Apollo-Soyuz Test Project (ASTP) - "US-Soviet Joint Space Mission" - 1975 - NASA

Bigelow Aerospace and NASA have expanded the B.E.A.M

"Houston, you have an epic balloon room in space. NASA has inflated the first-ever expandable room for astronauts on the International Space Station, a round module that made occasional popcorn-like popping sounds as it reached its full size.

It took NASA astronaut Jeff Williams on the station more than seven hours to inflate the privately built Bigelow Expandable Activity Module today (May 28). The new space room, called BEAM for short, was built for NASA by Bigelow Aerospace. Its inflation went at a glacial pace — a safety precaution since BEAM is the first of its kind — with Williams reporting that he heard popping noises with almost every short burst of air he fed into the module through a manual valve."

With the experience NASA and Bigelow Aerospace will learn from this, coupled with Bigelow's Genesis I and Genesis II, we are even closer to a fully inflated Station and possibly putting a research Station on the Surface of the Moon and Mars.

Bigelow Aerospace BEAM Module attached to the ISS

"The International Space Station gained a brand new room on Saturday (April 16), but it will be another month before it grows large enough for the astronauts to enter.

A first-of-its-type inflatable structure, the BEAM — or Bigelow Expandable Activity Module — built by Bigelow Aerospace, was attached to the rear-facing port of the space station's Tranquility node. It is the first new addition to the orbiting outpost in five years."

Bigelow already has proven their HAB Technology with Genesis I and Genesis II, and they have several other projects they have proposed and built but not launched. Hopefully with the BEAM NASA will get over their distaste of Inflatable HAB's, and start trying to use them in orbit and My biggest hope on the Moon and on Mars.

Were you ever Mad for Space?

I mean did you ever look up at the stars in the sky and think, "Some day, I'm going to go there."?  I know when I was a kid, I built models of the Gemini and Apollo Spacecraft and the Saturn and Atlas Rockets and the Lunar Lander.  When Testers came out with a model of the Space Shuttle, I bought and built several of them in differing scales.  I read hundreds of Science Fiction Novels, stories and shorts in Astounding Tales, and several other magazines.  To this day, I still read dozens of Science Fiction novels a year and I try to keep up with the various Space Programs throughout the world. 

Where am I going with this?

Well the other day I posted a link to YesterLand, about all of the old Walt Disney Land/World rides and exhibits.  And one thing leads to another and another and I was reminded about a website that deals with Space travel and all of the problems, technological, physiological and others, going from Science Fact and Science Fiction and melds them into one large database. 

So with all that out of the way, I should warn you that this site will take 6-10 HOURS to go through all the way, plus it has internal links and external links throughout that will sidetrack you even more.

So I present to you; Atomic Rockets

So if you were ever once Space Mad, or you still are like I am, click on that link and enjoy yourself.  Just be sure to set aside a large block of time to go through it all.  I STILL haven't finished it all yet and I've started over from the beginning, at 1740 hours on Sunday May 25th and it's now almost 0200 on the 26th.

So keep that in mind before you get too engrossed in it. 

The Mars Underground - Spaceflight

Have they read the Regs as well as the law?

"(CNSNews.com) -- Bureaucracies in the Obama Administration have thus far published approximately 11,588,500 words of final Obamacare regulations, while there are only 381,517 words in the Obamacare law itself.

That means unelected federal officials have now written 30 words of regulations for each word in the law."


30 words of regulation for each word of law.

Too much.

If any law or bill is longer than 10 pages it needs to be broken down into separate components.  And each component voted upon separately.  If the regulations are more that twenty pages, they need to be redone as well. 

I think it was James Webb or George Muller at NASA during the Apollo Program who said if you can't give the idea in less than 10 pages you aren't thinking enough and need to start with a single clean sheet of paper.  Maybe that type of thinking is what is needed now.

Think out the issue.

Distill it to it barest minimums, necessary to get the idea out so anyone can understand it.

Then get it done.

What we have no is a monstrosity that noone knows fully what it is, how it is to be implemented and what it's total effects are.

Maybe it's time to start with a single, clean, sheet of paper.

The Machinery of Apollo

NASA Answer a 7 year olds letter

NASA opens the closet and reaches into the past

"HUNTSVILLE, Ala. (AP) - A vintage rocket engine built to blast the first U.S. lunar mission into Earth's orbit more than 40 years ago is again rumbling across the Southern landscape. The engine, known to NASA engineers as No. F-6049, was supposed to help propel Apollo 11 into orbit in 1969, when NASA sent Neil Armstrong and two other astronauts to the moon for the first time. The flight went off without a hitch, but no thanks to the engine - it was grounded because of a glitch during a test in Mississippi and later sent to the Smithsonian Institution, where it sat for years.?

The pic isn't that enlightening, but the whole article is very interesting.  Such as this quote. 

"This wouldn't be your daddy's F-1," Coates said. "We'd use new materials and try to simplify it, update it."

This wasn't a full up F-1 Rocket Engine test, but the smaller engine which helped to power the pump that ran the F1.  Considering that the F1 developed about 1.5 million pounds of thrust and the Saturn V had 5 of them in the first stage, I don't think the neighbors in Huntsville would like a full up test.  

