Long Road to JWST

I downloaded a great presentation and transcript from a January 2008 briefing for JPL Solar System Ambassadors on the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). Unfortunately I couldn't attend the live telephone briefing, but I learned a lot from the presentation and the speaker's transcript. It's quite an amazing project, and when it is launched in 2013, it will certainly be a worthy successor to the Hubble Space Telescope. I found an earlier version (May 2007) of this talk by STScI's Knox Long here (~2.6 MB PDF).

JWST will operate in the infrared and will have a much larger primary mirror than HST, as shown in the graphic above. It will also be vastly more complex. I was talking recently with a colleague who is involved with the validation of the optical fabrication, assembly, and testing plans for JWST. As you might expect, NASA is not taking any chances on a Hubble-type mistake, and there are checks upon checks upon checks, with close attention paid to the assembly and test procedures and the testing optics (which were the source of HST's troubles). But the tolerances are incredibly tight (he mentioned that one engineer cheered when he learned of a particular tolerance that was about the thickness of a sheet of paper - such an unusually huge tolerance would be easy to achieve, but most tolerances are much, much tighter). The number of interacting systems and the number of items in the error budget are simply immense.

In addition to the usual problems of precision optical fabrication and the vibrations and stresses of launch, JWST must maintain its precision through a complex automated "unfolding" in space, and must operate at cryogenic temperatures. To stay cool, it will operate at L2, a special orbital point far beyond the moon. So a Hubble-like service mission will be essentially impossible. It will be possible to do various adjustments on-orbit, but it basically has to work "right out of the box" (or launch shroud).

When they say this project is challenging, they are not kidding. Will it be ready to launch by 2013? Everybody on the project is working to anticipate all the possible problems so it will make the date and work perfectly - but there is still a long road ahead.

Seeing ISS & Jules Verne

I have seen a couple of web articles pointing out that Europe's ATV "Jules Verne" is now in a parking orbit 2000 km ahead of the ISS. This offers the possibility of seeing both spacecraft a short time apart when they pass close enough to your viewing location. I've seen the ISS and shuttle separated on a close pass (STS-118 last summer), and it's a very cool sight.

But how to know when and where to look? There are several web sites that can tell you when the next visible pass will be for various satellites including the ISS (and shuttle and ATV when they are up). There's a new one from SpaceWeather.com that is especially simple for US and Canadian viewers. With Satellite Flybys, you simply enter your zip or postal code. The results are not too detailed but they give the basic information for the brightest objects - the satellite name, the rise time, the direction to look (like SSW), and the elevation. It seems to exclude low-elevation passes that are near the horizon and hard to see. For more detailed tables, NASA's SkyWatch applet is great. It will also provide a star chart with the object's path if you click the SkyTrack button. The sightings help page includes viewing tips and a nice 3D diagram.

Another good one is heavens-above.com which has tables, sky charts, and ground track charts. The latter are useful in understanding why the ISS shows up where it does with the predicted elevation. The example above is for next Wednesday the 26th which should be a decent pass for me if the weather cooperates (max elevation 51 degrees). The circle shows the region where the object is at least 10 degrees above the horizon, and the solid line is where it is lighted by the sun. The dashed area is in the Earth's shadow.

P.S. I was driving to Wilton, Connecticut Wednesday evening but skies were clear and I remembered to stop around 8:20 pm. I pulled into a neighborhood with a good view to the south, and I saw Jules Verne sail by, followed a few minutes later by the super-bright ISS. I missed seeing the shuttle because Endeavour had already made its deorbit burn and was about to land at KSC just 10 minutes later (about 8:40 pm EDT).

Carnival of Space #46

The carnival is back in town, once again hosted by Riding with Rockets. One of the many blog articles included is a brief overview of space elevators at New Frontiers, inspiring me to include this picture, which depicts a space elevator add-on for Orbiter. For some reason this is one of my most popular Orbiter screen shots on Flickr, viewed about 1,100 times (this Earth image is the most popular, 1,890 views).

It's also appropriate to show an "Arthur Clarke-style rigid pole space elevator" (as I noted in my Flickr caption), since the great science fiction novelist and space innovator Arthur C. Clarke died this week. His novel The Fountains of Paradise was one of the first to feature space elevators. Several posts in this week's carnival include tributes to this influential author, whose work helped to define many aspects of the space age in our imaginations, even for those who know him only through the great film 2001: A Space Odyssey which he wrote with director Stanley Kubrick.

Cell Phone Microscope

From MIT's Technology Review, an interesting optical design and LED medical invention from UC Berkeley, a low-cost (prototype was $75) microscope attachment for cell phone cameras. The idea is to allow capturing images of blood cells (60x magnification version) and skin lesions (5x version) and sending the images to someone for diagnosis, especially from remote areas. They plan to test it in Uganda, where blood cell images can be used to determine malaria parasite levels.

Who knew that a cell phone camera was useful for more than taking goofy pictures of your friends?

The Song Is Good Too

I was browsing through musical ringtones at myxertones.com when I noticed an unusual song title: "astronomy is my life, but i love you" by Breaking Laces. I never heard of this Brooklyn-based band, but I was intrigued, so I located the song on iTunes. It has a tongue-in-cheek, Saganesque cover, and the song is good too.

Check Out Orbiter-forum.com

I was trying to check the main Orbiter forum today, and for some reason it was down. Checking the forum list on the Orbiter main web site, I found a link to an Orbiter forum I hadn't noticed before, orbiter-forum.com, so I checked it out.

It's really quite good, with a modern and friendly forum interface, and it seems to be quite active. Looking back through the posts, I found it was started in October 2007 by "Tex," an Orbiter user known for his excellent Orbiter videos. Thanks Tex!

