Tag Archives: MIR

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Heavenly Palace


As Tiangong Crashes Down,
Star Dreams Remain Aloft

Has the world gone mad? A camelback rider could’ve said that about the Sphinx in 2550, then under construction. And so could a tourist during the rare pink snowstorm that blanketed Europe the other week. Some may say it about the Chinese space station’s plunge into Earth.
It’s reassuring to see that reality can still top whatever buffoonery the orange rerun of Mr. T. may come up with. What? NASA is inviting people to add their name to the cargo of that soon-to-be launched sun probe? Well, nature has a couple of penguins taking selfies for you.
Not all is fun and cookies however, in the realm of the bizarre and out of whack. Like some nut, high on proving that god existed, who crashed her car on a pole on purpose, with her two kids strapped in the back seat. They all lived but god’d better not help her get back the children.
Or a guy who ran the cops to the ground, and beat a record that shall not speak its name (or get on the Guinness Book): he spent 47 days without going to the bathroom. They wanted to recover some drugs they say he’d swallowed, but after watching him on the throne for six weeks straight, they couldn’t take it anymore and just gave up.
Guess what science came up with, just so we’re clear we have no idea what we carry around in our bowels? Not one but two unknown human organs in less than a year: the mesentery and the interstitium. They’re with us since our bodies got the latest upgrade, circa 30,000 years ago, among the biggest organs in the body. But only now got their own billing.

WE WILL BE LIVING AMONG STARS
The man sitting on the White House toilet, tweeting, is quickly running out of tricks to cover up his con, but life, in the words of that great Jurassic Park philosopher, will always find fresh ways to shock and awe us. Even when it takes, say, a couple of thousand years. Or we’re unaware of its wonders.
Shorter and much more recent is our history building space stations. Since way before the Skylab ended six years of watching over us and precipitously rained in pieces over the Australian town of Esperance, of all places, in 1979, we’ve been trying to stay aloft each time longer.
Mir, which lasted 15 years and managed to survive the breakup of the Soviet Union, before breaking up itself and falling back to Earth in 2001, upped the ante. And the beloved International Space Station, the current title holder that completes 20 years in orbit this November, is still sitting pretty on the night sky.

THE FALLING BROKENDOWN PALACE
Do not blame the Chinese for trying. Here’s a land where the impossible takes place everyday. For millennia. From building a quasi-replica of Paris to having a number of metropolises sitting on empty, awaiting its much slowed down population growth, China gets it. But Tiangong 1, its first space station, is coming back to Earth.
Where? No one knows. The prototype was not supposed to last pass the two-year mark, in 2013, anyway. These things cost a lot to maintain. They say the next one will be bigger and better than this small but highly-sophisticated space bus. Still, a refrigerator-sized leftover chunk may surviving reentry. So look out.
Even if what goes up has to come down, eventually, whatever happens above has been considerably better, and nobler, that what’s going on down here. For to keep people up there takes our best and the absolutely limit of our capacity as living beings. Astronauts make us proud.

CHERISH THE FRESH & THE UNEXPECTED
Yes, the world has gone completely insane. But just as it’s crucial to know all about thorns, let’s not forget to caress the petals. The fiery universe, or universes, are expanding to the speed of life, but we’ve been given a bubble to breathe in and grow. We’re the guardians of the guardians that protect us.
We’re not excelling at it, that’s for sure. But let’s not confuse (more)
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Read Also:
* Space Droppings
* Ungrounded
* Meanwhile, Up There

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Journey to Forever

The Challenger Explosion
& Its Thunderbolt Lessons

It was the U.N. International Year of Peace, and ‘We Are the World’ was a big hit. On its second visit in a century, the Halley Comet was at its closest to Earth when a melting Chernobyl reactor caused the world’s scariest nuclear disaster. But right off the bat, 1986 marked the worst tragedy of the space age.
On January 28, the Challenger Shuttle exploded on live TV, killing all seven astronauts, including Christa McAuliffe, who was to become the first space civilian, but turned out to be the last teacher to be nationally mourned and eulogized in the U.S. It’s been downhill for educators ever since.
It was the Reagan era, and footage of him will probably be all over the airwaves. In a year of yet another flawed immigration law, his administration would be caught selling illegal weapons to Iran and arming the Contras to top Nicaragua’s democratic elected government.
The 30 years that now separate us from the Challenger explosion also equal the entire length of the Space Shuttle Program, which folded in 2011. Before that, another group of astronauts perished in 2003, when the Columbia, the program’s first space-worthy vehicle, tragically disintegrated while reentering Earth’s atmosphere.
These tragedies, along with the program whose many achievements are now part of our daily lives, look now so far back into the past, that even the ideas that inspired it seem remote. NASA doesn’t even have a comprehensive space plan currently running.
A MAJOR MALFUNCTION
It’s also easy to forget how close we all came to believe that space travel would be a new century routine, and many are quick to point that it was exactly that kind of sense of false security that led to the fatal errors causing the Challenger’s demise.
Perhaps. What’s for sure is that, without daring mistakes, we wouldn’t even have gotten to the Moon, and how uninspiring our age really is if our dreams nowadays have to come attached to a mandatory bargain price tag. Unlike weapons and conspiracy theories.
McAuliffe was slated to conduct the first high school science classes from space, to a Internet-less world full of teenagers who still cared about the subject. Instead, children along millions endured her spectacular dead, and that of her co-travelers, broadcast live.

