What's that in the sky? It's a SpaceX rocket, but it sure doesn't look like it

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. — Planetary nebula? Supernova remnant? No, this incredible image is actually a photo of a rocket launch. The rocket's exhaust combined with atmospheric effects emulates an image of a deep-space object.

A photographer captured the shot during the launch of SpaceX's 20th cargo resupply mission on March 6 as the Falcon 9 blasted off toward the International Space Station. Before the first-stage booster touched down at the company's landing zone, a short distance away, it created quite the spectacle.

"It's always amazing to see this phenomenon happen in real time," Erik Kuna, a spaceflight photographer for Supercluster, told Space.com. "But there's nothing like seeing the images captured afterwards in your camera's viewfinder. I'm always amazed at the detail and clarity."

Video: SpaceX rocket stage separation captured in amazing ground view

Related: In photos: SpaceX launches third batch of 60 Starlink satellites to orbit

Standing in a grassy field at NASA's Kennedy Space Center that night, I, too, watched as the Falcon soared into the night sky. Appearing as a bright orange fireball, the rocket turned night into day, while the roar of the engines washed over me.

It was cold and windy at the press site, but it was also a clear night. This meant that you could see the rocket as it went through the various stages of flight: liftoff, main-engine cut-off (MECO), stage separation, second-stage ignition and a series of three landing burns.

As the rocket executed these steps, a glowing cloud appeared in the sky, resembling a planetary nebula. The cloud pulsed and rippled as the rocket's engines burned through their fuel. In the cloud, you could see two bright dots that separated as the rocket's two stages moved farther away from each other.

The phenomenon is featured in a short video that SpaceX posted to Twitter following the launch. The company explained that the effect is produced following stage separation, when the two stages are each doing their own thing: the second stage is firing up and propelling the payload into orbit while the first stage is firing its engines to head back to Earth.


Erik Kuna captured an incredible view of SpaceX's CRS-20 cargo launch to the International Space Station. In this image the launch resembles a planetary nebula. (Image credit: Erik Kuna/Supercluster)

The result? A trippy-looking rocket "nebula." But this isn't a phenomenon unique to the launch earlier this month. Erik Kuna, has been enthralled by the nebula since he first captured a nebula shot during the CRS-17 launch last year.

According to Kuna, most launches can cause stunning light shows, it's just not always as pronounced. "It happens every launch, just some are more prominent than others," he told Space.com. "The best are SpaceX launches where the booster returns to land, but any launch will have some level of the phenomenon."

For instance, during twilight launches just before sunrise or sunset, the sun can illuminate the rocket's plume and make it look like a giant jellyfish in the sky. These launches are often confused for UFOs because of the weird squiggly clouds produced. (Spoiler alert: It's definitely not aliens.)

ULA's Atlas V rocket, carrying the AEHF-5 military communications satellite, launched at dawn on Aug. 8, 2019. The rocket's exhaust is illuminated by the sun, producing a jellyfish-shaped plume. (Image credit: ULA)

Nebula images require slightly different circumstances, however. First, you need a nighttime rocket launch and a booster landing, preferably touching down on land.

That's where the Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy come into play. SpaceX designed its Falcon family of rockets to be reusable, so after liftoff, the rocket's first stage conducts an aerial somersault, reorienting itself midair to return to Earth. Then, it gently touches down, either on land or on the deck of a floating platform at sea.

Return to land landings are best for nebula shots because their flight trajectories make the interactions between the first and second stage separation and the boostback burn more visible against the dark sky. "This creates a magical symphony of light and gases that mix into a canvas of colors and shapes, producing one epic photo," Kuna told Space.com

"During previous night launches, I noticed that we would see this atmospheric glow almost like auroras around the rocket exhaust," he said. "The rockets were producing these fascinating patterns that looked a lot like deep-space images."


The interactions between a rocket's first and second stages can produce a dazzling image reminiscent of a nebula in deep space, as seen in this image of a SpaceX cargo launch to the space station. (Image credit: Erik Kuna/Supercluster)

Kuna set out to capture the incredible phenomenon with photography, researching what kind of gear and settings he would need to use. Thanks to the ultrasensitive sensors in his camera and special light-gathering lenses, he was able to capture the stunning spectacle.

