A few hours ago, the familiar roar of a rocket motor boomed through the humid air of Florida’s Cape Canaveral, but it wasn’t a space shuttle or a military Atlas launch. It was instead a privately owned rocket called the Falcon 9. After an aborted launch attempt earlier this morning, this gleaming debutante lifted off from its pad and streaked skyward without any obvious problems, carrying at its nose a mock-up spacecraft that may shortly replace the retiring shuttles. Behold:
(Stay with it until the end — the stage separation seen from the onboard camera is really neat!)

The Falcon 9 and its Apollo-style counterpart, the Dragon capsule, are designed, built, and operated by a company called SpaceX, which was founded by Elon Musk. You may not know his name, but you’ve likely heard of his other businesses: PayPal and Tesla Motors, the electric sports-car builder. Musk’s vision for the Falcon/Dragon combination is essentially to fulfill the promise made by the shuttle development team 30 years ago: a “space taxi” that will offer reliable, relatively cheap access to Earth orbit. Unlike NASA’s various spacecraft that are pieced together from contributions made by many subcontractors, SpaceX keeps everything in-house. The launch vehicle, the spacecraft, and the rocket motors are built by SpaceX itself. And the company is striving for design simplicity by using the same rocket motor — the Merlin, it’s called — on all its launch vehicles, including the Falcon 1, the Falcon 9, and a future heavy-lift vehicle. In the same spirit of keeping things simple, SpaceX plans for the Dragon to carry either cargo or passengers, depending on the craft’s internal configuration, rather than designing separate vehicles for different jobs. Moreover, the boosters and the Dragons are all intended to be reusable.

It all sounds good on paper, at least. And even though I’m sorry to see the shuttle program winding down, I have to admit I am excited about SpaceX’s plans. Musk’s vision sounds workable to me, and I like that someone in the private enterprise sector is thinking about practical spaceflight applications. By contrast, Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic, as nifty as the SpaceShipTwo and WhiteKnight technology is, really strikes me as more of a rich man’s playground that won’t lead to much. I hope I’m wrong about that — I’d love to see a sky filled with many different kinds of spacecraft doing all sorts of activities, including recreational ones — but it’s just my hunch at the moment. And anyway, the SpaceShipTwo vehicles Branson has commissioned are only suborbital cruise ships. To truly replace the shuttle, we need something that will aim a bit higher.

SpaceX already has a contract with NASA to send cargo to the International Space Station in 2011; several more test flights are planned through the rest of this year. And there are other private entities looking to fill the gap left by the shuttles, as well, including a partnership between Boeing and Lockheed-Martin called the United Launch Alliance and a supersecret venture funded by Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon.com. We’re not living in the space-faring 21st century I used to imagine, but maybe there’s a chance we’ll get some version of it after all…

I’m sure everyone has heard by now that space shuttle Atlantis returned safely to Earth this morning, concluding her 32nd — and final — mission. The old girl isn’t quite ready for mothballs yet; she will be prepped again as per the usual turnaround routine to serve as the “launch-on-need” vehicle — that’d be a “back-up” to you and me — for Endeavour‘s final flight in November, which will be the last of the shuttle program. Barring any problems with Endeavour, however, Atlantis is effectively finished. I won’t reiterate again how sad this makes me. Instead, let’s just paste a couple of souvenirs into our online scrapbook, and enjoy the memories while they’re still fresh.

First up, Twittering astronaut Soichi Noguchi captured a really gorgeous portrait of Atlantis as she pulled away from the International Space Station a couple days ago; click on the thumbnail below to see the full-size version:

And here is NASA’s official video coverage of the landing. This is what the future looked like when I was a kid, and even though I know a lot of people now see this as the past — the 1970s, to be precise — I never get tired of seeing it. For a vehicle that was once derisively referred to as “the flying brick,” the shuttle always strikes me as incredibly graceful in the air and surprisingly delicate when it touches down.

The next scheduled launch will be Discovery in mid-September…

Actor-writer-blogger-geek-extraordinaire Wil Wheaton has a brief but evocative post up about his memories of the Challenger disaster and watching the launch of Atlantis the other day. Here’s the bit that resonated the most with me:

When mission control gave the order to go with throttle up, I held my breath like I have every single time since the shuttle program was reinstated in 1988, and when the shuttle separated from the boosters and glided into orbit, I got something in my eye. Just take a moment, if you don’t mind, and think about what it means that we can leave our planet, even if we’ve “only” gotten as far as the dark side of the moon. Think about what it means that something as incredible as putting humans into space and bringing them back safely to Earth today earns less media attention and public excitement than the typical celebrity breakup.

 

It is amazing that we can do this, and even though I’ve come to believe the shuttle program isn’t the best way to spend NASA’s tiny budget (which is a pitiful fraction of what it should be), I hope that there was a child watching the launch today who will feel inspired to reach out to the stars and see what’s out there.

