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"Boeing became furious and tried to get me fired." //
In the early and mid-2010s, Sowers was leading the advanced programs group at United Launch Alliance (ULA), the rocket company co-owned by Boeing and Lockheed Martin. Propellant depots were among the technologies he was working on. Sowers is now a professor at the Colorado School of Mines. //
One of ULA's chief assets was its Centaur upper stage, and the company wanted to build an innovative version that could be refueled in space, and reused, called the Advanced Cryogenic Evolved Stage, or ACES. As part of this development, in 2011, ULA proposed an in-space test of depots to NASA that would cost less than $100 million.
"We had released a series of papers showing how a depot/refueling architecture would enable a human exploration program using existing (at the time) commercial rockets," Sowers tweeted on Wednesday. "Boeing became furious and tried to get me fired. Kudos to my CEO for protecting me. But we were banned from even saying the 'd' word out loud. Sad part is that ULA did a lot of pathfinding work in that area and could have owned the refueling/depot market, enriching Boeing (and Lockheed) in the process. But it was shut down because it threatened SLS." //
SpaceX privately developed the Falcon Heavy rocket for about $500 million, and it flew its first flight in February 2018. It has now flown three successful missions. NASA has spent about $14 billion on the SLS rocket and related development costs since 2011. That rocket is not expected to fly before at least mid or late 2021.
Last week, an asteroid large enough to destroy a city buzzed by Earth not long after scientists first spotted it. //
Congress mandated that by 2020 NASA find at least 90% of large asteroids that could hit Earth. NASA isn't on track to meet that goal but has found about 90% of all near-Earth asteroids that are 3,281 feet in size or greater.
A report released by the National Academies in June suggests the best way for NASA to meet that goal is to use a space-based infrared telescope like NEOCam.
However, that new mission reportedly doesn't have the funding it needs. //
Detecting asteroids in infrared light is effective because many of the space rocks are dark to the naked eye but shine brightly in thermal infrared.
it’s only a short drive to one of the high points overlooking Lebanon. It’s an astonishing sight. You look one way—toward Israel—and see nothing but blooming farms. You turn toward Lebanon and see nothing but barren hills with a sprinkling of Hezbollah flags and gun emplacements.
Why the disparity, since the land is basically the same? The congresswomen would probably explain it as due to Israel’s supposed oppression of the Palestinian refugees who live by the border or something like that.
They’d better start holding their ears, because it’s well documented that Palestinians are treated considerably better in Israel than in Lebanon. A 2017 Associated Press report tells us, but not the congresswomen apparently, that “Lebanese law restricts Palestinians’ ability to work in several professions, including law, medicine, and engineering, and bars them from receiving social security benefits. In 2001, the Lebanese parliament also passed a law prohibiting Palestinians from owning property.”
None of this is true in Israel, of course, where a Palestinian served on the Supreme Court. Actually, he was the second one. Would Omar and Tliab like to meet him? Probably not. Would they like to meet a Jewish judge at one of the 45 Islamic countries? Oh, wait. None of them have Jews any more.
As we go about our busy lives,sometimes it’s helpful to realize that in the end, we are all living on a pale blue dot, a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.
Nearly 50 years have passed since the Apollo programme first delivered astronauts to the surface of the Moon.
In that time, millions of words have been written about that mission, and the pictures the astronauts and cosmonauts captured on the race to our nearest neighbour have become iconic images.
But there’s been one problem for space enthusiasts poring over the images captured in orbit and on the lifeless lunar surface – they only reveal its beauty in two dimensions. As spectacular as they are, they can only do so much to make you feel like you’re there.
But amid the thousands of photos taken on Nasa's space missions, some of the images created were intended to make the viewer feel they were right there - stereo photographs that have only now come to light, thanks to a new book masterminded by Queen's Brian May.
“The Mission Moon book came about because we’re all kind of nuts about the Moon shot, and it all seems like yesterday to us old people. It’s 50 years ago – incredible,” he says.
