The Last Word On Nothing

“It’s so cute,” said Pete, watching our new robot vacuum cleaner gently ram the kitchen table. After gradually inching past the obstacle, the robot moved haphazardly around the room, missing the most obvious specks of dirt. Pete swept some of the dirt into a neat line in front of the robot, cooing encouragement.

I could see how the robot, a generous gift from Pete’s parents, was an improvement on our traditional vacuum cleaner. I hate vacuum cleaners — they’re icky to clean out and smell of burnt lint. I almost never use one since we don’t have carpet, just hardwood floors. But I couldn’t see how the robot vacuum was an improvement on that most elegant of household cleaning tools, the broom.

With their polished wooden handles and witchy straw bristles, brooms embody not only sexy design but my favorite form of procrastination. Along with baking, listening to audiobooks, and putting things in an online shopping cart and not buying them, I find that sweeping is an excellent way to avoid writing. 

I felt supplanted. Like Cinderella’s evil stepsister, I resented the robot’s cheery jingle. I even watched with perverse satisfaction as the robot bumped over a cardboard box and got trapped inside. Like Lucifer the cat in Disney’s Cinderella, I deliberately walked the floor in muddy running shoes, giving the robot more work to do. 

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I’ve already written for LWON once about the power outages that swept California this fall. Soon after I posted that piece, however, I heard from a family that lost power in the midst of a medical crisis, and wanted to share their story.

I met this family in 2018, while reporting a story for the Washington Post.  My goal for the story was to illustrate how a quiet change to California’s health care policy left two brothers-in-law – Gordon Surber and Mark Hailey — in vastly different worlds in terms of healthcare.

Gordon and Mark were neighbors on the Hoopa Valley Reservation in rural Humboldt County, California. Both men had chronic obstructive pulmonary disorder (COPD) a terminal lung condition that slowly whittles away lung capacity. Because of a recent law covering palliative care for a subset of people with MediCal, California’s Medicaid program, Mark was able to get palliative care– a suite of services including specialized pain control and visits from a nurse, chaplain and social worker.

Gordon, who died in November 2019, could not get palliative care covered by his Medicare policy or private insurance. Without palliative care, his wife Judy was left to care for Gordon, three grandkids and her mother largely unsupported, although the company that provides Mark’s care, ResolutionCare, stepped in to provide many services for free.

When the Washington Post story went to print, in December 2018, Gordon was in and out of the emergency room, each trip requiring an hour and a half-long drive each way through a windy mountain pass. It seemed unlikely he’d live much longer, but he made it through nearly another year, helping Judy take care of their three grandkids.

By fall of 2019, Gordon’s lung capacity had diminished to the point that he needed a continuous supply of oxygen. When PG&E shut the power off in October, there were no spare tanks in the house, Judy says. The home machine that delivered oxygen had to be plugged into an outlet, but it kept turning off when connected to their small generator. Someone brought a bigger generator, but that machine burnt out, Judy says. Ultimately they had to use his brother-in-law’s machine, as Mark’s health has improved since he started palliative care.

I called a company that supplies oxygen in Humboldt County, Broadway Medical, to ask how they handled the outages. The first outage came with only a few hours of warning, they told me. Although the company says none of its several thousand customers had emergencies, it also lost its internet connection when the power went out, including access to its electronic records. Unable to conduct business as usual, they sent most of their staff home.

During an outage, Broadway can still transfer oxygen from large canisters to smaller, more portable ones, and deliver them by truck, they told me. Their own supply is limited, however, by that of a separate facility that converts liquid oxygen into concentrated air. That facility can only make it so far on a generator, and when it runs out, Broadway can’t fill tanks. Things can start to go bad with in a day or two, the company’s operations manager told me: “If you go beyond 24 hours, that’s when you start to see real problems.”

Although she knows Gordon was living on borrowed time during his last weeks, Judy thinks the outages made things worse. He was so stressed by the prospect of running out of oxygen that he kept turning down the dial on the tanks whenever she left the room, she says. Every time his blood oxygen levels dropped too low he lost a bit of function, she says: at one point he had a seizure, then he couldn’t speak or swallow. “Every time something like that happened he never got back to how he was before,” she says.

Although my story for the Post was focused on health policy, I always wanted to write more about Judy, who has carried such a heavy caregiving burden — taking care of Gordon, her mother, and grandkids — while simultanously working as a medical grant writer for the Hoopa tribe and pursuing her own creative work.* It seems monstrously unfair that the outages struck during her final months with Gordon, her partner of more than 40 years. “Some people never have what we had, never know that unconditional, soul mate, best-friend type of love,” she wrote after he died. “I’ll love him forever, miss him every day and treasure what we had until the day that I join him.”

*One of the things that Judy and I connected over, early on, is that she also is a writer. She has published a novel, Reservation High, and is now working on her second book.

That’s a somewhat newer mission patch from the National Reconnaissance Office, the spy satellite outfit which is clearly still at the top of its game.

The amateur NRO watchers are still watching. I follow some of them on Twitter. Lately they’ve also been watching: the Starlink satellites, the launch of international asteroid probes, pretty pictures taken by weather and earth-observing satellites, North Korean missile launches — anything that may or may not go into some kind of orbit and can be seen. These watchers are related to other watchers of OSINT (open source intelligence) (meaning, unclassified images taken by satellites) (of stuff like missile strikes, nuclear facilities, and missile launch sites) (in countries not necessarily our friends). The former watchers tend to be looking up, the latter tend to be looking down. Not sure why I enjoy this so much. This first ran April 26, 2012, and the comments were interesting.

