I didn’t even knock on Justin’s door, I busted in like Kreamer on a Seinfeld episode. Justin had a client sitting in front of his desk.
“Sir–” Justin began as a young lance corporal turned around to see who had just come in.
“Oh, shit. Sorry. When you’re done, could you come by my office?” I asked.
“Yes, sir, we’re almost done.” Justin continued to call me “sir” for appearances, but we had already tried a case or two as co-counsel, he was due to pin on Captain soon, and we spent a lot of time off-duty, playing rugby and roller hockey, along with the fact that as a single guy there wasn’t a whole lot for him to do off-base in Okinawa. My kids loved him, while he and my wife had an ongoing North-South argument that made the Civil War appear just that. I went back to my office to wait.
“What’s goin’ on?” he asked curiously, when he came by a few minutes later. He could see the smile on my face.
“Dude, I got this in the mail.” I held up a stack of documents, about four hundred pages total, bound together.
“Is that the stuff from Bates’s attorney, what was his name?” Justin asked.
“Yes, Bruce Smith and a guy named Lou Michels, who’s a partner in McGuire, Battle, and Woods, by the way.” McGuire, Battle and Woods was a fairly well-known law firm outside of Washington, D.C. in Virginia, not far from where Justin went to high school. He raised his eyebrows.
“Well, what’s in there?” he asked.
“Listen to this carefully – there is a federal statute, ten u.s. code section one-one-zero-seven, that says the DoD cannot give a service member an investigational new drug or a drug unapproved for its applied use without the service member’s informed consent.”
“Okay . . .” Justin waited for the punch line.
“Here, my good man,” I brandished a thick sheaf of papers, “I hold in my hand, the investigational new drug application from the company that makes the anthrax vaccine.” Justin’s eyes opened wide. “And,” I went on, “here is the cover page for the IND application, in which the DoD asks to join the application and even asks the FDA to hurry up and approve it so they can start testing!”
“No way! Come on.” I handed him the application, which contained the entire clinical protocol.
“And, better yet, the application specifically asks for a change to get the anthrax vaccine licensed for an aerosolized exposure.” Justin looked at me quizzically. “You know how all of those AFARTS radio commercials have been saying that the vaccine has been licensed for thirty years; that it’s been licensed against anthrax?”
“Oh, you mean the ‘education program’ – the DoD brainwashing campaign? Yes, I’ve been taking copious notes since there’s only one English speaking radio station on the island and the Armed forces owns it.” Justin’s voiced dripped with sarcasm. I laughed. I was sick of hearing about the mandatory anthrax education video, too.
“Well,” I ploughed on, “you can get anthrax three ways: you can get it through your skin, you can get it intestinally by eating some infected food, or you can inhale the spores – and that’s how it would be delivered in combat, in an aerosolized form –”
“— from an artillery round,” Justin jumped in.
“. . . or a sprayer from a crop duster, or bomb of some kind.” I finished. “The company that manufactures it and the DoD specifically asked the FDA for a modification of the existing license in order to get it approved for that use.”
“What does that mean, though? Was it approved or just ignored?” Justin was still suspicious.
“Neither, it was acted upon, and here’s the ace in the hole, the President of the company testified before Congress like six months ago that ‘we still continue to hold an IND for the anthrax vaccine.’ Dude, it’s an IND, hence you can’t give it without informed consent, hence the program currently violates federal law. Quod Erat Demonstratum, Homes.”
Justin looked at me.
“I follow everything except the Latin.”
“Oh, sorry, dude. Q.E.D. It’s what you put at the bottom of a geometry proof when you solve it. It means like ‘what was to be shown, was’ or something like that. You didn’t have to do that in high school?” Justin looked at me and shook his head.
“Proofs, yes. Trivial Latin phrases, no. We had to learn to speak English first,” he deadpanned.
“Backwards Virginia school systems.”
“Yeah, right.” He sat down.
“I can’t believe this,” he went on, thumbing through some papers. “I mean, how the hell did somebody not find this before? Don’t get me wrong, Dale. I think you’re a good attorney, and I know I’m great, but these aren’t the first anthrax refusal cases. How come it hasn’t come up before?” I had asked myself this same question and done some research.
“I think a couple of reasons. First, the law only changed in late 1998 and some of the first cases were at 29 Palms. Second, would you have ever thought to look for a federal statute regarding investigational drugs in order to show the order wasn’t lawful?”
“Hmmmm. Yeah, good point. But how come no one in the SecDef’s office picked up on this? He must have a host of lawyers working for him.”
“Same answer, man. The anthrax program was launched in late 1997 and early 1998, but the law didn’t change until late 1998. So, in the Secretary of Defense’s defense, that law wasn’t out yet. However, the law actually reached back and so it doesn’t grandfather anything. In other words, if the SecDef wants to give troops an IND or a drug unapproved for its applied use, then he has to get a waiver from no one less than the President himself.” I sat back in my chair. I couldn’t have been prouder, although in truth I had done very little of the grunt work. My client, David Ponder, had actually hounded me to contact Mr. Bruce Smith, who had in turn put me in touch with Mr. Lou Michels, a LtCol in the Air Force Reserves and partner at McGuire, Battle and Woods, who sent me a very nice packet of information. By miraculous coincidence, David Ponder was from the same part of Kentucky as Major Sonnie Bates and had followed Major Bates’ case in the press pretty closely, as had his wife Jennifer. Eventually, David’s wife got in touch with Major Bates’ wife, Roxanne, who then connected David with some information and now here I was.
“There’s one other possibility, ya know,” Justin murmured. I sat forward. He looked up. “They knew about the law and just fucking ignored it.” I hadn’t thought of that and refused to consider it; it sounded ominous the way he said it. He went back to reading.
“This is unbelievable,” he said it out loud, but he was talking to himself as he read. I was thinking the same thing. The anthrax program, on its face, violated a federal statute.
Normally, in an orders violation case, the government enjoys a strong presumption that an order is lawful. Usually, all the government has to do is ask the judge to find as a matter of law that an order was lawful and then, once the judge rules in the government’s favor, the prosecutor only has to show that the order was transmitted to the accused and the accused refused to obey it. The defense has a pretty high burden to overcome the presumption of lawfulness… but there I sat with the smoking gun.
The DoD’s own signature on an IND application to amend the existing anthrax license in order to get an indication against aerosolized anthrax, the exact use to which the government was putting the vaccine. I sat there smiling, luxuriating in the feeling. I could tell Justin was, too.
“You know what?” he began, smiling.
“What?” I was smiling back, almost laughing.
“I cannot wait to tell this to Jay tonight at the O club.” I bust out laughing. Jay Town was another of our classmates from Naval Justice School. He and Justin were close friends, had attended The Basic School together, a six month infantry school for all Marine officers, and lived near each other in the Bachelor’s Officers Quarters (BOQ). Unfortunately, however, depending upon one’s view, Jay was assigned as the Deputy Staff Judge Advocate for 1st Marine Aircraft Wing. He was the assistant to the General’s lawyer. In our parlance as defense attorneys, he was a government “hack” and we taunted him endlessly about it. With a few beers in us all, the Officer’s Club on Kadena Air Force Base should supply some laughs that night. He was constantly needling us about our job defending “criminals.”
“Do you think he’ll feel obligated as a government weenie to tell someone about this?” I asked, considering whether we should share it. Our anthrax cases had nothing to do with 1st MAW, so Jay was a spectator on this case. Jay was also a good friend, but then again….
“No, he won’t care.” I nodded agreement. “But that won’t stop me from harassing him as the government representative,” Justin said, laughing.
“In short, sir, that means that if the defense can show that the anthrax vaccine is an investigational new drug, then the order violates the express terms of . . . 10 U.S.C. §1107. The statute creates rights, namely the right to informed consent before any service member accepts an investigational new drug.”
June 27, 2000.
It was almost three months after our first session of court in April. We had a discovery hearing on 9 June that accomplished nothing, just jousting. I could probably get my hands on anything I needed. Bruce Smith, Lou Michels, and some of their cohorts, were quick to answer any email and seemed to have an incredible list of contacts. If, for example, I had a question about FDA licensing procedures, ten minutes later an affidavit from a former high-ranking FDA official, now retired, appeared on my fax machine.
“So,” I continued, “it’s the defense’s contention that under Supreme Court case law, under FDA regulations, and under any of the other applicable standards that have been set forth as to what is an investigational new drug, the defense will put on evidence to show that the anthrax vaccine is an investigational new drug.” Okinawa in late June was tropical, so it was hot in the courtroom. I looked over to see Petty Officer Ponder with a sheen of sweat on his forehead, but it might just as well be from nerves. I could feel my white tee-shirt sticking to me under my “Charlie”, service “C”, uniform. The air conditioner was on, which made a noise like a 707 engine being turned up. I had to speak loudly.
“Therefore, if it is an investigational new drug and service members are being forced to take it against their will, that violates statutory rights that have been conferred by the Executive Order and the statute, 10 U.S.C. §1107.” I felt like I was starting to hit my stride. “And I would note, sir, that in the Manual for Courts-Martial . . . on page IV-20, at the top of the page, the first full paragraph – it says, ‘Relationship to Statutory or Constitutional Rights. The order must not conflict with the statutory or Constitutional rights of the person receiving the order.’” I had set it out as clearly as I could and the judge appeared genuinely interested, or he was doing a good job of faking it.
I sat down and wrote some notes and we debated some discovery issues and eventually the government called the Group surgeon to put some evidence in the record about the threat of anthrax and the general nature of the anthrax program. During the doctor’s direct testimony, I made some notes, but I couldn’t have cared less about what he was going to say. While the judge was going to allow me to cross-examine the doctor, a Navy Commander, it would be for giggles mostly. He had very limited information on the program. Our case would rise and fall on 10 U.S.C. §1107, not on my cross-examination of a Navy doctor.
Back in my office, I put my air conditioner on full and tried to pull the sticky tee-shirt away from my body. David Ponder and Justin were in the room. I turned to newly pinned Captain Constantine.
“Well, how did it come off? Do you think the judge got it?” I was asking for reassurance more than critique. It was lonely in defense and it wasn’t often that someone came and watched a case to offer support.
“I was actually looking for pointers on how to present the arguments for Arroyo’s case. I thought it went pretty well.” Justin represented PFC Vittolino Arroyo, one of three Marines who had all refused the shot together. Justin and I represented LCpl Jason Stonewall together.
“Sir, I thought you did great.” David Ponder sounded genuinely impressed, with his southern drawl. He was as sincere a person as I had ever met. It was the first time a client had used such words; most clients I had acquitted were less effusive than David was being.
“I just hope he gets it,” I mumbled to myself as much as anyone else. On some visceral level, it was crucial for me to convince the judge. I had crossed over the line at some point from mere advocacy to personal entreaty. I believed in 10 U.S.C. §1107 as fervently as my young daughters believed in Santa Claus, probably more so.
I went to the window and opened it. There was a slight breeze stirring the hot, sticky, Okinawan air, a few scattered clouds in an otherwise blue sky. I heard a familiar slapping and thudding sound and looked to the right, over the trees toward Marine Corps Air Station Futenma, perhaps a mile straight line distance from where I was on Camp Foster. A Cobra helicopter was in a climbing left hand turn, the thirty-two inch thick blades beating the air as the pilot climbed to what must be the autorotation pattern altitude of one-thousand feet. Those blades were truly awesome in their power, the tips turning at just under the speed of sound, each blade weighing 385 pounds. I had once seen what they could do to another aircraft and the human body up close. In 1996, I had served on an aircraft mishap board for a mid-air collision between a Cobra and a CH-46 Sea Knight, or “Phrog”, as it was affectionately known. During that board I had learned that I was selected for the Funded Law Education Program. Sifting through the wreckage, and then having to return home at the end of the day, living a block from the wife and children of one of the dead pilots, had made my decision to either accept or turn down the program a lot easier.
“Beautiful day for flyin’,” I said to no one in particular.
“What’s that, sir?” Ponder asked. I turned around and brought my thoughts back to the present.
“Nothing. Hey, don’t worry too much about the judge denying our discovery. We’re just playing footsy at this point. I can get my hands on everything through “alternative means,” but I was hoping to have the government produce the documents to eliminate any concerns about their authenticity. Even the judge denying our expert, Doctor Nass, isn’t a killer. Remember that biology professor I told you about?”
“Yes, sir. Mr. Cohen, is that his name?”
“Yeah. He said he will testify if we can’t get our expert here and he may not have the specific knowledge that Dr. Nass does, but he’s got a PhD in microbiology and he thinks the program is shitty. So, that gets him there in my book.” Justin laughed.
“What are our chances, sir?” Nobody laughed at David’s question. I had thought about this a lot. I had four acquittals, three of them came in bench trials in front of the same judge now hearing the anthrax cases. Some of the prosecutors had needled me that Judge Stone was partial to me. In reality, the cases had not only been shitty for the government, but I believed, no – knew, they had come out the right way.
“I don’t know, BT3. I mean, there is a federal law that says pretty clearly that you can’t be ordered to take the shot without your informed consent. All we have to show is that the vaccine is investigational and we’ve got the friggin’ application. That would seem to sufficiently rebut the presumption of lawfulness, but the judge was saying some weird things in chambers in Stonewall’s case. I just hope he gives us our chance to put this on in front of a jury. We sure have a lot of evidence.” I nodded toward the box in the corner of my office that was filled with Government Accounting Office reports, briefs, binders, transcripts of other cases, an Inspector General’s report on the contractual relationship between the DoD and the manufacturer, and a number of Congressional committee transcripts and reports. And that didn’t include the stuff I had at home and on my computer, not yet printed.