"The technique is kind of simple once you know your subject and understand what is happening," he said. For photographers who want to give it a try, he recommends a high ISO, a wide aperture and a slow shutter speed with a telephoto lens.

Kuna says there's a bit more to it than traditional launch shots, but that success really comes down to mastering basic concepts. Kuna was the first to capture the spectacle, but has seen a rise in the nebula's popularity ever since.


"I think it's been elusive for many because as photographers we are weary of things like noise [variations in brightness or color] or lack of sharpness in an image," he says.


But experimentation pays off. When he looked at his camera, he knew he had something special — the holy grail of launch shots: a rocket nebula.


"I had a picture (in my head) of what I thought a nebula looks like," Kuna said. "I started experimenting and finally captured it during that launch." He said his co-worker noticed the similarity to the cosmic cloud. "He leaned over my shoulder and said 'that looks like a freaking nebula,'" Kuna said. "I knew I got the shot." And the term "rocket nebula" was born.


So what do we see when looking at a rocket nebula photo? According to Kuna, in the CRS-17 photo, the first stage engine appears as a pinpoint of orange glow while the second-stage vacuum engine radiates out as a bluish purple web of light on the bottom.

"These two interact to form the image you see, both areas smashing into each other, wave after wave, creating a beautiful display in the dark sky," he said.

Each nighttime land landing, Kuna tries to photograph the nebula. So far, he's captured three: CRS-17, STP-2 (a Falcon Heavy mission) and now CRS-20. (The CRS-17 booster touched down at sea, not on land, but it was close enough to the launch site to produce the same effects.)

In this view of a SpaceX Falcon Heavy launch, the two stages are more pronounced, with the rocket's second stage producing the incredible purple spirals at the bottom of the image. (Image credit: Erik Kuna/Supercluster)

John Kraus, a local rocket photographer, had a different take on the CRS-20 nebula that was featured in NASA's Astronomy Picture of the Day (APOD) on March 12. In it, he focuses more on the boostback burn, the first of three burns that the rocket conducts in order to land itself.

In his image, we see the Falcon 9's first-stage boostback burn arc up toward the top of the frame as the second stage continues on its journey to low Earth orbit, its own fiery trail visible below the boostback burn. In the background are expanding exhaust plumes from the rocket's two stages.


A closeup, long exposure look at Falcon 9’s boostback burn and second stage burn, and the resulting plume interaction between the two stages. Incredible. pic.twitter.com/ki1lnJL979March 7, 2020


This image is a hybrid between your typical "streak" photograph, a sort of time-lapse image, and a rocket nebula. Streak shots have historically been rocket photography gold if you frame your shot just right. That's because in one shot, a photographer can capture the entire launch, including the landing.


"I think [streaks] are an exciting way to sum up an entire launch — or in my case, a unique portion of it — in a single photograph," Kraus told Space.com.


Kraus and Kuna both say that planning a shot like this is very different from planning a streak.


"Nebulas and streaks are two different worlds," Kuna said. "One is about capturing a small amount of light through the biggest opening possible on your camera and focusing on a specific moment of the launch, while a streak aims to capture a large amount of light in a very small opening, usually through a wider lens during a long period of time to convey the rocket's motion."

"To think we would never see this sight if SpaceX didn't land its boosters; it's truly majestic and awe-inspiring," he said. "I can't wait for the Starship boostback!"

Whether you're trying a streak for the first time or a nebula or anything else, Kraus said to remember to try new things, you never know what you may capture.

Hunting for dark matter — inside the Earth


By Paul Sutter - Astrophysicist

The answer to the dark-matter mystery may be under our feet.


The Cryogenic Dark Matter Search is one of the most sensitive efforts to track down dark matter particles. But the best dark-matter detector may be Earth itself, a new study suggests.(Image: © SuperCDMS/Slac National Accelerator Laboratory)


Dark matter is a hypothetical component to our universe, used to explain many strange behaviors of stars and galaxies.

Despite the almost overwhelming evidence that dark matter does indeed exist, we still don't know what it's made of. Detectors scattered around the world have been operating for decades, trying to catch the faint trace of a passing dark matter particle, but to no avail. A new paper offers an alternative approach: dig deep.

