Tag Archives: NASA

national news

Hoping for a return of manned space program

6938210-space-shuttle-photos

The thought just occurred to me that of the original men chosen to fly into space, only one of them remains among us.

He is John Glenn, who’s now 94 years of age.

From what I understand, Glenn remains in good physical condition. But, hey, he is 94. At that age, you live one day at a time, or so many of the 90-somethings I’ve known have told me.

What troubles me particularly about Glenn’s advanced age is that once he leaves us, there will no one left from that exhilarating time who can argue forcefully for the return of the manned space program in this country.

https://highplainsblogger.com/2010/06/john-glenn-still-a-legend/

The Bush administration announced plans to retire the space shuttle program and then the Obama administration followed through with the plan. Two of the shuttles were destroyed by tragic accidents, leaving just three ships in use: Atlantis, Endeavor and Discovery. Challenger blew up shortly after liftoff in January 1986 and Columbia — with Amarillo’s Rick Husband in command — disintegrated upon re-entry in February 2003.

After the final shuttle mission — the flight of Atlantis in July 2011 — U.S. astronauts have been ferried into space aboard Russian rockets to spend time in the International Space Station. Think of that for a moment. During the height of the space race, of which Glenn was a major player, it would seem unthinkable that we’d ever have to depend on our adversary to take our astronauts into space.

We’re not hearing much talk during this presidential election campaign about the future of manned space travel. We don’t know whether Republican Donald J. Trump or Democrat Hillary Rodham Clinton will light the fire that re-ignites our national pride in the effort to explore beyond the bounds of our planet.

I know that NASA is working on a new launch vehicle that will take humans into space. I understand the space agency has plenty of work on its plate; it has unmanned probes to launch and plenty of research to complete. NASA, though, seems to be working in a closet. Does anyone ever hear updates, progress reports on the development of that launch vehicle?

Americans have few legends who can speak with authority on such things. John Glenn — who later served several terms as a U.S. senator from Ohio — is one of them who can speak with clarity and credibility on the value that space exploration brings to us.

If only we could keep him around forever.

We cannot, of course.

I get that we have a lot of pressing issues that are consuming presidential candidates’ time and attention.

My hope is that we will start hearing from one or both of the major candidates about how they intend to accelerate our return to space exploration.

I relished those mornings awaiting those flights by John Glenn and his early astronaut colleagues. I’m ready to get excited once again.

national news

Sen. Nelson wasn’t an astronaut

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nelson

I just listened to a brief interview that I cannot let pass. I put something on Facebook about, but I have to expand it just a bit.

MSNBC anchor Brian Williams was interviewing Florida U.S. Sen. Bill Nelson as part of the on-going coverage of this morning’s horrific massacre in Orlando, Fla.

Williams introduced Nelson to his audience as “an astronaut-turned-politician.” He then referenced Nelson’s “many years at NASA” while commenting on the prospect of extra security in the wake of the shooting.

I now want to set the record straight.

Sen. Nelson is a politician-turned-one-flight-astronaut. He served in Congress when he got picked for a flight aboard the space shuttle Columbia in January 1986.

He served as a payload specialist aboard the shuttle. He flew once, came back to Earth and went back to work in Congress.

What is equally fascinating is that Nelson didn’t correct Williams on either occasion.

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Nelson, a Democrat, was the second member of Congress to fly on a shuttle mission. The first was Utah Republican Sen. Jake Garn, who flew aboard the shuttle Discovery a year earlier, in 1985.

Oh, and the third member of Congress to fly? That would be a Democratic senator from Ohio, John Glenn. Yes, that John Glenn, the first American to orbit Earth in February 1962 aboard the Mercury capsule.

I should note here that Sen. Glenn had an advantage that his congressional “astronauts” didn’t have. The crews with which Garn and Nelson worked had to translate the jargon they spoke among themselves, as their rookie crewmen weren’t fluent in “astronaut-speak.”

Glenn needed no translator as he trained to fly aboard Discovery in 1998. He knows the language well. He spoke it himself while training with his six other initial American space travelers back in the 1960s.

