26 years ago, today, Expedition 1 began our continuous habitation of space with NASA astronaut Bill Shepard and cosmonauts Yuri Gidzenko and Sergei Krikalev. Earth is just as stunning and station is still a platform that opens the doors to our future on the moon and, eventually, Mars. In this orbit, on this day, we passed by the blue fishing boats and, in the end, even a little aurora. See if you can spot the landmarks from the map. You’re looking out of the port window of the cupola, so to the left of the line.
I appreciate how Anil Menon doesn't explicitly go out of his way to make me feel old like Jared Issacman does:
If you’re under 26, you have never lived a day without someone orbiting above you.
26 years ago today, the first resident crew arrived at the ISS. Humanity has had a home in space ever since.
The research and advances made possible by our crews, teams on the ground and international partners have helped prepare us to live and work on the Moon and Mars.
As we transition to the next era of our presence in low Earth orbit, we build on everything they have made possible.
— NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman (@NASAAdmin) November 2, 2026
I am...significantly older than 26. In fact, when I was 26, manufacturing ISS components had barely begun, and assembly wouldn't start for another 3 years. While I was growing up, such a station was merely a dream (sorry, Skylab, A for effort).
Anyway, it's the kind of cool thing we can do if we put our minds to it. What learning and wonders will the next 26 years of crewed spaceflight bring, in Low Earth Orbit and beyond?
“We’ve never been in this vantage point in the history of humankind.”
The Artemis II solar eclipse was a lot. In a good way. (54 minutes of totality! That's way longer than we get on Earth.)
Explore more from the mission: https://t.co/VTUbJMrjIa https://t.co/TklYxWjjD0
Stacked and ready for what's next. 🚀
The core stage of the SLS (Space Launch System) rocket for NASA's Artemis III mission has been joined with the twin solid rocket boosters at @NASAKennedy, bringing us one step closer to testing and flight.
Read more: https://t.co/onOoFiy5Md https://t.co/pBikDDy5lL
Veteran astronauts Fred Haise and Gordon Fullerton completed the fifth and final glide test aboard Enterprise OTD in 1977. The Approach and Landing Tests (ALT) took place between February and October 1977 to test the Shuttle's flight characteristics prior to its first spaceflight in 1981.
Haise was the LMP on Apollo 13, and retired after the ALT phase was complete. Fullerton was on the support crews for Apollo 14 through Apollo 17, and went on to pilot STS-3, then command STS-51-F.
Anyway, it was exciting times. We were on the verge of a new era of routine spaceflight, or so I thought...
On October 24, 1946, a V-2 rocket captured the first-ever photo of Earth from space.
While these grainy, black-and-white images might not look like much today, they were a huge deal at the time, because no one had ever seen Earth from space before.
The V-2 rocket launched from the White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico. It carried a 35-millimeter motion picture camera that captured a new frame every second and a half. The rocket soared to an altitude of about 65 miles before falling back to Earth.
Both the rocket and the camera were destroyed after crashing into the Earth at a speed of about 340 miles per hour. But the film survived because it was protected inside a steel case. Scientists had to drive out into the New Mexico desert to retrieve the film. When they saw the images for the first time, the scientists were literally jumping up and down with joy.
The Outer Space Treaty was spurred by the development of intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) in the 1950s, which could reach targets through outer space. The United States proposed an inspection program for rockets in August 1957. The Soviet Union instead tested ICBMs and launched Sputnik, the first artificial satellite, in October 1957.
From 1959 to 1962, Western allies proposed various outer space arms control treaties, with US president Dwight Eisenhower proposing an outer space treaty similar to the Antarctic Treaty to the United Nations General Assembly on September 22, 1960. According to the United States Department of State, the Soviet Union did not accept these proposals unless the US removed its overseas missile bases. The Soviet Union de-linked these proposals after the 1963 signing of the Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty.
On 17 October 1963, the UN General Assembly unanimously adopted a resolution prohibiting the introduction of weapons of mass destruction in outer space. Various proposals for an arms control treaty governing outer space were debated during a General Assembly session in December 1966. US drafts covered only celestial bodies; it accepted the Soviet version which applied a WMD ban to all of outer space. Adoption of the final Outer Space Treaty was completed in January 1967.
With all the potential risk from the stupid AI race today, one might think a similar effort could be undertaken to rein that shit in, but unfortunately our government is chock full of super unintelligent nuts.
Selah.