“No one had ever done a 3D book on the whole Apollo history and we thought ‘Can we do it, is there enough material?’. So my good friend Claudia Manzoni, who spends her whole life trawling through Nasa archives, gradually sifted through and found images which looked promising.”
The astronauts didn’t take stereo cameras up with them, but they were trained in a rudimentary stereo photography method which meant their normal photographs could easily be turned into 3D images.“Very often they were too busy to remember it and practice it,” May says. “But they were taught to do the ‘cha-cha’ thing – take a picture here and a picture there and eventually it became a 3D picture. Occasionally you’re lucky enough to find one of those.
“I’m not the first person to make 3D pictures in this way but I think we are the most persistent… we’ve got something like 200 stereo pictures in the book, and they all work.”
May can add inventor to his long list of achievements, as well. At the back of each copy of the book is his patented Owl stereoscopic viewer, a pair of plastic lenses that help create the 3D effect. The Owl is the result of May collecting viewers since the early days of Queen, and combining the best bits of various designs.
“For me, it’s a nice coming together,” says May. “It is stereoscopic work, and it’s also astrophysics and it’s astronautics, and to bring them together is great. It wasn’t on my own, we have a great team. David Eicher wrote the text, he’s a wonderful writer and editor-in-chief of Astronomy magazine, and as a team we put this together.“
The guy who wrote our afterword – Jim Lovell [Apollo 13 crew member] – said this is the closest you can to feeling like you’re there.”Mission Moon 3D by David J Eicher and Brian May is published by the London Stereoscopic Company on 23 October. You can also visit the book's site, www.missionmoon3-d.com
In the first of BBC Future’s stories recounting the Apollo program in 50 numbers, we look at the people who helped make the Moon missions reality.
Neil Armstrong was one of Nasa’s most accomplished pilots. As he descended towards the lunar surface on 20 July 1969, the success or failure of the first Moon landing depended on the skills, reactions and expertise of this one man. With a boulder field ahead of him, alarms sounding and fuel running low, he guided the spacecraft to the ground.
But in the few talks and interviews Armstrong gave about the landing, he was always modest about the achievement. He pointed instead to the thousands of people who had made the mission possible.
At its height, Nasa estimates that a total of 400,000 men and women across the United States were involved in the Apollo programme. The number includes everyone from astronauts to mission controllers, contractors to caterers, engineers, scientists, nurses, doctors, mathematicians and programmers.
To see how Nasa arrived at that figure, consider a single aspect of Apollo 11 – the lunar landing itself. Armstrong’s right hand man was Buzz Aldrin. On the ground, there was a room full of mission controllers. Behind this core team of 20-30 (per shift) were hundreds of engineers in Houston and a team at MIT in Boston advising on the computer alarms.
Mission Control was supported by communications ground stations around the world, the engineering team at the Grumman Corporation that built the lander, and all their subcontractors. Add in support staff – from senior managers to the people selling the coffee – and already there are thousands involved. Multiply that by all the different components of the endeavour – from rockets to spacesuits, communications to fuel, design to training, launch to splashdown…and 400,000 seems an almost modest figure.
Teasel Muir-Harmony, Apollo Spacecraft Curator at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum in Washington DC. “Each of the [Apollo 11] crew members was born in 1930, they all have military experience, they're all pilots and I believe they're all Christian – so they fit a very narrow set of criteria that was required at the time to be an astronaut.”
At 38, Armstrong was the joint youngest Apollo commander (with Tom Stafford and Gene Cernan). Charlie Duke, the 36-year-old Apollo 16 lunar lander pilot, was the youngest Moonwalker. The oldest man to walk on the Moon was America’s first astronaut, Alan Shepard. By the time of his Apollo 14 mission in 1971, he was 47.
The record for the oldest man in space is held by the same astronaut who was the first American to orbit the Earth. John Glenn was 77 when he took part in a nine-day mission on space shuttle Discovery in 1998.