Check out this video of that shuttle mission.

 

 

 

national news

A moonwalk can produce the strangest reactions

mitchell_moon_080725_mn

I learned something just a few moments ago about a member of one of the world’s most exclusive clubs.

Edgar Mitchell was one of 12 men in the entire world who have walked on the surface of the moon. He died over the weekend at the age of 85.

What I did not know about him was the was born in little ol’ Hereford, Texas, a Panhandle town known more for the “smell of money” that wafts from the cattle feedlots in and around the community.

Mitchell walked on the moon during the Apollo 14 mission commanded by the late Alan Shepard, the first American to fly into space. Shepard’s first flight occurred a decade earlier, in 1961, when he was launched aboard a small rocket, flew into a sub-orbit and then splashed down into the ocean about 15 minutes later. He would command the Apollo mission in 1971 and then, as many of usremember, hit that golf shot that traveled “miles and miles” in the light gravity on the moon’s surface.

Mitchell apparently had a totally different experience on the moon, which to my way of thinking is understandable — even one doesn’t quite understand the experience in and of itself.

He came to Earth and then spoke out over many years about extraterrestrials, and his belief that they have visited our planet. Mitchell had some form of spiritual awakening on the moon.

Think about that for a moment, though.

Where else that has been visited by human beings could produce such an experience?

I don’t believe what Mitchell has preached, that we’ve been visited by beings from outer space. I do, though, believe that one can experience something beyond our ability to comprehend simply by walking on the surface of another celestial body and looking into the sky to see Earth in the sky — 250,000 miles away.

The dozen men who’ve walked on the moon all came back with different experiences and differing points of view. Many of them coped well with the experience. I think, though, of moonwalker No. 2, Buzz Aldrin, who went into serious depression, suffering alcohol abuse.

And if you consider, too, that traveling to the moon — which is no small task to be sure — is just the first hopeful step in humankind’s exploratory evolution, what will be the reactions when we finally travel far more deeply into our solar system?

I’d pay real money to look at the psychological profiles of the individuals who are selected for the first mission, say, to Mars.

If one astronaut can return from a relative hop-and-skip into space believing the things discussed publicly by Edgar Mitchell, well, the next corps of deep-space pioneers will return with some seriously wild tales.

 

media news, national news

In other news, Challenger blew up 30 years ago today

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Republican presidential candidates are debating at this very moment.

I’m a bit weary from listening to it all, so I’ll recall a tragic moment in U.S. history.

Thirty years ago today, the phone rang on my desk at the Beaumont Enterprise. I answered it. It was my wife, who worked down the street in downtown Beaumont, Texas.

“What’s going on? I just heard the shuttle blew up,” she said.

I turned to my computer, punched up the wire and saw the bulletin: “Challenger explodes.”

I blurted out a curse word and told her “I gotta go!”

I turned on the TV. The video was horrific.

Seventy-three seconds into a flight the shuttle Challenger blew up and seven astronauts were dead . . . in an instant.

We were stunned at our newspaper. We stood there, transfixed by what was transpiring. We heard over and over the radio communication to the Challenger, “Go at throttle up.” Then came the blast. It was followed by silence before the communicator told the world, “Obviously a major malfunction.”

I wouldn’t feel that kind of shock until, oh, the 9/11 attacks 15 years later.

But what happened next at our newspaper was that we would plan to do something the paper hadn’t done since the attack on Pearl Harbor. We decided to publish an “Extra.”

It contained eight pages of text and photos from that ghastly event. It contained an editorial page, which I cobbled together rapidly. I wrote a “hot” editorial commenting on the grief the nation was feeling at that very moment.

We went to press about noon that day and we put the paper in the hands of hawkers our circulation department brought in to sell the paper on the street. It went into news racks all over the city.

Through it all the tragedy reminded us — as if we needed reminding — of how dangerous it is to fly a rocket into Earth orbit.

Of course, it would be determined that a faulty gasket malfunctioned in the cold that morning in Florida. The shuttle fleet would be grounded for a couple of years while NASA figured out a way to prevent such tragedy from happening in the future.

