Busy Week in Space! May 25, 2012
Posted by Lofty Ambitions in Space Exploration.Tags: Movies & TV, Space Shuttle, SpaceX
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This week marked a milestone in space exploration: the successful launch of a space capsule by a private company and its berth with the International Space Station this morning. We wrote about SpaceX’s Dragon mission at The Huffington Post; click HERE to read our piece and a pretty interesting conversation in the comment thread. We’re set to do a follow-up there tomorrow, after we see how the opening of the hatch goes.
Yesterday, too, marked an important anniversary: the second time an American orbited the Earth. As part of the first U.S. manned space program, Project Mercury, astronaut Scott Carpenter climbed into Aurora 7 atop an Atlas rocket and launched into outer space. Her spent almost five hours there. Carpenter flew this mission only after Deke Slayton was grounded with a heart problem. Carpenter was the back-up pilot for the mission John Glenn flew to become the first American to orbit the Earth, and Glenn and Carpenter remain the only living Mercury astronauts. Our personal connection to this event is that, for four years, Doug worked for a high-tech company based in Carpenter’s hometown, Boulder, Colorado. And of course, we recently chatted with Glenn during “Discovery Departure.”
Scott Carpenter (NASA)
Today, the day of Dragon’s first berth, is the anniversary of President Kennedy’s speech before Congress in 1961 that announced his goal for the United States to put a man on the Moon by the end of that decade. (View an excerpt HERE and the complete transcript HERE.) April had been a bad month for the Kennedy administration, with Yuri Gagarin orbiting the Earth (view the launch footage HERE) and, thereby, giving the Soviets the lead in the Space Race, not to mention the Bay of Pigs. Among the “numerous and varied” proposals designed to combat “the adversaries of freedom” was that “that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the earth.” Just one day shy of a year later, Scott Carpenter was orbiting the Earth, taking the early steps in the process of reaching the Moon.
Today is also the birthday of two cosmonauts, Georgy Grechko, born in 1931 before jet aircraft existed, let alone anyone was serious about going to space, and Ivan Bella, born three years after Kennedy’s speech. Between 1975 and 1985, Grechko flew several missions, including a repair mission that brought the freezing, inoperable Salyut 7 space station back to life. In 1999, Bella spent almost eight days aboard Mir, the Russian space station.
And of course, just a year ago, space shuttle Endeavour was in the midst of its last mission, the crew giving a variety of press interviews before some serious spacewalking the next day.
Cast of Star Trek with Space Shuttle Enterprise in Palmdale, CA (NASA)
Perhaps, though, today’s most meaningful anniversary for us is the release of Star Wars in 1977. Thirty-five years ago this summer, we each saw Star Wars for the first of what would ultimately be dozens of times. Although Star Wars and Star Trek have been compared in innumerable ways, for this Lofty Duo, both franchises have been much in our minds and in the news lately. Star Trek has been a regular presence in our lives lately because of its association with the Space Shuttle Enterprise, so named because of a write-in campaign by fans of the original series bombarded NASA with cards and letters, and because the ashes of James Doohan, who played Chief Engineer Montgomery Scott, were carried to and dispersed in low-Earth orbit this week. Serendipitously, Doohan’s ashes were lofted into orbit by SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket, which is of course named after Star Wars’ Millennium Falcon.
Apollo 10 Crew (NASA)
Tomorrow will mark other anniversaries. Apollo 10, the last mission before someone set foot on the Moon, safely returned Tom Stafford, John Young, and Gene Cernan to Earth on May 26, 1969. This mission offered television viewers back on the ground the first color broadcast from space. And they tested the lunar module, though NASA did not give them enough fuel to land on the Moon and return to the capsule, probably because they knew a person that close to the Moon’s surface would be tempted to just go ahead and do it.
Sally Ride (NASA)
And Saturday is also Sally Ride’s 61st birthday. Ride joined NASA in 1978 and became the first American woman in space in 1983, on STS-7. She flew again on STS-41G in 1984. She served on the Challenger Accident Investigation Board, after which Roger Boisjoly, a whistleblower in that investigation and a Lofty Ambitions guest blogger, credited Ride as one of the few people who publicly supported his efforts. In 2003, years after she retired from NASA, she served on the Columbia Accident Investigation Board, the only person to serve on both accident investigation boards.
Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow.
A Day at NASA’s Dryden Research Center (#NASASocial): A Is for Aeronautics May 16, 2012
Posted by Lofty Ambitions in Aviation, Space Exploration.Tags: Museums & Archives, Space Shuttle, Apollo, Movies & TV, Concorde, GRAILTweetup, Dryden Flight Research Center
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If you missed last week’s post about Dryden Flight Research Center, you might want to start THERE. Otherwise, read on to continue the story.
A clear and consistent message was delivered at both the #DrydenSocial and last fall’s GRAIL Tweetup: NASA wants to use social media to help spread the word of its achievements. To that end, NASA trots out its best and brightest to address event attendees and then mixes in the kind of moments that only NASA can deliver.
David McBride, Dryden Center Director
To that end, the morning session of the May 4th NASA Social event at NASA’s Dryden Flight Research Center (DFRC) offered a broad overview of Dryden’s historical and continuing role in aeronautics research. David McBride, Center Director for DFRC and Christian Gelzer, Chief Historian, provided a wealth of contextual information in the day’s first two talks.
The wonderful Neil deGrasse Tyson, Director of the Hayden Planetarium and whose book, Space Chronicles: Facing the Ultimate Frontier, Anna has just finished reading, has been making some interesting comparisons regarding NASA’s budget of late. According to Tyson (watch the video HERE), the $850 billion spent on TARP, the Troubled Asset Relief Program, is greater than NASA’s budget for the fifty-plus years that NASA has been in existence.