Related: The 11 biggest unanswered questions about dark matter

We know that dark matter exists through a variety of astronomical observations. Stars are orbiting the centers of their galaxies too fast. Galaxies are whizzing around inside clusters too quickly. Massive structures in the universe are appearing too early.

As far as we can tell, there is much more to the cosmos than meets the eye — there is some form of matter that is entirely invisible to us. Whatever the dark matter is, it's a new kind of particle that doesn't interact with light, which means it doesn't emit, absorb, reflect or refract electromagnetic radiation. Which means we can't see it. Which makes it dark.

So far, the only way we know dark matter exists is through gravity. Despite its invisibility superpower, dark matter still has mass, which means it can tug and shape on the biggest objects in the universe, revealing its presence through the motion of the more luminous stars and galaxies.

On the other end of the scale, particle physicists have been concocting new particles as consequences for new theories of physics, and some of them fit the bill for what the dark matter could be. The most promising candidate is a particle known as a WIMP: a weakly interacting massive particle.

The "weakly interacting" part doesn't just mean the particle is feeble: it means that the dark matter does occasionally interact with normal matter through the weak nuclear force. But as the name suggests, the weak nuclear force isn't the strongest, and it has very short range, making these interactions incredibly rare.

Buried clues

But "rare" doesn't mean "never." It's thought that billions — even trillions — of dark matter particles are swimming through you right now. But since the dark matter hardly notices normal matter, and vice versa, you simply don't feel it. You have to go out to big scales before you start to see its gravitational effects.

Still, rarely (exactly how rarely is not known yet), a dark matter particle goes rogue and interacts with a particle of normal matter through the weak nuclear force. This involves a transfer of energy (i.e., the dark matter particle kicks the normal particle), sending the normal matter flying, something that we can, in principle at least, detect.

But since it's so rare and so weak, our detection attempts haven't proven fruitful. We need big detectors that take up a lot of volume (since the interactions are so rare, it's either build a giant detector or wait for hundreds of years to get lucky). What's more, we have to bury these detectors deep underground, the deepest going 1.2 miles (2 kilometers) below the surface. This is because there's a lot of subatomic nuisance going on: other high-energy particles, like neutrinos and cosmic rays, cause similar kicks, and we need to use lots of rock to absorb them before they hit the detector, ensuring that if we do see a signal, it's more likely to be caused by dark matter.

And so far, after decades of building ever-larger detectors and watching carefully, we haven't found squat.

Read more: "Searching for Dark Matter with Paleo-Detectors"

Fossil evidence

There's a limit to how big we can make a dark matter detector, based solely on engineering and cost constraints. But thankfully, according to a new paper recently appearing on the online preprint site arXiv, there's a gigantic dark matter detector that's been collecting data for millions of years.

And it's right under our feet.

The crust of the Earth itself serves as a massive dark matter detector. When stray dark matter particles interact with normal matter inside a rock, a proton or neutron can get knocked loose, changing the chemical composition of the rock in the vicinity of the impact site. This can potentially even send the particle flying, leaving behind a microscopic scar.

Even better, deep digs have access to portions of the Earth's crust over twice as deep as our current dark matter detectors, promising results even freer of confusion from cosmic rays and other nuisance particles. And since rocks stay as rocks for millions, and even hundreds of millions, of years, they've been recording dark matter interactions for all that time, far longer than we can ever hope to access in the lifetimes of our experiments.

So it's pretty simple: dig up a bunch of rock (preferably something pure, so it's easy to analyze) and look it over with a fine-tooth microscopic comb, looking for any signs of subatomic violence.

There is one catch, however. Earth rocks naturally contain some radioactive elements, and radioactive decays will give rise to similar features. To solve this, the researchers suggest digging into oceanic crust, which is much more pure than the stuff that builds continents. With this in hand, the researchers predict that we could have a super-detector within easy reach: even a mere kilogram of rock would beat the sensitivity of the world's current best detectors.

We just have to dig in.
It's official: Vera Rubin Observatory named to honor dark matter scientist
Did this newfound particle form the universe's dark matter?
Dark matter hasn't killed anybody yet — and that tells us something

Paul M. Sutter is an astrophysicist at SUNY Stony Brook and the Flatiron Institute, host of Ask a Spaceman and Space Radio, and author of "Your Place in the Universe." Sutter contributed this article to Space.com's Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights.

