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“Contact Light”
Our TV is broken, so Aunt Nora invites us to her apartment. (Aunt Nora isn’t really our aunt, but she introduced our parents to each other, so that’s what we call her.) My brother Jim and I lie on the floor close to the TV, while the adults sit on the couch. We watch NBC…
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Black Hole Radii
I set the alarm for 8:55 AM. Brutal, but I wanted to watch live the National Science Foundation Event Horizon Telescope news conference. I was expecting the first image of a black hole, and the EHT team did not disappoint. But the black hole was not the Milky Way’s Sgr A*, but M87*, a thousand…
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Dr. Rendezvous
Edwin Aldrin earned his PhD from MIT in 1963 with a thesis titled, “Line-of-sight guidance techniques for manned orbital rendezvous”. Just three years later in 1966, Aldrin was the pilot of Gemini XII, the last flight of the Gemini program, a critical precursor to the Apollo moon program. Aldrin and his commander James Lovell were…
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Moon Dance
I ran up the stairs to Studio Art. Justine was already rolling out the treadmill, so I climbed another flight of stairs to the old running track and let down both ends of the steel cable, one end connected to the harness and the other to the sandbag counterweight. Our reduced gravity rig was basically…
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Falcon Heavy
I was supervising Jr IS, but as I circulated around the lab, I watched the clock. Everyone was working quietly. Just before launch, I snuck back to my office and closed the door. The SpaceX Falcon Heavy was surrounded by swirling clouds of condensation at Kennedy Space Center‘s historic Pad 39A. Amidst spectactors’ cheers and…
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The Cupola
In the sky is a castle, built in free fall, brick-by-brick, where the sun rises and sets every ninety minutes. The castle derives its energy from sunlight and recycles its water. Sealed against a vacuum, its inhabitants float and glide through its passageways and gaze down at Earth through its expansive cupola. In an earlier…
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Raptor Interplanetary Transport Engine
Why has SpaceX chosen methane to fuel its Raptor rocket engine? Robert Goddard’s first rockets used liquid oxygen O2 or LOX and gasoline. The Saturn V moon rocket first stage used LOX and refined kerosene. The Saturn V second stage used LOX and hydrogen that burn to water in my favorite chemical reaction, 2H2 + O2…
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First Deep Space Walk
In 1971 during Apollo 15’s return from Earth’s moon, astronaut Al Worden performed the first deep space walk nearly 200 000 miles from Earth to recover external service module film canisters that had mapped the lunar surface. Worden was able to pause and orient himself to simultaneously see both Earth and moon as disks against…
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Into the Wind
Last month, on 2016 April 18, a SpaceX Falcon 9 launch vehicle delivered a Dragon cargo capsule to the International Space Station and successfully landed its 48-m first-stage booster on the drone ship Of Course I Still Love You in the Atlantic ocean. SpaceX intends to reuse such stages and perfect rocket landings on…
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Dreaming Eyes Wide Open
1968. White Plains, New York. My mother takes me to a matinee of 2001: A Space Odyssey. The theater seats thousands and the movie plays continuously all day without commercials or trailers. A uniformed usher with a flashlight seats us. I stare wide-eyed, mesmerized by the images and sounds. I ask my mother what the…
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.