In no particular order, here are some the achievements that NASA’s budget has funded in that five-decade span:
• the Hubble Space Telescope and its associated increase in our understanding of the universe;
• a significant portion of the International Space Station (ISS);
• the Space Transportation System (the shuttle) that carried Hubble and the ISS’s pieces into orbit;
• deep space probes such as the Voyagers, planetary landers and rovers such as Spirit, Opportunity, and Curiosity;
• myriad Earth-orbiting satellites that have taught us much about our planet’s weather, composition, and history;
• and of course, the Apollo program and the astronauts who landed on the moon.
Note that all of these scientific and engineering achievements have something to do with space. Space is sexy, space gets people’s attention.
LLRV (See, space looks sexy.)
That said, the first A in NASA is for Aeronautics. In recent years, aeronautics has been a remarkably small piece of NASA’s little pie. In his introduction to the NASA Social #DrydenSocial attendees, David McBride, Dryden’s Director, pointed out that aeronautics research receives about 2.5% of NASA’s roughly $18 billion dollar budget in any given year. Those monies go towards funding the four dedicated NASA Aeronautics Research Centers: Langley, Glenn, Ames, and Dryden. At the end of that quickly narrowing financial funnel, Dryden Flight Research Center (DFRC) receives less than 1% of NASA’s budget.
It turns out, however, that the first A in NASA is a really important part of the United States’ overall economic picture. McBride indicated that the manufacture of aircraft and its associated industries were the single greatest positive contributor to the U.S. balance of trade. NASA’s own web pages put the scope of aviation’s influence in the U.S. economy as follows:
“Aviation generates more than $400 billion in direct economic activity, supports more than 650,000 jobs and accommodates more than 600 million passengers every year in the United States.”
At last fall’s GRAIL Tweetup, Charlie Bolden also addressed the importance of aeronautics, when he said that he would like a part of his legacy as NASA Administrator to include leaving funding for aeronautics research on a “upward trend” in order to return NASA to its traditional status as the “premier aeronautics research organization in the world.”
SSBD at Valiant Air Command
The technical talks at #DrydenSocial started with engineer Ed Haering, who is a superstar in the world of supersonic booms. Haering’s presentation covered work that has been done at DFRC to mitigate—sshhh!—supersonic booms. Because commercial aircraft are prohibited from flying over land at supersonic speeds (this was a huge problem for Concorde), this research is imperative if we’re ever to see another supersonic transport aircraft. The Lofty duo actually had the opportunity to see some of Ed’s work up close and personal when we visited Valiant Air Command in Titusville, Florida. Valiant is the home of the Shaped Sonic Boom Demonstration (SSBD) aircraft, a test aircraft on which Haering worked at Dryden. As its name suggest, the SSBD successfully demonstrated that a sonic boom could be shaped to reduce its impact, and by impact, we mean noise.
SSBD
On the heels of Haering’s talk was an opportunity head outside and experience a sonic boom firsthand. Shortly after the #DrydenSocial attendees were led outside for a photograph beneath the wings of the X-1E, an F-18 flew overhead accompanied by the telltale crack of a sonic boom. Moments after that, the same F-18 treated us to a loud-and-low flyby.
NASA Dryden, or Anthony Nelson’s Office
In a day of artifacts and factoids, one that would have made a great impression on Anna, had she been there too, concerned the front of Dryden’s administration building. As we gathered around the X-1E, one of the handlers assigned to our group related that the front of the administration building had stood in for the NASA’s offices in I Dream of Jeannie. (If you want to read more about I Dream of Jeannie, click HERE.)
For Doug, though, the artifact that made the greatest impression was the insect-like Lunar Landing Research Vehicle (LLRV, in the photo above) which was located in a nearby hangar. The M2-F2 lifting body, used to validate the design of the space shuttles and located in the same storage space as the LLRV was a close second.
PurpleStride Chicago 2012: Research on Pancreatic Cancer April 27, 2012
Posted by Lofty Ambitions in Science.Tags: Biology, Movies & TV
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Tomorrow, we’re walking in PurpleStride Chicago 2012 to raise money for the Pancreatic Cancer Action Network. Click HERE for our team page. That’s an opportunity for us to focus this post on a health sciences topic and consider some of the science related to our own bodies.
Image from National Institutes of Health (NIH)
If you remember back to high school anatomy class, the pancreas, an organ about six inches long, sits horizontally behind the stomach. The head of the pancreas connects to the small intestine, where its secretions do their work on the food you eat. The job of the pancreas is to produce enzymes for the digestion process and hormones used for metabolism.
Pancreatic cancer has been in the news in recent years because Apple founder Steve Jobs, actor Patrick Swayze, and professor and author of The Last Lecture Randy Pausch died from this cancer. (Watch Jobs’s 2005 speech at the end of a previous post HERE. Watch Pausch’s CMU “Last Lecture” HERE.) Jobs was 56, Swayze was 57, and Pausch was just 48, which might lead a person to believe that successful white men in their late forties and fifties are particularly at risk. But one of the things we’ve learned from talking with nurses these past few weeks is that pancreatic cancer can strike at almost any age—one nurse knew a 30-year-old nurse and the 89-year-old grandfather of another friend who’d been diagnosed in the last couple of weeks—and that the risk factors are poorly understood. Smokers, diabetics, and those with chronic pancreatitis are at greater risk, and more women than men contract this cancer.
Image by Department of Health and Human Services
As cancers go, pancreatic cancer is relatively rare, with a lifetime risk of about 1.4%, meaning that fewer than 3 in 200 people are ever diagnosed with this type of cancer. Compare that with the commonly cited lifetime risk of breast cancer: 1 in 8 women, or 12.5%. Or consider the overall lifetime risk of being diagnosed with any cancer: 45% for men, 38% for women, according to the American Cancer Society (click HERE for more info). The overall risk of dying from cancer, though, is better: 23% (1 in 4) for men, and 19.5% (1 in 5) for women. Statistics are tricky, of course, and tell us nothing about a particular individual and only some things about everybody else. Those numbers indicate many things, including that we are living long enough to develop cancer, which is more likely as we age, and that we are, in many cases, surviving cancer long enough to die of something else.