PS - I loved Far Out Space Nuts when I was wee. Only episode I remember is one where Bob Denver basically Captain Kirks a sentient supercomputer. This is the scene (from It’s All In Your Mind), which is strangely germane today:
Junior: [holding up two of the engine's parts] Well, you see this piece? This goes right on top, because I'm right-handed. Now... and you gotta remember to match the patch to the hatch and make sure you don't lutch the mutch... er, touch the.... Have you eaten peanut butter? G.A.L.: Because you're right-handed? Junior: No, no, because peanut butter sticks to the roof of your mouth... [sticks his finger in his mouth] ...and makes it hard to talk... G.A.L.: You are overloading my circuits! Junior: Did you ever try it with... like, with jelly, like with kumquat or gooseberry? G.A.L.: Jelly? Peanut jelly...? Junior: You know, how about orange marmalade on a hot tamale? G.A.L.: Slower! Junior: That's really good. G.A.L.: Slower! I must compute. Junior: Oh. G.A.L.: Tamale? Tamale...? Junior: Well, I'm sorry. I really am sorry. G.A.L.: Yum yum! Junior: I am a fast talker. Look, I'll try to slow down. I'll start from the beginning and start all over again. Now, see, you gotta match the patch to the hatch... G.A.L.: Stop it! It's computing! Junior: ...and make sure you don't touch the clutch... or match the hatch to the patch and mutch the clutch... I just don't remember exactly how it goes, but... G.A.L.: Peanut butter sticks to my transistors... [An explosion is heard from inside G.A.L. as flames start to erupt on her panel.] G.A.L.: Slower! Slower! SLOWER...! [There's a final explosion, and G.A.L.'s voice fades away.] Junior: Was it something I said?
on this day in 1958, nasa officially launched operations!!
since then, its sent man to the moon, sent spacecraft beyond our home planet, sent robots to the surface of mars, and there’s still so much more to come.
This morning, a new crew launched to the @Space_Station for a long-duration science mission. Tune in to watch with us as Crew-13 arrives at the orbiting laboratory. Live coverage begins here at 5:20pm ET (2120 UTC). pic.twitter.com/08FSqJmFLg
[S]pace can be explored and mastered without feeding the fires of war, without repeating the mistakes that man has made in extending his writ around this globe of ours.
There is no strife, no prejudice, no national conflict in outer space as yet. Its hazards are hostile to us all. Its conquest deserves the best of all mankind...
So yeah, it tracks that the racist rapist with dementia would try to introduce strife, prejudice, and national conflict up there. Since there's not an agreement that he doesn't enjoy tearing up, I'm sure he's dying (cross fingers!) to abrogate the Outer Space Treaty:
Article I
The exploration and use of outer space, including the moon and other celestial bodies, shall be carried out for the benefit and in the interests of all countries, irrespective of their degree of economic or scientific development, and shall be the province of all mankind.
Outer space, including the moon and other celestial bodies, shall be free for exploration and use by all States without discrimination of any kind, on a basis of equality and in accordance with international law, and there shall be free access to all areas of celestial bodies.
There shall be freedom of scientific investigation in outer space, including the moon and other celestial bodies, and States shall facilitate and encourage international co-operation in such investigation.
Article II
Outer space, including the moon and other celestial bodies, is not subject to national appropriation by claim of sovereignty, by means of use or occupation, or by any other means.
Anyway, I take issue with the OP's suggestion that we send Trump. No need to trash the place.
The probe is now in interstellar space, the region outside the heliopause, or the bubble of energetic particles and magnetic fields from the Sun. Voyager 1 was launched after Voyager 2, but because of a faster route it exited the asteroid belt earlier than its twin, and it overtook Voyager 2 on Dec. 15, 1977.
Voyager 1 discovered a thin ring around Jupiter and two new Jovian moons: Thebe and Metis.
At Saturn, Voyager 1 found five new moons and a new ring called the G-ring.
Voyager 1 was the first spacecraft to cross the heliosphere, the boundary where the influences from outside our solar system are stronger than those from our Sun.
Voyager 1 is the first human-made object to venture into interstellar space.
STS-41-D (formerly STS-14) was the 12th flight of NASA's Space Shuttle program, and the maiden flight of Space Shuttle Discovery. It was launched from Kennedy Space Center, Florida, on August 30, 1984, and landed at Edwards Air Force Base, California, on September 5, 1984. Three commercial communications satellites were deployed into orbit during the six-day mission, and a number of scientific experiments were conducted, including a prototype extendable solar array that would eventually form the basis of the main solar arrays on the International Space Station (ISS).
STS-8 was the eighth NASA Space Shuttle mission and the third flight of the Space Shuttle Challenger. It launched on August 30, 1983, and landed on September 5, 1983, conducting the first night launch and night landing of the Space Shuttle program. It also carried the first African-American astronaut to go into space, Guion Bluford. The mission successfully achieved all of its planned research objectives, but was marred by the subsequent discovery that a solid-fuel rocket booster had almost malfunctioned catastrophically during the launch.