Thirty three men flew 11 Apollo missions. Of these, 27 men reached the Moon, 24 orbited the Moon – but only 12 walked on the surface. They represented “mankind” and had the challenge of conveying the experience to a global audience.
No-one knew what Neil Armstrong was going to say when he stepped down onto the lunar surface. He’d not discussed it with anyone, although his words: “That’s one small step for [a] man, one giant leap for mankind” could not have been more poetic or appropriate if they had been conceived by a committee of speech writers.
But what do you say when you’re the second man on the Moon? Buzz Aldrin summed-up the view of the barren lunar landscape perfectly in just two words: “magnificent desolation.”
All eight astronauts – along with six Soviet cosmonauts – are commemorated with a plaque left on the Moon by the crew of Apollo 15.
Looking at the coverage of Apollo, you might be forgiven for thinking it was a solely (white) male endeavour. The astronauts were all men, the mission controllers were all men, even the TV anchors were male. The only women seen on TV were the astronauts’ wives.
However, as we now know, there were thousands of women behind the scenes supporting Apollo and essential to its success. There were secretaries and nurses, mathematicians and programmers; women sewed together the spacesuits and wound the wires for the Apollo guidance computers.
Even so, the space programme wasn’t geared-up for women.
“Even when they built new buildings they forgot there were going to be more and more women as workers,” says Morgan. “The first building I worked in only had one ladies room in the whole three-storey building - they had to convert a men's room on each floor to a ladies’ room…so we had ladies’ rooms with urinals.”
Some astronauts didn’t want to bring TV cameras on board – but the footage captured has gone down as some of the most memorable in human history.
Christmas Eve 1968, the crew of Apollo 8 – Frank Borman, Jim Lovell and Bill Anders – were about to get their first glimpse of the far side of the Moon.
“We fired the spacecraft engine something like four minutes to slow down enough to get into lunar orbit,” says Borman. “We’re about halfway through when we looked down and there was the Moon.”
“The lunar surface was terribly distressed with meteorites, holes, craters, volcanic residue,” he says. “But one of the things that struck me was there's absolutely no colour, it was either grey or black or white.”
“It was a very interesting first view
But the most captivating view came as they swung back around on the fourth orbit and Anders spotted the Earth in the command module window.
“Oh my God, look at that picture over there! There's the Earth coming up. Wow, is that pretty!” he exclaimed. “You got a colour film, Jim? Hand me a roll of colour, quick, would you?”
These cartridges containing reels of 70mm film could be easily swapped on the crew’s Hasselblad cameras.
“Take several, take several of them,” said Lovell. “Here, give it to me!”
Once the film was developed back on Earth several weeks later, Nasa image 2383 (and the frames either side) would become one of the most famous pictures of all time.
The picture, showing the Earth in the context of the barren Moon, was one of the unexpected achievements of the Apollo programme.
“I think it's probably one of the more significant pictures that humans have ever taken,” agrees Borman. “The Earth was the only thing in the entire universe that had any colour – a beautiful sight, we're very fortunate to live on this planet.”
In the run-up to the Apollo missions, there was tremendous resistance among many Nasa engineers and astronauts to the idea of carrying TV cameras for live broadcasts from space. It was frivolous and would interfere with the mission, they argued.
The formidable head of mission control, Chris Kraft, thought otherwise and insisted that TV was a way of showing American taxpayers how their money was being spent.
The first astronauts to carry a TV camera into orbit were the crew of Apollo 7 – Wally Schirra, Don Eisele and Walt Cunningham. After a shaky start, they soon got the hang of adding a little showbiz to the space programme.
Despite their shortcomings, these first TV broadcasts from space – a total of seven – nonetheless won an enthusiastic global following. They gave the missions an immediacy that wasn’t possible with film or photography.
When the Apollo 7 crew returned to Earth, they were rewarded with an Emmy Award from the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences for their efforts.
