About the McWetlog

The McWetlog is Jonathan Crowe’s personal blog. It’s where he writes about the things that turn his crank, such as astronomy, paleontology, photography, science fiction and snake keeping. A writer, editor, and all-round pain in the ass, Jonathan lives in Shawville, Quebec.

Spaceflight

Books read: July 2010

Footprints in the Dust: The Epic Voyages of Apollo, 1969-1975, edited by Colin Burgess. The People’s History of Spaceflight series gets more disappointing with each volume. For the period from Apollo 11 to Apollo-Soyuz, this volume assembles chapters from different contributors, with mixed results — the Apollo-Soyuz chapter reads more as the author’s memoir of watching the launch than as a history of the mission. Particularly patchy about the period’s Soyuz missions and Skylab, and reveals very little about Apollo 11 through 17 that is not already covered in A Man on the Moon by Andrew Chaikin (still the book on Apollo: Amazon.ca, Amazon.com).

Shatnerquake by Jeff Burk. A novella in which all the characters William Shatner has ever played are sucked into our universe with the mission to destroy William Shatner. The Guardian’s Damien Walter calls it “a comparatively mild example” of the bizarro fiction genre, an underground genre focused on the weird — “literature’s equivalent,” says Bizarro Central, “of the cult section of the video store.” Concerning Shatnerquake: truth be told, the concept is a lot more awesome than the execution; the writing was weak and there were a lot of missed opportunities to do something more with the material. Bizarro fiction intrigues me, but I’m now wary of the quality.

The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Buying a Piano by Marty and Jennifer Flinn. Yes, I already have a piano — a digital Roland I bought more than two years ago — but this book was still worth reading. While I don’t regret what I purchased, and where I purchased it, even after reading this guide, boy do I wish I had it back then: it’s really useful intelligence for potential piano buyers who would otherwise go unarmed against marketing bullshit, and it sets out the differences between pianos, what to look for, and what not to worry about. Bought remaindered.

Game Change: Obama and the Clintons, McCain and Palin, and the Race of a Lifetime, by John Heilemann and Mark Halperin. Truth be told, I’ve always been a junkie for inside baseball of the political kind, and this book, which when it came out was the talk of Washington, provides me with that hit. With the revelations about the inner workings of the campaigns — the disaster that was the Clinton campaign, Edwards’ self-destruction, and McCain’s failure to properly vet Palin — it’s abundantly clear that the best-run campaign won. I wonder if that’s a truism. E-book bought through Apple’s iBooks.

Cod by Mark Kurlansky. Short but expansive history of the Atlantic cod, which went from insanely plentiful on the Grand Banks to commercially extinct in five centuries. I skipped over the recipes and wanted more history (the Basques, Massachusetts, the slave trade, the Icelandic cod wars, the collapse of the Newfoundland fishery); it could easily have been three times as long and still too brief.

Beethoven: The Universal Composer by Edmund Morris. Short biography of my favourite composer; looks like a good starting point before tackling longer, more serious biographies; light on the works themselves but provides good context. E-book bought through Apple’s iBooks.

Footprints in the Dust ed. by Colin Burgess: Amazon.ca • Amazon.com
Shatnerquake by Jeff Burk: Amazon.ca • Amazon.com
The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Buying a Piano by Marty and Jennifer Flinn: Amazon.ca • Amazon.com
Game Change by John Heilemann and Mark Halperin: Amazon.ca • Amazon.com
Cod by Mark Kurlansky: Amazon.ca • Amazon.com
Beethoven: The Universal Composer by Edmund Morris: Amazon.ca • Amazon.com

The cost of a trip to Neptune: $4 trillion

How much would it cost to send a manned mission to Neptune before the end of the 21st century? About four trillion dollars. That’s the estimate of a study examining the question of manned missions to the outer planets (PDF), which used Neptune as a case study. The basic premise is to send six people, in living quarters roughly the size of the International Space Station, to and from Neptune within five years — it can’t be longer because of cosmic radiation, and then you’d have to add more shielding (to say nothing of additional consumables). Essentially, interplanetary travel much beyond Mars and the asteroids is pretty much a non-starter barring the development of ridiculously efficient methods of propulsion and preposterously lightweight radiation shielding. Via io9. (Image credit: Voyager 2 image of Neptune, NASA/JPL.)

