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Watching Artemis II launch, I felt like a seven-year-old kid all over again. It was 45 years ago this month that the Columbia launched on the very first mission for the space shuttle system. I had wanted to finally watch real astronauts go up into space. The mission had been delayed a few times already and I didn't want to miss it. Finally, about ten minutes before time to head out to school at 8:30 in the morning, Columbia ignited and began its ascent. I couldn't tear my eyes off the screen but Dad said "Okay, it's up. NOW can we go?!"
I truly hope this will be a successful mission. I've harbored a lot of concerns about Artemis II. It would be such a shot in the arm for national morale... and the feelings of the world in general... if those four astronauts return safely.
History happened tonight. May this be only the beginning of the next adventure of man's journey into the cosmos.
I have a member of my family who was part of the team at Kennedy Space Center in 1986. On January 27th he begged the higher-ups not to launch Challenger. The space shuttle was clearly not rated for launch in such below-freezing temperatures.
My relative's pleas were ignored. We know what happened.
I confess that my own mind is not of the caliber of those who are engaged in America's space effort. My formal training is in history, not aeronautics and engineering. But I'm still begging you: do not launch the Artemis II mission tomorrow. In fact, don't launch it at all.
The vehicle has too many issues that are being ignored, just as Challenger's were ignored for sake of the chance to have a successful mission. The materials - especially the heat shield - are definitely not as sound as the ones that the Apollo craft were composed of. The life support system is untested. The rocket has leaked like a sieve so much during fueling that there is no telling what has been overlooked.
Look, few things would make me happier than to see Artemis II return to Earth with its crew of four having gone around the Moon, carrying people there for the first time in over fifty-three years.
I hate to tell you this though, but the NASA of today is not the NASA of the Sixties. The Apollo program was an unprecedented focused effort to fulfill President Kennedy's goal of landing man on the Moon and returning him safely to Earth. Almost the entirety of American industry played a role in making that happen. There has been no such similar effort in the more than twenty years since Artemis was conceived.
I believe that humans can be returned to the Moon. And that they can have a long-term presence there. But such a thing cannot be rushed. And that is what Artemis has always come across as being: a rush job. No offense meant to its designers and builders. And yes, I know that tomorrow is being seen as a day two decades in the making. But it's still too soon.
So I'm begging y'all, refrain from launching Artemis II tomorrow. Yes, daring to leap beyond the grasp of Earth is a magnificent endeavor. But it also must be thoughtful and considerate. And that isn't what I and others with better minds than mine are seeing is happening with this vessel.
Forty years ago today came the end of the childhood of my generation.
The space shuttle Challenger was blown to bits shortly after liftoff, taking with it the lives of seven of the best crew members that NASA has ever filled a mission with.
A few months earlier, I had read something fascinating: that those people who were old enough could remember where exactly they were when they heard about the attack on Pearl Harbor, and then when they heard about John F. Kennedy being assassinated. And I wondered if there would ever be an event like that in my own life.
Challenger was such an event. The first of too many.
Yes, I indeed remember that day forty years ago as clearly as if it were transpiring today. I was eleven years old, going on twelve, in sixth grade at Community Baptist School in Reidsville, North Carolina. I had just sat down at the table with my lunch when two classmates told me that the space shuttle had blown up. I didn't believe them. It was a cruel joke, I thought. But they insisted that it happened. And then I looked around at the other tables and overheard a lot of the other students saying "exploded" and "shuttle".
I looked down the length of our table, at our teacher. I mouthed to her "Is it true?" She quietly replied yes.
Every school then, it seemed, had its resident science geek. At Community Baptist, that was me. Everyone knew that I was a nut for science. That I had a great interest in this space shuttle mission. STS-51-L was the flight that was carrying Christa McAuliffe, the New Hampshire school teacher, into space. There had been a lot of interested across the country and around the world in this mission. January of 1986 was peak time for those of us with an astronomy/space exploration bent. There was Halley's Comet come around on its every-76-years visit to the inner solar system. And a few days before the launch of Challenger there was the Voyager 2 flyby of the planet Uranus. Many students and teachers had been asking me what I thought about all of these events taking place. The Challenger mission was going to be the finest of all.
When we got back to class after lunch, Miss Martin confirmed with us what most had already heard. Our school had no television sets in the classrooms so I could only imagine what it looked like. A few hours later Mom picked my sister and I up from school. She had one stop to make before we got home and I was eager to see for myself. When we did get back, the very first thing I saw on the television, turned to the CBS affiliate in Greensboro, was an image of McAuliffe. That was followed by pictures of the other crew members.
And then Dan Rather played the footage. And I finally got to see the fiery fate of Challenger with my own eyes.
A short while later, President Ronald Reagan delivered a speech live from the Oval Office. His remarks to the people of America, and especially the school children, is easily the greatest address by a president that I have ever heard...
I watched the speech. Dad asked if I'd like to help bring some firewood down into the basement. I told him yes, I would like to do that. Anything to get my mind off of the real world.
Tuesday, January 28th, 1986. The day that the youth of Generation X came to an end in the skies over the Atlantic off the coast of Florida.