What’s especially disconcerting about pancreatic cancer, though, is that more than half of pancreatic cancers are diagnosed after they’ve metastasized, when there exists no cure. The NIH reports even worse numbers than most resources, stating, “in more than 80% of patients the tumor has already spread and cannot be completely removed at the time of diagnosis.” Often, the first symptom is jaundice, which occurs after the cancer has spread to the liver. That late diagnosis contributes to a very discouraging survival rate, with roughly 6% of patients hitting that magical five-year goal, according to the American Cancer Society (click HERE for Cancer Facts & Figures 2011). Even if the tumor is localized and operable, the five-year surrvial rate is just 23%. In fact, just 26%—one in four—of patients are alive a mere one year after diagnosis. The numbers vary slightly from resource to resource, and these statistics capture information about the past (the 2011 report is based on numbers no later than 2007).
Mary Lee & Anna Leahy
Statistically, several patients out of every hundred do stick around for years to come. If caught before the cancer spreads, the tumor is sometimes operable, which is the key to a potential cure. Research shows that surgery is much more successful if done at a hospital where the Whipple procedure—abdominal surgery almost as complicated as organ transplant—is performed regularly and if the surgeon is very experienced with the Whipple. Jobs, who had the slower-growing, more treatable of the two kinds of pancreatic cancer, waited nine months after diagnosis to have the Whipple surgery and still survived eight years. Even those who aren’t candidates for surgery can live several years; Swayze held out 20 months. For inoperable tumors, chemotherapy, radiation, and newer NanoKnife technology can sometimes shrink the tumor and, thereby, improve quality of life. In some cases, these treatments make the tumor operable and the cancer possibly curable.
Pancreatic cancer is relatively slow growing, with tumors taking years to develop and even longer to metastasize. That long timeframe—before deadly metastasis—during which pancreatic cancer could be diagnosed and cured is excellent reason for research because a screening test or even a better understanding of risk factors that leads to early detection could drastically improve survival rates. Immunotherapy treatment is another area of worthwhile investigation for pancreatic cancer and for cancers more generally. In other words, pancreatic cancer seems an especially good target for medical research because answers could make big differences in outcomes and possibly could be adapted for screening techniques and treatment options for other cancers.
In addition, the American Cancer Society reports, “Since 1998, incidence rates of pancreatic cancer have been increasing by 0.8% per year in men and by 1.0% per year in women.” Pancreatic cancer is on the rise, as are death rates from this disease, and research needs to catch up. So tomorrow, we’re walking in PurpleStride Chicago 2012 because scientific research matters can make big differences in our health and quality of life.
On This Date: Marlin Perkins March 28, 2012
Posted by Lofty Ambitions in Science.Tags: Biology, Movies & TV
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When we were just little kids, Sunday night meant kids television: The Wonderful World of Disney and, before it, Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom. We’d rush through dinner in anticipation of flying over a herd of antelope or sneaking up on a tiger, all before discovering that Kurt Russell was the strongest man in the world and an absent-minded professor had invented flubber.
Today is the anniversary of the birth of Marlin Perkins, host of Wild Kingdom. He was born in Carthage, Missouri, in 1905, and his first zoo job was as a groundskeeper at the St. Louis Zoological Park, for which he was paid $3.75 per week in 1926. He ran Lincoln Park Zoo in Chicago for eighteen years before returning as Director to the St. Louis Zoo.
While at the Lincoln Park Zoo, the Chicago area’s smaller, urban zoo, Perkins developed a television show called Zoo Parade. This show featured Perkins interacting with the zoo’s animals, just as Jim Fowler and Joan Embery later did on The Tonight Show. Chicago is no stranger to television production, from Kukla, Fran and Ollie to Oprah, and this locally based series made both the zoo and Perkins well known. We are no strangers to Chicago, and Lincoln Park Zoo, which has free admission and is open every day, was Anna’s childhood zoo. In fact, her poem “At the Sea Lion Pool” appears in the new anthology City of the Big Shoulders. All photos in this post were taken at Lincoln Park Zoo in 2010.
While many viewers of Wild Kingdom mistakenly remember Perkins being bitten by a poisonous snake on camera, the real story stems from Zoo Parade, when Perkins was bitten by a rattlesnake during rehearsal. But the event wasn’t mentioned in the episode. That said, Perkins didn’t mind non-venomous snakes taking a chomp, if only to prove to Wild Kingdom viewers how harmless most snakes are.
Jim Fowler, the zoo director who had monkeys hugging Johnny Carson, got his start as Marlin Perkins’ sidekick on Wild Kingdom. Jim, in fact, is remembered fondly for doing much of the hard work, while Perkins narrated calmly. Eventually, in 1985, Perkins retired, and Jim hosted the show himself. Perkins died of cancer a year later.
As kids, we didn’t realize that most of the episodes we saw were reruns, though new episodes were filmed through 1987. We wouldn’t have cared anyway. Mister Rogers, I Dream of Jeannie, and Star Trek were reruns too. It’s not as if we thought Perkins and Fowler were running away from a lumbering bull seal or that a mother elephant was charging Jim’s jeep at that very moment.
Wild Kingdom has been criticized, of course, for the way it created neat thirty-minute stories and for the human-centered way it talked about animals. Admittedly, the show was filmed and edited to provide viewers like us with some Sunday evening drama. But as opposed to much of today’s reality television, Wild Kingdom claimed that nothing was staged to tell a preconceived story and that they didn’t do things that would put animals in danger. That’s a slippery argument, of course, because driving a jeep toward a mother elephant or lassoing an alligator for relocation could be considered staging, and, to anthropomorphize for a second, that alligator might have defined harm differently. But for the 1970s, Wild Kingdom was relatively progressive in its portrayal of and interaction with animals in the their natural habitats.
Now, the show seems dated. In the episode “Lion Country” (see the video below), we may question the opening sequence that ends with a lion standing over a zebra carcass, a bloody chunk eaten from the prey’s buttocks. Was that really what parents wanted their little tykes to see before the magical stories of Disney? For its time, Wild Kingdom was pretty honest about the ups and downs of life as we—animals—know it.
