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NASA Walkabout, 2007
NASA Walkabout
By Dennis Carlyle Kenney
© March 2007 Dennis Kenney
The wind off the Muddy Charles was cold and unfriendly as I walked across the HarvardBridge into Boston. It was cold enough for me to decide on as road trip to see the actual state of NASA, not the state as seen from press releases. Tonight, the working press of Bostonhad presented a report on the annual Davos, Switzerland meeting at the Swiss Technical Consulate on Broadway Avenue near Harvard in Cambridge. My desert-acclimatized body was repulsed by five days of freezing temperatures, pushing my mental compass in a southerly direction where I knew it would be warmer. The robins may have bird brains but they’re not freezing in Boston.
Davos, Switzerland 2007
The Swiss Technical Consulate in Cambridge is one of five technical consulates that the Swiss maintain around the world. This will change rapidly this year as the Swiss sell themselves around the world. The report by the local Bostonpress at the Swiss Technical Consulate in Bostonon the Davos meeting in Switzerlandhas become an annual affair.
Green Bank, West Virginia
Tons of Janskys of radio energy plow into the Earth from extraterrestrial sources, some of which are captured by the large Green Bank radio telescope, once upon a time the largest movable structure on land. Orion constellation is one of the most distinctive star pictures in the sky and it seemed to be hanging in the south during the recent cold, clear nights going back to Boston. A two-dimensional pictureto be sure, even with the Great Orion Nebula with a mass of thousands of our sun 300 light-years away. The two thousand or so stars that we can see are in a very small part of our Milky Way galaxy as a display in the Boston Museum of Science shows. A comparable display at the Green Bank museum shows the three-dimensional arrangement of Orion, the arrangement in distance a lot bigger than would be thought; it’s actually much deeper than its apparently width from our vantage point. While the asteroids beyond Mars seem to be the practical limit for our reaction mass propulsion systems (rockets), man will have to wait for impulse engines and warp drives before he can visit these near stars.
Huntsville, Alabama
NASA Huntsville was the construction location for the mighty Saturn missiles that took the Apollo astronauts to the moon. I looked at the SR-71 Blackbird on display one more time, wondering how a centerline rocket engine could be installed which would change the aircraft into a spacecraft capable of zooming into van Kaman space (100 kilometers). It was late so I would wait until I got to Canaveral to see the Disney’s Roving Mars 3-D IMAX movie about the Mars Exploration Rovers, Spirit and Opportunity. I’ve seen Tom Hank’s 3-D IMAX movie Magnificent Desolation three times already. MIT’s Buzz Aldrin (PhD in Astrophysics from Harvard) coined the title phrase, a descriptionwhich any viewer of the movie will agree with.
Stennis NASA, Mississippi
The moon rockets were tested at Stennis before they were shipped to Huntsville for assembly. The liquid fuel engines for the Aries V and Ares I, which will carry astronauts to the moon and Mars, are being tested right now at Stennis. The five-segment solid rockets, of course, are made by ATK Thiokol, and have been used on the shuttle space transportation system in a four-segment configuration. Ares I will carry the crew exploration vehicle (CEV), a 35-ton, Apollo-type five-man capsule and command vehicle, into orbit. The Ares V will be capable of putting 135 tons in low earth orbit. The Ares V has three liquid fueled stages as well as two extended shuttle solid rocket boosters.
Chalmette Plantation
“In 1814 we took a little trip, along with Andrew Jackson down the mighty Mississip.” The trip ended on the east bank of the Mississippi down the river from New Orleans. Privateer (don’t you dare say pirate) Jean Lafitte got a pardon from Andrew under duress that settled the misunderstanding on the sharing of the loot Jean had seized on the high seas from the British. After all, Jean owned most of the powder and cannon in New Orleans. Nothing worked right for the hardened British troops during their assault and Andrew Jackson headed for the White House with a short delay caused by shenanighens involving John Quincy Adams of Massachusetts.
Orleans
Hurricane Katrina and human failings put New Orleans on life-support system. The city will take years to recover but the parts of the city that were protected by natural levees are back to normal. The devastation in some residential areas and the wetlands is still there but the people and businesses have not returned. On 11/2007 life has started to return to parts of Ward 9 with the street lights back on. Ground Zero for Katrina and Rita, places like Waveland, are still repairing the streets and sewage with developers building condos and new housing. Mardi Gras, the New Orleans spirit and the fabulous food of Louisiana are still there.
NASA Michoud Assembly Plant, East New Orleans
This 832-acre site is owned by NASA and boasts one of the largest plants in the world (43 acres under one roof) and deep-water access to the Gulf of Mexico. The plant manufactured the first stage of the Saturn I and Saturn V heavy-lift vehicles during the Apollo program.
