"Поехали!"

Yuri Alexevich Gagarin
First Man in Space

It was a political act. It had little to do with piloting. It was a dangerous stunt that almost cost a man his life, but it was the moment that began all manned spaceflight that followed. Fifty-two years ago today, Yuri Gagarin was strapped into an eight-foot-wide, aluminum-alloy sphere and launched into Earth orbit.

Gagarin was a tiny fellow, barely 5' 2". He was assigned the mission mostly because he didn't add much to the payload of the automated spacecraft. Sergei Korolev, the Chief Designer of the Soviet space program, said a final command to him before Gagarin climbed into the spacecraft: "Come back."

The ship Gagarin rode into space was called Vostok, which means "East" but also carries the idea of "Dawn" - - the beginning of a new day. The Vostok wasn't originally designed as a crewed spaceship - - Korolev's engineers based its construction on the requirements for a reconnaissance satellite, capable of hoisting several hundred pounds of cameras, lenses, and film into orbit. The ship was supposed to counter the American Corona project, which was already returning miles of photographic intelligence about Soviet air bases back to the CIA. Korolev managed to tack on the manned aspect of Vostok as a selling point to the Soviet politburo, who liked the secondary role for what it was: a great tool for propaganda about "space exploration," while concealing Vostok's primary purpose as a spy ship.

1:4 scale model of Vostok at the Kansas Cosmosphere.
Service Module at left, Descent Sphere at right.

Because Vostok's chief purpose was for unmanned missions, the control and operation of the ship was entirely automatic. A cosmonaut's role as pilot, then, was superfluous. Korolev worried about "interference" by pilots during flight, so the onboard controls were locked down with a password. As a compromise between the designers and the flight controllers, the ship carried a sealed envelope containing the manual override code. Cosmonauts were forbidden to open the envelope without approval from the mission operators back on Earth. I'm not exactly sure how they would stop a cosmonaut from opening the envelope.

Launch Day

On the morning of April 12th, 1961, Yuri Gagarin rode a bus to the base of the R-7 rocket that would launch his Vostok into the sky. He saluted Korolev, shook hands with several ground support personnel, and then climbed a ladder up to the Vostok's hatch. The ground team screwed on the hatch, and then needed to remove and reseat the hatch when they noticed it hadn't quite sealed properly. At 8:07am local Baikonur Time, the twenty engines of the R-7 Semyorka booster ignited, and Gagarin's ship lifted off the pad. He shouted "Поехали!" ("pyoucali!" or "Let's go!") into his microphone as the ship cleared the launch site.

Six minutes after launch, both the boosters and the protective cover around Gagarin's ship separated from Vostok 1. The cosmonaut's first opportunity to view the Earth from space revealed a cloud-covered morning over central Russia. "I can see the Earth. The visibility is good. I can almost see everything. There's a certain amount of space under the cumulus cloud cover," he reported back to Baikonur before flying out of radio range.

Unlike the American network of ships and ground stations spread across the world, the Soviet program had only a small group of ships scattered along Gagarin's intended flightpath. With limited data being returned to the control site, Korolev's people weren't sure if Vostok was in a stable orbit for nearly a half hour after launch.

Things were equally mysterious for Gagarin. Since he had only a few instruments to inform him about his ship's status, Gagarin could only rely on whatever information the ground controllers could radio to him during the brief moments when they were in touch via the relay ships. As he flew within communications range of a radar station in southeastern Siberia, Gagarin asked,  "What can you tell me about the flight? What can you tell me?" The station radioed back that they had nothing to report and that Korolev (code-named "Number Twenty") had no instructions for him. Vostok-1 continued its flight as it headed down the length of the Pacific Ocean.

At the half-way point over the Straits of Magellan, the Vostok attitude control system identified the Sun rising in the eastern sky. The ship aligned itself for retrofire, arming the service module's sole remaining engine. Korolev's mission designers had an unusual backup plan in the event of the rocket's failure during reentry: the selected orbit would decay naturally in 7-10 days, so they loaded Gagarin's crew module with a week's worth of food and oxygen to wait out the "organic" landing mode.



Fortunately, the retrorocket ignited successfully, chopping the orbital parameters to intersect with a ground track down to Siberia. Immediately after retrofire, though, came the mission's greatest failure. The service module containing the navigation and propellant equipment failed to detach from the descent sphere. As the upper atmosphere began to buffet the two modules, the sphere began to whip around the service module at an ever-increasing rate. Gagarin was experiencing more than 8 g's of lateral force, compounded by the deceleration effects of the atmospheric reentry. Ground controllers lost contact with the ship as it passed over Egypt. They wouldn't be able to communicate until the Vostok ship passed through the ionization layer.

Ejection tube of Vostok ship.
Kansas Cosmosphere

The buffeting snapped the connection between the service and descent modules, and Gagarin's ship managed to right itself to deploy the ship's parachute. As the ship approached an altitude of 23,000 feet, the cosmonaut ejected from the descent module, just as cameras and film would be jettisoned on unmanned reconnaissance missions. Gagarin descended separately from his ship because Korolev's spacecraft designers couldn't figure out how to build a parachute capable of landing both payload and ship safely. It was an embarrassing compromise for Korolev, and this aspect of the mission plan was kept from the West for decades.

In the Saratov region of western Siberia, two farm girls saw a pair of parachutes descending overhead. A man suspended by one of the parachutes landed on a nearby hill. Dressed in an orange suit with a large white helmet, the farm girls began to back away as he approached. They had heard about the American pilot Gary Powers and didn't want to be involved with another spy pilot. "Don't be afraid!" yelled Gagarin, lifting his visor. "I'm Russian!" Gagarin's  25,000 mile flight ended on a Siberian farm a little more than an hour and a half after it began.