We may question the next segment of “Lion Country” too, as we spend some time with Marlin Perkins in his office for a brief background lecture on lions. Perkins holds W. K., the well-dressed, affectionate chimp named after the show’s title. On Perkins’ desk, Lester, a young lion, is snacking on some ground meat. W. K. pats Lester on the head. It’s a cheesy, everyone-gets-along if we all play by the rules situation.
Perkins’ lecture, though, goes on to talk about how a young lion must learn to be king of the jungle, that he’s not born with the skills and behaviors he will need to survive as a lion. While an oversimplified explanation of the importance of nurture (but at least posed in addition to, not versus, nature), where else on television was an American kid in the the early 1970s going to see images of Africa or hear about how animals learn? Perkins goes on to talk about hunting as an art and about lions having their own culture, though he doesn’t use the word culture. (For a related post on animals and empathy, click HERE.) Is he anthropomorphizing, or presaging current investigation into animal intelligence?
UFO March 21, 2012
Posted by Lofty Ambitions in Science, Space Exploration.Tags: Movies & TV
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In early February, we had a writing residency at Ragdale (see posts about that HERE and HERE). While there, we began in earnest the process of pulling together the material for a book about our year of following the end of Shuttle. In trying to conjure a context for our shared interest in the space age, we kept going back to the childhoods that forged our interest. The childhood memories that we reflected upon were as likely to be cultural touchstones as they were NASA’s scientific and technical achievements. Chatting and writing about these themes reminded us of a show that Doug watched in his childhood and that we had watched together in 2005: UFO.
UFO was a late-1960s British television show created by Gerry and Sylvia Anderson, a married couple who shared their working lives, which sounds familiar to us. Prior to UFO, the Andersons teamed up on The Thunderbirds (1965), a show that used their supermarionation technique. After UFO, the Andersons developed another space-themed television show, Space 1999, which featured husband-and wife-team Martin Landau and Barbara Bain in the lead roles.
Doug’s childhood memories of the show are of something scary and slightly illicit. He had to sneak around the house, watching the show in the dark and with the sound on low to avoid waking his parents. Unwittingly, he created the perfect viewing environment, a combination of unease and foreboding, for a show about an ongoing threat to the earth in the form of a piecemeal alien invasion. In an early episode, a dying alien is recovered from a crashed UFO (consistently pronounced as a two-syllable word in the series: You-Pho). After the alien expires and is autopsied, it’s revealed that the alien contained transplanted Earth human organs in its body. And thus, the series conceit is established: the aliens are coming to earth to harvest our organs.
Week after week, alien UFO’s emanating from an unknown origin planet attempt to make their way to earth singly or in small groups (usually of three). In order to do so, they must run the SHADO (Supreme Headquarters Alien Defense Organization) gauntlet: a trio of space interceptors that are launched from the uber-secret Moonbase complex, and a jet fighter called Sky One that is launched from underneath the ocean where it normally cruises affixed to the front of a submarine, SkyDiver. It was the 1960s, when anything was possible. It was the 1960s’ version of 1980. The show’s other conceit is that all SHADO’s activities are concealed by using a movie studio as the cover story for the headquarters.
The show is moody, eerie, and dark. The main character, SHADO Commander Ed Straker, is as unlikable a hero as one can imagine for television. He runs his SHADO fiefdom with a ruthless disregard for his compatriots—there’s an undeclared war going on, after all. Worse, save for two episodes, one about his son and the other about the dismantling of his marriage, he’s completely emotionally flat—seemingly on purpose. Even in those two aforementioned episodes, Straker always chooses SHADO over his personal ties.
Balancing out some of the show’s harder edges are its mod, psychedelic 1960s British vibe. The show’s costuming includes pretty standard sixties iconic fashion, such as Nehru jackets for the male leads and short skirts or clingy jumpsuits for the women, but the vibe really hits the mark in the secondary locations. At the Moonbase complex, most of the clothing is shiny and silver, and the women wear shiny purple wigs (which are not donned when the same characters appear on Earth). The women’s uniforms, looking something like braided metallic track suits, thoughtfully and quickly change into a sleeveless, short skirt number (and viewers see the characters change clothes). On the submarine SkyDiver, men and women both get see-through mesh shirts.
The whole show has a glam-and-gadgets James Bond feel, and there’s a reason for that: many of the actors and several props and stages were used for Bond films. We’re sure that this list is incomplete, but here’s a quick list of the actors who appeared in both UFO and a Bond film: Ed Bishop (You Only Live Twice and Diamonds Are Forever), Michael Billington (The Spy Who Loved Me, and he tested for the role of James Bond more than any other actor), Lois Maxwell (Moneypenny!), Vladek Sheybal (From Russia with Love), Steven Berkoff (Octopussy), Anoushka Hempel (On Her Majesty’s Secret Service), and Shane Rimmer (The Spy Who Loved Me, Diamonds Are Forever, and You Only Live Twice).
That’s not to say that the show avoided hard-hitting issues and make-you-think tropes. The episode “Close Up” (a pun for the movie-studio cover story) involves a space telescope designed to follow a UFO back toward the aliens’ home planet. When the telescope sends images back, everyone realizes that they have no calculations of distance or scale and that a planet—or in the demonstration the scientist gives Straker, a woman’s leg—looks completely different and possibly unrecognizable from different distances. Measurement and scale is a topic we discussed at Lofty Ambitions HERE.
We’re in the midst of re-watching the entire UFO catalog, just one season, but back when a season consisted of 26 captivating episodes. Here’s the opening sequence:
GRAIL: Another Lofty Quest (Part 5) September 9, 2011
Posted by Lofty Ambitions in Space Exploration.Tags: Apollo, GRAIL: Another Lofty Quest, GRAILTweetup, Movies & TV, Museums & Archives, Space Shuttle
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One reason we continue to return to Florida’s Space Coast, whenever work schedules and finances allow, is that each trip is an opportunity to discover something that we haven’t seen before. Today’s GRAIL scrub gave rise to yet another unexpected chain of events that ultimately led Doug to the U.S. Space Walk of Fame Museum (SWOF, because who doesn’t want to acronymize things related to NASA?).
