Quotulatiousness

June 18, 2023

Don’t Drop your Tools in Space

Filed under: Space, Tools, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Real Engineering
Published 11 Mar 2023
(more…)

October 27, 2021

Alouette and The Ionospheric Satellites; A Beginners Guide To The Early Canadian Space Program

Filed under: Cancon, History, Space, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Polyus Studios
Published 22 Aug 2109

Don’t forget to like the video and subscribe to my channel!
Support me on Patreon – https://www.patreon.com/polyusstudios

In the early 1960s Canada was among the early pioneers of space technology and research. Scientists and engineers took advantage of then cutting edge technologies like the transistor and solar panels, to produce the Alouette and ISIS series of satellites. It was an immense engineering challenge that represented the high water mark of a tradition of ionospheric research that began back before the establishment of Canada as a nation. The Alouette and ISIS series of satellites produced more than 1200 research papers exploring all aspects of the Earth’s ionosphere, the aurora, and other phenomena. They also demonstrated to the world that Canada was a world leader in peaceful space technology.

0:00 Intro
0:29 Arctic exploration and early magnetic field research
2:40 New technologies promote new questions
5:35 Birth of the Canadian Space Program
9:25 Testing and Launch of Alouette
13:04 ISIS series of satellites
17:12 Legacy and Conclusion

Music:
“Denmark” – Portland Cello Project

Research sources:
https://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/nmc/space…
https://space.skyrocket.de/doc_sdat/i…
http://www.friendsofcrc.ca/Projects/I…
https://www.ieee.ca/millennium/alouet…
https://www.ieee.ca/millennium/isis/i…
http://www.asc-csa.gc.ca/eng/satellit…
http://friendsofcrc.ca/Projects/ISIS/…
https://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/nmc/space…
http://acuriousguy.blogspot.com/2017/…
https://photostories.ca/explore/photo…
http://www.ieee.dreamhosters.com/digl…
https://www.ieee.ca/millennium/alouet…

#Spacecraft #PolyusStudios #CanadianAerospace

December 14, 2019

History of Space Travel – Guided by Starlight – Extra History – #6

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Government, History, Space, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Extra Credits
Published 12 Dec 2019

What happened after we touched down on the moon? And where are we going in the future? While we may have lost the glitz and glamor of the Space Race, we have continued to make incredible progress in reaching the stars. We’ve come together to build space stations while in space, create the international space station, and started developing new technologies that could take us to Mars and beyond.

Start your Warframe journey now and prepare to face your personal nemesis, the Kuva Lich — an enemy that only grows stronger with every defeat. Take down this deadly foe, then get ready to take flight in Empyrean! Coming soon! http://bit.ly/EHWarframe

December 7, 2019

History of Space Travel – One Small Step – Extra History – #5

Filed under: History, Russia, Space, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 06:00

Extra Credits
Published 5 Dec 2019

Start your Warframe journey now and prepare to face your personal nemesis, the Kuva Lich — an enemy that only grows stronger with every defeat. Take down this deadly foe, then get ready to take flight in Empyrean! Coming soon! http://bit.ly/EHWarframe

The United States was losing the space race. A number of unfortunate missteps and mistakes had hindered their progress. But the United States had also structured its space program entirely differently from the USSR. Instead of being helmed by the military, the National Aeronautics & Space Administration was created by Eisenhower with an emphasis on exploration and research. And in the end, the later but more advanced satellites will collect the data required a dream firmly placed in the American consciousness by JFK. A dream to place a man on the moon.

From the comments:

Extra Credits
19 hours ago
The plaque still gives me goosebumps in the best way possible. Hopefully one day we can live up to its promise of peace. Be good to one another. ❤️

And thanks to Rebecca Ford (the voice of Lotus) for voicing space mom at the end of each of these episodes. They’ve been a blast to make and we hope that you all have enjoyed this trip to the stars.

November 29, 2019

History of Space Travel – Red Star – Extra History – #4

Filed under: History, Military, Russia, Space, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 06:00

Extra Credits
Published 28 Nov 2019

Start your Warframe journey now and prepare to face your personal nemesis, the Kuva Lich — an enemy that only grows stronger with every defeat. Take down this deadly foe, then get ready to take flight in Empyrean! Coming soon! http://bit.ly/EHWarframe

While rockets had been proven to be indispensable to the Second World War, the idea to send people up into orbit was still seen as fantasy. Space was important only as a method to further the range of missiles meant to land oceans away from their original launch point. But a man named Korolev will change all of that, with work so secretive, he will be referred to as Chief Designer for nearly his entire life. But we all know the name of his first project into space: Sputnik.

