Space

There are 9 posts filed in Space (this is page 1 of 1).

My remembrance of Apollo 11

When I entered today’s date in my day log, I had a thought – “there is something special about today…mmm…what is it?”. After a few seconds, I remembered – today is the anniversary of the Apollo 11 landing on the moon and Neil Armstrong’s first steps on the moon. It was 53 years ago today, and I have three memories relating to this that standout in my mind.

The first memory is the actual date. I was six years old, but my brothers and I had been watching all of the coverage on NBC, with Frank McGee as the anchorman, and sponsored by Gulf Oil (there was a Gulf logo attached to the anchor desk – outrageous by today’s standards). Anyway, it was late at night when the event happened (10:53 pm EST), I was living in Texas, so we were on Central time. The TV image was black and white and grainy. We had been watching for a long time, then Armstrong exited the Lunar Module and started down the ladder. To me, though, it seemed like he was standing on that ladder for at least 10 minutes. I finally got up from the couch, announced that I was going to bed, and left the room. I did not see the final descent on the ladder – but I WAS only six years old….

My second memory is working at NASA at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas. There were a lot of events for the 25th anniversary in 1994, and one of them was a reunion at the Gilruth Rec Center on-site. The Apollo 11 astronauts were scheduled to appear, and I decided to go. The crowds were huge, and I never could get closer than about 5 feet to Armstrong/Aldrin/Collins – there were so many people who wanted to meet them. We did get commemorative pins for the anniversary at work.

The final memory was attending a banquet sponsored by the organization Spaceweek, originally started by a NASA employee by the name of Dennis Stone (now called World Space Week). I don’t remember if this was on the 25th anninversary or not (it was probably earlier). During the banquet, a film clip was shown of a speech by President John F. Kennedy on going to the Moon. The speech was at Rice Stadium in Houston, part of Rice University, a private university. The part of the speech that most people have heard is “We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard…”. But before those words, Kennedy lists several difficult achievements (climbing mountains, flying across the ocean), then says “Why does Rice play Texas? Not because it is easy, but because it is hard!” I fell out of my chair laughing at this line! I went to the University of Texas when Texas played Rice in football, and we never lost to them when I was there. Indeed, Texas lost to Rice only once, maybe twice in their last 30-40 games, so this was a great bit in the speech, but I had never heard it until that banquet. 

As a former NASA employee and still working aerospace engineer, I look back at those events with pride that I can say “I was there”, and that later I was able to be a part of the great organization that made that event possible. May we all have good memories to look back to in our lives… 

Exploration of the Moon is still going on!

Recently, I saw a post from Amit Gawande on a partial failure of an Indian space mission to the Moon (communication failure with the lander, orbiting part is still working). First, I was surprised that there was any national space program still active in lunar exploration. I think that the Lunar Prospector program in 1998 was the last effort from NASA to perform lunar research (oops! looking at this page, I guess there have been a few NASA missions since then…). Second, Amit mentions that it must be getting crowded on the lunar surface with all of the objects sent from Earth. While there may be a lot of debris in a small area, to me this is still just a fraction of the lunar surface. An alien visiting the Moon would still have quite a bit of undisturbed territory to explore…

Kinetic launchers and crimes in space…

Two recent stories of note:

TheTechie:

But there’s one company — named SpinLaunch — working on a different way, this time looking to send objects to space using a catapult, yes you read that right.

…SpinLaunch, by early next year, aims to begin the first tests of firing catapults containing payloads at hyper-sonic speeds to launch objects into space.

This may be good for things, but it’s hard to see if this would be safe for people…

BBC:

Nasa is reported to be investigating a claim that an astronaut accessed the bank account of her estranged spouse from the International Space Station, in what may be the first allegation of a crime committed in space.

Anne McClain acknowledges accessing the account from the ISS but denies any wrongdoing, the New York Times reports.

Her estranged spouse, Summer Worden, reportedly filed a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission.

How is it a crime to check your bank balance from space?

They don’t make them like they used to…

Ken Shirriff has restored an Apollo Guidance Computer (AGC), used in the Saturn V spacecraft. He recently published an article on how the power supplies still worked flawlessly after 50 years. Recently, two embedded computers that I work with burned up their power supplies, so this is really impressive to me! Ken has also written articles on creating a core rope simulator (the way software was programmed), writing software on the AGC to do bitcoin mining, and a more detailed discussion of core rope memory. Finally, he has references to a virtual AGC simulator, and to a great summary page on simulated AGC projects. Wow!

Please have a little respect for the past

I enjoy reading Philip Greenspun’s weblog, and he certainly has experience in aviation and software development. His recent post on visiting the Museum of Flight in Seattle throws quite a few digs at the US space program and people who have been a part of the effort. I worked at NASA and Lockheed in Houston from 1985-1997 on the Space Station program, and had the opportunity to work with a great group of people, both contractor and civil servant employees. Things were contentious at times (usually dealing with funding issues from Congress and the Administration), but we got the job done (flew Space Shuttles, came back from the Challenger accident, got the Space Station program back on track). I know that Philip likes to find fault with many things in the United States (and I agree with most of it), but I think he might want to stay with areas he has expertise in and not look for other ways to poke people in the eye.

Processing satellite data – now anyone can do it!

I saw this post on the Amazon Web Services weblog (via Stephen Downes) about Amazon offering ground station services for people operating micro-satellites – amazing! Processing satellite data is now just another web service….

A long time ago, I was a volunteer for the Lunar Prospector mission (before it became a NASA Discovery Program), and I was in contact with John Champa (K8OCL, SK) about setting up a ground station network using ham radio operators to collect data from the Lunar Prospector satellite. We did not get far with the volunteer effort, and it ground to a halt. I did attend the NASA launch (fun!) and followed the mission from afar. Boy, if this Amazon service existed back then, it would have been cool!

References:

Lunar Prospector archive page from NASA (original site http://lunar.arc.nasa.gov/ does not seem to exist at NASA or Internet Archive

Lunar Prospector book summary written by project scientist Alan Binder