Discovery in the skies over D.C.

I headed up to the Mall Tuesday morning to see a sight never to be seen again ... Well, at least until they fly Enterprise out of Dulles to NYC. Anyway, as anyone who reads this knows, I'm a space buff and the chance to see the space shuttle Discovery flown over the National Mall was enough to convince me to take the day off.

It was totally worth it. Seeing Discovery on the back of its 747 carrier aircraft was an amazing sight. I never got to see a shuttle launch, so I'm glad I saw Discovery on its way to an honorable retirement at the Air & Space Museum out at Dulles.

When I got to the Mall around 8:45, it was pretty deserted. That didn't last long. Within 45 minutes there was a festival-like atmosphere going on, and a cheer went up as Discovery made its promenade down the Mall.

After flying past the Smithsonian Castle, Discovery headed down toward the Capitol. I really like this picture because it reminds me of the opening of The Day the Earth Stood Still. In the movie (the original, not Keanu's remake), Klaatu takes his saucer right over the dome of the Capitol before landing on The Ellipse.

Without a doubt, these guys had one of the best views of Discovery. Always wanted to run a crane ... Oh well.

The sky, blue with puffy white clouds, was a perfect backdrop for Discovery's flybys.

This is probably one of the best pictures I got Tuesday. You can even see the T-38 chase plane just below and behind Discovery.

As we bid goodbye to Discovery and her sisters Atlantis and Endeavour, I think it's important for us to remember all they've done and, especially, what the future holds. I've heard comments about how shameful it is that America now lacks the ability to put humans into space. True, at the moment we can't. But, for the six years between July 1975 and April 1981, from the launch of the Apollo-Soyuz to Columbia's first flight, we were also unable to "slip the surly bonds of earth."

I look forward to the day, hopefully soon, when America will send its astronauts into space, either in NASA's Space Launch System or SpaceX's Dragon capsule atop a Falcon rocket. Until then, I'll be heading out to the Udvar-Hazy Center to pay my respects to Discovery.

Definitely not like tears in the rain…

As anyone who’s ever read this little corner of the interwebs knows, I’m a sucker for just about anything that has to do with human spaceflight. The video below comes to us courtesy of NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, and shows some interesting pictures of the moon’s surface. Specifically three of the Apollo landing sites – take that moon landing conspiracy theorists!

According to NASA’s website, LRO carries six instruments, one of them being the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera. This camera, “…[R]etrieves high resolution black and white images of the lunar surface, capturing images of the lunar poles with resolutions down to 1 meter, and imaging the lunar surface in color and ultraviolet. These images provide knowledge of polar illumination conditions, identify potential resources & hazards, and enable safe landing site selection.”

Just another way of saying some pretty cool pictures. Like this one, of the sunrise over Tycho.

With that thought in mind, let’s go to the video. These shots are of the Apollo 12, Ocean of Storms (one of my favorite place names on the moon), Apollo 14, Fra Mauro, and Apollo 17, Taurus-Littrow, landing sites.

For a non-chopped off version of the video, go here.


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I know why it is, no wind or weather, but isn’t it amazing that 42-plus years on you can still see the tracks the astronauts left in the regolith?

A picture's worth...

Everyone ready for the crushing heat that's coming our way? The number I heard for today contained a 9 and a 3, and for tomorrow the 3 is replaced by a 7. Get ready to sweat D.C.

Changing topics, I came across a couple of pictures in the last day or so I feel like sharing.

First, this amazing view of Saturn taken by the Cassini space probe in September 2006:

Here's part of the description of the photo from NASA (for more, go here):

"This marvelous panoramic view was created by combining a total of 165 images taken by the Cassini wide-angle camera over nearly three hours on Sept. 15, 2006. The full mosaic consists of three rows of nine wide-angle camera footprints; only a portion of the full mosaic is shown here. Color in the view was created by digitally compositing ultraviolet, infrared and clear filter images and was then adjusted to resemble natural color.

"During this period of observation Cassini detected two new faint rings: one coincident with the shared orbit of the moons Janus and Epimetheus, and another coincident with Pallene's orbit."

Now, anyone who's wasted a moment or two reading The Foggy Dew in the past knows I'm an unashamed proponent of man's exploration of space. There is much to be learned on the other side of our atmosphere and I believe mankind's destiny is in space.

But there is another reason and (sadly) I'm going to use a bit of a quote from a TV show (From the Earth to the Moon) to express it properly. We need to continue into space for the same reason Apollo 15 commander Dave Scott chose (in the show) to land at Hadley rille, "Grandeur. And I believe there's something to be said for... exploring beautiful places... It's good for the spirit."

Who among us wouldn't want to watch in awe as Saturn eclipsed the sun?

