A Time Lapse View of Earth From the ISS

The crew of expeditions 28 and 29 onboard the International Space Station took a series of time lapse photographs of earth from August to October, 2011. Here they are strung together in a video; an amazing look at our planet. Blow this up full screen and take five minutes to enjoy the world you live on.

Earth | Time Lapse View from Space, Fly Over | NASA, ISS from Michael König on Vimeo.

A Tale of Rings

I am really just blown away by this. Check it out, they are taking five years worth of photographs snapped by the Cassini space craft and crafting an IMAX flip-book of Saturn out of them. Everything in this video is real, No CGI, no models, nada. Amazing!

5.6k Saturn Cassini Photographic Animation from stephen v2 on Vimeo.

The Bare Essentials of Safety

Last year I took approximately 20 airline flights. Actually, when you count the connecting flights, I took a lot more than that, and each one began with the safety spiel by the crew or a safety video by the airline, none of which I gave much attention. That is the problem airlines face, nobody pays attention to the safety instructions. Air New Zealand thinks they have that problem licked:

Question of the Day

Will our goading of Russia back into a cold war stance extend the life of the Space Shuttle? Do you think the US will want to rely on Russia for all its rides into space for five to six years?

In The Shadow of the Moon

We saw the trailer for In The Shadow of the Moon last night for the second time in as many weeks and man, does it speak to me. It might not be the same if you are younger than I am and don't remember those times, but it was a time where one act could bring the world together, in awe and in pride. I watched every Mercury, Gemini and Apollo launch and recovery on TV as a child. My mother made sure I did, keeping me out of school on those days. She said it was more important to watch history being made than to learn of history already past. All of these launches were historic, but Apollo 11 was something else entirely. It was something that transcended borders; it wasn't about the feat of a country or a people, it was a feat for the whole planet.

I don't know how well this Ron Howard produced film will be received, but I sure plan on seeing it. Take a look at the trailer and you might plan on doing the same, and you might find yourself looking back longingly at a time when America stood for something other than greed and aggression; a time when we really were the land of the free and the home of the brave.

Where is the Pan Am Space Clipper When You Need It?

In Stanley Kubrick's groundbreaking 2001: A Space Odyssey, you took the Pan Am Space Clipper into orbit and then on to the space station. There you could stay at the Howard Johnson's. This is how it was supposed to be and we should have been there six years ago.

As visualized by master special effects guru Douglas Trumbell, the world of tomorrow (six years ago) showed space travel to be a fairly routine thing done in relative comfort. You would zip up to the space station through a major airline, spend the night in a room provided by a major hotel chain and them press on to one of the bases established on the lunar surface.

Well, we aren't there yet, but we are slowly making baby steps in that direction. First there is Virgin Galactic, Richard Branson's civilian spaceline that will launch from the Mojave Desert of California and later on from Spaceport America out in the New Mexico desert. Not the defunct Pan Am, but Virgin is a viable trans-Atlantic airline and now a viable US airline as well and will soon be the first sub-orbital spaceline in the world. $200,000 gets you a two and a half hour flight starting in 2009 or 2010 depending on the completion of the SpaceShipTwo fleet.

Now comes Galactic Suite, the world's first space hotel. Galactic Suite expects to open for business in 2012 and would cost $4 million for a three-day stay at the space hotel. The cost also includes a three-week stay at a "James Bond-style space camp on a tropical island."

These folks are supposedly spending $3 billion on the hotel and shuttle. If true, this is a mammoth private investment in space; much larger than anything before. Given that they do not have what appears to be a final tested design for their rocket/shuttle, 2012 seems a bit soon for these folks to be flying, but you never know. Huge sums of money have been known to move mountains in the past.

They estimate that there are 40,000 potential customers on the planet; I know you and I are not two of them, but some people appear to have a boatload of money to spend on a three-week vacation for one. A Pan Am space clipper sure would reduce the problems these folks are facing.

On a Wing and a Prayer

I was watching the beginning of the Rose Parade yesterday morning and as usual they had the flyover of the B2 Stealth Bomber flying wing. Such a beautiful airplane and it reminded me of a couple of things.

First was the 1953 version of H.G. Wells' War of the Worlds starring Gene Barry in which the original Northrup Flying Wing figures prominently near the end. As a child that film scared me some, but not as much as the newer version by Steven Spielberg did a few years ago. That film left me feeling creepy as hell. I think it had something to do with the sound mix for the alien machines and that horrific effect of the clothes of people disintegrated by the aliens floating in the wind. Like I said, creepy shit.