Fifty two years later, the world celebrates the birth of manned spaceflight with Yuri's Night, a series of parties and star-gazing that anyone is free to join in and participate. Although Americans tend to ignore the achievements of other nations in space, this is truly an international event to appreciate. Gagarin's quick jaunt into space motivated Americans to reach for the Moon, and built the foundation for the world's cooperative program: the International Space Station. Go and enjoy Yuri's Night tonight, and think about the little guy who took that first flight.

Thirty Pounds of Science

Previously on Citizen O'Kane, I wrote about how the Soviets beat the United States into orbit because President Eisenhower didn't want to win the Space Race on the shoulders of a reconstituted Nazi V-2 missile. The von Braun team, based in Huntsville at the Redstone Arsenal, were forced to cripple their experimental rockets with payloads of sand instead of propellant, just to make sure a competing Navy Vanguard program would get dibs on the first orbital mission.

After the October 4th, 1957 launch of the Soviet Sputnik satellite, all bets were off. Vanguard was nowhere near ready to be launched, and the Department of Defense gave the go-ahead to von Braun's rocket men to gear up for a launch as soon as possible. No more sand-bagged fourth stages, no more launch azimuths ending in the South Atlantic - - this time, the destination was Earth orbit.

The back half was just a rocket motor that wasn't jettisoned,

out of concern it might bang into the payload in orbit.

The folks on the von Braun team also wanted to make the payload more than just a beeping radio transmitter. The goal needed to be science related to make the project more than just a stunt. Fortunately, a payload group at the California Institute of Technology's Jet Propulsion Lab (under the direction of Dr. William Pickering) had been working on a satellite design for several years. The 30-lb satellite, powered by an experimental mercury battery and built with some of the first transistors ever manufactured, would carry out several experiments once in orbit.

Some of the more intricate experiments were designed by Dr. James Van Allen of the University of Iowa. Dr. Van Allen incorporated a cosmic ray counter and a geiger counter to track the elusive celestial energy particles that were rarely detectible at sea level. Due to the lack of space on the satellite, Dr. Van Allen omitted a data recorder, which eliminated continuous observations except when the satellite passed over a receiving station. The results from these observations were erratic and unexplained, until Dr. Van Allen made the remarkable discovery that massive magnetic bands emanating from the poles seemed to deflect most of the rays. The bands, now called the Van Allen Belts, are probably the greatest discovery of the early Space Age. The Belts reshaped our basic understanding of how Earth's magnetic field  - - they're why life can continue on the planet without being destroyed by celestial radiation.

All that previously unknown information became possible 55 years ago this evening, when von Braun's Juno booster hoisted Pickering's satellite with Van Allen's experiments into their first orbital mission. And we haven't stopped exploring since that evening.

Pickering, Van Allen, and von Braun, hoisting a backup version of their Explorer I spacecraft
at a press conference after their successful launch, Feb 1, 1958.

We had Everything in the World Drop Out

Here's a sad thought: as of 2010, more than half the country was not yet alive when America landed on the Moon. Folks my age, the people who witnessed the Apollo missions, are the exception, not the rule.

As such, the Apollo missions are a matter of remote history, consigned in popular culture to the same ranks of historic ignorance as the War of 1812 or the life of William H Taft.

Historical trivia: Tom Hanks didn't go to the Moon
with Kevin Bacon and Bill Paxton.

Surveyor 3 was the first spacecraft to
purposefully dig a trench on the Moon.
That doesn't include all the spacecraft that accidentally
dug a trench on impact.

Most people have a poor understanding of the history of Apollo. Their limited knowledge is derived almost exclusively from motion pictures such as Ron Howard's Apollo 13, a movie that, while accurate in most details, left behind a general idea that the only Bad Thing that ever happened on the way to the Moon was the Apollo 13 mission. The movie also gave the impression that Apollo astronauts were merely helpless passengers on a deep space journey, constantly hoping and praying that ground crews would come up with ideas to rescue them.

In fact, NASA's astronauts were not only veteran test pilots, but skilled aeronautical engineers, capable of diagnosing complex electrical systems and flight navigation software. The mission immediately prior to Apollo 13 put these myriad skills to the test in a life or death situation, just moments after launch. And the entire near cataclysm was witnessed by no less an audience than the President of the United States, 43 years ago on November 14, 1969.

The Apollo 12 mission was designed to be the first manned lunar landing with a precise target destination in mind. Unlike Armstrong and Aldrin's goal of merely landing on the flattest part of the Moon, astronauts Pete Conrad and Alan Bean would aim for a 300 square yard touchdown zone near the landing site of the unmanned Surveyor 3 spacecraft. The mission would test the limits of the crew's navigating and piloting skills, as well as the hardware's computing and event handling abilities.

Cmdr. Pete Conrad was arguably the best choice to lead this mission. The veteran naval aviator and test pilot had previously crewed the long-duration Gemini 5 mission, as well as the Gemini 11 Agena docking mission, a flight that briefly made Conrad and copilot Richard Gordon record holders for having traveled farthest from planet Earth. Conrad was a comedian and a prankster, but he also had a reputation for keeping a cool head and working through problems, even during the most dire emergencies. He was reliable when situations were no longer "nominal."

Don't disappoint the President.

Launch weather on the morning of Apollo 12's scheduled liftoff was hardly nominal. An advancing front had pushed a low cloud deck over Merritt Island during the evening, and set visibility conditions at the brink of flight rule acceptability. Unfortunately for NASA, politics sometimes trumped caution. President Richard Nixon, Chief Executive of the United States and holder of the Pen of Budget Appropriations Approval was in town for the launch that day, and to disappoint someone who was in charge of deciding the future of the agency would be an unwise move. So, despite the dodgy weather, the all-Navy crew was loaded into the 365-ft tall Saturn V and the countdown continued in the rain.

