Monthly Archives: July 2011

Jul072011

Space Shuttle Pic of the Day: There’s Something Different Here…

An iconic shot of Columbia standing on the pad prior to its launch on the first-ever shuttle mission, STS-01, in April of 1981. Notice anything different about the Columbia‘s appearance compared to more recent shuttle stacks?

The external fuel tank was only painted white for the first two missions before the engineers realized they could save several hundred pounds in weight by leaving it off. The more familiar orange coloration is the natural appearance of the spray-on insulation that coats the tanks. It’s funny, though… the painted tank was only used for two out of 135 missions, and 30 years ago to boot, but this is how I imagine space shuttles — spaceships in general, really — ought to look: clean and white, sparkling beneath the sun (or the floodlights, as the case may be). In fact, I was kind of hoping the paint might make a return for the final launch, just to bring everything full circle, but I suppose engineers aren’t as sentimental about such things.

Incidentally, it’s starting to look as if the final launch might be delayed. The forecasts are showing only a 30% possibility of favorable weather tomorrow, and I’ve just read of a lightning strike this morning within a third of a mile of the pad, which may have damaged Atlantis or the equipment around the pad itself…

Photo source.

Jul062011

Space Shuttle Pic of the Day: Hitchin’ a Ride

Here’s a sight we haven’t seen much since the shuttles began landing regularly at Kennedy Space Center, the same place they’re processed and launched from, instead of on the other side of the continent at Edwards Air Force Base:

This was the way the shuttle orbiters first entered the public consciousness during the Enterprise‘s ATL flights, before we civilians ever got a look at the now-familiar “stack” of solid-rocket boosters and external fuel tank, and it’s how the orbiters get home if they have to land somewhere other than at Kennedy. Basically, we’re looking at a tow-truck operation. It’s a tow of staggering statistics, a roughly 90-ton spacecraft physically anchored to the top of a 159-ton airliner, but a tow, nevertheless. If you don’t know your airplanes, the “tow truck” is a Boeing 747, still one of the largest airliners in the world even after 40 years of operation. NASA has two of them (technically referred to as the Shuttle Carrier Aircraft, or SCA) that have been specially fitted out for shuttle-hauling duty. Interestingly, the first was purchased from American Airlines and was still sporting the AA livery — red, white and blue stripes running horizontally down the length of the fuselage — during the early days with Enterprise. And here’s another fun bit of trivia: on both planes, the mechanism the orbiter mounts to sports hand-painted instructions to “Attach Orbiter Here… Black Side Down.”

One of the SCAs came through the Salt Lake area with an orbiter on its back about a decade ago, circling the valley several times before landing at SLC International, where it was on display to the public overnight. As I recall, I caught a glimpse of it flying along the eastern mountain range, but like a damn fool I didn’t make the time to go to the airport and actually see it. Now in the waning days, I’m kicking myself hard for that. It’d be nice if the orbiter destined for the California museum stopped by here on its way west, but I’m not holding my breath…

Photo credit: Ken Kuhl

Jul052011

Say What?

McSweeney’s Internet Tendency has posted an incisive and terribly important piece of psychological insight: a list entitled “What Your Favorite ’80s Band Says About You.” But while many of the items on this list are right on target — if your fave is Big Country, for example, you probably have a Highlander poster in a tube in the back of your closet; get it? Big Country was a Scottish band, Highlander is about an immortal Scotsman — I have to confess that I’m utterly baffled by the one that best applies to me. Here it is:

Rick Springfield: Your wallet weighs over a pound.

Huh? WTF is that supposed to mean? Anyone? My wallet… weighs… over a pound. Why would it weigh so much? And what does liking Rick Springfield have to do with that? Sometimes, I feel very dense…

Jul052011

Space Shuttle Pic of the Day: Enterprise Makes Her Debut

As we count down to the final ever space shuttle mission, I thought I’d post a few photos from the early days of the program, just to remind myself and my Loyal Readers of a time when the world was young and these vehicles were revolutionary, and we couldn’t wait to get them up there because we knew it was going to be a glorious adventure. First up, the official rollout of the prototype shuttle Enterprise on September 17, 1976 (two days after my seventh birthday), with some very special guests in attendance:

If you don’t recognize them, that’s the cast of the original Star Trek television series, minus William Shatner who was apparently too important to show up. (Actually, I don’t know why Shatner wasn’t there, but it’s no secret that he frequently behaved like a colossal jerk during the ’70s and ’80s.) From left to right, we’re looking at Dr. James D. Fletcher, NASA Administrator; DeForest Kelley (Bones); George Takei (Sulu); James Doohan (Scotty, hard to recognize with the beard); Nichelle Nichols (Uhura); Leonard Nimoy (Spock, of course); Gene Roddenberry (Star Trek’s creator and chief promoter); some unidentified dude, probably a NASA official; and Walter Koenig (Chekov).

Jul042011

One Week to Go

One week until the launch of STS-135, the final mission for space shuttle Atlantis, and the final mission of the space shuttle program.