 

We humans are a flawed species, to put it mildly, and I think we could do a much better job taking care of our planet and each other … but when I see what we’re capable of doing, it gives me hope that the future I pretended to live in twenty years ago will actually arrive some day.

(For anyone who doesn’t catch the reference in the final sentence — and I know at least one of my Loyal Readers probably does not — Wil played Wesley Crusher on Star Trek: The Next Generation.)

Just about one hour ago, space shuttle Atlantis lifted off from the Kennedy Space Center for the final time.

It was a textbook launch into a beautiful cerulean sky, and the shuttle is now safely on orbit and chasing after the International Space Station for a rendezvous two days from now. Mission STS-132 is scheduled to last 12 days; in its payload bay, Atlantis carries a Russian laboratory module — the first time a Russian-built ISS component has flown on an American spacecraft — as well as an assortment of replacement parts and batteries for the station.

Atlantis, the second youngest of the shuttles, flew for the first time in October 1985, and has racked up an impressive list of “firsts” in the 25 years since. Here’s a fairly nifty video produced by NASA to commemorate her life:

***VIDEO MISSING***

(And yes, I know I was just bitching about not having any time to blog, let alone watch space shuttle videos. So I’m rebelling a little, give me a break…)

Shuttle Discovery is back on the ground this morning after 10 days in orbit, servicing the International Space Station. A nice video of the picture-perfect landing is here.

Next up will be the final flight for shuttle Atlantis, then the swan song for Endeavour, and finally Discovery will fly one last time to close out the shuttle program.

I feel like a child is dying.

Jaquandor points us today to an opinion piece by comic-book writer and novelist Warren Ellis on the public’s waning enthusiasm for manned spaceflight. Ellis is a bit more curmudgeonly than myself — I know, difficult to believe, but as misanthropic as I sometimes get, I can’t quite bring myself to suggest that Twilight fans “could be rendered down into their constituent chemicals and scattered on barren land as organic fertiliser.” The woman I love reads those books, you know, and I’d rather not see her turned into Gro-Mor. Go figure.

I also don’t share Ellis’ concern with getting people into space as a hedge against extinction. This is a good reason for colonizing other worlds, to be sure, and it’s one many people believe ought to be paramount, but I myself have never been able to warm to this particular line of thinking. I’m just not enough of a doomsday-ist, I guess; I am less inspired by fear than by nobler sentiments.

Which is why Ellis’ rant doesn’t start to echo my own thinking until right about here:

Exploration has always been central to the human drive. Not because of population pressure, nor trade necessity, but because it’s in our essential nature to wonder what and where is next. We are unique in the biosphere as creatures of imagination. Robot missions do not thrill us because the empathetic engagement is on a level with watching a Roomba do a decent job of hoovering some carpet fluff. It is nowhere near the same as seeing and hearing one of us walking somewhere brand new and telling us about it in the knowledge (however misguided that might eventually prove) that more of us, the rest of us, will follow.

 

We’re almost resentful of human space flight now, because politicians and greedy technocrats screwed us out of the translunar Martian colony future we all thought was coming. We’re just a little too resigned to another few years of puttering around in low Earth orbit, of quickie space tourism and trying not to fart in the International Space Station for 30 days at a time. Even the Chinese, the current eager lions of crewed missions, admit that their Moon missions may prove to be robotic.
In my life I’ve seen a species go from believing it will live in space to accepting, all too easily, that it will die on the same old dirt its ancestors rot in. Having a nice robot phone is not an acceptable substitute for a future.

Here, here. I have a lot of respect and affection for those Mars rovers that Ellis sneeringly dismisses as “skateboards” (actually, I think I’m guilty of calling them that myself), but it’s the idea of human eyes looking out on those fantastic, literally unearthly landscapes that fires me up. Being human means you do some things simply because no one else has ever done them before, and somewhere along the line, I think we’ve lost touch with that aspect of our nature. I couldn’t care less about the latest cell phone, myself. Buttons, touchscreen, telepathic interface… who cares? It’s a phone. But crossing the horizon, just to find out what’s over there? Now that‘s exciting!

My friend Mike Gillilan sent this to me last night, and I thought it warranted sharing:

That’s the space shuttle Discovery (obviously) arriving at the International Space Station. I believe the structure in the upper part of the photo is one of several Russian spacecraft currently docked there; the Soyuz and Progress capsules serve as taxis, resupply ships, garbage disposal units, and, in an emergency, escape pods for the station crew.

Sorry the thumbnail is so small, but this is apparently how Twitter codes images for embedding on other websites. If you click on it, you’ll be taken to the full-size Twitpic version. It’s worth a click, believe me; the sharpness of the original is breathtaking.