Dark Matter and Dark Energy: The Mystery Explained (Infographic)

By Karl Tate April 03, 2013

Astronomers know more about what dark matter is not than what it actually is.

(Image: © Karl Tate, SPACE.com Infographics Artist)

Most of the universe is made up of dark energy, a mysterious force that drives the accelerating expansion of the universe. The next largest ingredient is dark matter, which only interacts with the rest of the universe through its gravity. Normal matter, including all the visible stars, planets and galaxies, makes up less than 5 percent of the total mass of the universe.

Astronomers cannot see dark matter directly, but can study its effects. They can see light bent from the gravity of invisible objects (called gravitational lensing). They can also measure that stars are orbiting around in their galaxies faster than they should be.

This can all be accounted for if there were a large amount of invisible matter tied up in each galaxy, contributing to its overall mass and rotation rate.

Astronomers know more about what dark matter is not than what it is.

Dark matter is dark: It emits no light and cannot be seen directly, so it cannot be stars or planets.

Dark matter is not clouds of normal matter: Normal matter particles are called baryons. If dark matter were composed of baryons it would be detectable through reflected light. [Gallery: Dark Matter Throughout the Universe]

Dark matter is not antimatter: Antimatter annihilates matter on contact, producing gamma rays. Astronomers do not detect them.

Dark matter is not black holes: Black holes are gravity lenses that bend light. Astronomers do not see enough lensing events to account for the amount of dark matter that must exist.

Structure in the universe formed on the smallest scales first. It is believed that dark matter condensed first to form a “scaffolding,” with normal matter in the form of galaxies and clusters following the dark matter concentrations.

Scientists are using a variety of techniques across the disciplines of astronomy and physics to hunt for dark matter:

• Particle colliders such as the Large Hadron Collider.
• Cosmology instruments such as WMAP and Planck.
• Direct detection experiments including CDMS, XENON, Zeplin, WARP, ArDM and others.
• Indirect detection experiments including: Gamma ray detectors (Fermi from space and Cherenkov Telescopes from the ground); neutrino telescopes (IceCube, Antares); antimatter detectors (Pamela, AMS-02) and X-ray and radio facilities.

A VIRUS IS KILLING CAPITALISM
A jarring new chart shows America needs to immediately brace itself for historic unemployment
Theron Mohamed Mar. 20, 2020

Andy Kiersz / Business Insider


US initial jobless claims could spike to a record 2.25 million this week as coronavirus-driven layoffs hit the labor market, according to Goldman Sachs.

"Many US states have reported unprecedented surges in jobless claims this week," the economist David Choi and his team said in a research note.

New claims for unemployment benefits increased last week by 70,000, to 281,000.
Goldman's forecast would mark an eightfold increase and more than triple the record set in 1982.

Goldman Sachs predicted that a record 2.25 million Americans could enter claims for unemployment benefits this week as coronavirus-driven layoffs hit the labor market. The outbreak has forced cities to shut down and prompted people to stay at home to combat the virus' spread.

"State-level anecdotes point to an unprecedented surge in layoffs this week," David Choi, one of the bank's economists, said in a research note. "Consumer spending on sports and entertainment, hotels, restaurants, and public transportation in particular have already dropped dramatically."

Unemployment filings last week jumped by 70,000, to 281,000, according to Labor Department data published on Thursday. Goldman's forecast of 2.25 million suggests it will increase eightfold this week, blowing past the record of nearly 700,000 set in 1982.


Fears about the coronavirus outbreak have decimated demand across industries such as airlines and hotels, and governments have scrambled to slow the spread by closing bars and restaurants and canceling events, leading to mass layoffs.

Choi and his team based their prediction on a surge in unemployment claims across 30 states this week. The New York State Department of Labor fielded 159,000 calls before noon on Thursday, nearly 16 times its typical daily volume. California, which typically receives 2,000 applications a day, was inundated by 80,000 on Tuesday, Gov. Gavin Newsom told The Sacramento Bee.

The Goldman economists cautioned that claims might tail off in the second half of this week or that they may have sampled states experiencing a sharper increase in claims. However, they added that "even the most conservative assumptions suggest that initial jobless claims are likely to total over 1 million."