I’m trying very hard not to get depressed over this, but I’m sure I’m going to be in tears come Friday, and certainly by the end of the mission 12 days after that. Not to be too hyperbolic, but it honestly feels to me like our country is on the verge of just giving up. Not only in space, but in everything you can think of, all fields, all categories of activity, all levels of society. Everything in America is diminishing, wearing out, running down, crumbling to dust. We used to dream big dreams and do big things. Now we ask how much it will cost and fret about whether it’s 100-percent safe. We bicker endlessly and worry constantly about whether any particular decision will help or hurt our particular ~~tribe~~ party in the next election. Now we just lower our gaze from the horizon to our smartphones and play another round of Angry Birds. And it doesn’t help my gloomy feelings any when I read articles like this one, which flat-out declares the space age to be over and we hope you enjoyed it, because low-earth orbit is the best we could do. We dreamed of Moonbase Alpha, but we could only manage satellite TV. And that seems to be enough for many, perhaps even most, people. And that’s the hardest thing for me to swallow, this realization that so many of the things I care about, the ones I’ve always cared about and held at the very center of my identity, are turning out to be nothing more than fads, and they’re all going out of style…

Photo: sunrise over Atlantis a few days ago, courtesy of the NASA Kennedy Space Center Facebook page.

Jul042011

Comments Closed Again… Possibly for Good This Time

When the Movable Type software that underlies this blog got upgraded a few months ago, I was hopeful that one of my most persistent and maddening problems — an unrelenting flood of comment spam — would finally be a thing of the past. Sadly, no. The sick bastards who create that shit must’ve had a uproarious laugh at my naivete. Their effluent started trickling back in within a few days of the upgrade. While my friends struggled to figure out how to navigate the new sign-in protocol, the bots were somehow slipping right past the hurdles and creating fully authenticated user identities for themselves, from which they could spew their annoying garbage with impunity. Yes, that’s right: several of my Loyal Readers still can’t leave a comment to save their own lives, but the spammers are able to set up pre-appoved accounts and publish their crap instantly, without even being held for moderation. And, just like it did before, the amount of spam I’ve been receiving has been inching up day by day. I’ve just spent several hours this evening manually clearing out a couple thousand phony comments accumulated over a mere two-day period.

It isn’t just the volume of spam that’s increased, either. The actual spam messages themselves have gotten larger, too; many of them are very, very long, essay-length strings of badly translated Engrish that appear to be masquerading as a some kind of epic folk tale but ultimately come down to a shill for knock-off designer shoes, or some damn thing. Sometimes the bots don’t even bother with the translation, and leave behind a big block of Chinese characters. At least I know where this shit is coming from, I suppose. But due to the way my back-end blog interface is constructed, I end up having to do a lot of scrolling to get past these huge tumorous things just so I can mark them for deletion. Sometimes I’m able to delete them in batches, which speeds things along, but just as often, the spammers publish a single message from each of a hundred identities, so I have to take them out one at a time.

Well, tonight I’ve reached the end of my rope. Again. The whole time I was wading through this stuff, removing it from my sight click by tedious click, I kept hearing a line from the classic Cold War movie WarGames: “After very careful consideration, sir, I’ve come to the conclusion that your new defense system sucks.” Indeed, sir, indeed.

I’m still hoping to find a solution to all this. A couple of helpful people have asked why I don’t install a Captcha module, one of those things that ask you to re-type the characters you see in a little box in order to prove your humanity; others have suggested I abandon Movable Type and migrate Simple Tricks to another blogging platform altogether. Unfortunately, neither of those options work for me, for various reasons. (The Captcha thing is especially frustrating. I know that system works well for those who have it, but for some ridiculous reason, Movable Type — at least the instance of it that I’m dealing with — isn’t set up to work with it.) So in the meantime, I’ve come to the unhappy decision to once again just shut down commenting altogether. As I’m sure I said the last time, I really hate to do this. The conversation with my friends and readers has been one of the great pleasures of having a blog. But I just can’t put up with this anymore. Lately, I’ve been spending more time dealing with spam than actually blogging.

I don’t know… maybe it doesn’t matter. There hasn’t been much conversation in a very long time anyhow. The last legitimate comment I received was over a month ago. And as much as I hate to say it, blogging itself seems to be on decline. Out of the little circle of non-professional bloggers I’ve enjoyed reading, only the indomitable Jaquandor still seems to be producing with gusto. Even my own habits have slacked off in recent months. I really hope I’m wrong, because blogs and blogging have been a pretty big deal to me over the past decade, but maybe it was just another passing fad whose time has come and is now rapidly going. Like I said, I just don’t know. And right now, it’s late and I’m tired and frustrated and more than a little depressed about all this, so I’m probably not thinking too clearly anyhow.

If anyone out there would like to talk to me about something I write here, I invite you to send a message to jason (at) jasonbennion.com. You can also find me on Facebook, where I post links to every entry that appears on this blog. I know these options are sub-optimal, but they’re the best I can offer at this time…