It was a beautiful launch this morning for the Ares 1-X rocket, a unmanned prototype for the next-generation Constellation spacecraft that are intended to replace NASA’s aging space shuttle:

It looks to me like the ship wobbles a little bit right after ignition, when it’s balancing on the thrust column but hasn’t actually started lifting yet, and I had a nervous moment when I wondered if it was going to spiral over and blow up like some of the spectacular accidents from the very early days of spaceflight (many of which are shown in the movie The Right Stuff, if you’ll remember). But I haven’t seen anyone commenting on that motion, so perhaps it’s normal for this design. Or maybe I’m not seeing what I think I am.

The Ares is really kind of strange-looking, in my opinion, oddly proportioned with an anorexic body — which is actually a derivative version of the solid rocket boosters you see on either side of the shuttles during their launches — beneath a bulky payload section way up high. It looks top-heavy, although I would guess the weight of the propellant balances it out. Strange or not, though, this is what the future of American manned spaceflight is going to look like. Assuming there is one, of course. Right now, that’s somewhat questionable, since the shuttle is slated to stop flying next year, the International Space Station may very well be abandoned after its funding runs out in 2015, and the Constellation ships — the Ares booster combined with a manned Orion capsule — likely won’t be ready to safely fly humans until sometime after that. Meanwhile, there’s a lot of talk in space circles about sending people back to the Moon or on to Mars, but frankly I don’t see that there’s much public or political interest in doing either, and some experts are now questioning whether the Ares rockets are even the right hardware to meet those goals. So we’re essentially developing a whole new spacecraft system with no clear idea of where we’re going to send it or what we’re going to do with it.

That’s not smart. Especially these days, when everyone is so concerned with return on investment instead of merely wanting to do great things for the sake of doing great things. But still, no matter what the future holds, I have to admit that I got a genuine thrill this morning as I stood in the coffee shop, watching on the flatscreen over the counter as a whole new type of bird took flight over Cape Canaveral. It reminded me of those early mornings when I was a boy, getting up before dawn to watch the first few shuttle launches with my dad.

Here men from the planet Earth first set foot upon the moon
July 1969 A.D.
We came in peace for all mankind

(The Lunar Module Eagle touched down at 14:17:40 MST on July 20, 1969, if you didn’t get the significance of the time code on this entry. The text above comes from a plaque mounted to one of the Eagle‘s landing legs. It’s still there at Tranquility Base, along with the descent stage Armstrong and Aldrin left behind. The photo is, of course, Buzz Aldrin, as photographed by Neil Armstrong. If you look closely, you can see Neil and part of the LM reflected in Buzz’s visor.)

The image above is something I meant to comment on Friday, when it was first released, but obviously I didn’t get around to it. What you’re looking at there, if you haven’t already seen and heard about it, is a photo recently taken by a spacecraft called the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, which is currently circling the moon. Similar to the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter that took that awesome photo of the Martian rover a couple years ago, the LRO is a mapping probe equipped with a powerful camera. When the probe’s system check-out is complete and it has entered the proper mapping orbit, it’s going to start photographing the entire surface of the moon at a high resolution, theoretically as preparation for the return of humans to our nearest neighbor. Regardless of whether that actually happens in our lifetimes, though, the LRO promises to send back some astoundingly detailed images of the lunar landscape… and naturally some of the first pictures it’s taken during this check-out phase are of places we’ve already been, namely five of the six Apollo landing sites.

They all show exactly what you’d expect to see, the squarish, reflective, obviously artificial shapes of the descent stages that were left behind when the astronauts returned to their Command Modules. And yet these fuzzy low-rez photos — the LRO’s camera isn’t operating at its full capabilities yet; better-quality photos of the Apollo sites are promised for later on, after the calibrations are complete — raise the hair on my arms and fill me with pride. Those shiny little objects were made by human hands and sent across a void of a quarter-million miles — think about that, a quarter-million miles — and they’re still there, untouched in the vacuum of space, silent testimony to the inventiveness and determination of the silly hairless apes swarming across the face of the blue planet next door. They’re still waiting for us to come back, you know, those abandoned artifacts.

You can see the rest of the LRO Apollo photos here. The image of the Apollo 14 site is especially fascinating; on that one, the lighting conditions were such that you can see the foot trail left by the astronauts who carried a scientific package out away from their Lunar Module. I can’t wait to see the full-rez shots.

In the meantime, if you haven’t been listening to that time-capsule audio stream of the Apollo 11 transmissions, now is the time to tune in. The Eagle has just cast off from Columbia, and Armstrong and Aldrin are getting ready for their descent… exciting stuff, even if I already know how the story turns out!