From the comments:

Extra Credits
1 day ago
We weren’t able to fit her into the episode, but the other famous first cosmonaut in space is Laika, the Soviet space dog. She was a stray who was taken in by the program to test the Sputnik 2 and some of its life support features (like a coolant fan). Unfortunately, Laika did not return from her mission alive but she’s still regarded highly in the history of space flight and has become a symbol for the space race and animal testing in general. Look her up!

I remember reading in Robert Heinlein’s Expanded Universe of the day on his tour of the Soviet Union in 1960 when he and his wife were told by a group of Red Army cadets of a Soviet rocket launch carrying a human into orbit for the first time. The story was officially denied and the capsule was said to be unmanned after all. Wikipedia says:

According to Gagarin’s biography, these rumours were likely started as a result of two Vostok missions equipped with dummies (Ivan Ivanovich) and human voice tape recordings (to test if the radio worked) that were made just prior to Gagarin’s flight.

In a U.S. press conference on February 23, 1962, colonel Barney Oldfield revealed that an uncrewed space capsule had indeed been orbiting the Earth since 1960, as it had become jammed into its booster rocket. According to the NASA NSSDC Master Catalog, Korabl Sputnik 1, designated at the time 1KP or Vostok 1P, did launch on May 15, 1960 (one year before Gagarin). It was a prototype of the later Zenit and Vostok launch vehicles. The onboard TDU (Braking Engine Unit) had ordered the retrorockets to fire to recover, but due to a malfunction of the attitude control system, the spacecraft was oriented upside-down, and the firing put the craft into a higher orbit. The re-entry capsule lacked a heat shield as there were no plans to recover it. Engineers had planned to use the vessel’s telemetry data to determine if the guidance system had functioned correctly, so recovery was unnecessary.

November 16, 2019

History of Space Travel – Kill Devil to V-2 – Extra History – #3

Filed under: Germany, History, Military, Russia, Space, Technology, USA, WW2 — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 06:00

Extra Credits
Published 14 Nov 2019

Start your Warframe journey now and prepare to face your personal nemesis, the Kuva Lich — an enemy that only grows stronger with every defeat. Take down this deadly foe, then get ready to take flight in Empyrean! Coming soon! http://bit.ly/EHWarframe

Early flight started as a utopian dream but quickly became the military’s top priority: first as reconnaissance vehicles, and then as weapons in their own right. After WW1, the threat of German aircraft led to the Treaty of Versailles banning Germany from having an airforce at all. But the Germans also found a loophole: rockets didn’t count as an airforce. Enter Werner Von Braun & the V-2 rockets.

November 6, 2019

How Did The Saturn 5 Rocket Work? | James May: On The Moon | Earth Lab

Filed under: History, Space, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

BBC Earth Lab
Published 3 Jan 2017

James May meets Harrison Schmitt, one of the last men to ride Saturn 5 and learns a bit about the science behind a rocket with six million components.

Taken From James May: On the Moon

Welcome to BBC Earth Lab! Here we answer all your curious questions about science in the world around you (and further afield too). If there’s a question you have that we haven’t yet answered let us know in the comments on any of our videos and it could be answered by one of our Earth Lab experts.

July 20, 2019

50th anniversary

Filed under: History, Space, Technology, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 11:41

Astronaut Buzz Aldrin, lunar module pilot, stands on the surface of the moon near the leg of the lunar module, Eagle, during the Apollo 11 moonwalk. Astronaut Neil Armstrong, mission commander, took this photograph with a 70mm lunar surface camera. While Armstrong and Aldrin descended in the lunar module to explore the Sea of Tranquility, astronaut Michael Collins, command module pilot, remained in lunar orbit with the Command and Service Module, Columbia. *This is the actual photograph as exposed on the moon by Armstrong. He held the camera slightly rotated so that the camera frame did not include the top of Aldrin’s portable life support system (“backpack”). A communications antenna mounted on top of the backpack is also cut off in this picture. When the image was released to the public, it was rotated clockwise to restore the astronaut to vertical for a more harmonious composition, and a black area was added above his head to recreate the missing black lunar “sky”. The edited version is the one most commonly reproduced and known to the public, but the original version, above, is the authentic exposure.

