Vic Socotra

13 February 2009

Vodka, Gravity and Satellites

(Space Junk)

If I were a man with a penchant for a morning drink, I would have raised one to the souls onboard Continental Connection Flight 3407, a Bombardier Dash-8 Q400 operated by Colgan Airways, which fell from the sky while on final into Buffalo.

God rest the 49 people aboard. Their loss is a sobering remainder that miracles like Captain Sully’s landing into the Hudson are few, and that the force of gravity is irresistible and callously unforgiving.

We will not know why this tragedy occurred for some time- the NTSB investigators are just arriving on the scene as I write, but that would not affect a fatalistic toast to the lost.

The Russians understand that. Vodka has been the joy and the scourge of their stoic society for a thousand years. It is consumed in a way that is astonishing to those of us in the further west, and quite a bit of fun, if not approached with an excess of exuberance. That is a challenge for me, but I was up to it during a visit to the Baumann State Aeronautic Institute in Moscow a few years ago.

Bauman got its start in 1830 as a special technical school founded for orphans. The Czar’s men believed that having technical knowledge would help them, and the Empire, in their lives. The orphan school later became the Imperial Technical School, one of the main engineering Universities in Russia.

After the revolution, the University was named for Nikolai Ernestovich Bauman, a Bolshevik veterinarian and confidant of Lenin who was beaten to death in 1905 in a demonstration not far from the main buildings. His body was on view for some time in one of the University rooms so other revolutionaries and students could drink a toast to the corpse. His funeral procession was a landmark in the road to the great October Revolution.

After November 1917, the Imperial Technical School was reborn as the "Moscow Higher Technical School Named After Bauman.” Organized and re-organized under Stalin’s march to industrialization, the departments of the school were spun off into other Institutes, with Bauman being the nucleus of the Moscow Aviation Institute.

I believe that our delegation actually funded the buffet that followed the tour of the structural labs, and the briefings in English. There were tiny pickles and dark course bread and strong shots of vodka. There were speeches, too, before eventually the bus had to leave and my seminar mates wanted to get back on it, and head for the Marriott, where the bathrooms were clean and the building not setting into post-communist decay.

There was a somewhat embarrassing moment at the end when our treasurer fumbled in his wallet for a sheaf of new rubles to hand over, and we all pretended not to notice.

We were in Moscow for a tour of space and aeronautical capabilities. It was the late spring of 1998, and Russia was still on its ass, looking for opportunities to leverage the infrastructure of the former Superpower to make a way in the world.

There were signs that not all would be well between our nations. We were stalled in Moscow, shut out of the recently re-named St. Petersburg and a closed industrial city in Siberia, where we had intended to travel. A diplomatic tiff somewhere resulted in an extended stay in Moscow, with more free time than we had a right to expect, and plenty of vodka.

There is coincidence aplenty in all this, though I don’t believe in it. A few months before, as we started our survey, Motorola launched an Irridium satellite to join the constellation of low-earth orbit communications birds in an elegant network of 70-odd vehicles that form a seamless web around the earth.

Better said, the Motorola people paid the Chinese to launch it, as they did the French and others in the business, all of which was in a dubious technical transfer of dozens of once-sensitive technologies, preciously held only by the Americans and the Russians. One of them permitted the industrious Chinese to observe the multiple ejection racks dispensed the 1200-pound Irridium vehicles, and are also used in the delivery of nuclear weapons.

It is called “dual use” technology.

High over our heads that spring was a Russian Kosmos-2251 military communications satellite, launched in 1993. It had died long before mean mission duration in 1995, and gone dark.

The two satellites collided high above Siberia this week, creating a cloud of space junk that could threaten the International Space Station.

Mission managers hastened to announce that everything was fine, and there was no immediate threat, since the space station’s orbit is nearly three hundred miles above where the two satellites collided at bullet speed.

Now, there are hundreds of smaller bullets whizzing around. Space junk. As of yesterday, the people that are supposed to pay attention to this said there were 9,831 pieces of debris (larger than 4 square inches) in flight up there, not counting the two clouds of material from the collision.

Gravity will win on those, eventually, but there is a growing problem up above. We will have to talk about that tomorrow, due to time constraints. I am running a little late this morning, and may stop the usual routine to have a sip of something Russian before I go to work.

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