Some more info about the F1 Engine is available at the following links.

F-1 Engine Fact Sheet - PDF File

F-1 Engine Diagram - Wikimedia Commons

Apollo 11 Moon Rocket's F-1 Engines - SPACE.com

Saturn V's F-1 Engines being installed - Wikimedia Commons - 5.15 MB photo

Encyclopedia Astronautica-F1 Engine entry

The International Space Station is getting a new room

"LAS VEGAS (AP) — NASA is partnering with a commercial space company in a bid to replace the cumbersome "metal cans" that now serve as astronauts' homes in space with inflatable bounce-house-like habitats that can be deployed on the cheap."

I'm glad that Bigelow Aerospace is being allowed to show just what their systems can do.  Their Genesis I and Genesis II modules are still orbiting the earth and can be tracked along with the ISS at the following link.

Our Planet Earth from Space

Bigelow is still working on their BA330 Module which is much larger than their two previous modules, and the TransHab systems are getting proven in space.  And hopefully in the coming years space tourism at an reasonably affordable price will be the jump start necessary to increase our use of space and the second step of our possibly colonizing other planets.

More on Asteroid mining

Can't you just tell one of my first loves was space?

"NASA is considering a $2.6 billion asteroid-retrieval mission that could deliver a space rock to high lunar orbit by 2025 or so, New Scientist reported last week. The plan could help jump-start manned exploration of deep space, carving out a path to the Red Planet and perhaps even more far-flung destinations, its developers maintain."

YAY!!!

I grew up in the 70's at the height of the Apollo Program.  As a kid I was given a model of the Saturn V with the LEM and the CSM.  The whole model was almost 4 feet tall.  I also had models of the CSM and the LEM that were almost 8 inches tall themselves.  I read books about the space program, I begged my father for books and models about the Mercury and Gemini program in addition to more Apollo models.  I read hundreds of science fiction novel y Asimov, Heinlein and others.  I wanted to go to space, live on a space station, be able to ride a taxi from the earth to the moon.

In short I was Space Struck.

Well budgets and political situations changed and space was put on a back burner.  It still is on the back burner, but now on the back back burner of the government.  However Private companies are bringing it to the front burner, a little bit at a time.

And I'm happy to see that.  I just hope that my kids can have the same excitement about space travel that I once had.  And that Private space travel can bring about that sense of wonder soon.

Astronauts may be able to make their own radiation shields

out of the trash they generate.

"The space trash compactor is not like the giant one on the Death Star that nearly squashed Luke Skywalker and the gang in the first "Star Wars" film. This one is smaller, producing circular tiles of trash 8 inches (20 centimeters) wide and a half-inch (1.3 cm) from a single day's worth of garbage. The discs then could be stowed away, or even used for radiation shielding to protect a spacecraft’s crew, NASA officials said."

This could solve two problems, what to do with the garbarge, and the fact that they can't carry enough shielding with them, as it costs too much to lift into space and  is too bulky to fit in current launch vehicles.  So we may see longer missions to other celestial bodies finally and again.  :)

Some cool historical tech

"This is a picture of theApollo Saturn V LVDC board that is in my collection.  It was a sparethat would have been placed into one of the later Apollo moon rockets. It is a marvel of its time and demonstrates so many firsts that it standsas a representation of the tremendous leaps that technology took for theApollo program.  It is the first example of applied microchip technology,surface mount components, multi-plane circuit board construction, platedthrough-hole vias, and TTL logic in one system."

This post of Jeff's

got me thinking, the post in question is HERE, I clicked through to the NASA website and looked at all of the beautiful photos.  I saved a few for my desktop backgrounds as well.

But the thought that I had was a cascade.

#1 Which moons/planetoids orbiting Saturn could humans conceivably colonize?

#2 Just how much gravity does Saturn exert on the space around it?

#3 Could the asteroid belt be mined by robotic miners based on moons/planetoids orbiting Saturn?

#4 How hard would it be, if the /GOV got their thumbs out of their butts and fingers out of their nether regions to jump start a new commercial space race?

Just a few thoughts.  Do you have anything to add?

NASA Has plans, The White House? Evidently doesn't like them.

"Despite speculation to the contrary, NASA's ambitious plans for a manned space station beyond the moon have not yet been cleared by the White House, a senior administration official told SPACE.com."

I like the idea of our own "Deep Space" Space station.  Think if such a planned station had it's own observatory.  Out of the glare of reflected light from earth and sometimes in the moons own shadow, it should be able to take serious science observations.  Which could help us even more with our understanding on creation.  also, with a station that far out, asteroid mining could actually become much more feasible and affordable.

There are so many upsides to this I"m happy just thinking about it.

Now for the downsides, at least according to Der Leader Obama.  The funds NASA would use for this, can't be used to prop up his union buddies underfunded pension plans, the funds for this would actually put people to work and stimulate the economy AND stimulate scientific research.  Such research could just invalidate all his Environmental/Climate Change pseudo science babble.  Money spent on this by NASA can't be used to buy votes in the inner cities.  I could go on for at least 1 or 2 more paragraphs, but you get the picture I think.

How true

Midnight Movie - Failure is NOT an Option

A Flight Control history of NASA