Okay, there was never a "Mister Gorsky" and Armstrong never said that. But everyone else is posting "One small step for man..." and I just had to be the oddball tonight.
Happy Fiftieth Anniversary to Apollo 11's touchdown in Mare Tranquilitatis!
1968 was perhaps the most turbulent year of the most turbulent decade of modern history. Assassinations, wars, upheaval - sometimes peaceful and sometimes not - and the looming threat of global annhiliation... it seemed that the whole world had gone mad.
So maybe it took three men a distance of more than two hundred thousand miles from that same world to put things into humbling perspective for the rest of us.
It was fifty years ago tonight, on Christmas Eve in 1968, that the crew of Apollo 8 ended one of the most-watched television broadcasts in history with a special message. William Anders, James Lovell, and Frank Borman took turns reading from the first chapter of the Book of Genesis. Half a century later, their glad tidings from orbit above the Moon has lost none of its magnificent potency.
Here it is:
A short while earlier, the crew had become the first humans to witness the Earth as an entire planet in one glimpse. Anders was able to capture the moment with a photograph that has since come to be titled "Earthrise":
"And from the crew of Apollo 8, we close with good night, good luck, a Merry Christmas – and God bless all of you, all of you on the good Earth."
Nearly thirty years after the Challenger disaster, it is now coming out that the first "regular citizen" to fly on a space shuttle mission was originally going to be an eight-foot tall yellow Muppet loved and adored by what has become generations of devoted fans.
Strange, but true: Big Bird almost had a seat on Challenger for its final flight.
In the new documentary I Am Big Bird, the most massive fowl on Sesame Street was in early talks to fly as he'd never flown before. Muppeteer Caroll Spinney would have gone aboard Challenger for mission STS-51L. It was meant to be something that would enthuse and excite children about the space program.
Can you imagine that? Big Bird himself in orbit around the Earth, talking to children via live television. To say nothing of what would have been some amazing footage for Sesame Street itself.
There was one, errr... "little" problem with the scheme. NASA determined that the Big Bird costume would have been too big to really be practical aboard the orbiter. And so it would be schoolteacher Christa McAuliffe who was scheduled for the mission instead.
"It made my scalp crawl to think I was supposed to be on that," Caroll Spinney has said.
Fifty years ago today, on February 20th 1962, John Glenn flew inside a Mercury space capsule christened Friendship 7 atop an Atlas LV-3B rocket, taking off from Cape Canaveral and into the history books...
It was the first orbital flight around the Earth by an American. Glenn made three orbits over the course of nearly five hours, before safely splashing down in the Atlantic.
Just think: it was only seven and a half years after Glenn's flight that we were walking on the moon.
How come we can't do cool stuff like that anymore? I mean, we use to make it look so easy...
I met John Glenn on Halloween Night in 1988. He came to my high school to campaign for the incumbent congressman from our district. Wish I'd gotten a photo of he and I together, but I do still have his autograph.
Anyway, here's wishing John Glenn a very happy anniversary of his pioneering flight! And hey, he's still looking in good shape at 90! I bet he'd be up for a trip to the International Space Station (if his lovely wife of 70 years will let him :-)
I have reposted stuff on this blog twice in the past, on rare occasions. But never three times. This deserves it though (and no doubt will be posted again in years to come).
It's been two years since the last time I shared this YouTube video. And since this is the week of Thanksgiving (yes I've already begun preparing to deep-fry a bunch of turkey) and there are perhaps still a lot of people who've never enjoyed this before, I thought it was well worth posting again :-)
It's the short film Thanksgiving With The Kranzes. Produced a few years ago by aviation students, it's a dead-on hilarious parody of Ron Howard's movie Apollo 13.
It is Thanksgiving 1970. This year it's Gene Kranz's turn to host the traditional dinner for his NASA colleagues. The heroic crew of the Apollo 13 mission has been given the command of the kitchen. But then... something happens.
"Take-out is NOT an option!"
Watch now the film that the real-life Gene Kranz has taken to watching with his family every Thanksgiving!
The orbiter Atlantis landed at Kennedy Space Center in Florida this morning, at 5:57 a.m.
And so, after 135 missions that began on April 12th 1981, the Space Shuttle program - a system that began to be engineered in the late Sixties - has come to an end. So too apparently has the United States' manned space endeavors: NASA has no crew-capable vehicles anywhere close to near-future use (the Orion system has been scrapped because of budgetary cutbacks). For now the International Space Station is going to have to be serviced by Soviet-era Soyuz craft: a design that has been flying into space since our own Apollo program.
Well, at least private enterprise is beginning to seriously engage in spaceflight. That is where there's going to be a future in manned space exploration. There is still a passion for space: it just needs to be matched with equal zeal and funding capability... and government can't do that anymore like it could in the days of Mercury, Gemini and Apollo.
But today, I don't wish to lament what many others have already done so and with greater eloquence. The Atlantis has come home. The Space Shuttle has accomplished its mission.
And that is worth honoring no matter how one looks at it.
