Tag Archives: space history

Three space-related items in today’s blog!

First, NASA is accepting votes and suggestions for naming Node 3 of the International Space Station (ISS). (Hat tip: Eric James Stone.) The four candidate names are Earthrise, Legacy, Serenity, and Venture. Quick, FIREFLY fans: which one do you think is winning? Here’s the link for casting your vote. (Voting ends March 20th, and the selected name will be announced in April.)

Second, five years ago today — February 26, 2004 — the ISS Expedition 8 crew made the first spacewalk outside a space station without a human crewmember inside. That is, C. Michael Foale and Alexander Y. Kaleri, the only two station inhabitants, were both outside the station at the same time.

Third, Spaceflight Now ran a piece based on a University of Arizona press release that, in my opinion, needed a little scrutiny. Entitled “Scientists find asteroids are missing, and possibly why”, the article makes two incredible claims in one paragraph:

[They] looked at the distribution of all asteroids with diameters greater than 50 kilometers, or about 30 miles. All asteroids of this size have been found, giving the UA researchers an observationally complete set for their study. Also, almost all asteroids this large have remained intact since the asteroid belt formed more than 4 billion years ago, a time record spanning all but the very beginning of solar system history.

First, how do we know that all asteroids larger than 50 km have been found? That’s a very definitely-worded claim. If it said “most” I would have no issue, but I’m skeptical. Second, I’m skeptical of the “almost all” claim as well, because there’s no way to say that the smaller asteroids we observe today weren’t once bigger asteroids that broke apart. Certainly the known 50 km asteroids have remained intact — we know that because they’re, well, intact — but to extrapolate that “almost all asteroids this large have remained intact since the asteroid belt formed” seems a big stretch. Am I missing something?

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Yes, that’s four hundred forty-five years ago today — February 15, 1564 — Galileo Galilei was born in Pisa, Italy. The rest, as they say, is history.

(Galileo portrait by Justus Sustermans, from Wikipedia. Click for larger version.)

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Twenty years ago today — February 14, 1989 — a Global Positioning System (GPS) Block-IIR satellite launched from Cape Canaveral, Florida. That might not seem like a big deal, since there have been so many GPS satellites launched and so many are operational — but it gives us a chance to point out how vital GPS is to your life, in ways you might not even know.

(GPS IIRM artist’s conception, linked from the Lockheed Martin web site)

Sure, you know about GPS receivers that, combined with mapping software, can tell you where you are and guide you to your destination. Maybe you have a GPS receiver in your car, or even in your cell phone. But did you realize the GPS signal provides more than just position information? That even if you don’t use GPS navigation in your daily life, you probably depend on the system anyway?

One of the most important aspects of the GPS signal is precise timing. Remember the Chicago song “Does Anybody Really Know What Time It Is?” The National Institute of Standards and Technology does know what time it is, and measures that time very precisely. But it wouldn’t do any good for one office to know the precise time, so the timing signal has to be sent out everywhere to keep everything in synch. That’s one of the GPS system’s roles, to distribute that precise timing signal that allows our networked world to keep communicating. If I remember correctly, the 2nd Space Operations Squadron actually maintains the backup timing standard for the whole country, just so they can keep the GPS system clock accurate.

Imagine you’re at your favorite restaurant and have just enjoyed a fantastic meal — it is Valentine’s Day, after all — and you pay with your credit card. The little computer in the credit card machine has to communicate with the computers in the bank or credit card company in order to process your transaction. The problem is, computer signals are time-tagged and if the computers don’t agree on what time it is, they can’t understand each other. But because they have a timing standard, those computers can communicate reliably and your transaction can go through. (As long as you have money in the bank, of course.)

Think of the common things people do every day using networked computers: making credit card transactions, placing phone calls over computerized switches, looking at blogs and websites on the Net. All of those things depend on timing signals between the computers, and what keeps those signals consistent around the world is the GPS satellite constellation.

GPS: it’s not just for navigation.

So if you didn’t know, that’s what space means to you in your everyday life.

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Ten years ago today — February 7, 1999 — the Stardust mission launched from Cape Canaveral Air Station on a Delta II rocket. Stardust was the first U.S. space probe sent to a comet, and in January 2006 brought back samples from comet Wild-2.

You can read more about Stardust on this NASA page.

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Today marks the 50th anniversary of the first successful flight of a Titan missile — in this case, a Titan-I — from Cape Canaveral. From there the variants of the Titan family took shape, including:

• The Titan-34D, the test firing of which I was involved in at Edwards AFB
• The Titan-IV … I have a piece of one on the desk in my office
• The Titan-IVB, for which I helped get some of the support and maintenance facilities built

The Titan was a vital part of the U.S. launch fleet for many years, and I’m proud to have been a (small) part of the program.

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