At T-0:00, with 7.5 million pounds of thrust, Apollo 12 thundered off the launch pad into the clouds. Just thirty seconds later, the ship would go transonic, pushing through maximum aerodynamic pressure inside the storm.

Launch commit... liftoff!

 Thirty six and one half seconds into the flight, the Something Bad part happened. Here's a transcript:

000:00:37 Gordon (onboard): What the hell was that?
000:00:38 Conrad (onboard): Huh?
000:00:39 Gordon (onboard): I lost a whole bunch of stuff; I don't know.

What happened was that a bolt of lightning seared through the clouds and the spacecraft, riding the trail of rocket vapor back to the launch pad. A second bolt of lightning repeated the journey a few seconds later.

000:00:50 Gordon (onboard): I can't see; there's something wrong.
000:00:51 Conrad (onboard): AC Bus 1 light, all the fuel cells-
000:00:56 Conrad (onboard): I just lost the platform.

Conrad was looking at a mess on his control panel. Every possible alarm signal was lit. The entire electrical system, previously being powered by fuel cells in the Apollo Service Module, seemed to be out. The navigation system (the pilots' familiar 8-ball) was spinning endlessly in a useless gimbal lock. And still the ship hadn't exploded... yet. Either the alarms were wrong or they were about to experience the first out-of-control Moonship. Conrad briefly explained the situation to Mission Control.

000:01:02 Conrad: Okay, we just lost the platform, gang. I don't know what happened here; we had everything in the world drop out.

Gordon, the Command Module Pilot, didn't think it was a hardware problem, but he wasn't sure what to do about the instrumentation problem.

000:01:09 Gordon (onboard): I can't - There's nothing I can tell is wrong, Pete.

000:01:12 Conrad: I got three fuel cell lights, an AC bus light, a fuel cell disconnect, AC bus overload 1 and 2, Main Bus A and B out.

This was no way to get to the Moon. Apollo 12 hadn't reached orbit yet - - they still were low enough to use their Launch Escape Tower and abort the mission. Conrad fingered the abort handle on the arm of his chair and pondered options.

Artist - astronaut Al Bean's interpretation of that moment.

 In the right-hand seat, Lunar Module Pilot Al Bean noodled through the dials on his side of the ship. Bean spotted a voltage indicator from the fuel cells that showed there was still energy in the system.  
000:01:21 Bean (onboard): I got AC.
000:01:22 Conrad (onboard): We got AC?
000:01:23 Bean (onboard): Yes.
000:01:24 Conrad (onboard): Maybe it's just the indicator. What do you got on the main bus?
000:01:26 Bean (onboard): Main bus is - The volt indicated is 24 volts.

Twenty four volts wasn't enough to run the mission, but it also meant that the electricity might be shorting out somewhere in the panel or in one of the circuits. The question was how to isolate the electrical problem without detonating the tons of fuel just behind them that was in the process of shoving them toward the Moon.
  

EECOM and veteran chain smoker John Aaron.

In Houston, a  NASA physics major named John Aaron suddenly realized this scenario was somewhat familiar. Aaron was the Electrical, Environmental and Consumables Manager (EECOM) for this flight, and he had seen a launch problem like this during a mission simulation back in 1968. The problem was that the primary equipment used to convert hardware electrical loads to power levels that could be read by the monitoring dials (known as "signal conditioning equipment") was broken. Fortunately, Apollo was equipped with backup, auxiliary equipment. Aaron knew the problems with all the different system alarms could be fixed with the flick of a switch. Aaron keyed his microphone to talk to CAPCOM Gerry Carr. "Try SCE to AUX," he said.

Astronaut CAPCOM Gerry Carr had no idea what that sentence meant. Neither did Flight Director Gerry Griffith, serving as Flight Director on his very first mission. "Tell them that," he told Carr.


000:01:36 Carr: Apollo 12, Houston. Try SCE to auxiliary. Over.
000:01:39 Conrad: Try FCE to Auxiliary. What the hell is that?
000:01:41 Conrad: NCE to auxiliary...

Carr corrected Conrad:

000:01:43 Carr: SCE, SCE to auxiliary.

Conrad also never heard that command before this mission. Fortunately, Al Bean knew what they were talking about. Bean had been part of the same simulation run that John Aaron remembered, and knew where the switch was on the many confusing panels of the Command Module. Al turned the switch, and the control panel reset itself. 

000:01:48 Bean (onboard): It looks - Everything looks good.
000:01:50 Conrad (onboard): SCE to Aux.
000:01:52 Gordon (onboard): The GDC is good.

Guidance and telemetry were back online, or rather, the astronauts were now able to see what Guidance and telemetry was trying to tell them. Conrad didn't have to pull the abort handle and stop the mission. Immediate crisis averted, they finally had time to take in what had just happened:
000:06:43 Gordon (onboard): Man, oh man ...
000:06:44 Bean (onboard): Isn't that a ...
000:06:45 Conrad (onboard): Wasn't that a Sim[ulation] they ever gave us?
000:06:46 Gordon (onboard): Jesus!
000:06:50 Conrad (onboard): [Laughter].
000:06:51 Gordon (onboard): That was something else. I never saw so many...
000:06:52 Conrad (onboard): [Laughter].
000:06:54 Gordon (onboard): ...There were so many lights up there, I couldn't even read them all.
000:06:55 Conrad (onboard): [Laughter].
000:06:57 Gordon (onboard): There was no sense reading them because there was - I was - I was looking at this; Al was looking over there ...
000:07:02 Conrad (onboard): Everything looked great [laughter] except we had all the lights on...

