The
Eclectic
Newsletter
Vol. 1, No. 2
Hello again!
Thanks for continuing this journey with me.
Today’s topics include creation and destruction. And let’s not forget, I am a language nerd. 😉
Spacecraft (Part 1) 🚀
Let’s start with an observation. I occasionally watch SpaceX launches. During these webcasts, I have heard a new acronym that fascinates me: RUD. It stands for Rapid Unplanned Disassembly.
You guessed it – ka-boom! 💥
But I like their use of language to take the sting out of the event and allow their teams to get beyond the emotional context.
As you might know, SpaceX is all about the iterative process. Their test flights have very specific goals they expect to accomplish, and anything beyond those goals is “icing on the cake,” so to speak.
So far, they have accomplished their expected goals with each test flight.
But then the spaceship experiences RUD.
By using an unemotional, “scientific” name for the resulting end of the test, they can move quickly on to the next development phase.
It’s genius! 💡
I sometimes wonder how many other industries use similar language to help their development teams move forward. If you know of any, leave a comment. 💬
As Thomas Edison would say, they simply found a way that it doesn’t work.
Spacecraft (Part 2) 🛰️
So, while SpaceX is “failing forward” with spectacular speed and efficiency, NASA is planning to spend $1B on what I am dubbing a “PCD,” or Planned Controlled Disassembly.
You see, the International Space Station (ISS) has been in a low Earth orbit for 25 years now. WOW! 💫
The US, Russia, Canada, Japan, and Europe have used the ISS as a collaborative international project.
But as the adage goes, “what goes up, must come down,” so, too, the ISS is falling back to Earth.
Russian space vessels docked with the ISS have more than once fired their engines to move it back into a higher, more stable orbit. These measures have prolonged its space life but won’t work forever.
NASA is developing a plan that will cost in the neighborhood of a billion dollars to bring the ISS through the atmosphere and crash land it in the South Pacific Ocean.
It’s a tricky business. If ISS comes through the atmosphere too quickly, it will break apart into many smaller pieces, and where these pieces land cannot be controlled.
On the flip side, if ISS comes through the atmosphere too slowly, it could break apart into larger pieces that stay on the low Earth orbital track and cause problems for other orbiting satellites.
It will take years for the planning and execution of the ISS’s decommissioning to occur.
The eventual return of the ISS to Earth will be a bittersweet ending of an era.
Earth-building 🌋
On the home front, Earth is doing her own building.
An underwater volcano that has been erupting for some time has finally broken the surface of the ocean and begun to create a new island.
It is not clear whether this new island, less than a mile off the coast of Iwo Jima in Japan, will survive the constant pounding of the ocean waves.
If the eruptions and growth continue, it is conceivable that this new island could merge with Iwo Jima to become part of its land mass.
A volcanologist from Japan overflew the region and took some spectacular videos of this fantastic event.
This small land mass is also visible from space, as several international satellites have shown.
Until Next Time
So, this ends the second edition of my newsletter. I hope you have enjoyed it as much as the first.
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