Category Archives: human spaceflight

Return of the droid

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The unpiloted ISS Progress 45 supply vehicle departs from the International Space Station at 5:10 p.m. (EST) on Jan. 23, 2012. Filled with trash and discarded items, Progress 45 was later deorbited, subsequently burning up in Earth’s atmosphere. The departure of Progress 45 clears the way for the next unpiloted supply ship, Progress 46, which is set to launch at 6:06 p.m. (EST) on Jan. 25 (5:06 a.m. Baikonur time Jan. 26) from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan bringing 2.9 tons of food, fuel and supplies for the residents of the space station. … (SpaceRef)


Whistelblower dies

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His reckless bosses sent seven people into their deaths. His “friends” and “colleagues” blamed him for all what went wrong with them afterwards.

Six months before the space shuttle Challenger exploded over Florida on Jan. 28, 1986, Roger Boisjoly wrote a portentous memo. He warned that if the weather was too cold, seals connecting sections of the shuttle’s huge rocket boosters could fail.

“The result could be a catastrophe of the highest order, loss of human life,” he wrote.

The memo was meant to jolt Morton Thiokol, the company that made the boosters and employed Mr. Boisjoly. In July 1985, a task force had been formed, partly on Mr. Boisjoly’s recommendation, to examine the effect of cold on the boosters. The effort, however, had become mired in paperwork, procurement delays and a rush to launch the shuttle, according to later investigations.

Meanwhile, his apprehensions only grew. The night before the Challenger’s liftoff, the temperature dipped below freezing. Unusual for Florida, the cold was unprecedented for a shuttle launching, and it prompted Mr. Boisjoly and other engineers to plead that the flight be postponed. Their bosses, under pressure from NASA, rejected the advice.

The shuttle exploded 73 seconds after launching, killing its seven crew members, including Christa McAuliffe, a high school teacher from Concord, N.H.

Mr. Boisjoly’s memo was soon made public. He became widely known as a whistle-blower in a federal investigation of the disaster. And though he was hailed for his action by many, he was also made to suffer for it. … (New York Times)

Look out for that boulder

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I guess I’ll never be able to walk on the Moon, but at least I can look at pictures. Not only from astronauts on the Moon, but from above as well. Here’s a picture from Apollo 17, and from above – LROC of course.

During their third and final EVA, the last walk the Moon on December 13, 1972, Cernan and Schmitt had the opportunity to sample “Tracy’s Rock,” or ‘Split Rock’, a hefty boulder that had, at some point in the relatively recent past, rolled down the south-facing wall of North Massif where it partly broke apart near the valley floor. It offered an opportunity to analyze and sample part of the high mountains imaged almost four decades later from LRO. … (Lunar Pioneer)

To the Stars – the sequel

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A project to pave the way for humanity’s journey to the stars will be helmed by a former astronaut, Mae Jemison, already a pioneer in her own right. She will lead DARPA’s 100-Year Starship project, the BBC says, citing DARPA documents.

Jemison, the first black woman in space, was one of scores of people to submit proposals for DARPA’s ambitious project. It doesn’t seek to build an actual starship per se but rather a program that can last 100 years, and might one day result in one. As DARPA told us last summer, it’s more of a thought experiment than a construction project. The idea itself sparked some other pretty audacious proposals, including one by J. Craig Venter to send human genomes toward the stars and reconstruct them upon arrival. … (POPSci)

To the stars

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“Humanity’s adventurous, stubborn, mad and glorious aspiration to reach the stars” is the subject of Physics World’s lead feature in January.

Sidney Perkowitz, Candler Professor of Physics Emeritus at Emory University, Atlanta, US, reports from the 100 Year Starship Study (100YSS) conference and discusses the challenges that interstellar travel presents.

With current propulsion technology only able to move spacecraft at 0.005% of the speed of light, a one-way trip to the star system nearest our Sun, Alpha Centauri, would take 80,000 years to travel the four light-years to our nearest stellar neighbours. … (IOP)

Apollo 17 from above

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Since the latest release of Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera (LROC) images on December 15 we’ve been able to get a better idea of what flight directors were up to last August. As advertised, the record-breaking spacecraft’s roughly 50 kilometer high circular polar orbit was briefly lowered to allow a narrow window for very low altitude photography.  The lowest perigee (or perilune) appears to have been engineered into orbits 9838 through 9973, between August 10 and August 21, 2011. At least that’s the period where LRO Narrow Angle Camera (NAC) frames from last summer are available at resolutions higher than 40 centimeters per pixel. … (Lunar Pioneer)