Kitchen progress

Here's what we're up to right now...

Orbital Express Videos

Orbital Express is a cool DARPA/NASA/Boeing sponsored mission to demonstrate autonomous rendezvous and docking and on-orbit servicing. A couple weeks ago I went down to Albuquerque to watch the "Scenario 1-1" experiment. I'll be back in a couple more weeks for one of the later experiments.

Here is the DARPA website that provides updates on Orbital Express:

Here is the link to the Boeing website on Orbital Express:

There are some ‘videos’ and animation links on the right side of these pages.

A new perspective on the Big Dipper

Follow the link to see a newly released set of Hubble Space Telescope images. The image covers a region "no bigger on the sky than the apparent width of your finger held at arm's length" and includes "at least 50,000 galaxies".

Amazing stuff...

Orbiting Junk... courtesy of Bejing

An interesting piece on the orbital debris environment, and how the recent Chinese Anti-satellite test may change it.

A Rocket To Nowhere

My mom sent me these pictures (source unknown), of the Shuttle (STS-115) launch in December, and supposedly taken from onboard ISS, so I went looking to see where they really came from (apparently they are from a NASA WB-57F Ascent Video Experiment airplane). Well, this search lead me to here, where I found a link to an interesting essay on the worthlessness of the space shuttle and international space station.


Not saying I completely agree, but there are some points that can't be denied, and this is a very well written summary of manned space exploration in the US. Here's a few excerpts I particularly enjoyed...

On the "Exploration" motivation for manned space flight (and the fact that we haven't left low earth orbit in 30 years):

But NASA dismisses such helpful suggetions as unworthy of its mission of 'exploration', likening critics of manned space flight to those Europeans in the 1500's who would have cancelled the great voyages of discovery rather than face the loss of one more ship.

Of course, the great explorers of the 1500's did not sail endlessly back and forth a hundred miles off the coast of Portugal, nor did they construct a massive artificial island they could repair to if their boat sprang a leak.

Ane on sending humans to do a computer's job:

Meanwhile, while the Shuttle has been up on blocks, a wealth of unmanned probes has been doing exactly the kind of exploration NASA considers so important, except without the encumbrance of big hairless monkeys on board. And therein lies another awkward fact for NASA. While half the NASA budget gets eaten by the manned space program, the other half is quietly spent on true aerospace work and a variety of robotic probes of immense scientific value. All of the actual exploration taking place at NASA is being done by unmanned vehicles. And when some of those unmanned craft fail, no one is killed, and the unmanned program is not halted for three years.

Over the past three years, while the manned program has been firing styrofoam out of cannons on the ground, unmanned NASA and ESA programs have been putting landers on Titan, shooting chunks of metal into an inbound comet, driving rovers around Mars and continuing to gather a variety of priceless observations from the many active unmanned orbital telescopes and space probes sprinkled through the Solar System. At the same time, the skeleton crew on the ISS has been fixing toilets, debugging laptops, changing batteries, and speaking to the occasional elementary school over ham radio

Kind of a long read, but I enjoyed it...

Jodi and Bo's Year in Review

Remembering 2006... (follow link above for some pics)

Titan Has Liquid Lakes, Scientists Report in Nature

Scientists think Titan has lakes of liquid methane, possibly "filled through methane rainfall." The Cassini probe, currently in orbit around Saturn, has done some cool stuff.


(Picture Credit: NASA/JPL/USGS)