Jaw-Dropping Guitar Playing

I saw and bought this today on iTunes, "Dreaming of Revenge," a new album by Kaki King. Her acoustic guitar playing is simply jaw-dropping, but this one also has electric, slide, some vocals, and some intricate and very cool arrangements. I also liked her 2003 debut "Everybody Loves You" but this new one is just somehow mesmerizing.

Bye-Bye Moon

On the flight back from France yesterday, I read Jack McDevitt's 1998 SF novel Moonfall. It takes place in 2024, in a generally peaceful and prosperous world that has solved many of today's problems and has developed extensive commercial and government sponsored space programs, including a private fleet of airliner-like SSTO (single stage to orbit) spaceplanes that fly regularly from special underground launch tunnels at various airports around the world and land on long but otherwise normal runways. They carry passengers on fast suborbital flights to distant cities and to space stations in low and geosynchronous orbits. A moon base has also been established (with over 600 people) and is about to be officially opened by the visiting vice president of the United States. A VASIMR-powered interplanetary spacecraft has also been built and is about to depart for the first human mission to Mars.

So far, so good. I'm not sure we're on track to have that much stuff going on in space by 2024, but it's plausible and hopeful. But that's just the background for the disasters that are the main thrust of the book. The main suspension of disbelief that is needed for the story is in the detailed setup. While the VP is on the moon to open the moon base, there is also a total solar eclipse, and this allows the detection from Earth of a previously undetected sun-grazing comet (hard to see without a convenient eclipse). The comet is huge and unbelievably fast (apparently coming from outside the solar system), and it is just five days away from a direct hit on the moon.

There is no way to stop it, and the moon will be destroyed. There are problems with evacuating the moon base and with predicting what will happen to the debris from the moon's destruction - will any of the fragments hit the Earth? You bet! There are many characters and subplots that show us the kinds of problems this event could cause. The characters and situations are generally believable, as are the effects of the bombardment of the Earth, and most of the technology.

The moon and the Earth have both been hit by many huge objects over our ~4 billion year history, and we could be hit again any time. There could be sun-grazing objects coming from the Oort cloud or from some exploded star, and it's possible that one of these could hit the moon or the Earth with disastrous consequences. The eclipse, the five-day warning, and the Veep on the moon are obviously contrived to set up a complex disaster novel. But stranger things have happened, and it mostly worked for me. Smaller objects hitting the moon or the Earth are more likely, and I think we ought to be preparing for this, as advocated by the B612 Foundation.

This was the first McDevitt book I've read, and I liked it. Setting up the various characters and situations was sometimes slow, but it all paid off in the second half of the book. It certainly held my interest and made me want to check out some of McDevitt's other books.

The loss of the moon would have some serious long-term consequences for the Earth (changes in the Earth's rotation, tides, and axial tilt stability, among others). The scientists in this book discuss some of them, though the story focuses more on the short-term "fallout" and the plucky resourcefulness of the characters. You can learn more here, here, and somewhat humorously here. There is also a 1993 book, What If the Moon Didn't Exist?, which seems to be out of print.

Orbiting for Peace

Of course the ISS is the "international" space station, and at this moment, the shuttle Endeavour is docked there to deliver and install a Japanese science module and a Canadian robot arm, adding to the ISS components already in place from Russia, Europe, Canada, and the United States. ISS and current shuttle crews are Russian, French, Japanese, and American. I believe that the extensive and peaceful cooperation among the participating nations is one of the greatest things about the ISS. You could call this "orbiting for peace."

There's another international space program, one that takes place in cyberspace and centers on Martin Schweiger's freeware Orbiter space flight simulator. It includes "orbinauts" from all over the world, many of whom regularly participate in the Orbiter Forum. Some 612 have registered their locations with Dansteph's Orbinauts World Map (statistics here). Forum users help one another with Orbiter problems, collaborate on add-on development projects, post screen shots and videos, discuss real space developments, and more. Many orbinauts also have web sites that help support other Orbiter users. Orbiter itself is not a multi-user program (though there have been some multi-user add-on projects), but the shared interests of these space flight simulation fans have created a real community. One small example is the recently released Mars for Less add-on project. The developers included two guys from the UK (one of whom was living in Finland for most of the project), one Canadian, and one American (me). We also got a big assist from a guy from Portugal. Other Orbiter add-on projects are even more international in scope.

One of the essays in the book What Are You Optimistic About? is "How Technology Is Saving the World" by Diane F. Halpern. She writes, "The strangeness of 'foreigners,' which used to define the relationship between people of different religions, customs, races, and regions of the world, is disappearing as the rapidly increasing numbers of users of technology connect over time and space in ways available only to members of the same clan or village a few decades ago." The Orbiter community is a good example of this sort of specialized "global village" and I like to think it contributes just a bit to world peace. It may be a virtual village of people playing in virtual space, but in a way, we're orbiting for peace too.

Carnival of Space #45

Isn't it funny how middle age just creeps up on you? The 45th Carnival of Space has been posted at Observations from Missy's Window, and I just can't believe the Space Carnival is 45 already (OK, it's weeks, so not exactly middle age). There are excellent posts from many of the usual space and astronomy blogging suspects as well as posts from a few fresh faces (new to me anyway). Check it out.

Bombs for Space

Maybe I'm relying too much on TED videos, but they sure have a lot of interesting people and subjects, and besides that, I don't have much time to think and write in the middle of this very busy trip (and French dinners take a long time).

This brief TED video is about Project Orion, the late-fifties/early-sixties plan to build giant rocket ships propelled by energetic "pulses" created by exploding a sequence of many nuclear bombs behind the ship (giant pusher plates and shock absorbers would try to make this tolerable to the crew). The speaker is George Dyson, a historian whose father, Freeman Dyson, was involved with the Orion Project. George has a lot of documents and images on this project that he probably shouldn't have. Wild stuff.