“Looks like you’re earnin’ what I’m payin’ you, sir,” Ponder cracked. I laughed. Justin moaned. He was always talking about ‘getting out’ and finally getting paid like a ‘real lawyer’ for the work he did.
“Hopefully you’ll still be saying that if the judge loses his mind and things don’t go so well.” I was only half-joking.
More can and must be done, however, to rebuild trust, to avoid repeating past mistakes, and to prevent future health consequences similar to those experienced during and after the Gulf War. Our troops must be assured that when we send them into battle, they will be protected by the best military technology, the best leaders, and the best medicine. Protection also means proper education and training, as well as provision of critical information, including information about investigational new drugs that may be administered to our troops for their protection against chemical and biological threats.[i]
At the end of multiple hearings on Gulf War Syndrome and many inquiries into the DoD’s use of experimental and investigational drugs during the Gulf war, in 1997 Congress (finally) decided that enough was enough. Representative Patrick Kennedy (D, RI), introduced a bill on the floor of Congress to provide some small measure of protection for service members. In its original form, the bill imposed three requirements on the DoD: either prior to, or within 30 days of, administering an investigational new drug, the DoD would have to inform military members that
The drug being administered is investigational;
The reasons why the drug is being administered;
The potential side effects of the drug, including side effects resulting from interactions of the drug with other drugs or treatments being administered to the individual.
Representative Kennedy’s remarks made clear that the bill was the direct result of inquiries into the Gulf War and what he perceived as a DoD cover-up of possible chemical exposures of U.S. troops. He noted that the trust between soldiers and the government
“has been called into question. One need merely read newspaper articles surrounding the Persian Gulf war to see what I mean. On February 28, the New York Times ran an article entitled: ‘Pentagon Reveals It Lost Most Logs on Chemical Arms;’ ‘Missing From Two Sites: Gulf War Veterans Now Raise Questions of Cover-Up or Criminal Incompetence.’”[ii]
Mr. Kennedy went on to cite another article that revealed that the Army had been warned by the CIA five years prior (to the article) about the possible exposure of troops to chemical agents and that the DoD had claimed that it only became aware of the exposures the prior year. Additionally, Kennedy referenced the DoD and FDA negotiations that took place prior to the Gulf War regarding a waiver of informed consent detailed in the previous chapter. He criticized the DoD for failing to comply with the conditions the FDA had set forth in order to grant the waiver of informed consent that the DoD legally needed and had negotiated in order to use both pyridostigmine bromide and botulinum toxoid on troops. Oddly enough, however, Kennedy then seemed to concede that the DoD could now use investigational drugs without informed consent because “[u]nfortunately, for our troops, the threat of chemical and biological weapons have become an increasing reality[.]” Mr. Kennedy seemed to believe that, at the least, “the men and women who served in the Gulf War had a right to know that the vaccines administered to them were investigational” and that “[t]he same service members had a right to know about the side effects of the investigational drugs.”[iii] As an author’s note, I feel compelled to add that Representative Kennedy did swear an oath to “defend the Constitution of the United States of America against all enemies foreign and domestic” and “to bear true faith and allegiance to the same.” Which can only mean that either (a) Kennedy believed that it is perfectly fine for the U.S. government to experiment on its troops, or (b) he doesn’t know very much about the Constitution. (‘Both’ is also an acceptable and likely answer).
To his credit, however, Kennedy did introduce the bill in order “to ensure that in the future our troops are informed of investigational drugs, and to help ensure that our service members can and will trust their government.”[iv] The legislation received some discussion on the floors of both the Senate and the House, always with reference to the Congressional investigations surrounding Gulf War Illness and the mistakes made with pyridostigmine bromide.[v] Finally, as part of the National Defense Authorization Act for fiscal year 1998 (from October 1997 to October 1998), Mr. Kennedy’s proposed bill became 10 U.S.C. §1107. In something that couldn’t be made up, within a year of this bill being approved and becoming law, Secretary of Defense William Cohen announced that he would begin the inoculation of all U.S. military personnel with the anthrax vaccine.
As this vaccination program was kicking off, the Senate Armed Services committee was already calling high-ranking DoD officials to explain how the program was going to work in light of the Persian Gulf experience and even the then recent deployment of troops to Bosnia. In fact, members of the committee pointed to the Presidential Advisory Committee’s review of the DoD’s efforts in Bosnia and pointed out that they were deemed “an abysmal failure.”[vi] This committee even addressed the issue of how the DoD proposed to handle the administration of clinical protocols in accordance with FDA regulations. It is important to note that here the DoD was acknowledging that it had to comply with clinical protocol requirements of the FDA if it administered a drug in such a way as to render it an investigational new drug. An FDA official opined that “we [the FDA] believe that they [DoD officials] understand… [the need to comply with IND procedures]. We believe that they have the capability of complying with all of our IND rules and regulations. As to whether they will comply in the next deployment situation, obviously we can’t predict that.”[vii]
The Acting Secretary of Defense for Health affairs, Gary Christopherson, tried to assuage the concerns of committee members by admitting that the Bosnia experience[1] was a “situation where we believed we ought to be able to do an IND and do it well, it still did not come off 100 percent. It did not meet their standards. It did not meet our standards in there.”[viii] He went on to add that the DoD and the FDA were engaged in a “conversation” to improve their compliance with the FDA’s regulations. In a bit of backpedaling, Mr. Christopherson implied that there was some kind of agreement between the FDA and DoD that there would not need to be full compliance with the requirements of the Nuremberg Code, the FDA’s regulations, and the DoD’s own internal regulations. He offered that “[t]he one thing that I think both FDA and we have come to somewhat – not necessarily a conclusion, but close to – is that in real combat situations it’s very difficult if not impossible to do a full investigative new drug protocol.” This did not seem to arouse much comment from any of the Senators, despite the clear implication that DoD was not going to comply with the requirements for informed consent for an IND procedure. One other question not raised (of course) was how combat would be defined. Even if the DoD were granted a waiver for combat exigencies, would Bosnia and other peacekeeping operations fit the justification given for the Gulf War?
At the same time that the Senate hearings were going on and the anthrax program (AVIP) was going forward, the FDA was also trying to determine if the interim rule that it had published to allow DoD to use investigational drugs without informed consent should become a final rule. That rule, granting the DoD waiver, was still “on the books” as the interim rule pending finalization. The FDA solicited comments by October 29, 1997. This means that (legally speaking) as late as autumn of 1997, the DoD still had a waiver from the FDA’s requirements of informed consent. The language of the rule was broad and did not specifically exempt just those two products, although that was the agreement reached in 1990. Now, as the DoD was preparing to use another investigational drug in Bosnia and not doing it particularly well, the FDA was asking whether or not the DoD should be allowed to maintain the waiver. This produced some interesting exchanges in committee hearings in Congress. In 1996, the Director of the FDA brought forward Ms. Mary Pendergast, a doctor at the FDA’s Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research (CBER), to answer the question about this rule.
REP. NETHERCUTT: So your conclusion five years later is that waiving the Informed consent requirements is acceptable?
PENDERGAST: Yes, basically. It’s not the preferred option, but there are some products that you cannot ethically test. . .
REP. NETHERCUTT: Okay. I’m trying to get to now. . . as to why you feel it’s acceptable to do that.
PENDERGAST: If there is another war —
REP. NETHERCUTT: Which is prospective.
PENDERGAST: Yes. If there is another war and if there is a circumstance where the military might need to give prophylactic treatment to its troops, then we would create simply the framework that would give them the opportunity to come to the FDA to ask for permission to waive informed consent. It’s not saying that we would waive it during peacetime; it’s not that we would automatically waive it, rather, we would create a framework that would permit them to ask for permission.
KESSLER: I think the presumption is, if it is at all possible, you get informed consent. That certainly is my personal position.[ix]
In this exchange, the head of the FDA, Dr. Ronald Kessler, asserts that informed consent would not be waived during peacetime at the same time that the FDA has on the books an interim rule that allows the DoD to waive informed consent, not just for combat, but also for the “the immediate threat of combat.”[x] How immediate would the threat have to be and what level of combat would it have to be? One can only envision that the DoD would get to make both of these determinations; certainly the FDA is not going to question a military officer’s determination that combat is imminent or immediate or of sufficient ferocity to be deemed combat.[2] Thus the rule is really no rule at all in terms of limiting the application of when the DoD can waive informed consent.
In a 1997 Congressional hearing on Bioethics, this issue also came up by Dr. Arthur Caplan, a professor of Bioethics at the University of Pennsylvania. He offered quite simply that “the handling of the waiver with respect to the troops was unethical.”[xi] His opinion was that even with the waiver of prior informed consent, the DoD should have informed troops after the fact, if nothing else; that “the Defense Department – and those military agencies have not – did not do what they needed to do to after the fact inform people when they were exposed to innovative or experimental substances.”[xii]
His second point of contention was that “there’s still been no formulation of a policy about what we do with respect to research on our troops. We don’t have it today. We didn’t have it six years ago. And I find it incredible that we have not had more than an interim rule to guide us with respect to research in the military.” At the time he said this, the FDA’s interim waiver rule for 50.23(d) was still in effect. Another doctor looked back even further and questioned the underlying assumption of the waiver, which, unfortunately, more people have not done.
BENJAMIN WILFOND: I think I was not convinced this morning that they ever gave a clear reason why it was not feasible to have given – asked for consent in the first place. I mean, presumably if you ask the soldiers: You may be exposed to nerve gas. This medication may help you, but we really don’t know and would like to do a project. Would you like to participate? Most of them would probably say yes.[xiii]
Some discussion ensued and there was the usual deference about the “quick” mustering up of forces, but Dr. Wilfond continued to question the assumption: “my point is that there’s still no – it’s not clear that they couldn’t have done it ahead of time either.”[xiv]
This is an important issue that seems to get swept away amidst the rhetoric and large questions, but it is a particularly pragmatic point but deserves some attention. Every member of the Armed forces has, at one time or another, stood in line awaiting some inoculation. There is absolutely no explanation by these people in Congress why – if a member of the Armed Forces has to stand in line to get the shot – there would not be sufficient time to obtain the member’s informed consent? Even if the requirement for written consent were waived, if medical records have to be annotated anyway, how much more difficult would it be for the corpsman or medical personnel to hand a sheet out to everyone as they are standing in line? Or, how hard would it be to include a standard medical brief along with all of the other briefs that servicemembers have to receive when deploying, during which the ranking surgeon explains that this is the only possible treatment for the known threat. As both Doctor Wilfond and another doctor pointed out in their testimony to the Congressional committee:
CAPLAN: We took a lot of testimony at the Presidential Advisory Committee on this matter, and it was summed up fairly well by one of our people who came to testify to us who said, if someone is shooting very large bullets at you which may be filled with biological weapons, the likelihood of your refusing an antidote is zero.[xv]
This may or may not be true: indeed, my own informal surveying concludes quite the opposite. The troops will take the known risks of being shot over the unknown risks of (yet another) DoD boondoggle with unproven chemicals being shoved into one’s body (a point to which I will return in detail later in this book). Despite these committee hearings, most of which had an FDA representative attending and concurring in the recommendations of others, the FDA had still not issued a new rule to replace the interim waiver rule from the Gulf War in late 1998. By this time, Congress had held so many hearings on the issue of informed consent and military members that it moved from the committee level onto the floor of Congress.
Representative Christopher Shays, a vocal opponent to the waiver granted to the FDA, rose as the speaker pro tempore in the House on June 16, 1998. He pointed out that there had been 13 hearings in three and-a-half years looking into Gulf War Illness. During this time, various agencies had testified in order to “try to get a handle on the problems that our Gulf War veterans have faced when they returned home. Out of the 700,000 that have returned, almost 100,000 have had some types of physical problems to deal with and have sought to have their illnesses be dealt with by the Department of Veterans Affairs.”[xvi] Mr. Shays noted that after 11 hearings, there had been a number of findings and recommendations made, among them that
“the VA and the Pentagon did not properly listen to sick Gulf War veterans in terms of the possible causes of their illness[;] [that] there is no credible evidence that stress or Post Traumatic Stress Disorder caused the illnesses reported by many Gulf War veterans[; and] that Congress should enact legislation establishing the presumption that veterans were exposed to hazardous materials known to have been present in the Gulf War theater.”[xvii]
Most importantly, Congressman Shays recommended that “the FDA should not grant a waiver of informed consent requirements allowing the Pentagon to use experimental or investigational drugs unless the President signs off and approves.”[xviii] This recommendation would become the cornerstone of a new version of Representative Patrick Kennedy’s first, more modest legislation. Interestingly, all it really did was seek a return to the “common rule” set forth in the Department of Defense’s own regulations, the Department of Health and Human Services regulations, the FDA’s regulations (prior to the waiver), the Nuremberg Code, and the federal statute passed which codified the Nuremberg Code. All of these regulations and laws have always stated that “the informed consent of the subject is absolutely essential” and all of them stated a presumption that “informed consent is feasible except . . .” in certain limited circumstances, usually when the subject was incompetent or incapable of giving consent or in a life threatening situation where the subject could not consent.[xix] As an example, the DoD’s own regulations state, unequivocally:
Except as provided elsewhere in this policy, no investigator may involve a human being as a subject in research covered by this policy unless the investigator has obtained the legally effective informed consent of the subject or the subject’s legally authorized representative. An investigator shall seek such consent only under circumstances that provide the prospective subject or the representative sufficient opportunity to consider whether or not to participate and that minimize the possibility of coercion or undue influence. The information that is given to the subject or the representative shall be in language understandable to the subject or the representative. No informed consent, whether oral or written, may include any exculpatory language through which the subject or the representative is made to waive or appear to waive any of the subject’s legal rights, or releases or appears to release the investigator, the sponsor, the institution or its agents from liability for negligence.[xx]
The FDA and DHHS regulations are identical, almost word-for-word. Additionally, the same regulation goes on to assure the subject that the only way that informed consent could be waived is if an appropriate Institutional Review Board, composed of doctors and other experts and members of the given community, determined that
The research involves no more than minimal risk to the subjects;
The waiver or alteration will not adversely affect the rights and welfare of the subjects;
The research could not practicably be carried out without the waiver or alteration; and
Whenever appropriate, the subjects will be provided with additional pertinent information after participation.[xxi]
This language is hard to reconcile with the policy in the Gulf war that Mr. Shays noted that “our troops were ordered to take an experimental drug referred to as PB . . . It was used . . . as an experimental drug to do something it was not designed to do. Our troops did not have the option to decide whether or not to do this. They were under order. If they did not live by their order, they would be prosecuted by the military.”[xxii] Congressman Shays, looking back at that moment, probably had no idea that his words actually foreshadowed what was to come under the anthrax vaccination program that had just begun in April of 1998. Notwithstanding his intent to prevent just such occurrences – the threat of forced/coerced inoculation – embodied in the legislation that was to pass later that year, courts-martial were already beginning for those who would try to exercise the very rights being re-issued to them under the new version of 10 U.S.C. §1107.
