As long as we’re thinking about astronauts today, Wired.com reminds us that the first extra-terrestrial round of golf was played on this date back in 1971 by Alan Shepard of Apollo 14. So-so quality YouTube video of the event below the fold:
When you live in Utah, you get used to hearing weird news stories that have some kind of local connection. From Howard Hughes’ “Mormon Mafia” and the tale of Melvin Dummar in the ’70s to the White Salamander bombings and cold fusion kerfuffle in the ’80s to anything related to the polygamist colonies of the Four Corners area in the last ten years, the more bizarre the story, the more likely it either happened here or has some kind of link to my home state.
Today’s weirdest news story is no exception to the rule, but it is really a wild tale: astronaut Lisa Marie Nowak is being charged with attempted murder after she drove 900 miles from Houston to Orlando while wearing a diaper (so she wouldn’t have to stop for potty breaks), intending to kidnap or otherwise harm a rival for a fellow astronaut’s affections. Nowak, who is a married mother of three and who flew on shuttle Discovery last summer, accosted Colleen Shipman in an airport parking lot while disguised in a wig and trench coat and carrying pepper spray, a mallet, a BB gun, gloves, a folding knife, rubber tubing, and trash bags. She later told police she only wanted to “scare Ms. Shipman into talking with her.” Um, yeah… you always go loaded for bear when you just want to talk.
According to the Orlando Sentinal, these are likely “the first-ever felony charges filed on an active-duty astronaut.”
Weird indeed. But what’s the Utah connection, you’re wondering? Well, as it happens, Nowak is a cousin of Tony Caputo, the owner of one of Salt Lake’s most popular eateries and a bit of a local celebrity in his own right. I imagine he’s screening his phone calls today…
For any fellow space buffs who may be reading my humble ramblings, I’ve compiled some end-of-year retrospectives that you may find interesting:
I love space exploration because it takes energy that could be spent destroying the planet or hurting people, and uses it to expand what we understand and what we can see in our lifetimes.
–Wil Wheaton
For various reasons that I won’t get into right now, I’ve been trying lately to articulate exactly why I find “space stuff” so interesting and exciting. I’m not sure Wil’s thinking on the matter exactly matches my own, but it’s probably a big component. And it’s nicely stated. The rest of his entry from which that line comes is worth a click, too…
[Update: If you’ve come here from Joel Schlosberg’s big meta-post, please see my contribution to the Carl Sagan Memorial Blog-a-Thon here.]
This is kind of cool… Nick Sagan, the son of the late astronomer Carl Sagan, reports on a plan to commemorate the tenth anniversary of his father’s passing:
The goal here is to make December 20th a blogosphere-wide celebration of the life and works of Carl Sagan. So if you’re a Carl Sagan fan with a blog, or you know someone who is, I hope you’ll join in and take some time on that day to share your thoughts, memories, opinions and feelings about my dad. And if you could help spread the word, it would mean a lot to me.
The Internet-spanning celebration was actually the idea of a blogger named Joel Schlosberg:
Read or reread a Sagan book and review it; discuss cool things that you’ve done that’s been influenced by him; pontificate on one of the many topics he treated (SETI, astronomy, critical thinking, the history of science, human intelligence….), or post about something completely surprising. Contact me by email or by leaving a comment, and then when the date approaches, I will create a meta-post that links to all the stuff people are doing, providing a network of the participating bloggers.
To kick things off, Joel provides a collection of Sagan-related stuff out there on the Web.
I’ve written before about Carl Sagan’s impact on me, and I’m not sure I can come up with much more than what I’ve already said. But I’m going to give it a go. If anybody reading this has their own blog or journal and something to say about Carl, consider yourself tagged. Stay tuned, everybody…
Without preamble, the items that have distracted me from work this afternoon:
Quickly, because of the advancing hour, here are a couple of items that caught my attention this afternoon:
You may recall that earlier this year, a private company called Bigelow Aerospace orbitted a prototype for an inflatable space habitat. That test module, the so-called Genesis 1, has proven to be so successful that Bigelow is claiming to be far ahead of its own schedule to develop an orbital hotel. The second, larger test module — Genesis 2 — is on track to launch early next year, and plans are for a human-rated module — the Sundancer — to be up in the black by 2009 or 2010. The company is also looking into possible vehicles to get guests up to and back from the hotel. Details on this exciting, fascinating venture are here.
Meanwhile, back here on Earth, one of those “extreme” young gazillionaire types, who made a fortune from one of those new-fangled energy drinks that the kids love (I find them revolting, myself) and who is fascinated by the classic Bell rocket belt of the 1960s, has had a lighter, more up-to-date version designed and built for himself. These things are undoubtedly dangerous as hell, and not quite as useful or slick as The Rocketeer‘s streamlined engine, but I’d still love to take a spin in one. Maybe one day… when I get back from my weekend in the space hotel. Ah, the future…
It doesn’t look good. Scientists are still analyzing the images sent back by the Mars Reconaissance Orbiter as it tried to find its companion, the Mars Global Surveyor, but there doesn’t seem to have been any “definitive sighting.” Emily at The Planetary Society isn’t willing to write off the MGS just yet — there is still an effort underway to relay a signal from the MGS through the Opportunity rover down on the planet’s surface. However, a number of space-related blogs and websites are already writing eulogies for the missing probe. This one includes a cool photo taken by the MGS in its salad days, as well as a good list of the mission’s highlights.
The Opportunity rover up on Mars has now reached its 1000th “sol” (or Martian day) of operation. If you’ll recall, Opportunity’s brother Spirit reached the same milestone a few weeks ago.
To celebrate these twin achievements, a multi-media producer and rover enthusiast named Doug Ellison has created a pair of posters that he sent as gifts to the rover teams at Cornell University and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). The posters are mosaics composed of images taken by the rovers themselves, and they’re pretty cool. Emily over at The Planetary Society has the details; you can see the Spirit poster here, and the Opportunity poster is here.
Not all of today’s news from the Red Planet is happy, though: the Mars Global Surveyor (MGS), yet another of our intrepid robot proxies, has vanished. Mission controllers haven’t heard from the spacecraft since November 5. They are hopeful that the MSG is still operational and has simply oriented itself at an angle that makes communication difficult (i.e., the antenna is turned away from Earth). Plans are afoot to try and spot the missing spacecraft with the cameras on board the Mars Reconaissance Orbiter (that’s the one that photographed the Opportunity rover a while back) and then to use the rovers to relay a signal to the MGS. For more information, check out the Planetary Society’s complete article.
Space.com has just posted the latest on the search for those missing slow-scan television (SSTV) recordings of Neil Armstrong walking on the Moon. (I’ve blogged about this search previously here, here, and here.) To cut to the chase, they haven’t found them yet.
The inquiry into the whereabouts of the SSTV tapes has not proven easy.
Budget cuts at NASA in the post-Apollo years meant that many day-to-day records were discarded. Jobs and entire divisions that dealt with data records were eliminated.
Since there was no official requirement to archive data like this, [Bill] Wood added, the SSTV tape could have gone the same way that many old television programs did: TV stations degaussed the tapes and reused them.
That’s a perfectly horrifying thought…
