Garrett Reviews Gravity

So Garrett reviewed Gravity, which is a pretty great film (see it on IMAX), despite its flaws. http://www.forbes.com/sites/quora/2013/10/17/what-does-a-real-astronaut-think-of-gravity/

Dragon Docks

Garrett did it!

Garrett On SpaceX

Jason Rhian of Universe Today did a great interview with Garrett regarding SpaceX. I am posting it here in its entirety. Like this blog's friend, Heather Archuletta (www.pillownaut.com) said, Space X could do a lot worse than having Garrett as its spokesguy.


CAPE CANAVERAL Fla. – Garrett Reisman knows a thing or two about what it takes to send astronauts to orbit. He should, he has taken the trip himself – twice. Reisman spent three months on the International Space Station launching with the STS-123 crew, and was a Mission Specialist on STS-132. He has walked in space, operated Canada’s Dextre robot and installed critical flight hardware to the ISS.

He has since left NASA to work for Space Exploration Technologies (SpaceX). Reisman took a moment to chat with Universe Today just before the final launch of the shuttle program, STS-135, on the orbiter Atlantis. Reisman spoke about SpaceX’s contract with NASA under the second phase of the Commercial Crew Development contract or CCDev-02, his new role as Director of SpaceX’s Dragon Rider program and whether there is another trip to space in his future.

Universe Today: Hi Garrett, thanks for taking the time to talk with us today, tell us a little about CCDev-02.

Reisman: “Thanks, it’s good to be here, SpaceX has dubbed CCDev-02 the ‘Dragon Rider’ program, CCDev sounds like someone’s logon name. Dragon Rider is the name of SpaceX’s efforts to send astronauts into orbit on board the Dragon Spacecraft.”

Universe Today: A nod to Anne McCaffrey’s Dragonriders of Pern?

Reisman: “Exactly!” (laughing)

Universe Today: If you had to pick out one of the most interesting elements of what SpaceX is working on for CCDev-02 – what would it be?

Reisman: “I think I would have to say it is the integrated launch abort system. The system that SpaceX is working on will not be the normal tower that is positioned above the spacecraft; instead it will be built into the sides of the Dragon. This system will be reusable and allow the Dragon to land.”


SpaceX plans to use the Dragon Spacecraft to send astronauts to the International Space Station. Image Credit: SpaceX
Universe Today: What do you think sets SpaceX apart from other, similar companies?

Reisman: “Some companies will offer you the rocket, others the spacecraft, at SpaceX we got both – it’s one-stop-shopping. We got the rocket, the Falcon 9, which has had two very successful test flights and we have the Dragon Spacecraft which became the first commercial spacecraft to orbit the Earth and splash down safely this past December. With both of these vital elements we have great confidence that we can do what we say we will do as we move forward.”

Universe Today: What made you decide to leave NASA and come to SpaceX?

Reisman: “I left NASA about four months ago and came over to SpaceX because I was very excited about what was going on in the commercial sector, just all this amazing innovation that was being unleashed and I wanted to be a part of that, to contribute to that.”

Universe Today: Final question, as a veteran astronaut are you hoping to ride Dragon to orbit one day?

Reisman: (smiles) While that’s not why I joined SpaceX – I wouldn’t rule it out either…”

SpaceX is looking to launch the next Falcon 9 rocket with Dragon Spacecraft some time this fall from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station’s Launch Complex 40. This demonstration flight will test out the Dragon’s navigation and other operating systems. This year SpaceX is planning to launch two flights under the Commercial Orbital Transportation Services or COTS contract, worth $1.6 billion, that the company has with NASA.

360° view of Discovery flight deck.

Click here for much awesomeness.

NASA - Hubble's Neptune Anniversary Pictures

NASA - Hubble's Neptune Anniversary Pictures

Look, since we're going to be doing this for a while...

For the love of Yuri, guys, it's SO-yuz¹.
The "yu" is one letter in Cyrillic. It cannot be split up.

If I have to listen to SOYooze for the next whatever², I swear...

¹Technically, it's closer to suh-yuz. Long story.

² I also get irked at "bay-ZHING." Don't even get me started on "TOLL-kin."

Gee, Hubble, it'd be nice if you were awesome or something.

Without manned spaceflight, Hubble would have become the most expensive piece of space junk ever launched.
Thanks again, guys.

From the website:

Zooming in on Omega Centauri Stellar Motion

This movie sequence begins with a ground-based image of the giant globular star cluster Omega Centauri and zooms very tightly in to a Hubble Space Telescope image of the central region of the cluster. In a simulation based on Hubble data, the stars appear to be moving in random directions, like a swarm of bees.

Well, most distant from us.