The second thing it got me thinking of was the Rose Bowl game my nephew took me too a few years ago. He is from Washington and Washington State was playing that year so he got tickets with a friend and had one left over. My first Rose Bowl was quite exciting. Before the game two Flying Wings flew over the stadium. The second was the B2, but the first was the Northrop N9MB Flying Wing, the only one still in existence, which was used to train pilots on how to fly the big boy back in the day.

You haven't lived till you've seen a flying wing arc gracefully over your head. They are just amazing to watch.

It's Your Friendly, Neighborhood...

So I'm going through my office "stuff" and I find a small drawing pad with only a very few pages still intact. My guess these few remaining drawings are from, oh, 1971 through 1973 or so.

I don't recall drawing many pictures of Spider-Man; too much detail in the webbing. Who has time for all that? I guess I did back in my high school days. This one is strange in that the anatomy is really odd, not like me at all (note how I cleverly skipped drawing the hands completely!). It does have a kind of Ditko look to it, but I have no idea where this came from or why I drew it, though it must have been my idea of a Spider-Man poster.

Of course, it has to have a big foot in it!

Thirty-Four Years Ago Today

If you turned on your TV, this is what you saw:

The last American lunar astronauts leave the Moon. Look at our little friend, the Lunar Module, go! A plaque on the base of the LM reads...

Here Man completed his first explorations of the moon. December 1972 AD. May the spirit of peace in which we came be reflected in the lives of all mankind.

The next crewed NASA mission to land on the Moon is very tentatively scheduled to occur in 2019 with the Orion 13 mission.

The Lunar Module

Most of you should recognize the object in the photo to my left; it's the Lunar Module (or Lunar Excursion Module if you like). It's the craft that the astronauts used to land and take off from the moon in the 1960s and 70s. I have a special attachment to the LM and to all things NASA and I have my mother to thank for that.

I watched every Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo spacecraft take off and land. My mother held me out of school whenever NASA did something that was televised. She felt that watching history as it happened was more important than reading about past history.

The moon landing happened while I was in junior high school and I belonged to a Space Club. The Space Club built and flew model rockets and was a lot of fun. Around the time of the first moon landing, Shell or one of the other gas station chains gave away a sheet of perforated paper, card-stock thick, that if you punched it out and followed the instructions, would fold into a Lunar Module. I had a couple of them (wish I still had them) that I built and one day decided to make one that actually flew. I set out to make a model rocket Lunar Module.

Now the first and most obvious problem is that the LM was never designed to fly in air. It's lopsided and out-of-balance as all hell and let's not even discuss wind resistance. It has far too much. But I wasn't going to let a little thing like physics stop me. I knew this would be a real challenge, so I decided to document the process, in case anyone else ever wanted to make one. Estes, the biggest maker of model rockets (then and now) had the sheets you could lay out your own designs on. I picked one up at the hobby store (I think they were free) and set to work laying out my LM.

The basic design was pretty easy, I made my LM the exact same size as the cardboard LM by cutting one apart and then cutting pieces of balsa wood the same size and shape. This actually turned into a lot of work; the LM has a lot of pieces.

I made a couple of changes to the design. First, I made the legs thicker since they were made out of balsa wood. I also put weights in the body in places to compensate for the unbalanced shape. But the biggest change was the ones you were not supposed to see.

I ran a clear plastic straw out of the top of the LM straight up (in my instructions I said to use a wooden dowel, but the clear plastic straw was harder to see). To do something about the wind resistance, I draped a large square of heat-n-shrink (you know, that clear plastic they wrap meat up with in the supermarket) over the top of the LM, centered on the top of the straw and glued the corners to each of the LM's feet. I then pulled out the sides to expose the excess heat-n-shrink and cut it away with scissors. Once it had dried I put the thing in the oven for four or five seconds and the heat-n-shrink shrunk, forming a clear plastic cone over the oddly shaped Lunar Module.

I then attached a clear parachute that I would basically drape over the model before take off. It sounds like this would not work, but it did.

I completed the model on March 23,1970 and attempted to fly it for the first time on March 27th. As I recall as I pressed the launch button, the solid rocket engine in the bottom of the LM fell out, ignited and spun around under the model, setting it on fire. We quickly put it out, but it was an embarrassing debacle for me as everyone thought I was crazy to even attempt this.

But I was undaunted and on May 9, 1970 I made another attempt to get my repaired Lunar Module off the ground. According to the stat sheet I have, it only rose about 10 feet off the launch pad and was in the air under power for only three seconds. I tried again with a much bigger engine and it flew to about 30 feet in a very stable flight.

The fun part of the LM model was watching it come down on the parachute cause it looked so cool. The only other flight I have stats for was a month later on June 6, 1970 and it was a mirror of the previous flight. The other kids in the Space Club didn't make fun of me after that; they thought it looked pretty cool too.