What's that you say? You'd like to see what flying this Orion nuclear pulse propulsion spacecraft would have been like? You won't be surprised to learn that there is an Orbiter add-on for this project, created by "Sputnik." Be careful with time acceleration if you have any issues with rapidly flashing lights.

Go Endeavour!

The wonders of the internet and of international time zones just allowed me to watch the nighttime liftoff of Endeavour on its STS-123 mission to the ISS. It was about 2:28 am in Florida but a friendlier 7:28 am here in Paris where I had just gotten out of my shower. My RealPlayer video feed was decidedly low-res but OK, though I couldn't capture a screen shot from the video overlay. So here is the mission patch which depicts the delivery of the first section of Japanese Kibo science module which is the main task for this mission.

I just watched the external tank separation so Endeavour has made it to orbit. A great launch!

Playing with Rockets

Steve Jurvetson has a cool hobby that he discussed and showed recently at TED. He also takes a lot of cool pictures.

l'Optimisme de ce Soir

I'm in Paris, and it's raining and chilly, but I've completed my first customer visit (just hours after arriving) without falling asleep, and I've had a nice meal of "moules et frites" (mussels and fries) at Léon de Bruxelles. I've been reading the essays in What Are You Optimistic About? and many of them are quite thought provoking and even inspiring. I will have more to say on this in days to come, but confining myself to just the short run, what am I optimistic about tonight?

• I am optimistic that my suitcase has finally been loaded on a United 777 in Washington Dulles and will arrive at Paris CDG tomorrow morning.
• I am optimistic that said suitcase will be delivered to my hotel between 10 and noon tomorrow as more or less promised.
• I am optimistic that I will be able to continue to wear my one pair of pants by not spilling red wine on them, even if this means switching to beer (it's working so far).
• I am optimistic that before my suitcase actually arrives, I will not need more than the one additional clean shirt and very few other essential clothing items that remain.
• Admittedly this is aiming low and I am actually optimistic about other things too.
• But on 3 hours of sleep and after two beers, this is the best I can do.
• Ah, Paris.

Jules Verne in Space

Although my personal "launch" to Paris was aborted by the nasty weather in the Northeast yesterday (I'll try again today), the launch of the ESA "Jules Verne" ATV cargo spacecraft was successful. It launched on an Ariane 5 spacecraft from the Kourou launch site in South America. I have launched a number of virtual Ariane 5's in Orbiter since this is the launch vehicle we use in the Mars for Less project to place the components of the Mars ships into Earth orbit as shown here.

The ATV will have to "loiter" in orbit for a while, performing various tests before docking with the ISS on April 3. In the meantime, the shuttle mission STS-123 (planned for launch on Tuesday) will have come and gone. The traffic up there is getting to be brutal.

Yin/Yang Travel Reading

I've got two new "serendipity" books for my trip next week, both discovered in a quick bookstore stop. What Are You Optimistic About? really looks great, judging from the few brief essays I've read so far. They asked the title question of a lot of interesting people, and they got a lot of interesting answers. Several people write about prospects for solar energy, and one writes about how by some measures, violence in the world is actually decreasing (if this is true, you would never guess it from our news sources). It's cool to see some experts looking on the bright side, and explaining why. That's a nice half-full glass on the cover, by the way.

The other book is SF, just something that looked good in the bookstore, by an author I never read, Jack McDevitt. The book is Moonfall, and it involves a comet hitting the moon in the near future. Reviews are generally good so we shall see.

"Discover" Orbiter

The April 2008 issue of Discover Magazine just arrived. There's an article called "Space Treks" ("seven ways to be a space tourist even if you're broke"), and it covers zero-G flight (which the reporter tried, $3500) and a range of pricier and some not-quite-yet available options (suborbital for $200K, ISS orbital for $30 million, moon orbit for $100 million). The usual space fan's dreams.

But at the low end, in the category "Virtually There," and coming in at an amazing "Cost: $0" is my favorite space flight simulator, Orbiter! Here's what it says:

Absent the money or time for any of the above, or if your ambitions go beyond the moon, there's only one option: going virtual. If you have a PC and an Internet connection, you can download - for free - the Orbiter spaceflight simulator, developed by Martin Schweiger, a physicist at University College London. Orbiter lets users pilot historical and fictional spacecraft around the solar system; options include flying a shuttle resupply mission to the space station and guiding a glider through the hazy skies of Venus.

That's all true, and with free add-ons, the range of things you can fly in Orbiter is quite amazing. The picture here shows the aforementioned Venusian skies with a fictional "space yacht" inspired by album art from the band Yes (more Yessongs pix and add-on info here). And to get started with the less exotic space station, moon, and Mars missions, you can also download my free Orbiter tutorial e-book Go Play In Space.

He's Bad, and He's Back: Carnival of Space #44

Check out Carnival of Space #44 over at Phil Plait's always informative and entertaining Bad Astronomy Blog. This week Phil has managed to fit (or force) everything into a Mars theme to create the Angry Red Planet Edition. Note that this picture does not imply that Phil believes the Face on Mars is now burning.

Up Close and Personal with Enceladus

I got a press release from JPL saying that Cassini has recently detected evidence that Saturn's moon Rhea may itself have rings. That would be a first for a moon in our solar system. Pretty funky.

While at the JPL-Cassini site, I noticed a video about Cassini's upcoming March 12 flyby of another moon, Enceladus. This one really shows the confidence they have in the orbital mechanics and guidance systems with this veteran spacecraft. They will pass within 50 kilometers of the surface. That's a pretty close shave (the video frame here compares this to the shuttle's typical Earth orbit altitude of 300 km). Its goal: "To scoop up samples of water-ice particles and gas spewing from Old-Faithful-like geysers." The QuickTime movie is here (I don't know how to embed the JPL videos).