TEACHING CHILDREN WELL
Such brutal awakening may have also marked, at least symbolically, the beginning of the end of Americans’ appreciation for the role of teachers and educators. It’s a curious phenomenon, promoted by half-witted politicians and their austerity policies.
Even though science and innovation was one of the tenets of U.S.’s ascension to its world power position, an entire generation grew apathetic and spoiled by the inventions that surround us. Science school grades have never been so low in average.
That’s probably why, instead of tele-transportation and weekly trips through the Solar System, we’ve got only a better iPhone (more)
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Read Also:
* Farewell Mission
* Waiting For Discovery
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Space Droppings

The High-Speed Junk Our
Dreams Left Above Earth

Look at that sky above you. See how the stars are bright tonight. Think about the immensity of the universe, quasars and nebulae, waiting to awe you, just beyond the reach of your fingers. And be careful with the falling debris of thousands of objects man placed on Earth’s orbit.
That’s right. We can’t seem to live without producing many times as much as we’re capable of consuming. And just like the oceans, all that floating garbage is choking us. Or, in the case of space, either falling often over our heads or racing around the planet at top speed.
So, hail poets and philosophers and astronomers and dreamers. But also, hail the new class of space cleaners that will have to be trained and sent to do what janitors have been doing since time immemorial, besides taking the blame for their bosses’ crimes: cleaning after us.
The U.S., and as a distant second, Russia (as in former Soviet Union), are by far the biggest producers of space junk around. But neophyte China‘s also doing its part, as it launched this week a monitoring center to protect its over 130 space objects in orbit.
Other countries are concerned too. A month ago, Japan announced that it’s studying the possibility of laser-blasting, Star Wars-style, all that junk out of existence, probably from the International Space Station itself. Just imagine George Lucas losing his sleep over this.
But theirs is only a slightly more sophisticated idea that’s been tried before, with disastrous results. We’ve covered that a few years ago. Then as now, there were few reasons Continue reading →

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Falling Junk

Long Life for
Our Star Trash

Since ancient times, people looked up at the sky and dreamed about the future, new worlds, or whether it’ll rain or shine. These days, they look out for something else: space junk. Statistically, the 60 to 80 tons of metal garbage we’ve once sent aloft and now comes back to Earth every year has little chance to hit anyone, personally.
Which doesn’t mean it can’t. Most actually get burned while entering our atmosphere. A lot dive straight to the sea, which covers most of the planet’s surface anyway. Then there’s the stuff that falls in deserted areas, and few even notice it. That leaves a small, tiny, teeny percentage of flaming rocks that, yes, can crush you to death.
We don’t want to worry you too much. After all, if this was Saturday, we’d be doing better featuring cat pictures. But think about a lottery, for instance, and the buck you risk weekly, hoping to change your life with a struck of a number. Well, chances of hitting the jackpot are roughly equivalent to chances of being hit by falling debris. So.
Let’s take a quick look at what’s up there, what may have reached its expiration date some time ago, and what’s getting closer and closer to reentry, shall we?
FLYING LITTER
The straight dope: right now, there are about 500,000 known pieces of space junk in orbit, including items 0.5 inches wide, and 21,000 objects larger than four inches in diameter, all currently being tracked by the Department of Defense’s U.S. Space Surveillance Network.
But if that makes you relax, you don’t know what’s coming at you at 17,500mph: once an object larger than those four inches reenters the atmosphere, it’s virtually impossible to know where exactly it’ll land.
A few years ago, a 2.5-ton scrap, left over after disabled German satellite Rosat reentered the atmosphere in October, missed Beijing and millions of residents by a matter of minutes. The 21-year old Rosat fell instead on the Bay of Bengal a few moments from the Chinese city.
Given the size of that thing, it’d have been, of course, a major catastrophe. But at that kind of speed, size is not really that relevant. There have been collisions in space between debris and operating satellites, or even misguided attempts at destroying them in orbit. That only increased the amount of high-speed junk circulating the Earth.
The International Space Station has had to dodge debris several times and even has a procedure for astronauts to adopt in such an event. And they did have to evacuate the ISS under the threat of a collision a couple of times. As you know, even a tiny bit of racing metal can disable the station and they’d have to abandon it for good.