I'll ignore the "almost malfunctioned catastrophically" part and turn to John Young for a different danger:
The situation at launch on 30 August turned out to be quite dangerous. Five days earlier, a tropical storm hit the Florida coastline, making landfall just south of KSC. Forecasters had seen the storm coming two days beforehand, but there wasn’t the time to roll Challenger back from the pad. It had to sit there and ride out the storm. Even after the storm was out of the way, the weather caused trouble. Heavy thunderstorms with lightning were in the area. The crew was told they could “man” the shuttle if they wanted to—a risky decision and not one that should ever have been left for the crew to make.
But hey, the crew and vehicle survived, so nothing could possibly go wrong in the future...
Above is the first image of Earth from the distance of the Moon, taken by Lunar Orbiter 1 on August 23, 1966 (2008 reprocessed version). And to think that just a couple years later, Bill Anders would take his famous shot during the Apollo 8 mission.
Why India Celebrates National Space Day on August 23
India celebrates National Space Day on August 23rd to honor the historic success of Chandrayaan-3—India's third lunar mission—which successfully soft-landed on the Moon's south pole on August 23, 2023. This achievement made India the first country to reach the Moon’s south pole, and only the fourth country ever to achieve a soft lunar landing (after the US, USSR/Russia, and China).
Prime Minister Narender Modi’s Official Statement:
“From now onwards, 23rd August will be celebrated as National Space Day in India. This will inspire generations to come.”
A Titan-Centaur rocket carrying the Viking 1 spacecraft launches from Complex 41 at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station on Aug. 20, 1975. Viking 1 touched down on the red planet on July 20, 1976, becoming the first truly successful landing on Mars. Viking 1 was the first of a pair of complex deep space probes that were designed to reach Mars and to collect evidence on the possibility on life on Mars.
Voyager 2 launched on Aug. 20, 1977, about two weeks before the Sept. 5 launch of Voyager 1. Why the reversal of order? The two were sent on different trajectories, and Voyager 1 was put on a path to reach its planetary targets, Jupiter and Saturn, ahead of Voyager 2.
Both lovely missions, although I've always been more enamored of the latter because it visited my favorite planet, Jupiter. I guess I was also more aware of the Voyager spacecraft since they launched and started sending photos and data when I was a bit older.
I took a summer astronomy class at the University of Toledo when I was a lad, which was held in the school's planetarium. Really fun all around (got to see sunspots through a telescope and filter!), but I was most captivated when we watched the Great Red Spot spinning on a huge projector screen, thanks to Voyagers 1 & 2. That was even before Cosmos.
We live in a pretty cool universe, and at a pretty cool time when we've gotten a chance to know it a little bit better. Hope we continue to survive as a species so we can learn more...
Meant to post about this yesterday, but I was pretty wiped from a long day battling with sandbox limitations and permissions while building out a new lab1, not to mention a long week, month, year, uh...yeah, I'm pretty tired generally, although in better shape than astronauts after an EVA on the lunar surface.
Anyway, Dave and Jim got to bust out some new wheels on July 31. Chaikin:
It would have been a strange sight, had anyone been there to witness it: a four-wheeled craft heading out among the craters, bearing two space-suited men. The Rover was less a car than a spacecraft on wheels, with its own navigation computer, communications system, and cargo space for such essentials as maps, geology tools—and moon rocks.
For all its sophisticated technology, there was still a hobby-shop look to this moon car, with its antennas and folding lawn-chair seats and tool racks. It had been designed, built and tested by Boeing in less than two years; the success of the mission rode on it.
Aboard Rover 1, the ride was more exciting than anyone, including Scott and Irwin, had banked on. Though the Rover averaged only 5 to 7 miles an hour, it seemed more than fast enough to the two men perched atop it. Every time the Rover hit a bump—and the “plain” at Hadley was all bumps and hollows—it took flight. Each new obstacle set one or two wheels off the ground for a long moment.
As an added encumbrance, the steering on the Rover’s front wheels was inexplicably out of commission, forcing Scott to rely on the rear-wheel steering alone. The ride was especially harrowing for Jim Irwin, who felt as though he were strapped onto a bucking bronco, especially when Scott had to swerve to avoid a crater. The transmissions from the Rover were punctuated every so often with a warning from Scott—“Hang on!”—followed by Irwin’s grin-and-bear-it laughter.