OK, now onto the funny part. Got this picture from a coworker. Don't know if it's true or not, but I get the feeling it is.

See, the way I always heard the way to tell them apart was to kick them in the balls and then run and climb a tree. If the bear climbs the tree and eats you, it's a black bear. If it pushes the tree over and eats you, it's a grizzly.

Happy Tuesday. Try to stay cool.

Fair winds, Discovery

The first of NASA's space shuttle's to reach retirement age landed today after completing its final mission to the International Space Station.

Welcome Home Discovery! You've done your crews, your nation and the world a great service during the past three decades. Actually four, come to think of it, OV-103 first flew in 1984.

Shuttle Discovery lands for the final time at the Kennedy Space Center

According to NASA, even after shuttles Endeavour and Atlantis make their final voyages in the coming months, Discovery will still hold the all-time record with 39 missions, 148 million miles flown (238 million kilometers), 5,830 orbits of Earth and 365 days spent in space. All that was achieved in less than 27 years.

Those of us in the D.C. area are lucky - we'll see you soon. According to what I've heard, you'll be replacing OV-101, the Space Shuttle Enterprise, at the Udvar-Hazy Center out at Dulles.

I can only hope the next Discovery will be as faithful a ship as you've been. Best of luck in your retirement Discovery, and may you have fair winds and following seas for the rest of your days.

If you believe they put a man on the Moon

We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too...Many years ago the great British explorer George Mallory, who was to die on Mount Everest, was asked why did he want to climb it. He said, "Because it is there." Well, space is there, and we're going to climb it, and the moon and the planets are there, and new hopes for knowledge and peace are there. And, therefore, as we set sail we ask God's blessing on the most hazardous and dangerous and greatest adventure on which man has ever embarked. – John Fitzgerald Kennedy, Sept. 12, 1962


I interviewed a man name of John Hirasaki about five years ago down in Texas. “Who the heck is John Hirasaki?” everyone is now asking and why are you writing about him today, July 20?

Well, Hirasaki is an interesting character. The son and grandson of immigrant rice farmers in Southeast Texas, he worked hard, graduated from high school and college and joined NASA after his graduation in 1963. Hirasaki was one of the young engineers who helped do the hard things to make President Kennedy’s dream of “landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the Earth” before the decade was out.

He’s also the fourth human to discover what the moon smells like.

“It smelled like after you strike two pieces of flint together, or like a firecracker,” Hirasaki told me during the interview in his Houston-area home in July 2004. Hirasaki was the maintenance engineer who, along with a doctor, William Carpentier, volunteered to spend 21 days with the crew of Apollo 11 after they returned from the moon. This is how I wrote it before:

John Hirasaki, center, Neil Armstrong, left, and Edwin 'Buzz' Aldrin Jr. peer through the window of the mobile quarantine facility during their journey from the USS Hornet to NASA's Houston Space Center.

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“The National Academy of Sciences made it mandatory that we take precautions. There was a concern of potential contamination from another (space) body,” Hirasaki said.
Instead of handshakes from politicians and hugs from their families, the astronauts joined Hirasaki and Dr. William Carpentier inside a highly modified Airstream trailer that served as the mobile quarantine facility during their journey back to NASA's Houston space center.
“All throughout when we were being offloaded from the ship and being transported to Hickam (Air Force Base), there were people lining the route,” Hirasaki says of landing in Hawaii.
“It's intoxicating and you could feel the excitement on the outside of the mission and the event,” he said of the crowds who welcomed the crew home. “You could see it in their expressions and posture.”The 65 hours he spent with the astronauts in the trailer were not spent lying around. Throughout, the astronauts were debriefed, wrote reports and had medical exams. Along with being the facility's maintenance man, Hirasaki was busy unloading the priceless cargo of moon rocks and film the crew brought home to Earth. That work was done in a containment facility on the ship.
"One of the interesting things I noticed was that there was a unique scent I hadn't noticed on other Apollo capsules," Hirasaki said about opening up Columbia, Apollo 11's command module.
“I attributed it to the dust they picked up on the moon,” Hirasaki theorized.
Although most of the rocks were stored in specially made containers designed to protect them from Earth's atmosphere, there was one small bag of samples Armstrong collected and kept with him in case anything happened to the larger cache. “We looked at them, but we didn't touch them because that would mess up the sample,” Hirasaki said of seeing the moon rocks for the first time.
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As anyone who reads this little space knows, I’m a big fan of spaceflight. I watch the space shuttle launches, follow the news and generally try to keep myself current on what’s going on when it comes to this subject. This may be because my very first memory is watching an Apollo mission take off from the Kennedy Space Center. It’s amazing the impression a rocket makes on a 2-year-old.
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I’d like to think Hirasaki’s statement, “…[Y]ou could feel the excitement on the outside of the mission and the event. You could see it in their expressions and posture,” was still as true today as it was 40 years ago, but I don’t think this is the case. Interrogating the intern who sits near me last week, he seemed unimpressed the anniversary of the moon landing was nigh. I’d hate to think it’s a generation gap, but he’s 23 and unless my math is wrong (and I’m never wrong) he wasn’t even alive when the shuttle Challenger went down.

