LiftPort Staff Blog

Carnival of Space – Week 13

PowerPoint – good and good for you.

If I were King for a week, I’d ban PowerPoint. We’d see an immediate decrease in storage requirements on file servers and a marked increase in productivity. It’s the economy, stupid.

But until the day when PowerPoint is stood against the wall please enjoy The Lost PowerPoint Slides (Apollo 11 Edition) from Mark Rayner of the skwib.

JFK presents “Er, ah, space race” (circa 1962) –> slide 1

• we choose to go to the Moon in this decade
• and do the other things
• not because they’re easy but because they are hard
• just like listening to Miss Monroe sing me happy birthday.

Click the link for the pretty pictures and more slidey action.

History

L. Riofrio has pictures of pretty flying machines at the National Air and Space Museum in Washington D.C.

There are children out there, nearly two generations who have never seen people walk on the Moon. Even many of their teachers were born after 1969, and have no memory to pass on to students. Many don’t even know what a spacesuit is for, but they all think it looks cool. Why should our generation be deprived of the Moon?

Getting to the moon is like making gravy – it doesn’t just happen, you have to make it so.

Speaking of guys who worked hard to make it so – it’s Carpenter, Stafford, And Cernan, O My! from Dave Rankin’s Tales of the Heliosphere. San Diego Air and Space Museum (Motto: It’s nice here in the summer unlike D.C.) hosted Scott Carpenter, Tom Stafford and Gene Cernan recently.

Cernan told the children in the audience to have a dream. He told them to dream the impossible. He said they should do what they love to do and do their best at it. They may not end up the best at what they do but their efforts will pay off. He said that he dreamed as a child of one day flying off aircraft carriers. He never dreamed he would ever fly into space. But his dream of flying and his hard work at it put him in a position to fly into space when the opportunity presented itself.

Luck favors the prepared.

Alfa King (motto: The first step is the hardest) remembers July 20 – a day of small steps leading to giant leaps. We all know the giant leap we celebrate on July 20 – I had no idea that

a child that was born on this day in 1919 in Auckland, New Zealand. That child later became a world famous figure. Named Edmund Percival Hillary he later became Sir Edmund Hillary.

Amazing coincidence, that.

Speculative

Darnell Clayton from Colony Worlds has a post on gravity assisted launch / landing systems for Mars.

Although a space elevator would compliment Martian colonies by providing a low cost method of delivering goods to the surface, such a structure would easily be destroyed by the red planet’s global storms that dust the surface every three Martian years.But despite the fact that constructing a space elevator upon Martian soil may be not be feasible, constructing an orbital one (that does not touch the ground) from the base of its nearest moon may not.

This is just going to have to be one of those ‘we’ll see how it plays out’ deals.

Speaking of gravity assisted whoozits, Brian Wang at Advanced Nanotechnology talks about improving the hypersonic skyhook.

A tidal stabilized tether is called a “skyhook” since it appears to be “hooked onto the sky”. They are also called “hypersonic tethers” because the tip nearest the earth travels about Mach-12 in typical designs. Longer tethers would travel more slowly. A grapple system attached to the tip of the tether can thus reach down below the facility and rendezvous with a payload moving in a slower, suborbital trajectory. The grapple would then capture the payload and pull it into orbit along with the tether system. Later, it could release the payload at the top of the swing, tossing it into a higher orbit.

Ten times more cargo weight to orbit. Cool.

Gordon Vaughn at AeroGo reminds us that the more we peer into the universe the more interesting things we find in That’s Why They Call it space EXPLORATION

… Because you might just find something (right). Of course, even when you do, you may not know what it is you’ve found. Every once in a while, though, the questions prompted by the find are just too compelling to ignore, a point the public seemed to get back in 1968, when the film 2001: A Space Odyssey, based on Arthur C. Clarke’s novel supposing a dramatic discovery on the Moon, came out.

Business

Do good things in business and you’re like a pretty attractive songbird in the jungle: attractive and tasty. Jon Goff of Selenian Boondocks has a long well thought out post on Northrop Grumman’s acquisition of Scaled Composites.