Bootprint in lunar dust created and photographed by Buzz Aldrin for the boot penetration (soil mechanics) task during the Apollo 11 moon walk.

June 26, 2019

“… what’s happening now is even better than Apollo”

Filed under: Space, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

At Popular Mechanics, Joe Pappalardo reminds us that the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 lunar landing is coming up next month, but that current developments in space are worth celebrating too:

Astronaut Buzz Aldrin, lunar module pilot, stands on the surface of the moon near the leg of the lunar module, Eagle, during the Apollo 11 moonwalk. Astronaut Neil Armstrong, mission commander, took this photograph with a 70mm lunar surface camera. While Armstrong and Aldrin descended in the lunar module to explore the Sea of Tranquility, astronaut Michael Collins, command module pilot, remained in lunar orbit with the Command and Service Module, Columbia.

Apollo was born of Cold War desperation: a political exercise that paid enormous scientific and technological dividends. After the launch of Sputnik in 1957, it became vital to beat the Soviet Union to the Moon, a geopolitical urge that created an enormous budgetary effort.

The problem with politically motivated — well, anything — is that the faucet of support can be closed just as quickly as it opened. It happened to Apollo, as follow on missions were cancelled and the focus shifted to a reusable craft to service low-earth orbit. This pattern of shifting space priorities and strategies whipsawed NASA, most noticeably when the Obama administration’s cancellation of the Bush-era Constellation moon program in 2010.

But multiple private companies pursuing their niches in space have an obvious redundancy. While companies may rise and fall, the very nature of a commercial effort isn’t as dependent on government funding. If it’s worth doing, especially if it makes money, space industry will endure political shifts. The objectives of a well-run company do not change that much every four years.

That leaves today’s NASA with a choice: Do it themselves and control everything (the traditional way), or fund private companies to develop the tech the agency needs and then allow them to sell their services to any nation, company, or individual (the new way). With those services on the open market, NASA would be one of many customers for a new U.S.-based space economy.

This debate is boiling over right now. The ongoing effort to return to the moon, called Artemis (after Apollo’s sister), is becoming a lesson in the advantages of the commercial model.

[…]

If only investment guaranteed results. For those who miss bloated, government-run spaceflight, there is already a NASA spacecraft mired in the old ways of thinking. The feds have sunk a lot of money into the Space Launch System, a mega-rocket built to NASA specs for deep space missions. It was supposed to fly in 2017, but we’ll be lucky to see a first flight in 2020 — and it busted the $9.7 billion estimated budget, now costing about $12 billion.

But something happened during these SLS delays: the commercial space industry started delivering on its promises. Most visibly, private firms have been delivering supplies to the International Space Station for years and (hopefully soon) will ferry astronauts as well. Blue Origin and SpaceX has started development of crewed spacecraft able to reach to the moon and Mars. Elon Musk even sold a moon trip to a Japanese billionaire.

May 2, 2019

NASA to export bullying off the Earth to small, harmless objects in the solar system

Filed under: Space, Technology — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Colby Cosh on NASA’s latest plan for “nudging” an asteroid out of its orbit:

NASA has a plan — a serious plan, which it intends to carry out pretty soon — to smash a spacecraft into an object in the solar system and intentionally change its orbit. I confess I don’t quite know why this act of awesome American techno-hubris hasn’t been bigger news. I think partly it is because the mission comes under the heading of “planetary defence” against small natural objects straying into the path of the Earth. Science reporters on that beat are easily distracted by apocalyptic fantasies, and by smirking anthropology about the actually-quite-numerous band of researchers trying to deal with this arguably-quite-important subject.

Part of the problem may be that NASA’s mission to mess with the asteroid Didymos B is hidden under a mountain of technical jargon about “kinetic impactors” and “xenon thrusters.” And part of it is surely the hard-earned professional knowledge that NASA ends up implementing about one plan for every 10 it makes. Accountants have a way of showing up with an axe at the last minute.

Still, the idea is pretty neat, and not just because it appeals to everyone’s natural appetite for destruction. The basic premise of the DART (Double Asteroid Redirection Test) is that our planet may one day face the asteroid/meteor/comet collision scenario outlined in a vast corpus of books and movies (Lucifer’s Hammer, Armageddon, Deep Impact). If that day comes, we as a species don’t want to just be winging it — so let’s go out now, find some innocent chunk of rock that isn’t bothering anybody, and see if we already have the technological capability to change its course.