The 1998 version of 10 U.S.C. §1107 was passed as part of the National Defense Authorization Act for fiscal year 1999, in October 1998. The differences between the 1997 version and the 1998 version are startling and important to note, not only for their legal effect, but for what they reveal about the rational for making the changes. The original (1997) 10 U.S.C. §1107 required the Secretary of Defense to provide written notice to service members of the use of an investigational new drug or a drug unapproved for its applied use “unless the Secretary of Defense determines that the use of written notice is impractical because of the number of members receiving the investigational new drug or drug unapproved for its applied use, time constraints, or similar reasons.”[xxiii] This means that the Secretary of Defense had almost unfettered discretion to determine that written notice was not feasible. The only condition or enforcement mechanism was that the Secretary was supposed to provide Congress a written explanation if written notice was not used. The 1998 version, however, in sharp contrast, would strike that language out (from “unless” to the end), thus eliminating anything except written notice. The new version would then add one significant paragraph, (f) and change the current (f), the definitions section, to (g). The new paragraph, unchanged since 1998, reads as follows:
(f) Limitation and Waiver.—
In the case of the administration of an investigational new drug or a drug unapproved for its applied use to a member of the armed forces in connection with the member’s participation in a particular military operation, the requirement that the member provide prior consent to receive the drug in accordance with the prior consent requirement imposed under section 505(i)(4) of the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act (21 U.S.C. 355(i)(4)) may be waived only by the President. The President may grant such a waiver only if the President determines, in writing, that obtaining consent–
(A) is not feasible;
(B) is contrary to the best interests of the member; or
(C) is not in the interests of national security.
2. In making a determination to waive the prior consent requirement on a ground described in subparagraph (A) or (B) of paragraph (1), the President shall apply the standards and criteria that are set forth in the relevant FDA regulations for a waiver of the prior consent requirement on that ground.
This portion of the statute vests the decision to use or not use investigational drugs with one person and one person alone, the President of the United States. While the President appoints a cabinet member, the Secretary of Defense, to be his representative on military affairs, this law specifically lifts the power to make these decisions out of the Secretary’s hands and placed it squarely on the President.
3. The Secretary of Defense may request the President to waive the prior consent requirement with respect to the administration of an investigational new drug or a drug unapproved for its applied use to a member of the armed forces in connection with the member’s participation in a particular military operation. With respect to any such administration –
(A) the Secretary may not delegate to any other official the authority to request the President to waive the prior consent requirement for the Department of Defense; and
(B) if the President grants the requested waiver, the Secretary shall submit to the chairman and ranking minority member of each congressional defense committee a notification of the waiver, together with the written determination of the President under paragraph (1) and the Secretary’s justification for the request or requirement under subsection (a) for the member to receive the drug covered by the waiver.
The crucial portion of this new law is that only the President could waive the requirement for informed consent. Furthermore, even if the Secretary wishes to request a waiver, he cannot delegate that request, putting him- or herself on the hook, as well, if something were to go wrong. The President could also only grant the waiver in writing, and then the Secretary has to submit a copy of the waiver and his justification for requesting it in writing to both the House and Senate Committees involved that have cognizance over military affairs AND appropriate the money for such operations.
This section thus vests political liability for the decision to waive informed consent with the President. Second, it provides Congress with the weapon to veto the Presidential decision with its mightiest tool – control over the appropriations to conduct such an operation. While there is still an ongoing battle over the two provisions of the Constitution that vest control of the military in two different branches of government,[3] ultimately Congress could win such a battle by denying the funding for any military operation under its plenary power to appropriate money. Perhaps the most important aspect of the statute comes from the enabling public law. The National Defense Authorization Act for FY 1999, which passed and enacted the second version of 10 U.S.C. §1107, contained two notes that would affect any existing waivers of the requirement for informed consent. The first paragraph (paragraph (2) of the 1998 act) explains that the new paragraph (f) applies to any new operation involving service members. The second of these two clauses addressed the possible “grandfathering” of any pre-existing waivers and states that
(3) <10 USC 1107 note> A waiver of the requirement for prior consent imposed under the regulations required under paragraph (4) of section 505(i) of the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act (or under any antecedent provision of law or regulations) that has been granted under that section (or antecedent provision of law or regulations) before the date of the enactment of this Act for the administration of a drug to a member of the Armed Forces in connection with the member’s participation in a particular military operation may be applied in that case after that date only if –
(A) the Secretary of Defense personally determines that the waiver is justifiable on each ground on which the waiver was granted;
(B) the President concurs in that determination in writing; and
(C) the Secretary submits to the chairman and ranking minority member of each congressional committee referred to in section 1107(f)(4)(C) of title 10, United States Code (as added by paragraph (1)) –
(i) a notification of the waiver;
(ii) the President’s written concurrence; and
(iii) the Secretary’s justification for the request or for the requirement under subsection 1107(a) of such title for the member to receive the drug covered by the waiver.
Thus, the statute not only looked forward to future operations, it also reached back and effectively wiped out the existing interim FDA rule and waiver that the FDA still had not changed. The FDA would update its regulations in May 1999, incorporating all of the requirements of 10 U.S.C. §1107, some 7 months after the passage of the act and some eight plus years after it issued an “interim” rule for Desert Storm.
Endnotes
[1] In the Bosnia deployment, the DoD vaccinated troops against a tickborne encephalitis with an investigational drug.
[2] This is not a game of semantics, either. Our predecessor veterans in Vietnam, having spent time in the “Arizona Valley” near Da Nang or serving near the DMZ, might not characterize the role of our troops in Bosnia as “combat”, yet any time a bullet flies from a hostile rifle, there is the possibility for death and harm. The FDA is certainly not going to gainsay the military in such matters.
[3] The Constitution, in Art. I, §2, names the President as Commander-in-Chief of the armed forces. Art. II, §8 grants Congress the power to make rules for the land and naval forces, to raise armies, and the power to make all necessary rules in carrying out its duties under Art II.
[i] 143 Cong. Rec. E 637, April 10, 1997 (remarks of Representative Patrick Kennedy of Rhode Island).
[v] See, e.g., 143 Cong. Rec. H. 9137 (Oct. 23, 1997). Section 766 of the National Defense Authorization Act for fiscal year 1998 contained this bill under the subtitle Persian Gulf Illness (Subtitle F).
[vi] U.S. Senate Committee on Veterans’ Affairs Holds Hearings on the Nomination of Togo West to be Secretary of Veterans’ Affairs and U.S. Biologic Vaccines for Gulf War Veterans. Statement of Senator Rockefeller. March 17, 1998.
[vii]Id. Testimony of Mr. Randolph Wykoff, Associate Commissioner for Operations, Food and Drug Administration.
[ix] Testimony before the House Committee on Appropriations Subcommittee on Agriculture, Rural Development, Food and Drug Administration, and Related Agencies, (March 12, 1996).
Here we are on the cusp of one of mankind’s greatest accomplishments and many Americans have never been taught what a big deal successfully landing men on the moon was. Most of the Glibertariat know about the Apollo program and some of us probably know about it in much more and fascinating detail than I. Because I was a planetary geology major as an undergraduate it fell upon me to write this short piece on Project Apollo. So here is: “Plntry 101 Apollo Missions MWF 3-4”. If this doggerel inspires you to learn more about Apollo there are plenty of sources for further reading and watching.
The HBO series “From the Earth to the Moon” does a magnificent job with each episode concentrating on one portion of the effort. “In the Shadow of the Moon” is a great documentary which interviewed all the surviving astronauts (less Armstrong) and is purely archival NASA footage and interviews. Even Netflix’s “The Last Man on the Moon” is fantastic on Gene Cernan. There are books, too many to mention, that cover the program from the first detail to the last; from an overview for teens to tomes with a Selenologist’s attention to detail on a handful of samples; and even a crime story about the largest ever heist of lunar material from NASA. Okay, I’ll mention the last- “Sex on the Moon” by Ben Mezrich- covers how a world class BS’ing college student managed to steal samples directly from a NASA secure site.
The Apollo missions can be broadly separated into two categories, the “engineering” missions and the “science” missions. Of course every mission involved both aspects, but the program was designed to work out how to get men safely to the moon and back; then to move on to missions in the more geologically interesting areas. . President Kennedy said we’d go to the moon so now the scientists and engineers asked, “Okay. How do we do this?” NASA was full of engineers and the astronauts were test pilots (and one geologist) with a well-known design and test philosophy of incremental testing and validation. With no surprise this was the approach adopted for the Apollo Program. A series of missions would test aspects of the lunar mission profile culminating in a series of proof of principle landings before the serious science missions began.
There are several ways to go to the moon but they break down to basic models- brute force and meet ups. The brute force option (direct ascent) would involve a missile that would dwarf the Saturn V and involved landing the entire manned portion on the moon. This is what early SciFi films portrayed. The engineering was way too formidable for the time and this plan was discarded. The next version involved multiple launches with small existing launch vehicles and assembling the various parts and pieces in low Earth orbit. The lunar portion would be assembled in orbit. Another version had unmanned return craft sent to the moon with the manned portion landing nearby and returning in the first vehicle. This was daunting, especially considering that our first lunar impact mission (Ranger 3) missed the moon.
Easy, Just Do This and Visit the Moon
The Apollo program adopted the Lunar Orbit Rendezvous (LOR) mission program. Launch a large system that shed parts as they were no longer needed. This system made sense but involved the US having to develop expertise at multiple skills (orbital rendezvous, docking, multiple firings of engines, people working outside of spacecraft, space navigation etc.) before attempting a lunar mission. These were the goals of the two man Gemini missions. NASA achieved these goals in a rapid two year series of ten missions which learned the required skills for a lunar mission despite multiple mishaps, “adventure learning”, and several near disasters.
The workhorse of Apollo was the Saturn launch system. The smaller “little brother” Saturn IVB was used only for the Apollo 7 manned mission. The Saturn V (ASV) was the monster brother used for the balance of the Apollo missions. The ASV is still the most powerful vehicle ever used by mankind. A full ASV “stack” was 363 feet tall, 33 feet wide (fins added additional width) at the base and could send a 103,600 pound payload into lunar orbit. In order get this machine off the Earth the five engines in the first stage generated 7,610,000 pounds-force. To give an idea of scale, the escape engines atop the Apollo capsule generated more energy than the Redstone that the US used for the first two Mercury flights. The small third stage alone of an ASV was taller than an entire Mercury-Redstone system.
The first stage of the stack was 46 yards tall, weighed 5,100,000 pounds loaded. The five F-1 (or F-2) engines were independently gimbaled and controlled to keep the massive system upright within very small tolerances as it left the pad and powered up to 36 miles of altitude at an engine cutoff of ~160 seconds of flight. The great precision was required both to clear the pad- at the tightest spots there was only 2 feet of space between the ASV and the gantry- and to keep the system from tearing itself apart as it climbed. Even a few feet of shift at the bottom would translate into many yards of movement over a football field higher where the crew was located. This movement combined with the acceleration would have torn the stack apart in a huge fireball. As anybody has climbed even a small sailboat mast can attest, small changes at deck level quickly become manifest off the deck. Add in acceleration, winds aloft, shifting center of gravity as millions of pounds of fuel is consumed, and the rotation of the system and you can see why each engine was gimbaled and computer controlled.
The second stage was slightly smaller and less powerful than the first stage. It was fueled by burning a mix of liquid Hydrogen and liquid Oxygen through five J-2 engines. This pushed Apollo through the upper atmosphere and into space with 1,100,000 pounds-force in up to six minutes of burn time.
The famous footage of the separating booster and the ring shaped interstage (now on TV commercials) shows the ignition of the third stage of the ASV. It had one J-2 engine and same fuel as the 2d stage. The crucial difference was the third stage could be re-ignited in flight. It would burn for 2.5 minutes to place the Apollo into a parking orbit where systems would be checked. Later it would burn for 6 minutes to accelerate Apollo into lunar insertion. This meant the third stage accelerated the remaining stack from 25,000 feet/second (orbital velocity) to 35,545 f/s (lunar insertion) in under six minutes.
The third stage also had two other crucial functions. At the top of the 3rd stage was an instrument unit containing all the computers and instruments required for stages 1-3 to successfully function. Also at the top of the third stage (inside a shroud) the Lunar Module (LM) rode into orbit. The third stage followed parallel and near the Apollo to enter solar orbit after passing the moon. After Apollo 11 most of the third stages were deliberately crashed into the moon to provide signals for seismographs to help determine the interior lunar makeup.