Ambassadors from Earth

Book cover: Ambassadors from Earth The fifth volume of the University of Nebraska Press’s Onward Odyssey: A People’s History of Spaceflight series, Jay Gallentine’s Ambassadors from Earth: Pioneering Explorations with Unmanned Spacecraft is intended as a history of the exploration of space using unmanned space probes from the Explorer and Sputnik programs to the Voyager program. Like the other two books in this series that I’ve read, it’s largely based on interviews with the key people involved. This is, in other words, an oral history rather than a definitive account. Also like those other books, it gives a vivid, behind-the-scenes look at how these programs were developed, in all their improvised, chaotic and bureaucratic glory.

There is much of interest here, but Gallentine’s coverage is surprisingly patchy: for example, it covers the early Luna, Mariner and Venera probes in some detail, but omits the later craft, as though the early failures were more interesting than the later successes. Much attention is given to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory: the development of the Grand Tour — what eventually became JPL’s Voyager 1 and 2, is described in loving detail, but only passing reference is made to Pioneer 10 and 11 (Ames projects), and the Viking program (run from Langley) is barely mentioned at all. A substantial amount of attention is given to Mike Minovitch’s campaign to be recognized as the “inventor” of gravity-assisted spaceflight — a bit of dirty laundry that did not warrant so much detail. Gallentine may well have been a prisoner of his source material: not enough on some subjects, too much on others, and reluctant to throw away or to winnow out what he has.

Nor is the book improved by Gallentine’s style: I’m a big fan of informal writing, but Gallentine’s prose is not only too casual, it’s purple, and verges too far at times into the smart-assed or chuckleheaded; the result is a jarring sense of bathos.

Ambassadors from Earth by Jay Gallentine: Amazon.ca • Amazon.com

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There’s water on the Moon

LCROSS impact

The ejecta plume from the LCROSS upper stage 20 seconds after impact (NASA).

The big news in space last week was the announcement that the LCROSS probe, which along with its Centaur upper stage rocket smacked into Cabeus crater on October 9, has discovered water on the Moon.

Now, this isn’t exactly a surprise: the possibility of water is precisely why NASA sent LCROSS there. The idea was that water ice might persist in craters near the lunar poles that never saw sunlight. Water molecules don’t tend to survive on the lunar surface: sunlight tends to break water molecules apart. So the plan with LCROSS was to smack something big — i.e., the Centaur stage — into a crater they thought might contain water and then analyse the ejecta plume spectroscopically (before LCROSS itself crashed). The data revealed at least 100 kilograms of water vapour — which principal investigator Tony Colaprete called “a significant amount.”

Coverage: Astronomy; Bad Astronomer; Sky and Telescope; Universe Today.

The presence of water is everything from the perspective of setting up a permanent base: if there’s water on the Moon, you might not have to take it with you. It has implications not only for potable water, but also for generating fuel for fuel cells and rocket propellants: water ice from craters in permanent shadow could be electrolicized using power generated by solar cells set up on nearby mountains in permanent sunlight. It’s why talk of a permanent lunar base has generally assumed that it would be at the poles — because such talk assumed the existence of water at the poles. That may no longer be merely an assumption.

Remembering Apollo 12

Pete Conrad at the Surveyor 3 spacecraft; the Apollo 12 lunar module is in the background. November 20, 1969. Credit: Apollo 12 crew/NASA.

Today marks the 40th anniversary of the launch of Apollo 12, the second manned lunar landing. Each Apollo mission had its own memorable highlights, and 12 had plenty: not least of which the fact that the Saturn V rocket was struck twice by lightning during the launch. It was also the first precision landing, with the lunar module coming down within 200 metres of Surveyor 3.

Apollo 12’s lunar module pilot, Alan Bean, turned himself into a full-time painter after his retirement from NASA. He’s been painting scenes from the Apollo mission for years, incorporating bits of his uniform and moon dust into his paintings, and texturing them with his boot prints. An exhibition of his work opened at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum in July and runs until January 13, 2010; I bought the accompanying book, Alan Bean: Painting Apollo (Amazon.ca, Amazon.com), which reproduces his work since 1982. It’s interesting stuff, not at all photorealistic — an honest attempt to portray in paint what he saw and experienced, and definitely a change from the books that collect Apollo-era photos that have been published this year.