High-speed  launchpad cameras revealed the twin lightning strikes
that nearly wrecked the mission.

An amazing, terrifying moment that could have easily ended in failure, or tragedy. Instead, the training and skill of the crew and support staff managed to avert disaster. Oh, and they did manage to land right next to that Surveyor spacecraft just five days later.

Mission Accomplished

Me and Captain Girlfriend with
CAPCOM Gerry Carr, who later flew on Skylab 4

 

Percival Lowell and the Blood Vessels of Venus

Percival Lowell, shown during the middle of the
longest unwitting eye exam in history

 Astronomer Percival Lowell died 96 years ago on November 12, 1916. Everything I've ever read about him lauds his enormous contributions to the field of astronomy, but I'm really not quite sure what those contributions were.

Lowell was a rich guy, descended from a family of rich guys who arrived in Massachusetts about 15 years behind the Mayflower. Let me just give you an idea of how rich the Lowell family was: Percival's brother Lawrence was the president of Harvard University, and his sister Amy had enough free time to become a professional poet.

Percival graduated Harvard University in 1876, with a degree in mathematics. For ten years, he traveled the Orient writing and publishing three books about the history, psychology, and culture of Japan. By 1893 he had grown bored of travel, and turned his interests to planetary astronomy.

Planetary astronomy was all the rage in the 1890s, especially terrestrial planets like Venus and Mars. Lowell was especially taken by the writings of the Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli, who believed he viewed lines of channels or canals on Mars. Lowell believed in these canals as well, and built an observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona to confirm these sightings.

Lowell's Martian canals, 1896.

Percival Lowell cranked out three books about Mars, each volume loaded with dozens of sketches of the elaborate Mars canal system. He interpreted the canals as a last gasp construction of the dying Mars race, built to move dwindling water supplies from the polar ice caps to the parched equatorial regions. The whole idea seems maudlin and melodramatic, but after all, this was the Victorian age.

Lowell's observations of extraterrestrial canals weren't limited to the planet Mars. He also spotted a hub and spoke system constructed on the surface of Venus. Unlike Schiaparelli's Martian canals, Lowell was the only astronomer to note such features on Venus. In fact, Lowell only spotted these features when he narrowed the objective lens of his telescope to a mere half millimeter in front of his eye.

Not astronomy - - it's anatomy.

In 2003, retired optometrist Sherman Schultz figured out what Percival Lowell was actually seeing: the objective lens was reflecting shadows of blood vessels inside Lowell's eye. The map of Venus was in reality a map of the back of Percival Lowell's eyeball. It's quite likely that the canals of Mars were also a side effect of Percival Lowell's optical blood vessels. In any case, Mariner 4 eliminated the question of canals on Mars during its flyby of the Red Planet in 1965.

So, if Lowell's observation of canals on Mars was a bust, and the structures on Venus were a delusion, did he make any contribution in the field of planetary astronomy? An argument could be made that he helped in the discovery of the dwarf planet Pluto – – except, even in that adventure he was horribly mistaken on a planetary scale. Lowell, the mathematician, found a glaring gap in the gravity equations governing the motions of planets Uranus and Neptune. To account for the discrepancy, it seemed as though there was a third, more distant planet tugging on Neptune. This mysterious "Planet X" was Lowell's focus in the final decade of his life. Hundreds of photographic plates were made at the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, searching for a tiny dot in the sky to resolve the equation. The search continued long after Lowell had passed away, ending finally with the discovery by Clyde Tombaugh of the dwarf planet Pluto in 1930. Revisiting earlier photography, Tombaugh noted that Pluto had been imaged previously during Lowell's lifetime in 1916, but the tiny speck of Pluto had been overlooked.

It turns out that the entire search for Pluto had been a mathematical mistake in the first place. Spacecraft Voyager 2 confirmed that the planet Neptune was much less massive than Lowell had estimated, making the search for an additional planet unnecessary. Although the data was erroneous, Lowell's mistake set in motion the process of discovery that allowed Tombaugh to find Pluto.

Percival wasn't the only person in the Lowell household to see things that weren't there. His wife, Constance Lowell, was sued by a neighbor for "false arrest and malicious prosecution" after she claimed the neighbor had stolen twelve chickens (and a chicken coop). The neighbor was acquitted, and I can't find a record of how the civil suit turned out.

 Even though Lowell's astronomical work didn't do much to advance the science of astronomy his romantic notions of Martian canals gave birth to the science fiction stories of H.G. Wells and Ray Bradbury. Bad astronomy makes for great science fiction.

Lowell's tomb is in the shape of an observatory.
John Carter would approve.

Downmass

The word "stevedore" has a great heritage. It comes from the Spanish word "estevador," for "one who stuffs things." Being a stevedore was an occupation for many people working at seaports, where loads of cargo needed stuffing into the holds of freight ships.

Stevedores getting ready to stuff the stuff in with the other stuff on the ship.

 The job of stevedore shouldn't be confused with that of the longshoreman. Longshoremen unload freight ships, stacking the cargo on docks for delivery to warehouses. It's a different skill set, and actually made for two distinct unions during the 19th and 20th Centuries.

Most of us have only a cinematic understanding of  modern dock operations. We think not much has changed since the days of On the Waterfront, where burly, Vic Taybeck-looking guys would offload a ship full of wooden crates with hand-held freight hooks and hemp rope hoists.

If containerized shipping had been established in the 50's, maybe Lee J. Cobb
wouldn't have gotten into that big fist fight with Marlon Brando on the Hoboken docks.