Lockheed Martin Space Systems arrived in 1973 to begin work on the space shuttle program, in particular the expendable external fuel tank, which is the primary product of the facility today. Michoud will produce the first stage of the new Ares V using the new Pratt Whitney Rocketdyne RS-68 engines now being tested across the state line in NASA Stennis, Mississippi, now that the external tank is being integrated into the first stage as well as miscellaneous other light structures like liquid oxygen tanks.
37 employees remained at the Michoud Assembly Facility during Katrina to keep the generators and water pumps working to protect the flight hardware in the plant. I couldn’t get into either Michoud or the environmental test facility at Eglin, AFB. Post Turkey Day, 2007 I made it into Michoud twice (being turned around by the gate guards). Both guards agreed that I had to get into Building 350 which was behind two chain link fences to get a visitor’s pass. The facility looked quite extensive at night from the nearby bridge over the adjacent canal.
Mardi Gras
Fat Tuesday is the grand finale of a week of marching and drinking that is New Orleans’ preparation for Lent. Microsoft sponsored a stop for Jefferson Airplane in its Vista promotion tour at LouisArmstrongPark during Mardi Gras. I got my black promotional t-shirt. Each day’s activities alternated between marches, tours and eating the unique cuisine of the area.
NASALBJSpaceCenter, Houston
I avoided most of Houston by coming into and leaving Galveston on a free ferry. I usually get lost when I hit Houston on interstate 10 from either direction. The International Space Station module preparation building is starting to look abandoned with the modules being plugged into the ISS. I like the long-horned cattle on the campus and the old rockets.
Turkey Day + 1, 2007: I’m back in Houston taking a trip to the Neutral Buoyancy Laboratory where astronauts simulate and practice microg tasks in a six million gallon pool. I’ve seen the Skylab trainer, the Apollo 17 capsule and a real Gemini capsule again. There’s no way that astronauts are going to go to Mars in a small Apollo-like crew exploration vehicle.
Notoway Plantation
The buildings at Notoway Plantation would cost an estimated $15 million dollars today to be replicated. The plantation faces a levee that looks at least 25 feet high. The levee seems to follow the Mississippi all the way to the gulf. The point is that it was only a few feet high during the Civil War, before the levees were built to protect the farms up the river. Now all the annual water flows speed down to New Orleans and dumps its silt in the Gulf of Mexico instead of in the wetlands and bayous of the delta. The nutrients in the water have caused a massive dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico.The loss of wetlands is appalling, since they protect the residences inland and New Orleans from strong winds and water surges. What are the implications for the Gulf statesand the rest of the southeast with the increase in hurricane and tornado activity?
NAS Pensacola
The Blue Angels haven’t returned to the Florida Panhandle so I couldn’t watch their Tuesday and Wednesday practice sessions. I am more and more impressed by the PBY amphibious aircraft (“I fly boats.”), which sunk more Japanese shipping than any other vehicle. Throw in reconnaissance and rescue missions and you have a truly amazing airplane. The PBY sank a lot of German U-Boots in the Atlantic and was responsible for sighting the Bismark in Europe. The F-14 Tomcat has been retired and the T-34 trainer will also be sent out to pasture. The retired volunteer tour guide and a young aviator on the tour had both trained in the T-34 Mentor trainer. Scary.
I had my normal sandwich, soup and pink lemonade at the transported NAS Cubi Point Officers Club. The O-Club was transported chair-by-chair, plaque-by-plaque after the Navy was nudged out of the Philippines after Mt.Pinatubo’svolcano blew its top and blanketed the Subic Bay Naval Station with volcanic ash. The force of the eruption was eight times as great as Mt.St. Helens’ eruption and was followed by a typhoon.
OcalaNational Forest
Arnie is camping somewhere in the area so I check out a few campsites and eat a peppered flounder at one of the area restaurants. The birds are starting to all look the same after a hike along some of the birding trails. You know – beaks, brown spots and chirps. There are abandoned rice fields throughout the southeast all the way to Texas, some of which were part of the wildlife refuges that I visited. Need I mention that we are basically talking about old slave plantations?Arnie hasn’t been seen back in Boston and he probably never will be.
Merritt Island Wildlife Preserve
The birders are out in force but I chose to walk the trails and drive the roads by myself on this trip. A birder had called out the endangered scrub jay on a previous trip and I had seen alligators and manatees galore. There were dolphins in the BananaRiver and I had swum with a giant turtle south of CocoaBeach by Patrick AFB. The bus driver on the tour bus at KSC pointed out an endangered gopher tortoise to his passengers. Later, I bought six amazing stuffed birds at the Merritt Island Wildlife Refuge information center, which imitate the sounds of live birds for my grandchildren. Even I could recognize the robin’s call.
KennedySpaceCenter
The shuttles are launched from KSC and recovered on KSC’s three-mile runway if weather permits. Back when the shuttles were recovered at Edwards in California, the public could be closer to the shuttle touchdown spot and I often heard the characteristic double sonic boom of a shuttle reentry at my house in Westlake, California. Now the public has to watch the landing from about ten miles away, the same safety radius as a shuttle launch. At a distance of ten miles only the steep descent path lets an observer know he is watching an orbiter.
