Apollo 8 50th Anniversary

Fifty years ago today the Apollo 8 mission was launched just four days before Christmas.

1968 had been a rough, tumultuous year.  We'd lost the Rev Dr.Martin Luther King, Jr and Sen. Robert F. Kennedy to assassins bullets.  Riots had broken out in several US cities.  Czechoslovakia got invaded by the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact to put an end to the Prague Spring.
The Vietnam War was raging, and the protests against it were ramping up.  Nixon was now the president-elect after LBJ declined to run for another term.

Despite all the national and international drama, NASA was still working to make President Kennedy's challenge to the country to land a man on the moon and return him safely to Earth before the end of the decade happen.

And this mission was critical to making the other goal happen with the clock inexorably ticking toward the end of the 1960's.

After launching on December 20 with astronauts Frank Borman, Jim Lovell and William Anders onboard   was one packed with historical firsts.   The first to leave Earth and set out for another celestial body.  Most importantly in that Cold War space race period, the first manned mission to orbit the moon. 

It arrived at the moon to start its ten orbits of the moon on Christmas Eve.   And then the got the sight and the photo of a lifetime, the famous shot of Earth rising above the moon.

They also sent a message from lunar orbit to the people back on Earth breathlessly watching the mission.



Seven months later, the mission that President Kennedy had set the nation on course to complete would be accomplished with Apollo 11 landing on the moon that July.

Falcon Heavy Test Launch Successful

Space X has been busy since 2010 trying to not only develop a reusable rocket called the Falcon 9, but a heavy launch vehicle for commercial space purposes.   They also want it to be able to be used for manned and military launch missions, to launch commercial and military satellites, space probes and supply missions for the International Space Station.

The US hasn't had a space vehicle of its own since the retirement of the space shuttles in 2011, and a super heavy lift rocket since the Saturn V was retired in 1973.  NASA's successor to the Saturn V called the Space Launch System or SLS is under development .

That's why the Elon Musk financed Falcon Heavy project has had people's attention.  It has also had the attention of NASA, the military, international space agencies and other commercial space rivals.,
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The Space X Falcon Heavy is the world largest rocket, hence the delays in its development to srt out engineering challenges and aerodynamic problems that have cropped up.

Yesterday the Falcon Heavy test flight, carrying Elon's Musk's Tesla roadster and a mannequin in the drivers seat as a payload, successfully launched from the historic Pad 39A from which the Apollo 11 mission was launched

   

The only glitches in th launch were the reusable center tank not landing on the drone ship and the cruising burn lasting a little longer than planned and putting the rocket on a trajectory toward the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter.

But for the most part the lest launch was a success.    W'll have to see what happens next. 
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Total Solar Eclipse Today

I remember the 1970 total solar eclipse that ran up the East Coast of the United States and got a mention in Carly Simon's hit song You're So Vain.   It was the last total solar eclipse we experienced in the continental United States until this one that is happening today.

If you live in the 70 mile wide path of totality that will stretch from Salem, Oregon to Charleston, South Carolina, you're going to get the celestial skywatching treat of seeing a total solar eclipse.

Assuming your local weather cooperates.

Those of us in Houston will only get a partial solar eclipse that covers about 67% of the Sun that will start around 11:46 AM CDT and end around 2:45 PM CDT.

But in any case, whether it is the total or partial, be advised not to look directly at it/   You can go to you local planetarium to see it or check out this webstream broadcast of it on NASA's website.

The ISS Will Finally Get A Black Astronaut On It!

NASA has launched 14 African Americans into space through it history.   Thanks to the movie Hidden Figures, we now know that African-American women played a prominent role in America's first manned space mission.

But NASA hasn't sent an African American astronaut to the International Space Station,  and that is thankfully about to change.

