I am sad to hear of the passing of astronaut Neil Armstrong.
There are many photos of Armstrong, but my favourite is this one take after the successful landing. Armstrong was a humble and private man, but the emotion displayed here is of someone who has just done the near-impossible.
Neil Armstrong in the LEM after the lunar EVA.
At the time of the moon landings, Neil was age 38. When I think about what I was able to accomplish in my life when I was 38, and what those brave, brilliant explorers of space were able to accomplish, I gain a perspective on what humanity can really achieve.
I only wish I could see with my own eyes what those 24 Apollo astronauts saw.
I invited everyone at the lab to come, but no one took me up on the offer. I left a little early hoping to beat the line-up. When I arrived and found my way into the building, I found that the line-up extended over 2 floors and was over an hour waiting time.
I spoke with one of the JCCC hosts, and they had only expected maybe 150 people. Instead, we calculated they might have about 2000 during the 5-hour transit.
I wish I had had something eat and read while I was waiting. I spoke a little with the others in the line.
When I finally reached the roof, there were two ways to view Venus. There was a hand-made viewing barrel with a solar filter that you hold up to your face. It was fascinating. I used it and hand-held my camera to get the shot below. The odd colour is from the reflections inside the barrel. You can even see some of the sunspots.
There were also three big telescopes set up with special solar filters. Two were sensitive to a particular hydrogen spectrum and one was sensitive to another spectrum. You could see different features using each telescope. It was so amazing to see such details on the disc of the Sun.
I’m in Kansas City (actually, Overland Park / Lenexa) for a 16-day business trip. We are doing field trials of a new solution for one of our most important customers.
I had to leave the hotel at 7:45AM to get to Hutchinson, which is about 3.5 hours from Overland Park. As I did not get a GPS with the rental car, I printed the directions.
I arrived after 11:00AM. I spent some time outside looking at the Mercury-Redstone and Titan-II rockets and an example of the mighty F-1 engine. The F-1 engine did not have the nozzle extension, so the vents for the turbopump were visible. Counter-intuitively, the exhaust from the massive turbopump was pumped along the inside of the exhaust bell for cooling; the turbopump exhaust was much cooler than the 3,200°C hot gas exiting the engine combustion chamber.
Hanging inside the entrance was the incredible SR-71 Blackbird. The SR-71 spy plane first flew in 1964 and even at its retirement in 1998 was an unparalleled technological achievement. It was capable of Mach 3.3 (3,529 km/h) and flew at 85,069 feet (25,929 m) using two very innovative Pratt & Whitney J58 engines, which were a combination turbojet and a fan-assisted ramjet. Only 32 of these fascinating planes were built.
Next to the SR-71 was a full-size mock-up of the left (port) side of the Endeavour Space Shuttle. Behind the SR-71 was a T-38 Talon Trainer, which has been the training aircraft for NASA.
I bought tickets to see everything at the Cosmosphere: ‘Dr. Goddard’s Lab’, the planetarium, IMAX, and of course the museum itself.
Dr. Goddard’s Lab
I rushed to the ‘Dr. Goddard’s Lab’ first, as the next demonstration started soon after I arrived. The host of ‘Dr. Goddard’s Lab’ demonstrated principles of rocketry. The demos involved liquid oxygen, hydrogen and explosions. It was more for kids, but hey, who doesn’t like explosions?
After the Lab, I grabbed a slice of pizza in the café and then plunged back into the museum. There was so much to see.
After wondering around for a while, I went to see the IMAX film Born to be Wild. Seeing the orphan elephants in IMAX brought back the wonderful memories of my Tanzanian safari in December.
I took a quick break to see the final presentation, the Justice Planetarium. I wish I could remember the constellations better. I only know three: the Big Dipper, Orion and Cassiopeia.
Standing next to the Apollo Lunar Module
After the Planetarium, I continued through the rest of the museum. In one corner was a full-size engineering test structure of an Apollo Lunar Module (LM) and a lunar rover. The LM was built by Grumman for testing during the Apollo program, and contains many flight-ready components. When I saw the LM hanging from the ceiling at Kennedy Space Center, it was mounted too far up to allow me to really connect with the vehicle. Being able to stand next to the LM footpad, you get a much more intimate relationship with the towering Lunar Module (17.9 ft (5.5 m) tall).
For the American space program, the two jewels of the collection were the notorious Liberty Bell 7 capsule and the Apollo 13 Command Module.