After you look at this picture, be sure to check out the entire feed. It’s the personal Twitter account (or whatever the hell you call it) of a Japanese astronaut named Soichi Noguchi, and he posts at least a couple new photos every day. Here are a couple of my recent favorites:

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That’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida, the day Discovery launched. The two roundish features to the right are the launch pads, one of which would’ve been occupied by the shuttle when this was taken. And here’s one that’s not so great, technically speaking — there’s quite a bit of “noise” in the image — but is beautiful and awesome — in the original, pre-1980s sense of that word — nonetheless:

The green glow that looks like classic Star Trek phaserfire is in fact the aurora borealis, the famed northern lights; a pair of Soyuz capsules are in the foreground.

As much as I gripe about the way the 21st century has turned out (as opposed to the way we all imagined it), how incredible is it that we have people living in space, taking photographs of what they’re seeing, and sending back to us via the Internet?

This was the scene in Florida early this morning as space shuttle Discovery lifted off before dawn for a rendezvous with the International Space Station:

Watch that video a couple of times, kids, and savor it with a bit of melancholy nostalgia, because this will be the last time anyone ever sees the golden flare of a space shuttle’s main engines and solid-rocket boosters combined to banish the darkness. This flight is the last scheduled nighttime launch, and the last that will feature a full crew complement of seven astronauts. After this, only three missions remain before the surviving shuttles are sent off to the museums… and the way things are going, manned American spaceflight may be going with them.

I’ve been wanting to write for some time about the impending end of the shuttle program, as well as the president’s desire to spike the Constellation program that would replace it, but it’s such an emotional issue for me, and I am so ambivalent about the details, that the subject tends to elude me. Still, here are a few quasi-coherent thoughts:

Continue Reading…

Somewhere in the vast and dusty recesses of the fabulous Bennion Archives, I’ve got a cache of old Science Digest magazines from the early ’80s. I subscribed for a time in middle school, or, more accurately, my parents subscribed me, first as a birthday gift, I believe, and then for a few more years because I was actually reading the things and — apparently — getting something from them. To be honest, what I was mostly getting was the foundation for a lot of future disappointment when all the crazy-cool stuff promised by the speculative articles failed to materialize. No high-speed underground maglev trains whisking us from LA to New York in an hour. No gigantic cargo blimps full of consumer goods gliding serenely through the skies on silent electric motors. No manned missions to the moons of Jupiter. You get the idea. The standard “where’s my jetpack?” sort of thing.

But not all of the magazine’s predictions turned out to be bull, and every so often deja vu will strike like a zap of static electricity as it occurs to me that I first read about some aspect of modern life years and years ago in the pages of SD. Cell phones and prepaid phone cards come to mind, as well as DNA sequencing and growing replacement body parts in laboratories. These ideas were only two steps removed from science fiction 25 years ago, but they’re now commonplace, or soon to become so in the case of lab-grown organs. The really big ideas, though, the ones requiring some kind of monumental engineering project… those were all just poppycock, right?

Well, maybe not. I read this morning that a California company called the Solaren Corporation wants to orbit giant solar-power collectors and beam the energy back to Earth in the form of radio waves. I immediately recognized the proposal as yet another concept I first learned of while sitting crosslegged on the floor of my old treehouse in the heat of a far-off summer day, listening to the old car radio my dad rigged up to run on AC and thumbing through the pages of the latest Science Digest. I remember thinking back then that it was a cool idea, and I still like the sound of it. No doubt it would be an immensely expensive and complex undertaking, and it probably won’t work for all sorts of reasons, but the basic idea itself is so elegant, so… obvious. It’s something from the happier Buck Rogers future I always thought I would be living in, instead of the considerably less ambitious and less hopeful future we actually got, and I hope this Solaren company actually attempts it.

Who knows, if this orbital power station thing works, maybe I’ll still get my maglev train someday as well…

This will be short because I’m trying to finish a bunch of mundane chores and miscellaneous loose ends so I can leave tomorrow on a last-minute adventure with a clear conscience, but I couldn’t let this pass without mention. Remember Lisa Nowak, a.k.a. The Jealous Astronaut? The woman who drove nonstop from Florida to Texas while wearing a space diaper so she could confront (and possibly do major damage to) her romantic rival?

When last we encountered Captain Novak roughly 18 months ago, she had entered a “not guilty” plea. Well, I just spotted the news that she’s now pled guilty to lesser charges of felony burglary of a car and misdemeanor battery as opposed to the original charges of attempted kidnapping, burglary and battery. The prosecutor in the case has complained that Nowak’s attorney has “chipped away” at the case until there’s nothing left, i.e., the defense has fought to have evidence thrown out and managed to get a prohibition on any discussion of the diapers.

Nowak and her paramour, Commander William Oefelein , were both throw out of the astronaut core in 2007. The woman Nowak was apparently after is now living with Oefelein and they’re reportedly engaged. So I guess that’s the end of this strange tale. I have to admit that it feels rather anti-climatic…