Miles O’Brien (the former CNN space reporter) has this video of Alan Bean giving a tour of the exhibition:

Here’s a New York Times article about Bean and his art from last June.

Ares I-X

NASA’s Ares I-X rocket on Launch Pad 39b at the Kennedy Space Center on Monday, Oct. 26, 2009. It launched Wednesday morning. Photo credit: NASA/Bill Ingalls.

The engineering test flight Ares I-X took place Wednesday morning. A lot of us were excited to see it, though real Ares launches are still years off. More on that in a moment. Meanwhile, here are collections of photos:

The fact that Ares and the Constellation program are still years away from operational status, despite the fact that the Shuttle fleet they’re designed to replace is supposed to be retired next year, is a basic problem of resources: NASA doesn’t have the funds to develop new space hardware and use existing space hardware at the same time, and developing new space hardware doesn’t exactly happen overnight. (Consider that there was only one U.S. spaceflight between Skylab 4 in 1973-74 and STS-1 in 1981 — a period of seven years. That was the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project, which used surplus Apollo hardware.) We’re in for a long drought in U.S. manned spaceflight.

From the Earth to the Moon

From the Earth to the Moon (box) Amazon.ca is having a sale on DVDs right now, and I notice that one of my favourite TV miniseries, From the Earth to the Moon, is now on sale for a paltry $30. (In the U.S., it’s even cheaper: it’s only $13 on Amazon.com.) If you have any interest in NASA, the Apollo program, or manned spaceflight in general, and you haven’t seen this thing, you owe it to yourself to remedy that forthwith. (Preferably via one of these links, because then I get an affiliate-program kickback. Maybe even a whole dollar! But lay hands on it one way or another.)

From the Earth to the Moon isn’t without its flaws: the near-ubiquity of Frank Borman (played by David Andrews), who appears in five episodes but flew only one Apollo mission (not for nothing do I jokingly call this series The Frank Borman Show); the near-invisibility of John Young (played by John Posey), reduced to bit parts on the sidelines despite flying two Apollo missions; a couple of overly sentimental episodes; and a tendency to omit some of the touchier points of the Apollo astronauts’ biographies (e.g., the Apollo 7 crew’s backtalk, the Apollo 15 stamp incident).

But the production values and writing are excellent. Each episode focuses not only on a specific Apollo mission, but also on one aspect of the Apollo program: the development of the lunar module for Apollo 9, the return of Alan Shepard to flight status for Apollo 14. Apollo 8’s episode places it in the context of the very bad year of 1968; Apollo 15’s episode (our favourite) dramatizes the training of astronauts as field geologists. It doesn’t hurt that the spacecraft dialogue is often taken verbatim from the actual missions. There’s plenty to gush about.

From the Earth to the Moon basically takes us from The Right Stuff to Apollo 13 and beyond, and fills in the blanks for the rest of the Apollo program. With all the recent hubbub about the 40th anniversary of Apollo 11, it’s worth pointing out that the Apollo 11 mission does not serve as the series’s climax; in fact, it’s only dramatized in the sixth episode — halfway through. From the Earth to the Moon dramatizes the whole picture — not just the triumph of 11 and the near-tragedy of 13 — and makes it all interesting.

Previously: Lee Silver; The passing of the moon walkers.

STS-128 launch

I love night launches.

(Image credit: NASA/Ben Cooper.)

Arab astronauts

Jonathon Narvey uses South Korea as a template for progress in the Middle East; among other things, he tries to make a point about space programs:

In 1950, this tiny country [South Korea] was broken, worse off even than the Arab Middle East of the time.

Sixty years later, South Korea is the 15th largest economy in the world, with an entrenched democratic political system and, despite the temporary setback of this week, an active space program. …

But back in the Middle East, all of the Arab states, comprising a far larger population and geographic area than South Korea, have a combined GDP less than the country of Spain (at one time a Muslim outpost in Europe). Space program? The closest thing to an Arab astronaut we might see in the next while could only be a Hamas suicide bomber strapped to an augmented Ashoura rocket.