Liberty Bell 7
The Liberty Bell 7 (Project Mercury) was the second American manned space flight, launching Gus Grissom on a sub-orbital flight in July 1961. After landing in the Atlantic Ocean, the explosive hatch blew open. The capsule filled with water and was lost. Gus Grissom almost died too, as he had removed his helmet upon landing and his suit also filled with water. Research after the flight indicates that it would have been nearly impossible for him to blow the hatch without sustaining an injury to his hand. But at the time, some had blamed Grissom for the incident.
Sadly, the Liberty Bell 7 incident led to a design change that removed the explosive hatches in future American spacecraft. When Grissom, Ed White and Roger Chaffee were testing the Apollo 1 capsule on January 17, 1967, a fire started in the high pressure pure-oxygen environment. The three astronauts perished partly as a result of the non-explosive hatch which could not be opened quickly.
The Liberty Bell 7 was located on the bottom of the Atlantic and was lifted back to the surface in 1999. It was partially restored by the Cosmosphere and put on display.
Everyone is familiar with the story of Apollo 13. It was a thrill to see the actual Command Module. The three Apollo 13 astronauts had one of the most amazing rescues in history in that tiny vessel (well, they stayed in the LM during the lunar slingshot phase). Jim Lovell’s space suit was also on display. It was the one he would have worn had the mission accomplished the lunar landing.
Interior of the Lunar Module
One of the two Apollo white rooms is also at the Cosmosphere; the other one is at Kennedy Space Center. There is also a mock-up of the LM ascent stage, with plexiglass sides for people to look in. I spent a few minutes staring at the interior of the small craft, imagining what it would have been like to live in the LM for 1 to 3 days while on the surface of the moon. The interior is only the size of a closet. That little space was used by the two astronauts for preparing for the EVAs, eating meals, sleeping and using the washroom :().
The collection also includes the Gemini X module, which was flown by John Young and Michael Collins, both of whom later flew Apollo missions. The larger Gemini spacecraft had two-person crews (Mercury supported one person, and Apollo supported three). The Gemini program explored longer duration missions and docking procedures that were needed for the Apollo lunar orbit rendezvous.
Last were the Space Shuttle artefacts. A mock-up of the washroom, a tire, tiles, tools, food and many other items were on display. The tire was neat – I was surprised by the thickness of the sidewall. Another neat item was a set of the frangible nuts that were used to hold down the Space Shuttle Solid Rocket Boosters before they fire. There are four on each booster, and they are all that is holding the entire 4.46 million pound (2,027 tonne) vehicle to the mobile launcher platform. The nuts are explosively cut at T=0 (lift-off).
American Flags at dusk
After more than 6 hours at the Cosmosphere, it was time to leave. On my long drive back to Overland Park, I stopped to take pictures of the Kansas countryside. I stumbled upon a cemetery surrounded by American flags. It was Memorial Day weekend. It was a nice, quiet spot to watch the sunset.
I arrived back at the hotel around 10:30pm, exhausted. But I was so happy to see such an amazing collection at the Cosmosphere.
Tonight was the ‘super’ moon, a full moon that occurs 25 minutes before perigee. It would be within 600km of the smallest possible lunar perigee (356,955km vs ~356,400km).
I had some free time in the evening, so I decided to try to photograph the event. I choose to use Parliament Hill as the foreground, so I drove to the Museum of Civilization. There were over a dozen other photographers there, all with tripods like myself. I wasn’t quite sure what lens I should use, but after experimenting, I found that the Canon EF 70-200mm f/2.8 allowed the best magnification of the moon and to bring the moon and the foreground together. If I went with a wider lens (like the Canon EF-S 17-55mm f/2.8), the details would be too small, and the moon would seem insignificant. If I had used the Canon EF 1.4x EXII extender, it would crop the buildings in the foreground.
In the end, I was not able to solve the biggest problem – the massive contrast difference between the full (‘super’) moon and the local buildings after sunset. I could not maintain any surface detail on the moon, even if I tried tone-mapping/HDR.
For the first time since the beginning of manned space exploration, there are no available spacecraft that can be used for manned launches.
The US Space Shuttle system has been retired and the next-generation launch system will not be flight-ready for years. The Russian Soyuz has been grounded because of today’s failure during the launch of the Progress M-12M. The Chinese Shenzhou has had only 3 manned flights with the next one not scheduled until 2012.
Today is the 50th anniversary of the first man in space, Yuri Gagarin, and marks the 30th anniversary of the first flight of the Space Shuttle, STS-1.
It is remarkable that only 20 years separated the two events, and that so little has changed in the most recent 30 years. In that short initial span of time, space technology advanced at an incredible pace.