From the Hubble's official site:

The Universe's Most Distant Object

This video is a zoom into the Hubble Space Telescope infrared Ultra Deep Field, first taken in 2009. It is a very small patch of sky in the southern constellation Fornax. The zoom centers on the farthest identified object in the field. The object, possibly a galaxy, looks red because its light has been stretched by the expansion of the universe. Credit: NASA/ESA/G. Bacon, STScI (no audio)

Lest we forget...

There are still VERY awesome things going on in space that don't involve manned flight.

The badass Cassini spacecraft detected a storm on Saturn way back in December and that storm still rages today. It covers a mindblowing 2 Billion-With-A-'B' square miles. (By contrast, the Earth's surface is only 197 million square miles.)

At its most intense, the storm was producing 10 lightning strikes a second. Listen to the audio of the lightning.

In honor of STS-135 and as a memento to the Program: Post your favorite shuttle memories!

You don't even have to have stepped foot in Florida to have a favorite memory of a shuttle mission!
What are some specific memories that you relate to the shuttle?
Let's just do happy memories today. I can't take anymore emotional stuff.
We all have extremely similar tragedy stories, but I'll bet not one other person who isn't a Ward relates a #2 Washtub* to a shuttle launch. Hell, half of you probably don't know what a #2 Washtub is. I'm still not sure.


Don't be shy. Log in and comment. It's free!

I'm morose and grumpy.
Make me smile, Visitor.

*More on this later.

Onward.

Don't cry because it's over. Smile because it happened. -Dr. Seuss

I had a really vivid dream about watching a shuttle launch last night. It was so vivid (and took place with my sisters at my parents' house as a bonus) that it woke me up, and I lay there for a few minutes thinking, "Man, that was a great dream."

I grew up in Florida during the 1980s. The space shuttle plays a starring role in an enormous amount of my childhood memories.

I remember the excitement of those early days. For kids like me, it was the dawn of spaceflight, period. We didn't remember Mercury or Gemini or Apollo. Those things were history book material. I surely understood and appreciated the magnitude of them, just like I understood the magnitude of the voyage of Columbus. But I have no personal experience with either.

To me, seeing the shuttle actually do what they said it would do convinced me that spaceflight was about to become routine.

I developed the obligatory crush on Bob Crippen; bizarre, since John Young was infinitely cuter. I delighted in the fact that during launches and landings, we were allowed to watch TV (TV!) in the classroom. I looked up at space and for the first time in my life, I was pretty sure I had a shot at it.

Um.

The shuttle program gave America an abundant crop of ever-changing heroes: Crippen, Ride, Bluford, Chang-Diaz, Collins, Lucid, Musgrave, Thagard. Heck, we Coasties even got one eventually.

And the Reds? The Moon, Lake Placid, and then Columbia. Ouch.

Aw. 

As the years went by, children became adults, adults became elderly, presidents came and went, and nations rose and fell. Eventually, even the Soviets were gone. Still, our space program remained. We might have funded it with chump change, we might have shrugged our shoulders, we might have even ignored it (until a tragedy when we would cover it 24/7 for a couple of weeks), but with few exceptions, we were glad it was there. We funded a full 50% (or $50,000,000,000) of the ISS; it was rather important that we be able to get a few astronauts there from time to time. 

Unfortunately, the never-ending wars, famines, and epic natural disasters of the late 20th/early 21st centuries have made even the most optimistic among us jaded and cynical.  When John F. Kennedy said his goal was to put a man on the Moon in ten years, he meant it. He was unashamed; it was very matter-of-fact. We can, so we should. Find me a politician today who honestly believes space exploration is important and is willing to man up and demand funding for it, and not just on the campaign trail in Central Florida - in Nebraska and New Hampshire and Boise, Idaho, too. They sell America the most ridiculous things imaginable, and we willingly buy it all. They can't sell the exploration of the cosmos? 

I cannot believe this gap is happening. After Friday, the United States of America will no longer launch manned spacecraft for an unknown number of years. (Yes, SpaceX is amazing and I see great things happening there. But no, it is not representative of the nation.)

I love Russia. I love the Soyuz. I love-love Sergei Volkov.  

But now we are hitchhikers, just like South Korea, Canada, Japan, Israel, and billionaires everywhere, if they're so inclined. There's no shame in it for those guys; for us, there should be. Our space program now depends on politicians, not just for funding and maintaining public support, but for keeping the peace. Without a stable, workable peace, we have no ride to the party and we go nowhere. And let's face it, the guys with the keys can be temperamental.

At least we have a manual.

Thank you, thank you, thank you to the thousands of men and women who over the last four decades made the shuttle program so awesome and awe-inspiring and fun, especially Pam. Thank you to the politicians who supported them. Thank you to the men and women who blazed a trail for them. Thank you to the astronauts who gave us so very much. Thanks especially to Garrett, for inviting us into his life and sharing his experiences and for just being an all-around great guy, the sort of guy you imagine an astronaut to be. Thank you to the families who tolerated endless separations and fears and worries and inconveniences, especially Simone. Thank you to the men and women who gave their lives for the program. Thank you from a grateful nation.