We would feel intense national pain, of course, in February 2003 when the shuttle Columbia would disintegrate upon re-entry over Texas, killing that crew as well — including the mission commander, Amarillo’s very own Air Force Col. Rick Husband.

They both brought intense pain to our nation.

Challenger’s sudden and shocking end, though, remains one of those events where we all remember where we were and what we were doing when we heard the news.

And to think that some Americans actually thought those space flights were “routine.”

 

national news

NASA finds another ‘Earth’

Well, how about this bit of news?

NASA announced it has discovered a planet that looks a good bit like Earth, orbiting a star that looks a lot like our sun.

The space agency has been hunting for this kind of scenario for decades. It means — maybe, possibly, potentially — that the planet, known as Keplar 452b, could be hospitable for, um, life … perhaps even as we know it.

That’s the good news.

Here’s the bad news: Keplar 452b is 1,400 light years away. How far is that? Well, a light year is the distance light travels — at 186,000 miles per second — in a single year. So, it’s 1,400 light years out there. That means, quite clearly, that we cannot get there.

http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/technology/nasa-discovers-earth-like-planet-orbiting-cousin-of-sun/ar-AAdnQPj

Nor, one can assume, can they — if there is a “they” on Keplar 452b — can get here.

Then again, maybe they have come here and we don’t know it.

OK, I get that it’s not likely. Astronomers think the planet is in its rocky stage, which is a precursor supposedly to entering its “greenhouse” phase.

Still, this discovery is quite exciting.

I’ve long thought that the statistical probability is just too great for there not be life somewhere in our universe, given the known numbers of galaxies, solar systems, stars, planets and other orbiting celestial bodies out there.

How many gazillions of them are out there? Too many to discount the probability — let alone the possibility — of life.

national news

‘The Eagle has landed’

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E96EPhqT-ds

I might be the only person in America who did not watch Apollo 11 land on the moon via CBS News’s legendary coverage of the event.

I was tuned in that day to NBC News. I heard the late Frank McGee intone, simply: “Man … is on the moon.”

But the link here is of the CBS coverage of the event, which occurred 46 years ago today.

It brings to mind this simple truth: We grew complacent about space travel over the years.

We launched a space race to the moon with the then-Soviet Union. President Kennedy had declared in 1961 that the goal would to be to “put a man on the moon and return him safely to the Earth” by the end of the 1960s. We got there in the seventh month of the final year of that decade.

It was an exciting time. It was fraught with peril. But we knew that and at some level accepted the risk as part of the grand strategy, the goal. We had to beat those dreaded Soviets and by golly, we did!

The lunar program would end in 1972. NASA couldn’t justify spending so much money on missions that had grown — this is he word they used — “routine.”

There could be nothing routine about putting human beings atop a flaming rocket carrying thousands of pounds of fuel and sending them into outer space.

Tragedy would strike later. We’d go through the Skylab program. Then came the shuttle missions. Challenger blew apart on Jan. 28, 1986, killing all seven crew members. On Feb. 1, 2003, Columbia disintegrated on its return from space, killing seven more crew members.

Routine? Hardly.

But on that glorious summer day in 1969, two men — the late Neil Armstrong and Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin — had us holding our breath as they walked into history.

State news

A most predictable response

I kind of knew this reaction would come as Texas Gov. Greg Abbott asked the federal government for help in combating the state’s terrible flooding. It comes from former Labor Secretary Robert Reich, who served in the Clinton administration Cabinet back in the 1990s.

This is what he wrote in his latest Facebook post.

“Texas Governor Greg Abbott finally requested federal disaster relief, and the President has just signed the order, as record flooding continues. I don’t begrudge Texas billions of federal dollars — we’re all part of the same nation, after all – but I do recall just five weeks ago the same Greg Abbott assuring Texans who believed a federal military training exercise was a plot to takeover the state that he would call out the Texas national guard to monitor the exercises.

“Not … incidentally, Texas’s congressional delegation contains some of the nation’s most outspoken deniers of human-induced climate chaos, such as Representative Lamar Smith, who charged that the White House report on climate change was designed ‘to frighten Americans,’ and whose congressional committee just slashed by more than 20 percent NASA’s spending on Earth science, which includes climate change.

