New Rocket Ready To Go Nowhere

October 23, 2009

Like someone who just bought a new car, earlier this week NASA proudly rolled out its next generation spaceship, the Ares I-X. The spindly rocket looks anemic compared to its predecessors: the space shuttle, Saturn V, and Saturn IB.  But at a height of 310 feet it casts a long pencil-like shadow over the Kennedy Space Center causeway.

Ironically, the Augustine Commission report that formally came out this week casts a black eclipse shadow over this arrow-craft that is scheduled for its maiden test flight in just a few days. 

The commission will give a series of options to the White House for President Obama to consider for redirecting NASA’s future human space effort.

Forgotten Planet

October 18, 2009

There’s another dwarf planet to add to the list of solar system bodies that  share minor league status with Pluto.

Newly published Hubble Space Telescope pictures show that the large asteroid Pallas is nearly spherical. In other words the body has enough gravity to pull itself into ball where all surface features are essentially the same distance from the core.

This is one criterion for a planet according to the International Astronomical Union (IAU). Hubble’s sharp view can resolve the disk of Pallas and shows that it is slightly egg-shaped, and roughly the width of West Virginia.

When We’ll Really Nuke The Moon

October 14, 2009

The dust is still settling from the public blowup over NASA’s LCROSS experiment to go prospecting for water on the moon by crashing a rocket booster into it last Friday. The impact was a PR flub. There were no dramatic images for any evidence of the smashup.

Nevertheless, I have subsequently received a few angry e-mails from people who are incensed that we would harm Earth’s only natural satellite.

The tersest note was from a retired Marine:

“Stop bombing the fu*king moon.”

In a following e-mail he was more philosophical: 

“Yes, worlds are being destroyed every second in our timeless universe, but through natural processes of creation and recreation . . .”  

If I apply that logic, then we should do nothing in the future to deflect or destroy any Earth-bound asteroid, but instead let nature take its, er, natural course  in “recreating” life on the surface of an incinerated Earth.

Bootprints On The Moon

September 07, 2009

Last month a reader left a comment on this site wondering where the “Apollo artifacts” were that I said NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) would photograph.

Well this is the coolest picture to date from LRO that captures the activities of Apollo astronauts at a moon-landing site. It is littered with hardware! 

But even more intriguing, we see the astronauts' footprints. From LRO's altitude they look like the humble little tracks of small birds across newly fallen snow. 

LRO flew over the flat lava plain in western Oceanus Procellarum where Apollo 12 landed on November 14, 1969. The unmanned Surveyor 3 landed there two years earlier.

The Real Visitors From Space

August 19, 2009

There was a lot of hubbub in the news this week about the British Ministry of Defense releasing declassified UFO reports from 1981 to 1996. Not coincidentally, sightings in Great Britain appeared to increase sixfold with the release of the 1996 space invasion movie Independence Day. But I’m not going to waste  bandwidth to give any further attention to this collection of  space-age fractured fairy tales.

Instead, last month a real interplanetary face-to-face encounter took place between two chunks of metal. One is the Mars rover Opportunity; the other is a 1,800-pound piece of iron. Both fell out of the sky onto Mars. The rover, back in 2004, the meteorite, 3 billion years ago.

Mars or Bust By 2035?

July 27, 2009

When I was a kid I loved those board games that let you take a shortcut to get to the “finish” square first. Everybody's favorite is: “Go directly to Go and collect $200,” from Monopoly.

An interplanetary shortcut was implied last week when NASA’s new administrator, astronaut Charles Bolden, said he would like to see humans venture beyond the moon and onto other destinations in the solar system. The 62 year-old administrator said that he’d like to see humans on Mars within his lifetime.

Could we get to the Red Planet in the next 25 years? I’d say only if we sidestep spending all the time and resources to set up a base on the moon, i.e. “go, past moon, go directly to Mars.”

One Giant Leap Into Past Glory

July 20, 2009

Of all the Apollo 11 decadal anniversaries, this one is particularly made poignant with the passing of the "journalist’s journalist" Walter Cronkite. Alongside astronaut Wally Schirra, he shared our collective excitement about the historic Apollo 11 moon landing on July 20, 1969. 

I remember camping out on the living room couch, like waiting for Super Bowl, to watch the landing actually happen. Cronkite was like having an uncle in the living room sharing the intimacy and wonder of what was unfolding in real time. I needed this because the only real person in the living room was my widowed mother’s boyfriend, who did nothing but curse out the landing as a waste of his taxed blue–collar wages.

Do We Still Have the Right Stuff?

July 13, 2009

We went to the moon 40 years ago flying by the seat of our pants.

The years from 1968 -1972 to will be remembered as the pioneering days when fearless humans barnstormed the moon in spacecraft comparatively as fragile as the biplanes of WWI. The Apollo lunar lander was so lightweight that an astronaut could kick a hole in the side of it, if not careful.

The Apollo Command Module navigated to the moon using a high-tech sextant. The landing computer on the Lunar Module -- far less powerful than an Iphone – was so overwhelmed with tasks it kept rebooting during the critical moment Eagle’s descent on July 20, 1969. Commander Neil Armstrong, who must have been born without a nervous system, adroitly took manual control to skirt by a dangerous crater and boulder field, with just a few seconds of propellant left.

Lost Opportunities on the Moon

July 09, 2009

Anticipation is now building to the 40^th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing on July 20, 1969. There are two things about this historic anniversary that I regret. First, that we landed in the pre-Internet days, and second, there where exciting lunar landing targets that were simply cancelled.

Are We Ready to Live on Other Planets?

June 08, 2009

The  International Space Station has a beefed up crew that has gone from three to six astronauts, now that the construction of the $100 billion space laboratory is nearly complete. We are told that the station crew will be able to spend more time doing medical and biological experiments in the station's microgravity environment to prepare humans for journeys to the moon and Mars.

We are “learning to live in space” is the shorthand justification for why we have a space station. But are the right questions behind the ISS experiments being asked? Exactly how salient is the research on the ISS when applied to human interplanetary travel?