Two Americans landed on the moon 40 years ago today and 10 more followed in the next three years. The question I have is this: The next time Americans leave boot prints in the regolith of the lunar surface, will any of these men be alive to see those steps? Three moon walkers have died and Charles Duke, 74, (Apollo 16) and Harrison “Jack” Schmidt, 75 (Apollo 17) are the youngest. Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin is 79 and his Apollo 11 commander, Neil Armstrong, turns 79 next month.

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Spaceflight is important. There are many who believe NASA and all its work is a waste of money that could be better used elsewhere. I disagree. NASA’s budget is minuscule ($18.686 billion for 2010) compared to most other segments of the federal budget.

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Simply put, when a nation stops exploring, it starts dying.
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Then and Now

At least it was “now” a couple of weeks ago. As some frequent readers know, I am enamored of spaceflight and things outside the shell of our atmosphere. Why? Well, because it’s cool and I’m a guy and astronauts get to play with some of the worlds biggest toys.

But those toys weren’t always so big. For instance, 44 years ago today (June 3, 1965) to Ed White found his Gemini 4 capsule so constraining he popped the door and went for a walk. In space. OK, so maybe it wasn’t quite like this, but White was the first American to walk in space. (The first spacewalk took place about two and a half months earlier when Soviet Alexey Leonov stepped outside the Voskhod 2. Booo Commies!)

Anyway, can you blame the guy? I think if I had to spend four days in a 3-foot by 3-foot by 10-foot tube (90 cubic feet) with another guy I’d be looking for the door too.

According to Wikipedia: “After 15 minutes 40 seconds White was instructed by Houston to reenter the spacecraft. He said, ‘It's the saddest moment of my life.’ ” White eventually spent 23 minutes outside Gemini 4 and traveled 6,500 miles as he hung about 150 miles above the Earth.
Here is a picture taken of White by the mission commander James McDivitt:

Compare it to one taken less than a month ago aboard the space shuttle Atlantis during the STS-125 Hubble repair mission:

Here’s the NASA caption to the picture: Tethered to the end of the remote manipulator system arm, which was controlled from inside Atlantis' crew cabin, STS-125 astronaut Andrew Feustel navigates near the Hubble Space Telescope, during the mission's third spacewalk on May 16, 2009. Astronaut John Grunsfeld signals to his crewmate from just a few feet away. Astronauts Feustel and Grunsfeld were continuing servicing work on the giant observatory, which was locked down in the cargo bay of shuttle Atlantis.

In 44 years we’ve gone from merely floating outside in space to spending hours outside doing a billion-dollar service call on one of history’s most important scientific instruments. I’m sure that White, who along with Gus Grissom and Roger Chaffee tragically died in the pad fire that destroyed Apollo 1, would be just as impressed with the work his fellow astronauts did last month as I am.

Up like a cannonball

A couple of things caught my eye this morn as I perused my online NYT, but I’ll get to them in just a minute.

Let me say this: “ Hey MOSTFAMOUSNAMESHOUTEDINAMOVIEEVER!!!!”

Last night on HIMYM, Ted Mosby, architect, finally got around to telling his kids the beginning of the story of how he met their mother. After a couple years wait, I might add.

I won’t go into all the funny details (in case some of you have it on your divver and haven’t watched yet) except to say Barney nails a body builder chick by accident (she calls it her cardio) and Ted Mosby, architect, meets the eyes of a woman he’s known as they wait at a crosswalk. But I say too much.

So, without giving too much away, I hope the next thing that happens is she introduces him to another woman who becomes those silent kids’ mother. Because if it’s her, I’m giving up on the show. The only thing making her his true love would do is turn Ted Mosby, architect, into Ted Mosby, total pussy push-over.

I can handle Barney having the hots for Robin, but Ted cannot fall for this woman. I’d much prefer he fall for Victoria, the baker. At least she didn’t leave him at the altar.

Ground Control to Major Tom
This article in the NYT, (Finally! He got to where he was going) about the shuttle heading to the Hubble, reminded me of my very first research paper in 7th grade about the shuttle. And by 7th grade research paper I mean copying information about the shuttle out of the library’s encyclopedia and a copy of NatGeo at home and presenting it as research.