This turns out not to necessarily involve Bruce Willis or Robert Duvall; mostly we just need Isaac Newton. The scheme of planetary defence now emerging from decades of speculation and effort emphasizes systematic tracking of near-Earth objects and early detection of potentially dangerous ones. If we can spot an approaching impactor soon enough, we don’t need to deliver a bundle of explosives: we can just nudge it out of the way.

Humanity has been pretty lucky that the asteroid impacts have been relatively rare since we started keeping track of important things like the planting calendar, the seasonal flooding of the rivers, and the ever-important (to the rulers) tax records. It wouldn’t take a particularly large object hurtling into the atmosphere at interplanetary speeds to ruin our collective day (year, decade, century, etc.). We think we know how to divert incoming dangerous objects … but we need to actually do it successfully before it becomes the last headline of all recorded history.

June 6, 2018

QotD: When the “Right Stuff” becomes “old school”

Filed under: History, Quotations, Space, USA — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Consider the popular conception of firefighters: brave, selfless, strong enough to haul an incapacitated person from a burning building.

A few years ago, at a conference, I learned that many women were failing to qualify as firefighters, because they were coming up short on the strength test. What was so interesting, though, was that in practice, it turns out that one of the most important skills a firefighter needs is not so much the strength to drag an unconscious person from a building, but, far more commonly, the ability to coax someone who’s in danger and is terrified to come with them. Apparently, many women turn out to be far more persuasive than men – highlighting the importance of selection based on real-world skills, rather than legacy stereotypes.

Space flight offers another striking example of this phenomenon. In the context of a recent Tech Tonics podcast interview with Dorit Donoviel, director of the Biomedical Innovations Laboratory at the Center for Space Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine, I had told Dr. Donoviel about my lifelong interest in astronomy and space, about launching Estes rockets and my love of the National Air and Space Museum and above all, about my affection for the heroism captured in the movie The Right Stuff, an all-time favorite.

In response, she laughed, and told me how “old school” that thinking was. When the space program started out, she explained, there was an exceptional degree of risk involved, and astronauts tended to be selected from the ranks of fighter pilots – because, in her words, they had “the skill sets and the cojones.” But today, she said, things are different – in large measure because the “space program is a lot safer than it used to be.”

Consequently, Donoviel explained, “Today what we’re looking for is less of the sort of alpha-male pilots, and more of the sort of scientists and engineers, geologists and earth scientists, folks who can work together in a cohesive manner in a team.”

Moreover, she added, the astronaut of the future needs to be able to endure long periods of boredom and the prolonged lack of stimulation – in many ways, the opposite of high-adrenaline “seat-of-the-pants flying” that in some ways characterized the early astronaut missions.

In space travel, as in firefighting, our notion of what constitutes the right skill set has evolved appreciably.

David Shaywitz, “Evolving Notions Of The Right Stuff — In Spaceflight And In Medicine”, Forbes, 2016-09-20.

October 18, 2017

Are There Parts of German WW1 Warships in Space?

Filed under: Germany, History, Military, Space, Technology, USA, WW1 — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Real Engineering
Published on 19 Jul 2017

May 17, 2017

NASA swings for the Moon … and misses

Filed under: Space, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Robert Zubrin is not a fan of NASA’s recent announcement of a planned lunar orbital station as its next major goal, calling it “NASA’s worst plan yet”:

At the recent Space Foundation conference held in Colorado Springs, NASA revealed its new plan for human space exploration, superseding the absurd Asteroid Retrieval Mission (ARM) championed by the Obama administration. Amazingly, the space agency has managed to come up with an even dumber idea.

In the early months of the Trump administration, some lunar advocates spread the rumor that the new president would seek a return to the Moon within his first four years, thereby dramatically making America great again in space. That is not the plan.

Nor is the plan to send humans to Mars within eight years, something that I think we could achieve. Nor is it to send human missions to explore near-Earth asteroids, as then President Obama suggested in 2010, nor is it even to send humans to a piece of an asteroid brought back from deep space to lunar orbit for study, as called for in the ARM.

No, instead NASA is proposing to build a space station in lunar orbit. This proposal is notable for requiring a large budget to create an object with no utility whatsoever.

