Editorial
Welcome
Infrastructure is a vital part of our modern society, and yet when it's working well, it goes virtually unnoticed. I wanted a place where people could dip in and learn about what's going on behind the scenes without having to be - as I often am - fully immersed in that flood of information. As well as, of course, highlighting when things go wrong and why they did.
I have thought about starting a newsletter like this for some time, and I think a similar idea has been bouncing around the Infrastructure Club Slack for even longer - and honestly, most of the credit for the inspiration and this starting content goes to that wonderful place. If you find any of this particularly compelling, you should consider joining.
Expect a weekly mix of news, deep-dive articles, and fun information on whatever I can claim as infrastructure - and trust me, it's a very broad definition. If you have any ideas or things you'd like to see included, you can always send them to contact@fromtheinfra.com - or, if you're on the infraclub Slack, poke me on there.
Thanks for reading!
Land
Wow, That Glass Is Really Transparent
In something that probably resembles a nightmare for many people, a glass-floored tourist bridge in China had a bit of a bad time this week as a storm caused a large number of the glass panels to, well, fall out of the bridge.
That would have been bad enough by itself as a vote of confidence in the engineering involved in this particular skyway, but even worse, an unfortunate soul was trapped on the bridge as it happened and had to cling on for dear life.
Fortunately, he's been rescued and offered counselling, which I'm sure we'd all need at least a little of after that experience. Glass-bridge architects the world over are likely double-checking their drawings right now, but fortunately, most tend to be designed to avoid this kind of thing.
This Bridge Is Also A Bit Broken
In what might be the biggest underplay of the word "crack" so far this year, a major road bridge in Memphis, Tennessee, USA has been closed this week because engineers discovered that one of the bridge's structural members had a "crack" in it - by which they meant it had completely sheared in two.
The state of the US's infrastructure is generally pretty bad after decades of underinvestment - one report states that 7.5% of all bridges are in poor condition - but I'd suggest this goes a little beyond "poor condition" into the realm of "shut it down, now". They're not even sure if the bridge can support its own weight, so the river underneath has been closed to shipping as well until they can at least verify that.
This is a pretty major crossing; there's thankfully another one only 3 miles to the south, but it's not sized to deal with all the resultant traffic, so anyone in Memphis can expect a long traffic jam (even if you're only there to see the ridiculous giant pyramid). We can only hope this will spur a bit more investment into bridges as a whole; they really need care and attention to keep working well.
Sea
Ekranoplans are... back?
It's no secret that I love strange vehicles, and Ekranoplans - or ground-effect vehicles if you want to be more boring - are one of the best. Half aircraft, half hovercraft, half ridiculousness, they are an incredibly effective way of transporting large loads quickly across relatively flat areas, such as large bodies of water.
The Soviet Ekranoplans were, in many ways, the only design that got some proper work in. People have tried over the years to revive the idea, but they've been largely unsuccessful, and while this company has some very shiny renders, that's all they seem to have right now.
Still, I wish this new attempt well, even if it is mostly at the conceptual stage. We could all do with a few more weird vehicles in our life.
When Your Superyacht Might Be Too Super
Jeff Bezos, well-known billionaire, is reportedly getting a superyacht so big that it will need a second support yacht. The second yacht is no slouch either, as it's reported to have its own helipad. I guess all that money has to go somewhere, especially as he does not seem keen on giving it back to either Amazon workers or tax authorities.
Sky
Plane Parachutes: Saving Lives
The mid-air collision over Denver that happened this week between two small aircraft certainly had some spectacular imagery - nothing like seeing a fuselage with a giant hole in it - but the most notable thing is probably the fact that there were no fatalities.
Now a hole in the upper fuselage, provided it doesn't go through control cables or fuel lines, is not the end of the world - though it takes a skilled pilot to land an aircraft in that state, so congratulations are in order to the Metro pilot who got that thing on the ground (just look at it!) The aircraft that made that hole, however, would usually be toast.
