Tag Archives: NASA

national news

Thrill returns at rocket launch

A curious feeling came over me this morning as I watched the television screen.

A rocket took off from a launch pad at Cape Canaveral, Fla. It was carrying — on its maiden flight — the Orion spacecraft. The Delta rocket roared to life, spewing flame and roaring like a thousand freight trains, and then it lifted off slowwwwly into the sky.

I began muttering under my breath: Come on, come one, come on.

Then I realized something. I was smiling broadly, ear to ear. I was feeling a thrill similar to what I had watching astronauts blasting into space aboard their Mercury, Gemini, Apollo, Skylab and space shuttle craft.

http://www.cbsnews.com/videos/orion-clears-first-hurdle-in-getting-to-mars/

Hey, this was a big launch today.

Orion is being developed as the United States’s long-range vehicle that eventually will carry astronauts into deep space. I’m talking about Mars. Or perhaps to one of Jupiter’s moons. Or maybe to an asteroid.

It flew two orbits around Earth this morning, then splashed safely and on target into the Pacific Ocean.

Mission accomplished.

I’ll admit to being a sap when it comes to space flight. I’ve wept at the sight of rockets launching and at the sight of spacecraft re-entering the atmosphere. Heck, I’ve watched the film “Apollo 13” about, oh, 20 or 30 times and I still get misty when Jim Lovell tells NASA ground controllers that the spacecraft is coming home safely after that harrowing rescue mission in April 1970.

Orion’s first manned flight is years away. Its maiden voyage to the great beyond is even farther into the future.

I hope to be around to watch it take humans into our solar system. Yes, I’ll be crying.

 

International news

Good job, Philae lander

As an American baby boomer who came of age during the Space Race, I am in absolute awe of the picture I saw this morning.

http://www.nbcnews.com/news/photo/philae-probe-sends-back-first-photo-surface-comet-n247586

The European Space Agency’s comet lander, Philae, has sent back the first image fromĀ Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko.

Holy cow!

That a mechanical device could be launched from Earth, travel 10 years through deep space and then land on a comet, for crying out loud, is enough of a scientific marvel all by itself.

Now we’re getting pictures that are being sent more than 300 million miles from Earth. What’s more, the clarity is astounding beyond measure.

I saw the news report earlier this week when Philae landed on the comet and watched space agency engineers cheering, back-slapping and hugging each other. It reminded me of the reaction at NASA when, for instance, the late Neil Armstrong told the world: “Houston, Tranquility Base here. The Eagle has landed.”

Oh, those were the days.

I’m glad the ESA has accomplished this monumental feat. I’m delighted to see the pictures. A part of me, though, is a bit envious of the spectacular success that someone else has just achieved.

 

 

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It's been 45 years since that 'giant leap'

Allow me this admission: I didn’t do much thinking Sunday about the 45th anniversary of man’s first steps on the moon.

I was too busy traveling home from a glorious weekend with my family.

And to be frank, thinking of that day saddens me a little. It’s not because of the event itself. The late Neil Armstrong’s first step off the Apollo 11 lunar lander was captivating at a level I’d never experienced. “One giant step for (a) man, one giant leap for mankind” became a mantra to be repeated by proud Americans everywhere.

No, the sadness comes in realizing where we’ve gone — or not gone — in the decades since then.

We landed a few more times on the moon, had a near-tragedy when Apollo 13 exploded en route — only to be brought home in a miraculous seat-of-the-pants rescue effort. Alan Shepard, America’s first man in space, got to land on the moon and hit that golf shot that went miles.

Those were heady times.

Then the missions became “routine.” How sad. NASA pulled the plug after Apollo 17. It embarked on the Skylab mission to test humans’ long-term endurance in space. Then came the space shuttle experiment, with its huge highs and devastating tragedy.

Then it ended. The shuttle fleet is retired. We’re piggybacking into space aboard Russian rockets.

I admit to longing for the days when we could get re-inspired the way we were when President Kennedy made it the national goal to “put a man on the moon before the decade (of the 1960s) is out and return him safely to the Earth.” We had that big, bad Soviet Union to race to the moon. We won that contest.

Now there’s some vague talk about going to Mars — eventually. Why “vague” talk? Because one hardly ever hears anything publicly about what’s going on. NASA engineers are toiling in obscurity — apparently — designing a vehicle to take humans to the next planet out there in our solar system.

My late mother and I spent many mornings awaiting the launches of the early space missions. Mercury and Gemini preceded the Apollo program. We agonized over the delays. Cheered at the launch. Wept with joy when the men landed safely in the ocean.

I’ve never grown tired of watching these vehicles lift off from the pad and roar into space. It pains me that the nation became bored with it.

I am grateful to have watched humanity’s first steps on the moon. I surely now want to live long enough to hear someone say, “Houston, we have landed on Mars.”

