Into the Black by Rowland White - Book Report #275

As a fan of all things NASA I am constantly surprised as to how much I do not know.

The length of time it took to decide to build the shuttle, the preliminary work involved before any metal was bent, the different entities within the US government that fought over it, the construction and the testing before it was finally launched was fascinating to me.

The shuttle program was decided to go ahead while men were walking on the moon during the Apollo 16 mission.

In the mid-sixties, reconnaissance satellites were so primitive that images were shot on film and the film parachuted down to earth to be picked up by specially designed aircraft that would pluck them from the sky.  The technology did not exist to wirelessly send images from space, which seems odd since TV signals were being beamed from the moon.  I'm sure it had something to do with encryption.

The thing about NASA and the space program is just how risky everything they do really is.  They just make it look and sound like it’s no big deal.  But all of the hardware is on the absolute bleeding edge of technology and engineering.

Everything about the Shuttle was new and it was BIG compared to anything else NASA had done.  Transporting the Shuttle on a 747 was not a new idea but noting had been tried at that scale.

The fully-assembled launch stack was completely new.

And that heat shield was a nightmare to design, test and fly.

The Shuttle became what NASA had wanted it to be; an everyday thing, routine and boring.  But it was nothing of the kind.

This was a thoroughly engrossing book.

Highly recommended.

Rowland White's website - http://www.rowlandwhite.com/

Rowland White

Beyond: Our Future In Space by Chris Impey - Book Report #163

14/15/2016

I found this book to be a page-turner.  The subject of space exploration; past, present and future has always captured my imagination.

Impey did a nice job of informing the reader on how we got to here without getting bogged down in the details of the history of space exploration.

These broad strokes of background expertly puts today's program, both government and private, into focus.

The near future looks to be held back only by money and a bit of engineering.  I found myslef wishing that it's five years from now.  I want to know how it all turns out.

Where the book lost my interest was the final section, which looks at the far future.  One where we are no longer content with our solar system but are now making moves to interstellar travel.

My own personal interest is in the near future; how do we go back to the moon and then Mars?  Asteroid mining and generally moving human activity off the face of Earth, that's what really intrigues me.

The book would have felt funny if Impey did not tackle the subject of voyages beyond the solar system.  Most science fiction is based on this type of journey.

The book is very approachable, well written and makes a complex subject come into focus.  There is no doubt about where we are going, the sub-title says it all:  Our Future In Space.

I enjoyed the book very much and I am glad I was able to read it.

Chris Impey's website -  http://chrisimpey-astronomy.com/

Chris Impey

Red Rover by Roger Wiens - Book Report #161

13/15/2016

This a a fascinating story of how one particular science package, ChemCam, came to be built and installed on the Mars Curiosity rover.

What you will come away with is the incredible journey an instrument takes from concept, approval, build, installation and operation.  I was impressed at the dedication and effort that goes into such a project.  For years prior to launch there is a constant struggle for funding and crating the best possible science instrument that can be made.

Don't think for one minute that instruments are built from off the shelf components.  Everything is on the bleeding edge of engineering.  There is nothing about Curiosity that is ordinary.

When you consider the efforts of the ChemCam team is repeated by every other team that has an instrument on the rover AND the team that built the rover itself AND all the components it took to get it to Mars, I was left wondering how anything actually gets built, flown and operated at all.

Usually the public is let in on the launch and landing days, but there is about a decade of work that has happened before the rocket is launched.

Roger Wiens

 

New Space Frontiers by Piers Bizony - Book Report #150

02/15/2016

Pretty cool, eh?  150 books.  That's something.

I borrowed this book from the Edmonton Public Library but I simply must get a copy of my own.

If you are even a little bit interested in today's space flight this is the book that will explain it all and be the starting point for deeper research.

It may surprise you to learn just how many projects are out there that are just about ready to break out.  If half of the programs that are explored here make it to flight, the next five to ten years will be so much fun to watch.

The book itself is just beautiful with the interior photos and artwork sending my imagination soaring.