“As I said, Texas deserves federal disaster relief. But wouldn’t it be nice if the Lone Star State acknowledged it can’t go it alone, and embraced reality?”

Precisely.

Except, Mr. Secretary, not all Texas believe as you have suggested.

 

Uncategorized

Hoping this ocean existed … on Mars

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Oh, how I want this report to be proven true.

NASA has reported finding compelling evidence that Mars once contained an ocean the size of the Atlantic Ocean, which makes it a body of water that covers more than half of the Martian surface.

http://www.cnn.com/2015/03/06/us/mars-ocean-water-study/index.html

The rover Curiosity has been boring into the Martian surface and has returned data to NASA that suggests the presence of water — lots of it — on the Red Planet.

Look, I grew up in a time when astronomers were taking picture of Mars from Earth showing those lines running across the planet’s surface. They called the “canals,” or some such thing that suggested that they were put there by Martian beings.

I’ve never really believed in the presence of life as understand the earthly term on Mars.

But the water finding, if its true, suggests something quite exciting about further exploration of Mars.

Here’s the deal, though: I haven’t a clue what that finding will produce.

That is why we need to send human beings to Mars. Let ’em take a look around.

 

national news, Uncategorized

Look what they found in moon walker's closet!

Neil Armstrong: smuggler.

It has a fascinating ring to it. Who would have thought the nation’s premier space hero, daredevil test pilot, the first man to ever walk on the moon would have squirreled away some artifacts from humankind’s most daring adventure?

The First Man on the Moon died in 2012, and his widow, Carol, has uncovered a trove of goodies she discovered in his closet.

http://www.cnet.com/news/forgotten-apollo-moon-artifacts-found-in-neil-armstrongs-closet/

I think it’s quite cool that he managed to sneak this stuff past his NASA bosses.

The artifacts were supposed to have crashed into the moon, along with the Apollo 11 lunar lander, which Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin left behind in lunar orbit in July 1969 when they hooked up with Michael Collins in the command module. Armstrong, though, brought the items home with him.

They include a camera used to take pictures on the moon as well as some gizmos and gadgets that had been stuffed into a bag and placed in Armstrong’s closet.

Hey, these items aren’t secret weapons, nor do they require some kind of top-secret clearance to handle.

I can recall coming home from the Army in 1970 with some items I was supposed to turn into the quartermaster’s office as I was transitioning back to civilian life. I still have my trusty entrenching tool, issued to me in 1968 and, by golly, I still use it around the yard. I can’t recall how I got it past the supply sergeant back then.

Whatever.

Mrs. Armstrong’s discovery has been turned over to the Smithsonian Institution’s Air and Space Museum, where I’m sure it’ll be put on proper display.

It’s a pretty cool discovery.

national news, political news

Is Ted Cruz anti-NASA?

Ted Cruz worked tirelessly in 2013 to shut the federal government down, shuttering agencies throughout the vast federal bureaucracy for 16 days.

One of them was the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.

Well, talk about bad karma.

The freshman Texas Republican senator is going to chair a subcommittee with oversight of NASA.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/01/12/ted-cruz-nasa_n_6456270.html?

This will be fun to watch. It might be Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s way of placating the TEA party wing of the GOP, of which The Cruz Missile is one of the team co-captains.

Cruz will chair the subcommittee on Space, Science and Competitiveness. The chairman of the Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee will be Sen. John Thune, R-S.D.

It’s going to be a new day in the Senate for the next two years, maybe longer.

Cruz isn’t known to be friendly to science, let alone to NASA. His insistence on shutting the government down to make some kind of political point likely didn’t go over well with the dedicated employees at the space agency.

He’s also shown a bit of nerve in blaming the Obama administration for cutting funds for NASA, suggesting that the president is de-emphasizing space travel.

I’m going to reserve judgment on the young senator’s stewardship of this panel. I’ll need to await some actual legislation that passes before his eyes for review.

Suffice to say that I am not hopeful for a good result.