The world's moved on, though. Since 1969, when the US Department of Defense established a standard size for containerized freight, a revolution in cargo transport has changed every job at ports throughout the world. Gone are the days of guys shoving wooden crates into excelsior-lined hulls. Today, the roles of both stevedore and longshoreman have been combined into that of crane operators, a mechanical method of loading and unloading ships without requiring a bunch of guys to crawl all over the cargo. While the number of folks employed by the dockside industry has declined, the amount of merchandise and material shipped worldwide has grown exponentially, expanding employment in related fields such as logistics, transportation, and warehousing.

Today: less Elia Kazan movies, more Denny's Claw games

All this leads up to something going on in outer space next week. On October 7th, SpaceX will launch the first production mission of its Dragon cargo ship to the International Space Station. The previous launch of Dragon was an experiment to see if the process would work - - this time, the cargo is for real.

SpaceX Dragon: this time, it's professional.

Why are the Dragon missions so important? Besides being the precursor to future manned American trips to the ISS, the Dragon is unique among its cargo-carrying rivals (Europe's ATV, Japan's H-III, and the stalwart Russian Progress modules) in that it not only can bring cargo to the ISS, but also bring equipment back to Earth. The other cargo ships are built for one-way trips. They don't have heat shields, parachutes, or any method of surviving re-entry. Even the manned ship, Soyuz, is only capable of returning less than 110 lbs of station equipment back to Earth, and that would only be small things that could fit through the Soyuz's narrow 27-inch hatch.

Puny 27" Soyuz hatch.

Dragon, by comparison, is a proverbial supertanker of downmass cargo. Instead of using the Soyuz probe-and-drogue connector, or even the Shuttle's old PMA linkup, the hatch to Dragon connects directly with any available Common Berthing Mechanism (CBM) port, which allows for a full 50-inch pass through width for equipment. H-III and ATV also use the CBM ports, but as I said before, they can't bring anything back home. The Dragon's downmass capacity (6,614 lbs) equals half the amount it can carry into orbit (13,228 lbs); in fact, this first production ship is going to bring more down than it carries up.

Un-be-freakin'-lievable 50" Dragon CBM hatch.

 How is this such a game changer? Simply, because it's brought the return of downmass capability to ISS operations back to the station program that's been missing since the retirement of the Shuttles last year. Experiments that didn't fit through Soyuz's tiny hatch, or weighed more than 110 lbs were stuck in orbit or doomed to fiery destruction in the old one-way cargo ships. Dragon, built specifically to accomodate the standard ISS experiment rack, makes possible the completion of dozens of station experiments that can now be studied back on Earth. Equipment is now capable of making round trips, so expensive, disabled hardware can be returned to Earth, repaired, and sent back into orbit on a future freight run - - all at a cost about 1/100th of a Shuttle mission.

Round-trip ticket, baby.

A dozen cargo missions by Dragon are scheduled for next year, followed by manned Dragon missions six months to a year after that. The routine-ness and simplicity of Dragon missions will finally make ISS missions safer and more affordable. Like its ocean-going counterpart, the two-way containerization of space cargo will change the economics of space -- for the better.

Man in the Middle

There's a chain of scientists and astronomers, from Copernicus to Newton, who figured out how the Solar System works. Today (September 28th) is the birthday of a guy who frequently gets left out of the chain, namely because he got part of the workings right and another part of it completely wrong. So, let's focus on him a little bit too much now, shall we?

Ismaël Boulliau, or Ismaël Bullialdus as he's called in his writings, was a French guy born in 1605. He was from a Calvinist family, so that meant he didn't have to worry too much about upsetting Papal authorities with new ideas about the heavens. His dad, an amateur astronomer, got young Ismaël interested in the latest theories about orbits and planetary motion.

Despite his Calvinist upbringing, Ismaël converted to Catholicism and became a priest at age 26. Fr. Bullialdus wound up working in the Royal Library in Paris, reading, sorting, and purchasing books for Louis XIII's court. King Louis was big on funding the arts and sciences, so Fr. Bullialdus was a busy guy for library acquisitions.

Ismaël continued the astronomy studies sparked by his father, and due to his position in the upper ranks of the government, became friends with other astronomers and mathematicians such as  Christiaan Huygens, Blaise Pascal, and Pierre Gassendi (all of whom were visitors to the royal court).  These men were on the cutting edge of planetary motion theories, and their correspondence shaped the investigations made by astronomers throughout Europe.

One of the hottest theories about planetary motion was made by a fellow astronomer in Germany at about the same time all these French guys were writing each other. Johannes Kepler figured out that the planets didn't move in circles around the Sun (as the astronomer Copernicus had theorized) but in a path of ellipses, with the Sun located on one focal point of the ellipse. Kepler wasn't sure what force caused the planets to move around the Sun in this manner, but he was pretty certain that the force was inversely proportional to the distance of a planet to the Sun.

Fr. Bullialdus was intrigued, but Kepler's numbers didn't add up. It seemed as though this mysterious force (if it did exist) would operate similar to how light and sound did with distance: namely, that the force would fade not by the inverse of the distance, but by the inverse of the distance, squared. When Bullialdus plugged in the numbers using his own formulas, the motions seemed to work just fine. Fr. Bullialdus published his findings in a book he called Astronomia philolaica, which appeared in 1645.

So, in 1645 Bullialdus had written this book that accurately described the motions of the planets. Unfortunately, he spent the second half of the book refuting the idea that some kind of "force" existed to make the planets go around the Sun. Instead, Ismaël believed the Sun and the planets were rolling around in the sky because of their initial trajectories at the beginning of the Universe. Fr. Bullialdus wrote, "I say that the Sun is moved by its own form around its axis, by which form it was ignited and made light, indeed I say that no kind of motion presses upon the remaining planets." Despite mathematical evidence to the contrary, he refused to apply the clues to discover the laws of gravity.