On Wednesday NASA announced that Dr. Jeanette J. Epps would become the first African American to board and stay on the ISS.   She will join fellow astronaut Andrew Feustel as a flight engineer on Expedition 56 to the ISS that will launch in May 2018 ,and will stay onboard for Expedition 57

Epps has a PhD in aerospace engineering, and has been a NASA astronaut since 2009

The Syracuse, NY native will become when that May 2018 launch happens the 13th woman to spend time on the ISS and only the fourth African American woman to fly in space.

She's currently training for that historic mission, and looking forward to seeing it happen.  .

Looking Forward To Seeing 'Hidden Figures'

As a native Houstonian who also grew up as a space junkie, loved it when we got to do a field trip to NASA stating in our junior high school years.    There was also the one I earned with my writing skills in ninth grade for a joint NASA-HISD contest that got me a nonstandard tour of the Johnson Space Center and a chance to meet the first group of African-American shuttle astronauts that included Dr. Mae Jemison,  Dr Ron McNair and Charles Bolden.

Even as well versed in Black history as I have been, I was unaware of the stories of Katherine Goble Johnson, Dorothy Vaughan and Mary Jackson, who were African-American women working in NASA's Langley, VA computation facility..

Computers do that task now, but before they were developed to handle that task human beings crunched the numbers.

Johnson  (who is still here with us at age 98), Vaughan and Jackson were part of the group of women mathematicians called computers who cross checked the math the male engineers were doing that would get John Glenn into orbit around the Earth.

The movie is based on the book of the same name by Margot Lee Shetterly, and stars Taraji P Henson as Katherine Goble Johnson, Octavia Spencer as Dorothy Vaughan and Janelle Monae as Mary Winston Jackson.

Math prodigy Katherine is plucked from the computing room and assigned to the Space Task Force team that will calculate the launch coordinates and trajectory of the Atlas rocket that will launch Glenn into space.  

Of course, this being 1961 Virginia, she is met with a double whammy of gender and racist indifference,  One engineer played by Jim Parsons named Paul Stafford stands out in not giving her a warm welcome to the male dominated unit.  Because of the segregation of the day, the nearest bathroom for her to use is in a distant building on the NASA Langley campus  

Vaughan does the work of a supervisor, being in charge of several dozen computers, but doesn't get the title or the money that comes with it. is treated with condescension by her boss played by Kirsten Dunst, and is repeatedly denied promotion.

Jackson has a more understanding Polish born boss, but she too runs into Jim Crow segregation when she is denied the opportunity to take the graduate level physics courses she needs to qualify for the engineering opening she wants and has to sue to do so..

Houston, naturally is one of the cities in which this movie is opening in limited release, with it opening in the rest of the country on January 13.   I hope you'll go see this movie.

30th Anniversary Of Challenger Disaster

Today is the 30th anniversary of the space shuttle Challenger disaster.   It ,exploded 73 seconds after it was launched from Cape Canaveral on a chilly January 28, 1986 winter day with a large live TV audience of schoolchildren looking on in horror.

One of the people who was part of that Challenger crew on that STS-51L mission was Sharon Christa McAuliffe, a Concord, NH schoolteacher who was set to become the first civilian launched into space and was going to once the shuttle got into orbit do some teaching from space.

But that broadcast never happened.  The collapse of the external fuel tank caused an explosion that broke the shuttle apart and sent the crew cabin in a fall from 46,000 feet altitude to the Atlantic Ocean below that killed all seven crew members.

The mission crew that perished that day were Mission Specialist Ellison Onizuka, Teacher In Space Christa McAuliffe, Payload Specialist Greg Jarvis, Mission Specialist Judy Resnik, Pilot Mike Smith, Mission commander Dick Scobee, and Mission Specialist Ron McNair.

Like the 1963 Kennedy assassination or the September 2001 terror attacks, people of my generation and who were kids watching the launch in their classrooms across the nation remember what they were doing when it happened at 10:39 AM CST.

