Happy Moon Day!

When I moved out to West Virginia about 13 years ago, I started a tradition.  Almost every year since then, I have sent an email to my good friend Dr. Eleanor O'Rangers celebrating what we call Moon Day.  That day, July 20th is the Anniversary of when Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin stepped out onto the Lunar surface.

Usually I rant for a few paragraphs on the lack of direction this country now has in space.  This year I want to try something different.  A few positive thoughts (or at least non-negative) might be better.

First I have a link to a blog post written by someone I went to high school with.  I guess I did not know him as well as I thought.  Turns out he is a "space" guy as well.  In this post he talks about going to the launch of STS 135. The title is "Space Shuttle Launch: Joe's Personal Experience" published online via "The Boone Examiner".  I just wish I had gotten to see one of them launch too.

Forty-two years have passed since man first set foot upon the moon.  If I have my numbers right, that means most Americans have been born since that event.  As a kid growing up, I had thought that we would have a space station and that we would be refueling spacecraft there.  And that those spacecraft would be taking us to the other planets, and maybe, just maybe, to some distant star.  I hope kids growing up today feel that same awe and wonder as the space shuttle flies it's last.  I hope they dream of building spacecraft, robots, and space stations too.  I hope one of them discovers a way to allow our fragile bodies to conserve muscle and bone to allow long space flights.  I hope one of them discovers better propulsion and better life supports systems.  I hope one of them makes a computer breakthrough which allows us to fully map our solar system's weather allow us to predict events hazardous to our astronauts and plan for their safety.

I think someday soon, they will.

Happy Moon Day Eleanor, and everyone.

Dangerous Shuttle and ISS Events

Since the last space shuttle mission lifted off this morning, I thought I would share a link to a Scientific American article and slide show entitled:

The 10 Most Dangerous Moments in Space Shuttle and Station History

Most of them I remember, but a couple of them snuck in under my radar.  Let's just hope NASA and the commercial companies springing up these days learn from these problems.

Enjoy and have a great day!

So now that the International Space Station is near completion, here come the platitudes about its value as a research platform being fully realized, etc. Indeed, platitudes abound (particularly promulgated by NASA over the years) regarding the value of space research conducted on the space shuttle as well as the ISS. Some have questioned the "real" return on investment of such research (the IOM report which cited the waste of time that protein crystallization experiments have been is one that immediately comes to mind.)

One oft-cited "factoid" about space research concerns the value of biomedical investigation... and how knowledge of the physiological effects of spaceflight can lead to effective "countermeasures" to mitigate such effects. Nevertheless, has any of this research really led to breakthroughs in true countermeasures? What has the NSBRI been doing all these years? As one colleague has put it, the only effective countermeasure to the physiologic effects of spaceflight is.... a Gravity Prescription. Indeed, man has evolved in a 1G environment... and if taken out of that environment, logic would dictate that replacing that G force is the obvious answer to the deleterious physiologic effects which occur in microgravity.

The problem is.... what IS the Gravity Prescription and how to we "make" it? I'd love to hear some of your ideas and speculations (or frank disagreements with my opinions regarding the "real" value of space research.)