Hail pelted the shuttle Discovery during the month it was out at launch pad 39A. The damage included a heavily divetted fuel tank so the shuttle stack was scheduled to be returned to the VehicleAssemblyBuilding. There was no point in waiting for the next launch so I figured it must be getting warm in Boston. I was wrong. I had no way of knowing that I’d back for STS-122. I also had no way of knowing that STS-122 would be put on hold until after the holidays so I hit the road after the Atlas V shot at 5:25 p.m. from Cape Canaeral.
NASA will be going back to an Apollo-type configuration for their Moon, Mars and Beyond vision of space exploration after the shuttle is retired in 2010. Pad 39B will be modified to launch the Ares I while the Ares V will be launched from 39A. The astronauts are launched in the Crew Exploration Vehicle with the Ares I and rendezvous with the upper stage of the Ares V in low Earth orbit before continuing to the moon or Mars.
Shuttle Launch Experience
KSC opened its $60 million exhibit in May 2007 with 44 astronauts experiencing simulated shuttle launches. The simulator shakes the poop out of you presenting a preview of what space tourists will pay $20 to $200 million for in the future. Eventually, reentry simulation may be part of the Shuttle Launch Experience with the Earth’s surface speeding by and Florida ahead as an impact area.
Cape Canaveral AFB
The unmanned launch pads are located south of the manned launch pads in the triangle of land facing the ocean. Space Exploration Technologies or SpaceX has concluded an agreement with the Air Force to use the old Titan launch padon Complex 40 for commercial launches. I watched the Huygens-Cassini launch from the pier on CocoaBeach eight years ago. Cassini is still flying around Saturn taking beautiful pictures of Saturn, its rings and its satellites.
The United Space Alliance has anoffice complex across A1A from the Cocoa Beach Chamber of Commerce information center.
Atlas V Launch, December 10th, 2007
I watched the unmanned Atlas V launch at 5:25, one minute behind schedule because of an unplanned one minute hold.
Bigelow Aerospace
Robert Bigelow of Bigelow Aerospace has a fast-track schedule to orbit their Sundancer spacelab. The sticking point is getting their flight crews to and from Sundancer and supporting them in orbit. Bigelow Aerospace is negotiating with the United Launch Alliance to man-qualify the Atlas V rocket and place an order for six launches starting around 2011.
Commercial Orbital Transportation System (COTS)
NASA has juggled its funding to allocate the $500 million it promised to spur commercial access to the International Space Station. NASA will spend $26 billion over 5 years for crew and cargo transportation to the ISS, most of which will probably be for Russian space vehicles. Funding to begin development of the Altair lunar lander and Ares V heavy-lift vehicle have been included in the current Fiscal 2009 request.
Solarmax, BCCC Iwerks Discovery Movie Theatre
The movie shows the history of man’s quest to understand our sun right up to satellite (and ground-based) observations of the sun from all of the electromagnetic spectrum. Observations of high-energy frequencies show the sun’s massive ejections of matter and energy into space and its resultant effect on the Earth. There have been solarmaxes which could completely wipe all of the satellite constellations.
BrevardCountyCommunity College
I try to go to the BCCC planetarium in Cocoa, Florida whenever I’m in the Cape Canaveral area. There is usually a rock laser show besides the usual large screen and star fare. Volunteers man the 24-inch reflector telescope on the roof but with the nearly full moon its blinding light became the main attraction. Saturn earned a passing glance and I had seen Pluto on a previous visit. The planetarium would be featuring the Dark Side of the Moon with Pink Floyd tomorrow during the lunar eclipse. I got a case of homitis after the delay in the shuttle launch, so I headed north up 95.
St. Mary’s, Georgia
I missed the rising of the eclipsed moon the next night because I was in overcast St. Mary’s in Georgia. I joined some young crab fishermen (“You’re not from here, are you?”) near an abandoned paper mill before giving up on the moon. Southern crabs like chicken backs.
Udver-HazyNationalSpaceMuseum
I spent the night in Friedrichsburg, Virginia without visiting the Civil War battlefield. I would save that for another trip when the weather was above freezing. I hoped to avoid DC, NY and the NJ tollbooths by heading north from Dulles airport in Virginia. For now I had a full day for the museum and would finally see the 3-D IMAX movie Roving Mars that wasn’t playing at Houston, Pensacola or Canaveral. Watching the simulated travels of the amazing rovers Spirit and Opportunity was like watching the brave little cartoon train of my youth. The Mars Exploration Rovers just kept going and going over rocks and dunes, through cold nights and winter, ignoring the radiation and dust. Signs of water were everywhere. The hematite sensed from orbit was manifested in the spherical blueberries, which were found freestanding and embedded in sedimentary rocks. Recent studies from orbit seem to sense free flowing water in images snapped only a year apart.