Yuri Garagin flew one orbit of the earth on April 12, 1961 (Vostok-1). So little was known about space at the time that the controls of his capsule were locked to prevent him from operating them – it was thought that zero-G would induce madness.
About three weeks later, Alan Shepard became the first American in space, although with a sub-orbital, 486 km flight (Mercury-Redstone 3 aka Freedom 7). Less than three weeks later, US President John F. Kennedy publicly set the goal to putting a man on the moon before the end of the decade. It was an incredible challenge. The US had less than 16 minutes of manned space flight experience at the time of the speech.
Mercury 12B (boilerplate spacecraft)
The American manned space programs moved at a breakneck pace. The Mercury program completed 2 years later. There was a 2-year gap before the first Gemini flights, which saw the first American two-man crews, the first American space walk, the first spacecraft rendezvous and docking, and much longer flights (Gemini VII was 13 days, 18 hours). The Gemini program wrapped up at the end of 1966, making way for the Apollo program.
The first manned Apollo flight, Apollo 7, was 2 years after the end of the Gemini program. Part of the reason for the gap was the deadly cabin fire on Apollo 1 in January 1967, which was being tested for a possible first flight in February. The fire and investigation, combined with program challenges for the Apollo CSM and LM landers, led to the delay. Boldly, the Apollo 8 mission actually reached moon orbit – a daring objective for only the second manned flight of the program.
With the goal of a manned landing on and returning from the moon accomplished on July 16, 1969, winning the moon-landing race against the Soviets, the funding for Apollo was drawn down. It was only 8 years and 3 months from Gagarin’s flight to the touchdown of Apollo 11 in the Sea of Tranquility on the moon.
Apollo 14 Command Module
The final flight to the moon was Apollo 17 at the end of 1972. Some of the Apollo equipment was used for the Skylab space station, manned for 171 days in 1973 and 1974, followed by the mid-decade Apollo-Soyuz flight. From that point, there were no manned American space flights until STS-1 on April 12, 1981.
The early designs of the Space Shuttle systems date back even before the moon landing. President Nixon approved the program in 1971. It took 10 years to build and test the first two Shuttles – Enterprise, which was only used for approach and landing tests from a converted Boeing 747, and Columbia which was a fully functional orbiter. It looks less time to move from the first manned suborbital space flight to landing on the moon.
STS-132 Atlantis
Since the start of the Shuttle era, I feel the US manned space program has stagnated. For 30 years, the US has entirely depended on the shuttle for all manned flights. Again, that’s three times longer than it took to go from Yuri’s flight to landing on the moon. I feel that the US should have been spending more on trying out new technologies.
While I am fully supportive of the International Space Station, and feel that it should be the springboard for any future above-low-orbit manned missions, it hasn’t really pushed forward the manned program. It has provided a workspace for research of course, but it’s not about manned flight really. It’s about a zero-G research facility. It’s also not the first space station – it’s been done before.
Without producing any new vehicles for the past 30 years, it would be like the aviation industry stopping creating new planes with the Boeing 707, or if computer science stopped once IBM created the System/360.
In the future, I would like to see the US exploring new ways and new vehicles for its manned program. Allowing private space companies to provide services is an interesting direction but I am concerned that NASA would be without any space program, should these private companies (who are doing it for a profit) either fail or decide that it is not financially viable for them to continue. Then what will NASA do? It seems directionless at the moment.
I have some strong opinions and I’m working on an essay about the future of NASA.
When I was reading Moonfire, one statement really jumped out at me and made me think.
“What a vehicle was the spaceship! A planet-traveler massive as a destroyer, delicate as a silver arrow. At the moment it lifted off from the earth it would be burning as much oxygen as is consumed by half a billion people taking their breath – that was twice, no, more than twice the population of America. What a deep breath must then have been concentrated into the liquid oxygen they were passing into its tanks right now, a liquid oxygen cooled to 297 degrees below zero and thereby turning air to cloud at every hint of contact with the pipes which were in turn contained within other pipes two feet think to insulate the fuel.”
I had never thought about comparing the volume of oxygen used by the Saturn V engines to the breath of millions of people. So, I wanted to look into this in further detail.
F-1 engine from Saturn V (S-IC first stage)
The human lung has an average total volume of 4 to 6 litres at sea level. That’s the total volume of both lungs combined, including residual volume that cannot be exhaled. Of that volume, an average breath (tidal volume) is 500ml, or about 10% of the total capacity.