20,000 Revolutions

I once wrote a macro program to calculate days between dates. This is a common sort of routine that wasn't really needed in my application, but for a sort joking encouragement to myself to work harder (it ran every time the program started). I called it MOZART and when it ran, it compared the day's date to my birthday, reported the difference in days and years, and told me that when Mozart was my age, he had been dead for 11 years (or whatever).

I hadn't looked at this macro in years, but I ran it the other day and noticed that today would be somewhat special. Yes, today I am 20,000 days old. I have experienced 20,000 spins of the Earth (and well over 54 trips around the sun). Whoopee!

If you want to find similar fascinating facts for yourself, you can try this or many other date calculation sites.

Little Robot Friends

I wrote about Pleo about a year ago when I read about its development in Wired. It's available now, and the Reuters video here gives a pretty good overview. The reviews at Amazon are generally very positive. Some people are really bonding with these little $304 robo-dinos, complaining mostly about short battery life. It's a very interesting product. And it doesn't run Windows, it runs LifeOS.

Speaking of bonding with robots, the Roomba I bought in December has become our dog's best friend. Jackie is odd anyway because he loves vacuum cleaners - get one out and he gets excited and runs to get a tennis ball, because vacuum time is ball chasing time around here. Now during the day, he has Roomba to play with. We turn him (oops, it) on when we leave for work and Jackie follows it around and drops the ball in front of it. Roomba docks itself when its battery runs low, and sometimes Jackie even gets a second Roomba play session at lunch time. He loves that little robot - we can't even say "Roomba" in Jack's presence or he gets very excited.

Technology is getting weirder.

Last Brain Cells Outsourced

So I'm having dinner at a T.G.I. Friday's with my daughter, and they have all sorts of pop culture paraphernalia on the walls - photos, album covers, models, whatever. Above our table is this photo of TV's original Charlie's Angels from the 1970's, and I point out to my daughter that the one in the middle was my favorite, Kate... Kate... Kate what? All I can remember besides "Kate" is Farah Fawcett and that the first name of the angel on the left started with J.

So out comes the Blackberry, I browse to Google, type in charlie angel kate, and in seconds, I can "remember" Kate Jackson and Jaclyn Smith. Although remembering television actors from the 70's is perhaps not the best measure of mental acuity, it's just one of many examples. I'm lucky to now have a brain prosthetic I can use almost anywhere. I can't wait for the implant version.

Cool ISS View

Lots of preparations this week for a business trip on Saturday. Lots of stuff to learn so I can give demos of many new software features to some French customers next week. So too busy to read much or blog, but I did notice today's APOD which is a wonderful view of the International Space Station from shuttle Atlantis on the recent STS-122 mission to install the European Columbus lab module. I just set this one as my computer wallpaper.

Going Mobile with MicroSky

Since I now have wireless internet access on a truly mobile device (new Blackberry), I took a quick look to see if there are any astronomy applications for it, and I found MicroSky (v3). It's pretty cool, and it's free. Essentially it's a small Java application which can run on many mobile devices, as long as they can access the internet to get the sky data from SkyServer. SkyServer is a free astronomical database service that you can also use on a regular web connection. MicroSky is tailored to the small displays and limited computing and control capabilities of mobile devices. You need to set up a free account on SkyServer to use MicroSky. You log into it on your mobile device to get the pictures you want sent to your screen.

So how is it? Well, compared to Stellarium, it's more of a star chart than a planetarium, but it's a dynamic little star chart you can hold in one hand anywhere you have a cell phone signal (like the middle of some big, dark field). It's got features for defining where you are and what you want to see. It even has orientation aids on the screen - point your phone south and two circular "altitude/azimuth" icons help you to line up your display with the part of the sky it is displaying. Simple and clever, and explained with pictures in the small manual (the screen shot above doesn't include these, but see below). It has GPS and BlueTooth support too, but I haven't gotten that far with the Blackberry yet!

If you would like to see how this works before downloading and installing the (tiny) files, there is a working demo of MicroSky v2 here. You click the buttons of the on-screen phone as if you were pressing them on a real device (except you get to use your keyboard to type the login info). You can use the demo account, but it's better to create a free account so you can set your own location. This will also show you the altitude/azimuth icons.

Only Because I Can

Testing ability to blog by email from this silly new little Crackberry I said I could never get addicted to. I can sorta see the problem now.

(Picture added later by editing the post.)

WorldWide Telescope at TED

I've been reading about Microsoft's upcoming WorldWide Telescope for a few weeks on various blogs, but I wanted to wait to talk about it until more information was made available at last week's TED conference in Aspen. Fortunately they have released this video of the 7 minute TED presentation much more quickly than they usually do with TED talks. There's a high-def version of this video that you can download here.

WorldWide Telescope will be available this spring as a free download (but I believe it will only run on Windows machines). WWT will be similar to the "sky" extensions for Google Earth, but whereas Google Earth in sky mode looks and feels kludgey to me, Microsoft's new effort is described as "seamless" and "elegant" in the way it stitches together astronomical imagery from the web and allows you to explore and to experience it and create "tours." It looks to me very much like the interface of the free program Stellarium that I often use for demos, but cleverly linked to a huge online database of imagery.

I'm looking forward to trying out WorldWide Telescope when Microsoft releases it. Based on the rave reviews of a lot of knowledgeable people, I'm sure it's good, and I hope it's great.