[If you want to catch up with Parts 1-4 in "GRAIL: Another Lofty Quest" before you go on, click HERE.]
Located in downtown Titusville, just a few hundred feet from the water’s edge, SWOF is housed in an unassuming downtown storefront. During Doug’s visit, museum volunteers Betty Conant and Mike Vesey (pronounced like easy) were engaging and enthusiastic about their museum. SWOF previously had been located in the Sear’s Mall on Route 1, but, as Mike Vesey related to me, the rent kept going up and up, and ultimately the museum was forced to relocate. The move was also a downsizing, and parts of the collection are now kept in storage.
And what a collection it is. The bric-a-brac display has the feeling of a small, Midwestern county historical society. Just imagine the kind of museum that one could create if your county’s history encompassed the whole of the United States’ role in space exploration. This gives a rough idea of the scope and content of the museum’s collection.
SWOF is laid out by rough eras: Mercury (with a smattering of Gemini), Apollo, and Shuttle. Two wildcard collections are included: a reconstituted Atlas launch control room and a room that includes fire-and-rescue team materials and items related to Russia’s space programs.
Some rooms contain glass-covered shelving cases with regalia such as commendation plaques, manuals of various types (control room launch procedures, systems, etc.), safety hard hats with the wearer’s names, mission patches, and signed photographs. A wonderful example of the bric-a-brac in the Mercury room is the book Exploring Space with a Camera.
Mercury Hatch
Tucked away in another corner of the Mercury room is one of the museum’s more unusual items: a hatch from an actual Mercury capsule. But this isn’t just any old spacecraft hatch (as if that could ever be true anyway). This hatch is the door from Mercury capsule #4, the first to attempt to fly. Mercury Atlas 1 was launched from the Cape on July 29, 1960. Fifty-eight seconds after launch, traveling at a speed of 1700 mph, a structural failure in the Atlas rocket brought the launch to an ignominious end. The museum’s hatch is appropriately charred and battered, and, as the display script points out, the titanium (an especially tough metal) looks to be torn “like tissue paper.” The display script also tells one of those tales of loss and discovery (much like the Los Alamos limousine we discuss in our “In the Footsteps” series), the sort of tale we have started to expect and yet which continues to amaze us. The museum’s spacecraft hatch was found in a scrap yard by an artist looking for materials to incorporate into his work. In a true expression of serendipity, the artist, Gene Hummel, also happened to be a mechanical engineer for McDonnell-Douglas. And he happened to have worked on the Atlas-Mercury program. And he was there for the day of the ill-fated launch; it was his first month on the job at the Cape. So one of the few people who could identify the meaning of this particular piece of scrap found it.
The museum also contains the reconstituted control consoles from Atlas Launch Complex 36 (pads 36A & 36B). Mike Vesey pointed out that NASA had donated the consoles directly to SWOF, and, although their computational innards were removed, volunteers rewired the switches and lights so that kids could enjoy playing with them. Doug would argue that the setup isn’t only suited for kids, because, after all, what space nerd doesn’t enjoy flipping switches, watching flickering lights in response, and falling into a good daydream.
Among the high points displayed in the Fire-and-Rescue and Russian materials room are the following: a photo of a rescue worker, standing before a Saturn V on a launch pad, clad in his own silvery, spacesuit like garments; a poster of the Lockheed-Martin Family of Launch Vehicles, which contains photos of the Russian Proton launch vehicles; and finally, an item that surreally (that’s our word for the week) blends the room’s two disparate themes, a Russian children’s book about firefirefighters. Like the rug in Lebowski‘s living room, the children’s book “really tied the room together.”
The artifacts in the Apollo room were more astronaut focused than the other collection areas. On the walls hang two training life-support system backpacks and a spacesuit. Just beneath the spacesuit is a display that, in part, answers one of the more common questions asked in the early days of space exploration: how do astronauts go to the bathroom in outer space? As in The Graduate, the answer to the big questions is “plastics.” The complete answer is plastic bags. And they’re here on display.
The room dedicated to Shuttle contains some of the more complete and intricate engineering models in the museum’s collection. On display are a complete Launch Complex 39 crawler, launching pad, rotating service structure (RSS), and shuttle stack. Continuing the theme set up by the Launch Complex 39 models, nearby are pieces of the real thing: mounts that the shuttle assemblage used to rest upon; restraining bolts, thick as an arm, that hold the solid rocket boosters onto the pad; and a 220-lb slice from the crawler’s metal track, or shoe (the entire shoe has approximately the same mass as a Mustang GT, 3500lbs).
Tomorrow, another attempt at launching GRAIL. Doug will rise at 5:00a.m., reconnoiter with the remaining GRAIL Tweetup attendees at the buses at 6:00a.m., and head over to KARS park to witness the launch. The weather is trending better. There exist two “instantaneous” launch windows tomorrow morning, meaning that each opportunity lasts for just a second. Not just a second as in hold on a minute, but exactly 1/60 of a minute. When it comes to this GRAIL launch, just a second means maybe tomorrow.
GRAIL: Another Lofty Quest (Part 1) September 4, 2011
Posted by Lofty Ambitions in Collaboration, Science, Space Exploration.Tags: Books, Cognitive Science, GRAIL: Another Lofty Quest, GRAILTweetup, Movies & TV, Physics
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In the 1975 film Monty Python and the Holy Grail, the bridgekeeper asks three questions, much like the security questions now used for credit card accounts. What is your name? Lofty Ambitions. What is your quest? GRAIL. What is your favorite colour? According to Crayola, America’s favorite color is blue. We suppose this bridgekeeper’s question calls for a separate post on color and the light spectrum.
In just a few days, Doug will head off to an event that feels like a mixture of old and new, familiar and strange, routine and unexpected. He’ll return to NASA’s Kennedy Space Center for another lofty quest: GRAIL, or the Gravity Recovery and Interior Laboratory. The two GRAIL spacecraft, identical twins, are scheduled to launch on Thursday, September 8, and Doug is covering the days surrounding the launch as part of the GRAIL Tweetup.