WHO: All countries must 'test, test, test'

© Claudio Furlan/LaPresse via AP

The WHO's director-general, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, told reporters that there's been a rapid escalation of the novel coronavirus virus in the past week as well as social-distancing measures.

But handwashing, social distancing, and travel restrictions, while important, aren't enough to fight the pandemic.

"We have a simple message for every country: test, test, test," he said.

Over the past week, cases of the novel coronavirus have accelerated in many parts of the world, as have efforts to try to control its spread, including the closing of schools, sporting events, and restaurants.

But personal hygiene, social distancing, and travel restrictions, while important, aren't enough "to extinguish this epidemic," the WHO's director-general, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, told reporters on Monday.

"We have not seen an urgent enough escalation in testing, isolation, and contact tracing, which is the backbone of the response," Tedros said.

It's "the combination" of approaches that matters, he said.

"As I keep saying, all countries must take a comprehensive approach, but the most effective way to prevent infections and save lives is breaking the chains of transmission, and to do that you must test and isolate," Tedros said. "You cannot fight a fire blindfolded, and we cannot stop this pandemic if we don't know who is infected."

"We have a simple message for all countries: Test, test, test, every suspected case," he said. That way, people who've been in close contact with those who test positive can be identified and tested as well.

Tedros said more tests are being produced to meet the demand, noting WHO has shipped almost 1.5 million tests to 120 countries.

Later, Dr. Maria Van Kerkhove, the technical lead for WHO Health Emergencies Program, added that countries need to increase the number of labs, availability of test kits, and the number of people who can conduct those tests.

The virus isn't only affecting elderly people and those with chronic health conditions

Tedros noted that while the message has been that people who are over 60 are at highest risk, "young people including children have died."

Tedros also raised concern for developing countries that may be hit harder by the crisis.

"We have seen epidemics in countries with advanced it health systems, but even they have struggled to cope as the virus moves to low income countries," he said. "We're deeply concerned about the impact it could have among populations with high HIV prevalence or among malnourished children. That's why we're calling on every country and every individual to do everything they can to stop transmission."

Tedros said that crises like these bring out "the best and worst" in people, and discouraged people from hoarding supplies.

"This amazing spirit of human solidarity must become even more infectious than the virus itself," he said.

GM will make ventilators as the coronavirus pandemic rages and hospitals face unprecedented stress

Matthew DeBord BUSINESS INSIDER

An employee of Hamilton Medical AG tests ventilators. Reuters

General Motors is working with Ventec Life Systems to accelerate the production of ventilators.

The carmaker could produce ventilators at its factories.

As the number of coronavirus cases in the US increases, the healthcare system has raised alarms about running out of ventilators to assist the most severely ill patients at hospitals.

General Motors will help make desperately-needed ventilators. 

On Friday, the automaker said it was working with Seattle-based Ventec Life Systems.
"We are working closely with Ventec to rapidly scale up production of their critically important respiratory products to support our country's fight again the COVID-19 pandemic," GM CEO Mary Barra said in a statement. "We will continue to explore ways to help in this time of crisis."

The statement added, "Ventec will leverage GM's logistics, purchasing and manufacturing expertise to build more of their critically important ventilators."

As the number of COVID-19 coronavirus cases rapidly increases in the US, and New York state, California, and Illinois issue shelter-in-place directives, ventilators could soon be in short supply for the most severer cases of illness.

GM CEO Mary Barra. Bill Pugliano/Getty Images

"With GM's help, Ventec will increase ventilator production," Ventec Life Systems CEO Chris Kiple said in a statement. "By tapping their expertise, GM is enabling us to get more ventilators to more hospitals much faster. This partnership will help save lives."

StopTheSpread.org, "the nation's coordinated private sector response to COVID-19," according to the statement, helped organize the partnership.

President Donald Trump has indicated on several occasions that GM could switch from making cars to making ventilators, and on Friday a source with knowledge of the planning at the company said that it was working with another firm to expedite the process.

On Wednesday, GM announced that it was shutting down all North American production through the end of March. 

As the coronavirus outbreak and intensified in the US, with thousands of new cases being diagnosed each day and the death toll rising, the healthcare system has raised alarms about the scarcity of ventilators, which can assist the most severely sick patients in breathing.