Women's Work

Women can do anything. That's what I've always told my daughters, and it's what I like to tell Girl Scouts and other girls I meet during educational outreach activities. The good news is that it's true, at least in many parts of the world, and there are many inspiring examples. The bad news is that some of the most visible role models for women are pretty negative - people like Britney Spears, Paris Hilton, etc. who are famous for being famous (or something - of course there are also many celebrity women who are known for their talents and good works). Fortunately there are also positive role models in the growing numbers of women in business, government, law, medicine, sports, etc. as well as in more traditional roles such as teaching. Of course there is still room for improvement, but with a woman making a serious run for President, it's clear we have made a lot of progress.

But in some fields such as science and engineering, there are still relatively few role models for women. You could point to woman astronauts like Eileen Collins and Peggy Whitson, but there are very few astronaut jobs for men or women. There are many women in non-astronaut space and astronomy roles, as Emily Lakdawalla pointed out in her recent Planetary Society post about an all-female team of Mars Rover scientists, engineers, planners, and operators. Women are doing all these things and more in science and engineering, but how can girls find out about these possibilities?

There's a new series of books and a web site from the National Academy of Sciences, iwaswondering.org, that addresses this issue. The book series is Women's Adventures in Science, and I just bought and read one of them, Beyond Jupiter: The Story of Planetary Astronomer Heidi Hammel by Fred Bortz. Dr. Hammel has specialized mainly in the outer planets, especially Uranus and Neptune, though she also was the team leader for Hubble observations of Jupiter for the "Great Comet Crash" in 1994. The nice thing about this book is that it is not only about her science accomplishments, but it also talks about Heidi Hammel as a regular person. She was a smart girl who didn't really know what she wanted to do, was encouraged to apply to MIT, got accepted, struggled with physics classes there, got interested in astronomy, and went on to get a Ph.D. in astronomy. She has done breakthrough work and has received many awards. But she has also been a musician and a Grateful Dead fan and later a wife and mother of three children. The book includes quite a bit of information on planetary astronomy to help explain the work she has done.

This is a really good book, and I strongly recommend it to parents or teachers to share with their daughters and students.

Carnival of Space #43

Carnival of Space #43 has a special Academy Award theme this week. Check out the many Oscar Edition "winners" over at Starts With A Bang. I couldn't resist linking to that panspermia graphic. Reminds me of a sacred Monty Python song that I best not get stuck in my head. Damn, too late! OK, just don't sing it at the office. Stick to whistling.

More Moonshadows

I just received the DVD of In the Shadow of the Moon, a movie that I saw and really enjoyed last fall when it was in limited theatrical release. I'm looking forward to seeing it again this weekend. It's so good that even some of my non-space-freak family members might enjoy "meeting" some of the Apollo astronauts as real people looking back at the achievements and emotions of their younger days.

And speaking of Moon shadows, imagery released by NASA today of of the Moon's south pole region is pretty impressive. That is some really rugged terrain, and Shackleton is one humongous crater. The animation of a spacecraft landing on the edge of Shackleton is great, and really gives a sense of scale, but I think the coolest one is the lunar illumination movie (1.6 MB QuickTime). There are some areas there that stay very, very dark and cold. And icy, we hope. Landing anything there will require careful planning and preparation, and this is a good start. Bill Stone, take note.

From the Kingdom of Tonga, to Space?

I'm not sure how the private space company Interorbital escaped my attention - I guess their PR isn't as good as SpaceX, Scaled Composites, Bigelow, and Virgin Galactic. They've done some press releases recently but I just noticed them in a blog post at Colony Worlds.

It appears that they have been around since 1996, just down the flight line from Burt Rutan and company in Mojave. They've been building and testing rocket engines, and planning for sea-based launches of microsatellites sometime soon. They are also selling tickets ($2.5 million) for orbital space tourism flights on their Neptune starting in late 2009. These things will launch from the water - not from a boat or sea platform, from the water. Polar launches off the coast of California, equatorial launches from near the Kingdom of Tonga (south Pacific, near Fiji).

But wait. Orbital? Starting in late 2009? And just the other day I said that SpaceX's Falcon 9 and Dragon flight plans sounded like an amazing schedule (unmanned cargo test flight to the ISS by the end of 2009). Interorbital hasn't flown anything yet, but they have passengers signed up, and if the 2009 thing works out (which somehow seems doubtful considering they haven't flown anything yet), they may even beat Virgin Galactic's SpaceShipTwo into commercial service. Of course SS2 is "only" suborbital (and tickets are "only" $200K) and it hasn't flown yet either, but Rutan did do that X-Prize thing in 2004 with SpaceShipOne.

It's looking like the wild wild west out there! I sure hope some of it comes true. Guess I better start saving for one of those later flights (I want to give them time to make sure that "tunnel through the heat shield" thing works out). Interorbital also has some sort of promotion going for a less expensive way to fly ($250,000), something like an expensive lottery I guess. I suppose I'm a bit skeptical because it all comes across as a sort of shoestring operation (a web site can really make an impression), though I really hope it works out as they say. Just the idea that they are talking about orbital vacations starting next year - hey, that's wild.

Best Picture in the Orbiter Category

I've written a lot recently about AMSO, an amazing Apollo program add-on for Orbiter. If you would like to see how good a free add-on for a free simulator can be without installing and trying it for yourself, check out this very well produced 11 minute video from Tex-Films, Apollo 11: Remastered. Great job, Tex!

Alternate Futures

Back in the late 1980's, I went through a period of being pretty pessimistic about the future. With Reagan in the White House and the US and USSR armed to the nuclear teeth, I read books like Jonathan Schell's The Fate of the Earth and really believed it would be a miracle if we made it to this century without a nuclear war.

Fortunately I was wrong about that, and while the world remains a dangerous, violent, and messy place, I'm somewhat more optimistic about the future. I believe that technology, education, and the wider recognition that we are all sharing the same small planetary boat may help us survive for a while longer. My interest in space and in educational outreach is related to this belief. International cooperation in space won't save the world, but it helps. Encouraging kids' interest in science and technology can also help. And so on.