FOLLOW DOUG’S TWITTER FEED: http://twitter.com/#!/dougdechow
In addition to tagging this series with its title, we’ll also use the tag GRAILTweetup to make it easier to follow on Twitter.
We didn’t expect to head back to the Space Coast. At least, we didn’t expect to return this year, soon after witnessing the last-ever space shuttle launch. We are somewhat stunned that NASA finds itself unable to launch human beings into space and remains unprepared to articulate a consistent, achievable future for human space exploration. Our rational, logical selves understand how much simpler and more effective lifeless, robotic space probes are. The Voyager twins may be among humankind’s greatest achievements, whizzing out of the earth’s ecliptic plane and on to whatever cold, dark fate awaits them. They have traveled farther from the sun than Pluto, which was classified as a planet when they left Earth in 1977. But few people take notice of them. Few will mourn the passing of lifeless, robotic space probes, no matter their accomplishments.
We owe a lot to NASA. Maybe that’s why our thoughts about the space program are not always completely rational and logical. Doug’s first memory in and of life is watching Apollo on television as a tyke. His first job out of college was as an abstractor and indexer at NASA’s Center for AeroSpace Information, a job that helped keep us fed, clothed, and adequately lodged for three of the most invigorating years of our lives together. Doug’s job at NASA coincided with us striking out alone together, far from our families and homes and into the cultural-political fray that is the metropolitan D.C. area.
Over the past whirlwind year, NASA employees have guided us to understand and interact with the world in new ways. News Center flacks like Allard Beutel, security guards like Omar Izquierdo, volunteers like Matthew Baker, and engineers like Stephanie Stilson (see our interview with Stilson HERE) have been some of the most competent and conscientious professionals with which we’ve ever dealt. They’ve helped us become more eager journalists (two posts on that subject are HERE and HERE), more informed bloggers, and more interesting people.
We’ve traveled enough in the past year that we now think of airport codes—MCO—instead of stopover and destination cities. Three years ago, when we were just settling into our new life in Southern California, if a soothsayer had foretold of our year cycling between SNA and MCO, we might have stared at each other blankly, wondering how and why we’d end up working for The Mouse. After three years, when we mention that we haven’t yet been to either Disney theme park, others stare blankly or get embarrassed for us. Even Mike Coats, the Director of Johnson Space Center, chastised Anna for never having experienced the pixie dust (see that interview HERE). But it hasn’t yet made our list of things to do. It can wait.
Six weeks ago, GRAIL wasn’t on our list of things to do. Then, NASA sent out a call to Twitter users, and Doug was chosen to participate in the meet-and-greet that is the next NASA Tweetup. NASA has become avid about social media. The Tweetup tents for the last three launches were air-conditioned and had separate high-speed wireless that worked better in the hour after launch than that for the press. Two NASA websites won Webby Awards this year, and Astronaut Doug Wheelock won a Shorty Award for an image of the Moon he tweeted. If you don’t follow Astro_Mike, you’re not getting the most space geek out of your social networking. Mike Massimino has more than 1.2 million followers on Twitter.
For a while, people lamented that the rise of video games and personal computers would make us all more isolated from each other. Each of us would be holed up in our offices and our homes, interacting only with an individual machine. While Nicholas Carr in The Shallows and others point to cognitive changes that remain disconcerting, Facebook and Twiiter and all the rest of social media have connected us in ways we couldn’t imagine ten years ago. Social networking allows us to stay in touch with friends we haven’t seen in years, and it invites people who might otherwise never encounter one another into larger social networks—perhaps not friends in the traditional sense, but far from isolated. Fears that technology would further distance people from each other physically and emotionally seem to have been unfounded.
Plenty of people go about their days without Facebook or Twitter. Some people don’t bother with the internet at all and get along just fine, though they’re missing a chance to read this post. When Anna’s mom invested in an iPad, scrolled through photos right away (this weekend, she’s reliving the national Elvis impersonator semi-finals), played virtual solitaire for hours, and even started sending email messages, we knew her world had changed. NASA is all in too, and space geeks are using Facebook pages, a wiki, Google docs, and a variety of social media to share information about GRAIL instantly. And the virtual interaction supports the in-person gathering, including a barbeque, that will be this coming week’s Tweetup.
This trip to the Space Coast, therefore, will be different because Doug will view the events through the lens of the Tweetup. He’ll be busy looking for Nichelle Nichols and Neil deGrasse Tyson. This trip will also be different because Anna is staying home, working with her graduate and undergraduate students to create together a (private) cross-course blog about poetry. Together, we will negotiate, for the first time, how to co-write posts while separated by 3000 miles. We plan to post every day this week! Check back to see how we manage.
Last Chance to See (Part 16) July 20, 2011
Posted by Lofty Ambitions in Space Exploration.Tags: Last Chance to See, Movies & TV, Space Shuttle
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As we write this post, we remember that on this date in 1969, Apollo 11 landed on the Moon. Today is the anniversary of humankind’s first steps on the lunar surface, when Neil Armstrong stepped off the lunar module at 2:56 UTC (July 21), or 10:56 p.m. EDT today (for our recent post on time, click HERE).
As we post this, we are likely hours away from the symbolic end of the space shuttle program. Atlantis is scheduled to land at Kennedy Space Center at 5:56 a.m. EDT, with another shot about ninety minutes later. By tomorrow evening, the precise anniversary of Armstrong’s small step and humankind’s giant leap, the last functioning space shuttle will be a historical artifact. (For our related post on shuttles as artifacts, click HERE.)
On Monday, we finalized media credentials with Dryden Flight Research Center, in case the space shuttle lands at Edwards Air Force Base here in Southern California. After we moved here three years ago, one of our first trips out of the neighborhood was to see Discovery land. Seeing the last mission conclude here would suit the story we’d like to tell.