Thirty-eight years later, Sir Issac Newton would take the clues left by Bullialdus in Astronomia philolaica in order to shape his own book, the Principia Mathematica. Newton noted in the foreword to his book that Bullialdus's math was right on the money. However, Newton (and rival Robert Hooke) both managed to take the next step and specify that gravity was a predictable force in the Universe.

Tough break for Fr. Bullialdus. He retired to Abbey St. Victor, where he lived out his final years as a simple priest. On the plus side, today he's got a crater named after him - - if you have clear skies tonight, the sunlight should just be hitting his crater in the middle of the Sea of Clouds. Easy to spot - it's got a tiny peak in the middle that casts a shadow on lunar mornings.  So, maybe go out and take a look at the Moon tonight, and think of the fellow who had all the pieces, but didn't solve the puzzle.

Space Pedantry

I apologize: I'm a nitpicker. I'm pedantic, to use the crossword puzzle term. Little things make me twitch like Herbert Lom in the Pink Panther movies.

Nothing gets me more nitpicky than errors in space reporting. People who write technical articles about space are supposed to simplify explanations so that the general public can understand matters of orbital mechanics and engineering, but it doesn't mean that the writers need to be inaccurate.

My latest twitchiness revolves around the COTS-2 Dragon spacecraft, due to meet up with the International Space Station on Friday. Dragon is a history maker, being the first commercial cargo ship to arrive with a billable payload for the ISS.

Where does the craziness erupt? It's when TV reporters describe the linking as "docking" the spacecraft to the station. It's not a docking. In fact, avoiding a docking situation is exactly why the Dragon is such an attractive ship to both NASA and the other space station partners. Dragon has been built specifically NOT to dock with the station.

Docking is when a ship under its own power connects with another ship. Think of a boat on the water as it pulls up to, well, a dock: the boat steers and alters its speed so that it can connect with the cleats on the pier deck. The Apollo Command and Lunar Modules docked in lunar orbit.

Docking

Berthing is when something at sea is snatched out of the open water and placed in a slip, or on a deck. Imagine a cargo ship being unloaded in a harbor. The harbor crane is berthing the cargo containers by stacking them in piles on the shore.The cargo containers are not under their own power - - the crane is doing all the work. The Dragon spacecraft is berthed with the ISS.

Berthing

This doesn't seem like it should be a big deal - - docking vs. berthing - - but in the history of space station operations, it's a best practice when the cargo can be berthed instead of docked.

Why? Because way back in 1997, a docking collision almost wiped out the Mir space station, and the six people on board. Progress ship M-34 had a stuck thruster and wound up ripping a gash in the starboard side of the Mir station, causing a sudden vacuum in the Spektr module and a series of lengthly repairs for the station. Although Russia still uses Progress ships to resupply the ISS, they use minimal thrusts to bring the spacecraft within the "danger zone" (the KOS or "Keep Out Sphere") of the station.

Progress SMASH!

Newer ships are designed around a berthing model. First, the ship will arrive from the underside, or R-bar axis of the station. Why? Let's take a look at the R-bar and see:

The R-bar is a line that runs from the bottom of the station through the center of the planet Earth. Any ship arriving from this direction will fall back towards Earth as the thrust is reduced. So, it's a safe vector if you want to get close to the space station without bumping into it.

Dragon will climb up the R-bar line until it crosses inside the KOS. Astronauts on board the ISS will reach out with the Canadarm and tuck the ship into a port on the bottom of the Harmony module. The connector for the ship and the station is called, aptly enough, a Common Berthing Mechanism, or CBM. Dragon's port hinges will click into place with the ISS mechanism, and -boom- mission accomplished!

So, if you get up early Friday morning to watch all this orbital ballet, you'll be able to yell at the TV with a sense of authority as you correct the woefully misinformed news reader. Hooray for you!

Some things never change

One of the best parts of living in The Future is that things I'd normally have to go to a library to do I can now do while couch-surfing on my laptop at home.

When I was a kid, I used to haunt the basement of my local public library, perusing the stacks of old magazines and newspapers. It was fascinating to read the letters columns of popular science magazines such as, well, Popular Science, and see what the subscriber base at the time thought of Things to Come.

I remember reading this particular letter to the editor from October of 1949, and I managed to find it again, online!

Not sure what R. Klingbeil's life was like after 1949. A Google search shows a "Klingbeil Shoe Labs" from Queens doing quite a healthy business in ice skating equipment today. I hope Klingbeil got to see Sputnik flash overhead only a decade after this note was published.

Funny, or maybe sad - - I had a similar discussion with someone about this same topic on a pier at the Banana River in Florida. We were both waiting for the final launch of Space Shuttle Discovery. I was amazed that the concept of how orbits work still evades the minds of many people currently living in the Space Age. How is this possible?

Live in the World of Tomorrow...Today!

Norman W. Edmund passed away last Tuesday at the age of 93. Any American boy who grew up in the 1950's and 60's knows the company he founded: Edmund Scientific. His business made home science projects affordable and accessible across the country.

Norman W. Edmund

 Mr. Edmund knew how to connect with the inner scientist in boys everywhere. Rather than playing off the current fad of painting science as something for geeky "outsiders," Norman Edmund portrayed his customers as a group of industry "insiders" who suddenly had access to high-quality science gear at affordable prices. His catalogs, hawked regularly in magazines such as Boys Life, were punctuated with bullet lists of applications for each of his military surplus equipment. What young scientist wouldn't want a Audio Phase Discriminator with resolution down to 200 cycles? And for only $15 plus shipping - - why not order one and find out how to use it when it arrived?

And if you saved up enough money: LASERS!