But what about the Dark Side? While always in favor of cooperation and non-violence, I have also enjoyed naval strategy games and combat flight simulators with titles like "Total Air War." I also have read and enjoyed a large number of war novels and technothrillers, including a few classics by Tom Clancy (before he became so successful he could give up editors and have other people write his books for him). His WW3 novel Red Storm Rising was one of my favorites.

I noticed in the supermarket yesterday that Clancy is bringing back WW3, now set around 2020 and with a new but still quite familiar cast of characters. Tom Clancy's EndWar (written by David Michaels) is a new technothriller that is also a tie-in to an upcoming video game called EndWar (as you might imagine, the title is ironic). Although I don't personally play RTS and similar games, the video preview and interviews on the game make it sound pretty impressive (a lot of the game development seems to be in Shanghai). Based on the Amazon reviews, I ordered the book to read on my next trip.

Why? Well, I still do like the occasional technothriller, and I'm also curious about the premise, which as it happens involves the militarization of space as well as more fighting over oil. The book and game apparently put you in the middle of a global conventional war which had erupted a few years after Iran and Saudi Arabia had destroyed each other in regional nuclear war in 2016.

I will let you search for more information or read the book if you'd like to know more, but for some reason the fictional 2016/2020 events that I read about struck a nerve. Will the period from 2010 to the 2030's and beyond be a new golden age, in which technology and international cooperation help to solve many of the problems that plague us today, and in which we start to become a spacefaring civilization? Or will it be more along the lines of Clancy's imagination? I don't know, maybe neither. But I really think we ought to start building lifeboats just in case.

P.S. I jumped the gun and read Tom Clancy's EndWar in about 5 hours the other night. It's definitely an exciting and sometimes thought-provoking read, fast-paced, high-tech military fiction with some political background. Not as deep or good as Red Storm Rising, but quite a good read for a video game teaser.

A Memorial in (Cyber) Space

For a bunch of "space geeks," the Orbiter community is pretty cool. Today I participated in an unusual memorial service that took place (virtually) on the Moon, within Orbiter itself, and which is part of the latest release of the AMSO Apollo simulator whose main author is Alain Capt, known as "ACSoft" on the Orbiter forums.

Although Alain is the main author, AMSO includes contributions from a number of other people. One of its key features is the autopilot that allows you to land safely on the Moon (it also allows some manual overrides, similar to the real Apollo autopilot software). This brilliant piece of programming was provided by Dennis Hare, known on the Orbiter forums as "LazyD." Sadly, Dennis passed away suddenly last year.

While many people expressed their sympathies at Dennis' passing in forum comments, Alain created a special tribute within the software itself. He constructed a virtual monument at the Apollo 17 Taurus-Littrow site, and provided a special scenario which uses LazyD's autopilot to land you near this site. You can then drive the Lunar Rover to the memorial and plant the US flag there. This triggers a musical and graphical tribute to Dennis, with a sort of "eternal flame" as well as several photographs of Dennis with comments about his life. I've included one of my screen shots above (you can see more here).

I personally never knew Dennis, though I would have liked to - he was close to my age and shared some of my interests such as flying, astronomy, software, and Orbiter. As Alain discusses in his notes on the tribute, I too have experienced close friendships through the internet, as he had developed in working and talking with Dennis (Alain lives in Switzerland, and Dennis lived in Lopez Island, Washington). So I know this must be a real loss for him. I would like to express my condolences to Dennis' wife and family, and to also thank Alain for remembering him in this special way, and for sharing this with the Orbiter community.

SpaceX Falcon 9 & Dragon

Thanks to Next Big Future (via the Carnival of Space), I learned about some recent developments at SpaceX, including the success of a preliminary design review with NASA for their Dragon spacecraft (unmanned cargo version) to approach the ISS on a test mission. The plan is for a first launch of Falcon 9 with Dragon for a brief (5 hour) non-ISS test mission in the fourth quarter of this year, followed by an extensive 5-day "station keeping" ISS test mission in Q2 2009. Then in Q3 2009, there would be a full Dragon test mission to the ISS, including approach and "mating" (with an empty cargo capsule). The brief video above shows how docking will work.

This is an amazing schedule, and I hope it all works out. They have been doing test stand multi-engine firings for the Falcon 9, but no test flights so far (the first demo flight of Falcon 9 is also scheduled for Q4 of this year).

Attention Orbiter add-on builders: is anyone working on add-ons for the Dragon spacecraft and Falcon 9 launch vehicle? These puppies will be flying soon! There is a Falcon 1 add-on available - just downloaded it to try.

Carnival of Space #42

I'm a few days late in pointing it out, but Chris Lintott is hosting this week's Carnival of Space #42. I've found a couple of interesting nPublish Postew blogs there this week, in addition to some old favorites.

So Much Music, So Little Time

Here is one of those problems that is nice to have: I keep discovering cool new music and rediscovering older music I used to like but forgot about, in part because I only ever replaced a fraction of my collection of vinyl records with CD's or digital tracks. A couple of years ago I got some software, hooked up a turntable to my PC, and "ripped" about a dozen rediscovered albums to mp3 files. But that took a lot of time and the quality wasn't always that great, so I gave up. With 11,660 songs in iTunes, it's not like I'm hurting for variety.

So here are some recent rediscoveries (usually bought from iTunes or as often cheaper Amazon mp3 files, or sometimes on CD):

The Beach Boys, "Carl and the Passions - So Tough" - great harmonies from 1973.
Donovan's Greatest Hits - Spacey in the old-fashioned, 1968, trippy way.
The Doors, "Waiting for the Sun" - A 1968 favorite.
Paul McCartney, "Flaming Pie" - Came out in 1997, but I never listened much. He can be sappy at times, but I love McCartney's melodies.
Van Morrison, "Avalon Sunset" (1989) - Van is the man. Good songs, fine singing.