ETERNAL LANDFILL
The only thing certain about this dangerous by-product of our space adventures is that it’ll all eventually fall back to Earth, and there isn’t much that can be done about it. NASA’s Orbital Debris Program Office has been trying to address the problem for quite some time now.
The program’s main goal is to find ways to avoid collisions, specially when launching new satellites that, ultimately will also contribute to the pile. Or soon, there won’t be a way to safely launch them up at all. But NASA is historically plagued by budget concerns anyway.
The same goes, by the way, to its Meteoroid and Orbital Debris Program Offices. All both programs can do is to track some of the objects. There isn’t any practical plan to do away with the problem which, in the case of meteorites, has the potential to end our civilization.
But before the hawks who like to blame the government for incompetence start to croak, see if there’s any initiative from the private sector to deal with the issue of space debris. Or with errant meteors, for that matter. That’s because there isn’t.
And to show that in matters of space, we’re really falling behind, while we argue about government spending and earth-bound priorities, the Swiss has come up with a way. Expensive, lengthy but better than nothing. Let’s see if it gets off the ground. We hope it does.
Even sexier programs, such as space travel, have a hard time finding deep pockets to get off the ground. So, like education, health care, defense, and individual freedom, either the government steps in or it’s every man for himself. That’s how it already looks like anyway.

WHAT GOES UP…
Two dramatic examples, coincidentally both Russian-made crafts, underline the need for us to, well, at least keep an eye on the sky. The $160 million Phobos-Grunt satellite, and the $65 million Meridian communications satellite both malfunctioned either in orbit or right before reaching it and crashed back shortly after launch.
Besides the huge amount of money literally burned with the failed projects, and the effect they had on Russia’s once proud space program, there’s something else about them: they both could’ve hit a major city and caused a catastrophic event. Not this time, thank goodness.
Before we forget, let’s quickly address the one-track minded, shoot from the hip, Monday quarterbacks out there who have one ‘solution’ to this problem: to blast it, either with lasers or some other video-game-inspired solution. Well, let’s us be the ‘Nth’ party to tell you all: it does not work, either with satellites or meteorites.

China already tested in 2007 this disastrous theory, which has even its own name, the Kessler Syndrome, when it blasted an aging weather satellite, only to create about 2,500 pieces of new debris. It happened again two years later, though, in a head-on collision between U.S. Iridium satellite and a defunct Soviet Cosmos spacecraft.

Add another 1,000 pieces of trackable debris to the space landfill tally up there. And so on. The consequences of blasting a meteor in outer space, supposedly using nuclear power, as many advocate, are unpredictable and, most likely, absurdly devastating. But, if the rock’s really heading toward us, who knows?
PERMANENT GRIDLOCK
With over 50 nations now actively launching rockets to space, the traffic jam is obviously increasing. And speaking of nukes, some of these do have nuclear powered engines, and are not any safer than the usual sources of propulsion. That was the case in 1978, with a secret spy Soviet satellite.
The Cosmos 954, which had compact nuclear reactors for each of its radar antennas, spiraled out of control and fell to Earth, shedding debris across the frozen ground of the Canadian Arctic. It required a major cleanup operation, obviously motivated by its military purposes.
The number of space debris is projected to triple by 2030, and if today there are probably 10 times more objects in space than we’re able to track with our current sensor capability, imagine how it’ll be then.
There’s growing awareness of the problem and spacecraft built nowadays are relatively superior than those launched before, in what they use lighter materials, are more energy efficient, have longer life spans, and can more easily be tracked and even brought back to Earth for recycling, instead of just crash-landing.
That being said, and even if unrealistically, we’d consider stopping launching anything else to space, there’s still the problem of what’s already there. Perhaps in a 100 years or so, if we’re still around, we’ll send some kind of space-age, small-planet sized shredder to turn it all into something we can reuse. Stardust, anyone?
But that’s, well, a fairy-dusted way of imagining the future. Just like imagining the you’ll hit the lottery someday. Which doesn’t mean we don’t want you to, just don’t forget us. Or the fairies. And, for crying out loud, take at look at the sky above you, every once in a while.

* Originally published on 8/15/2011.