The thirtieth anniversary of Strategic Defense Initiative

It was thirty years ago this week that President Ronald Reagan gave a historic speech proposing, for the first time, a space-based anti-ballistic missile system for the United States.  The plan, once developed, would utilize ground and space-based weaponry to blast apart incoming nuclear missiles.  The basic premise was an array of missile-launching satellites around the Earth.  A far more radical design called for the deployment of platforms in orbit: either carrying anti-missile lasers or particle beams, or as part of an adaptive-optics system which would focus a surface-generated laser onto a moving target anywhere around the world (see illustration).

The official name for the concept was Strategic Defense Initiative, or SDI.  But for reasons apparent to everyone it was quickly labeled "Star Wars" by the mainstream press and the name stuck.

SDI gained notoriety overnight, as much from many people in the United States as from the government of the Soviet Union.  Reagan's political enemies swore and declared that "Star Wars" was a ridiculous fantasy that would never work.  Soviet officials were outraged: among other things, claiming that SDI was a violation of the SALT II treaty.

The thing is, Strategic Defense Initiative did work.  But not at all in the way that it was advertised.  And out of all of Reagan's accomplishments, it is SDI that stands as the most genius.  Because SDI didn't have to function at all as Reagan had proposed.  Instead, it was the very idea of SDI that compelled the Soviet government to pour an insane amount of money into its military budget in an effort to "catch up" with the United States.  It was money that the Russians didn't really have to begin with and the rush to build up that country's military and technology took a severe toll on an economy that was severe enough already.

In short: SDI was one of the biggest reasons for the fall of the Soviet Union.  It drastically accelerated the Russian's bankruptcy and inability to contain its own people as it had for many decades.

I'll put it in even shorter terms: Ronald Reagan is the man most responsible for ending the Cold War.  He did it with SDI.  And he did it without a single shot being fired by either side.

Like I said: genius.

There are a number of retrospectives about the thirtieth anniversary of Strategic Defense Initiative, but one of the better ones I've found is a series by Jay Nordlinger running all this week on National Review's website.  It's recommended reading for anyone interested in the very rare crossing of politics, technology and history that is SDI.

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In memory of the crew of STS-107

The crew of the Space Shuttle Columbia,

who perished in re-entry from Mission STS-107

ten years ago today

February 1, 2003

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"The Eagle has landed."

Neil Armstrong
1930 - 2012

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Fiftieth anniversary of John Glenn's orbital spaceflight

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 :-)

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Newt Gingrich promises permanent Moon base by 2020

That's if he's elected President, 'course (and if he wins re-election in 2016).

Read about Gingrich's plans for a lunar establishment here.

I just couldn't resist having some fun with this...

"To the MOON, Alice!!"

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End of the Space Shuttle program

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.

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Twenty-five years ago today...

High Flight

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.

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Witness the fiery re-entry of the HAYABUSA probe over Australia

Remember when the Mir space station came crashing and burning out of the sky nine years ago? I was watching that on TV and among friends we jokingly quoted Kirk's line from Star Trek III: The Search for Spock: "My God Bones. What have I done?"

Well, this ain't the flaming destruction of a space vessel for once. This is the atmospheric re-entry of the HAYABUSA Asteroid Explorer mission, videoed from a NASA DC-8 over Australia. The Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) launched HAYABUSA in 2003. A few years later it landed on the asteroid Itokawa. Then HAYABUSA scooped up some samples and made the five-year journey back to Earth, using a high-tech ion engine to return its precious cargo.

The capsule containing the asteroid samples has been located at its calculated arrival point in western Australia (gotta love mathematics aye?). And soon the asteroid rocks and dust will be in laboratories undergoing analysis.

That is about as successful a space mission as I have ever heard of in any recent memory. Congrats to JAXA and the HAYABUSA crew on a job well done!

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Interstellar hydrogen would be lethal for warp drive travellers

Assuming that we could ever figure out how to travel faster than the speed of light, there may not be a heck of a lot that we could do with it. That's what Professor William Edelstein of the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine (dude sounds like a polymath for having a good head about medicine and high-energy physics) has determined.

The problem is hydrogen, which exists in interstellar space on average of two atoms per cubic centimeter. Which ain't a whole lot. But if a spacecraft were to accelerate toward lightspeed those scarce atoms would start bombarding the ship like a hail of bullets...

As the spaceship reached 99.999998 per cent of the speed of light, "hydrogen atoms would seem to reach a staggering 7 teraelectron volts", which for the crew "would be like standing in front of the Large Hadron Collider beam".

This is a very bad thing, because humans in the path of this ray would receive a dose of ionising radiation of 10,000 sieverts, and as Bones McCoy would doubtless confirm, the lethal dose is 6 sieverts.

The result? Death in one second.

The spacecraft's structure would do little to mitigate the effects of the killer hydrogen. Edelstein "calculates that a 10-centimetre-thick layer of aluminium would absorb less than 1 per cent of the energy", and the intense doses of radiation would damage the ship's structure and fry its electronics.