Now that last sentence is a bit unkind — particularly since a cursory check online reveals at least two Arabs to have flown in space (a good place to look is Space Facts’s biographies of international astronauts).

In June 1985, Sultan bin Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud of Saudi Arabia flew as a payload specialist on STS 51-G, the fifth flight of Discovery; his backup, Abdulmohsen Al-Bassam, never flew in space.
The Soviet Union’s Intercosmos program allowed a Syrian cosmonaut, Muhammad Faris, to travel to the Mir space station in July 1987 aboard Soyuz TM-3, returning on Soyuz TM-2. His backup, Munir Habib, never flew in space either.

Admittedly, they went to space through the benevolence of their Cold War patrons, but Arabs have been to space. Meanwhile, the first South Korean in space, Yi So-yeon, flew to the International Space Station only last year, in April 2008.

(Interestingly, the Intercosmos program also generated a cosmonaut from Afghanistan: Abdul Ahad Mohmand, who spent nine days on Mir in August and September 1988. The first Iranian in space, Anousheh Ansari, flew as a space tourist in September 2006; her family emigrated to the U.S. while she was still a teeenager. Neither Afghanistan nor Iran are Arab or part of the Middle East, but it’s not like those two countries aren’t conflated with it all the time.)

Remembering Apollo 8

Earthrise from the Moon, Apollo 8, December 1968 (NASA).

Apollo 11 was not the alpha and omega of the entire Apollo program; last December, there was another 40th anniversary commemorated: that of Apollo 8, the first manned space mission to leave the vicinity of Earth and orbit the Moon. Subsequent events — i.e., six successful moon landings — have obscured just how significant that was seen at the time. Apart from the achievement in and of itself, the flight of Apollo 8 was seen as one bright spot in a year that saw a lot of pain — war in Vietnam, the Prague Spring, riots in France, the assassinations of MLK and RFK. The crew of Apollo 8 — Frank Borman, Jim Lovell and Bill Anders — were selected as Time’s men of the year for 1968 (cover).

Nowadays, Lovell is better known as the commander of Apollo 13, thanks to the movie; Borman and Anders have comparatively low profiles among the moon voyagers, since neither of them landed on the Moon. (I was disappointed, for example, that neither of them appear in In the Shadow of the Moon.) All three astronauts did, however, reunite for talk about Apollo 8 at 40th anniversary celebrations at the Newseum in Washington last November. NASA has video from the event on YouTube: part one, part two, part three.

PBS’s American Experience had an episode on Apollo 8 (Amazon.ca, Amazon.com), but I haven’t seen it.

Apollo 11 crew at the National Air and Space Museum

A public appearance by Neil Armstrong is rarer than a sighting of a megamouth shark, but he joined his Apollo 11 crewmates last night for the annual John Glenn lecture at the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum, commemorating the 40th anniversary of the first moon landing. The Times has coverage of the event; NASA has video of the entire evening on YouTube and a photoset on Flickr.

(Image credit: NASA/Bill Ingalls.)

The old men of Apollo

Apollo 14 astronauts in the Mobile Quarantine Facility aboard the USS New Orleans after their return from the Moon in February 1971. Left to right: Stu Roosa (command module pilot); Alan Shepard (commander); Ed Mitchell (lunar module pilot). Mitchell is the only surviving member of the crew: Roosa died in 1994 and Shepard died in 1998. (NASA)

I grew up in a world where people used to walk on the Moon. I was born two months before Apollo 16; the last moon landing, Apollo 17, took place before my first birthday. The moon landings took place in what was virtually a historical instant: only four brief years separated the first flight to the Moon, Apollo 8 in December 1968, from the last, Apollo 17 in 1972. We pivoted, as a species, from dreaming of going there to leaving it behind in hardly any time at all.

The astronauts who went there, from the first five NASA astronaut groups, were roughly the same age — peers who, for the most part, fought the same wars and flew the same aircraft before their selection as astronauts. And, as I’ve said before, they’re getting all getting old together, too. The surviving moon voyagers range in age from 73 (Charlie Duke) to 81 (Frank Borman); of the 24 who have travelled to the Moon, 18 are still alive, and of the 12 who have walked its surface, nine are still with us.