And some of the newer stuff:

Rilo Kiley, "Under the Blacklight" (2007) - Jenny Lewis & company are a new indie favorite.
Sara Bareilles, "Little Voice" (2007) - Her voice is not so little, and her songs are great ("Love Song" is on the radio a lot but don't hold that against her).
Iron & Wine, "The Shepherd's Dog" (2007) - Cool songs with breathy, mysterious-sounding vocals.
Anoushka Shankar, "Rise" (2005) - I'm not into a lot of Indian music, but Ravi's other daughter is also amazing.
"Once," movie soundtrack - I really liked this 2007 movie about a couple of songwriters in Dublin. A truly natural musical with songs mostly by Glen Hansard of the Frames.

I guess I'll skip putting in more links - you can use Google or Amazon as well as I can I'm sure.

iTunes/iPod Tip: I just discovered "smart playlists" in iTunes. This allows you to define the contents of a playlist based on various conditions (artist, length, style, dates, etc.). I used it to create some dynamic folders of recently added music, e.g., the "last two weeks" folder updates automatically each day.

Mars for Less on Flickr

Over at my Flickr site, I've started to add some additional pictures of the now-released Mars for Less for Orbiter add-on. I created a new photo set for MFL to make it easier to see what's there. The picture here shows EVA astronauts performing Earth-orbit assembly of the two separately launched components of the MTSV (Mars Transfer and Surface Vehicle, better known as "the hab"). While the propulsion modules could probably be designed to be "self-assembling" via automated docking, assembling two large parts of a crew vehicle with all the structures, plumbing, electrical systems, etc. would probably require ISS-like on-orbit assembly by astronauts.

Although it's not included in the add-on, in this picture, I show a proposed t/Space CXV crew vehicle, an Orbiter add-on by Kodiak. I briefly experimented with using this as a vehicle to carry astronauts up to the Mars ship for assembly, testing, etc. I'm not sure of the status of the air-launched CXV crew vehicle. I hope someone will eventually make Orbiter add-ons for SpaceX's Falcon 9 and Dragon (a private crew vehicle which is being funded and built), but I haven't seen any yet.

In the Shadow of the Earth

While my hand-held eyepiece digital camera shot leaves much to be desired, visual conditions for tonight's total lunar eclipse were just perfect (aside from the cold). I set up my little Orion Starblast telescope on the front porch and got some really wonderful views of the partial and total stages of the eclipse. The burnt-orange colors were great. I got some nice views of nearby Saturn too. This makes up for a lot of cloudy nights in recent weeks.

AMSO 1.16 - Just Amazing

No time to say much tonight beyond "in-freaking-credible" about the new version of ACSoft's free Apollo program add-on for Orbiter, AMSO 1.16. I just downloaded it (66 MB!) and tried a few scenarios to check out the improvements. Now with 3D virtual cockpits and astronaut figures as well as improved exterior models, it is simply beautiful. There are even clouds of dust as the LM gets close to the lunar surface for landing. Check out the updated gallery for an idea of the work that has gone into this thing. Bravo!

Mars for Less: We Shipped!

As a software project, it was only natural that Mars for Less for Orbiter would be late, even though it was essentially done back in August 2006. After the big push for the Mars Society paper that summer, I think we just ran out of energy for tying up the loose ends. But thanks to Andy and Mark, MFL has finally "shipped!" Mars for Less V1.6 (24 MB zip file) is now available for download over at Orbit Hangar. Be sure to read and follow the included documentation on this, both for installation advice and usage tips, and note that it does assume pretty good familiarity with Orbiter. A forum discussion thread has been started here.

Mars for Less: Coming Soon. Really.

It has said "close to being publicly released" on this page since fall 2006, but now the Mars for Less add-on for Orbiter really is coming soon. Andy McSorley and Mark Paton have pulled together the files and finished up the basic documentation, and I've contributed a few edits and a bit of final testing. The add-on itself fills up a 23 MB zip file, and there are a bunch of additional add-ons recommended for the full experience, all described in the documentation. There are many scenarios to try.

I had forgotten how cool this stuff was since I was immersed in it for a few months in spring/summer 2006, working closely with Andy and Mark on the add-on parts and scenarios, and culminating in our paper and presentation at the 2006 Mars Society Conference, "Virtual prototyping of human Mars missions with the Orbiter space flight simulator" (the paper and slides can be downloaded from the bottom of this page).

Andy has pictures on his Mars for Less page, and I have quite a few in Flickr. There's a video too (just the Mars landing, a small but exciting part of the mission). Stay tuned...

Damn Interesting Indeed

Is Damn Interesting a web site or a blog? I'm not exactly sure, but it does often live up to its name on a wide range of topics by a number of different writers. A case in point: this post on late World War II plans for a very strange super weapon by Third Reich researchers. It combines optics and space with a sadistic Nazi-amplified nostalgia for burning ants with a magnifying glass. It's very bizarre, as are most of the hundreds of comments in response to this post, most of which have nothing to do with the post itself. Damn interesting indeed, and not just the posts on space exploration.

Free Evolution Info

The National Academy of Sciences has some great new material that may come in handy if you ever get into a discussion with proponents of so-called "creation science" or "intelligent design." Science, Evolution, and Creationism is a free 88-page PDF e-book, and there is also an 8-page brochure that provides a quick summary of the key points.