The manned portions of Apollo consisted of the Command and Service Modules (CSM) and the Lunar Module (LM) which was the only true “spacecraft” that man has ever operated. The three seat Command Module was much roomier than the earlier Mercury and Gemini capsules since it had to execute longer missions and have room to bring back “souvenirs” from the lunar surface. In addition to the standard hatches it had a nose hatch designed to mate with the LM to enable the crew to move between the two vehicles. The coke can shaped Service Module had the long term fuel, oxygen, water, and other cells, onboard computers and an engine designed for multiple use. The SM engine was key in retrieving the LM from the third stage, mid-flight corrections, slowing to lunar orbit and accelerating to lunar escape orbit so the mission can return to Earth. Shortly before reentry into the atmosphere the Command Module would separate from the Service Module leaving it in Earth orbit.
CSM
The LM was designed ride into orbit inside the ASV third stage then ferry two men to and from the surface of the moon. The LM had two main parts. The lower section had the legs, descent engine and carried instruments for the lunar surface. It would then serve as the launch platform for the upper ascent stage. The ascent stage was the “home” for the astronauts and could cycle between an atmosphere and no atmosphere. It would carry the astronauts and lunar materials back to the CSM and then be abandoned in lunar orbit or crashed into the moon. Everybody who operated the LM was impressed with the handling, but it could only operate in the vacuum of space.
LM from CSM in lunar orbit
I need to add a few words about Apollo’s computers. A current kid toy has more computing power than the entire computer system used onboard during an Apollo mission. A current smart phone? Forgitaboutit. NASA would have given anything to have a cheap bottom line 2012 model. If you every listen to the unedited complete mission transmissions you’ll hear hours of Houston reading numbers to the crew, the crew reading back the numbers, the crew confirming the numbers entered, a pause while the onboard computer ran one part of an equation, the crew reading the new number to Houston, Houston reading the number back, a pause while Houston checked the new number, Houston reading another number, the crew reading it back…….. That is correct. The computers could not run an entire equation.
The astronauts for the Apollo missions had a clear hierarchy. All the Apollo missions were commanded by either Mercury or Gemini “class” selections and the junior mission members were often from one of the “Apollo” classes. Deke Slayton (Mercury) had been grounded in 1962 for a heart murmur but was made “Director of Flight Crew Operations” and made the crew selections for all Gemini and Apollo missions. His word was law. The mission commander was always an experienced astronaut who had done well previously. The CSM pilot was always an experienced astronaut because he would operating solo in lunar orbit while the others left in the LM. The LM Pilot was the junior astronaut and was more accurately the LM Co-pilot because the Mission Commander actually flew the LM. In total 33 seats were flown by Apollo, 24 different men went to the moon (3 were repeats) and 12 walked on the lunar surface.
Apollo 1
Crew: Grissom (Cdr), White (CSM) Chaffee (2d pilot)
This mission was designed to use the smaller Saturn IVB to achieve low earth orbit to conduct testing on the Command and Service Modules. Slayton chose Grissom as the mission commander because he was considered the best engineering pilot. Grissom was the second Mercury pilot in space, commanded the first Gemini mission, and was to take the first Apollo mission through the engineering paces. During the workup the engineers grew increasingly unhappy with “Gloomy Gus” who was pointing out issue after issue with the capsule and the training apparatus. Ed White flew on the 2d Gemini mission and was the first American to walk in space. Roger Chaffee was the FNG and was a communications specialist.
The crew was concerned about whether or not the capsule would have the deficiencies corrected in time to fly and Grissom was skeptical that the systems would work for the entire scheduled 14 day duration. On Jan 27, 1967, less than a month prior to the scheduled flight date, the crew was conducting a dress rehearsal in the sealed capsule and in a pressurized (29 psi) pure oxygen environment. During the test an electrical short under Grissom’s couch ignited a fire. Nine seconds later a voice (likely Chaffee) announced over the circuits that there was “a fire in the cockpit”. Fifteen seconds later the pressure from the fire caused the capsule to breech and then the nitrogen from outside led to increasing smoke while the fire burned itself out over the next hours. Engineers and technicians outside of the capsule heard the radio call and noticed movement inside, briefly, but the crew was dead even before the capsule breeched.
Apollo 1 Cabin Post Fire
This disaster caused NASA to refocus and redesign numerous aspects of the capsule and systems. Designs went from the major: redesign the door to open under pressure, changing the atmosphere from 100% to 40% oxygen and more carefully checking for friction points; to more mundane- spacesuits changed from nylon to fire resistant materials etc. NASA and the multiple contractors worked feverishly for the next year and a half until the CSM was declared to be flight ready for humans. Meanwhile multiple unmanned launches continued to test the various systems of Apollo and the Saturn V.
Apollo 7- October 1967
Crew: Shirra (Cdr), Eisele (CSM) and Cunningham (LM)
After 21 months of redesign of the CSM the mission of Apollo 7 was the same as Apollo 1. Apollo 7 launched with the smaller ASIVB and conducted testing in low earth orbit for 11 days. From a technical standpoint the mission was a complete success, the CSM flew extremely well and checked out. From a personal management system the mission was a mess.
Wally Shirra flew the Mercury and this was his third flight. Both Eisele and Cunningham were on their first flight. The larger capsule size (about the size of a standard closet) contributed to members suffering from space sickness. This combined with rations that weren’t sitting with the crew’s stomachs and Shirra coming down with a head cold led to “the mutiny”. Shirra and the others started to “talk back” to the ground control team and decided not to perform some requested actions that Shirra didn’t consider crucial to the core mission. The culmination of the mutiny was shortly before re-entry when Shirra decided that crew safety demanded that they not wear their helmets- which had been SOP since the first flight. The new fishbowl type helmets prevented the astronauts from being able to clear their eardrums. Since he and others were suffering from congestion he believed the risks were worse from helmets on versus possible impacts from having the helmets off.
After their return to Houston the crew had to defend their actions for when they didn’t follow directions from the ground. Slayton rejected Eisele and Cunningham from all further flights and Shirra retired from NASA. Their post flight medals were downgraded (the only crew to have that happen) and weren’t returned to the post flight standard awards until 2008. Slayton’s actions had the desired impact on the rest of the astronaut roster, the mutiny was never repeated during the remaining Apollo missions.
Apollo 8- December 1968
Crew: Borman (Cdr), Lovell (CSM), Anders (LM)
This flight is when Apollo started really attaining world prominence. This mission originally was to be another low orbit test, this time with an ASV, to test the LM with a crew aboard. The LM construction and testing was behind schedule so George Low basically said, “Well, we have the launch vehicle, so let’s flip missions and test the CSM under lunar conditions by going around the moon.” The mission change was announced after Apollo 7 returned, the original crew slipped back to Apollo 9 since they were training on the LM and Anders crew was told, “Be ready to go to the moon in two months.” The decision to undertake this mission on such short notice was influenced by having a complete ASV and not wanting to “waste it in low earth orbit”, combined with a recent Soviet mission (Zond 5) which sent some animals around the moon and back to Earth, and a rumored Soviet manned mission to orbit the moon.
Borman and Lovell were both Gemini pilots with well-regarded missions under their belts. Borman had commanded Gemini VII with Lovell as his crew. GVII was designed to be a long term flight of two weeks to simulate the time for a lunar mission. After Gemini VI’s aborted take-off the revised mission had GVII launch before GVI and then when GVI launched the two missions would rendezvous. After the meeting GVI returned to Earth and Borman’s mission remained in orbit for the full 14 days. (Imagine being in your front seat of your car for 14 days without a break.) Lovell later commanded Gemini XII (with Buzz Aldrin). GXII is considered the most successful Gemini flight because they easily docked with a target vehicle, and most importantly Aldrin completed multiple successful EVA’s which finally demonstrated that an astronaut could complete precise tasks outside a spacecraft without undue hazard to themselves or their craft. Michael Collins was originally scheduled to be the CSM pilot and had started training but developed back problems and got two vertebrae fused. Since recovery took time, he was dropped and Lovell was added.
The risks to Apollo 8 were real. This was only the third launch of a Saturn V and the first manned mission with an ASV. The two earlier unmanned launches had some serious issues including a compression problem (“pogo sticking”) that would have endangered the crew. Engineers had developed solutions and Apollo 8 was the test that the solutions worked. The other risk was Apollo 8 had no “lifeboat” or spare engine from a LM. This was the only time during Apollo no spare was flown and was done only because the LM was not ready to fly. Apollo 13 validated having a spare was valuable.
The mission launched on Dec 21, 1968 with no issues. Twelve and a half hours later the crew was approved to conduct lunar insertion and they became the first humans to head to another body in the Solar System. A8 had one issue on the way to the moon when the third stage was shadowing them too closely for comfort. After several discussions with ground control the solution was to radio the abandoned stage to vent all remaining fuel. This changed the trajectory enough to clear the hazard.
Riding to the moon is in some ways like riding a roller coaster. On the way there your initial velocity of 35,505 ft/sec gradually bleeds off as you climb out of the earth’s gravity well. As you travel the craft also slowly rotates (1X hour) like a rotisserie chicken to balance heating and cooling and you can’t even see the moon. Around 55 hours after lunar insertion the craft reaches ~39,000 miles from the moon and has slowed down to around 3,900 ft/sec. At that point the craft enters the lunar gravity well and starts to speed up as it falls down the roller coaster towards the moon. Now comes the odd part. The decision to enter lunar orbit is made with communications to the ground, but the firing of the Service Module engine to slow down to lunar orbit occurs behind the moon and out of communications with the Earth. The A8 CSM was only ~72 miles above the lunar surface and about to swing behind the moon when it got the okay. The CSM engine burn went without an issue and Apollo 8 settled in for 10 orbits (~20 hours) of quality time at the moon.
Now that Apollo 8 was orbiting the lunar surface they started their recon. Apollo 8 was launched so that when they arrived the lighting would be the same as it would be when Apollo 11 arrived. This was important because one key task was to photograph Apollo 11’s approach path and planned landing location. Having completed all their tasks the return to Earth went according to plan.
1968 would not be listed among the best years in America’s history. We were fighting a war in Vietnam and the “Tet Offensive” started off the year. There were multiple assassinations and riots throughout the country. The presidential election came down to Nixon, Humphries and Wallace. It was a good year to have not to have lived through. Apollo 8 was the one thing the country could look up to. The mission was a worldwide phenomenon and totally at odds with the USSR space program. The Soviets always kept their missions held close to the vest, Apollo was everywhere, for anybody anywhere, to watch. The Apollo 8 crew were the first people to see the entire planet in one glance. They shared with us the view of our home planet as a blue marble in the total darkness of space. They pointed the camera down and we all looked down on a totally alien world consisting of shades of grey. This is what the world saw that Christmas Eve. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1aIf0G2PtHo&app=desktop
One of the Most Important Photos of all Time
One of the Most Important Photos of all Time
Seeing the earth from space is a cliché now as evidenced by VW’s current automobile commercial. But when this photo was released it immediately grabbed the attention of people worldwide. The contrast of the blues and whites of the planet against the dead moon in the foreground and the black of space was instantly understandable. In a blink of an eye that photo was everywhere, from commercial products to stamps issued by a dozen governments and it gave a major boost to the environmental movement.
Apollo 9 March 1969
Crew: McDivitt (CDR), Scott (CSM), Schweickart (LM)
Apollo 8 captured the World’s attention and was glamour personified. It was the first time men journeyed to another body in the Solar System, reading Genesis at Christmas from lunar orbit, and the famous Anders “Earthrise” photo. Apollo 9 returned to the relative humdrum of low Earth orbit, but accomplished critical engineering goals with élan.
James McDivitt commanded Gemini IV on his first space flight and is often overlooked because he remained in the capsule while Ed White made America’s first EVA. Scott was on his second flight after flying Gemini VIII with Armstrong. Schweickart was on his first flight. Scott returned to space commanding Apollo 15. McDivitt transferred to managing the Apollo Program office after this flight.
Apollo 9 was the first time a complete Saturn “stack” was launched. This was test one of a complete lunar mission profile and most importantly was the first time the LM performed in manned flight. The LM was the reason and star of this mission.
The Lunar Module is the only true spacecraft that has ever been flown by man. The LM was designed to only operate outside of the atmosphere, so unlike the Command Module, once the LM piggybacked into orbit inside the Saturn stack it would never return to the planet. The LM was constructed with every ounce in mind and was robust, it was designed to fall the last three feet onto the lunar surface and the lower half was engineered to take the forces of the upper half launching from it. At the same time it was frail and there were areas so thin that a careless move could punch an arm or leg through the skin of the spacecraft.
The launch went well and so did the next 10 days as the crew put the LM through the test program. The crew tested each phase of a lunar mission including safety backup procedures. Schweickart wore the Lunar EVA suit designed for the moon outside the spacecraft and demonstrated that it didn’t “balloon out” which would have made walking on the surface impossible. He also took it out the LM’s door and back along to the CSM proving that this could be a backup way to return astronauts in the event of a docking problem. The testing highlight was flying the LM on a simulated lunar landing profile. After reaching a distance of 115 miles from the CSM, McDivitt fired the ascent stage and returned to dock with the CSM. After four further days of CSM based testing, Apollo 9 splashed down in the Atlantic, the last U.S. crew to do so (intentionally).
After the complete success of this mission Apollo managers realized that (barring any unexpected problems) Apollo 11 would actually have a chance to land on the moon. The only downside to this mission was Schweickart’s recurring space sickness. He was the first astronaut so badly afflicted and the knowledge and protocols that were later adopted for dealing with even worse episodes were not in place. He never was placed on a prime crew position again. His colleagues believed this was unfair and that he “suffered so the rest of us could have a chance.”