Now, while some of the comments I’ve seen about the acquisition seem to “get it” (particularly comments from Nathan and Ferris over on Hobbyspace, and surprisingly enough, Mark Whittington as well), there still seems to be a lot of people who are worried that this will become a case of a “big dinosaur company gobbling up a plucky alt.space mammal.” On the contrary, I would argue that not only is this acquisition likely to be a net win for Scaled, but in fact it may be one of the most important events this year f or the future of commercial space development. Here’s some thoughts on why:

You’re going to have to click the link to find out why. This is a Carnival not Reader’s Digest.

Science!


Ian and Stewart both sent links about a Harry Potter Star Party – Ian the before, Stuart the after.

On Friday night, Jodrell Bank Observatory was turned into Jodrell Bank School of Astronomy & Astrophysics for the release of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. Around 120 people turned up to enrol as students for the night. On arrival everyone was sorted into one of the four houses by a sorting hat which actually spoke. The four houses were all animal constellations visible from the northern hemisphere and everyone was given a house badge.

I’m not a huge Harry Potter fan but … props to JK Rowling for getting millions of kids to read many many books. And good job to Jordell Bank for jumping on that trend.

What’s up with Opportunity and Spirit? Outreach Educator and astro-poet Stuart Atkinson at Cumbrian Sky fills us in in a rather lyrical way.

As you read this, Oppy and Spirit are both becalmed on Mars, cowering under a martian sky turned foul and molasses-dark with dust. And while Spirit’s condition is “serious but stable”, poor Opportunity is in serious trouble. She can’t see the Sun, the sky is so saturated with dust, and as the rovers rely on the Sun to provide them with solar power and keep them alive, the problem, and danger, is obvious. Starved of sunlight, Oppy is standing on the edge of the abyss in more ways than one… and all we can do here on Earth is wait, and watch, and hope the Sun breaks through the cloudy sky soon.

A short post, pointing to a more formal news story from Emily Lakdawalla at the The Planetary Society Weblog.

I spent the last week conversing with people working on all five spacecraft at Mars — three orbiters and two rovers — to find out what’s going on with the dust storm.

Oh no, Spirit, look out! It’s a dust devil! Geek CounterPoint explains

In case you haven’t seen it yet, this is one of the latest images to be released by the team working with the HiRISE camera on the MRO orbiter at Mars. It shows a dust devil (albeit a little one, only about 500 meters tall), spinning its way across the plains east of Hellas Planitia.

Okay, no immediate danger. But a dust devil sure wouldn’t do her any good.

Art

What’s a world without art? Boring that’s what. Like an eternal Thursday in a Dilbert-ized cube farm …

Space Elevator poetry. No, don’t make that face. It’s pretty good. It’s called Touch The Sky from Randomized.

The following is inspired by the thought of the space elevator that the Liftport Group is trying to build. (Big dreams!).

It comes from thinking what it would be like climbing a ribbon of nanotube on a Harley-Davison.

I thought of calling it ‘Tsiolkovsky’s Dreaming’ but decided that was a bit of a mouthful (for a title, at least!).

Space video of the week from ‘Robot Guy‘ Ed Minchau at Space Video of the Day – 070722. It’s a brief history of the first fifty years of space exploration.

Pet Peeve

Correct capitalization is a Good Thing reports Annas Rahman at The Universe Made Simple.

I understand it is fairly simple to write something like, “The sun is at the center of the solar system.” But I just feel those are large errors to commit when writing. Again, both the Sun and Solar System are proper nouns so they should automatically be capitalized.

It seems nitpicky, perhaps, but he’s right.

Thanks for reading and we’ll see you next week at Universe Today.

Submissions for the Carnival of Space are due to: CarnivalOfSpace@gmail.com by 6:00 PM (PST) on the Wednesday evening of the week. It will be appreciated if the submissions come in earlier. The carnival will be posted on Thursday. Please send the following information:

Title of Post
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If you haven’t read any blog carnivals before, please read What is a Blog Carnival.

Here are the expectations for carnival participants.

Update: Brian Wang’s entry was not correctly linked – this has been corrected with our apologies.

Written by Brian Dunbar and posted on Thursday, July 26th, 2007 at 8:17 pm and is filed under LiftPort Group. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.