In this case, though, the other aircraft was a Cirrus SR22, which are very notable for their CAPS system - a ballistic recovery parachute which you can pull in unrecoverable situations to get the plane down to earth relatively safety. It's not great for the plane's ability to fly again, but it does generally end a lot better for the humans on board, and when you've just hit the 1970s-everything-was-overbuilt-era Metro? Plane's already not going to fly again any time soon.
Safety in general aviation (light aircraft) is definitely improving in recent decades, but it's incidents like this that make me think a far larger number of small aircraft manufacturers should really be considering a CAPS-style system.
Space
SpaceX's Starship Is Going To Orbit
After managing to do a Starship test flight that did not end in a rapid unscheduled disassembly, it looks like the folks over at SpaceX are prepping for their first orbital test flight, launching from Boca Chica in Texas and going the long way round to Hawaii.
I'm still mildly sceptical of this whole powered landing business, but they're getting a good track record with Falcon 9, and it really is a lot more reuseable than splashing in the ocean every time. That said, this test flight will be soft-landing in the ocean, since it's a really handy place to land spaceships without hurting anyone, even if they are going to pretend it's a landing pad.
No confirmed timeline for this test flight yet, but it looks likely to be this year, possibly as early as June or July.
The God Of Fire Has Landed
After chilling in Mars orbit while Perseverance landed safely, and Ingenuity flew around Mars for the first time, the Chinese Zhurong rover has taken its turn at one of the most difficult descents in aerospace and landed successfully on the Red Planet.
They opted for a slightly different landing approach than the last two NASA rovers - rather than a rocket crane, this rover was instead on a rocket platform. So, you know, still a ridiculous dance of perfectly timing rockets to land autonomously on another planet.
The stated mission length is 90 days - but that's also what Spirit and Opportunity were designed for before they lasted for 6 years and 15 years respectively. It'll be doing some geology and looking for water ice.
Silicon
People Really Need To Stop Using 32 Bits
The Berkshire Hathaway (BRK.A) stock price hit record highs this week - climbing past $421,000 - which would ordinarily be great news for the financial world, apart from the fact that stock prices are sent using only 32 bits of data, and it turns out that when you have four decimal places, that results in a maximum stock price of $429,496.7295 before you literally run out of space.
Stock markets are not alone in their poor choice of how many bits to use for numbers - at least they didn't build a plane that needs rebooting every 51 days - but in their defence, the high price is mostly because Warren Buffet refuses to do stock splits (it certainly illustrates the value of compounding returns). The second-highest stock price isn't even past the $100k mark yet.
Still, the financial world is relatively tight-knit, so hopefully they can get the protocol updated here relatively quickly, and we can instead wait and see what the next system is going to be that falls over. Well, until every piece of old technology fails in 2038, anyway.
Ransomware Continues To Be Troublesome
Ransomware - which maliciously encrypts computers and then demands payment to unencrypt them - has been growing at a rather worrying rate recently, and the latest large-scale victim is a large fuel pipeline in the northeastern US.
Now, if companies actually had sensible security practices this wouldn't be nearly as bad, but the number of industrial control systems exposed to the Internet is quite troubling. It's not quite clear if the actual control systems here were impacted - in fact, it looks like it was just the billing systems - but it was enough that they had to shut the thing down.
It had a bit of an impact on fuel supply, but was maybe outstripped rapidly by people panic-buying gasoline (petrol) across the US, leading to the US CPSC account taking a break from their usual top-quality memes to tell people that no, really, you shouldn't put gasoline in plastic bags.
US President Biden has responded with both an emergency declaration and also an apparent move towards requiring improvements in the software involved, which seems to not be terribly written and might actually be a step in the right direction here.
And Finally
Duck Ramps
Adapting our manufactured environment to animals is definitely infrastructure, and this duck ramp is just a perfect little example of it. If you want to see more examples of helping animals along, you should take a look at toad tunnels, cat ladders, crab bridges, and, of course, the iconic salmon cannon.