WAR PROFITEERING CARTOON 2

WAR PROFITEER CARTOON 1

War, Demobilization and Memory pp 254-268| Cite as

Enterprising Women and War Profiteers: Race, Gender and Power in the Revolutionary Caribbean

Authors
Kit Candlin
Cassandra Pybus
Authors and affiliations
Part of the War, Culture and Society, 1750–1850 book series (WCS)

Abstract

War profiteers have long been a theme in conflict studies. Profiteering was as much a feature of the wars that tore through the Caribbean at the end of the eighteenth century as it was for later wars in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The age of democratic revolutions in the Atlantic World, beginning roughly with the end of the Seven Years War in 1763 and continuing through the American, French, and South American revolutions, brought upheaval to the Caribbean that lasted decades. In this turbulent world of slave rebellion and imperial contest a new group of people emerged to complicate further the social demography of the region. This chapter focuses on free women of colour, who perhaps more than any other social group were able to navigate the revolutionary turmoil in the Caribbean, self-fashion their own lives and profit from division and conflict. These were women who were descended from slaves and yet they themselves became slave owners with little inclination to manumit any of their chattels unless they happened to be family. By the time these conflicts came to an end, their mark on networks of power would be an indelible, often denigrated, part of afro-Caribbean identity. Their presence is an important legacy in the history of war, demonstrating that conflict and insecurity could create important entrepreneurial opportunity to be seized upon by marginalized or displaced civilians.

Commodore Vanderbilt: Patriot or War Profiteer?

T.J. Stiles, author of The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt, 2009 National Book Award Winner

When I set out to write a biography of Cornelius Vanderbilt, a man known by the informal title of "Commodore," I faced one mystery after another. Even though he was one of the richest and most powerful businessmen in American history, he conducted most of his operations in secret. He left no diary, no collection of papers, and carried out many transactions orally, without committing them to paper. But perhaps no period of his life was more bewildering than the Civil War.

Congress bequeathed a gold medal upon the Commodore for donating his largest steamship (the Vanderbilt) to the Union navy—but he did so only after leasing it to the War Department for many weeks, until the bill reached $300,000, nearly a third of what it cost to build. He refused to take any compensation when he organized a massive flotilla to transport an expedition to New Orleans led by General Nathaniel Banks—yet the press was scandalized by stories of decrepit, unseaworthy vessels that he hired for the fleet. It was said that Vanderbilt used an agent who extracted outrageous commissions from shipowners, suggesting the Commodore had received some of the gains as well.

Was Vanderbilt a noble patriot, or a war profiteer? Most histories of the period that mention him list him as an example of the latter, alongside men who sold the government rotten shoes and shoddy uniforms that fell apart in the first rain. Yet Vanderbilt named two of his sons after national heroes (William Henry Harrison and George Washington), and seems to have taken great pride in his country.

Some of my initial research only made things more confusing. Newspaper accounts and the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Navies in the War of the Rebellion showed that the Commodore tried to donate the Vanderbilt at the war's outset, only to be turned down by Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles. Why would he follow this noble gesture with leasing it at piratical rates?

The answer to this and other questions came from Vanderbilt himself. Congress regularly published the evidence it collected in its various investigations, including testimony given to committee hearings and documents provided by the executive branch. These invaluable volumes of primary sources—the Congressional Serial Set—have been fully digitized and made text-searchable by Readex, a division of NewsBank. Working at the Columbia University library, I was able to search all the incidents of "Vanderbilt" in the Readex edition of the Congressional Serial Set. There were a lot. None were more revealing than the Commodore's testimony about his role in the Civil War.

"The moment a man comes to New York he is surrounded by a lot of thieves all the time, and in every shape and direction," Vanderbilt told a committee of the House of Representatives. When Welles turned down the gift of the Vanderbilt (supposing it to be too expensive to operate), the War Department sought it as a transport for amphibious expeditions on the South's Atlantic coast. But when the department sent its agents to New York, they relied on ship brokers, who took a commission of 2.5% or more.

Vanderbilt called them "outside thieves": men with every incentive to run up the price, and the authority to demand any ship they wanted. The Commodore told Congress, "I would rather sell my ships than let them remain in the government employ until they earn their whole value and then have the ships and the money too."

