This footage captures a major attack unfolding in Ukraine, with Zelensky claiming it was caused by an ICBM—missiles designed to deliver nuclear or conventional warheads and nearly impossible to intercept.
Over the years I've seen several videos of these massive transporters in action (here's one) so when this showed up in my feed it was like old home week and I had to post it. I've put up a couple of posts regarding the Topol rocket (here and here), but now it looks like the Russians are going to pull them from service. Not to worry though, they are going to replace it with another BFR (Big Fat Rocket) that is also going to be carried on a BFT (Big Fat Transporter).
New one looks just like the old one, but the Yars is a MIRV (Multiple Independent Reentry Vehicle) which means it carries not one, but several nuclear warheads. Yay.
I got to thinking about the Orion spacecraft the other day, in particular splashdown and recovery of the capsule. The US Navy had a ship standing by and they were able to successfully retrieve the capsule, which is good. But then I got to wondering about how accurate was the splashdown? Was it within a few yards of the predicted point of impact, or a few miles? Or should we be talking about hundreds of miles? I mean the thing is traveling 5 miles per second, it wouldn't take a very big mistake to have you end up on the wrong side of the world. Even if you miss your landing site by only 100 miles, it is still going to take the recovery ship hours to get to you, and that could lead to a sticky situation. One way to compensate would be to deploy several ships in the vicinity, but that would raise the cost. Sending even a small Navy ship out has got to be expensive. I wouldn't be surprised if a destroyer cost something like a million dollars a day to operate. Makes that million dollars a year to field a soldier in Afghanistan look like a real bargain.
MX re-entry vehicles over Kwajalein, following their launch aboard an MX missile some 30 minutes earlier from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California, October 1985.
So I started poking around, looking for answers, and not finding much of anything. And then, snap, I realized this is probably all classified because of nuclear warheads and ICBM-s (Inter-Continental Ballistic Missiles). You don't need to be real accurate with ICBM-s because, well, nuclear bombs. Still, you would like to be within a mile or so of your target. You can bet the military has spent billions on this very problem. When I started looking into this from the ICBM angle I found all kinds of information, everything that is except how accurate they are.
The big factors affecting reentry are the time when fire your retro-rockets, and how much you slow down. You want to be accurate about this because a little too much or too little, too soon or too late, can easily kill you. But after you've fired the retro-rockets there isn't much you can do except pray.
Except I seem to recall something about Orion being able to adjust it's attitude, which could easily affect it's trajectory, except how can you tell? GPS will be useless as the fireball you generate as you plunge into the atmosphere pretty much ruins any chance to sending or receiving any radio communications. Well, how about inertial guidance? That used to require big heavy chunks of equipment that was marginally accurate and marginally reliable, but I think we've gotten better at it. So it's not inconceivable that Orion was able to steer itself quite accurately.
Once you deploy the parachutes, you kind of lose your steering capability, but you also become much more visible, so the pickup crew should be able to find you. As if they haven't been tracking you on radar since you appeared over the horizon ten minutes ago.
Minuteman III attacks Kwajalein
This video has some odd bits, but it also has some good shots.
Total comic book action movie. The heroine is a tough girl who takes on a succession of bad guys in the close confines of the command center of the SBX, a giant floating radar station. It's kind of like a James Bond movie, lots of high tech gadgets, a plethora of bad guys, really nasty villains and a smart, savvy hero who wins against impossible odds. The fight scenes are very well done. They are almost believable, not like some of these science fiction fantasies where a hundred pound cutey takes on a dozen bruisers and knocks them down with one blow. Our girl takes a beating, but she also responds in kind and manages to defeat them using skill and whatever material is within her reach. She does have a problem with running out of bullets at the wrong time. A little ammunition management would have helped, but I imagine that might be a little difficult to enforce in the middle of a fire fight.
The entire show (well, 90% of it) takes place in the command center. A rather small room filled with computers and radar displays and manned by 3 or 4 people. Entrance to the room is through two super-fancy security doors. Bad guys don't care, they have a cutting torch. Zero hour is approaching and they haven't finished cutting through the second door, so it looks like their fancy scheme will come to naught, but then a ninja jumps up from a hatch in the floor. Criminently, that looks like a weak point in the control room's security. Then we look down through the hatch and it's a straight drop to the water a hundred feet down. Evidently this ninja is Spider Man because he was able to crawl along the underside of the platform.