I was getting ready for a job interview, and my space junkie self had forgotten for a moment that the launch was happening after two prior postponements.   So I flipped the TV on CNN and was listening to the commentary as I got dressed.

The CNN commentators hadn't mentioned the explosion at the time I turned on the television, and I said to myself, "'Damn, the way they're talking, something must have happened to the Challenger."

A few minutes later I would see the horrific video of that shuttle launch gone horribly wrong.  The shuttles were grounded for nearly three years as NASA and the Rogers Commission sought to find out what happened and make the necessary corrections to the shuttle's design to make it safer.

It was later determined that the cold snap that affected the Cape Canaveral area plus a design flaw in one of the solid rocket boosters combined with violations of NASA launch procedures and protocols caused the accident.

As President Ronald Reagan said in his speech to the nation that night, "The future doesn't belong to the faint-hearted; it belongs to the brave.  The Challenger crew was pulling us into the future and we'll continue to follow them."

And may the souls of the Challenger 7 continue to rest in power and peace, and inspire this generation and future ones to continue to look to the stars.

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Flying By Pluto

Because I am a Kennedy Baby, I have grown up as a serious space junkie watching NASA and the US space program undertake some amazing exploratory manned and unmanned space missions .  

The Mercury missions started a year before I was born.  The Gemini missions happened when I was a toddler, and I spent some of my Saturday mornings as a teen watching as an elementary school student and into my early teen years Walter Cronkite cover the various Apollo moon landings.

I got to see the launch of Skylab as a teen and the three missions that happened on it in 1973-74.  I was saddened when our initial US space station burned up on reentry over the Pacific in 1979 before it could be refurbished and boosted into a higher orbit.   I watched the Voyager I and 2 probe launches in 1977 as a high school student that flew by Jupiter, Uranus, Neptune and off into interstellar space and the Space Shuttle program.

I have grown to adulthood during a period where the knowledge of our solar system and space has exponentially grown. While bassackwards elements of the GOP may hate science, I and many reality based Americans, especially those of us who have grown up here in a Houston in which NASA is an important sector for our local economy, don't.

I am also quite aware that NASA technology and ongoing research is benefiting our 21st century  lives today.

Today at 7:49 AM EDT the New Horizons probe will zip by Pluto a mere 7800 miles above its surface to take pictures of the planet.  It will do the same to Pluto's moon Charon form 12,000 miles over its surface before zooming off into the Kuiper Belt and a rendezvous with a dwarf planet to be named later.

When that flyby of Pluto happens, the USA will become the first spacefaring nation to have sent probes to all the known planets (I still consider Pluto as a planet along with the IAU) in our solar system.

As New Horizons gets closer to Pluto, I also with the rest of humanity will get to see close up pictures of it for the very first time.

And I'm so looking forward to that along with every other space junkie.

Happy Martian New Year!

If you were sitting on the planet Mars, you'd be celebrating a brand new year this week.

The Red Planet has a similar axial tile to or planetary home and a day that last 40 minutes longer.   But because of an eccentric orbit, it takes Mars nearly two Earth years to make on trip around the Sun.

The Curiosity rover roaming the Gale Crater in Mars' southern hemisphere over the last three years has been doing experiments and ascertaining through soil and rock sample analysis with its onboard instrumentation suite whether Mars once harbored life, and if we Earthlings could live there.

There are even people contemplating if we could actually terraform Mars so that we could comfortably live on the planet.

On Friday, NASA will celebrate the occasion at a event for space enthusiasts in the town of Mars, PA, about 30 miles north of Pittsburgh.  The town of 1700 has a flying saucer sculpture in the town square, and will celebrate the occasion with a festival that has an outer space costume contest and exhibits from NASA.

And if you want to attend the next one, here's your save the date moment for it.  It's scheduled to happen May 5, 2017.

With the upcoming Pennsylvania event, NASA wishes to inspire kids to take science and technology courses.   Their goal is hopefully when NASA is ready to tackle the scientific and engineering challenges of manned missions to Mars in the 2030's and we have the political and societal will to do so, they will have a pool of qualified STEM trained people to select from.