Apollo 10 May 1969
Crew: Stafford (Cdr), Young (CSM), Cernan (LM)
Only two months after the success of Apollo 9 came the dress rehearsal for the lunar landing. Apollo 10 was man’s second trip to the moon and it would rehearse the mission that followed it by two months. Stafford was on his third flight and Young and Cernan on their second. This crew was assembled for their engineering and testing skills and might have been the most proficient Apollo crew ever to fly. (Apollo 10 and Apollo 11 were the only two missions to have all veteran crews.)
Apollo 10’s mission profile was simplicity in itself. Run the exact Apollo 11 mission profile to just short (8.4 miles above lunar surface) of the actual landing. The mission was timed so the practice landing run to the planned Apollo 11 location had the same lighting conditions. (You are noticing a theme here, right?) The ascent stage was light loaded with fuel so it would be at the same weight as the same point as in the actual ascent from the lunar surface. Cernan later said they were so close to Sea of Tranquility it looked like they could just reach out and touch the surface.
The mission went well except for one serious issue. The crew had accidently double loaded a command into the LM’s computer (weak computers are not your friend) and when they fired the ascent stage they started rolling. After a few tense moments, and on camera oaths, they regained control of the LM and the mission continued successfully. Years later it was revealed that the problem was more severe than NASA had publicly stated and that the crew was within several seconds of losing control and crashing into the surface.
Apollo 10 from an astronaut perspective was the true Hall of Fame crew. Only three men went to the moon twice. Young and Cernan were two of them, both of them commanding later missions and walking on the moon. (Lovell was the third two lunar mission vet.) Young was the astronaut’s astronaut with six flights. He was on the first Gemini mission, commanded Gemini X, was the CSM pilot for Apollo 10, commanded Apollo 16 and commanded the first Space Shuttle mission. For his swan song he commanded the 9th Shuttle mission. Gene Cernan commanded Apollo 17 and was the last man to have walked on the moon. Thomas Stafford flew one more mission after Apollo 10 when he commanded the Apollo-Soyuz mission.
Apollo 11 July 1969
(Do I really need to list them?) Crew: Armstrong (Cdr), Collins (CSM), Aldrin (LM)
This was it. The big one. The whole enchilada. El tutti mundi. Add the whipped cream and nuts to the sundae. Yadda yadda yadda. The older Glibs need no reminding, the entire Nation was riding along with Apollo 11. The younger Glibs probably could use an introduction to the scale of Apollo. Approximately 400,000 US citizens were employed in various aspects of manufacturing or mission conduct during the Apollo program. It was a huge part of the economy. From 1961 to 1972, including Gemini and the unmanned lunar survey missions, the country spent $28B ($169B in 2018 dollars) on Apollo. The entire world followed Apollo 11. A higher percentage of the world’s population watched or listened to Armstrong step onto the moon than any other event before or since. Florida’s Atlantic coast was filled for miles and miles with 100,000s of people who came to watch the launch. Hell, e Dbleagle’s father even sprung for a color TV to watch Apollo. He was among the 400,000 working on Apollo. His personal stake in Apollo was helping to design and inspect a set turbine blades in the LM’s descent module.
For all the scientists, engineers and programmers of Apollo this was what years of work were culminating in. All the theories, all the testing, all the inspections were coming down to this. As Buzz Aldrin put it, “Can we really pull this shit off?” The mission profile had been rehearsed in Earth orbit (9) and various aspects in lunar orbit (8 and 10), now the mystery of the last 8.4 miles were to be filled in.
This was a specially selected crew of all veterans. Armstrong had a military background but was a civilian member of the Gemini class. He commanded Gemini VIII on his first flight, made the first successful docking of two spacecraft and then saved the mission (and their lives) by skillfully stopping unexpected rolling after a thruster stuck open. Later while training for Apollo 11 he survived a literal last 2 second ejection from the LM landing trainer. He caused a significant stir among the other astronauts by immediately going back to work after lunch. Aldrin was “Doctor Rendezvous” and not the best guy to have around at parties. He was well known for buttonholing anybody at a party to talk about rendezvous procedures. Admittedly a difficult procedure but would you want your wife trapped in a corner while a coworker discussed Sugar Free stories in infinite detail? But Aldrin had cracked the code on how to do a successful EVA and if somebody had to piece together getting the LM and CSM back together in the event of an “ahh shit” moment he would be the guy. Collins had worked on the CSM since the beginning and was thought highly enough to had been the original primary for Apollo 8. Collins later said when he had been tapped as the CSM pilot for A8 he knew he would probably never walk on the moon because of his skills with the CSM.
Why the Sea of Tranquility? Well it was the easiest and most boring spot to land a mission. Remember incremental steps. If Apollo 11 was to answer Aldrin’s question it meant going “How easy can we make this landing thing?” Put it near the equator, with no mountains on the approach or nearby, no big craters, valleys or other stuff and close to lunar dawn so the features would stand out. Plus if something went wrong the short and long areas were flat and open as well. This meant the potential launch window opened up since the window for the primary site was less than twenty-four hours. Tranquility Base fit those requirements perfectly.
Most Apollo missions had issues during launch until landing (or not landing- cough Apollo 13 cough) but for Apollo 11 the trip to the moon was surprisingly textbook, until it came time to land. Now the shitbucket started filling up- and fast. Computers overloaded with data and started blaring warnings, the Eagle was coming in long and steering directly for a crater. Armstrong took over and manually flew the LM and landed with seconds of fuel before the abort point was reached.
Watch it here. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RONIax0_1ec&app=desktop At home we only heard snippets and no video. We never saw the contact light come on, the descent engine shut down or the LM as it falls the last three feet to the surface. We heard clipped language and suddenly there was a pause, “Tranquility Base here. The Eagle has landed.”-and the world erupted. Throughout the world people rejoiced.** It was an impossible moment, but it just happened and we listened to it. My great grandfather called to congratulate my dad. My great grandfather was born in a dirt poor Calabrian village before the Wright brothers and now his grandson had designed part of the “wonderful machine” on the moon. During a break in the hours before the EVA I took my young Quarter Eagle personage outside with my telescope to look at a moon with men on it. It looked the same, but I knew just over from the terminator (line between day and night) there were two people and that made it different from any time in the history of the human species.
Much of the EVA was difficult to see on TV. But the world watched the blurry black and white images. Unlike the later missions which traversed increasing segments of the lunar surface this was “Can we pull this shit off?” and nothing was known. The best minds available had ideas, tested and formed hypotheses, but here was the first chance to live test. The suits worked, bunny hopping became the preferred method to move, the surface dust layer was thinner than thought. Houston extended the EVA because consumption of oxygen was lower than thought and the cooling system worked more efficiently than believed. Everything took longer than thought as well so the astronauts were working harder and faster until Houston saw their respiration rates climbing too much and let them know to slow down. Finally, after around 2 hours Aldrin followed by Armstrong re-entered the LM an sealed the door. It is estimated that 600,000,000 people watched the EVA. See it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CC3ncS-wXXI&app=desktop The total area explored was about the size of a baseball diamond.
Apollo 11 Landing Site
Here are a few photos of the EVA. Armstrong took almost all the pictures so the best photo of him is when he was reflected on Aldrin’s facemask.
First Photo from Lunar SurfaceFirst Panorama After LandingHome from the SurfaceArmstrong Reflected in Aldrin’s Facemask (LM Pad and Contact Rod in Foreground)
Much like on Shepard’s Mercury mission, when ya gotta go-ya gotta go. So Aldrin did. As he later said, “Neil took the first step on the moon, but I had my own first as well.” After the EVA the crew had a sleep period which did not go well and forced NASA to think up a better plan for later missions. The crew had just achieved the crowning moment of their professional lives and the sleep plan was “sleep on the floor.” All through the rest period A&A were keyed up, aware that they were 250,000 miles from home and the LM vented, turned on and off various pumps, motors and whatnot which they noticed. Plus even at 1/6 gravity a metal floor was not comfortable. Sleep was poor and badly fragmented.
The “aw shit” moments weren’t over for LM crew. During EVA prep or recovery a backpack unit snapped off a critical switch. If the crew couldn’t figure out a way to flip the switch there would be no take off. Aldrin partially disassembled a pen and used a piece jammed into the console to flip the switch at the required time. They docked with Columbia and transferred 47.5 pounds of lunar material and returned home without incident- or did they?
The ten minutes hanging upside after splashdown until the inflation bags righted the Columbia was almost to be expected. Part of the safety protocol to save the world from an “Andromeda Strain” incident was to seal the astronauts, all lunar material and all material exposed to lunar material in a quarantine. So there were intricate procedures to put everything into isolation bags. The crew was kept in a closed environment with a med team for three weeks. So far so good, until somebody noticed one of the bags was forgotten and had remained outside of quarantine for several days. The answer? Crack open the door and chunk the bag in.
After getting clearance that they would not bring Armageddon upon the Earth the crew of Apollo 11 was released and then started what has been described as a version of hell by all three men. NASA sent them on a Nation- and world-wide goodwill tour. All three men were private people by nature (less so for Aldrin) and this tour quickly wore them down. The crew was described by Aldrin as “amiable strangers”. They remained friendly but were not regulars at each other’s casas. Armstrong and Aldrin knew they would never fly in space again but Collins was told he could command a later mission. He decided that the training demands were too much and said if Apollo 11 was successful he was done.
So Apollo 11 answered Aldrin’s question. The US could pull off this shit. Besides bringing back the samples and photos from the surface Apollo 11 left an instrument package on the moon. The laser reflector is still used to this day to make precise distance measurements.
** The North Vietnamese did not rejoice and knew that the Apollo missions would raise the morale of the POW’s. So they ensured no word of Apollo reached the POW’s ears. They only found out after later pilots were shot down and captured. The Viet’s were correct. The success of Apollo did raise the prisoners’ morale.
Lunar Recon Orbiter Photo (2011) of Tranquility Base with tracks and instruments visible
Apollo 12 November 1969
Crew: Conrad (Cdr), Gordon (CSM), Bean (LM)
While being on any Apollo crew would have been a highlight of any Glibs life, this would have been the most awesome crew to be on. The three were known for their good humor with everybody they worked with and were routinely involved in hijinks (and matching Corvettes). The three remained close friends for the rest of their lives. Success during this engineering mission was critical to the remaining science missions visiting much more interesting areas than flat mare landing sites. This mission was also the victim of too much success too quickly for the Apollo program.
Pete Conrad was in the Mercury selection program until he rebelled against the invasive biological testing by leaving his stool sample in a gift-wrapped box for the medical staff. Even though he was not selected he was encouraged to apply again by Alan Shepard and was selected in the Gemini Class. He flew on Gemini V and commanded Gemini XI. GXI used the docked Agena as a booster to change their orbit to 850 miles, which is still the highest low Earth orbit flown by man. Richard Gordon was a long time friend of Pete Conrad from their time in the Navy. He also flew with Conrad on Gemini XI doing two EVA’s during the mission. Al Bean was the FNG on his first flight but had quickly bonded with the two old friends.
So Apollo 11 showed we could land in a huge open flat area. But to explore geologically interesting areas precision landing was required. Apollo 12 was that test. The chosen landing area had been intentionally crashed into by a Ranger mission, landed on by Surveyor 3, and accidently crashed landed by a Soviet mission. It was nicknamed “Pete’s Parking Lot” since Apollo 12’s mission was to land near Surveyor 3 to prove precision landing navigation was possible. The mission also was to test more extended durations on the surface since they would conduct multiple EVA’s. The crew would also test the sleeping hammocks to see if good sleep was possible on the lunar surface.
Remember when I said Apollo 11 had been lucky on their way to the moon? Apollo 12 wasn’t. The skies were overcast and 36.5 seconds after launch the Saturn V was hit by lightning and started losing systems. The stack was hit again at 52 seconds and more systems started dropping out. The instrument unit atop of stage 3 (remember it from earlier?) continued to function keeping the stack upright and accelerating. One young engineer remembered an obscure command that wasn’t part of the procedures book and the FNG executed the command which cycled the system and brought all the systems back online. All this excitement was while the first stage fired away. After a careful check of the systems Apollo 12 fired for trans lunar insertion. Houston decided not to inform the crew that the lightning may have screwed up the Command Module parachutes since there was no backup. You can’t see the strikes because of the clouds but can hear the crew and ground here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eWQIryll8y8 or here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9i6yD2c2Jho
Apollo 12 successfully conducted their first mission when they landed just over 360 yards from Surveyor 3. This is the only time that mankind has landed, manned or unmanned, alongside an earlier mission. Like Apollo 11 the Apollo 12 crew took control and moved the landing site. Here is the landing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kFSa6vUix70&app=desktop
The EVA’s went well with one major OOPS. NASA had upgraded to color TV for Apollo 12 but Bean accidently pointed the TV at the Sun while setting it up. This exposure fried the tube and that was the end of TV transmissions. When the team arrived at S3 they removed some parts to bring home but failed in one unstated mission. The crew lived up to its joker reputation by sneaking a camera timer to the moon. The plan was to use it to take an unannounced photo with both astronauts in the frame and let the scientists at home try to figure out how the crew did it. Unfortunately the timer couldn’t be found in the equipment bag until too late for use. Bean would not be your first choice for President of the AV Club since he fried the TV and accidently left a couple of exposed rolls of film on the surface.
Apollo 12 site from the LRO (2011)Conrad at Surveyor 3 with LM in Background (Too bad the prank at this spot didn’t happen)Bean Stepping off LM
The backup crew caught the spirit of the prime crew and smuggled Playboy centerfolds into the checklists worn during EVA 1 (and for Gordon on the CSM for his solo orbits). The checklists (and all sorts of other mission information for all the lunar landings) are available here: https://www.hq.nasa.gov/alsj/main.html
Checklist Page with Additional Visual Aid
Apollo 12 set up a series of instruments designed for long term use. As part of the testing, after they re-boarded the CSM the LM was crashed into the lunar surface where the seismograph recorded the impact. On the way home the crew experienced an unique eclipse when the Earth eclipsed the Sun. One last OOPs happened when a camera broke free at splashdown hitting Bean in the head (helmets were no longer worn thanks to Apollo 7) knocking him briefly unconscious and required six stiches to close.
