Category: Space and flight

Posts about flying in atmospheres, or outside of them

Waiting for my Lego shuttle

In part because of housing uncertainty — and mindful of George Monbiot’s excellent advice about true freedom arising from low living expenses “If you can live on five thousand pounds a year, you are six times as secure as someone who needs thirty thousand to get by” — I have been avoiding and minimizing taking on new physical possessions.

Nonetheless, with my interest in space and the Space Shuttle program specifically, I could not resist ordering Lego’s new Space Shuttle Discovery and Hubble Space Telescope set on the day of its release.

The Hubble is arguably the greatest scientific achievement of the Space Shuttle program and certainly one of the most powerful instruments humanity has ever created for understanding the vastness and history of our universe. The dimensions of the Hubble also did a lot to dictate the final size and configuration of the shuttle (less for the telescope itself, and more for the secret Earth-observing versions operated by the National Reconnaissance Office). Those design decisions, in turn, did much to shape the shuttle’s operational characteristics and history, including the design choices that contributed to the Challenger and Columbia losses.

The set will be fun to put together, and I should be able to find somewhere to display it even if I end up living in a tiny space.

Starlink in the Canadian north

SpaceX’s Starlink satellite constellation promises to provide low-latency high-bandwidth internet to anyone on the planet.

In November or so, the company announced a beta release in Canada. Some northern communities are already being connected, notably Pikangikum in northwestern Ontario with the charitable assistance of FSET Information Technology and Service.

With my brother Mica starting to teach at the Chief Jimmy Bruneau School in Behchoko, about 125 km down the highway from Yellowknife, we both wondered whether the satellite internet package might be useful for them.

So far, I have found three explanations for why Starlink isn’t available in the region yet:

  1. SpaceX doesn’t yet have the necessary satellites to support access from that latitude
  2. SpaceX needs ground stations in areas where there will be customers
  3. Starlink needs to negotiate with Innovation, Science and Economic Development Canada (ISED) for use of the Ka radio band

I have reached out to bureaucrats and people in ministers’ offices to try to get authoritative information on what the issue is.

This post — based around this map — shows a station in Kaparuk, Alaska. I sent a message to the map’s creator for verification, since I can’t see how satellites going from pole to pole could cover Alaska but not the Canadian territories. This post shows a Starlink ground station in St. John’s Newfoundland.

If you have any relevant information please contact me. If you are also looking into getting a Starlink connection in northern Canada I don’t have any further information for now but I will provide updates when I do.

SpaceX and US crewed launch capability

Since STS-135 in 2011 and the retirement of the Space Shuttle, the only way for human beings to reach orbit has been a Soyuz launch from Baikonur. On May 27th, SpaceX is scheduled to launch the first crew from the US in nine years.

There are good reasons to be skeptical about human spaceflight (especially by useless space tourists, or ballastronauts), but there is something useful and unifying about the International Space Station as a science platform and humanity’s only effort at a permanent human settlement off the Earth.

Gravitational waves and multi-messenger astronomy

Most of the history of astronomy consists of observing electromagnetic radiation from outside our planet. That includes the light which shines off the sun and reflects from bodies in the solar system, as well as radio waves produced by phenomena around the universe including pulsars.

Now that we also have neutrino detectors and gravitational wave detectors like LIGO we can receive signals of other kinds from around the universe, helping us to understand it all better. One neat trick: since the universe did not allow the transmission of light for the first 400,000 years there is a limit to how far back we can look by electromagnetic means.

You can sign up for neutrino burst warnings, in case they indicate something great happening in the sky that you may wish to observe by other means.

Prospects for Mars colonies

I have long been skeptical about the prospects for off-world human colonies. Given that the International Space Station is the most expensive thing we have ever built and it is entirely reliant on supplies from Earth, it would be a gigantic leap just to make a self-sustaining closed life support system. Beyond that are many other obstacles, from radiation to Mars’ reduced gravity and even interpersonal conflict.

George Dvorsky has written an article with details on many of these challenges, which also quotes Louis Friedman on the psychological and philosophical implications of extraterrestrial expansion as an unlikely prospect:

If humans can’t make it to Mars, it means we’re destined to be “a single-planet species,” he said. What’s more, it suggests extraterrestrial civilizations might be in the same boat, and that the potential for “intelligent life to spread throughout the universe is very, very gloomy,” he told Gizmodo.

“If we can’t make it to a nearby planet with an atmosphere, water, and a stable surface—which in principle suggests we could do it—then certainly we’re not going to make it much beyond that,” said Friedman. “But if we’re doomed to be a single-planet species, then we need to recognize both psychologically and technologically that we’re going to have live within the limits of Earth.”

There’s a case to the made that the principal role that Mars is now playing for humanity is as some kind of faint hope that we can wreck the Earth and still somehow survive. That’s probably not healthy on any level. Having a crazy, desperate backup plan isn’t a substitute for a credible plan that doesn’t disregard or sacrifice almost everything humanity has ever valued. Furthermore, to degrade the Earth to the point where it no longer supports people would be an act of vandalism and malice toward the rest of life so severe that it would raise grave questions about whether it would be good for any life form, including us, for people to continue to survive.

Humour and group cohesion

Andy Weir’s hard sci-fi novel The Martian has a protagonist whose sense of humour was part of why he was selected as part of a crew for a Mars mission: “They all showed signs of stress and moodiness. Mark was no exception, but the way he showed it was to crack more jokes and get everyone laughing.”

Apparently, this accords with real research on interpersonal dynamics:

Something researchers have already learned from these experiments is that certain personality characteristics are essential to helping groups work well together. A good group needs a leader, a social secretary, a storyteller and a mixture of introverts and extroverts. Intriguingly, by far the most important role seems to be that of the clown. According to Jeffrey Johnson, an anthropologist at the University of Florida who has spent years examining relations between people in Antarctic crews overwintering at the South Pole, the clown is not only funny, he is also smart and knows each member of the group well enough to defuse most of the tensions that might arise during long periods of close contact. This sounds rather like the role of a jester in a royal court. The clown also acts as a bridge between different groups of people—in Antarctica the clowns linked scientists on the base with the tradesmen who also worked there. In groups that tended to fight most or to lose coherence, Dr Johnson found, there was usually no clown.

Perhaps that helps explain the sometimes childish humour in Mike Mullane’s account of the space shuttle program?

Orbiting Carbon Observatory 3

The first Orbiting Carbon Observatory (OCO) was lost on the way to space because of fraudulent metal provided by a supplier.

The OCO was rebuilt at OCO-2, which has since collected data on the spatial distribution of carbon dioxide on Earth.

OCO-3 will be attached to the International Space Station, which will further fill in data gaps and help the world come to terms with its carbon problem.