Edelstein grimly concluded: "Hydrogen atoms are unavoidable space mines."

Kinda makes you have whole new appreciation for them forward shields on the U.S.S. Enterprise, aye? :-)

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NASA will bomb the Moon tomorrow

(Sounds like a Weekly World News headline, don't it? :-)

I'm praying that we will keep having clear skies until later tomorrow, 'cuz at around 7:30 a.m. EDT (and 4:30 in the morning for y'all on the West Coast) NASA's LCROSS mission will literally "shoot the Moon".

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).

And depending on how much good junk gets kicked up we might be able to see this from Earth!  I'm gonna be outside tomorrow morning with my trusty 3-inch refractor and a good pair of binoculars.  But some are also saying that this might be briefly visible with the naked eye.  If nothing else, NASA TV has a streaming video feed online where you can watch it live wherever you happen to be, and there's also the official NASA page for LCROSS's mission profile.

"To the Moon, Alice! RIGHT TO THE MOON!"

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Want to launch your own satellite into orbit?

For $8,000 you can purchase the TubeSat Personal Satellite from Interorbital Systems. Then you outfit your satellite however you like, and send it back to Interorbital Systems where it will be scheduled for orbital insertion aboard a NEPTUNE 30 vehicle (set to begin launch next year). Your satellite and 31 others will be hurled into an orbit 192 miles above the surface of the Earth, where it will function for a few weeks before safely re-entering the atmosphere and burning up. I'm thinking this might be a groovy thing for schools to look at: imagine the students of a science class beaming with pride as a satellite they designed is flying overhead and sending back telemetry!

Here's the page at Interorbital Systems' website for their TubeSat kit where you can order a satellite of your very own. And they even take PayPal!

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"That's one small step for a man..."

"...one giant leap for mankind."

(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.

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Perhaps we should call it the "International Still Suit"?

Thanks to a newly-tested and approved recycling system aboard the International Space Station, its long-term crews are now able to drink water recovered from urine, sweat and breath exhalation. It's the first time that water has been acquired and imbibed in space in such a manner.

The new system takes the combined urine of the crew from the toilet, moves it to a big tank, where the water is boiled off, and the vapor collected. The rest of contaminants - the yucky brine in the urine - is thrown away, said Marybeth Edeen, the space station's national lab manager who was in charge of the system.

The water vapor is mixed with water from air condensation, then it goes through filters, much like those put on home taps, Edeen said.

When six crew members are aboard it can make about six gallons from urine in about six hours, Edeen said.

The system sounds very much like the stillsuits worn by the Fremen in the Dune series of novels.

Wonder how long it'll be before some bold entrepreneur approaches NASA about selling drops of "authentic recycled astronaut urine" :-P

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Bat may have ridden shuttle into space

When the Space Shuttle Discovery blasted into orbit two days ago, it might have taken this bat along for the ride. NASA technicians spotted the flying rodent clawed up against the vehicle's external tank during inspections. And it was thought that it would eventually take fly off on its own.

But as Discovery roared from the launch pad, a tiny black speck was spotted clinging to the side of the tank. Sure enough, it was the bat.

Nobody has seen the bat since Discovery cleared the tower, but it was last seen still holding on to the vehicle.

Remember kiddies: hitchhiking can be dangerous....

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Two satellites collide in space over Siberia

At least 600 pieces of spaceborne shrapnel are now plaguing the sky, no thanks to an unprecedented collision between two satellites in low-Earth orbit.

Early yesterday, 790 kilometers (490 miles) above Siberia, an inoperative Russian satellite called Cosmos 2251 smashed into Iridium33, a communications satellite. Ground radar is now tracking the hundreds of resulting bits of debris, hoping that none of it will smash into any other satellites or the International Space Station.

When asked which satellite was at fault, NASA scientist Nicholas Johnson said, "they ran into each other. Nothing has the right of way up there. We don't have an air traffic controller in space. There is no universal way of knowing what's coming in your direction."

The good news, if there is any, is that Iridium Satellite LLC still has 64 satellites in unusually low orbit, relaying calls between special satellite phones (the U.S. Department of Defense is one of its biggest customers).

I wonder if one of them was trying to speed through an intersection...

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Iran launches first satellite

Just six months after initial tests of the delivery vehicle, Iran has launched its first satellite into space. Early this morning a Safir-2 rocket lifted off from a launch facility somewhere in Iran, and shortly afterward successfully inserted the Omid satellite into low-Earth orbit.

Naturally, some folks on this side of the pond are worrying about Iran using its newfound spaceborne capability to rain nuclear fire down on Washington D.C. or Tel Aviv. But I don't see too much to fret about... yet, anyway. What Iran did today is much more in the league of what the Soviets did with Sputnik. It's a few magnitudes order of greater sophistication to build a working ICBM.