The sad reality of the exploration of space is that it has held orders of magnitude more promise than results.  So it is with a cautious optimism that I follow these newcomers to the black.  The chief difference today is that it is private enterprises, who have a profit motive, that are creating the new hardware that will make the next leap possible.

Don't let anybody tell you that spending money in space is a waste.  The money is never spent in space, it's spent here on Earth and launched into it.  The human race must push forward or stagnate in place.

I found this book to be filled with hope for the future.

Piers Bizony

Virgin Galactic, The First Ten Years by Erik Seedhouse - Book Report #139

Not to distance myself too far from my science fiction roots my next book to help restore my faith in humanity was the story of Virgin Galactic.

You may have heard about Richard Branson's next way-out business venture; after the success of the Ansari X Prize Branson invested in Scaled Composites to create Spaceship Two and sell tickets to space.

The book tells the story of suborbital flight from it's beginnings and of all the challenges faced with this type of flight.

But the author also delves deeper into the challenges of the first ten years of Virgin Galactic up to and including the tragic crash of October 2014.  Getting this business off the ground (take the pun if you want) requires patience, bravery and deep pockets.  Luckily Branson has all those qualities but I fear that the entire project is in danger of being abandoned - How much more money can he put into this?

Given that I grew up watching the Apollo program, I really want this project to succeed.  As far as I am concerned there should be moon bases all over the place and we should be on Mars by now. Opening space to commercial ventures is the only way space will be truly explored.  Why?  Because there is money to be made up there!

Back to the book - found it odd.  Don't get me wrong, I liked it very much and got more from it than I expected, it's just that it felt like I was reading a paper-bound version of a Wikipedia page.  Maybe it was all the website links listed at the end of each chapter, maybe it's the output the author, I can't put my finger on it. 

And speaking about the author, Seedhouse should be wearing a cape!  Author, astronaut, ultra-long distance athlete, master's degree in medical science, paratrooper -  how can a person like this not be genetically engineered?  Maybe he will simply explode from doing so much.

I kid, but really, this guy is a modern day version of Doc Savage.

Virgin Galactic

http://www.virgingalactic.com/

X Prize - Ansari X Prize

http://www.xprize.org/

http://ansari.xprize.org/

Scaled Composites

http://www.scaled.com/

Erik Seedhouse

Murmurs Of Earth, The Voyager Interstellar Record by Carl Sagan - BookReport #133

Think of the Voyager record as a time capsule from Earth of the 1970's.

The book is really a collection of essays about the creation of the Voyager record.  Which itself is quaint, knowing how technology has progressed since then. Even now, with the current resurgence in popularity of vinyl records, a person would be hard pressed to even play the Voyager record if it was available to buy.  It was encoded at 16 2/3 RPM in order to pack as much information as possible into it.

For The Future Times and Beings by Carl Sagan. I was surprised and a bit disgusted by the politics that came into the project and by some of the vitriol that was launched at the project team for what was included and what was left out.  It is lucky it was made at all.

The Foundations of the Voyager Record by Frank Drake.  The second essay tackles the difficult subject of just how you compose a message to an alien race.  There have been other instances of humanity sending proverbial messages in bottles.  Notably Pioneer 10 and 11 have plaques attached that caused much controversy because they included nude figures of humans.  In November of 1974, from the Arecibo radio telescope, a message was sent to the globular star cluster, Messier 13, which will take 25,000 years to get there.  In this transmission was an easily decode-able binary message that I thought would be quite difficult to understand.  As a matter of fact, I certainly would not be able to understand anything that has been sent so far.  I shouldn't worry about that since the intended audience are the scientific minds of unknown alien races not regular alien folks like me.

The plaque attached to Pioneer 10 & 11

The message sent by the Arecibo Observatory

The Voyager golden record cover

Pictures of Earth by Jon Lomberg: explains each individual photograph that is on the voyager record.   Here, again I was struck at how much thought went in to selecting each photo.  

There was a considerable effort in making sure each selection built upon another. Even with the nearly four decades that have passed you can get the impression that this is really a time capsule of sorts. The technology in the images has certainly moved on. But there is also a timeless quality to most of it; images depicting human beings will never be outdated. Unless we tragically don't continue as a race. 