Yesterday, the email to the credentialed press made it clear that Kennedy Space Center wants to host the final shuttle party. Edwards AFB isn’t even a back-up landing site tomorrow. If the weather isn’t good in Florida on Thursday, Atlantis will orbit for another day and try again for KSC, though Edwards will be the back-up site for Friday and, if necessary, Saturday.
STS-135 Crew: Chris Ferguson, Rex Walheim, Doug Hurley, Sandy Magnus
The weather on the Space Coast looks good—improving, the email said—for tomorrow’s landing. (for our most recent discussion of weather, click HERE.) NASA has a slew of events scheduled after the landing, with Charlie Bolden, NASA’s Administrator, and STS-135 Commander Chris Ferguson scheduled to give remarks at the runway at 7:45 a.m. Following that, there’s a full day of press briefings, comments from administrators and crew, photo opportunities with Atlantis outside the Orbiter Processing Facility, and employee appreciation all around. Emotions will be reeling, adrenaline will keep journalists on the story for hours, and everyone will draw this landing out as long as they can before leaving KSC.
Meanwhile, we’ll be in California, three hours behind and thousands of miles away. We may spend a good portion of our usual sleep time watching NASA-TV. That’s okay. We’ve been part of the media fanfare before. Now, it may well be time for us to contemplate the end of the space shuttle program from some distance. As with the frenzy at KSC tomorrow, we’ll draw out our “Last Chance to See” series a bit longer, too, unable to stop before we’ve seen the landing and articulated some larger meaning. Stick with us as we work our way through just a little more.
Three Mile Island Anniversary March 28, 2011
Posted by Lofty Ambitions in Science.Tags: Movies & TV, Nuclear Weapons, Physics, Radioactivity
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This weekend, we were working on our regular post for Wednesday about radioactivity and how we measure it, because we’re trying to make sense, in small ways, of the nuclear accident currently unfolding in Japan. Suddenly, we remembered that, on March 28, 1979, a valve stuck at Three Mile Island. At that time, we were teenagers not yet very aware of the world’s dangers. This was before the twenty-hour news cycle (which would feel its birth pangs later that year with the Iran hostage crisis), when we spent afternoons listening to the Bee Gees, Rod Stewart, and The Knack.
President Jimmy Carter leaving Three Mile Island on April 1, 1979
The accident at Three Mile Island began with a minor problem in a secondary system, but the chain of events continued, as they so often do. A relief valve stuck open in the primary system, and some coolant from the nuclear reactor escaped. That wasn’t good, but it’s what happened next that really accelerated the problem. An engineer in the control room misunderstood what one of the indicators was telling him. An indicator light showed that electric power was not operating the valve, but they interpreted that to mean the valve was closed, not requiring power. If the valve was closed, the coolant level had risen, so they released some steam, further lowering the coolant level. The core was being exposed.
Years later, in 1985, a television camera finally physically accessed the core (read more at National Museum of American History), and we understood that it had partially melted down. The cladding (the first level of uranium containment) on most of the fuel rods had failed, allowing the products that result from fission in the core to be released into the cooling water surrounding the rods. Tons of melted uranium flowed to the bottom of the reactor vessel (the second layer of containment).
TMI-2 Schematic
Less than two weeks before Three Mile Island, The China Syndrome hit the theaters. Anna, already a fan of Michael Douglas from The Streets of San Francisco, became an even bigger fan of Jack Lemmon, who played Jack Godell, the shift supervisor at the fictional nuclear power plant. During what seems to be a relatively routine SCRAM, or shutdown, Godell discovers that a gauge has given the operators the wrong information. He taps the indicator with his pen, and it unsticks. They thought the water level in the reactor core was too high and released some, but the gauge was wrong and the release has left the water level too low. When the water level cooling the fuel rods gets too low, the rods can overheat. Moviegoers understood the Three Mile Island scenario because The China Syndrome had shown us something similar.
During the incident in the film, Godell feels an unusual vibration that tells him something bigger than a stuck indicator is amiss, and it turns out to be falsified x-rays of pipe welds. When he examines one of the suspicious water pumps himself, he discovers radioactive material has leaked. We won’t spoil the rest of the story, but suffice it to say that the power company wants to hush things up.
In the Three Mile Island accident, radioactive coolant escaped to an auxiliary building, outside the official containment area. And radioactive steam was vented directly into the atmosphere. Still, several studies found no contamination in the area’s water and soil and determined that the releases didn’t raise radioactivity levels enough outside the containment area to cause any additional cancer deaths. The nuclear accident at Three Mile Island remains the worst in United States history, and the cleanup didn’t officially end until 1993.
Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant (National Land Image Information Color Aerial Photograph)
The nuclear accident at Fukushima Daiichi in Japan seems worse than Three Mile Island, though each of the three damaged reactors (of six reactors at the plant) have been individually rated, like Three Mile Island’s single reactor accident, as a 5 on the International Nuclear Events Scale. Preventing explosions (and the widespread dispersal of radioactive contaminants) and preventing acute radiation sickness (and the near-term deaths that result) are crucial in limiting the severity of the accident.
In Japan, the fission products have contaminated water that is now in some of the plant’s basements and tunnels. Contaminated water has made its way the short distance from the nuclear plant’s buildings to the sea. Traces of radioactive iodine and cesium have been noted in tap water and vegetables even farther away. As we prepare to post this piece, the news reports that trace amounts of plutonium—the most toxic substance that might be released in a nuclear accident—have been found outside the nuclear plant itself. While some plutonium might be left from weapons testing in years gone by, at least two of the samples are believed to be from the one nuclear reactor at the plant that uses both plutonium and uranium as fuel.
On Wednesday, we’ll pick up this conversation again, as we’d planned, with a discussion of how we measure and talk about radiation.