Happy Martian New Year!  In the meantime, we'll keep looking thorough our telescopes, watching movies, reading sci-fi books with Mars as part of the plot, and contemplating if we have what it takes and the will to make that dream a reality.

45th Anniversary Of Apollo 11 Moon Landing

After blasting off from Pad 39A in Florida and a three day journey to enter lunar orbit, the world is waiting as astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin leave Columbia pilot Michael Collins behind to orbit the Moon as they climb into the lunar module Eagle.

It's on them to fulfill the challenge that President John F. Kennedy laid down to the nation and Congress in 1961 of landing on the moon and safely returning to earth .

As the Eagle descends toward its landing area in the Sea of Tranquility, Armstrong has to improvise to manually pilot the ship past an area of rocky boulders with the Eagle's onboard computers signaling alarms as he's doing so. 

Finally at 3:18 PM CDT  the lunar module is on the surface of the moon with 30 seconds of fuel left and Armstrong radios, "Houston, Tranquility Base here,  The Eagle has landed." as cheers and the tension breaks in Mission Control. 

At 9:56 PM CDT Armstrong is ready to begin the EVA and plant his foot on the lunar surface as half a billion people watch on television screens around the globe.   As he climbs down the ladder from Eagle and steps onto the surface he proclaims: "That's one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind." (› Play Audio)



He's joined by Aldrin as the duo explore the lunar surface for two and a half hours.  They collect rock samples, take photographs, and leave behind an American flag, a patch honoring the fallen Apollo 1 crew members, leave their footprints in the lunar soil and a plaque on one of Eagle's legs before blasting off to dock with Collins in Columbia and head back to Earth.   

With the splashdown in the North Pacific on July 24, President Kennedy's challenge to the nation had been successfully fulfilled.  

Over the next three and a half years I'd get to witness ten more Americans land on the moon and safely return.  

I'd also in April 1970 agonize and pray with the rest of the world for the safe return of the Apollo 13 astronauts after a service module oxygen tank explosion enroute to the moon cancelled the landing at Fra Mauro and they had the use the lunar module Aquarius as a 'lifeboat' to get home.

Gene Cernan, commander of the Apollo 17 said as the Challenger prepared to leave the lunar surface on the final Apollo lunar mission in December 1972,"We leave as we came and, God willing, as we shall return, with peace, and hope for all mankind."

It's past time this nation did so.

45th Anniversary of Apollo 11 Launch

On July 16, 1969 my space junkie self was up on a warm summer Houston morning like everyone else in the country and the world nervously awaiting the launch of Apollo 11 on live television. 

Meanwhile to the southeast of me down in Clear Lake, Mission Control was keeping a watchful eye on their monitors and Launch Pad 39A.  They too along with their counterparts in Florida were awaiting the launch of the ginormous Saturn V rocket from Cape Kennedy that would propel Neil Armstrong, Edwin 'Buzz' Aldrin and Michael Collins toward the Moon and their rendezvous with history. 

At 8:32 AM CDT the Saturn V rocket roared to life and slowly lifted off from its launchpad enroute to the Moon.   12 minutes later it was in Earth orbit and after one and a half trips around the planet the third stage of the Saturn V fired up on its translunar injection burn to send Apollo 11 to the Moon.



 

Asteroid Passing Way Too Close To Earth Today

At 2:24 EST today an event will take place unprecedented in recorded human history.  

Asteroid 2012 DA 14 will uncomfortably zip by our planet and miss it by a mere 17,200 miles (27,700 km) above the eastern Indian Ocean near Sumatra..

That is way closer than our communications and weather satellites parked in geosynchronous orbits 22,000 miles above our planet.  

The asteroid is 45 meters across (150 feet) but if the calculations of astronomers are off and it struck it would be a real bad day for the peeps on that side of our planet.