The article got me to thinking. Do you still stop and look at the TV when a shuttle takes off? Is anyone else still amazed, and I mean deep down tingle in your stomach amazed, when you see those men and women ride a controlled bomb into, through and out of our atmosphere?

I’ll admit it, I do. If you don’t I can’t understand. Let me try something here: Imagine you’re you, and today’s still May 5, but instead of 2009, it’s 1961. Just 48 years ago. The Commie Reds have beaten the True Blue Defenders of Freedom and Right into space the month before and the defenders are now rolling the dice.

Down in Florida a young Naval Aviator, name of Alan B. Shepard Jr. is sitting high up in his 60-cubic-foot capsule (for reference, a 3x3x6-foot box is 54-cubic feet) and is waiting to blast off. To become the first American to ride a rocket toward space. The rocket in question attached to his Freedom 7 capsule is a retired Redstone missile. It's 60 feet long and about 6 feet in diameter and provides 78,000 pounds of thrust.

Pee-U-Knee. Puny by today’s standards, but it'd still kill ya.

When Atlantis launches toward Hubble next week, it will ride not only its three main engines (400,000 pounds of thrust each), but two, TWO!, solid rocket boosters. These boosters might have even scared Shepard, John Glenn, Gordo Cooper and company. (According to Mike Mullane, author of Riding Rockets, who flew the shuttle three times, they scare today’s astronauts.) Measuring in at 149 feet long and 12 feet in diameter, the SRBs together produce almost (finger to the corner of the mouth a la Dr. Evil) 6 million pounds of thrust.

Now imagine that Shepard’s back on Earth safe and sound. How do you feel? Our first steps in space were so small I’d barely dare to call them baby steps, but we’ve been there.

And we went back.

Imagine now that it’s July 20, 1969, just a little more than eight years later. We’ve gone from clawing toward the stars to walking on another planet.

July 20 is such an important day, in fact, you take your 2-month-old son from his bed and lay him in front of the black-and-white TV so that someday he can say he watched man walk on the moon for the first time.

And we’ll be back.

I don’t know about you, but if I’m near a TV next Monday, you can be sure I’ll take the eight and a half or so minutes — the time from lift-off to MECO (main-engine cut-off in orbit) — to watch man head toward the stars and inspire me one more time.

Seeing it again...for the first time

Y'all know I like history and space and trying to take an event from the past and tie it to something relevant today. Well, I'm going to try it again here.

Forty years ago just about right now, 3 p.m. EST on Dec. 23, men from Earth were, for the first time (that we know of, of course), entering the gravitational influence of another celestial body. Frank Borman, Jim Lovell and William Anders were piloting their Apollo 8 command module on man's first trip to the moon. Like its predecessor, Apollo 7, this capsule didn't have a name, unlike those that would follow: Apollo 11's Columbia, Apollo 13's Odyssey and Apollo 17's America. (The other names can be found here.)

Three guys in a 210 cubic foot space, one of them puking from space sickness and suffering from diarrhea (Borman), headed to the moon. Imagine their families, never again able to complain on a vacation road trip.

"Dad, I need to stop, the cheese curds are making me sick."

"Son, did I ever tell you about the time I was on the way to the moon and my buddy Frank was hurling all over the capsule? I have? Well, then suck it up."

Imagine though, being the first person to ever see the Earth rise over the horizon of the moon. They went a long way, but they saw something amazing. Something no one had ever seen before.

You may think to yourself, "I'll never see anything for the first time," and this may be true. You may never be the first person ever to see something, but you're always seeing things for the first time. And you never know, you don't need to go to the moon to discover something new like, say, a 400-foot waterfall.

In California.

In 2005.

Neither here nor there. The important thing is, even if you're not an astronaut, as humans we're genetically compelled to seek out new experiences and sights. So, since most of us have the next couple of days off, give yourself a present and do something new.

Go to Great Falls (it's beautiful in the winter). Go to the National Arboretum (yeah, I know it's up in Northeast, but take advantage of the daylight and make a run for it). Go visit the renovated American History Museum. Go to the Textile Museum (yeah, there's a textile museum up near the Woodrow Wilson House, who knew?).

I don't care what you do.

Just. Do. Something. New.

I don't know what I'm going to do. Everything I've mentioned I've done (except for the history museum, but I'm saving that for February). Anybody got a suggestion? I don't mind the cold...too much... and I don't even mind driving somewhere to see something new and interesting. One of my greatest regrets (OK, maybe not regret) is living in Texas for six years and never seeing Big Bend National Park.

To borrow from Borman and the crew of Apollo 8 on this day before the day before Christmas, I close this by saying, "...Good night, good luck, and a Merry Christmas to all of you, all of you on the good Earth."