That said, as someone with a life-long interest in aerospace efforts - no matter who it is who's doing the effortin' - I shall be keeping an interested eye on Iran in the near future.

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And to think that I sometimes loose a screwdriver in the kitchen drawer...

A few days ago during a spacewalk at the International Space Station, astronaut Heidemarie Stefanyshyn-Piper accidentally lost her bag of tools and it went floating away.

But don't worry: Kevin Fetter of Brockville, Ontario found it last night! He was in his backyard with his satellite-observing gear, which was also armed with a good video camera. And Fetter not only spotted Stefanyshyn-Piper's bag as it scooted past the star eta Pisces, he filmed it too...

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Soviet-era Buran could replace NASA space shuttle

Twenty years ago yesterday the Buran (shown landing at left), the Soviet Union's answer to the American-made NASA space shuttle system, launched from Kazakhstan for its first test flight. It wound up being its only mission to date. A few years later the fall of communism left the program in limbo. The only flight-worthy Buran was destroyed during a roof collapse at the Baikonur facility in 2002, although a number of others were already in production and one is currently on display in a museum in Germany.

But with the space shuttle fleet due to be retired in less than two years, Russia Today is reporting that interest is being rekindled in the Buran system for use as a service vehicle for the International Space Station and perhaps other purposes as well. Despite its visual similarity to the American space shuttle, the Buran was in many ways the superior vehicle (the feature that its designers were most proud of is that it can be launched and landed un-manned). And the Energia booster system that was developed parallel to the Buran is an absolute beast of a launch vehicle: it's said to be powerful enough to send a payload to Mars. Click here for more comparisons between the American shuttle and the Russian Buran.

I would love to see the Buran finally get some serious use... and achieve the appreciation that I've long thought was due her and her creators. I've been a devout student of the Russian space effort for well over a decade, ever since I made it the topic of my senior history thesis while at Elon (and I ended up presenting my research about it at a national conference in Rochester, New York). In spite of how screwy and completely wrong the the Soviet government was, the scientists and engineers who were forced to live under that regime still had a total passion for technical achievement (often in defiance of how much the Soviet bureaucrats got in their way: do some research on how Kruschev screwed-up a lot of Sergei Korolev's projects). Buran is a terrific vehicle and now at last she has a chance to soar and shine.

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NASA unveils final Space Shuttle flight schedule

There are ten more missions for the Space Shuttle fleet, as NASA has revealed the final slate of missions before the system is retired, after what will be 29 years of service. Endeavour is set to be the last one that will launch, with a mission scheduled for May 31, 2010 to bring spare parts to the International Space Station.

After Endeavour lands, NASA plans to begin using the new Ares launch vehicle (currently in preparation for testing), which will be carrying the Orion crew module. In the meantime, the station will be serviced by Japanese, ESA and Russian craft for supplies. Including the Soyuz, which it's safe to say has gained far more respect in recent years than it ever had before in its long and admirable history... which predates the American-made Space Shuttle by fifteen years!

I've got mixed feelings about seeing the Space Shuttle program retired. On one hand, it fulfilled the role that it was meant to play. But then, I wonder if maybe we came to rely on the Space Shuttle too much, and got lulled into complacency with it. It's like this: sending men and women into low-Earth orbit is always going to be a thrilling albeit risky venture. But it's not real manned space exploration. The last time we could say that we did that was Apollo 17 in 1972: the last time man walked on the Moon.

Maybe going back to the basics with Ares and Orion will be a better thing than we yet realize.

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Sex in space "inevitable" says experts

A Japanese firm is offering weddings in space beginning next year, and now officials with both state-sponsored space agencies and private corporations are beginning to openly concede that sexual intercourse beyond the confines of the Earth is going to happen... if it hasn't already (NASA is tight-lipped about whether it's taken place on the International Space Station or a shuttle flight).

Of especially great concern is what will happen on a long-term mission, like the ones now in the planning stages for a manned flight to Mars, or even an extended stay on something as relatively close by as the Moon. Space experts agree that humans are, by nature, beings who require sexual activity and expression in order to remain both emotionally and physically healthy. In more than forty years of forays into space, we've learned how to deal with just about every other human physiological need... and now we're going to have to confront the final frontier if we are to consider going any further.

It all sounds funny. But it's not.

Think about it: if we are bent on being an extra-planetary species, then what's going to happen to children who are conceived, and then grow up, in either a micro-gravity environment, or on a world with two-thirds or less of Earth's gravity? The movie WALL-E had some fun with that idea. But in reality, someone who matured in such an environment might very well die if he or she came to Earth, from failure of the body to acclimate to the higher gravity.

(And on a geeky note, the failed ABC pilot movie Plymouth back in 1991 took a very serious and engaging approach to this notion. It was yet another idea for a television series that was way ahead of its time...)

Of course, it would be remiss if one did not note that at least this would bring a whole new meaning to the term "panspermia"...

Okay, I'm stopping now.

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