A Voyager's Greetings by Linda Salzman Segan: was probably the most touching section of the book.  I was not surprised, by this point, that there was an agonizing amount of thought put into this portion of the project.  The bulk of this essay was occupied by a chart depicting; the language the greeting was spoken in, what was said printed in the characters of that language, the English translation, the speaker's name, the countries where the language is spoken, how many millions of people speak that language and the percent of the world's population that represents.

I was quickly drawn to the English translation column and found the greetings to be very poignant, hopeful, funny and respectful.  If I take this book off the shelf to show someone, I will most likely flip the pages of this section first.

Voyager

The Sounds of Earth by Ann Druyan.  On the Voyager record there is a collection of typical sounds from Earth; volcanoes, earthquakes, thunder, wind, rain, surf, crickets, frogs, footsteps, heartbeats, laughter, Morse code, train, truck, jet and many more.

All the sounds are laid out in a chronological order of life on Earth.  My personal belief is that this may be the most confusing portion of the record, just because sound effects, on their own require a familiarity with the source.  Many of the sounds tie with the pictures and are roughly in the same sequence as the photos so there is an elegance and logic to it.

Voyager's Music by Timothy Ferris.  I'll be honest here; I skipped most of this essay.  I love music and have something playing in the background as much as possible.  (I'm listening to some Gene Ammons as I write this). I am not, however, well versed in classical music, or traditional world folk music which comprises the bulk of the music selections.  I also am very weak in the terms used to describe music and its creation, so much of the discussion here just went over my head.

I do believe the addition of music on the record to be an inspired choice. Talk about putting our best foot forward.

The Voyager Mission to the Outer Solar System by Carl Sagan.  Since this book was published in 1978 and the first encounters with Jupiter did not happen until the next year the essay is worded in forward-looking language which made reading it quite special.  Sagan speculated on what would be learned based on what was then only theorized or remotely detected.  The flybys of Uranus and Neptune were still in the planning stages. 

It is a treat to see just how well the scientist of the day predicted what they found.  I was especially taken by what they knew of Io, Jupiter's innermost moon; they knew it was orbiting through a doughnut-shaped cloud of material that was thought to come from its surface but not why.  How wonderful it must have been when Voyager showed it to be caused by intense volcanic activity.

A massive volcanic eruption on the surface of Io.

The final essay is the Epilogue by Carl Sagan. Here we get back into the romanticism of the project and where we find ourselves today (2015).  Now that both Voyager 1 and 2 have crossed into interstellar space the final question to answer is what to do with the remaining propulsion fuel?  Currently the spacecraft are headed to open space but there is some thought being made to alter course and send them to nearby star systems.

Sagan also speculated how long the Voyager records can physically last given the environment of space; radiation and micrometeorites will have the greatest influence on the durability of the messages it contains.

Final thoughts.  If you can track down a copy of this book it is well worth adding it to your collection.  I took from it a sense of satisfaction and pride from what it contained and the efforts of the project team. I can't think of a better way to introduce humanity to the galaxy.

Carl Sagan holding the Pioneer plaque.

Landing on Mars.

It's funny; knowing we've landed on the moon and dropped rovers on Mars, I thought it wouldn't be that difficult to land humans.


After reading The Mars Dilemma from the October/November 2014 issue of Air & Space Smithsonian magazine, I was surprised to learn how little we know about landing humans there.  The two factors coming into play are: the thinness of the atmosphere and how massive a manned vehicle would need to be.

The article was written by co-authors Robert Manning ad William L. Simon who also wrote the book Mars Rover Curiosity, something I must read soon.

I found this article particularly insightful especially after reading The Martian by Andy Weir.  You can find my review of Weir's book is HERE.

The article in question can be found here :
http://www.airspacemag.com/space/mars-dilemma-180952797/?all

Air & Space Smithsonian magazine is something I'm subscribed too and enjoy the mix of aviation history and new space exploration news.  Their website is here:
http://www.airspacemag.com/