Scientists calculate if 2012 DA 14 made impact it would have the explosive power of a few megatons of TNT and cause localized damage similar to the 1908 Tunguska Event.  

That was an airburst explosion which flattened about 750 square miles (1,200 square kilometers) of a thankfully remote Siberian forested region in what is now northern Russia.

NASA and other international space agencies are tracking the space rock in order to calculate its precise orbit and add it to the 9500 asteroids it is tracking with diameters of half a mile (one km).

And speaking of calculations, hope the astronomers were right .

TransGriot Update:  If you have a good pair of binoculars and live in Asia, Australia and eastern Europe, you'll be able to see 2012 DA 14.

Live Long And Prosper, Nichelle Nichols!

Today is the 80th birthday of iconic actress and space enthusiast Nichelle Nichols who was born on this date in Robbins, IL in 1932.

All us Trekkies know of her most famous role as Lt. Nyota Uhura of Star Trek and have heard the story of how she nearly quit the show after the first season but was convinced to stay by a Star Trek fan by the name of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.. 

In addition to making American television history with th first interracial kiss, in the later Star Trek movies her character was subsequently promoted to Commander in the movies involving the original cast.

She has been an inspiration for people of my generation and subsequent ones to not only follow their dreams, but reach for the stars.  

She was Dr. Mae Jemison's inspiration to become a NASA astronaut and was recruited by her during the 70's when Nichols worked for NASA as part of a program to not only encourage African-American youth to consider math and science careers but recruit women and minority astronauts.

Two of the people she recruited, Charles Bolden and Lori Garver are the current administrator and Deputy Administrators of NASA.

She also recruited Dr. Sally Ride, Col Guion Bluford, Dr Ronald McNair and Dr Judith Resnik

She has served since the 1980's on the Board of Governors for the National Space Society and is considered part of the NASA family.    She and many of her Star Trek castmates were on hand when the space shuttle Enterprise was christened.

Whoopi Goldberg was inspired to become an actress because of her and there are numerous women born in the late 60's and 70's who are named Nichelle or have it as a middle name.

Live long and prosper Nichelle, and happy milestone birthday!

It's Already December 21st....

for my readers west of the International Date Line.

Those of you who east of the International Date Line who presume December 21 is the last day our planet will be around you have until the end of the day to send me your valuables for safekeeping.  I'll give them back to you after the Christmas holidays, minus a 10% administration fee.

There's something happening on the 21st, but it happens every year.  It's called the winter (for those of us in the Northern Hemisphere) or the summer solstice.  It's the shortest day of the year for those of us in the Norther hemisphere and the longest day for those of you in the Southern one.  

If you're north of the Arctic Polar Circle, you'll now get 24 hours of darkness while those of you below the Antarctic Polar Circle will get 24 hours of sunlight.

For those of you clinging to gloom and doom scenarios, we already had the 3 mile wide (5 km) asteroid 4179 Toutatis zip within 7 million kilometers (4.3 million miles) of Earth yesterday.  

Once again I point you to the words of astrophysicist Dr. Neil deGrasse Tyson. 

China Launches First Female Taikonaut Today

Y'all know I'm a space flight junkie, and I found this piece of news to be way cool.

Chinese space history will be made later today when the Shenzhou IX mission blasts off into space with the first female taikonaut on board  

33 year old PLA transport pilot Liu Yang beat out  14 other female taikonaut candidates and will be part of the three person crew along with male astronauts Jing Haipeng and Liu Wang.

Jing Haipeng, the mission commander will make a little Chinese space history of his own when he becomes the first taikonaut to make a return trip to space.   He was part of the 2008 Shenzhou VI mission in which China's first space walk took place.

After blasting off from the Jiuquan launch facility they will head to China's Tiangong 1 space station module launched last September to attempt China's first manned docking with it. 