Continue reading this entry »

Whither NASA?

Via Bad Astronomer, a trio of op-eds in the New York Post on where NASA goes from here, particularly in the context of manned spaceflight:

We need a modern Apollo program by Phil “Bad Astronomer” Plait;
Orion and Ares — the future of NASA by former astronaut Tom Jones;
Lost in space by Buzz Aldrin (whom you may have heard of).

The status of the Constellation program (especially the Ares booster) is causing no shortage of angst, it seems, but the big picture is of concern either way: insufficient funding, insufficient vision.

Star Trek and reality

Star Trek cast members attend the rollout of the Space Shuttle Enterprise at its Palmdale manufacturing facility on September 17, 1976 (NASA).

Paul Wells:

I wonder whether the people who put the original Star Trek series together had any inkling that, nearly 43 years after the first episode aired, humanity would have travelled such a great distance in depicting wide-scale human space travel — and such a paltry distance in achieving it.

In that vein, a comparative timeline:

Continue reading this entry »

Freedom 7

Forty-eight years ago today, Alan Shepard became the first American to travel into space with the launch of Mercury-Redstone 3 (Freedom 7). The flight lasted 15 minutes, 28 seconds; here it is in full:

This video combines footage from the pilot observation camera (left) and the instrument panel camera (right) with audio from both Shepard and Mission Control. Via NASA’s Twitter feed.

The biggest model ever of the biggest rocket ever

Earlier today, Steve Eves’s 1:10-scale model of a Saturn V launched from a farmer’s field in Maryland. Eves’s rocket is one for the record books: at 725 kg and nearly 11 metres in height, it’s apparently the largest model rocket ever built by an amateur. It seems fitting that it’s a model of the largest rocket ever built, the Saturn V. Apart from this YouTube video (above), which covers everything from countdown to the parachute landing of the rocket’s three pieces, Gizmodo has photos and video from the launch. A long article from the February 2009 issue of Rockets tells the story of how this monster came into being. Via NASA’s Twitter account.

Update: Jeff Foust’s Flickr photoset of the launch.

It’s funny because it’s true

The Onion, last Friday: NASA embarks on epic delay. “Top officials at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration unveiled plans this week for a comprehensive, multibillion-dollar delay — the agency’s most ambitious postponement of cosmic exploration ever.”

The New Scientist, also last Friday: NASA may need extra $30b to stay on schedule to moon. “Without an influx of cash, cost overruns could delay NASA’s return to the moon or prompt cuts to the agency’s science missions to try to keep its moon plans on track, according to a government report issued on Thursday.”

Sigh.

Animals in space

Further to my last post, there’s actually quite a bit on the use of animals in spaceflight. See NASA’s brief history of animals in space and the inevitable Wikipedia entry. A book, Animals in Space: From Research Rockets to the Space Shuttle by Colin Burgess and Chris Dubbs, was published in 2007 (Amazon.ca, Amazon.com).

Turtles in space!

On September 18, 1968, the Soviet Union’s Zond 5 spacecraft orbited the Moon and returned safely to the Earth; it was one reason behind NASA’s decision to change Apollo 8’s flight into the first manned spaceflight to orbit the Moon.

Zond Zond 5 was an unmanned spacecraft, but it was not uninhabited: “A biological payload of turtles, wine flies, meal worms, plants, seeds, bacteria, and other living matter was included in the flight. … It was announced that the turtles (steppe tortoises) had lost about 10% of their body weight but remained active and showed no loss of appetite.” That’s right: the first vertebrates to visit the Moon were Russian Tortoises (Testudo horsfieldii). They apparently survived their trip (unlike Laika); I wonder if they’re still around — they’re tortoises, after all.

Recovering lunar history

Earthrise as seen by Lunar Orbiter 1 in August 1966, more than two years before Apollo 8 (NASA/LOIRP).

