31 October 2006
+ 0 - 1 | § ¶Hubble Update
So, yeah,
HSM-4 is Go.
So there you go.
+ 0 - 1 | § ¶Send Your Name To Space
If anyone's interested, there's a couple of those send-your-name-to-space opportunities out there now.
One of them's been going on for a while, but the deadline is coming this weekend. You can send your name to the asteroid belt on
NASA's Dawn spacecraft, scheduled for launch NET June 21.
In addition to Dawn, you can now add your name to a DVD that will be flown on the
Phoenix lander, which will launch for Mars in August.
30 October 2006
+ 0 - 1 | § ¶Hubble Update
So the Hubble mission
Go/No Go announcement will be made tomorrow. Rumors are Go, but those are just rumors. (And that I'm hearing from outside sources, I should be quick to note.)
27 October 2006
+ 0 - 1 | § ¶The Terrific Secret of Space
I didn't pay a whole lot of attention to this story at first -- "
Al Gore disagrees with elements of Bush policy" just really isn't that big a newsflash.
But then Lain pointed out an interesting aspect of the story:
LAS CRUCES, New Mexico—Former U.S. Vice President Al Gore has called for better use of the "space resource" to battle Earth's climate crisis, enlisting entrepreneurial muscle to help solve global issues that threaten the planet's habitability.
Gore said he has long been a fan of faster, cheaper, better approaches that allow the private sector to exploit the space resource "in a responsible and creative, and cost-efficient way."
...
"We ought to learn that lesson and apply it to space," Gore said. "Because of the environmental climate crisis, we need to speed up the introduction of private companies into the creative exploitation of the space resource."
...
"It has the potential, down the road, to create the kind of fuzzy thinking and chaos in our efforts to exploit the space resource as the fuzzy thinking and chaos that the Iraq policy has created for us in Iraq," Gore explained.
...
"We need to avoid putting in place a set of policies that end up creating chaos and new obstacles for the creative exploitation of the space resource," he added.
Oooooh, "the space resource"! What exactly is
the space resource? (Dun-dun-duh!) Mysterious!
26 October 2006
+ 0 - 1 | § ¶1,000 Sols
It's been more than three months since Spirit passed it's original target mission length by two orders of magnitude, and another milestone has been reached --
1,000 sols on Mars!
Not bad. Not bad at all.
25 October 2006
+ 1 - 3 | § ¶Whew!
Good news, folks! If, in fact, it were determined that an asteroid were going to hit the Earth,
Russia would save us with their mighty rockets, rockets that could "repulse asteroids threatening Earth."
There. Now you can all sleep soundly at night. Doesn't that make you feel safe?
24 October 2006
+ 1 - 1 | § ¶To Fly Or Not To Fly
So it all comes down to this.
No more robotic servicing mission. No more new options. NASA will either fly a shuttle crew to Hubble to service the telescope one last time, or it won't.
And the decision will be made soon. Engineers and managers will be meeting Friday to review the situation, and administrator Mike Griffin is supposed to announce his decision not long afterwards.
Shuttle safety is the primary concern. Unlike with space station missions, there's no "safe harbor" option; abandoning the orbiter and staying on
ISS until another shuttle can come bring the astronauts home. Rescue would involve having another shuttle ready to launch almost immediately if there were a problem, and determining whether there was almost immediately in the mission. Otherwise, they're flying without a net.
It will be interesting to see what is decided.
20 October 2006
+ 0 - 0 | § ¶STS-117 Update
OK, the first update for STS-117, the first flight of 2007, to say that it's been delayed about a month.
In fact, there have been several changes in the schedule, so I've gone through and updated the left-hand sidebar. A lot of delays in the early part of the schedule, but some of the later flights have actually moved to the left, so that's cool.
The full
current manifest can be seen at that link.
+ 0 - 0 | § ¶Spaceflight Training
Here's a bit of minor news that I thought captures how spaceflight is changing:
For those who may not know, NASA doesn't hire people on as astronauts. When someone is selected by NASA, they come on board as an Astronaut Candidate. Only after an extended training period -- that includes such things as neutral buoyancy diving, flight experience on a trainer jet and weightlessness on a parabolic-flight aircraft -- does that person earn the full title of astronaut. At that point, though, the rookie spaceflight is still years away.
In the future, though,
ASCAN training for spaceflight may include, well, spaceflight. NASA administrator Mike Griffin said in a talk at the X Prize Cup that the agency has given some thought, once the suborbital commercial spaceflight business is up and running, to hiring out seats for candidates as part of their training. Rather than simulating the experience on an airplane, ASCANs would essentially experience what Shepard and Grissom did on the first U.S. spaceflights. As training. That's just kinda cool.