But a crisis gave him the chance to carry out his original plan. When the Confederates converted the frigate Merrimack into the ironclad Virginia, Lincoln and his cabinet went into a panic. They turned to Vanderbilt. As he explained to Congress, he personally offered the Vanderbilt to President Lincoln, expressing confidence that the rebels wouldn't dare risk the Virginia against it. He converted the massive ocean liner into a warship at his own expense, and piloted it to Hampton Roads, where it helped to bottle up the Virginia in harbor at Norfolk. He sold it to the navy for $1, and converted it into a cruiser to hunt for the commerce raider Alabama.

One mystery was solved. But what about the scandal surrounding the Banks expedition—the secret effort to charter steamships for military transport, which led to a Senate investigation and a motion to censure Vanderbilt? Did the Commodore lease rotten vessels for the government? Did he skim money through an agent? Again, the Congressional Serial Set provided the answers.

It turned out that Vanderbilt leased only one vessel (out of twenty-seven) that was unseaworthy—and that its rotten timbers had been planked over to disguise the ship's true state. As for the scheming agent, one Thomas J. Southard, he had been recommended by General Banks himself. He handled only the sailing ships, outfitting them to carry horses (his particular expertise). Vanderbilt took no pay for his efforts, and he insisted that Southard work for free as well. Unwilling to do so, Southard extracted commissions through highly indirect methods—implying that ship owners must use suppliers with family connections to Southard. Meanwhile he carried out his duties as expected.

If Southard's skimming escaped Vanderbilt's notice, not much else did. He cut out the "outside thieves" he despised, dealing directly with the ship owners. "I believe religiously that he has saved the government fifty percent in fitting out these vessels," the Navy's Commodore George J. Van Brunt told Congress. "He was acting, as I thought, with great patriotism, in serving the government for nothing."

I was ready to indict and convict Vanderbilt of war profiteering, if that's where the evidence led me. Instead, it convinced me that the Commodore deserved his gold medal. Vanderbilt has often been treated with cynicism by historians, who are ready to believe the worst of a staggeringly rich, secretive, and combative man. Certainly I did not set out to rehabilitate his reputation. But I couldn't ignore the evidence—evidence provided in breathtaking abundance by Congress in its Serial Set, now more accessible than ever thanks to digitization.

---

Tags

Filed under

• American History
• Archive of Americana
• Historical Government Publications
• Trends in Database Use

About the Author

T.J. Stiles is the author of The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt, published in 2009 by Alfred A. Knopf. Winner of the National Book Award, The First Tycoon was selected as one of the best books of the year by The New Yorker, The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, The New York Times and many more. Also the author of Jesse James: Last Rebel of the Civil War (2002, Knopf), Stiles has written for The Atlantic online, Smithsonian, Salon.com, the Los Angeles Times, among other publications, and taught nonfiction creative writing at Columbia University. He served as historical advisor and on-screen expert for "Jesse James" and "Grand Central," two films in the PBS documentary series American Experience.

War Profiteering Comparing Military-Industry Stock Portfolio Returns versus Market Returns During the Iraq and Afghan Wars

8 Pages Posted: 29 Apr 2015

Isaac Faber

United States Military Academy - Department of Systems Engineering

Maxwell Flanagan

United States Military Academy, West Point

Date Written: April 27, 2015

Abstract

The Department of Defense (DoD) relies on a privatized defense industry for tools of war. Following the Cold War, the majority of this Defense Industry consolidated into 5 large corporations: Boeing, United Technologies Corporation, Honeywell, Raytheon, and Lockheed Martin. In this study, an equally weighted portfolio of the 5 aforementioned companies stocks is constructed, and then analyzed during Operation Iraqi Freedom (OIF) and Operation Enduring Freedom (OEF). The equally weighted portfolio is then compared to the market to see whether or not a defense-industry portfolio can outperform the market during wartime. Both the portfolio and the market index are assessed by average monthly return and the Sharpes Slope. These metrics are compared between the portfolio and the market through a Difference in Means Statistical Test.

Suggested Citation:

Faber, Isaac and Flanagan, Maxwell, War Profiteering Comparing Military-Industry Stock Portfolio Returns versus Market Returns During the Iraq and Afghan Wars (April 27, 2015). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=2599846 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2599846