SBX
Later on, we open a hatch in the ceiling that gives us access to the upper deck. For all the planning the bad guys have supposedly done, you'd think they would have thought of this. Stupid bad guys.
The highlight of show is when our girl climbs up a ladder attached to the side of one of the supporting pylons. That's no small feat, it is at least a hundred feet straight up, and she does it with a broken arm that is just hanging by her side. Then she has to follow the ninja's path across the underside of the deck. Seems that someone thoughtfully provided a set of monkey bars and she manages to traverse them, once again one handed. In case your hands aren't sweaty enough she gets to a place were a couple of bars are missing, so she has to really swing to throw herself across the gap. Criminently, who is this chick? And was that a real stunt? Her name is Elsa Pataky and Netflix Tudum has the story.
The SBX is a real thing, though I don't think there are any missiles on board. The movie version has a bunch of anti-ICBM missiles, kind of like you might have on a G.I. Joe toy. Our real anti-ICBM missiles are carried on ships. We might have some on land bases but I'm not too sure about that.
The whole anti-missile missile thing is kind of iffy at best. They whiz kids in the military industrial complex have been working on the problem for years and they have some missiles that they have demonstrated successfully, but we don't know how reliable they are. A demonstration is one thing, but how well would they work against a real attack? Here's hoping we never find out. Then there's the problem of quantity. Russia has a zillion ICBM's. How many anti-missile missiles do we have? Assuming the missiles worked reliably, do we have enough to stop an attack? And how many do you need if the missiles are not reliable? And how do you demonstrate that your missiles are reliable enough to justify spending a zillion dollars to build up your inventory? I don't think Biden cares, he seems bent on armageddon.
Compared to some of the stuff the US Military did during the cold war, this one isn't too bad, it probably didn't cost more than a few million dollars. The Aviationist has the story:
In 1974, the U.S. thought that the best way to preserve its ICBMs (Inter Continental Ballistic Missiles) from Soviet nuclear strikes was to load them in C-5 Galaxy airlifters and keep them on the move. A three-stage Minuteman, 56 feet in length and 86,000 pounds in weight, was attached to some parachutes that could drag it out of the cargo hold and then point it upward, then it was loaded into a Galaxy and air launched over the Pacific from the aircraft: a timer ignited the rocket motor and the missile flew for about 25 seconds before it cascaded into the Pacific Ocean.
An ICBM loaded into the silo of the Titan Missile Museum in Tucson, AZ. August 2005.
Cousin John & Iaman paid a visit to the Titan Missile Museum Green Valley, Arizona.
I recommend a visit be mandatory for all citizens of Nuclear countries.
Very sobering , especially the museum depicting the early age of ICBM reality.
Launch crews would not feel hear anything during a launch, they then would be vaporized by a incoming ground burst enemy weapon.
Launch crews shifts 24 on 48 off, their families always exposed for annihilation.
The launch code originated at Offut AFB or another location, without the code the crew could not launch.
A ~6" Butterfly opening allowing the combining of fuel and oxidizer was the rocket igniter. All safe guards were protecting this key link, six false launch attempts the valve would be permanently locked out with a pin, requiring a team to enter the missile and reset.
The guide was a veteran having served in launch facilities, intelligent and articulate about every aspect of the facility, I asked him if the crew would discuss the consequences of their launching missiles, he said "oh yes, quite often".
The Missiles and sites were serviced by a 400 man contingent from a airbase 20 miles away where redundant parts and systems where kept.
The launch of the Titan Missile could occur within 58 seconds of receiving a launch command.
Testing proved the ICBMs had a 86% chance of making it to their targets, as witnessed by our enemies.
The crews never knew their target. The launch crew would select one of three predetermined, anonymous, targets as well as the altitude for detonation: air-burst for cities or ground burst for hardened targets like missile silos.
The socket that was dropped, causing a catastrophic explosion was a big-un, 3 or 4 inches.
Under SAC’s “no-lone” zone, both an officer and enlisted person remained on duty at all times.
The aging titan systems 6-man crew to one missile was phased out in favor of a newer 2-man crew for 10 missiles.
The site was built in the desert, then homebuilders surrounded it with developments, schools, parks and shopping centers, all within a hour of being vaporized.