16 October 2006
+ 0 - 1 | § ¶For Great Justice.
Sorry for the disappearing act, folks.
I left Thursday for Stennis Space Center and was gone all weekend. A really impressive site, by the way, with some great stuff going on. Very exciting to see NASA coming full circle there: a big banner on the building where I spent most of my time commemorated the 40th anniversary of the first engine test there -- of the J-2 moon rocket engine. Elsewhere, they just stopped testing the shuttle main engine on one of the pads, so they could convert it -- for testing of the J-2X moon rocket engine.
Today, I reported for jury duty, and will likely spend a good chunk of the week on that.
So, sorry for the lack of blogging, but my responsibility in determining a man's fate has to come first.
10 October 2006
+ 0 - 0 | § ¶STS-116 Update
It's official --
Discovery is cleared to launch at night.
Launch remains scheduled for around 9:38 p.m. EST on Dec. 7.
+ 0 - 0 | § ¶Well, Wiki What We Have Here
My first appearance on Wikipedia -- in an entry about
Hatbag -- was deleted, but I'm back!
My name appears, for the moment at least, in
an entry about the invaluable (albeit, apparently, "of low importance") collectSPACE Web site. Check it out.
Keywords: collectspace,hatbag,wikipedia
07 October 2006
+ 0 - 0 | § ¶STS-116 Update
As of tonight, it will be two months until the STS-116 launch.
Unless, you know, they delay it. But what are the odds of that happening?
06 October 2006
+ 0 - 0 | § ¶Picture Of The Day
The Mars rover
Opportunity, as seen by MRO in orbit.
+ 0 - 1 | § ¶SUPER BIG MOON!!!!!
Tonight's full moon will be like
12 percent bigger than some this year. So go check it out.
The story has an explanation and some other info, though I imagine my wife will disagree with that last strange moon fact.
04 October 2006
+ 0 - 0 | § ¶Today In History
4 October 1957 -- The Beep Heard 'Round The World
Cosmic Log has an article about the
other space race born on this date two years ago.
02 October 2006
+ 2 - 0 | § ¶Beginning The New Era
The first hardware for the first launch of a test version of the Ares I crew launch vehicle has arrived at Kennedy Space Center. The first stage SRB aft skirt is now at the Assembly and Refurbishment Facility.
Along those lines, Stennis has made the
final Space Shuttle Main Engine test on its A-1 test stand, which was the site of the first SSME test back in 1975. (SSME testing will continue on the A-2 stand.)
A-1 SSME testing is stopping so that the stand can be converted for use testing the Ares J-2X engine.
+ 1 - 0 | § ¶A!
I have a lot of respect for Neil Armstrong.
I've never met him. In fact, of the nine men alive today who have walked on the moon, he's one of two that I've never had the opportunity to see in person, and, to be honest, I'm fine with that. There's a part of me that would like to, of course, but there's another part that likes not having that level of reality. Despite having had personal interaction with other moonwalkers enough to appreciate their just-a-guy-who-did-something-incredible humanity, I like the idea of Armstrong as a near-mythological larger-than-life figure. From a historical perspective, he's possibly the most significant person to have lived during my lifetime, and so it seems fitting that he should be a little bigger, a little less "real" than other men.
The respect that I have for him primarily stems from how well he's carried that burden. It's hard to find a single complaint against him. He's had to embody perhaps the greatest success of a century, and has managed to keep his own humanity from impinging on that legacy. No one's perfect, but Armstrong's public profile comes pretty close, which says a lot in this modern age.
That out of the way, I say with all love and respect, I have a hard time buying that he didn't flub his line on the moon, even despite the new supposed
computer analysis finding of the missing "a" in "one small step for (a) man."
I mean, I'd love for it to be true, though it doesn't make me think any less of him if he dropped the word. I'm fine with it either way. And, given my above comments about liking him to be larger-than-life, I do find appealing my layman's understanding of why it sounded like he skipped the word -- that Armstrong spoke the line 10 times too fast for human ears to be able to hear the word "a". OK, now it makes sense -- I have no trouble believing that the problem was Neil's superhuman abilities.
But, it all comes down to this --
listen to the line. Ignore whether you hear the "a"; you're not going to. But pay attention to the timing. Is there enough of a gap between "for" and "man" for another word, even a one-syllable word? Even one spoken at superhuman speed?
For me, the new "evidence" is wonderful, and I like that it provides more counterevidence to the conventional wisdom that he skipped the word, but, for me, the mystery remains open.
And I'm fine with that.