Later missions would push the boundaries of TV technology, with improved cameras, transmitters and content. Apollo 8 broadcast live from lunar orbit for the first time and, during Apollo 10, the crew produced the first colour TV shows from the Moon.
Broadcasting from the relatively bright and controlled conditions of the Apollo spacecraft was very different from transmitting the first images from the surface of another world. But Nasa realised it was essential to broadcast mankind’s first footsteps on the Moon.
Nasa wasn’t taking any risks with ensuring the live video reached the Earth and arranged for the transmissions to be received by 64-metre wide dishes in Goldstone, California and at Parkes in New South Wales, Australia.
Engineers at Parkes spent months working with Nasa to prepare the giant radio telescope to receive the first TV pictures from the lunar surface. On the 21 July 1969, everything was ready for the big event but then the weather suddenly changed.
“Just minutes before the Moonwalk was due to begin, a violent squall hit the telescope with winds that were over the safe operating speeds,” says Parkes operations scientist John Sarkissian. “The astronauts may have been on the Sea of Tranquility on the Moon,” says Sarkissian, “but it was the ocean of storms here.”
During the later Apollo missions, a TV camera was fixed to the lunar rover to give viewers a drivers-eye view of the Moon. The camera was remote-controlled from Earth, which also enabled operators to capture one of the coolest shots in TV history. As Apollo 17 blasts-off from the Moon, the camera tilts to follow its trajectory
Around 600 million people watched as Neil Armstrong took his first tentative small step on the lunar surface. At that time, it was the world’s largest-ever TV audience.
But by the time of Apollo 13, just nine months later, the world had already lost interest. As Jim Lovell, Jack Swigert and Fred Haise travelled to the Moon, none of the national US TV networks carried their broadcast.
28,000: Distance the Blue Marble image taken from, in miles
As the Apollo 17 crew headed to the Moon for the final time in 1972, they were instructed to take a picture looking back at the Earth. The image – known as the Blue Marble – gives a unique perspective of the whole Earth hanging in the blackness of space. Not only does it show the South Pole but it puts Africa – not the USA – at the centre.
Even when we return to the Moon, these first images – particularly those of Earth – will have a special place in the history of humankind.
In the words of Apollo 8 commander, Frank Borman: “I don't think any of us paid any attention to the fact that we would be going all the way to the Moon and be more interested in looking at the Earth.”
111: Height of Saturn V rocket in metresAt 36 storeys high, the Saturn V ranks as one of the greatest technical and engineering achievements of the 20th Century. Its development was led by Wernher von Braun who, even while building V2 rockets for Hitler, dreamed of building a rocket to carry men to the Moon. “Not only was he technically competent,” says Jay Honeycutt, a rocket engineer and later senior manager at Nasa, “but he had great leadership skills and a great ability to communicate with government officials who funded the projects.”
2: Maximum speed of the crawler transporters, in miles per hour
The Saturn Vs were put together in the Vehicle Assembly Building (VAB), a structure so large it even has its own weather system. Engineers then had the challenge of getting the rockets to the launch pad, some five or so kilometres away. After an initial suggestion to float the spacecraft on barges, it was decided to build giant tracked vehicles called crawler-transporters.
With eight giant tracks – driven by 16 electric motors, powered by two generators – the crawler-transporters are more like ships than vehicles. And, like ships, the drivers are part of a team of operators and engineers that keep the vehicles moving slowly to the launch pad. Very slowly.
“The crawler has the power to go two miles an hour,” says driver Sam Dove. “However, you really don’t want to get it up to two, especially with a load on it – the most we ever go is one.”During Apollo, it could take up to 16 hours to deliver the spacecraft the few kilometres from the VAB to the launchpad. The time from pad to orbit was just eight minutes.
5: Saturn V upper stages on the Moon
Just nine minutes after launch, the Saturn V had already shed its first and second stages, sending them tumbling away towards the Atlantic Ocean. The third stage (rather confusingly known as the S4B), with its single engine, gave the spacecraft enough speed to reach orbit before shutting down.