Oxygen is about 21% of the air at sea level. Meaning that an average breath contains 105ml of oxygen. Humans breathe an average of 20 times per minute (10-20 resting, I’ll use the higher number as a guesstimate for a daytime office worker). That is a per minute average of 2.1 litres of oxygen.
The first stage of the Saturn V rocket, the S-IC stage, burns liquid oxygen (LOX) and RP-1 (refined kerosene) rocket fuel for the first 160 seconds of flight, and pushes the 3,039 ton rocket from the launch pad to a height of 56km and a speed of 8,530km/h. The thrust is generated from five F-1 engines. Each F-1 engine consumes 93,920 litres of liquid oxygen per minute. The total capacity of the LOX tank in the S-IC stage is 1,204,000 litres (which can also be derived by multiplying 93,920 litres/minute by five F-1 engines by roughly 160 seconds of flight).
Liquid oxygen has an expansion ratio of 860.6:1, meaning that gaseous oxygen at sea level has about 861 times larger volume than the liquid phase.
Translating 93,920 litres per minute of LOX into the gaseous form means that that a single F-1 engine uses the equivalent of 80,827,552 litres per minute of gaseous oxygen (at sea level). The entire S-IC stage would therefore consume 404,137,760 litres per minute of gaseous oxygen (sometimes abbreviated as GOX) equivalent. A human uses 2.1 litres per minute, so the S-IC stage is consuming LOX at the same rate as 192,446,552 adults and one baby. If the lower rate of 10 breaths per minute were used, it would increase to nearly 400 million people.
Brazil has the fifth largest population in the world, 190,732,694 (August 1, 2010, estimated). So the S-IC stage LOX consumption rate is equivalent to the entire population of Brazil breathing. The world’s population in 1969 was 3.6 billion. 192 million people would be more than 1 in every 20 people on the planet.
The island of Manhattan in New York city has a population density of 71,201 people per square kilometre. At the same population density, the S-IC would consume the same amount of oxygen as a city like Manhattan 62,057 square kilometres in size – a little less than the area of the island of Sri Lanka. That’s a city with a radius of 140.5 kilometres (281 kilometres in diameter).
Another interesting statistic is the weight. The F-1 engine burns LOX and RP-1 at the rate of 1,789 kilograms and 788 kilograms per second, respectively.
BMW powered Saturn V
My (red) 2003 BMW 330Ci is 1,490 kilograms, unloaded. The weight of the S-IC stage decreases at a rate that is nearly equivalent to 8.6 BMWs per second. Imagine that as a stream of BMWs blowing from the bottom of the Saturn V at 2,989 metres per second to lift the massive 3,039 ton rocket out of the Earths gravity well. The high speed is required. Newton’s Third Law (for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction) means that to push a much heavier weight up, a smaller weight needs to be pushed down at a much greater speed, proportional to the difference in the weights.
This was the first Norman Mailer book I’ve read. I’ve been very tempted to read some of his other books, such as “The Naked and the Dead“, but I lack the time. I’m already about a dozen books and a dozen magazines behind.
This book, “Moonfire”, was originally serialized in Life magazine under the title “Of a Fire on the Moon”. It tells the story of the Apollo 11 mission from the point of view of a reporter named “Aquarius” (also the name of the Apollo 13 LM, used as a lifeboat after the explosion). The writing is quite poetic, although a little less technical than I was hoping for (as an aerospace nerd).
When I first saw the book at Chapters Indigo I looked up the book on the Taschen web site.
That’s where I discovered the most expensive book in the world.
When I was a teenager, my mother owned a bookstore in New Minas called “Between Covers”. I worked there some evenings and weekends until my first years of university. Once, a dentists’ wife ordered the complete The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) for her husband. It was 12 volumes and cost a few thousand dollars (in 1988; now on Amazon.ca: $10,251 Cdn). That was pretty damn expensive. I has also never heard of a dictionary that required more than one volume before. When the full set arrived, it stood multiple feet high.
However, Taschen has trumped the OED with limited editions of the “Moonfire” book.
My copy was less than $30, which is a good price for such a large book.
More expensive than the basic edition is the Cdn $1,360 edition that includes a framed print of Buzz Aldrin on the moon – the iconic photo of the Apollo program. There are only 1957 copies of this edition available. It weighs 12 kilograms, four times heavier than the edition I have.
Not available on Chapters or Amazon are the 12 “Lunar Rock” editions. These include an actual piece of moon rock. Since NASA is not going to give up any of its extremely valuable collection, and there have been no private lunar return missions yet, how did Taschen manage to do this? They used lunar meteorites. When large meteors impact the moon (not slowed by any atmosphere), some of the molten rock debris from the impact will actually have enough energy to escape the lunar gravity well. The debris, now solidified rock, will most frequently get pulled into the Earth’s gravity well. If the lunar impact debris survives the passage through our atmosphere, it can be collected on the ground as a meteorite.