Conrad was selected to command the first manned Skylab mission and led the effort repair Skylab for habitation. On an EVA he used the “Warty method” aka brute force to open one solar panel and followed that up by adding a sun umbrella/micrometeoroid to Skylab so it could be inhabited. Al Bean then commanded the second manned Skylab. Gordon was selected to command Apollo 18, but more about that in a bit.
In the 1990s I had a chance to enjoy a pleasant 30 minutes with Pete Conrad. My son was on a major Star Wars kick and wanted to visit a SciFi event. My then wife wanted a quiet Saturday so I was elected to take both kids to Santa Barbara for the day to attend. As is normal (I guess. I only went to one of these events.) there was a chance for autographs from the SciFi shows and the lines were huge for the TV actors. Off to one side was a grey haired man sitting almost alone at a table. As I wandered up I saw the sign saying it was Conrad. We started talking Gemini, Apollo and Skylab (mainly A12) for almost 30 minutes until people came up to hustle him off to an event. At the last second I grabbed a couple of signatures for my kids. To this day I am confused by that event. Here was the 3rd man on the moon, a veteran of 4 space flights, and an engaging and humorous person. I had a chance for a half hour conversation with only a couple of brief interruptions because people were choosing to stand in lines for an autograph from an actor. People are weird.
Next Steps for Apollo
In the decade leading up to the lunar landings all things space were the rage throughout American society. The space effort was everywhere in culture. It was in radio, TV shows (“I Dream of Jeannie” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gRNwv8opJT0 Is it just me or does Larry Hagman resemble Tom Brady?), Snoopy gave up on the Red Baron and became an astronaut, worldwide advertising for just about anything, GI Joe and Barbie both had astronaut versions, plastic models, model rocketry, drinks, food (“Space Food Sticks” and “Tang”), motels, you name it- the space themes were there. But Apollo 11 popped the popularity balloon. Space was old, the new thing was environmentalism, spurred on in part by Anders image from Apollo 8.
NASA had four successful lunar flights in 11 months. They made the entire enterprise seem routine when anybody involved in the program knew the risks and close calls that were avoided. While the entire planet thrilled to Apollo 11 the overall view of Apollo 12 was: “Why are we still doing this since we already beat the Russians?” Bringing home more rocks (~75 lbs) and used metal from an unmanned lander seemed not worth the cost to an increasing number of Americans. Apollo 13 was to be the first science focused mission because this stuff was now routine.
Apollo had been conceived to run through Apollo 20 and the required ASV systems had already been purchased. By when Apollo 12 returned, the Apollo 20 mission was cancelled and in 1971 Apollos 18 and 19 were scrapped. (Sorry Gordon) After Apollo 15 returned Nixon tried to scrap the remaining two missions but was convinced to conduct them by Caspar Weinberger.
The early missions proved man could work on the lunar surface. The biggest scientific findings from Apollo 11 and 12 killed the lunar capture theory. The moon is almost unique in the Solar System. It is larger in proportion to the host planet than anywhere else (except for Pluto/Charon). If the moon was captured then the chemistry of the rocks should show a different base chemistry. The rocks from Apollo showed the rocks chemistry to be very similar to Earth in most respects. This brought increased examination of the impact theory. Summarized: Early in the Solar System a Mars sized object hit a glancing blow on Earth, badly shattering both. The debris that was flung into a low orbit and rapidly impacted together forming the Moon. More easy detail here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Origin_of_the_Moon
Now let the serious Selenology commence! To be continued……
In part one of this two-part article, I made the following (paraphrased) claims:
The state of science is unwell.
A sample of the majority of published papers are likely irreproducible, or just plain garbage.
I know of no other way to make the case for these propositions than by example, knowing full well that this is subject to the counterclaims that “these are just anecdotes” and/or that they are not representative of the whole of science. To somewhat blunt such criticism, I begin with examples of people who were at the pinnacle of some of the most prestigious scientific and medical journals and let their experiences begin the discussion. I finish my proof by offering a history lesson on the origins of these phenomena, which I believe assists in showing that the “how” of “how we got here” helps explain and buttress the conclusion that “here” is, scientifically speaking, a very bad place.
Ben Goldacre is a British doctor and author who wrote the wonderfully evocative “Bad Science” and its companion follow-up “Bad Pharma.” Ben makes a living speaking and writing about the vagaries of pseudoscience and does so in a wonderfully humorous and accessible way. Having seen him speak in person, I tend to think of him as a kind of Malcolm-Gladwell-meets-Michael-Lewis of junk #science. His examples are relevant, modern, funny (most of the time), pervasive, and cross cultural boundaries. His chapter in “Bad Science” entitled “The Doctor Will Sue You Now” should be read by all high school students as an introduction to science by showing these future adults how governments, physicians, and all of the supposed checks and balances of peer review don’t prevent, but in actuality help enable, the kind of fraud peddled by Dr. Matthias Rath (who claimed he could cure AIDS with his multivitamins and managed to get the support of the South African government for a completely unethical clinical trial on human beings).
Goldacre’s book begins with an offhand remark that I believe merits consideration on this notion of the poor state of science.
“The hole in our culture is gaping: evidence-based medicine, the ultimate applied science, contains some of the cleverest ideas from the past two centuries; it has saved millions of lives, but there has never once been a single exhibit on the subject in London’s Science Museum.”
Bad Medicine, Preface, p. x (emphasis added).
If Goldacre is correct that medicine is truly an “applied science,” then I feel confident that my claim that science is a mess can be amply proven because “The Mess” that is modern medicine can be considered an archetype for all of the ills of science. Additionally, the greatest killer of human beings in the United States right now is chronic disease: that is to say, far and away in the United States, more people die every year as a result of repeated, entirely optional, bad behaviors than any other single disease or causal factor. We also spend about $0.86 out of every healthcare dollar on the various chronic diseases. As just one salient example, when I was the general counsel for CrossFit, Inc., and we were approaching 7,000 gyms in the United States, we got curious to know what other ‘chains’ were growing as fast. Starbucks and Subway certainly had more locations, but they had started well before us and were no longer opening stores as quickly. After some web searching we found the only business opening as many new locations was DaVita – kidney dialysis centers – owned by Berkshire Hathaway. Diabetes and its associated disease states are a massive drain on the healthcare budget. Then think about adding in coronary artery disease (Thanks govt nutrition guidelines!) and the associated problems, most strokes (Thanks doctors who advocated smoking!), etc. Yet these are diseases of advanced civilization. We continue to pat ourselves on the back at our advanced #science(!) while we kill ourselves with lifestyle behaviors at a rate that approaches the death chambers at Auschwitz. And speaking of which, one would think that the entirety of WW2 and its aftermath, with the use and application of science to produce more efficient ways of killing, should give us great pause to consider whether our science (with or without the hashtag) might need some recalibration, yet there is no post-war period of philosophical introspection about science at all to which one can point. FN 1
Richard Smith began his career as a physician in Great Britain, and finished it as the chief editor of the “prestigious” BMJ (previously known as the British Medical Journal) from 1991-2004. He was also head of the BMJ publishing group and worked at BMJ for a total of 25 years, beginning in 1979. Here is his take from 2006 on some ideas for reform, or even abandonment, of the peer review process in medical and scientific journals. Ten years later, however, in a lecture to the International Journal of Epidemiology, he was singing a different tune: blow the entire system up. One might argue that this is simply a case of one man’s bitterness, but Marcia Angell, the former editor-in-chief of the New England Journal of Medicine, arguably the most influential medical journal on the planet, had very similar things to say after her time in academic publishing (in 2009). She was disenchanted enough to write a book entitled “The Truth About the Drug Companies: How They Deceive Us and What to Do About It.” Her conclusion?
“It is simply no longer possible to believe much of the clinical research that is published, or to rely on the judgment of trusted physicians or authoritative medical guidelines. I take no pleasure in this conclusion, which I reached slowly and reluctantly over my two decades as an editor of The New England Journal of Medicine.”
Dr. Marcia Angell, 2009
A great place to really get one’s “bad science” on is Retraction Watch. Retraction Watch, as the name implies, began as a simple blog about scientific papers that were subsequently retracted, in part because – just like other publishers, especially newspapers and magazines – science publishers aren’t particularly keen on reporting that something they previously published was completely wrong. More importantly, in addition to burying subsequent retractions, no one is charged with connecting a paper’s retraction to all of the subsequent papers and research that relied upon the conclusions of the original faulty paper. Entire fields of study have been wiped out by faked papers and research.
John Ioannidis wrote a paper attempting to explain mathematically why “Most Published Research Findings Are False.” The sidebar to that article is worth following as Ioannidis responded to the firestorm that his paper generated.
My own personal favorite is based upon my experience as a criminal defense attorney with government run forensic laboratories. While this may bum-out the viewers that keep the “CSI” franchise and its sponsors in business, I invite anyone to go to a search engine and type in the name of a state agency’s lab – the ones that handle forensic analysis of evidence in criminal trials – and the word “scandal” after it and see what results return. Massachusetts, for example, is still dealing with the fallout from their drug-using forensic chemists. But. Massachusetts. is. hardly. unique. Indeed, one could argue that government attempts to use #science to put people in cages is the perfect jumping-off point for explaining how we got “here” with bad science.
The “Generally Accepted” Test
In Frye v. United States, 293 F. 1023 (D.C. Cir. 1923), a man was convicted of second-degree murder and appealed his conviction. The basis for his appeal was the trial court’s decision to exclude the results from what amounted to an early form of the lie detector, which the defendant had ‘passed’ and wanted to submit to the jury via expert testimony. The judge did not allow the evidence and on appeal the D.C. Circuit upheld the court’s ruling.
Just when a scientific principle or discovery crosses the line between the experimental and demonstrable stages is difficult to define. Somewhere in this twilight zone the evidential force of the principle must be recognized, and while courts will go a long way in admitting expert testimony deduced from a well-recognized scientific principle or discovery, the thing from which the deduction is made must be sufficiently established to have gained general acceptance in the particular field in which it belongs.
We think the systolic blood pressure deception test has not yet gained such standing and scientific recognition among physiological and psychological authorities as would justify the courts in admitting expert testimony deduced from the discovery, development, and experiments thus far made.
Id., at 1023.
This case and its announced legal standard held sway in courts around the Nation for almost seven decades, even surviving the court reforms of the 1950s and the adoption of the Federal Rules of Evidence in 1975. What is important about the decision, however, was that it gave legal definition to “science” in courtrooms across the United States, or at least, that is what subsequent courts did with it. The so-called “Frye standard” consulted no scientists nor, perhaps even more importantly, scientists steeped in the philosophy of science. The standard did nothing more than reify the idea of a ‘consensus’ of opinion about some particular technology – in this case, the so-called ‘lie detector’ – at any given moment as being the standard of admissibility for ‘scientific evidence’ in federal courts. It is a fundamental misapprehension about what makes something “science.”
The case was, of course, *not* the single causative event of its era that led to the diminution of real science. In point of fact, it may not have been even the second, or third, or fourth most important event, but it was certainly a part of a series of events between World Wars that changed the course of science. (FN 2) The inter-bellum period of the early twentieth century saw radical changes in the prevailing models of how economics, politics, public policy, and even how the universe worked. In the ‘science’ of economics, Marxism rose to ascendance in the same period that eugenics was a very real policy of multiple states in the U.S., born out of the (mis)application of Darwin’s theories on evolution to social structures. The same was true for Einstein and relativity.
It is hard to fully appreciate now the impact Einstein’s general theory of relativity – and its “proof” by the eclipse of May 29, 1919 – had on the underlying faith in science and a wide swath of popular culture. As Brittanica notes:
The ideas of relativity were widely applied—and misapplied—soon after their advent. Some thinkers interpreted the theory as meaning simply that all things are relative, and they employed this concept in arenas distant from physics. The Spanish humanist philosopher and essayist José Ortega y Gasset, for instance, wrote in The Modern Theme (1923),
‘The theory of Einstein is a marvelous proof of the harmonious multiplicity of all possible points of view. If the idea is extended to morals and aesthetics, we shall come to experience history and life in a new way.’
The revolutionary aspect of Einstein’s thought was also seized upon, as by the American art critic Thomas Craven, who in 1921 compared the break between classical and modern art to the break between Newtonian and Einsteinian ideas about space and time.
David Stove of the University of Sydney makes a compelling case for where the philosophy of science in the western world went awry in his book Popper and After: Four Modern Irrationalists, Pergamon Press, 1982. He also points to the disruption that Einstein’s relativity wrought upon the scientific world.
The crucial event was that one which for almost two hundred years had been felt to be impossible, but which nevertheless took place near the start of this century: the fall of the Newtonian empire in physics. This catastrophe, and the period of extreme turbulence in physics which it inaugurated, changed the entire history of the philosophy of science. Almost all philosophers of the 18th and 19th centuries, it was now clear, has enormously exaggerated the certainty and extent of scientific knowledge.
D.C. Stove, “Popper and After,” p. 51.
Stove takes only 100 pages to fully identify and explicate the source of irrationalism in science, beginning his work with Karl Popper and his fellow scientific irrationalists, and leading eventually to Hume’s extreme inductive skepticism, going so far as to detail the flaw in inductive skepticism by use of symbolic logic. Stove contends that Hume’s belief that one could draw no conclusions at all from repeated observations in the past about the future was revived by Karl Popper in the aftermath of the “fall” of the Newtonian view of the universe. FN 4.