Funny, I remember the story about the socket wrench being dropped, at least vaguely. The Encyclopedia of Arkansas History and Culture has the story (yes, it happened in Arkansas). I thought this bit was telling:
At about 3:00 a.m., the two men returned to the surface to await further instructions. Just as they sat down on the concrete edge of the access portal, the missile exploded, blowing the 740-ton launch duct closure door 200 feet into the air and some 600 feet northeast of the launch complex. The W-53 nuclear warhead landed about 100 feet from the launch complex’s entry gate; its safety features operated correctly and prevented any loss of radioactive material.
So a Titan II is powerful enough to put a 5 ton bomb into orbit, or chunk a 1,000 ton rock 100 feet into the air. Huh.
WW1 submarines had torpedoes. WW2 submarines had torpedoes. Then we got the atomic bomb, the cold war, ICBM's and somebody got the idea of stuffing ICBM's into submarines, which is how we got the ginormous missile subs. Missile subs carried their missiles in two long rows aft of the sail, control room and crew quarters. And that's where my knowledge stopped until today when this picture pops up on daily timewaster. The USS Oklahoma is a Los Angeles class attack submarine and it carries a dozen Tomahawk missiles in its nose. The Oklahoma was launched in 1985 which just goes to show how outdated my knowledge was.
In early 2007, Oklahoma City became the first submarine certified to exclusively use Digital Nautical Charts (DNCs), using the Voyage Management System (VMS). VMS is part of the Electronic Chart Display and Information System-Navy (ECDIS-N) system, which has been under development since 1990. The shift from traditional paper navigation to an all-electronic navigation suite marked the first significant shift in U.S. Navy navigation practices since the introduction of the Global Positioning System (GPS) in the 1990s.
The Unwanted Blog has a post up about Chinese FOBS (Fractional Orbital Bombardment Systems) that might keep you up at night, that is, if end-of-world, apocalyptic destruction is something you worry about. I tend to leave those kind of worries to the professionals in the defense department. It is a little worrisome when we have a clown show that is purported to be in charge, but I suspect that the fools we see and hear are only a thin layer of icing on a very substantial cake. I think they will be scraped off and tossed in the garbage sometime in the next few years. I like to think that the cake is substantial and will not be affected by the idiocy in the icing. Yes, I may be delusional.
Anyway, somehow I never considered that ICBMs (Inter-Continental Ballistic Missiles) flew so much higher than a LEO (Low Earth Orbit), so this picture was illuminating.
The science fiction novel Too Like The Lightning by Ada Palmer is set 500 years in the future here on planet Earth. The situation is much like it is now, but technology is more advanced, there are more people, and we still have high-powered political rivalries. There have been wars and disasters but the great seething mass of humanity continues to muddle along.
Flying cars are now commonplace. At any moment there are something like 800 million people traveling in the air*. Most trips are short range, but crossing the oceans is not a problem and if you were to watch the traffic patterns you would see the oceans covered with the tracks of aircraft.
While we like the sea, it can still be a very dangerous place, and while we sometimes need a little peace and quiet, we also need some stimulation, which usually means interacting with other people, so while we could stop in mid-ocean for a little quiet reflection, mostly we don't. We want to get across the ocean to where there are other people doing stuff, like cooking something good to eat. Mmmm, weird food.
Elon Musk wants to use SpaceX rockets to travel anywhere on Earth
Ocean liners were our first attempt at transporting people across the ocean on an on-demand basis. Then came flying boats and now we have jet airliners. You may heard about Elon Musk's idea to use ICBM's to transport people around the world. Crazy, but I suppose it could happen, right? I mean a hundred years ago who wooda thunk a week's wages could get you across the ocean in a day? Okay, a previous incarnation of Elon Musk probably thought it.
The problem with crossing the oceans in an airplane is that it takes a long time, and while you are traveling you are confined to a relatively small space. Okay, coach is more like cruel and unusual punishment. If you've ever flown coach you know what it's like, so you have no one to blame but your own desire to be somewhere else, like Australia.
We have airplanes that go fast enough to cross the ocean quickly, but I don't think there is a single one that has the range. Plus they are gas guzzlers. No one wants to foot their fuel bill. That's why we have congress so they talk each other into allocating the funds.
Is a flying car that could cross oceans even feasible? Well, we have business jets, and I am sure there are some that are capable of long ranges. But they are still subsonic, so ocean crossings are still going to take hours and hours and you are still confined to a cell, a plush, comfy cell, but still a cell. No thank you. I like to be able to get up and walk around every once in a while.