My first purchase from Mr. Edmund's catalog was a set of six prisms. The glass was Army surplus, originally used as part of a lens set for an armored personnel carrier's periscope, and was virtually impervious to cracking - - even if dropped on a sidewalk. With the simple prisms, I learned how to recreate Isaac Newton's studies of light diffraction and wavelengths. I found out how to aim the prisms to cast rainbows on my bedroom walls, and how to stack prisms to restore the rainbows back to plain white light. All this science for about $3 including shipping.

I didn't buy the most common Edmund product, but many of my friends did: the official surplus military weather balloon with auxiliary helium tank. Many balloons (with an attached Spy Camera with Delayed Shutter Timer) were lost in the New Jersey stratosphere, all in the hope of returning pictures of a near-space panorama. Somewhere in the Raritan River basin, there must be dozens of rusting cameras full of moldy Ektachrome film reels, the remains of many failed junior meteorology experiments.

It's a Professional weather balloon!

Einstein, Salk, von Braun, and Sagan inspired many people my age to become scientists, but the case could be made that Norman W. Edmund inspired more future scientists than all those other men combined.

When I Heard the Learn'd Astronomer...

Captain Girlfriend and I went to a nearby library today for a lecture about Apollo 11. The fellow giving the lecture was a retired engineer who worked at MIT's Instrumentation Lab. He helped design the alignment telescope used in the Lunar Module.

Here's a picture of what the alignment telescope looked like inside the LM:

 

That camera looking thing behind the yellow guard rail was the Alignment Optical Telescope. It was a critical piece of hardware used to figure out where the Lunar Module was in relation to the Earth and the Moon. By pointing the telescope at two bright stars, the guidance computer could figure out where the ship was located in space. Quite an amazing bit of machinery that's often forgotten when looking at all the marvelous Apollo equipment developed during the same project.

The telescope and associated software cost $15 million for each unit delivered. The speaker told about how, when he was freshly hired at MIT, he was sent to give a demonstration of the new telescope to NASA. His sample telescope was placed on a table near a lectern, and several other engineers from other companies were also given space on the table to present their hardware projects. One of the other engineers got up to explain his system, and bumped into the table. The telescope began rollling... and rolling... and the speaker was sitting TWO ROWS away from catching the thing. Fortunately, nothing wound up broken, and the MIT folks didn't fire him for not wrapping himself around the scope 24/7.

The Q&A session was disappointing. I like going to popular science lectures to hear what average people want to know about, but it's usually quite depressing to think that most people believe the job of NASA is to redirect asteroids that are going to hit the Earth like a Michael Bay movie. The questions were about asteroid redirection, why America is "no longer in space anymore" and whether America would establish a permanent base on an asteroid. It's difficult to have a dialogue about the state of American manned space exploration when so few people actually follow what's in development at NASA. 

An interesting question from a 15-year-old boy in the audience made me realize how little of the Apollo era has translated to the current generation. The young man could not understand how the Apollo parachutes could have survived reentry. I've never noticed this before, but the landing sequence for Apollo really isn't described in much detail in movies about the missions. The engineer did his best to detail the Interface and Entry process in Apollo, but I'm not sure if the boy completely understood. 

After the Q&A, the small crowd broke up into little groups getting ready to leave for home. One family asked me a few questions, as they had heard some of the questions I had asked the engineer. I explained that there were many manufacturers working with NASA on manned spacecraft, and reading sites such as spaceflightnow.com was a great way to find out what's new. Their son (also about 14 or 15) didn't ask questions but seemed very interested in the topic. I can only hope that his curiosity would turn into the passion so many folks my age still have. 

All in all, a fascinating day.

Backyard Lucas

A million billion years ago when I was young, I used to make animated movies - - not the kind with the acetate sheets on a drawing board, but actual 3-D, stop-motion films. With a bucket of Matchbox cars, a Super 8 camera and a cable release (something that the camera guy at Woolworth's couldn't understand: "Why would you need a cable release for a movie camera?"), I'd film stop-motion traffic jams in my backyard as long as the summer afternoon light lasted. Pixelated GI Joes in Mercury spacesuits would be tethered to the "orbiting space platform" that looked an awful lot like the family mailbox out by the curb. Hundreds of feet of processed film epics sit in shoeboxes somewhere in my house, each reel  a short lesson that taught me how to make the next film a little better.

I went to college to learn how to make professional, compelling films. Then I got married, had kids, and found other priorities that crowded out my early desire to tell stories with moving images. I couldn't go back to making films, because I didn't have time or budget to take care of what was more important in my life. Understand that I enjoyed the life that happened instead - - - I didn't think I'd ever be able to go back to making films like I used to.

In the past month, I've found out that there may be a way to make cool movies again. Since I'm now the CEO of a New England high-tech company, I can now experiment with the latest software technologies and equipment. One of these software technologies is the latest release of Adobe's AfterEffects program, a piece of software that comes pretty close to parking Industrial Light & Magic on your desktop. For troglodytes like me, the output from this software is nothing short of breathtaking.

Let me give you a brief idea of the level of coolitude brimming from this software. I ordered a copy of Adobe AfterEffects from Amazon early last week. It arrived Saturday and took about 10 minutes to install on my computer. After looking at a few brief tutorials online, I thought of a test subject to try as a first-go at learning the ins and outs of the program.

Here are the details: NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory has been receiving closeup photo data of the Moon from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbit for more than a year now. Last spring, JPL published a high-resolution Mercator projection photo of the Moon. It looks like this:

 

One of the cool things Adobe AfterEffects can do is  take a flat picture and wrap it around a 3-D sphere, so that the result can be displayed as a virtual globe. So, I took the hi-res LRO picture, told AfterEffects to wrap it around a sphere, and then I spun the virtual sphere and told AfterEffects to move the virtual camera away from the virtual Moon globe. Here's the result:

That's just from an hour or so of playing with the controls and slapping one NASA pic into the photo asset directory. 