So, for the past several hours, I’ve been listening here at work to that Apollo audio feed I wrote about last night. It’s something of a strange experience, to be honest… I’m very conscious of the fact that this is a recording, that I’m sitting in my cubicle in the year 2009 and that everything I’m hearing happened two months before I was even born, and yet it all seems so immediate. I find myself feeling genuine anxiety as I wait for the next exchange, wondering what’s happening up there and what the astronauts and controllers are doing right now. And then I remember that I ought to be thinking in the past tense, that there is no spacecraft currently zooming outward from the earth at 11,000 feet per second, that some of the voices on this feed belong to people who aren’t even alive anymore, and I feel a little silly. But I keep listening anyhow.

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Only a few hours from now, we will mark the 40th anniversary of the launch of Apollo 11, the spaceflight mission that delivered Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Mike Collins to the moon. I personally consider the Apollo program the greatest achievement of the human species, a feat of engineering, scientific know-how, and technological advancement that has yet to be matched or surpassed, as well as a testament to humanity’s perseverance and courage. It breaks my heart that so few people today seem to care that once, not so very long ago, mankind found a way to actually leave our planet and go somewhere else. In person, not by robotic proxy. To stand on soil that had never felt a human footprint and just… experience it. To fulfill our heritage and our destiny as explorers, just like the first hunter-gatherers who decided to walk over the hill and see what was over there. How can people not find that absolutely thrilling? And let’s not even speak of those who don’t believe we went. I never will understand how those folks can be so cynical or hold such a dim opinion of their fellow humans as to think we couldn’t possibly have figured out how to do it.

I’m just a tad too young to have experienced this amazing moment in history as it unfolded. I wouldn’t be born for two more months after Armstrong made that giant leap. And even though I’ve seen the documentaries, read the books, and grew up just generally knowing about all this stuff, it’s hard for me to imagine what it must’ve been like for my parents and other people living at that time. Fortunately at times like these, we at least have the Internet.

I’ve learned that NASA is going to begin streaming actual audio recorded during the mission, starting tomorrow morning at 6:32 central daylight time, two hours before the giant Saturn V booster rocket launched the Apollo spacecraft out of the atmosphere. The idea is that we’ll be hearing the transmissions between astronauts, ground teams, and Mission Control at the exact same moments they were broadcast in 1969. It’ll be just like being there… almost…

Details on this nifty simulation can be found in this press release. The audio will be streaming here.

The John F. Kennedy Presidential Library is hosting another similar, but more visually punchy site called WeChooseTheMoon, a reference to JFK’s famous speech that set the ball rolling inexorably toward Tranquility Base. And if you’d like a visual to go with the audio, here’s a video recording of the actual TV coverage that you would’ve seen had you been watching the tube on this morning four decades ago. The quality isn’t great, sadly, but I still defy you not to feel a tingle down your back when those mighty engines start to rumble…

Galactic Center of Milky Way Rises over Texas Star Party from William Castleman on Vimeo.

I have nothing else to say about this, except to note that as best I can determine it is not faked or “enhanced” with special effects. This is our galaxy, our neighborhood, our place in the cosmos. And I wish somebody would hurry up with inventing that dang warp drive already so we could get out there for a good, close-up look…

And now for something that has nothing to do with International Talk Like a Pirate Day but is still pretty dang cool:

I grabbed this awesome photo from Damaris, a woman who works at Kennedy Space Center and is in training to become an astronaut herself. It’s not especially rare for two shuttles to be on their launch pads at the same time, but it is quite unusual for them to both be visible like this, because usually there’s a massive gantry called the Rotating Service Structure surrounding them and blocking the view. (The RSS is the bulky-looking mess of girders to the left of the shuttle in the foreground… not that upright tower, but the other part with the white center.) This particular photo is actually 18 years old; that’s the late, lamented Columbia and her sister ship Discovery back in September of 1990, the last time anyone saw this particular spectacle. But as Damaris explains, we’ll get the chance again tomorrow when Endeavour and Atlantis take their places out there at Launch Complex 39 and, for a few hours at least, will be standing naked beneath the Florida skies.
There’s nothing earth-shattering here, just a neat picture of something you don’t see everyday, and some interesting trivia. Click the pic to enlarge it, and then head over to Damaris’ blog for the whole story…

[Update: Damaris just updated her blog with pics of Endeavour and Atlantis on their pads, including a really gorgeous aerial shot that even includes a rainbow! Go check ’em out…]

Via SF Signal, here’s an interesting link to a PDF that lists the books, movies, TV shows, and music stocked on board the International Space Station for the crew’s off-duty entertainment. It’s quite a nice little library that covers a pretty wide range of topics, genres, and quality levels (i.e., “hammock reading” versus Literature-with-a-capital-L).

Titles that caught my eye among the books were The Brothers Karamazov, Darwin’s Origin of Species, the Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy, The Da Vinci Code (of course — is there anywhere you can’t find a copy of that one?), Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, and, amusingly enough, several years-old issues of both Analog and Asimov’s Science Fiction. (How weird would it be to read science fiction while floating weightlessly in a tin can that whips around the planet once every 90 minutes? But wait… it gets weirder…)

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