Scott and Irwin were having as much trouble gauging distance on the airless, treeless moon as everyone had before them. But they were in no danger of losing their way, thanks to the Rover’s navigation system; it clicked off readings of heading and distance as Scott drove. Irwin, meanwhile, followed along on the photo map. Aside from the usual difficulty in recognizing landmarks, the maps were misleading:
Many of the craters and bumps that looked so prominent on the over-enhanced photos were barely noticeable on the real moon. But one landmark was impossible to miss, and as the Rover headed southwest, over the undulating mare, both men suddenly caught sight of it: “There’s the rille!” For a time, they followed the canyon’s curving edge, then stopped at Elbow crater to gather samples. Soon they were driving again, heading uphill toward St. George; Scott could feel the difference.
Once released, the rover—our “Moon car”—slowly descended to the surface; a brilliant piece of engineering with sealed electric motors in the hub of each wheel. After securing its joints with pins, I climbed aboard to test its operation. Almost immediately, I realized that there was a problem with the front steering.
This was perfectly manageable with rear steering and eventually righted itself. Even so it was a pretty bumpy ride. After loading a rack at the rear with the geological equipment we would need for our first day of exploration we climbed aboard—something of a challenge since the suits did not bend easily into a seated position—and started the engines.
Driving the rover was actually more like flying an airplane, albeit with four wheels, than driving a car. Instead of a steering wheel, which would have been very difficult to grasp in our bulky suits, it was controlled with a joystick mounted on a control console between my seat and Jim’s.
Despite our maximum speed of only 7 or 8 mph, the reduced gravity and very irregular surface meant one or more of the independently suspended wheels lifted away from the surface every time we hit uneven terrain. No part of the lunar surface was totally flat or even. It was all rolling and irregular with a wide variety of small and large craters, some with debris inside.
Maneuvering around the larger craters and across this combination of rolling hummocks and fine- to coarse-grained lunar soil required intense concentration. Driving into the sun was the most difficult, since the glare caused a “wash-out” of the surface features. Though the rover could turn on a dime and had very good traction and power, the wire-mesh wheels kicked up impressive rooster-tails of dust, which were deflected by large fenders. It all made for a ride like a cross between a bucking bronco and a small boat in a heavy swell.
“This really is a rockin’ and rollin’ ride. Hang on,” I told Jim as we headed southwest in the direction of the first of our destinations, Elbow Crater and the northeast flank of St. George Crater on the lower flank of Mt. Hadley Delta.
Why they were there (Scott):
Each stopping point on our three days of lunar traverses had been selected to allow us to examine contrasting aspects of the Moon’s complex geology, much of which was largely a mystery. Our ultimate goal was to throw light on the origin of our nearest galactic neighbor—which had long been the source of speculation and serious scientific debate. Greater knowledge about the Moon’s genesis was expected to throw more light on the origin of our own planet, of the Sun and of our entire solar system.
Over time three competing theories about the origin of the Moon had evolved. The so-called “sister” theory held that the Earth and the Moon were born at the same time and of the same cloud of gas and dust. The “spouse” theory held that the Moon was born in another part of the solar system and had been forced into wedlock with our planet after moving into the Earth’s gravitational field. According to the “daughter” theory, the Moon was born of the Earth, splitting off very early on.
I bet even Michael Jackson would be exhausted after a moonwalk (Chaikin):
The mountains of the moon captivated Jim Irwin, just as he knew they would. That anticipation had been with him yesterday as he followed Scott down Falcon’s ladder. When he put his weight on the footpad, it tipped so suddenly that he went reeling backward, hanging on with one hand, until he was gazing almost straight up at the sparkling blue world he had left behind. Regaining his balance, he took his first buoyant steps into the valley, and could not suppress his elation.
The Apennines were not gray or brown as he had expected, but golden in the light of lunar morning. Their rounded, dust-covered forms reminded him of ski slopes—Dollar and Half Dollar mountains at Sun Valley. He was surprised to find that a place others had called stark and desolate could feel so friendly. The mountains surrounded Hadley Base like a cradling hand. He felt at home on the moon.
But yesterday’s exploration had taken a toll on Irwin. Not until he and Scott were back in the LM did Irwin feel the full measure of his exhaustion. Aside from the mental fatigue brought on by hours of intense concentration, and the pressure spent. The incessant glare from the sun and the bright landscape had given him a fierce headache. And he was parched; the water bag in his suit had refused to work and he’d gone more than seven hours without a drink.
Worst of all was the pain in his fingers. By the end of the moonwalk they were so sore that when it came time to take off his gloves he had to ask Scott for help. When they had settled in for the evening, Irwin used a pair of scissors to trim his fingernails all the way back; that helped. He suggested his commander do the same, but Scott declined, reluctant to do anything that might compromise his dexterity.
