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Astronomy Christmas Gift
I awoke early this Christmas morning to watch the successful launch of the James Webb Space Telescope. I remember the genesis of the telescope a quarter of a century ago when it was called the Next Generation Space Telescope. (The telescope’s name is controversial, and I would have preferred an astronomer’s name.) Its development has…
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Part Science, Part Art, Part Luck
Launched just last month, Lucy will be the first spacecraft to visit Jupiter’s trojan asteroids, rocky swarms that orbit about 60 degrees ahead and behind Jupiter in its orbit. Hal Levison, Lucy’s Principal Investigator, has described Lucy’s complicated trajectory, which includes an Earth gravity-assist and visits to both trojan swarms, as “part science, part art, and part luck”.…
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Punch it, SpaceX
She’s not looking up at the sky; she’s looking down at it. I am excitedly following the Inspiration4 spaceflight and its diverse all-private crew of Jared Isaacman, Sian Proctor, Christopher Sembroski, and Hayley Arceneaux. Orbiting higher than any humans this millennium and carrying the largest window ever flown in space, their Crew Dragon Resilience is providing unprecedented and…
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21st Century Skyscraper
Recently at its Boca Chica launch site, SpaceX stacked a Starship on a Superheavy booster to briefly form history’s largest rocket, dwarfing the Apollo Saturn V. Both a fit-check and a statement, SpaceX released the photograph below in black & white, which evokes classic mid-20th century skyscraper construction. But this 21st-century skyscraper is designed to…
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Mars Sky Crane
At the NASA press conference today, chief engineer Adam Steltzner presented three iconic images of the space age: Armstrong’s photo of Aldrin on the lunar surface, Voyager 1’s photo of Saturn and its rings from above the ecliptic, the Hubble Space Telescope’s photo of the Eagle Nebula’s “Pillars of Creation” star-forming region. And then he…
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Nightfall
NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) has discovered a sextuply-eclipsing sextuple star system. I think of “Nightfall”. The six stars of TCY 7037-89-I orbit each other in three binary pairs, as in the schematic. The primaries are slightly larger and hotter than our sun and the secondaries are about a half as large and a…
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Dragon Eye
“Resilience rises! Not even gravity contains humanity when we explore as one for all.” My eyes were glued to NASA-TV last weekend as I followed the flight of the SpaceX Dragon “Resilience” to the International Space Station. Ferrying a diverse Crew 1 of Mike Hopkins, Victor Glover, Shannon Walker, and Soichi Noguchi for a six-month…
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Flying Silo
Yesterday, SpaceX successfully flew a full-sized Starship tank-section prototype at its launch facility in Boca Chica, Texas. Standing thirty meters tall without its nosecone, weighing one to two hundred tons with methalox propellant, and made from stainless steel, Starship was powered by a single Raptor engine, the first full-flow staged-combustion engine to fly. Operational Starships…
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The Tall Towers
In 1945, science fiction author Arthur C. Clarke published “Extra-Terrestrial Relays – Can Rocket Stations Give Worldwide Radio Coverage?” in Wireless World magazine. Clarke calculated a special orbit, about 36 000 km above the equator with a period of one sidereal day, in which artificial satellites would appear to hover motionless above Earth. The satellites…
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Intrepid-Surveyor
Fifty years ago, Apollo 12 landed within sight of another spacecraft, a dramatic demonstration of pinpoint landing capability. While Dick Gordon orbited Luna in the command module Yankee Clipper, Pete Conrad and Al Bean left the lunar module Intrepid and walked over to the robotic Surveyor, which had landed over two years earlier. They retrieved…
Category: Space Exploration
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Nice post, John! Thanks for writing these. I always enjoy them.
David Smith’s ein stein is an awesome shape!
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Thanks, Mark! I enjoy reading your posts as well.