Wow. Lots of history to be commemorated today. Now I'm being reminded that it was thirty years ago today that the first Space Shuttle flight - which was the orbiter Columbia - took off from Cape Canaveral in Florida.
Here's footage of the launch...
I remember watching that! 'Twas knee-high to a grasshopper as they say. It was supposed to have lifted off a day or two before, but the launch was scrubbed 'cuz of technical problems. And I was about to leave for school that morning and really hoping that it would take off without any more delay and then... WHOOOOOSH!!! It was the first manned spaceflight that I ever got to watch live on television.
In case anyone's wondering why the external tank is white in this clip, the tank was painted on the first three flights of the space shuttle, but after that it was left its normal fiberglass-y orange: not painting the tank saved a lot of weight (and subsequently, fuel).
And unfortunately as everyone knows, Columbia was lost in that tragic re-entry accident over Texas in 2003.
But on this day, this blogger honors its maiden flight, and the inauguration of the Space Shuttle system.
Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of earth
And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings;
Sunward I've climbed, and joined the tumbling mirth
Of sun-split clouds - and done a hundred things
You have not dreamed of - wheeled and soared and swung
High in the sunlit silence. Hov'ring there
I've chased the shouting wind along, and flung
My eager craft through footless halls of air.
Up, up the long delirious, burning blue,
I've topped the windswept heights with easy grace
Where never lark, or even eagle flew -
And, while with silent lifting mind I've trod
The high untresspassed sanctity of space,
Put out my hand and touched the face of God.
-- John Gillespie Magee, Jr.
No 412 squadron, RCAF
Killed 11 December 1941
In memory of the crew of Mission STS 51-L of the Space Shuttle Challenger, who perished on this day a quarter century ago, January 28th, 1986.
The Knight Shift and its eclectic proprietor would like to join the very many other admirers of Dr. Neil Armstrong in wishing him all the best on his 80th birthday today!
Not really trees, but an optical illusion captured by NASA's HiRISE camera in orbit around the red planet. What appears to be a scattering of pine trees is actually several trails of debris near Mars's north pole, left behind as the ice cap goes on its seasonal retreat.
It's not the first time that I've blogged about this. But a short film this good easily merits sharing more than once. And who knows, there might be some who have never had the pleasure of seeing it before.
Here is that brilliant, spot-on and hilarious spoof of Ron Howard's Apollo 13 that Gene Kranz himself has taken to watching with his family as a holiday tradition.
LCROSS - short for "Lunar CRater Observing and Sensing Satellite -is looking for frozen water and other potentially cool stuff (no pun intended) that might be lurking in the shadows of Luna. Tomorrow morning LCROSS will release a heavy projectile probe. Not long afterward the probe will impact around the crater Cabeus A near the Moon's south pole, and the expectant plume of vapor, dust and debris will be analyzed by the LCROSS main satellite (its orbit will carry it through the hoped-for cloud).
Sounds like a Marvel Comic character in the making, doesn't it?
Scientists working for NASA have created a device which uses magnetic fields to levitate small animals (in this case, a three-week old mouse) in an effort to simulate and study various amounts of gravity.
(And before anybody gives me grief over it, in the past few years audio analysis has determined that Armstrong did indeed say "step for a man" :-)
Forty years ago today, on July 20th, 1969, astronauts Neil Armstrong, Michael Collins and Eugene "Buzz" Aldrin, with the assistance of a few hundred thousand of their good friends back on Earth, fulfilled an ages-old dream when Apollo 11 landed on the Moon. Armstrong was the first man to stretch his legs on the lunar surface, while Aldrin has the distinction of being the first person to "drain the main vein" on another world.
I didn't know until this past year that before they began their "extra-vehicular activity" (in layman's terms: they went outside the spaceship), that Aldrin also took communion on the Moon. At the time he was an elder of Webster Presbyterian Church and asked that a communion kit be prepared for his mission. The chalice he used on the lunar surface is now kept by the church.
Now, wanna see something really cool? Just in time for the fortieth anniversary, NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter has taken this image of the Apollo 11 landing site! You can clearly see the Eagle lunar module's descent stage, just as Armstrong and Aldrin left it forty years ago. The LRO has found four more Apollo landing sites thus far. Future photos will be even more detailed.
Forty years ago today came the greatest technological triumph of human history. It did not come cheap, and it was not without sacrifice. And it seems that somewhere along the way, we've lost that same spirit which once upon a time, did put a man on the moon.
But I like to believe that it's there still... and can be found again.
Here's a toast to the people of Apollo 11. May what they accomplished ever serve to inspire us all.
Remember how Richard Pryor's character Gus Gorman in Superman III (an "under-rated" film, as the guy in Office Space says) used his hackin' skillz to embezzle all that money from the company he worked at? Okay well...
A now-retired aerospace engineer discovered forty years ago that he was being overpaid by 2 cents an hour. He suggested a way to fix the discrepancy, but it got lost in bureaucratic bungling.
And now, four full decades later later, the government has lost BILLIONS OF DOLLARS, literally pennies at a time, because it failed to address what is being called a "simple" error that would have only required very minor changes in accounting software.