After the moonwalk Irwin had been overtired, and he had not slept well. Then, this morning he and Scott were awakened early by a call from mission control, to check on a water leak in Falcon’s cabin. When they looked behind the ascent engine cover, they found a couple of gallons of water that had leaked through a broken filter. Irwin was glad that Grumman had waterproofed the LM’s electronics.
Thankfully, despite all of this, Irwin felt renewed as he and Scott prepared for the second traverse. Yesterday, they’d been denied the chance for real prospecting up on Hadley Delta; now they would have one more chance to find out what the mountains of the moon had to offer.
The adventure continues...
1 - Thursday morning I did a walkthrough of our extant VPC peering exercise with the re/Start crew, and my learners asked if we could do something with AWS Transit Gateway in future, so I promised to gin something up for next time.
What seemed like it would be a really quick bit of dev work ended up taking several hours because of a variety of non-obvious constraints in the lab environment. Also, as is typical when I do this stuff, I kept going on little side quests which found their way into the architecture, tying together a bunch of different things we've explored in the last several sessions and expanding on them.
This is my happy place, but sometimes I just run out of cognitive space when doing deep tech dives. Regardless, got everything worked out, and I spent a good bit of this morning testing and writing out instructions whilst drinking coffee and watching the WNBA (what a shot by Sydney Taylor to win it for the Sky!).
PS - got a chuckle when CAPCOM Joe Allen told Dave, "buckle up for safety." When I was a wee lad, I would sing that jingle with a little twist: "buckle up for Jesus, buckle up!"
I'd bet most folks likely won't want to listen to the entire stand-up EVA conducted by CDR Scott at the start of lunar surface activities. I mean, what Dave describes is wicked amazing, but the audio is admittedly a bit dry. Anyway, here's how he sets the scene in the book he wrote with Cosmonaut Alexei Leonov (you've met before), Two Sides of the Moon:
Though Deke Slayton and others in NASA management had initially opposed it on the grounds that it would consume extra oxygen, the plan we had finally agreed on was for me to perform a half-hour stand-up EVA, or SEVA, shortly after touchdown. By climbing up on to the cover of the engine inside the craft, and opening the upper hatch—rather as if I was in the conning tower of a submarine or the turret of a tank—I would stand up and take a good look around.
On geology trips I had learned the value of such an initial reconnaissance. But this would be a reconnaissance like no other. So, two hours after touchdown, after slowly depressurizing the cabin, I placed a protective outer helmet—a lunar excursion excursion visor assembly, or LEVA—over my inner helmet, and clambered up to my vantage point in my bulky, but by now pressurized, spacesuit.
Pulling my oxygen hoses and communication cables behind me, I slowly hoisted my elbows on to the rim of the hatch. I found I could support my own weight quite comfortably in the reduced gravity, and started to take in the view. What an awesome view it was.
Even with the protective filter across my visor, the sunlight reflecting off the crystal-clear features on the surface was intense, contrasting sharply with the deep, rich blackness of the sky beyond. The low sun angle of the early lunar morning laid long shadows over the spectacular scenery spread before me.
It was like an exhibition of exquisite images by the great photographer Ansel Adams. There was no color, but great contrast between the brightly illuminated surface and the black shadow of the mountain slopes and craters where no sunlight fell.
“Oh, boy, what a view!” I exclaimed. “Beautiful.”
Jim handed a bearing indicator and large orientation map up to me, and I began to give a number of precise location indicators and started to take a series of high-resolution connecting photographs of the full panorama that encircled us. Shortly after we had landed I had advised Houston, “Tell those geologists in the back room to get ready because we’ve really got something for them.”
They sure did. And with that, happy First and Only (so far) SEVA on the Lunar Surface Day to all who celebrate!
PS - Image from here. You know, I have a birthday coming up...
The launch hiccup—the failure of a heat sensor that resulted in the premature automatic shutdown of one of the three Space Shuttle Main Engines (SSMEs)—was a peculiar form of emergency: serious enough to warrant special contingency measures but relatively tame in impact. In the event that one SSME failed, the shuttle would still reach Earth orbit, but lower than planned. “
‘Abort to orbit,’ it was called at the time,” the Post noted of the incident. In a space program that had, until that point, been relatively free of well-publicized in-flight mishaps, the failure was both a troubling warning and a metaphor for the Space Transportation System (STS). Although giving the appearance of an operational infrastructure (deploying satellites and conducting scientific work), the space shuttles’ flights from 1981 to 1986 were marred by a series of worrisome problems.