The Los Angeles Times has the fascinating story of the effort to recover data from the Lunar Orbiter program of the 1960s, during which 2,000 photographs were taken by five unmanned probes. The data sat, all but forgotten on obsolete tapes, for decades, while a NASA archivist struggled to find the funding and hardware to get them transcribed. Neither was found until recently, after her retirement; now, they’re trying to digitized the old analog data stored on those tapes. So far, two images have been released: this awesome Earthrise, taken more than two years before the more famous Earthrise photograph by the crew of Apollo 8; and this grand shot of Copernicus crater. More at the Lunar Orbiter Image Recovery Project page; MoonViews is the associated blog. Via MetaFilter.

Lee Silver

After watching From the Earth to the Moon (see previous entry), I decided to do some digging into Lee Silver, the Caltech geologist who spent several years teaching geology to the Apollo crews. Played by David Clennon in the series, he appears in two episodes: Galileo Was Right and Le voyage dans la lune.

Lee Silver, Dave Scott and James Irwin Now in his mid-eighties, Leon T. Silver retired from Caltech in 1996, where he remains W. M. Keck Foundation Professor for Resource Geology, Emeritus. This older page summarizes his research. He remains quite well known for his work on the Apollo program; when the HBO series came out, Silver talked about the differences between the series and real life (see also here). This contemporary article (1.5 MB PDF), which I presume is from a Caltech publication, profiles his work with the Apollo 15 crew, though in fact his work with the astronauts began with the Apollo 13 crew. Finally, Silver sat for a series of interviews about his life and career between 1994 and 2000; go to session 3 for his work on Apollo (he’s quite candid).

The passing of the moon walkers

Charles Duke Apollo 16

Lunar module pilot Charles M. Duke Jr. collecting samples during the Apollo 16 mission on April 21, 1972. Duke, the youngest person to walk on the Moon, is now 73 years old. (Photo information)

Jennifer and I finished watching the 1998 HBO miniseries From the Earth to the Moon last night. If you’ve seen it, you know how good it is; if you haven’t, and you have any interest in human spaceflight, what the hell is wrong with you? Get it right now: Amazon.com, Amazon.ca.

Anyway, it’s triggered (or rather, reawakened) a fairly passionate interest in the history of NASA, so expect a few posts in this vein in the near future. (Consider yourself warned.) Including this one:

Of the 24 astronauts who have travelled to the moon,¹ six have since died:

Jack Swigert (Apollo 13) died in 1982 from bone cancer shortly after being elected to Congress; he was 51.
Ronald Evans (Apollo 17) died of a heart attack in 1990 at the age of 56.
James Irwin (Apollo 15) died in 1991 at the age of 61. He had developed arrhythmia during the mission, and died after a series of heart attacks. He was the eighth person to walk on the Moon.
Stuart Roosa (Apollo 14) died in 1994 due to complications from pancreatitis; he was 61.
Alan Shepard (Apollo 14) — the first American in space — died in 1998 from leukemia at the age of 74. He was the fifth person to walk on the Moon.
Pete Conrad (Apollo 12) died in 1999 at the age of 69, after a road accident. He was the third person to walk on the Moon.

Continue reading this entry »

Remembering Challenger

To pick up on Megnut’s and Damien’s memories of the 1986 Challenger explosion on its twentieth anniversary:

When it happened, I was in Grade 8, a space-crazy kid filled to the gills with Star Trek and histories of NASA, and the deaths of seven astronauts was more than just a shock. I found out at the noon hour — I’d come home to make myself lunch and had flipped on the television for background. I was stunned, riveted — but of course, I had to go back to school, where I could think of little else.

At that time the Winnipeg Free Press was published in the afternoon, and I had a paper route after school. It was late that day; in a rare move, the paper had stopped the presses and remade the front page, which now read, in the biggest type I would see until Gorbachev was ousted in a coup, “Shuttle explodes.” Later that night, as I was collecting my paper money from my customers, I couldn’t help myself from talking about it with them — or with anyone.

It might be that for my generation — those of us who were children then, in our late twenties or early thirties now — it was our Kennedy assassination, our Pearl Harbor, our 9/11: the event that brought us to a collective halt.

(I live-blogged Columbia’s destruction three years ago.)

Note: Entries prior to November 2003 did not have categories assigned to them, and are not included in category archives; please consult the monthly archives.