The 12 editions each includes a lunar meteorite. Each edition is priced by the size of the meteorite. The smallest one was discovered in Algeria and it weighs 1.40 grams, 20% less than a Canadian dime. This edition was priced at €60,000 (Cdn $81,000).
The top of the line edition includes a 348 gram (1/3 of a kilogram) meteorite found in Morocco. It costs a jaw-dropping €480,000 (Cdn $648,000)!!!
I could buy a huge house and a Lamborghini for that. All for the cost of a book and a rock.
Most of the items are not very interesting, just signed photos (SP) and covers (stamps) from various missions, or items from Mission Control.
What I was really excited about were the “flown” items. That is, items that have actually been into space on missions. Those are the ones I wanted!
I scanned through the entire catalog (401 items) and found a few flown articles that were still not too expensive. Some of the flown flags were already in the thousands of dollars. The smaller items were in the hundreds of dollars.
From the Apollo program, there were 1×1 inch strips of kapton, which was used on the outside of the returning Command Module, small strips of beta cloth, which was a flame-proof white cloth used for straps, nets and even the white Apollo spacesuits. There were also some pages from the mission manuals.
Only one non-flown item was interesting to me: the Apollo fight plans. These were the 300-page books that detailed every moment of the 12-days missions with instructions for each astronaut. While not flown, they were immensely interesting. But hard to justify the cost when the books are also available for download as PDFs now from the Apollo Lunar Surface Journal web site. The Apollo 11 flight plan opened at $300 and closed at $5,296.
There was a one-page (double-sided) flown checklist from STS-5, the fifth Space Shuttle mission. That one page traveled 3,397,082 kilometres during the 5 day mission. That’s likely further than I will ever travel during my entire lifetime. The bidding opened at a reasonable $100, but completed at $525, which was too high for me for a single page.
One of the more desirable items was the personal preference kit (PPK) bag from astronaut John Young during the 11-day Apollo 16 mission. It would have been used for personal and private mementos. The opening bid was an affordable $200, but it closed at $5016.
He was the Command Module pilot for Apollo 10, which practiced the procedures for the lunar landing that took place on the next mission (Apollo 11, less than two months later). He was therefore the first person to orbit the moon alone. He and his crew mates still hold the record for the fastest speed of any humans – 39,897 km/h during their return from the moon.
For Apollo 13, he was on the backup crew. When the mission aborted due to the Service Module explosion, he played a role in determining how to stretch the consumables on the LM, now functioning as a life-boat.
On Apollo 16, he was the commander and descended to the lunar surface, where he and Charles Duke spent three days.
He flew the first Space Shuttle mission, STS-1 and the ninth, STS-9, both on the Columbia. The first mission, the first time a full-up manned mission was done as the first launch of any American manned space vehicle. Previous programs started with unmanned launches of the vehicles; this was also how the Russian Buranshuttle program was done.
Captain Young retired from NASA in December 2004 after 42 years of service, with an active astronaut career from 1965 to 1983.
John Young was really a cool cat. During the Apollo 16 lunar landing, his heart rate peaked at 90 beats per minute. Neil Armstrong’s was 150. During the STS-1 launch, his heart rate also didn’t rise above 90 when his pilot, Bob Crippen, was 130.
Back to the auction, I kept looking over the small items, watching their prices, and thought seriously about sending a bid. However, on the last day of the auction, the prices started to rise dramatically.
For example, a single page from the Apollo 11 flight plan, flown to the moon, rose from an opening bid of $1000 to $22,275.
A 1 inch piece of a safety line from Apollo 14 rose from $100 (affordable) to $1,641. For a 1 inch long piece of rope…
I spotted an item I thought I could afford and would be worth having. A 0.75×0.75 inch square of beta cloth that was soiled with actual moon dust from Apollo 16, which opened at $200. During the days before the close of the auction, the price had increased to around $500, which was on the edge of what I thought I could afford. However, when the auction ended, the closing bid price was $1,504. This would have been one of the few opportunities to acquire moon dust.
” by 
(OED) for her husband. It was 12 volumes and cost a few thousand dollars (in 1988; now on Amazon.ca: $10,251 Cdn). That was pretty damn expensive. I has also never heard of a dictionary that required more than one volume before. When the full set arrived, it stood multiple feet high.
edition that includes a framed print of 
