I believe I originally planned the Georgia trip post for Monday, and then pushed it back to Tuesday. Here it is Wednesday and I’ve finally written the darn thing. C’est la vie.
Where to start? Last Thursday morning I drove from College Station to Houston where my flight was departing. There’s an airport in College Station but it was considerably more expensive to fly out from there for some reason, so Houston Hobby it was. I’ve mentioned before that we grad students are not rich, and if all that math training is good for anything it’s good for minimizing whatever the financial equivalent of the classical action is.
An unfortunate lightning and hailstorm knocked Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson airport offline for a few hours, and so we landed at some tiny airport in Columbus for two hours before taking off again and arriving in Atlanta. Met up with some friends and wandered around downtown for a few hours and attempted to see the aquarium and the Coke Museum. Both were closed by that time - apparently Atlanta is not one of those cities that never sleep. So we had fun walking through Underground Atlanta, at which we were pretty solidly a minority. Lots of Obama shirts and such. I don’t think this is just stereotypes being expressed; later on we spent some time in blazingly white Cumming, GA and didn’t see a single McCain sticker. While it’s perfectly possible he simply appeals more to people who don’t actively participate in politics, there does seem to be an enthusiasm gap. This observation is built on anecdote, not facts, so take it for what it’s worth - not much.
Of course the reason I was in Georgia in the first place was to see my girlfriend’s sister’s wedding. The ceremony was held at the lodge in Amicalola Falls State Park, which is a really lovely place with a 700-foot waterfall. There’s a trail leading from the lodge to the base of the falls. Despite the fact that the downhill climb is in theory a perfectly natural energy-favorable process, it’s surprisingly strenuous. The uphill climb was much worse and revealed that I am in fact in tremendous need of some endurance-building exercise. The staggering amount of reception food I ate a few hours earlier probably didn’t help. Let’s see, my weight times 700 feet is about… a whopping 36 (food) calories. Oh good grief. Well, I guess the fact that the human body is not nearly 100% efficient means I actually burned a lot more than that. That’s what I’ll tell myself anyway. All in all though, it was a great experience. The wedding went without a hitch (other than the intentional one), and not only did it not have a faulty unity candle, they actually kept the dramatic moment where they inquire if anyone had a reason that the marriage should not take place. No one did. The groom and his father are both applied scientists - petroleum engineers to be specific - and we had some great conversations about the future of oil and other energy sources. We’re all big nuclear fans. As my wedding attendance goes, this was certainly one of my favorites.
The next day I arrived at the Atlanta airport at 10 AM, with my flight scheduled for departure at noon. My flight had been overbooked and I was put on standby. While I understand the efficiency rationale behind overbooking, the fact of the matter is that I paid for a seat on a certain flight and it’s frankly rather irritating that some airlines (AirTran in this case) are willing to say “Oops, it seems we’re not going to give you the service you paid good money for, despite the fact that we’d wouldn’t refund in a million years if you failed to show up for your flight.” As it was, more inclement weather delayed the arrival of our plane at our gate until about 4 PM. It would have been more tolerable to just tell us that, but instead they pushed back the estimated departure time by about 45 minutes every 45 minutes. Then with no explanation, the plane sat at the gate for another two hours while different flight crews meandered on and off. Finally at 6 we were in the air, as apparently enough people had missed their connecting flights and given up to try their luck at a later flight so that I managed to wrangle a seat on the flight for which I actually bought a ticket. To top it off, roughly 75 minutes elapsed between landing and the first luggage appearing at the baggage claim carousel. It was a rough day.
You don’t want to read about it, and at this point I’m done thinking about it.
To make up for the appalling lack of science in this post, and to continue the theme of woeful sorrow over the air transportation industry, here’s Michael Benson in the Washington Post with a proposal for the International Space Station: move it out of low Earth orbit and use it as a large spacecraft. It’s actually possible, and at any rate couldn’t be any more of a waste than it is now, draining funds that could be used for robotic science missions or (my counter-science-cultural preference) more dramatic and groundbreaking human spaceflight. Strap an ion engine on to the thing and let ‘er rip. It’s worth looking at the idea, anyway.
3 responses so far ↓
1 Uncle Al // Jul 16, 2008 at 10:47 am
Whether you are going to heaven or Hell, you first go through Atlanta. Local service is therefore predicated upon the assumption that you are dead.
International Space Station Freedom FUBAR Space Hole One Alpha is process not product. If it weren’t spam in a can it would be flying naturally normal to the surface not reaction wheel-burning tangent. Mercury ion engines dissolve the spacecraft and short out electronics. Xenon ion engines… price 100 kg of xenon. SF6 ion engines chemically erode away the engine.
http://www.mazepath.com/uncleal/nasa3.htm
The empirical solution
2 CCPhysicist // Jul 16, 2008 at 8:55 pm
The enthusiasm factor for Obama is real and well documented in polling. The best way to spot a McCain supporter is to look for someone who hasn’t scraped the W sticker off yet, and that person doesn’t actually like McCain. Others are Democrats who think Obama is Muslim. (Seriously. This is well supported by multiple polls.)
Although amusing that article is seriously flawed on the physics of interplanetary flight. Low earth orbit is, literally, halfway to anywhere. The energy needed to get to orbit is about half of what you need to get to infinity and beyond (escape energy). This is why Clarke built the Jupiter mission spacecraft in orbit. It is cheaper to use smaller, general purpose lift vehicles, particularly since launch payloads have to be aerodynamic but space vehicles don’t. The ISS is a perfect example of this principle … although it would likely break in lots of places if you tried to accelerate it out of orbit.
Warning:
You know who gets married after the girlfriend’s sister? Her sister’s sister. ;-)
PS -
The only thing worse than sitting in an airport waiting for clearance to land (these days you rarely take off without a landing slot on the other end) is spending 4 hours orbiting above the St. Louis Arch and Fermilab waiting to land at O’Hare. (Right. We went into a holding pattern over St. Louis to land in Chicago.) Those were the bad old days before Reagan broke the controller’s strike and they restructured the entire system.
3 CCPhysicist // Jul 16, 2008 at 9:06 pm
Oh, and make a note of this:
Shuttle ends in 2010. Next system is to be ready in 2015. Five years where the US cannot send anything at all to the ISS. This was also the plan when the Shuttle was designed. It was to go back to Spacelab between the last visit (1974) and its reentry (1979). The Shuttle did not fly until 1981, although that was only a test flight. Its first real flight was in 1982. You can guess that I don’t believe the 2015 date.
At least this time there is a backup plan, since the European ’space truck’ can provide the orbital boost ISS needs to stay up there.
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