Happy seventy-fifth birthday!
Category Archives: Space History
Half A Century Of Americans In Orbit
Started today, on February 20th, 1962. Amy Teitel has the story (though the URL is wrong — it’s fifty, not sixty years), and Clark Lindsey has some other links. I’ve written a piece that I hope will go up at PJMedia, but if not, I’ll post it here later.
[Late morning update]
My piece is up now.
Gerry O’Neill
Today would have been his eighty-fifth birthday. Many of his dreams may have been unrealistic, in retrospect (they were based on the assumption that the Shuttle really would reduce the cost of space access, among other things), but he inspired, and reinspired a generation jaded by the letdown of Apollo.
On a related note, Alexis Madrigal has an interesting bit of space (and California) history, over at the Atlantic.
The Apollo Fire
It’s been forty-five years since Ed White, Roger Chaffee and gus Grissom were horribly incinerated on the launch pad, in a ground test. Clara Moskowitz has the story of the changes to the program that ensued as a result. And tomorrow will be the twenty-sixth anniversary of the loss of the Challenger. Where has the time gone?
[Update late morning]
More from Amy Teitel. Note that for both these young women, this is history — it happened before they were born.
NASA’s “Day Of Remembrance”
OK, so the anniversary (forty-fifth) of the Apollo I fire is tomorrow, the twenty-sixth Challenger anniversary is Saturday, and Wednesday is the ninth anniversary of the Columbia loss. So why commemorate today?
To Boldly Go
…where no wives or kids can follow. Another piece from the current issue of Reason, by Nick Gillespie.
Another December 7th Anniversary
Thirty-nine years ago today, the crew of the last mission to the moon took this picture in their rear-view mirror.
Phobos-Grunt
What a name. Anyway, I have an article about it up over at Popular Mechanics.
[Update a while later]
Here’s some more info. According to that piece, it’s dropping in altitude a little over a mile per orbit, but that will accelerate as it gets lower in the coming weeks, if they can’t get it on its way.
[Update a few minutes later]
Emily Lakdawalla has the latest. It’s not looking good, according to sources in Russia.
Looking For Snoopy
The search is on:
In a celestial version of finding a needle in a haystack, Howes and his team are about to embark on the seemingly impossible: finding Snoopy!
After consulting members of NASAs Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the Faulkes Telescope team, who are working with the Space Exploration Engineering Corp and astronomers from the Remanzacco Observatory in Italy as well as schools across the UK, the team are under no illusion of how difficult the task will be as Paul Roche, Director of the Faulkes Telescope Project states: “To paraphrase President Kennedy, we are trying these things ‘not because they are easy but because they are hard’ — this will be a real test for the hardware and the people involved.”
The challenges facing the team are enormous, a fact that isn’t lost on Howes. “The key problem which we are taking on is a lack of solid orbital data since 1969,” he told Discovery News. “We’ve enlisted the help of the Space Exploration Engineering Corp who have calculated orbits for Apollo 13 and working closely with people who were on the Apollo mission team in the era will help us identify search coordinates.”
Here’s an interesting project. Have Paul Allen or someone put up a prize to not just find it, but to retrieve it, and put it on the lunar surface as part of the lunar Apollo historical sites. It’s the kind of thing we’d do if we were really a space-faring nation. And we will never do it with anything like an SLS.
Just How Important Is Space Policy?
Traditionally, though it’s not a written rule, vice presidents have been in charge of space policy, though some are more so than others. Johnson was very much so, Agnew was somewhat, Ford and Rockefeller not much, Mondale tried to kill the Shuttle and succeeded in reducing the fleet size, GHW Bush wasn’t particularly involved as far as I recall, but Quayle was considerably, as was Gore. Sean O’Keefe was supposedly a friend of Dick Cheney’s, being groomed for bigger things when he was tapped as NASA administrator.
So I was over at Barnes & Noble, and picked up a copy of Cheney’s new book, and turned to the index. Mentions of O’Keefe? None. Mentions of the moon? None. Mentions of the Vision for Space Exploration? None. Mentions of NASA? None.
Come to think of it, I didn’t do a search for “Shuttle” or “Columbia,” but it’s hard to see how they would have been mentioned without mentioning NASA or O’Keefe. Basically, it wasn’t important enough to him to discuss it in a several-hundred-page book.
I would also note that, thankfully, Joe Biden doesn’t seem to be involved with space policy.