In this dependence on Hume, Popper is only an extreme case of a general condition. For the influence of Hume on 20th-century philosophy of science in general is so great that it is scarcely possible to exaggerate it. He looms like a colossus over both of the main tendencies in philosophy of science in the present century: the logical positivist one, and the irrationalist one. His empiricism, his insistence on the fallibility of induction, and on the thesis which flows from those two, of the permanent possibility of of the falsity of any scientific theory, are fundamental planks in the platform of both of these schools of thought.
Id. p. 50.
By the time we get to the Supreme Court finally updating the “Frye standard” to discuss what the can qualify as ‘scientific knowledge’ for admissibility in the case Daubert v. Merrell Dow Pharmaceuticals, 509 U.S. 579 (1993), the battle has already been lost, with Chief Justice Rehnquist’s mewling lament of a concurrence:
I defer to no one in my confidence in federal judges; but I am at a loss to know what is meant when it is said that the scientific status of a theory depends on its “falsifiability,” and I suspect some of them will be, too.
I do not doubt that Rule 702 confides to the judge some gatekeeping responsibility in deciding questions of the admissibility of proffered expert testimony. But I do not think it imposes on them either the obligation or the authority to become amateur scientists in order to perform that role.
Daubert, at 600-01. (emphasis and bold added).
Sacre bleu! Why, the very idea that a learned man or woman – and jurist – should know what science is!
AGW being taught in schools as “science” is simply the culmination of a journey that begins with Karl Popper and his intellectual heirs – Kuhn, Lakatos, Feyerabend – coming to dominate the philosophy of science. Some seventy years after “general acceptance” in Frye the Supreme Court is now citing a self-admitted irrationalist, who did not believe that it was possible for human knowledge to be cumulative and advance, for its definition of what “scientific knowledge” is. The opinion itself discusses all manner of non-science as being characteristic of science, or should I say #science, including “peer review” and consensus.
And that, my friends, is how fast we went from a society bursting with innovation and the understanding that science was an attempt to model underlying universal truths, to a level of specialization that approaches only insects, and our schools hammering our children with post-modernist ideas about what makes something #science.
FN 1 – There is no post-WW2 ‘scientific reformation,’ for example, with a commitment to use the awesome power of the atom to provide energy for all – there are instead only more bombs that can reach farther faster. This doesn’t even begin to address the science used to make chemical and biological weapons.
FN 2 – In order to avoid claims of plagiarism, I want to be clear that I am hardly the first person to point to the era between the First and Second World Wars as being historically significant for the changes that were wrought in this country – and across the world – most specifically in the outcome of the clash of ideas of the day. For example, the influence of Progressivism and the Eugenics movements, as well as Marxism’s influence on Russia and its subsequent Lysenkoism, show that as early as 1935, people were sounding the alarms on the influence of post-modernist ideas in seemingly diverse fields of human action.
FN 3 – Stove’s work puts me in mind of Albert J. Nock sounding the alarm in 1935 in “Our Enemy, The State,” or “Isaiah’s Job.” Stove also authored a compelling book titled The Plato Cult: And Other Philosophical Follies, Basil Blackwell Ltd., 1991. The book’s jacket has a professor describing Stove as “an entirely worthy member of a distinguished tradition of outrageous curmudgeons.” That phrase immediately invokes Richard Weaver and his “Ideas Have Consequences,” as well (1948).
FN 4 – To be clear, Einstein’s theories did not in any lessen the utility or power of Newton’s Laws, they only shortened their reach, but Einstein’s ideas about space-time and how gravity would bend light were a departure from Newton’s corpuscular model of light, as well as what had been the prevailing notion of space as essentially “inert.” Regardless of subsequent interpretations, for many people and pundits in that era, the boundaries of what could be known with certainty certainly seemed to have shrunk.
A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.
Max Planck
I’m going to begin with two claims about the state of #science in the United States. I use the hashtag advisedly because one of my assertions is that the majority of what passes for science in the current zeitgeist is generally non-science, or, most charitably, bad conjecture, if we’re properly classifying some of the current crop of pop-culture fads attempting to pass themselves off as real Science (yes, I’m looking at you AGW). To begin with, here are my two claims:
The current state of science in the United States is…unwell. This is not to say that there isn’t some good science being done to which one can point, but the measure of the health of science in any age isn’t simply what things are invented, or what new technologies may be invented or arise that lead to the ease of living of the species. I will take this up in detail below, but for now I make the claim that science in the U.S. is in a deplorable state, due to a confluence of factors that began from within science itself, but spread to other areas, such as the Law, for example, and reinforced the rot that has led us to our current state, which an esteemed scientist and friend of mine calls “the Post-Rational Epoch.” More on him below, as well.
While a direct consequence of #1, it is also a piece of evidence while being its own separate problem, but the odds are that anything you’ve read recently in a mainstream media science piece, no matter how ‘peer reviewed’ it was, is garbage. My estimate is that it’s about 70/30 – in favor of garbage. I’ll back up that claim, as well.
Before I can properly begin my argument, however, I must first define what I mean by science, as well as a number of related concepts in order that a metric is established by which I can show where things are currently awry, as well as the how and why that happened. So, I’ll leave these here and return to their proof below. Without trying to be pedantic, and in respect to the science knowledge of the Glibertariat, I ask some forbearance on this reiteration of the basics. Blame public education – I do. (See my prior writing on that topic if you’re curious.)
What is Science?
It is a methodology for modeling the universe; nothing more, and certainly nothing less. To be more precise, science is the process by which we develop models of the real world with predictive power better than random chance. Science proceeds on an underlying assumption: that there are underlying truths of our material world, of the universe itself, that can be discovered, and modeled, by mankind. In some cases, like Newton’s Law of Gravity, the model can be so powerful, with such mathematical precision, that predictions can be made about the future time, position, and even energy state of bodies on Earth or in space.
Science is also how you have been understanding the world from the moment your senses turned on and became capable of taking in and processing stimuli. You have been producing models, using heuristics and other cognitive mechanisms, to come to grips with the stunning array of information presented to you, then updating these as more data comes in, confirming some hypotheses, discarding others, modifying yet others, limiting the domain and range of some theories… What we traditionally learned as the scientific method is an articulation of that mental machinery that churns out models of how the world works.
Observe
Ask a question
Develop a testable hypothesis
Experiment – TEST your hypothesis
Analyze the data/results
Conclusion
This is also an iterative process and can be entered from different points along the path. You may have a simple question that nags at you, or you may have a particularly well-developed theory – as in the case of Einstein’s gravitational waves – but in either case, if you don’t have a testable hypothesis, one that has measurements and criteria for validation, the problem remains. (P.S. it turns out Einstein was correct – it just took 100 years for the equipment to be invented to confirm it). As this example above (hopefully) illustrates, Science does not necessarily yield absolute, universal truth… at least not NOW, or maybe not on the first go-around, which is why we have categories for models. The generally agreed upon definitions are:
Conjecture – An incomplete model, or an analogy to another domain;
Hypothesis – A model based upon all data in its specified domain, with no counterexample, and incorporating a novel prediction that has yet to be validated by facts;
Theory – a hypothesis with at least one non-trivial validating datum;
Law – a theory that has received validation in all possible ramifications, and to known levels of accuracy;
One scientist, an author on the subject of science, science education, and former two-time chief scientist at Hughes Aircraft Company, has offered the following addenda to the hierarchy above.
Rational argument must be the zeroth axiom.
Observable evidence must be reduced to measurements—that is, to comparison against a standard.
Scientific facts, the foundation of all model building and testing, are measurements with an established accuracy.
Science is a branch of knowledge, the objective branch, and ultimately public.
The application of science to public policy with unvalidated models is unethical. FN1
What Science Isn’t
With this as the foundation upon which we build, it’s evident that the IFL #Science! Crew traffics in something more akin to a religion – scientism, but certainly not science. For example, nowhere in our schema above for science does the word ‘consensus’ appear. For some of us of a certain age, the word ‘consensus’ was never taught in conjunction with science; the word was never spoken in a science classroom. This is because consensus is not a part of the scientific method and its adoption into #science has a direct correlation to the cheapening of real science. Science cares nothing for votes or popularity; either a model delivers predictions that can be tested and measured, that is validated or not, or it is either (1) an incorrect model, or (2) isn’t science at all. This is where the popularity of certain ideas, mingled with the need for funding for continued research, can lead to bad outcomes. This is at its worst when popularity includes the government concretization of ideas. FN2
In truth, the new #science is the politicization of science, and it is, unfortunately, nothing new. The Lysenkoism of the 1930’s charts its rise quite nicely with the fall to our current state of scientific illiteracy and innumeracy. Science in service to the state is another of the defining characteristics of statist systems of government, such as socialism, communism, fascism, and even corporatism, of which we have more than our share. AGW is simply the newest version of Trofim Lysenko’s politicized science that seeks its answers not in universal truths, but in power and control, in popularity, populism, and the censorship of competing ideas, all of which undermines the very foundations upon which science is built. Science proceeds on the refinement of models, as Einstein slightly narrowed the domain of Newton’s Laws of Motion to more accurately model what happens when the v = velocity in Newton’s equations approaches c, the speed of light. It is easy to forget that was a refinement that was four-hundred years in the making. Or to cast it in a slightly different light, five years before the Puritans started the Salem Witch trials of alleged witches, Isaac Newton published the Principia. Newton’s models withstood four-hundred years of human progress in science and even then, Einstein only narrowed them for a few special classes of objects traveling at light speed.
Einstein left us with numerous other models, some of which bear his name, on the basis of the profundity of his contributions. The same is true for Otto Warburg: the Warburg effect is what occurs when you drink a radioactive sugar and then have a PET Scan that “lights up” the cancerous tumor cells, as those cells preferentially uptake the glucose over surrounding healthy, non-cancerous cells. FN 3. It’s why Glenn T. Seaborg had an element of the periodic table named after him, (Seaborgium, Sg – 106), while he was still alive. Seaborg and Edwin McMillan discovered Plutonium and both won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1951. That line of transuranium elements on the bottom of the periodic table – the actinide series? Seaborg, as well.
Industrial Science
In the late 1960’s, a gentleman named Jeff finished his PhD in Engineering from UCLA. Like many of his fellow graduates, given their interests and multiple degrees in electronics, applied mathematics, applied physics, and communication and information theory, employment was plentiful in the corridor north of Los Angeles that contained the heart of the United States’ burgeoning aerospace/defense industry, chief among them Hughes Aircraft Company. Jeff’s family had a legacy at Hughes and it was no accident that he would spend half of his three decades at Hughes as the Division Chief Scientist for both the Missile Development and Microelectronics Systems Divisions.
Among the projects to which Jeff contributed significantly was the AWG (pronounced in military slang like it rhymes with dog) Nine (AN/AWG-9) radar. That caught my attention when I learned about it from his son. I was an attack helicopter pilot in the 1990’s, but I grew up keenly interested in American military aviation of the 1980’s. The AWG-9 radar, and the plane that ultimately carried the famous missile guided by it, would be featured in “Top Gun.” The F-14 Tomcat ultimately was what arrived at the end of a long acquisition process to find a fighter-intercepter capable of taking advantage of the standoff distance of both the radar and the vaunted Phoenix missile. While the Iranians claimed to have splashed over 60 Iraqi MiGs with the Phoenix and the AWG-9, the only three ever (admitted to being) fired by U.S. fighters missed their targets.
Regardless of its record, the chief deterrent effect of it lay in its effect on pilots on the other side of the Cold War. Almost all fixed-wing aircraft, and even some rotary-wing, have devices much like the ones you use in your car to detect police radar. The detectors work in specified frequency bands and detect the radiated electromagnetic energy that is being sent at your car by the cop’s radar gym. In return you get a tone, or a spike, on your detector. The ones in planes are using fundamentally the same principles, but the receivers will give returns for slightly more sophisticated radars, including a strobe for direction and strength of signal, up and including targeting radars, like the kind on missile seeker heads and their radars. These produce the “tone” that is now ubiquitous in modern aviation movies.
The old adage in dog-fighting is that ‘first in sight wins the fight.’ This is because in dog-fighting, the person in the higher energy state – typically the person at higher altitude – all other things being equal, can translate that extra potential energy into kinetic energy at some decisive point in the fight, usually as airspeed, sufficient to shoot down the opponent. For Soviet-bloc fighters going up against the Tomcat, its radar, and the accompanying Phoenix (AIM-54) missile, it meant getting a tone in our headset and a “lock” signal while you were still flying blind, unable to “see” anything, because that’s what happens when someone else’s radar can “outreach” yours. Hence, regardless of the U.S. record with the Phoenix missile, the AWG-9 likely helped keep the Cold War cold and gave the U.S. air superiority because it could see farther than anything the Russians had.
The AWG-9 and the accompanying technology for the missile seeker head, the ability for the missile to track multiple targets, to travel at supersonic speeds, and to be able to shunt fuel in turns at 5-6 times the force of gravity, is all Science at an extraordinary level, where getting it wrong means lives lost. Notice also that all of that work was classified top secret or better and therefore not subject to “peer review” or “publication” in a science-y journal; yet the mathematics behind radar is at a level that very few people can understand. Radar is, fundamentally, the ability to distinguish signal from noise among a radar return from, say, 75 nautical miles away… that is a math problem of a very, very high order. And none of that even begins to address the ability of the radar to acquire, track, and target multiple aircraft traveling at high velocities in different directions all intent on doing harm to the person sitting in front of that radar.
