Author Archives: Gray Rinehart

Economic Recovery Blues

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Introducing my second foray into songwriting: “The Economic Recovery Blues,” the 2009 Industrial Extension Service (IES) Song, now available on YouTube.

And now, the story behind the song …

Friends from the Titan System Program Office at Vandenberg AFB may remember that I penned quite a few Titan-related lyrics to Beatles tunes, but “The Economic Recovery Blues” was only the second time I’ve tried to write lyrics and something of an original tune. Back in late 2008, my first attempt was “The I-E-S Song” — I wrote the lyrics and had the basic tune in mind, and Mark Minervino (my Pastor at North Cary Baptist Church) fleshed out the music. He also did all the instruments and the background vocals — his versatility is boundless — and I just sang the main lyrics. Then I put together a video montage and showed it off at our annual Christmas luncheon.

The original “I-E-S Song” was a big hit with the folks at work. Several of us wanted it to go on YouTube, but the humor was a little too sharp — mostly self-deprecating, but it got in digs at some other North Carolina institutions of higher learning. Maybe the powers-that-be will change their minds one of these days.

I had so much fun doing the first “I-E-S Song” that I figured, why not do another one? So in December 2009 the process repeated. I had the lyrics and the beginning of a tune, and Mark figured out (and performed!) the rest. Because I didn’t get started as early as the first one, we didn’t get this song done in time for the IES Christmas luncheon, so at that I sang another song — this one a work-related lyric sung to “Oh, How I Love Jesus” — and then finished up “The Economic Recovery Blues” over the holiday break. The video montage is rougher than the first one,* but the office folks decided to post it “as is.” So this is the first song I’ve done to be posted online. Hope you enjoy it, if you go in for that sort of office-related-silliness thing.

Meanwhile, if you know of anyone who needs some business consulting in lean manufacturing, “Six Sigma” statistical process control, ISO quality management standards, safety and health, or growth services, point them at the Industrial Extension Service — and at “The Economic Recovery Blues.”

Ah-one, and ah-two ….

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*A note on the video montage. For the first one, we purchased some nifty graphics off the web; for the new song, I used Creative Commons images and put attributions in the credits at the end of the song.

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First Japanese Deep Space Mission: Halley's Comet

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Twenty-five years ago today — January 7, 1985* — an M-3SII launch vehicle took off from Japan’s Uchinoura (formerly Kagoshima) Space Center carrying the Sakigake spacecraft toward Halley’s Comet.


(Sakigake spacecraft. Image from NASA’s Space Science Data Center.)

Sakigake means “pioneer,” and this spacecraft was actually a pathfinder for the Suisei spacecraft launched eight months later.

Sakigake’s main role was to provide a distant reference point to help scientists interpret data sent from probes that flew much closer to the nucleus of the comet. Sakigake’s closest approach to comet Halley was 7 million km (about 4.4 million miles).

Additional comet encounters were planned for the Sakigake spacecraft, but it depleted its hydrazine propellant and finally telemetry from the vehicle was lost in November 1995.

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*For us here in the U.S.; it was already January 8th in Japan.

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Europa Flyby

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Ten years ago today — January 3, 2000 — the Galileo space probe made a flyby of Jupiter’s moon, Europa.

(Natural and false color images of Europa. NASA image. Click to enlarge.)

… the spacecraft flew over Jupiter’s icy moon Europa on Monday morning, January 3, at an altitude of 351 kilometers (218 miles). Galileo then performed observations of three of Jupiter’s smaller moons — Amalthea, Thebe and Metis — at 7:30 p.m. Pacific Standard Time on Monday. The encounter was capped off with several observations of Jupiter’s volcanic moon Io at about 4 a.m. PST Tuesday, January 4, 2000.

The Galileo mission was originally supposed to end in December 1997, but was extended twice. The mission finally ended with a descent into Jupiter’s atmosphere in September 2003. Kudos to NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory for another excellent mission!

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New Year, New Free Downloads Available

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Happy 2010, folks! Hope your New Year has started off well.

I’ve been meaning to make some new items available for download on my GrayMan Writes web site, and today seemed like a good day to do it.

First, a new essay: “An Unsolicited Proposal for the Secretary of Education.” Here’s the opening:

We often treat education in the United States as a utility; i.e., we take it for granted the way we take for granted that the lights will work when we flip a switch. As long as it appears to be working, most of us give little thought to education, and it only takes a little interruption to arouse a great deal of attention. The Department of Education could and should help this vital national “utility” run better and produce uniformly excellent results, but to do so it should do more than collect and disseminate research, and more than dole out Federal funds for various programs.

With that in mind, we offer this proposal for how the Department of Education could lead by example: the Department of Education should establish, staff, and operate a charter school in metropolitan D.C. and make it the best school in the country….

The full essay is at this link.

Second, some free fiction: a historical short story entitled, “The Surfman.” The market for historical short fiction is almost nonexistent, but hopefully folks who like historical fiction will be able to find it on the web site. Here’s how it begins:

Several hundred yards off Long Beach Island, New Jersey, the small freighter should have been slipping along the wavetops headed who-knows-where. Her captain must’ve been drunk or incompetent to have hit the shoals in broad daylight with a favorable tide, but that didn’t matter to Silas Jacobs. It didn’t so much matter that the ship had ten or twelve sailors on board, and most couldn’t swim a lick; deep ocean sailors were like that. What mattered to Silas was that the ocean was trying to kill them….