The problem that struck STS-51F came as little surprise to those who designed and operated the shuttle: the three main engines mounted at the rear of the orbiters operated under unprecedented pressure, using one of the most energetic propellant combinations available: liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen, each chilled to hundreds of degrees below zero. Unlike previous engines using this combination of propellants, the SSMEs were intended to be reusable for up to 100 flights, a level of performance never expected from a propulsion system devised to work for only a few minutes.
The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) had hoped that the engines would require little maintenance between flights, but as problems mounted, the engines required almost complete disassembly and recertification before each flight, an expensive process representative of the tremendous risks that NASA sought to control. On July 29, 1985, though, Challenger dodged a bullet: it had not failed, but neither had it quite succeeded. Procedures intended to compensate for problems had worked, but the abort had left the orbiter where nobody wished it to be.
Abort to Orbit (ATO) was one of several contingencies scripted by NASA in the event that the shuttle suffered a serious malfunction on launch. Astronauts, to the extent possible, trained for these aborts and carried printed procedure books in the cockpit to perform the often-complex steps required for each. Each abort mode was keyed to a failure of the shuttle’s propulsion system at various points in the flight, from a relatively late, partial failure (ATO) to more crippling early failures of the main engines or solid rocket boosters (SRBs).
A more profound propulsion system problem (or inflight emergency) required an Abort Once Around (AOA), in which the shuttle, having limped into too low an altitude to sustain multiple revolutions around the Earth, would reenter the atmosphere and land after a single ninety-minute circumnavigation. A more disabled shuttle unable to enter orbit could, alternatively, coast on a suborbital trajectory to Transoceanic Abort Landing (TAL) on a predesignated airstrip several thousand miles east of the launch site in Florida.
More extreme and most difficult to execute would have been a Return to Launch Site (RTLS) abort, which would have been the earliest option available to the crew. The crew would jettison the shuttle’s boosters after they burned out and fire the SSMEs to try to loop the shuttle in a return trajectory that would place it on a path to land on the runway at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center (KSC). Astronauts regarded this abort mode as impossible to execute: NASA had considered attempting it during an early shuttle test flight, but astronauts refused, finding the abort more dangerous to fly than an orbital mission.
Just presaging what would come:
The space shuttle was, simply, only half-complete: safety systems intended for the craft were shed during its tortuous development...
The peculiar dangers that the Challenger and Columbia astronauts experienced were not a feature of spaceflight generally. Rather, they were caused by specific flaws manufactured into a vehicle by engineers who knew about better alternatives and hoped the vehicles would never fly long enough to be undermined by the compromises they had made.
The Thrust-Assisted Orbiter Shuttle (TAOS) configuration that NASA selected in 1972 lacked robust propulsion technologies, redundancies, and safety systems that would protect a crew in the event of trouble; that is what had made it cheap and why it was chosen over safer vehicles that would have cost twice as much and employed liquid-fueled boosters, escape pods, and configurations that generally offered lower risk. While NASA publicly insisted that the shuttle was safe, even the engineers and analysts who developed the TAOS configuration believed that the shuttle would be redesigned to improve its safety.
Challenger’s loss appeared to stem principally from the fact that these upgrades came too late; indeed, most never came at all. A second fatal accident involving the orbiter Columbia in 2003 similarly failed to derail the space shuttle program, despite new evidence that the shuttle was even more fragile than the public believed.
It's well-known that I still love the beautiful, compromised machine, but it was a fucking deathtrap all the same. One hopes we learned those lessons written in blood as we continue to reach for the stars.
Figured that instead of focusing on the launch of Apollo 15 on this date in '71, I'd take a look at one of the pivotal events in exploration and science from the mission. Chaikin described it thus:
Scott and Irwin’s attention was riveted to the strange, white rock Irwin had seen earlier. As they approached, they strategized about the best way to collect it. Irwin suggested lifting it off its dusty pedestal with the tongs. Scott did so, and he raised it to his faceplate to inspect the find, which was about the size of his fist. It looked fairly beaten up, and it was covered with dust, but as he grasped it with his gloved fingers some of the ancient coating wiped off, and he could see crystals: large, white crystals. Suddenly—
“Ahhh!”
“Oh, man!”
—both men realized what they had discovered. The rock was almost entirely plagioclase. Exposed to light for the first time in untold eons, its white crystals glinted in the sun, like the ones they had seen in the San Gabriels. This was surely a chunk of anorthosite, a piece of the primordial crust. Scott radioed the news.
“Guess what we just found. Guess what we just found. I think we found what we came for.”
“Crystalline rock, huh?” prompted Irwin.
“Yes, sir,” said Scott.