I want to finish this first chapter on Science with a reminder of Science’s truth-seeking function. I also note here that Science is in this aspiration no different than the Law, or Literature, or, more broadly, all of good Art. Good comedy is funny because of how well it presents the Truth – or apparent Truths – typically in an odd or unusual light. Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet was written in the context of 17th century Elizabethan drama, yet it has been remade time and time again, into the Sharks v. the Jets and many other variants. This isn’t because it’s false. Indeed, even Religion would be well included in this list of truth-seeking human endeavors and it serves (perhaps) as a reminder why the IFL #Science crew is so much closer to being a religion than they are to being scientists.
In the next installment, I will make good on proving the two propositions I began with and trace the history of the degradation of science, from Karl Popper and his colleagues to David Stove to Daubert v. Merrell Dow Pharmaceuticals. Yes, we finally get after the lawyers next time.
FN 1: Conjecture, Hypothesis, Theory, Law: The Basis of Rational Argument, by Dr. Jeff Glassman, Ph.D., CrossFit Journal#64, Dec. 1, 2007.
FN 2: I’ll explore a number of those specific instances in future articles, in order to show how wrong science can go in model-building, but how much worse it is when government becomes involved in choosing which is the “correct” model. This is true from nutrition guidelines to cancer research, from fitness to hydration, and many more. It’s almost as if the government is completely ignorant of the ‘procedural’ nature of genuine science. For the more cynical, it may be assumed that this is no accident at all, and instead a feature of politicians intentionally picking whatever theory works best for their political purposes, the truth-seeking function of science be damned.
FN 3: Warburg’s contributions to what might be called biochemistry now, but had no such name during his life, rival Einstein’s in physics. Warburg received the Nobel prize in 1928 for his articulation of the aerobic and anaerobic processes of cellular respiration.
FN 4: I am aware that various publications list the AWG-9 anywhere from 50-100nm depending upon what one reads and at what classification and when it was published. Suffice it to say that the AWG-9 outdistanced (and thus out-scienced) anything the Russians had during that timeframe.
Purpose: To increase the personalization and granularity of divinatory results for the Glibertariat.
Background: The stars shine upon us all, rendering astrology suitable for predicting events occurring to multiple people simultaneously. However, the skies only speak to and about persons above a certain threshold of relevance. Also, Glibs bitch when their sign isn’t mentioned. Tarot reading provides excellent results on an individual level, though the quality of the results varies greatly with both the skill of the reader and the relationship between the reader and the subject, typically established to be as follows:
SCIENCE! requires PowerPoint
However, the mechanism by which the Tarot works as a divinatory technique is completely separate from the functional principles of Astrology, the latter resulting from the Celestial Emanations from beyond (but also including) the Lunar Sphere, while the former relies on the individual’s Deep Intuition and the universal connections of the Forza Vitae between individuals. As such, Tarot has not been proven reliable on a collective scale.
Hypothesis: Tarot can be modified to provide satisfactory results for groups of people. Tarot is a notoriously individualistic technique, but Glibertarians are notoriously individualistic subjects. The concept that Glibertarians can collectively be described as individualists is a paradox that opens the door to supernatural examination in much the same way as crossroads, dusk/dawn, or beach surf regions.
Technique: Each week, a single tarot card will be drawn for each astrological sign and the result revealed for interpretation by the individual Gliberatus/a/x. Initially, the deck chosen will be the Rider-Waite, but will transition to the Glibertarian Tarot once such a thing exists. Merging the two contradictory techniques this way will create a harmonic resonance in much the same way that adding 4 (earth) to 3 (sky) yields 7 (perfection, magic). In addition this combination of incompatible auguries is particularly suitable for the Glibertarian penchant for impurity, hybridization, miscegenation and sodomy.
Data: Customer responses in the Sunday noon post will be evidence of the usability of the provided cartomancy. Data collection will continue for an unspecified number of weeks with analytics performed at irregular intervals.
Ok, now that you all know what’s going on, here’s what you have to work with:
Three alignments, interlinked:
Mercury-Sol-Terra = “Good news from/about home”
Jupiter-Sol-Mars = “Strength to the Righteous Warrior”
Terra-Luna-Saturn = “domestic shortages”
Aquarius plays host to the Sun and Mercury this week. Expect surprises, suspense, anticipation… basically the good aspects of chaos or uncertainty. Much like last week, Jupiter in Sagittarius protects those who do right, so a karmic bonus with the stuff going on in Aquarius. You’re going to need that however, since Saturn and the waning Moon in Capricorn portends that you are going to make an unusually stupid mistake. You may make this mistake because it will be easy to be belligerent, what with Mars being in Aries and all. However, it also means that a direct approach to problems will be successful.
So that’s the overarching (literally) state of the universe. What about for you in particular?
Aquarius – Wheel of Fortune. Good luck. Combined with that whole Mercury/Sun thing you’ve got going on, this is the week to take a trip to Vegas.
Pisces – 7 of Wands. Courage, discussion, barter, success at competition.
Aries – 8 of Wands. Activity, speed, haste, flight.
Taurus – Strength. This means strength. Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.
Gemini – 3 of Wands. This signifies that I probably need to shuffle the deck better next time. Also stability, commerce and discovery.
Cancer – Knight of Swords. Skill, courage, wrath, destruction, successful surgery.
Leo – Ace of Cups. “True Heart,” joy, contentment, fertility. Is a Ed Wunkler a Leo?
Virgo – 4 of Wands. Harmony and prosperity.
Libra – The Emperor. Stability, power, aid, protection, reason.
Scorpio – 6 of Coins. “Now is the Time,” gifts, attention.
Sagittarius – 3 of Swords. Division, delay, absence
That’s it. We’re at the end. Today we’ll go through the steps to make a beer starting with some malted barley, some hops, water, and yeast. I just recently brewed up a batch of my Saison, which has been tweaked to my tastes, and is fairly popular with visitors:
1.5 oz Saaz (2.8% AA) at 90 minutes
.5 oz Saaz (2.8% AA) at 20 minutes
This should end up with an OG of ~1.050, and a FG of ~1.008 for about 5.5% ABV
Pitch with a saison yeast (I usually use 565, but used a new one for this batch).
So what’s different with All Grain versus Extract? For All Grain beer, you’ll be starting with malted barley, and need to convert the starches in it to sugars. This is done in the mash. You’ll need a 10 gallon (or larger) insulated (or heated) container with some manner of filtering out the grain from the wort. This can be done with a stainless steel false bottom, which is something like a colander with smaller holes that sits on the bottom of the mash tun over the spout where you’ll be draining the wort. Or, you can use a bag that you attach to the side of the mash tun. The bags are cheaper, easier to clean, and prevent stuck sparges. The only problem is you’ll have to lift a heavy (water + grain) bag out of the mash tun in order to clean it.
There are two main enzymes that will break the starches into sugars, Beta Amylase and Alpha Amylase. Now, these two enzymes have different temperature ranges that they’re most active in, for Beta Amylase, that range is 131-149°F; for Alpha Amylase, that range is 145-158°F. Anything above those temperatures will denature (break) the enzymes, and they’ll stop working. The lower the mash temperature, and the longer, the more fermentable sugars you will get from the grain. The higher the mash temperature, the more unfermentable sugars you’ll get. Too high of a temperature (or too short a mash time), and you’ll have unconverted starch in the beer instead of sugar.
Using a calculator, we figure out what temperature we need to heat the water up to so that when it is mixed with the malt, it’ll be at our expected mash temperature. This is known as the strike temperature. In this instance, my strike temperature came out to be 160 F. We then take the malt and add the hot water to it.
During this part of the process, you’ll want a mash paddle, which is used to stir up the mash and break up any dough balls that form. You can use a big whisk (or spoon) if you want, but stay away from the $5 cheap plastic mash paddles, they do not work all that well for batches over 1 gallon..
Then we put the top on the mash tun and wait, stirring it every once in a while if you so desire (which will up your efficiency a bit). So since this is a 90 minute mash, we’ll take this time to discuss efficiency. There’s two main measures of efficiency that matter to the home brewer: Brewhouse efficiency – how much of the sugars did you get to out of the malt and into the fermenter at the end of the day (80% is a good standard to reach for); Conversion efficiency – How many of the sugars did you get out of the malt. These numbers will be different, because there’s going to be some loss in water absorbed by the grain, left in the mash tun, and left in the boil kettle at the end.
So while the mash is going, we’ll also heat up water for sparging (rinsing more sugars off the malt). We want this water to be hot (I usually aim for 185 F and boiling), because we want to stop the conversion process, and because we need to get all of this wort up to a boil anyway. I do a 2 step batch sparge. So after draining the mash tun, I’ll dump hot water over the grain and drain it twice. You can do a single batch sparge, or even a continuous sparge (where you have a pump recirculating the mash over the grain).
All of these runnings will go into the boil kettle and brought up to a boil. At this point, you follow the same steps as you would for an extract batch. Now you just have to clean up your mash tun, and decide what to do with the spent grain. The grain still will have some sweetness to it, and can be used to feed livestock, dried and ground into flour, or used in its current state to make spent grain bread.
And for sitting through all of these columns, here’s a bonus recipe:
English Mild
Yield: 5 Gallons
OG: 1.034
FG: 1.008
ABV: ~3.3%
60 Minute boil
Grain bill:
4 lb Maris Otter
1 lb Crystal 90 L
1 lb Crystal 30 L
1 lb Carapils
Mash at 150 for 90 minutes.
Hops:
1 oz East Kent Golding (7.2% AA) at 60 minutes
Ferment with a Dry English Yeast (I use WLP007 for this one)
Today is a twofer in the ongoing esoteric education of the Glibertariat. We have reason N+1 why I “never mention your sign” and also concrete proof of the sciencyness of astrology.
Here is the chart for Jan 18. This in NOT the actual chart I use, but one generated by a computer (SCIENCE!) that has many of the same features and can be used as a teaching example.
Want to know the secrets of the universe? Start here.
So obviously, you’ve got the zodiac around the edge, and the position of all the planets and a few other things marked as to where they are. You will notice that everything falls in the range between Aries and Sagittarius. If your sign is between Scorpio and Taurus inclusive, there is literally nothing there. So why don’t I mention your sign? Because you’re unimportant. Your life has no meaning. The cold, uncaring stars don’t even bother to look in your direction, nor do they avert their gaze. They simply aren’t aware that you exist. The eternal empty eons of apathy ignore you. Only the Glibertarians love you, and you can make them love you more by donating at https://glibertarians.com/donate
“But wait!” you may be saying “There IS something on the chart! That weird messed-up pawn shop logo pointing to Cancer!” Well, no. That’s the ascending node for people born that day– it doesn’t actually exist. But it is a great example of how astrology is a true science.
I’ve talked before how astrology was born out of inductive reasoning — taking data, matching events and signs and using them to make a model that predicts the future, just like notable scientists such as Ptolemy, Pythagoras, Brahe and Copernicus did. But as science advanced, so did astrology. Just as the concrete, inductive discipline of practical masonry lead to the abstract, deductive Freemasonry, so too did astrology gain a philosophical, theoretical, deductive branch. Particle physics has “virtual particles” and “supersymmetric counterparts.” Cosmology has “dark energy.” These are things that might not exist, or in the case of virtual particles absolutely do not actually exist, but we keep them around because they are useful to the models and keep physicists employed. Likewise, clients get pissed off when you tell them that there’s nothing in their sign on any given day, so astrology has developed these virtual heavenly bodies to keep the income stream going (just like any other scientist with their research grants.) Sometimes these are actual objects (like the asteroid Ceres) with absolutely no demonstrated astrological value, and sometimes they are completely invented spots in the sky, like the Dark Moon Lilith (indicated by the black crescent and cross symbol pointing into Aquarius) but they need to exist, otherwise astrology wouldn’t work. And since astrology works, they must exist. Q.E. Freaking. D.
Last week’s amaze-o bad luck Rune of Ending from Wizard of Earthsea has broken up, so that’s good. Still some reverberations from it as Saturn remains aligned with the sun and the moon leading to additional good things ending.
One of those good things that ended was Venus’s transit through Scorpio. If you didn’t take advantage of that, too late. This week Venus enters Sagittarius with Jupiter, so there’s an interesting double-path to good lovin’. Your Game will be on this week (On point? On fire? On fleek?) However, even if you don’t have Game, this is one of those rare weeks where being polite and well mannered will get you laid.
Swimming will be more difficult this week as Saturn joins the Sun and Mercury in Capricorn. Also bad luck involving leather goods. Lastly, someone will make a conscious effort to deceive you.
The moon and Mars are in Aries this week, bringing an extra jolt of belligerence and higgledy-piggledy. Ares will enjoy competitive success, but also an increased risk of indigestion. This is an obvious sign that you should enter an eating contest if there is one this week.
So what’s different with All Grain versus Extract? For All Grain beer, you’ll be starting with malted barley, and need to convert the starches in it to sugars. This is done in the mash. You’ll need a 10 gallon (or larger) insulated (or heated) container with some manner of filtering out the grain from the wort. This can be done with a stainless steel false bottom, which is something like a colander with smaller holes that sits on the bottom of the mash tun over the spout where you’ll be draining the wort. Or, you can use a bag that you attach to the side of the mash tun. The bags are cheaper, easier to clean, and prevent stuck sparges. The only problem is you’ll have to lift a heavy (water + grain) bag out of the mash tun in order to clean it.
Using a 
the malt, it’ll be at our expected mash temperature. This is known as the strike temperature. In this instance, my strike temperature came out to be 160 F. We then take the malt and add the hot water to it.
So while the mash is going, we’ll also heat up water for sparging (rinsing more sugars off the malt). We want this water to be hot (I usually aim for 185 F and boiling), because we want to stop the conversion process, and because we need to get all of this wort up to a boil anyway. I do a 2 step batch sparge. So after draining the mash tun, I’ll dump hot water over the grain and drain it twice. You can do a single batch sparge, or even a continuous sparge (where you have a pump recirculating the mash over the grain).