If you want to read the story, you can download it here.

Both of these downloads are licensed under Creative Commons, so you can feel free to share them with anyone — all I ask is that you include the right attribution.

And I hope you have a terrific New Year!

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A Little Christmas Space History

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Merry Christmas!

Spacecraft don’t celebrate Christmas (so far as we know), and the laws of motion don’t, either. So it happened that five years ago today — December 25, 2004 — the European Space Agency’s Huygens probe was at the right point in its journey to detach from the Cassini spacecraft and head toward Saturn’s moon, Titan. The Huygens probe landed on Titan on January 14, 2005.

It’s interesting to me that the Cassini spacecraft, which carried Huygens to its rendezvous with Titan and has returned spectacular images of Saturn for the last five years, was launched from Cape Canaveral on a Titan-IVB rocket.

(Cassini-Huygens launch, October 15, 1997. NASA image. Click to enlarge.)

I remember it well; before it was launched, some groups protested because of the radioactive plutonium in Cassini’s radioisotope thermal generators (as noted in this CNN story). Kudos to my old compadres on the Titan team for that successful launch!

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Three Solstice Launches

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As Jethro Tull sang, “Ring, solstice bells!” Happy midwinter, everyone.

Forty-five years ago today — December 21, 1964 — Explorer-26 launched on a Delta rocket out of Cape Canaveral, to study the Van Allen radiation belt. Also known as EPE-D, or the Energetic Particle Explorer, it measured trapped particles in the geomagnetic field.

Twenty years later, in 1984, the Soviet Union launched the second of its probes to Venus and Halley’s Comet. Vega-2, or Venera-Halley-2, launched atop a Proton-K rocket from the Baikonur Cosmodrome. They’d launched Vega-1 back on the 15th, as I noted in this blog entry.

And ten years ago, in 1999, ACRIMSAT — the Active Cavity Radiometer Irradiance Monitor satellite — launched from Vandenberg AFB on a Taurus rocket.* ACRIMSAT was launched as a secondary payload with the Korean KOMPSAT, and was designed to study variations in solar radiation.

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*Note that this launch took place late at night on December 20th on the West Coast; it was already December 21st on the East Coast, so different references list the launch date as one or the other. I think it made a nice trifecta to list it with these others.

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Holiday Hubble Service Mission, A Decade Ago

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Ten years ago today — December 19, 1999 — the Space Shuttle Discovery launched from Kennedy Space Center on mission STS-103.


(STS-103 mission patch. NASA image.)

Astronauts Curtis L. Brown, Scott J. Kelly, Steven L. Smith, C. Michael Foale, and John M. Grunsfeld, plus Switzerland’s Claude Nicollier and Jean-Francois Clervoy of France, became the first Space Shuttle crew to spend Christmas in space during their mission to service the Hubble Space Telescope. In fact, they released the HST from the cargo bay on Christmas day.

Also of note: Curtis Brown is one of several astronauts with ties to North Carolina, and is featured on several North Carolina Aerospace History pages that I’ve built for the North Carolina Aerospace Initiative. For instance, here’s the December aerospace history page, which features STS-103 — along with another famous flight….

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A European Symphonie and the Health of Our Planet

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Thirty-five years ago today — December 18, 1974 — the first European-built communications satellite was launched aboard a Thor-Delta rocket from Cape Canaveral. Symphonie-1 was a cooperative French-German spacecraft, as detailed on this Wikipedia page. (Note that the page lists the launch as December 19th because it’s based on UTC — what used to be known as Greenwich Mean Time — but it was still the 18th on the East Coast of the US.)

And 10 years ago today, an Atlas-2AS rocket launched Terra, a joint US-Japanese-Canadian weather satellite, from Vandenberg AFB.


(Terra launch. NASA image.)

Terra was “the first of a series of large satellites meant to monitor the health of our planet” by monitoring cloud formation, radiation balances, and aerosols in the atmosphere. As the NASA web site puts it, “Terra’s primary mission is to answer the question: How is the Earth changing and what are the consequences of change for life on Earth?”

This page shows some interesting comparative images taken by Terra.

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Two Launches: One Local, One to Venus and Halley's Comet

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Forty-five years ago today — December 15, 1964 — the San Marco-1 satellite launched from Wallops Island, VA, on a Scout rocket. This was the first in a series of Italian atmospheric science spacecraft, and the only one to be launched from the U.S.


(San Marco satellite in checkout at Wallops Island, VA. NASA image from Wikimedia Commons.)

Succeeding missions were launched starting in 1967 from the San Marco platform, a converted oil platform anchored off the coast of Kenya. I find that fascinating, as the San Marco platform was a precursor to the Sea Launch operations I observed over 30 years later.

And 25 years ago today, in 1984, the Soviet Union launched its Vega-1 mission atop a Proton-K rocket from the Baikonur Cosmodrome. (I wonder if it was processed in the same building in which I later saw the Nimiq-2 satellite get mated to a Proton launch vehicle.) Vega-1 — also known as Venera-Halley 1 — was a very successful mission that deposited a lander as well as a set of balloon-borne experiments on Venus, and then continued to a 1986 flyby of Halley’s comet.

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