At 4:12 p.m., Pacific time, on April 3, 2012, the National Reconnaissance Office – the 50-year old spy satellite agency whose existence the government didn’t admit until 1992 – launched a “payload,”  a classified radar satellite, NROL-25.  The launch was webcast live but the NRO didn’t want to reveal sensitive information about the satellite’s eventual orbit, so it cut off the webcast after three minutes.  Five hours later, a Canadian member of a loose group of amateur trackers watched the classified satellite pass overhead; then other trackers from Sweden, Russia, Scotland, and another Canadian watched it too.  They calculated its orbit. The tracker from the Netherlands was clouded out and didn’t see it until April 5, but he photographed, then filmed it. The whole thing is up on the internet.

I hardly know which question to start with.  Let’s begin with the questions I’m not going to ask:  what the NRO is up to, and what target that classified radar satellite is looking at, and why the target requires using radar and not regular optical imaging.  The answers I’d get would be neither exact nor satisfying.  I know this because I’ve spent time asking such questions and I swear, the people who answer them have taken lessons in stringing common English words into sentences that range from non-responsive to gibberish.  This pisses me off unbearably and I used to think I’d rather they just told me they weren’t going to answer.  But then I ran into some classified guy at a party and asked politely, “And what do you do?” and he said, “I can’t tell you,” and I wanted to yell, “Well for chrissakes then make something up, I was just being polite!”  The point is, classification is a mighty hard on friendly conversation with your fellow man.

No, the point is, I may have needed to get that off my chest but we’ve strayed from the subject: those amateur trackers.  They’re international – in addition to the countries above, they come from the U.S., England, South Africa, Australia, France, Germany – number around 15 to 25, and are mostly retired.   They operate out of their back yards using binoculars, stop watches, cameras, and math.  They’re not looking randomly around the sky, they’re looking for specific objects:  the International Space Station and the space shuttle carrying crews travelling to the station, satellites with decaying orbits, and mainly, classified satellites.  They hear about a launch – NRO announces launches which are full of conspicuous fire and thunder and not exactly secret – spot the satellite, communicate positions and trajectories to their colleagues, and calculate the orbit that the NRO doesn’t want them to calculate.

Orbits tell them something about the satellite itself.  A sun-synchronous orbit — that follows the sun’s path — is probably an optical satellite taking pictures, says Allen Thomson, a former intelligence analyst, of the same locations with the same sunlight and shadows.   A Molniya orbit sits over one location; Thomson says it’s probably a signals intelligence satellite.  The April 3 satellite’s orbit was retrograde – the opposite direction of the earth’s rotation – so it’s probably radar (for reasons I faintly understand and can’t begin to explain but having to do with the earth turning away from the satelllite, thereby enhancing the Doppler shift and ultimately the resolution of whatever the satellite is looking at).

Not that any of this is secret, though the tracker from the Netherlands says that they don’t publish everything they’ve seen.  The NRO reportedly doesn’t like the trackers but the trackers aren’t telling the bad guys anything the bad guys don’t already know.  Thomson says the bad guys can probably afford equipment better than stuff that trackers can order from Amazon.  The tracker from the Netherlands says, “If 15 retired hobbyists with simple equipment can do this, then rogue nations certainly can.  They really don’t need us.”

The trackers are space nerds, they like looking at space-type things that are supposed to be secret. Tracking is their definition of fun.  Some of them were at one time employed as government trackers, many have been tracking since the first decade of the space age.  They feel as though they’re recording a hidden history – the Netherlands tracker is an archeologist and thinks of his hobby as space archeology.

The trackers also don’t much like secrecy — I heard about them because the Federation of American Scientists‘ secrecy-hating Steven Aftergood put it in his Secrecy News – and like to point out that the UN Outer Space Treaty asks countries to disclose the whereabouts of their satellites.  The Netherlands tracker adds that the trackers have seen satellites going out of control within a few weeks of launch, and the US government won’t mention it until a year later when the thing becomes a public menace.  They’re currently watching an out-of-control 1.5 ton Japanese spy satellite, he says, that’s coming down mid-2012.

I’m always impressed by amateurs doing for free and pleasure the things that professionals are paid to do.  I’m also impressed that stuff this close to being classified is all over the internet – a person could make a career of following the links of these links.  I’m not sure whether this internet ubiquity is a testament to our country’s relative openness, or the internet’s ability to find dusty corners, or the irresistibility of secrets.

Meanwhile, the NRO is in the middle of a series of launches with an “unprecedented operational tempo” – oh yeah? and what’s that unprecedented tempo all about?  Good luck finding out.  And I wouldn’t google “NRO” and “patches” either — these are the fairly normal-looking ones.

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Photos of launch patches:  National Reconnaissance Office

Happy New Year, for what a year is worth given the light of Betelgeuse fading from the shoulder of the constellation Orion. Thanks to Ann for pointing that out last week, and that it may have gone supernova hundreds of years ago and no longer exists.

Beginning of January, heart of winter, is a good time to think about time, figure out where we are in the scheme of things. I stand on a boulder sticking up from snow in the yard and spot where the sun’s been setting on its post-solstice turnaround, creeping day by day northward, proof the clock is still ticking.

We each find a sense of time for ourselves: light comes low under south-facing eaves, alarm goes off in the morning announcing the stirring.

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