the man who saved the world

Outside of our usual sphere of coverage, but nevertheless worth thinking about. In 1983 the world nearly came to an end. At the Russian equivalent of NORAD, alarms sounded indicating that the United States had launch a missile strike against the Soviet Union. In fact, it was faulty technology. But the effect would have been the same, if not for Stanislav Petrov’s intuition and refusal to follow orders blindly.

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Russia Unleashes Cyberwar on Estonia

The BBC reports that Russia has unleashed cyberwar on Estonia in retaliation for the Baltic country's moving of a Soviet-occupation era memorial that the Russian government says symbolizes war dead but that for Estonia symbolizes occupation. Unlike Russia (or LIthuania for that matter) Estonia is one of the most networked countries in Europe. Is this the first case of cyberwar? Politically acceptable dirty tricks? Well, I suppose it's better than the U.S.'s debacle in Iraq.

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desert america @ columbia university gsapp

On Monday, November 20, 2006 at 6:30pm, I will be speaking as part of the American launch of Desert America: Territory of Paradox , a new book from ACTAR in which I have a piece about the Mojave desert and SpaceShipOne while AUDC analyzes the instant city of Quartzsite, Arizona.

The press release follows:

Desert America takes on the discussion of the American desert as a space of extreme uses and activities. The desert is a huge paradox: beneath the immensity and silence of its outward appearance, the traces of all kinds of activities, experiments, mysteries, fictions and utopias can be heard. Far from being “empty,” the desert is full of an uninhibited, excessive activity that encompasses everything from oases of entertainment to the secret staging of military power. The most hostile and seemingly uninhabitable of environments turns out to be an ideal setting for action.

Speakers:

Michael Bell, ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR OF ARCHITECTURE, GSAPP
Sanford Kwinter, ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR OF ARCHITECTURE, RICE UNIVERSITY
Kate Orff, DIRECTOR, URBAN LANDSCAPE RESEARCH LAB, GSAPP
Kazys Varnelis, DIRECTOR, NETWORK ARCHITECTURE LAB, GSAPP
Moderated by Michael Kubo, DIRECTOR, ACTAR NEW YORK

Event co-sponsored by ACTAR to celebrate the publication of its new title, Desert America: Territory of Paradox.

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Baran’s Revenge: Underground Cold War Nerve Center Retired

Built to withstand nuclear attack during the Cold War, NORAD's underground nerve center in Cheyenne Mountain is being retired. See this article from CNN, from which the following quote is taken:

"In today's Netted, distributed world we can do very good work on a broad range of media right here," Adm. Timothy Keating, commander of the North American Aerospace Defense Command, or NORAD, said from his Peterson headquarters. "Right there at that desk, including one push-button to the president."

It only took forty-two years for Paul Baran's insights about the greater survivability of distributed communications in crisis situations to be realized.

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Blackstar Real or Fantasy?

One of my secret obsessions is the history of space programs. I’ve never managed to do anything with it in my academic work, but I have my hopes. Late last night I was browsing through sci.space.history, a USENET group that still is a great source for information on the topic when I ran across this thread, referring me to a lengthy Aviation Week and Space Technology story on a secret government space plane called Blackstar.

Now AWST isn’t the Inquirer. On the contrary, it’s published by McGraw-Hill and its usual readers are people in the industry or the government. But if this piece, by William B. Scott, a senior editor of the journal, is to be believed, a two stage-to-orbit space plane was developed in the 1980s and may have become operational in the 1990s only to be cancelled recently.

As the piece details, the program was built in response to the loss of the Challenger and subsequent military concern about access to space. During an ultra-secret crash development program, the SR-3, a mothership based on the XB-70 Valkyrie bomber and the XOV, a low-Earth orbiter derived from the X-20A Dynasoar were developed.

xb-70 taking off

This isn’t all that far-fetched, Scott suggests, both projects were well under development in the 1960s and there was talk about launching the Dynasoar from the XB-70 at altitude, much as SpaceShipOne was launched from the White Knight carrier (wondering aloud: is Blackstar something an inspiration for Rutan? … of course White Knight flies at sub-Mach speeds and the Blackstar mothership would have flown at Mach 3 or above and SpaceShipOne is incapable of orbit, but still … if anyone could take the general idea of Blackstar and run with it, if only to taunt the Feds, it would be Rutan). The small orbiter would be able to slip into space, make a lightening-fast overflight of a site and return to a horizontal runway. Other applications suggest launching small satellites from its payload bay and retrieving and servicing satellites and perhaps even a role as a weapons platform.

dynasoar x20

Pentagon officials, the article reports, think that the project may have been owned and operated by companies, not by the government to ensure plausible deniability of its existence. Top military space commanders remained in the dark about Blackstar, which may have been operated by an intelligence agency. Blackstar’s existence would explain the mysterious retirement of the Lockheed SR-71 reconnaissance plane in 1990. Observers have long wondered why this program was cancelled. The article concludes with a discussion of sightings of mystery aircraft.

The article is certainly filled with conjecture and speculation. Noted space analyst James Oberg was skeptical, and cites sources saying it was simply unworkable due to the laws of physics. Dwayne A. Day in The Space Review ripped the Aviation Week article, suggesting that the journal also published a mistaken story about a Soviet nuclear bomber in 1958 and then giving evidence as to why the story couldn’t be true. Maybe Oberg and Day are right, but AWST is a major publication, not the Inquirer and if Day suggests Scott has been barking up the wrong tree since the 90s, Scott’s position is that he has 16 years of files and wants to present that research. Day makes a lot of noise about the government officials being anonymous, but last I heard, it was still illegal to reveal classified information.

Some of the posters on USENET suggest that there is a reason for this leak now. Perhaps it is because the program is operational and in being cancelled will deprive some corporation of a large contract. Perhaps it is an attempt to force reconsideration of the Apollo-style CEV, which seems to many like a move in the wrong direction when a smaller Dynasoar like vehicle, especially air-launched, seems like a much more attractive possibility. Maybe it’s just that some old Cold Warriors started thinking that their work wouldn’t make it into the history books.

Remarkably, however, the mainstream media have barely picked up on this story. Google news delivers very few hits on the topic, leaving me to wonder if we will ever learn the truth about Blackstar. Is it merely misguided conjecture? Or has the most important story of the US military in outer space just been broken?

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From Apples to A-Bomb Blasts

Future Feeder carries a piece on the work of MIT’s Harold E. “Doc” Edgerton. Best known for his 1964 photograph of a bullet piercing an apple, by that point Edgerton’s work with stroboscopic photography had led the Atomic Energy Commission to hire him to take high speed photographs of nuclear fireballs. In order to record such photographs, Edgerton’s firm EG&G would wind up building nuclear triggers and eventually became the prime contractor of the Nevada Test Site.
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