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Hottest May in human history

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http://www.nbcnews.com/science/environment/may-was-hottest-recorded-history-n138446

Planet Earth just experienced the hottest May in recorded history.

That’s according to those left-wing, socialist, tree-hugging, anti-business organizations such as the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, NASA and the Japanese government.

OK, so the reaction to this latest report will be quite predictable.

The righties will contend it’s all cooked up, fabricated, tailored to support the climate-change agenda being put forward by the communists who run the White House. The lefties will say these findings prove what they’ve been saying all along, which is that Earth is getting hotter.

I haven’t yet decided how I feel about who’s to blame for what I believe to be happening, which is that the planet is warming up.

Is it manmade or is it part of the planet’s evolutionary cycle?

A lot of scientific data suggest that human beings are largely responsible for this, through the emission of greenhouse gases and the deforestation of large tracts of land that used to serve as a counterbalance to what humans spew into the atmosphere.

I tend to believe the data. I haven’t yet drawn any firm conclusions. I’m still open to the possibility that Earth is beginning a cycle repeated every million years or so.

NOAA, NASA and the Japanese, though, have laid it out — once more — for all the world to see. This past May was the hottest on record. How can we possibly deny that the climate is changing?

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Rocket launch rekindles age-old interest

I watched the launch of a rocket Monday afternoon and found myself smiling as it blasted off the pad and headed into space.

NASA is sending a probe to Mars. It’ll take 10 months to get there. The Maven satellite will settle into Martian orbit and send back data that is supposed to tell scientists back home on Earth about the atmosphere that surrounds the Red Planet.

http://www.nbcnews.com/science/mars-mystery-tour-nasa-counts-down-maven-orbiters-launch-2D11603312

That, of course, will happen if all goes according to plan.

Why the keen interest? Well, the launch rekindled my childhood fascination with rocketry and with the notion of sending manmade objects — not to mention human beings — into outer space.

NASA has been relegated to the back burner of our national discussion. The United States no longer has an operational manned space program. NASA grounded the shuttle fleet two years ago, sending the three working space shuttles and its one prototype model to museums around the country. It sent thousands of space workers packing.

We’re still training astronauts to fly into space. They are hitching rides aboard Russian rockets — if you can imagine that — to spend time aboard the International Space Station.

I’ve long thought human beings were put on this planet to explore beyond its bounds. We’re still doing so, but now we’re doing it with unmanned vehicles, such as the Maven mission that is now en route to Mars.

The launch excited me Monday. These events usually do, especially when the communicator counts down the final 10 seconds, the engines ignite and the vehicle lifts off. I become slightly breathless as it starts to turn toward orbit and am relieved to hear the launch director declare that the vehicle has attained orbit successfully and then has launched its way toward deep space.

I keep hoping one day — before I check out — that we’ll see human beings take this journey.

Indeed, I still believe that’s one of the reasons God put us here in the first place.

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Godspeed, Scott Carpenter

And then there was one.

Of the seven men chosen initially to explore space on behalf of the United States, only John Glenn remains with us. Scott Carpenter, the second American astronaut to orbit Earth, died today at age 88.

Now only Glenn is left. The former U.S. senator from Ohio, in 1998, became the oldest man to fly in space when he took part in a mission aboard the shuttle Discovery.

Carpenter had just one flight into space. It was on May 24, 1962 aboard Aurora 7, the tiny Mercury capsule that made three orbits around the planet. Carpenter’s capsule splashed down off the Puerto Rico coast, but missed the mark by a couple hundred miles. The world waited as Navy ships searched the ocean before finding Carpenter safe and sound after his harrowing mission.

Those were the days, of course, before we took space flight for granted. That was before it all became “routine,” as if soaring off a launch pad atop a flaming rocket, accelerating to 17,000 mph ever was like walking your dog through the neighborhood.

My mother and I would get up early in those days to await those launches. We’d wait literally for hours on end in some cases. In the case of Glenn’s flight, we waited several days as one glitch after another resulted in the flight being “scrubbed” for the day.

Carpenter, and the six men chosen with him, embodied the can-do spirit of the time. We were involved in a space race with the Soviet Union, which had launched the first satellite in 1957 and put the first man into space in 1961. We were still playing catch-up when Carpenter took off. But we got to the moon first and, well, the rest is history.

Speaking of “can-do spirit,” recall that Donald “Deke” Slayton was one of the Mercury Seven, but he was grounded because of a heart murmur. He remained on active flight status until 1975 when he finally got the “go” sign from NASA and he took part in the joint Apollo-Soyuz mission that hooked up with the Soviet spaceship 200 or so miles above the earth’s surface.

Scott Carpenter and his fellow space travelers helped bring a generation of young Americans — such as me — along for a glorious ride into the unknown.

John Glenn is the last of that illustrious corps of explorers.

Just as Carpenter famously said “Godspeed, John Glenn” as his colleague took off in February 1962, let us now wish Godspeed to Scott Carpenter on his own final journey.