“Yes, sir,” repeated Joe Allen, like a brother at a revival meeting. After describing the rock in detail, Scott placed it in a special sample bag by itself. Of all the rocks brought back from the moon this one would be the most famous. To the geologists, it would be sample number 15415, but to the world it would be known by the name bestowed upon it by a reporter covering the mission at the space center: the Genesis Rock.
In time, probing the treasure with electron beams in their laboratories, the geologists would peg the rock’s age at 4.5 billion years. If the moon was any older than that, it wasn’t much older; the solar system itself was thought to have formed only 100 million years earlier.
Scott couldn’t hear the geologists’ ecstatic reactions in the back room, but he didn’t need to. And Spur had even more to offer.
Kids in a candy shop:
As they made their way along the crater rim they happened on one remarkable find after another, poking out of the dust. Scott sounded like a rare-coin collector who had stumbled across a treasure chest in the attic. “Oh, look at this one!” Scott told Allen what was already clear: “Joe, this crater is a gold mine!”
“And there might be diamonds in the next one,” said Allen, a gentle reminder that Scott and Irwin could not linger here. They were getting close enough to their immutable walkback limit that Allen was telling them to press on. Now Allen radioed that Irwin’s sample bag was about to come loose—everyone in mission control could see that on the big screen, and they worried that all those priceless samples might tumble into Spur crater.
Precious minutes were lost as Scott cinched it up. With less than 15 minutes remaining, Scott and Irwin looked hopefully at a boulder that lay perhaps a dozen yards farther along Spur’s rim, the only large rock in sight, and therefore the only rock for which the geologists could be sure of its place of origin. Undoubtedly it had been torn from the floor of Spur.
Just now, Allen passed up word from the back room: forget the boulder; they wanted them back at the Rover, using the rake to collect a bunch of walnut-sized fragments. Scott eyed the boulder. He told Irwin to go ahead and start raking; in the meantime he went into high gear. A short run along Spur’s rim brought him to his quarry. Working on stolen time, he clicked off Hasselblad pictures of it from every angle.
There wasn’t time to hammer off a piece, but he spotted a small fragment in the dust—obviously knocked loose from the big rock—and got his sample after all. He hoped the geologists would be able to figure out where it came from by studying the pictures. Scott turned and ran back to join Irwin in his work. He hated to leave. It was a frustration he would feel again and again on the moon, just as he had that first day in the Orocopias with Silver: there was never enough time.
This is one of my favorite missions ever. Looking forward to seeing astronauts getting dirty again on the lunar surface, lighting new fires in our imagination and expanding our understanding of the cosmos.
One of the most famous examples of pareidolia ever. (1976)
RIP, Percival Lowell, you would have hated the Viking (and Mariner) missions:
Cydonia was first imaged in detail by the Viking 1 and Viking 2 orbiters. Eighteen images of the Cydonia region were taken by the orbiters...
In one of the images taken by Viking 1 on July 25, 1976, a two-kilometre-long (1.2 mi) Cydonian mesa, situated at 40.75° north latitude and 9.46° west longitude, had the appearance of a humanoid face. When the image was originally acquired, Viking chief scientist Gerald Soffen dismissed the "Face on Mars" in image 035A72 as a "trick of light and shadow"...
After analysis of the higher-resolution Mars Global Surveyor data NASA stated that "a detailed analysis of multiple images of this feature reveals a natural looking Martian hill whose illusory face-like appearance depends on the viewing angle and angle of illumination". Similar optical illusions can be found in the geology of Earth; examples include the Old Man of the Mountain, the Romanian Sphinx, Giewont, the Pedra da Gávea, the Old Man of Hoy, Stac Levenish, Sleeping Ute, and the Badlands Guardian.
On 22 July 1951, after six months of training, two small dogs nicknamed Tsygan and Dezik were launched from the site of the first Soviet cosmodrome in a region called Kapustin Yar. At a height of 110 km, the head of the rocket containing the dogs separated and began to free-fall back down to Earth.
They experienced intense G-forces during descent, but after a heavy jolt from the parachute, the cabin containing the two four-legged pilots slowed and touched down safely. The trip, which lasted 15 minutes from start to finish, made Tsygan and Dezik the first animals to experience space flight and to emerge from the craft unharmed...
Chief Designer Sergei Korolev decided that the Soviet space programme would...work with dogs. The choice of dogs, ‘man’s best friend’, over monkeys, among our closest genetic relatives, was based on rational reasoning springing from emotional attachment. The Russian scientists believed they could build stronger bonds with the animals and so ensure their obedience. They also believed that the dogs eking out an existence on the harsh streets of Moscow would possess a survivalist temperament.
