Comm Check

On February 1, 2003, the unthinkable happened. The space shuttle Columbia disintegrated 37 miles above Texas, seven brave astronauts were killed and America's space program, always an eyeblink from disaster, suffered its second catastrophic in-flight failure. Unlike the Challenger disaster 17 years earlier, Columbia's destruction left the nation one failure away from the potential abandonment of human space exploration. Media coverage in the immediate aftermath focused on the possible cause of the disaster, and on the nation's grief. But the full human story, and the shocking details of NASA's crucial mistakes, have never been told -- until now. Based on dozens of exclusive interviews, never-before-published documents and recordings of key meetings obtained by the authors, Comm Check takes the reader inside the conference rooms and offices where NASA's best and brightest managed the nation's multi-billion-dollar shuttle program -- and where they failed to recognize the signs of an impending disaster. It is the story of a space program pushed to the brink of failure by relentless political pressure, shrinking budgets and flawed decision making. The independent investigation into the disaster uncovered why Columbia broke apart in the sky above Texas. Comm Check brings that story to life with the human drama behind the tragedy. Michael Cabbage and William Harwood, two of America's most respected space journalists, are veterans of all but a handful of NASA's 113 shuttle missions. Tapping a network of sources and bringing a combined three decades of experience to bear, the authors provide a rare glimpse into NASA's inner circles, chronicling the agency's most devastating failure and the challenges that face NASA as it struggles to return America to space.

To Slip The Surly Bonds—NASA, The Shuttle Disasters and the Demise of the U.S. Manned Spaceflight Program: To Slip the Surly Bonds—enters into the world of NASA and tells the story of not just why the shuttle disasters happened, but exposes NASA’s inner workings and what actually led up to the two most horrifying space accidents known. It explores the new CEV and explains the need for the United States to pay more attention to space. NASA’s budget had been gutted many times by various Presidential administrations and Congress, following the halcyon days of Apollo and the Moon. NASA was short on money and mission profile after we landed on the moon. The Space Shuttle was truly a successful program and the ISS gave the shuttle an excuse for being. Congress was also having a field day with budget cuts, not to mention devastating the programs with pork barrel projects that were hooked into the NASA budget. NASA too, had been its own worst enemy due to its static, bureaucratic, way of doing its internal business. China, and Japan, and India are forging their way to the stars while NASA sits on a lonely launch pad, waiting for the next crumb to fall from the Congressional table. The U. S. Commercial Aerospace sector has had some brilliant successes with reaching the space station with robotic cargo flights, but there is nothing that is now man-rated for travel to the ISS or anywhere else. The new CEV or Crew Exploration Vehicle is in the process of testing, but the money is again short. NASA must continue to struggle for its needs while other nations reach higher. To Slip the Surly Bonds explores the intricacies of how and why NASA was created, the Manned Spaceflight program, how the shuttle disasters happened and why the United States’ position in the space frontier is in jeopardy.

Lieutenant Anthony Pacino reports aboard the “project boat” USS Vermont two years after having survived the catastrophic sinking of the Piranha. Pacino quickly learns that Vermont’s missions are all ultra-secret with the boat reporting only to the Sub Force commander, the National Security Advisor and the President: Vermont does the dirty deeds that need doing in deadly silence and obscurity. After Vermont misses the mark on an easy mission, there are questions asked about her ability to conduct the next mission, one that is vital to the security of the United States and the future of the submarine force. Vermont is tasked with stealing a revolutionary submarine that the Russians are testing with an Iranian crew because it’s too risky to use Russian sailors. It’s a high-stakes gamble for all involved, with the losers vanishing if things go wrong, the winners validating a world-changing technology. Pacino is part of the mission to steal the submarine, but the toughest obstacle is a wolf-pack of Russians coming to the defense of the Iranian submarine. Getting it back to the United States for evaluation becomes secondary to surviving an exchange of missiles and torpedoes in an underwater battle that threatens to let the final genie out of the bottle. *** “DiMercurio has used the last decade to refine his writing and produce the best naval thriller in decades. I couldn’t put it down.” Joseph Courtemanche, author of Assault on Saint Agnes.

The two-volume proceedings LNCS 9056 + 9057 constitutes the proceedings of the 34th Annual International Conference on the Theory and Applications of Cryptographic Techniques, EUROCRYPT 2015, held in Sofia, Bulgaria, in April 2015. The 57 full papers included in these volumes were carefully reviewed and selected from 194 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections named: honorable mentions, random number generators, number field sieve, algorithmic cryptanalysis, symmetric cryptanalysis, hash functions, evaluation implementation, masking, fully homomorphic encryption, related-key attacks, fully monomorphic encryption, efficient two-party protocols, symmetric cryptanalysis, lattices, signatures, zero-knowledge proofs, leakage-resilient cryptography, garbled circuits, crypto currencies, secret sharing, outsourcing computations, obfuscation and e-voting, multi-party computations, encryption, resistant protocols, key exchange, quantum cryptography, and discrete logarithms.

On April 12, 1981, NASA's Space Shuttle Columbia blasted off from Cape Canaveral: a state-of-the-art flying machine, and the world's first real spaceship: a winged rocket plane, the size of an airliner, and capable of flying to space and back before preparing to fly again. Less than an hour after departure tiles designed to protect the ship from the blowtorch burn of re-entry were missing from the heat shield. White recaptures the historic moments leading up to the launch of the Columbia, her daring maiden flight, and her life and death struggle to return, using interviews, NASA oral histories, and recently declassified material.

The way we prepare and analyse tests has evolved, as well as the way we perform and conduct those tests. However, we all concluded that the face-to-face exchange could not be replaced by any digital event. The ettc2022 was the first in-person telemetry event since the outbreak of the pandemic in 2020. The conference presented a dense technical program of more than 40 high quality papers, merged in the Conference Proceedings. As always, you could find the latest and most promising methods here but also hardware and software ideas for the telemetry solutions of tomorrow.