Once the docking is completed, the taikonauts will enter the space station module and spend 13 days aloft conducting scientific and technological experiments in the longest mission so far attempted by the Chinese manned spacecraft program.

China would become the third nation after the old Soviet Union and the United States to launch a woman into space using their own equipment. 

50th Anniversary Of John Glenn Mercury Mission

Fifty years ago John Glenn became the fifth human being launched into space and the first American to orbit the earth when he climbed into Friendship 7 and rocketed into space from Cape Canaveral's Launch Complex 14 on this date in 1962.

His historic flight took him four hours and 56 minutes to orbit the Earth three times before splashing down in the Atlantic Ocean.

The successful manned orbital mission paved the way for NASA to proceed with the remaining three Mercury orbital flight missions and put the United States on the path toward fulfilling President Kennedy's goal of landing a man on the moon before the end of the decade. 

After retiring from NASA Glenn entered the political arena and served as the Democratic US senator for Ohio from 1974-1999.

Glenn holds another American spaceflight distinction as the oldest person to fly in space.   At age 77 he was part of the STS-95 mission that flew aboard the shuttle Discovery from October 29-November 7, 1998.

But the road to the successful Apollo 11 mission started with John Glenn's mission that launched fifty years ago today.

China A Step Closer To Building Its Heavenly Palace

Last week China became the third nation after Russia and the United States to successfully master space docking when their unmanned Shenzhou-8 spacecraft that was launched on November 1 docked with the already orbiting Tiangong-1 space station module 211 miles above the planet on November 3.  

"China is now equipped with the basic technology and capacity required for the construction of a space station," chief designer Zhou Jianping was quoted as saying by the Xinhua news agency."This will make it possible for China to carry out space exploration on a larger scale," he added.


The Chinese have been conducting tests over a twelve day period since then with the joint assembly.  To make sure the docking collar works and the previous docking wasn't a fluke they will separate the remote controlled Shenzhou-8 from the module and attempt to dock it with the Tiangong-1 module again before the Shenzhou-8 craft is scheduled to return to Earth on November 17.    

The Tiangong-1 module was launched into orbit from their Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center back on September 29, and the Chinese plan to send two more Shenzhou missions to dock with it next year.  One of those missions will be a manned one with taikonauts scheduled to stay on board for a month.

They plan to launch two more test modules before launching the actual planned 60 ton station into space in three sections between 2020 and 2022

But the ambitious Chinese space program has taken another step toward catching up with the Russians and the USA in terms of becoming a spacefaring nation and if the United States wants to keep its hard won leading position in space technology, we need to step up our game now.

Aircraft Carrier Sized Asteroid to Pass Between Earth And Moon Tomorrow

As you long time readers know I'm fascinated by all things space related, and the news that an aircraft carrier sized asteroid is passing between the Earth and the Moon got my attention.

The asteroid is named 2005 YU55 and it is being watched by ground antennas as it approaches Earth from the direction of the sun.  It will pass within 202,000 miles of our home planet and less than 150,000 miles from the Moon at 5:28 PM CST tomorrow.

That's the closest approach any space rock has made to our planet in 35 years, but scientists are satisfied it won't hit either the Earth or the Moon.  

"We’re extremely confident, 100 percent confident, that this is not a threat,” said the Don Yeomans, the manager of NASA’s Near Earth Object Program.  "But it is an opportunity.”

If it did it according to Purdue University professor of Earth and atmospheric sciences Jay Melosh, it would be a very bad day for the planet.  If it struck land it would gouge out a crater four miles wide and 1700 feet deep with the explosive power of 25,000 Hiroshima bombs.  If it hit the ocean it would cause a 70 foot high tsunami that would speed toward the nations bordering whatever ocean it hit.

Melosh also echoed what Yeomans stated in terms of the Earth and Moon being safe this time, but hope both of y'all double and triple checked your math.

At any rate, not canceling any plans I had for Wednesday either.  .  
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