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Brian Potter on the Apollo Program

2023-12-29

Two things I took away from Brian Potter's recap of the Apollo Program:

  1. The mixture between "complicated" innovation and "brute force" innovation; to make the second stage rocket booster light enough to be effective took both totally new design concepts and simply shaving off weight wherever it could be taken off.

Not every effort at weight reduction was solved through clever (if complicated) ideas like cold-strengthened aluminum or the common bulkhead. Much of the effort was achieved by pure brute force: parts would be fabricated, tested until failure, and then redesigned to be slimmer until they broke at exactly the required load (scaled by an appropriate safety factor).

  1. The interaction between new designs, new materials, and new techniques. New designs almost always require a new material or a new technique to be used.

Worth reading!

The rise and fall of steel in Pittsburgh

2023-12-26

The furnace proved that coke made from the nearby Connellsville seam of bituminous coal was uniquely able to be used in the blast furnaces that transformed iron ore into pig iron. For decades, coke made with coal sourced elsewhere proved unusable — giving southwestern Pennsylvania an enviable competitive advantage as the second industrial revolution powered explosive demand for iron and then steel.

That technical innovation gave coal-rich Pittsburgh, which was already a successful region for energy-intensive industries like iron and glass, an overwhelming advantage in ore-based steel production.

via Chris Briem. Despite growing up in Pittsburgh, I found this explanation enormously helpful.

The dangers of coal

2023-12-20

An interesting example of status quo bias. We know that coal is dirty and that it is a part of the electricity system, and these negative health effects are a part of normal operations, so we accept them.