Happy 80th Birthday Leonard Nimoy and William Shatner March 23, 2011
Posted by Lofty Ambitions in Space Exploration.Tags: Apollo, Movies & TV
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Space Shuttle Enterprise with Star Trek Cast
Eighty years ago this week, on March 22nd and 26th respectively, William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy entered this world in near simultaneity. Almost forty years later, starting in 1966, their lives became intertwined with the cultural phenomenon that is Star Trek. In the forty-plus years since the first airing of Star Trek on September 8, 1966, Shatner and Nimoy have variously rejected, embraced, and come to terms with their iconic roles as Captain James Tiberius Kirk and Science Officer Spock.
Leonard Nimoy (Photo by Kelly Walker)
Both men have had notable successes in recent years. Nimoy’s turn as William Bell on Fringe was well received and widely advertised as his swansong. Some have interpreted his exit speech and actions in the season two finale, “Over There,” as an homage to his Needs of the Many speech (see below) in Star Trek 2: The Wrath of Khan. This linkage is no surprise considering the producer of Fringe, J.J. Abrams, also directed the Star Trek franchise reboot. To our way of thinking, Spock’s speech was a more singular moment than Kirk’s equally famous (and more often invoked) “KHAAANNNN!” scream in the same film.
Nonetheless, that moment when Shatner’s Kirk turns the name of his enemy, Khan Noonien Singh, into an execration, well suits the bombastic end of William Shatner’s range as an actor. Shatner later channeled and morphed that same brand of bombast into his role as Boston Legal legend Denny Crane. Shatner’s tenure as the self-eponymous Denny Crane was a scheduled weekly ritual in our home, and Boston Legal was the inspiration for one of our first adventures here in California.
As Boston Legal came to a close, we spent one happy Saturday at David E. Kelly Studios rummaging through clothing worn on that and other DEK shows. Among our purchases was a Screaming Eagle American flag tie that must have been for uber-conservative Denny Crane. Whether or not it was worn by William Shatner is open to debate. But in our family’s lore, we know he wore it, Mary Lee!
As happy as we are for both men’s late career success, it’s the childhood memories of William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy as their alter-egos Kirk and Spock that we cherish. Those memories of the roguish Kirk, the ascetic Spock, Bones, Scotty, and all the rest are now part and parcel of our larger popular culture birthright.
For Doug, the obvious choice for a role model would have seemed to be the all-American, all-Id Kirk. Kirk was even born in Riverside, Iowa, just a stone’s throw (and almost two-hundred years in the future) from Doug’s own Illinois home. What red-blooded, land-locked Midwestern boy wouldn’t dream his way through junior high school science class, transfixed by the possibility of the future version of himself traveling at warp-speed through the cosmos? The fact that Kirk also got most of the ladies didn’t escape Doug’s notice as an adolescent watching the series in syndication.
William Shatner (Photo by Jerry Avenaim)
In fact, the series’ adherence to a philosophy of cosmic pluralism gave Kirk the opportunity to canoodle with females born on different planets (Miramanee in “The Paradise Syndrome” and Shahna in “The Gamesters of Triskelion”), in different timestreams (Edith Keeler in “The City on the Edge of Forever”), and from different species (Marta in “Whom Gods Destroy”). Kirk’s amorous activities were wide and varied enough to also include non-carbon-based lifeforms such as androids (Andrea in “What Are Little Girls Made Of?”). Who knows how to classify the body-invading entity Thalassa (“Return to Tomorrow”), but the final analysis suggests that the man’s tastes were profoundly catholic.
That said, the green that most captured Doug’s attention wasn’t the skin of the Orion women, but the color of Spock’s copper-tinged blood and all of the strength (mental and physical) and perfection of character that it connoted. Spock’s implacable appeals to rationality and logic may have had a more explicit moral undercurrent in the turbulent sixties, but they also spoke directly to the chaos that is a teenager’s worldview. Then as now, faith in science offered both a worldview and a hope for a better future.
The differences between the Kirk and Spock characters were never more clearly on display than in those episodes that called for the characters to become somehow alternate, opposite versions of themselves. This had an unanticipated effect in the case of Kirk, for when Kirk’s darker-side was trotted out in the alternate-universe episode, “Mirror, Mirror,” it took no real imagination or effort to measure the moral distance between the two Kirks. However, when Spock cut loose—such as “This Side of Paradise,” where Spock fell in love—it got your attention, peaking at the episode’s wrenching end when Spock reveals that, for the first time, he was happy.
In the end, though, what’s most memorable about Kirk and Spock isn’t their differences, but the sense of wholeness—of complementarity—in their long-lived friendship: Spock’s calm, cool yin harmonizing Kirk’s incandescent yang. As friends, the two are greater than the sum of their parts. It’s odd that this blending has never played out as well in the show’s fervent fan base.
We probably risk a huge chink in our nerd-core armor by admitting that we never got the Trekkies vs. Trekkers thing and would have to go to Wikipedia to get a sense of who is who. Debating the merits of Kirk vs. Picard never held much currency for us either; it was apples and oranges, Jean-Luc Picard being an avuncular teacher, not a warrior king. One even wonders if the creators of Star Trek: The Next Generation consciously sought to distribute Spock’s defining characteristics over two characters: Riker playing the role of the Captain’s trusted confidant and Data absorbing the cold, calculating mental space of Spock’s enormous brain (add in Deanna Troi’s psychic bent as analogous to Spock’s Vulcan mind-melding).
Michael Collins, Apollo 11
What an odd sequence of circumstances in the universe must have conspired resulting with these two men—Leonard Nimoy and William Shatner—being born four days apart. Or perhaps not so odd after all, as original Apollo 11 moonman Michael Collins noted in the preface to the 2009 edition of his book Carrying the Fire: “On my tombstone should be inscribed LUCKY because that is the overriding feeling that I have today. Neil Armstrong was born in 1930, Buzz Aldrin in 1930, Mike Collins in 1930. We came around at exactly the right time.”
Collins’s statement could apply equally well in the in the case of Leonard Nimoy and William Shatner. Not only did they luckily come into this world at the right time, to meet up later in what would become Star Trek, during the nation’s race to the Moon. Shatner also reprised his astronaut role by waking up the crew of Discovery. That they were born the same week allows us, too, to write a single post that wishes them both a happy 80th birthday, and many more.