Then, after one and a half revolutions of the Earth, the crew relit the S4B’s engine. In a manoeuvre known as Trans Lunar Injection, the rocket thrust the spacecraft out of orbit on a trajectory towards the Moon.
After the astronauts shut the engine down for a second time, and with the lunar lander extracted from the casing at the top, the rocket was abandoned. But – because it was travelling at the same speed and in the same direction as the spacecraft – unless the crew changed trajectory, the spent rocket would follow them to the Moon.
For the first few Apollo missions, Nasa’s solution was to send the S4B into orbit around the Sun. And, today, the S4B stages for Apollos 8, 9, 10 and 11 are still orbiting the Sun. Apollo 12’s upper stage, however, has been recaptured by the Earth’s gravity.
For the remaining missions, Nasa came up with a more imaginative plan.
The Apollo Lunar Surface Experiment Package (Alsep), left by the moonwalkers of Apollo 12 onwards, included a seismometer which relayed data to Earth. By smashing the S4B stages into the Moon, geologists could trace the resulting tremors through the lunar rock to help determine its geological composition.
As the missions progressed, and the more stages they crashed, the more data they got back. The Alseps continued to return data until 1977, when Nasa shut the programme down.
The Apollo programme pushed space and computing technology to its limit. Cutting edge at the time, some of the tech used seems alarmingly simple today.
74: Memory (ROM) of Apollo guidance computer, in kilobytes
Computer technology was one of the greatest – and long lasting – achievements of Apollo. From the solid-state microcomputer fitted to the lunar lander, to mighty IBM mainframes, with their flashing lights and banks of magnetic tape.
Although the 74 KB ROM and 4 KB RAM memory of the AGC sounds puny today – the equivalent of a 1980s home computer such as the Sinclair ZX Spectrum or Commodore 64 – it was an impressive machine. Designed for the rigours of spaceflight, its software was hard-wired into coils and, crucially, it was set up so it couldn’t crash.
22: Diameter of Saturn V computer, in feet
If the Apollo Guidance Computer was impressive for its miniaturisation, then the computer controlling the Saturn V Moon rocket must rank as the largest ever launched.
Fitted within a ring above the top of the upper (third) stage of the rocket, the Saturn V instrument unit was massive. As well as digital and analogue computers, the unit contained all the electronics to control and monitor the rocket that would get men to the Moon.
Designed by Wernher von Braun’s rocketry team in Huntsville, Alabama, the computer was built by IBM. It was practically the equivalent of flying a mainframe computer into space and then abandoning it.
When Apollo 12 was struck by lightning during launch, knocking out power in the command module, mission controllers believe the circular design of the rocket’s computer saved it from the power surge.
The Apollo astronauts might have been in peak physical condition, but that doesn’t mean they didn’t suffer all sorts of health complaints. In space, no-one can hear your sneeze.24: Number of decongestant tablets taken by the Apollo 7 crew
Apollo 7 was commanded by one of Nasa’s most experienced astronauts, Wally Schirra - a veteran of both Mercury and Gemini missions. Alongside him in the capsule, rookie astronauts Don Eisele and Walt Cunningham. Commentators predicted this would be the crew to make the first attempt to land on the Moon.
Within hours of launch, however, Schirra came down with a cold.
Voyager 2 turned off a heater, the first in a series of choices NASA will have to make as the probe and its twin face ever-shrinking power supplies. //
Power is a scarce commodity on the pair of spacecraft because they run on nuclear-power sources that become less and less efficient over time. By now, each of the three generators on each probe is making only about 60% of the power they did when the Voyagers launched. Engineers on the mission have been grappling with the challenge for years already and knew it would only become more pressing as the spacecraft continue their journey. //
Despite the aging pains the geriatric duo are facing, nine instruments between the two spacecraft are still working out of the 20 that took flight. And NASA personnel on the mission are confident these most-distant explorers will continue to gather valuable observations about our solar system and its surroundings.