A super-sonic flying car would fit the bill. Some people are talking about building supersonic business jets and that may be the next step, but it's a very energy intensive kind of solution. I'm thinking a scramjet assisted Supercar might be what we want. That's going to take a while.
On the other hand, super-high altitude Zeppelins might do what we want. You get up high enough, like 70,000 feet, and the air gets thin enough that you should be able to push your Zeppelin along at current airliner speeds. And with something the size of a Zeppelin, you would have enough room to walk around so you could work out the kinks you acquire squoze into your comfort cell.
We tested the US Military’s secret space weapon
Veritasium
I first came across the idea of using heavy metal rods dropped from space as a weapon in Footfall, a science fiction novel by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle. It sounded like a great idea, simple, inexpensive and devastatingly effective. Derek tries to demonstrate it but fails. He might have done better with some kind of guidance system and some steerable fins. However, while there might be cases where it could be useful, he goes on to explain that for any of the proposed uses, it's not going to be all that effective. I think the biggest objection is that pound for pound, nuclear weapons are much more devastating. An ICBM might carry a ten ton payload. That would be enough to launch one big tungsten rod or half a dozen nuclear weapons. And while you aren't going to get any radioactive fallout from a ten ton kinetic weapon, I'm not sure that argument will carry any weight when you are bent on destroying your enemy.
Came across this video the other day and at first I didn't think much of it. The first time you see it being set off it happens so fast that there is hardly anything to see, but then the slow motion replays start and, yes, you can see the Christmas tree shape. Detonation Cord is a plastic tube filled with a high explosive. Once you set off detonation cord, the explosion travels down the cord very quickly, faster than anything else on Earth except maybe electricity, light or thought. Much faster than a speeding bullet, faster than an ICBM. The speed of detonation is right up there with the orbital velocity of satellites, as in miles per second.
I'm guessing RatedRR (the guy who made this video) used a couple of hundred feet of Det Cord in his Christmas Tree, so the whole thing blew in like one one-hundredth of a second (25,000 / 200 = 125). The first slow motion explosion takes 15 seconds of video time, and given a frame rate of 24 frames per second, that means his camera was operating at 45,000 (125 * 24 * 15) frames per second. You aren't going to find a camera capable of these kind of speeds at your local Target, at least not this week. Access to high explosives and super-high speed cameras kind of makes me think he has military grade connections.
These high explosives are really very strange substances. You can do pert near anything you want to them, hit, cut, punch, shoot or burn and they will just lie there and take it. It takes a blasting cap or some other kind of high explosive to set them off. Very strange stuff indeed.
The doomsday clock is still ticking. North Korea has launched a satellite into orbit. No mean feat considering it's the middle of winter in North Korea. Remember Frozen Chosin? The Washington Post has a story about this story. Some people are really excited about this rocket launch.
I find it curious that any number of countries can build nuclear bombs and ICBM-s, but cannot build a decent jet engine, and by decent I just mean one that will hold together for some number of hours. The pumps used in liquid fuel rockets are essentially jet engines, but they only have to run for ten minutes or so. When the Germans introduced the Me-262 jet fighter towards the end of WW2, the engines only lasted 20 hours before they need to be overhauled. A duration of hundreds of hours, or even thousands of hours, would be preferable for an aircraft engine, but if 20 is all you've got, well, you make do. But nobody outside of the big six is even doing that, or if they are, they aren't telling anybody. I dunno, maybe they think 20 hours isn't anything to brag about.
If I built a jet engine that ran for 20 hours I would be pretty proud of myself. Of course my neighbors would probably have me shut down for disturbing the peace if I let it run more than about ten minutes.
Anyway, I decided to look up this Ukrainian outfit. There seem to be two of them, both in the same city (Zaporizhia), both building the same thing. I'm reading a short history of Lutsk Repair Plant "Motor" that lists four or five moves during WW2. Think maybe the invading Germans had something to do with that? In any case, they mention how they supplied aircraft for the battle at Voronezh, which I had never heard of. Seems the Germans used it as a big staging area for the battle of Stalingrad.
Voronezh is near the top center. Azov is not shown, but is just downstream from Rostov on the Sea of Azov. Google Maps does a poor job of showing rivers.
Voronezh looks like a really weird place to build big sailing ships being as there is no open water for hundreds of miles. All there is is the River Don, and it looks like you have pert near a thousand miles of river to traverse before you get to Azov and your fight with the Turks. One description of the battle mentions galleys, which are just big rowboats, which would make a lot more sense on a river. But hey, who am I to complain if Pete wants to sail giant square rigged sailing ships down the river?
