Brian Yee

Yesterday’s Astronomy Picture of the Day was pretty neat.  It was an astronaut grabbing a rather large satellite in an untethered spacewalk.

The picture doesn’t capture really what’s happening here.  The satellite is rotating while being captured.  The video shows this better. Shannon couldn’t believe what she was seeing.  ”Is he crazy!” seems like what Not surprisingly, NASA stopped the practice of untether spacewalks after the Challenger accident.

This reminded me of an interesting anecdote from Mike Mullane’s Riding Rockets on risks in spaceflight.  The shuttle engineers had found a very rare but potential flaw with the shuttle that might prevent the solid rocket boosters from separating (which would be fatal to the crew).  They had asked the astronauts if they would still launch knowing the risk.  That astronaut’s response:

They might as well have asked a three-year-old if he wanted to eat his candy now or wait until tomorrow.  If the engineers said, “We forgot to install the center engine.  Do you still want to launch?” Hank (astronaut Hank Hartsfield) probably would have said, “No problem.  We’ll just burn the two we have.”  Nothing was going to get in our way.

The business of being an astronaut is extremely risky.  I wonder if I could fly in the face of those risks.

Great post by NASA’s Wayne Hale on his blog regarding conjuctions, or close encounters between the Space Shuttle and space junk.  When a conjunction is going to occur during the crew sleep period and there is sufficient reason to believe there will not be a collision, mission controllers will set a timer to expire at the Time of Closest Approach and everyone would hope they did their math correctly.  This happened three times during Wayne’s tenure in Mission Control.  His quote:

So as we waited for the clock to count to zero, there was plenty of time to contemplate metaphysical topics:  life, death, courage, risk, achievement, probability, dishonor.  They are all fellow travelers, intimately bound together.  No great accomplishment comes without difficulty or risk.  Miscalculation or failure results in death and dishonor.  But it is what it is; you do the best you can, make the best rational choice you can given what you know, and then wait for the result.

Going to Las Vegas holds no enticement for me.

I follow Wayne Hale on twitter (@waynehale) and I am always impressed with his insights and thoughts on the space program.

I tried to stay up to watch the start of the rollout live – scheduled for 12:01AM this morning, but it got delayed about an hour, so I’m glad I didn’t.  The last bit of the rollout is happening right now.

Someone on the nasaspaceflight.com forum this morning noted that the last rocked to rollout from the VAB that wasn’t the shuttle was ASTP (on a Saturn 1B), which rolled to pad 39B on March 24 1975.  It was an interesting sense of scale.  And it’s neat to finally see something new.

Spaceflightnow.com Gallery

Before launches at Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, Helicopters search the downrange path of rockets to find any nomads in the vast grasslands of Kazakhstan.  If any are found they are warned of the upcoming launches.

Link

This picture of this activity was particularly interesting:

(image from russianspaceweb.com, copyright noted)

The americans launch with ocean downrange. and a similar search is performed for boats that are in the wrong spot.

One of the things I’ve been looking forward to recently is the rollout (on 10/20) and the launch (scheduled for 10/27) of  Ares I-X: NASA’s first test flight of the new rockets in support of the Constellation Program (created by Bush II in his Vision for Space Exploration).

It’s been exciting to read about the development, creation, and assembly of the new rockets — the first new thing from NASA since the launch of STS-1 in 1981.  Even more exciting, in a different sort of way, is to read the debates going on right now on the web and trying to figure out what’s going to happen next.  There’s been a review of the entire program by the Augustine Commission — and the future direction of NASA is going to announced soon by new NASA administrator Charles Bolden.

Whether or not Ares I continues development, it’s still an exciting time in Human Spaceflight…even if you only get to watch from the sidelines.

These beautiful images, taken from the Landsat Program, show the strange way things look from >250 miles up.  The Bahamas image of the sand beneath the ocean is breathtaking.

Link (via kottke).

NASA released the updated manifest for the last 10 space shuttle flights a few days ago.  If you’re interested in seeing a launch, there are only 10 left.  After mid-year 2010, the next manned launched likely will not occur until 2014.

Two more shuttle flights are planned this year, in October and November, five in 2009 and a final three missions in the first half of 2010 to bring the program to a close.

NASA had planned to retire the shuttle Atlantis after a final Hubble Space Telescope servicing mission in October, but the orbiter will make two more flights beyond that, one in 2009 and another in 2010, to provide additional processing margin. Atlantis and Discovery will fly three more times each and the shuttle Endeavour will make four more flights, including the 10th and final mission.

Link to Flight Manifest