The orbiters will soon be all across the nation in museums where they will be walked upon by children who never saw them launch, who never saw anything painted United States of America launch. The smoke trails will disappear over the Cape (the only Cape that really matters, Floridians know) and the tourists will leave too. Or at least, they'll head back to Orlando, never again to venture out into The Real Florida.

The memories, hilarious and painful and exhilarating and heartbreaking, will remain forever.

Photo taken by a high school pal of mine, Jimmy Vernacotola. True story.

 

I love the Sun. I. LOVE. THE. SUN.

Milky Way/Arches Nat'l Park

You can never have enough Milky Way pictures.
Ever.
Awesomeness:

Three Arches Above Utah
Credit & Copyright: Brad Goldpaint (Goldpaint Photography) Explanation: How many arches can you count in the above image? If you count both spans of the Double Arch in the Arches National Park in Utah, USA, then two. But since the above image was taken during a clear dark night, it caught a photogenic third arch far in the distance -- that of the overreaching Milky Way Galaxy. Because we are situated in the midst of the spiral Milky Way Galaxy, the band of the central disk appears all around us. The sandstone arches of the Double Arch were formed from the erosion of falling water. The larger arch rises over 30 meters above the surrounding salt bed and spans close to 50 meters across. The dark silhouettes across the image bottom are sandstone monoliths left over from silt-filled crevices in an evaporated 300 million year old salty sea. A dim flow created by light pollution from Moab, Utah can also be seen in the distance.

NASA - Ames Imaging Experts Create Unique Views of STS-134 Launch

NASA - Ames Imaging Experts Create Unique Views of STS-134 Launch

Folks...

There is a reason why Chile is my chosen "If I ever leave this country, that's where I'm moving" spot.

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Don't Panic

I have no idea why, but May 25 is Towel Day, a celebration of the life of Douglas Adams. The first commemoration of the event was held two weeks after his death on May 25, 2001. It is a tribute to The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, in which he writes:

"A towel, it says, is about the most massively useful thing an interstellar hitchhiker can have. Partly it has great practical value - you can wrap it around you for warmth as you bound across the cold moons of Jaglan Beta; you can lie on it on the brilliant marble-sanded beaches of Santraginus V, inhaling the heady sea vapours; you can sleep under it beneath the stars which shine so redly on the desert world of Kakrafoon; use it to sail a mini raft down the slow heavy river Moth; wet it for use in hand-to- hand-combat; wrap it round your head to ward off noxious fumes or to avoid the gaze of the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal (a mindboggingly stupid animal, it assumes that if you can't see it, it can't see you - daft as a bush, but very ravenous); you can wave your towel in emergencies as a distress signal, and of course dry yourself off with it if it still seems to be clean enough.
More importantly, a towel has immense psychological value. For some reason, if a strag (strag: non-hitchhiker) discovers that a hitchhiker has his towel with him, he will automatically assume that he is also in possession of a toothbrush, face flannel, soap, tin of biscuits, flask, compass, map, ball of string, gnat spray, wet weather gear, space suit etc., etc. Furthermore, the strag will then happily lend the hitchhiker any of these or a dozen other items that the hitchhiker might accidentally have "lost". What the strag will think is that any man who can hitch the length and breadth of the galaxy, rough it, slum it, struggle against terrible odds, win through, and still knows where his towel is is clearly a man to be reckoned with."

Adams was an environmentalist and a champion for gorillas and black rhinos. His "trilogy" of Hitchhiker works comprises, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy; The Restaurant at the End of the Universe; Life, the Universe and Everything; and So Long, and Thanks for all the Fish. Yes, it's not three books.

His greatest contribution to sci-fi freaks is "42," the answer to the "ultimate question of life, the universe and everything." The question remains unknown. The mice, who were the intelligent beings, were about to answer the question when the Earth was destroyed by psychiatrists who feared for their livelihoods should the answer become known.

The mice, however, decide to just pick a question out of thin air, rather than wait for another millennium's worth of pondering. The question was: "How many roads must a man walk down?" appropriate since May 24 (yesterday) was Bob Dylan's birthday.

Adams was friends with Gary Booker, lead singer and songwriter for Procol Harum; dedicated The Restaurant at the End of the Universe to the Paul Simon album "One Trick Pony;" was friends with the Monkees' Michael Nesmith and quoted Beatles lyrics extensively in a number of works.

Here is a link to find what people worldwide are doing to celebrate Towel Day.

Cool STS-134 pics

Panelist: SpaceX Costs Offer Hope For NASA | AVIATION WEEK

Panelist: SpaceX Costs Offer Hope For NASA | AVIATION WEEK

STS-134 - The final launch of Endeavour - Full Launch in HD