Category: Space Exploration

  • Falcon Heavy

    John F. Lindner

    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…

  • The Cupola

    John F. Lindner

    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…

  • Raptor Interplanetary Transport Engine

    John F. Lindner

    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…

  • First Deep Space Walk

    John F. Lindner

    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…

  • Into the Wind

    John F. Lindner

     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 both…

  • Dreaming Eyes Wide Open

    John F. Lindner

    Kubrick’s transcendent match cut, millions of years in 1/24th of a second, from the film 2001: A Space Odyssey. 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…

  • Kelly Twin Paradox

    John F. Lindner

    Yesterday astronaut Scott Kelly returned from nearly a year in free fall aboard the International Space Station to join his identical twin brother Mark back on Earth. Due to their different spacetime paths, I estimate that Scott aged about 9 ms less than his brother, and therefore travelled about 9 ms into the future, becoming one of…

  • A New Kind of Astronomy

    John F. Lindner

    One of the first things I did as a grad student in 1982 was tour the Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory (LIGO) prototype on the Caltech campus about a block from my dorm. It was housed in a utilitarian L-shaped building wrapped around the corner of another building. I toyed with the idea of working…

  • Hillary & Armstrong

    John F. Lindner

    You’re probably familiar with the iconic photograph of Edmund Hillary standing atop Earth’s highest mountain wearing an oxygen mask in air so thin the sky is almost black as space — but apparently Hillary declined to be photographed and instead this photograph is by Hillary of his companion Tenzing Norgay during 1953’s first successful ascent of…

  • The Falcon Has Landed

    John F. Lindner

    Monday evening, the first of SpaceX’s 70 m (or 230 ft) Falcon 9 full thrust launch vehicles successfully deployed 11 satellites to low Earth orbit — and performed reversal, supersonic retrograde, and landing burns to return the first stage to Cape Canaveral. Recent upgrades to the Falcon 9 include densified oxidizer and fuel, with liquid oxygen…

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