Very recently, my 7 year old grandson was traveling with his parents through the east Texas town of Hemphill. In that place, where much of the debris of Columbia came to rest on February 1, 2003, the townspeople have built a very appropriate little memorial and museum for the Columbia crew. My grandson called me that evening and asked me to explain to him what happened to Columbia. That is a tough request coming from a serious questioner.
How does the Space Shuttle reduce speed during the re-entry process?
Does the Space Shuttle have flaps, spoilers and reverse thrust capabilities?
Can the Space Shuttle make a go-around?
Engineers on Friday released preliminary data about what they believe went wrong in the last moments of Beresheet’s flight, a day after the Israeli spacecraft crash-landed on the moon.
Engineers believe a technical glitch — likely in the component that measures the spacecraft’s altitude in relation to the surface — triggered a chain reaction of events that caused the main engine of the spacecraft to stop.
Without the main engine running as a braking mechanism, it was impossible to slow Beresheet’s speed from 1,700 kilometers per hour (1,000 mph) to 0 just above the moon’s surface. Engineers were able to restart the engine, but by this time the spacecraft was too close to the surface to slow down sufficiently.
No private company has ever achieved what SpaceIL is trying to do.
Thursday 3:35pm ET Update: The Moon remains a harsh mistress.
On Thursday, SpaceIL's lunar lander attempted to make a soft landing on the surface of the Moon, but it apparently crashed instead into the gray world. Although a postmortem analysis has not yet been completed, telemetry from the spacecraft indicated a failure of the spacecraft's main engine about 10km above the Moon. Thereafter, it appears to have struck the Moon at a velocity of around 130 meters per second.
“We have had a failure in the spacecraft," Opher Doron, general manager of the space division at Israel Aerospace Industries, which built the lander, said during the landing webcast. "We have unfortunately not managed to land successfully.” Israeli engineers vowed to try again.
The failure to land is perhaps understandable—it is extremely hard to land on the Moon, Mars, or any other object in the Solar System. In this case, the private effort to build the lunar lander worked on a shoestring budget of around $100 million to build their spacecraft, which had performed admirably right up until the last few minutes before its planned touchdown.
Original post: It has been 48 days since the Beresheet spacecraft launched on a Falcon 9 rocket and began a spiraling series of orbits to raise itself toward the Moon. Last week, the 180kg vehicle fired its engines to enter into lunar orbit, and now the time has come for it to attempt a soft landing on the Moon.
"What it means to me is that the responsibility is very high."
The case of the unknown satellites
Here are the times they could have died in space.
SpaceX Claims To Have Redesigned Its Starlink Satellites To Eliminate Casualty Risks - IEEE Spectrum
SpaceX has always claimed that the design of its Starlink satellites would evolve. Now, it says that, at the most, the first 75 Starlinks will include an iron thruster and steel reaction wheels likely to survive re-entry. Any built subsequently will “use components that will demise fully in the atmosphere,” wrote the company. No satellites at all will be deployed with the silicon carbide components described in its initial filing.
SpaceX CEO Elon Musk says that the first full-scale Starship engine to be tested has already been pushed to the point of damage less than three weeks after the campaign began, setting the stage for the second full-scale Raptor to take over in the near future. //
Raptor’s main combustion chamber (the bit directly above the nozzle) has been designed to nominally operate at and reliably withstand extraordinary pressures of 250+ bar (3600+ psi), performance that demands even higher pressures in the components that feed hot methane and oxygen gas into Raptor’s combustion chamber. One prime example hinted at by Musk in a 2018 tweet is its oxygen preburner, used to convert liquid propellant into a high-velocity gas that can then feed a dedicated oxygen turbopump. Aside from the absurdly corrosive environment created by extremely hot gaseous oxygen, the preburner must also survive pressures that could peak as high as 800+ bar, or 12,000 psi.