We do not need a lunar-orbiting station to go to the Moon. We do not need such a station to go to Mars. We do not need it to go to near-Earth asteroids. We do not need it to go anywhere. Nor can we accomplish anything in such a station that we cannot do in the Earth-orbiting International Space Station, except to expose human subjects to irradiation – a form of medical research for which a number of Nazi doctors were hanged at Nuremberg.

If the goal is to build a Moon base, it should be built on the surface of the Moon. That is where the science is, that is where the shielding material is, and that is where the resources to make propellant and other useful things are to be found. The best place to build it would be at one of the poles, because there are spots at both of the Moon’s poles where sunlight is accessible all the time, as well as permanently shadowed craters where water ice has accumulated. Such ice could be electrolyzed to make hydrogen-oxygen rocket propellant, to fuel both Earth-return vehicles as well as ballistic hoppers that would provide the base’s crew with exploratory access to most of the rest of the Moon. Other places on the Moon might also work as the base’s location, because while there is no water in nonpolar latitudes, there is iron oxide. This can be reduced to produce iron and oxygen, with the latter composing 75 percent or more of the most advantageous propellant combinations.

May 14, 2017

Space Myths Debunked – Earth Lab

Filed under: Science, Space — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Published on 4 May 2017

From astrology to the temperature in space, Dom counts down the top 5 space myths and explains why they are baloney.

1 http://astronomy.swin.edu.au/cosmos/N/Neutron+Star
2 http://www.universetoday.com/77070/how-cold-is-space/
3 https://www.wired.com/2007/11/no-dark-side-of/
4 http://www.livescience.com/34212-great-wall-of-china-only-manmade-object-visible-from-space.html
5 http://www.universetoday.com/25364/can-you-see-the-great-wall-of-china-from-space/
6 https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/fact-or-fiction-nasa-spen/
7 https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/proceedings-of-the-international-astronomical-union/article/div-classtitleastronomy-and-astrologydiv/3171E9B009B4E8421B1913AC0A08AB32

January 8, 2017

The worship of NASA

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Science, Space, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

James Miller is more than a bit skeptical of those who unabashedly sing the praises of NASA and more generally the “I love science sexually” crowd:

I’ve never understood the slobbering love affair many have with outer space and, more specifically, NASA. Sure, the moon landing was an incredible feat demonstrating American strength at time of conflict with a competing superpower. But I’m in agreement with Gary North: It was the “most expensive PR stunt in American history,” with little other benefit. We have yet to put a man on another moon, let alone another planet. It’s been a half century since Neil Armstrong made history, and the federal government still fails at running a simple website.

The saccharine lengths some go to to express their admiration for NASA has always made me queasy. Like all government bureaucracies, it wastes an incredible amount of money. Yet conservative lawmakers like Ted Cruz never miss an opportunity to remind us that conquering new galaxies is paramount to our national survival.

If the windbags in Washington can’t put a stop to the caliphate of killers in the Middle East, what hope is there for putting a colony on Kepler-186f?

My antipathy for space travel goes hand in hand with my overall distaste for science worshipping. The celebrification of the study of the natural world has been as infantilizing and degrading as Richard Nixon’s clownish appearance on Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In. “I fucking love science”? I’d much rather string celebrity science guy Neil deGrasse Tyson up by his thumbs.

H/T to Kathy Shaidle for the link. Kathy also throws shade at Star Wars and praises the heck out of Star Trek:

If Star Trek was actually set on Antarctica (and here, it is) I would watch the hell out of that (and have.)

But I also love how this fictional universe (which I would HATE to live in because they’ve abolished money, wear ugly clothes, and pretend to believe in peace and love and shit) has inspired real world, well, enterprises.

Yes, space travel is stupid. But it’s amazing that a black woman decided she could and would become an astronaut because she saw an actress do it on her TV when she was a kid.

I totally get that, and just get off on the phenomenon of people taking a sliver of fiction, and having seen this fake, plastic, non-functional prop, worked to create a functional version (and a multi-billion dollar industry.)

It’s like cargo culting, except by, well, smart people with way more resources who actually want shit to work.

Star WARS on the other hand is just life-wasting masturbatory etc EXCLUSIVELY.

Star Wars is nothing but escapism.

It has had no real world impact except that negative one. Star Wars has been a net negative on society while Star Trek has been a net positive:

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