Iran's Space Launch Center. Zoom out to see nearby associated sites. I think Point 9 was used for the Monday's launch, it's the only one without any tall buildings.
Working from an Israeli news video, I was able to locate Iran's space center. It would have been easier if I had found NTI's video (top) sooner.
Meanwhile, REAL TIME SATELLITE TRACKING AND PREDICTIONS told me about Space-Track dot org, which is US Government website which is the font of all active satellite tracking data. It requires signing up, which entails agreeing to their terms, and since it's the US Government, you probably should read what you are agreeing to. I looked at it and decided I didn't want to know all that, so I didn't sign. Besides, if automatic posting services like NASA's can't get the info, am I going to have any better luck?
P.S. Embedding a Google map requires more hand work these days. This forum post explains the magic codes you need to make it work. I did this one by trial and error and it took a while. If I had been able to find the latitude and longitude, it would have gone much quicker. That's a medium size 'if'. Besides, I wanted to see if I could do it. Kind of like playing solitaire, but with a purpose.
Finally got around to watching Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol this weekend. The DVD from Netflix has been sitting on the table for at least a month. Well, we were busy with Damages. Can't watch everything all at once.
There are some pretty realistic shots of an SLBM (Submarine Launched Ballistic Missile) flight during the last part of the movie. Naturally, it is interlaced with the climatic fight scene between our hero and the really nasty-ass villain.
During the missile's flight, it ignites a second stage, which surprised me. I thought all ICBM's, and especially SLBM's were single stage rockets. I figured Hollywood just added that to have something to show. I mean a missile just gliding along isn't that interesting. Turns out I'm wrong. All current US and Russian SLBM's use three stages.
They did get the re-entry scene wrong. When these things re-enter the atmosphere they are hustling along at a pretty good clip, like several miles per second. At those speeds friction with the air is going to heat up the warhead until it is glowing bright red. No sign of any re-entry heating in the movie.
Another thing was how long the final pursuit and fight lasted. You know how these scenes go in movies, they seem to go on forever. You know the hero will prevail, but they keep you on the edge of your seat for what seems like forever. You're pretty sure that if this was real life, the bomb would have gone off hours ago, and all this fighting would be for naught. Not quite the case. Ballistic missile flight times are on the order of 30 minutes from ignition to detonation, so in this case the time frame was plausible.
Ethan (Tom Cruise) made the mistake of not finishing off the bad guy before attempting to abort the missile. If he had just concentrated on doing one thing at a time, the fight would have been over much sooner and he would have had plenty of time to deal with the missile. But then we wouldn't have been on the edge of our seats as long.
SLBM's owe their existence to MAD, the policy of Mutually Asssured Destruction. MAD is just that: mad, as in insane. I can see where you might want to maintain the capability of building and delivering nuclear weapons, but keeping a whole arsenal of the things primed and ready for launch at a moments notice is just asking for trouble. Yes, someone could launch an attack and destroy every large city in our country and do it without fear of immediate retaliation. But what would that gain them? And how long would it be before the survivors, however few there were, found a method for exacting revenge? And how would the rest of the world treat someone who had unleashed a nuclear holocaust on us? Sure, a few nut cases might celebrate, but most nations would wonder who was next on the agressor's list. Having a bunch of nuclear missiles on hand, primed and ready to go, is a bad, bad, bad idea. If we removed all of our nuclear weapons from front line deployment, other nations might follow our lead.
Update: It occured to me that final impact sequence was wrong as well. Anything going as fast as it should have been would only have been a momentary streak and it's impact in S.F. bay would have created an explosion of steam and a mini-Tsunami that would have rocked every boat in the bay, at the least.
The ship is the USS Kearsarge, an amphibious assault ship. It looks sort of like an aircraft carrier, but it is not as big and does not have a catapult, so the only aircraft it carries must be capable of short or vertical take off, like helicopters, the Osprey and the Harrier.
I didn't realize the Suez canal was so long, nor that there was a lake in the middle. Two lakes, actually. The video is only one minute long, but we are flying. The canal is 120 miles long and transit normally takes upwards of 12 hours, so the ship is traveling at a real speed of 8 or 9 knots. Our virtual speed is up around 500 feet per video frame, or Mach 10, which is like an ICBM.