One of the things that seems to confuse people about evolution (and science in general) is the word "theory." It has a very specific meaning in the context of science, and it doesn't mean the same thing as in common conversation. If you have a theory about who has been eating your secret stash of cookies at the office, it means a sort of a hunch, or perhaps an informed guess. As explained in the NAS brochure, a scientific theory is quite different: "In science, the word theory refers to a comprehensive explanation of an important feature of nature that is supported by many facts gathered over time. Theories also allow scientists to make predictions about as yet unobserved phenomena."

The theory of gravity is such a theory - it doesn't mean that scientists have a hunch that there might be gravity. It means that they understand gravity in a very detailed and systematic way, and they can use this understanding to (for example) design spacecraft trajectories. Scientific theories can change over time as new observations and experiments are done. Newton's theory of gravity provides an extremely good approximation that still works well for most purposes (including satellite operations). Einstein's General Theory of Relativity confirms the predictions of Newton in most respects, but also accounts for some usually small effects that Newton's theory cannot (sometimes these effects are not small, e.g., black holes).

The theory of evolution is similarly well understood so it can be used to explain observations in the fossil record, Earth's biological diversity, changes in DNA among different organisms, and practical applications such as the ability of bacteria to develop resistance to antibiotics. Evolution is an observed fact. The theory of evolution is a comprehensive explanation of how evolution works and forms the core of modern biology and medicine (with applications in other fields too). The fact that this is even up for debate among educated people in the United States is a bit embarrassing, but there you go (at least Huckabee seems to be out of the running in the presidential race). This new material is a good resource for when this does come up.

Kepler: Staring at the Suns

According to a news release today from JPL, studies based on infrared observations from the Spitzer space telescope indicate that many, and perhaps most nearby Sun-like stars may form rocky planets (estimates range from 20% to 60%). This is based on analysis of multiple infrared wavelengths associated with rings of dust around the stars (neither Spitzer nor Hubble can directly detect small Earth-like planets even for nearby stars).

In about a year (February 2009), NASA will launch Kepler, a mission specifically aimed at detecting Earth-like planets in the habitable zone around nearby stars. Kepler won't be able to directly image these planets, but instead will use the the transit method to detect the slight dimming caused by a small planet passing in front of its much larger sun. It will literally stare at a single region of the sky for over 3 years to collect photometric data on around 100,000 stars in a patch of sky between Deneb and Vega (see graphic). Since the transit method depends on the planet passing the star across the line of sight to Earth, only a very small percentage of stars with such planets will be "aimed the right way." This is why they will need to monitor 100,000 stars for over 3 years (because like Earth, these small planets would need to be moderately far from their star to be "habitable" and therefore would have a period of something like an Earth year).

The dust-based Spitzer studies (being presented this week at the AAAS conference in Boston) are encouraging for Kepler's planet-finding prospects. If the optimistic end is right and 60% of sun-like stars have rocky planets, then Kepler could detect a pretty decent harvest of well-aimed rocky planets.

Astronaut Dreams

From an AP news story on Yahoo comes this quote from space station astronaut Dan Tani, who has been living aboard the ISS since October 2007 and will soon be returning home on Atlantis with the STS-122 crew:

"I look forward to some odd things," Tani said. "I'm looking forward to putting food on a plate and eating several things at once, which you can't do up here. I'm looking forward to spitting my toothpaste out in a sink rather than swallowing it."

So while Earthbound space fans like me dream of being able to experience zero-G and of seeing the Earth from space, Tani's current dreams are more down to Earth. It's all about perspective, though Tani also appreciates that he has been pretty lucky:

"I love living here on the station. It's comfortable. It's fun. It's exciting. The view, of course," said Tani, a 47-year-old mechanical engineer and the father of two young daughters. "But obviously, I want to get back and see my family."

Bill Stone: Bravado and Robots

Here's another interesting person I "met" through a TED conference video. Bill Stone is an explorer and engineer who isn't afraid to go the extra mile, even if he has to build a robot to do it, and even if the extra mile is straight down, or at the Moon's south pole, or under the ice of Europa.

Stone has done some serious deep cave exploring, and his company, Stone Aerospace has built some amazing underwater equipment to aid in exploring deep underground bodies of water. He has extended this to autonomous vehicles (robots) that have explored, imaged, and measured otherwise inaccessible underground lakes. NASA is now testing Stone's latest vehicle, ENDURANCE, in a Wisconsin lake, in preparation for more challenging tests in Antarctica. A future and presumably smarter version of this robot could someday search for life in the under-ice ocean that is thought to exist on Jupiter's moon Europa. Of course drilling through kilometers of ice to get to the water is a big problem, but people have thought about that too, as shown in this video (the Europa part starts around 5:00, the landing around 6:30 - too bad the JIMO mission was canceled, but someday...).

As with caves on Earth, Stone is not content to leave all space exploration to robots. Near the end of the TED video he describes a proposed mission to establish a base at the Moon's south pole, where ice would be mined and converted to rocket fuel and oxidizer, including the propellants needed to get his mining team home (I'd guess that this would be great motivation for getting everything to work). Yes, his mining team - Stone proposes that this mission would be privately funded, and he intends to personally lead it. By 2015. It will need some serious robot assistance. And some serious rocket support, not to mention crew vehicles and lunar landers (he's not counting on NASA for any of this). This is certainly a bold and exciting idea, and it's not only for the adventure - Stone proposes that space-based fuel depots will be the key to opening up space for private enterprise. I hope he's right and that he met a lot of "angels" and "super-angels" at that TED conference. He certainly doesn't suffer from lack of ambition.

Carnival of Space #41

Check out Carnival of Space #41 over at New Frontiers. This one is a Really Big Show, the largest number of space and astronomy posts in a single space carnival so far. The post descriptions are pretty thorough so it makes for a good and informative read even if you don't have time to check out all the blogs right now.