Now, I really *want* to make a short film with this amazing bit of software. First, though, I think I have to make it through Christmas first.

Be a Moon Expert! - Part 2

You're half an expert on Moon geography already - - so let's get the rest of the Moon into your head right away.

Quick technical review: the maria are the dark splotches we see on the Moon. The maria are spread out over the whole Moon in an easy-to-remember pattern:

"Five on the East Side,

Five on the West Side,

Two in the Middle

and an Ocean out West"

Last time, we went over the East (right-hand) side of the Moon, where there are FIVE maria: the Sea of Crises in the East, then then three "ity" maria in the middle East (Serenity, Tranquility, and Fertility -- "STuF," remember?), and then the Sea of Nectar, "dripping" at the bottom of the East side of the Moon.

Let's take a look at the Moon again:

Okay, we did the East side, and we'll do the West side - - but first, let's make a note of the two maria
that aren't East or West - - they're right in the middle, see?

Let's pull the Moon out of the background to make it clearer about how these maria straddle the centerline of the Moon:

They're a snap to remember. The north mare is Mare Frigoris - - the Sea of Cold. So, North - - North Pole - Cold, get it?

The second mare is smack dead-center in the middle of the Moon. It's called Mare Vaporum, the Sea of Vapors.

Now, I will tell you the incredibly stupid way I remember the name of this sea: "when you get a head COLD, you put Vicks Vapo-Rub on your chest." I came up with this memory aid when I was 8 years old, and it's been my personal shame to remember things like that for decades. Head Cold (up north where it's cold), then Vapo-Rub on the chest - - middle of the body, middle of the Moon. Sigh. Sad, but it's worked for me since the Apollo days.

Okay - - - remember where all the maria are:

"Five on the East Side,

Five on the West Side,

Two in the Middle

and an Ocean out West"

Let's press on to the West side of the Moon, okay?

Wow, that looks like a lot of maria, doesn't it? Fortunately, most of the dark part of the West side is taken up by the only named "ocean" on the Moon (the "Ocean out West") - - the Oceanus Procellarum, or the Ocean of Storms:

The way to remember the Ocean of Storms is to once again think of a US map - - the biggest ocean the United States bumps up against is the Pacific, which is in the Western part of the US. So, West... Ocean. And since it's the only "ocean" on the Moon, just remember that the name of the only ocean is the Ocean of Storms.

The Ocean of Storms accounts for almost half the "maria-type" surface of the West side of the Moon, so that brings the remaining maria in the West down to a more manageable number. Namely, there are only five more maria to remember. Let's look at the five remaining circles on the map of the Moon:

Okay, that looks like a lot of circles - - but you already know the blue one is the Ocean of Storms, so we just have to get the names of the five orange circles and we're done! Let's clear off the Moon and work on just the shapes:

So the first mare we'll deal with is the big round one at the top of the stack: Mare Imbrium, the Sea of Showers or the Sea of Rain.

There's an easy comparison you can make in your head - - the Ocean of Storms is HUGE. Mare Imbrium isn't as big as the Ocean of Storms, so it's just a "shower," not a "storm." Got it? Showers and Storms.

Okay, so the next mare on the stack is Mare Insularum -- the Sea of Islands.

Think of a rainy island, and you can remember that the islands are surrounded by the Ocean of Storms and the Sea of Showers. Another way to remember that it's a sea of islands is that there are some honking great craters scattered across it, like Copernicus and Kepler. We'll talk about craters next time, but right now just remember that the "islands" in the Sea of Islands are big craters.

This next mare is really difficult to remember, but I've kept it in my head with one of the stupidest metanymic memory aids ever conceived.

Mare Cognitum is the "Sea That Became Known" or The Known Sea. The way I remember this mare is that I *know* the mare below the Island Sea is the Known Sea. Yes, it's meta, but it works for me because I know the Known Sea is under the Island Sea. And now you know, too.

Here we go with the final two maria. As you can see from the places you've already learned, the places on the West side of the Moon seem to be concerned with weather - - storms, showers. The final maria are also about weather: namely, clouds and moisture. The mare on the bottom right is the Sea of Clouds, Mare Nubium.

 

The other mare is Mare Humorum, the Sea of Moisture.

 

How to remember these two? Well, on the Moon, "moisture is on the outside of clouds." Easy to see as the Sea of Moisture is closer to the edge of the Moon's horizon than the Sea of Clouds. Additionally, the Sea of Moisture is the lowest mare in the West - and so it's a drippy business, just like the Sea of Nectar, the lowest mare in the East.

Yes, the memory system is all quite infantile, but it seems to stick in the head if you give it enough time. Let's take a final look at where all these maria fit on the lunar surface:

Remember? The head COLD and the VAPO-RUB in the middle of the chest? Then, there's the only big Ocean, like the Pacific on Earth, that's way out to the West and is called the Ocean of Storms. 

Next there's the remaining five maria in the West - - the top one is Showers, which is like the big Ocean of Storms except Showers aren't as big as Storms. And it Showers on the Islands in the Sea of Islands, right in the middle of the West side of the Moon. And under the Island? Well, you KNOW that the Known Sea is under the Island, right? And you also know that the West is full of Clouds and Moisture - - but Moisture is on the OUTSIDE of Clouds on the Moon. Got it? Great!

Here's a look at what you know about the Moon:

"Five on the East Side,

Five on the West Side,

Two in the Middle

and an Ocean out West"

And you can name ALL of the maria now - pretty darned impressive! Next time, we'll go over some quick tips so you'll be able to point out ALL SIX Apollo lunar landing sites like a MOON BOSS. Failure is NOT an option. More soon.