying, we realize that there is an eleven day difference between our year and the astronomical year.

We have a couple of options at this point.

We have a twelve-month calendar, and we need to add eleven days. So, let’s add a day to every month but one. Instead of having months of alternating 30 and 29 days, we’ll have eleven months of alternating 31 and 30 days, and a month of 29 days. That makes for 365 days in a year, and that makes our months match our seasons (pretty closely, anyhow).

Another option could be to take those 11 days and make a new month out of them. It would be annoying to have months of 30, 29, 30, 29, 11, 30, 29, et cetera, but we could handle it. It might be less of a headache to instead make a 33-day month every third year. That way months are more-or-less the same length, and our months will match our seasons for quite a while. This extra, occasional month is called an “Intercalary Month”.

We’re off by a bit, but our error is slowly decreasing. I could go on, but this little example more-or-less demonstrates the evolution of our modern calendar systems. Leap years (and more recently leap seconds) are continued attempts at making sure our system of measuring time matches the motions of the Earth in its orbit around the Sun.

What does this have to do with Easter?

Religious institutions tend to prefer a lunar month. The Muslim calendar is purely lunar — the holy fasting month of Ramadan falls at a different time each year. My Muslim friends during my freshman year of college (1992-1993) celebrated Ramadan during the months of March and April. In 2008 the first day of the lunar month of Ramadan will be on September 2. It’s been almost sixteen years, and so the month of Ramadan has migrated across half the calendar in that time.

The Hebrew calendar is based on the intercalary month calendar described above. The calendar is essentially lunar, but an extra month is added seven times each nineteen years. The extra month is added as the twelfth month of the calendar and called “Adar I”; the usual twelfth month (just “Adar”) becomes the thirteenth month and is named “Adar II”.

The Christian calendar was pegged to the solar calendar due to the influence of Rome. The Julian calendar, the leading political calendar at the time of the spread of Christianity, became the Christian calendar.

Easter is the only Christian holiday to be based on a lunar standard. (There are other so-called “moveable feasts” in the Christian calendar, but they’re all based off of Easter’s date so that doesn’t count.) In order to guarantee that Easter falls in the springtime, its date was set to be the date of the first full moon after the vernal equinox, March 21.

Easter was not always a Sunday. In about the second or third century AD, the festival was moved to a Sunday, so the official definition of Easter became “the first Sunday after the first full moon after the vernal equinox.”

If you’re up to a challenge, you can see the “real” rules for dealing with Easter calculations on Wikipedia. The rules are called the computus and are really tough to follow. (I have a couple degrees in physics and started to zone out around the third paragraph. So read at your own risk.)

This means that Easter can fall as early as March 22 (if the full moon occurs on the vernal equinox which is a Saturday) or as late as April 25 (if the moon is one-day past full on the equinox and that happens to fall on a Sunday).

Why is Easter so early this year? Because we’re lucky, that’s why.