There were strict criteria for scouting the first-star squad of dogs. They had to be female because the specialised clothing and toilet technology was easier to tailor to them. And they needed to be small in size: 6 to 7 kg each to accommodate the strict weight limit for the rocket. These dogs also needed to have light-coloured fur, in order to show up clearly in front of the onboard camera. The scientists had even attempted to bleach the fur of one of their favourite darker dogs without success.
It is left as an exercise for the reader to look more into the less-than-happy outcomes of subsequent flights...
Naturally planned to watch First Man yesterday, but did not finish.
Not atypical for the ADHD squirrels in my head, especially when the WNBA is on, but I don't think I've ever watched this one all the way through in one sitting. It is not your big space spectacle, but rather an emotional journey, and I have difficulties these days when it comes to stuff that gets me in my feels, especially involving grief.
And actually, that's a big part of what I love about the movie. Don't get me wrong, I obviously enjoy real rockets and sci-fi explosions and whatnot, but I really appreciate the lens Damien Chazelle used here. Astronauts are just as human as the rest of us, and deal with life and loss in their own ways. There are times that I wish I could compartmentalize the way Neil apparently did.
Anyway, the final is scene is a perfect punctuation mark. It doesn't show up in Hansen's book, so I went looking to see if the filmmakers had said anything about it. Here's the screenwriter, Josh Singer:
Look, in point of fact, Neil and Janet didn’t get divorced for another 20 years. They were both strong-willed individuals who were going to muddle through regardless. In the first version of that scene, we didn’t have them touching hands. On the page, it was just them looking at each other through the glass. Then there was a subsequent scene where Neil is told he’s not going to fly in space again and he comes home and looks at his house and he can’t quite bring himself to go in because he’s a stranger in his own home.
We actually got feedback from Janet who was like “Well, it wasn’t over. The seeds were there, but we kept trying for a long time.” And ultimately we also decided we’ve got to leave you with a little hope. They’re still reaching for each other. So we re-wrote it and that’s where we wind up.
Not an exclamation point, but...yeah, I guess an ellipsis is what it is.
The final Shuttle mission, STS-135, ended when Atlantis touched down on this date in 2011. It wasn't originally going to fly, but:
During an address at the Marshall Space Flight Center on November 16, 2010, NASA administrator Charles Bolden said that the agency needed to fly STS-135 to the station in 2011 due to possible delays in the development of commercial rockets and spacecraft designed to transport cargo to the ISS. "We are hoping to fly a third shuttle mission [in addition to STS-133 and STS-134] in June 2011, what everybody calls the launch-on-need mission... and that's really needed to [buy down] the risk for the development time for commercial cargo", Bolden said.
The first commerical re-supply mission, CRS-1, launched in October the following year. We wouldn't have American crewed flights resume until late 2020 with Crew-1, and relied on 27 Soyuz missions to ferry astronauts up to ISS in the meantime.
Exactly 50 years earlier, Ole Gus went up (and down) in Liberty Bell 7:
The addition of the large viewing window was a result of a change requested by Mercury astronauts. This window allowed the astronauts to have a greater viewing area than the original side port windows. The field of view was 30 degrees in the horizontal plane and 33 degrees in the vertical. The window is composed of an outer panel of 0.35-inch thick Vycor glass and a 3-layer inner panel.
That ended up being the final suborbital mission, with John Glenn's being changed to an orbital flight using the Atlas rocket:
August 18: NASA announced that analysis of Project Mercury suborbital data indicated that all objectives of that phase of the
program had been achieved, and that no further Mercury-Redstone flights were planned.
Speaking of suborbital missions, Thursday might see Starship Flight 13 finally launch (rescheduled after an abort last week):
The planned flight profile builds upon previous test flights. Starship will fly on a controlled suborbital trajectory designed to fall just short of orbit, while the Super Heavy booster executes a high-precision, controlled splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico.
Ostensibly, the big rocket will get into orbit for a prop transfer demo later this year, although I remain skeptical. That will involve multiple launches - not sure we've done anything like that since Apollo-Soyuz in '75 - but least they won't be using the finicky Agena Target Vehicle.
More importantly, 14 years ago Sadie landed safely, just like Eagle.
In contrast, Ericka crashed on the table a couple times after the spinal was administered, which left me cooling my heels longer than expected before I was invited into the delivery room. The med team's demeanor suggested something was off, but nobody told me anything until after our girl had escaped that cursed Ovarian Bastille.
Anyway, my high school freshman is going to hang out with some friends today (we already started on the cake), then pizza for dinner, and a mainland adventure awaits on Wednesday. Time marches on...
PS - Only astronaut in that video still alive is Charlie Duke. Collins died in '21, and Stafford in '24. Time marching on, indeed.
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