Happy 20th Birthday, Hubble!

Tomorrow marks the 20th anniversary of the deployment of the Hubble Telescope into Low Earth Orbit. How cool is that, that it's been around for 20 years and it's still producing amazing images, like the one below.

Source: Hubblesite.org

I wonder what the next thing will be that captures the public's attention like Hubble has.

Here's a neat video with some images and a tiny bit about the history of Hubble: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/8638263.stm

SolarBeat

This is a neat little visualization with sound of the solar system and the planets' orbits.

Listen here: http://www.whitevinyldesign.com/solarbeat/

Returning to the Moon?

http://news.cnet.com/8301-13512_3-10347397-23.html

I was mostly in agreement with this article until I got to this line: "And if we needed to, we could put the Saturn V rocket back into production, along with the old Lunar Module. NASA still has all the plans for these vehicles on file."

Drawings mean nothing. Conceptual engineering is fairly cheap compared to manufacturing. I doubt any of the Saturn V tooling is around anymore, and all of the expertise is definitely gone.

And now that I go back and read what he actually said, it just makes me more angry. Yes, we have the Atlas and Delta, but it takes a lot of money and effort to man rate a launch vehicle. SpaceX isn't man rated either, as far as I know. Cutting NASA's budget will not do anything, and it's ridiculous to propose that they could continue to function as they were on half as much money. He wants higher risk? You can't have higher risk in spacecraft. It's unacceptable. Save your judgement until after you've worked in the industry, or at least done more research than looking up the names of launch vehicles. Hmph.

Apollo 11 40th Anniversary

As you probably know, July 20 is the 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 landing on the moon. There have been plenty of events to celebrate this, including the LV campaign with Buzz Aldrin, as I blogged about before.

Something else that my good friend KJ showed me is this website: http://wechoosethemoon.org/ where they're doing a 'live' webcast reenactment of the Apollo 11 launch and all of the stages. Go check it out! As of right now, we have 36 hours until launch.

LV does Space

It may or may not be well known that I have something of a handbag addiction. Well, I was browsing my favorite bag blog and came across this Louis Vuitton campaign.



A combination of two things I'm passionate about... handbags and space! Photographed by Annie Leibovitz no less. I do not own any LV, but I have a lot of respect for their artistic and interesting ad campaigns. Very cool! And you can check out some of their previous campaigns at the website, including the Sean Connery and Coppolas.

NASA: Keeping shuttle costs $3 billion yearly

I just wanted to comment on this article from a few weeks ago about keeping the shuttle running for a few more years.

I don't think it's a good idea. In fact, I think it's a terrible idea. The only reason I would be for keeping the shuttle running would be so that my friends at Michoud in New Orleans could keep their jobs. Even ignoring cost, here are my reasons:

1) I don't even know how feasible it is. Building an external tank takes many months, maybe even years, I'm not sure. If I remember, they only had one or two spare tanks at Michoud, and they had already been loaded and unloaded and dissected to see what effect loading has on the foam. We had already sent up one tank (ET-123 or ET-125 I think) that had been loaded previously and repairing the foam was a big pain in the butt. And if we were going to build new ones, well, the process probably would have had to already started. And chances are the workers from the very beginning of the process have already been moved elsewhere.

2) It would be dangerous. The technology freeze for the shuttle and its components was in 1973. Yes there have been improvements since then, but the fundamentals of the system are very old. The shuttles also were not meant to have so much internal maintenance done. (I wish I had a source for this, but sadly it came from a video we watched in one of my classes.) I don't think I'd want to drive a car that old, much less be propelled into space.

3) We need to move on. The new program is well on its way, and even though I don't think it will go to the moon (really we should just skip the moon and go to Mars anyways) and needs the manpower, money, and manufacturing capabilities. They want to maufacture parts of the Orion at Michoud. Well, you can't be building tanks and the new parts with the same tools at the same time. I'm pretty sure they're going to have to modify the current tooling before building Orion components (I think the diameter is larger, and the stack is taller).

4) It's the *International Space Station*. Isn't the point supposed to be collaboration? So what's the big deal that we have to use the Russian launch system? There's cosmonauts on the ISS, so we have to get along with them anyways.

As an engineer, I'd rather be without immediate space access for a few years, rather than prolong the life of a dangerous vehicle, or rush the development of the new one. But politicians run the world and not engineers, and display of power is important to them. So chances are we'll do both and have a meh space program for another decade. Ah well, there's always the private industry. ;)