

Any Port in a Storm - rfreytag
http://www.cringely.com/2010/11/any-port-in-a-storm/

======
shaddi
This comment on the article particularly struck me:

    
    
        There was a time in the U.S. history could have launched
        a dozen or so satellites in its sleep. “Need another GPS
        communication satellite? It’s on order. We’ll build it by
        Friday and launch it by Wednesday. We’d do it faster, but
        it’s Presidents Day on Monday, and you know how those Unions
        are with holidays” I read some NY Times articles about the
        U.S. response to the Pearl Harbor attack. How in months, we
        built giant cranes, uprighted ships, and rebuilt our fleet.
        Now, we can’t even build another measly two track tunnel
        under the Hudson river without political posturing.
    
    

[http://www.cringely.com/2010/11/any-port-in-a-
storm/comment-...](http://www.cringely.com/2010/11/any-port-in-a-
storm/comment-page-1/#comment-32670)

~~~
TomOfTTB
This isn't a fair comparison. The United States has always been able to muster
its resources with great efficiency in an emergency. That hasn't changed with
time. You'll remember about 9 years ago when we had a similar situation and we
managed to establish a military presence, mobilize and to a certain extent
complete a military operation half way around the world in just a few months.

But for a government to move that fast politicians have to act rashly and that
can lead to some nasty side effects like putting Japanese citizens in
internment camps. Preventing that rash behavior is why society becomes
litigious under normal circumstances.

I'd be the first to admit we've become too litigious but I can't see that
stopping us if we made the space program as much of a priority as Pearl Harbor
or 9/11 was.

Edit: Just to prove the point there were apparently 40,000 deaths by
industrial accident in the first year or WWII alone. So clearly there was a
cost to that speed of production.

[http://www.historykb.com/Uwe/Forum.aspx/world-war-
ii/3992/de...](http://www.historykb.com/Uwe/Forum.aspx/world-war-
ii/3992/deaths-due-to-accidents-in-factories)

~~~
anamax
> Just to prove the point there were apparently 40,000 deaths by industrial
> accident in the first year or WWII alone. So clearly there was a cost to
> that speed of production.

How many industrial accident deaths were there in 1936-39?

------
jdietrich
I feel obliged to point out the limitations of LORAN. Current-generation
systems are only accurate to within a few hundred metres and they are just as
vulnerable to geomagnetic storms as satellite-based systems. LORAN-C operates
on 90 to 110khz, so it is vulnerable to multipath interference caused by
skywave propagation. At present it also has relatively limited coverage, most
obviously in North America. LORAN is a wonderfully simple, rugged aid to
maritime navigation, but it is no substitute for GPS.

Modern radio systems are so slick and mature that it is easy for us to imagine
that they are a magical force akin to electronic telepathy, but they are
reliant on simple electromagnetic radiation and highly susceptible to
interference. Beyond the obvious issues of space weather, propagation and
accidental interference, most radio systems are trivially easy to deliberately
interfere with and we are now at a stage where intersatellite conflict could
cause massive destruction. We have no realistic means of either defending
satellites or of removing orbital debris. GPS is tremendously vulnerable,
particularly to malicious attack and we are best to assume that it will fail
completely at some time in the immediate future.

------
roadnottaken
" _It would fry satellites, overload power grids, destroy all our computers,
and possibly put the lights out for most of us for months..._ "

If this happens, I think losing GPS would be the least of our worries.

~~~
sudont
Would a faraday cage protect equipment? Obviously the power grid would be
down, but combine solar with low-power electronics and it wouldn't be too hard
to equip oneself with a running computer after the event.

~~~
stcredzero
What about simply having computers and other machinery powered down? If we
situated several probes closer to the sun, they could warn us like a canary in
a coal mine. The satellites would simply transmit a heartbeat and status
signal along with electromagnetic observations data. When one fo the
satellites fails, we'll have a couple of minutes to shut machinery down and
get the most sensitive equipment into Faraday cages.

~~~
sorbus
Do you have any idea how quickly the corona ejection would travel, and hence
how long it would take to hit earth? It would take a bit over 8 minutes for
any message from a probe near the sun to reach us, and if the ejection is
travelling at (random number) 0.5c, it would only give us a bit over 8 minutes
to react and get the word out. Obviously, if it was slower (0.1c), we would
have a lot more time. The worst case scenario would be it travelling at >0.9c,
giving us under two minutes to react and do everything.

It's perhaps a much, much better solution to keep a large (and I mean really
fucking large, since it might be all we had to bootstrap ourselves back up to
our current level of technology) store of equipment in a large Faraday cage.
Probably several, distributed for redundancy, really. This could be combined
with probes, of course.

------
ced
I've made this point on HN a few times, but "space weather forecasting" has
become an industry in itself. A lot of scientists have made predictions for
the next cycle. The big problem is that cycles last 11 years, and the
predictions are of the form "Very strong cycle", or "Abnormally weak cycle".
You can see why "This researcher has correctly predicted the last two cycles"
can easily be attributed to luck. Given that a research career spans at most 4
such cycles, it's hard to demonstrate one's ability.

There's a few respected solar scientists who have written papers to the effect
that such forecasting is way beyond our capabilities (there's hints of chaotic
behavior in the sun). But these papers don't get any citations, because if
they're right, most of the money in this field will dry up. No one wants that
to happen.

With that said, Cringely speaks of a two-year forecast, and I don't know if
that is short-term enough to be feasible. Still, I'm skeptical of the
impending doom predictions, because it takes only one known scientist willing
to beat the drum for the government to worry about its space-bound investment
(and quite reasonably so).

~~~
stcredzero
Someone could probably make money by launching 6 or so observation satellites
around Mercury and at Mercury Trojan points. Since mass ejections are
directional, we should be able to quickly confirm that as the cause of failure
for a satellite with the others, and send out a digitally signed warning via
the networks. This should give us a couple of minutes time to shut machinery
down.

~~~
Splines
According to Wikipedia, CMEs have a top speed of 3200km/s. The earth is 147Mm
from the sun (at its closest), so we'd have a minimum of 12 hours warning.

How vulnerable are electronic devices that are powered off to CMEs?

I imagine that while we have sufficient warning, there is also considerable
variation in CME speed (and size?). It might be difficult to coordinate "turn
stuff back on" day without functioning communication systems.

------
cromulent
NASA posted this today:

[http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-
nasa/2010/08...](http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-
nasa/2010/08nov_iswi/)

The Omega system was shut down years ago, to the joy of local BASE jumpers.

------
tomjen3
Assuming we have a corona ejection, how long a warning would we get?

~~~
iwr
Between 18 hours to a few days.

Flares can take as little as 15 minutes (with early warning from satellites in
L2).

For high energy x-rays there'd be no early warning through other means than
forecasting.

~~~
tomjen3
Okay that should be enough to put a faraday cage up and the gear the network
down.

