AirSpaceMag.com

Hubble, re-released. What's next, Knighthood?

We sure do love our celebrities, don’t we? And I don’t mean whatsisname, who won on American Idol last night. I’m talking about the newly upgraded Hubble Space Telescope, whose astronaut repairmen received a call from President Obama yesterday, and will deliver live testimony from space at a Congressional hearing today. An appearance on Leno is a shoo-in.

What other science instrument has Hubble’s star power? Maybe the Spirit and Opportunity Mars rovers, but that’s about it. And mostly, it’s deserved. Hubble is the sharpest, most sensitive eye on the sky we have. But it’s not the only one, nor the best we’ll ever build. And therein lies a point.

Six years ago, the astronomy community faced a decision—keep Hubble going, or abandon it, move on, and use the money to build newer, better space telescopes. Hubble won out, but the choice wasn’t easy, and it had a downside. Due partly to the added cost of more upgrades (and mostly to other NASA budget pressures), there hasn’t been money for other astronomy projects, like building telescopes to hunt for Earthlike planets or study dark matter.

Hubble is fabulously expensive—its total cost to design, build, launch, and operate is estimated at upwards of $9 billion in today’s dollars. And that doesn’t count the five shuttle missions to repair and upgrade it at regular intervals. This most recent repair job alone cost nearly $1 billion.

Is Hubble worth it? Depends on how you measure it. One analysis of citations in scientific papers (a common measure of “productivity”) found that Hubble observations accounted for 19 percent of the citations in astronomy papers published in 2001, the largest number for any optical-wavelength observatory. But the number of citations per paper was only average compared to other optical observatories like Keck.

This is hair-splitting, sure, and not meant to sound ungrateful for the skillful repair job by the STS-125 astronauts. Hubble is an awesome, historic instrument. But should we become so celebrity-struck that we only pay attention to the star performers? Bureaucratically, it’s always easier to feed a few big projects than a lot of little ones, however deserving. And that’s a habit we may someday have to break.

In my last post on Neil Armstrong, I mistakenly repeated the fable that as a test pilot, Armstrong once looked out the window of his X-15 rocket plane just prior to landing, and saw the Rose Bowl instead of the Rogers Dry Lake at Edwards Air Force Base. Makes for good bar talk. But here’s the truth, as reported in James Hansen’s biography First Man:

On Friday, April 20, 1962, Armstrong zoomed up to 207,500 feet in the X-15, as high as he’d go until his Gemini 8 mission would quadruple that four years later. Well outside the atmosphere, he used the reaction control system to maneuver. Another job on this flight was to check out the MH-96, a G limiting device designed to keep the rocket plane from exceeding 5 Gs. He kept the nose up as he plummeted from his peak altitude, which caused his flight path to “balloon,” or rise again, producing about 4 Gs. This ballooning continued as he waited to see the G limiter kick in, which it never did. It turned out that the real flight was not agreeing with simulations he’d done on the ground. All the while, he was cruising along at the rate of ten football fields a second toward Los Angeles, and still up around 140,000 feet. Soon he heard the main flight control center telling him as they watched his telemetry, “We show you ballooning, not turning. Hard left turn, Neil! Hard left turn!” By then, Armstrong had, in his own words, gone “sailing merrily by the field.”

With not enough atmosphere for his flight control surfaces to bite into, he couldn’t turn. Instead, he followed a ballistic path like an artillery shell over the San Gabriel Mountains and toward the populated areas of southern California. When he finally fell far enough that the wings began to respond, Armstrong pulled a U-turn and headed northeast in a steep glide toward the lake beds he had overshot. He was 45 miles south of them, not far enough to put him over the Rose Bowl. But he was still generally over Pasadena. Luckily, he was still above 100,000 feet, and cleared the San Gabriel Mountains by a wide margin, then performed a straight-in landing on Rosamond Dry Lake, south of Rogers. The transcript shows he used speed brakes on his way to touchdown, dispelling notions that he was about to fall short in the Joshua trees. Furthermore, in the heat of the overtasked moment, he failed to consider jettisoning the ventral, or underside, tail fin at the back of the X-15 earlier than normal, which would have reduced his drag and extended his time in the air.

Armstrong and his rocket plane

Not quite the close shave many have claimed. Often a joke becomes the official story. Well, the joke afterward began with Joe Vensel, the head of the Flight Research Center’s flight operations, who asked pilot Forrest Petersen, “How far was Neil from the Joshua trees?” Petersen replied, “Oh, probably 150 feet or so.” To which Vensel inquired, “Were the trees to his right or left?”

Still, in 12.4 minutes, Armstrong had covered 350 miles ground track, the record for longest duration and distance of all 199 X-15 flights.

Nice to be able to laugh about it four decades later. But in fact, the fatality rate of pilots at Edwards was grim. Though astronauts Gus Grissom, Roger Chaffee, and Ed White died in January 1967 in the Apollo 1 fire during a training session, no American astronaut was lost in a spaceflight until the seven crew members of the space shuttle Challenger perished in 1986. Meanwhile, throughout 1948 at Edwards, 13 test pilots were killed. And in 1952, 62 pilots died there during one nine-month stretch. That’s not a typo. Sixty-two. About seven unlucky pilots a month.

Liking the risk level of your desk job a little better?

Launch pads on MARS (the Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport, that is)

I’m already kicking myself. A Minotaur rocket is launching from Wallops Island, Virginia tonight, with the Air Force Tacsat-3 spacecraft onboard, and I won’t be there. I drove four and a half hours for the first launch attempt on May 5, but got rained out, and alas, can’t make it back down for this one.

A shame, since orbital launches from Wallops are rare. The operators of the Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport hope that will change, though, and that their range becomes the go-to site for small launches.

Looking around Wallops’ small visitor center while waiting on the weather two weeks ago, I learned something—that Wallops had put in a bid in 1958 to be the site of the first U.S. astronaut launch. But Alan Shepard launched instead from Cape Canaveral, three years later. Wallops did, however, play a part in the Mercury program, testing the capsule escape system in a series of Little Joe launches.

Watch tonight’s Minotaur shot on the Wallops webcast. (Update: The launch went off perfectly at 7:55 p.m. Eastern time, and Tacsat-3 was deployed 13 minutes later)

In 1982, the year E.T. The Extraterrestrial ruled at the box office, another, less heralded movie about aliens came out—John Carpenter’s remake of The Thing, starring Kurt Russell. In the first film, a kind-hearted, magical being appears on Earth, works miracles, then ascends into the heavens with a promise to return. Basically, the Christ story.

The second film took a darker, more Darwinian view of extraterrestrial contact. “They” were here to invade their newfound host organisms (us!) with no explanation or apology.

Lacking information about the motives of whatever aliens might exist, both scenarios are equally plausible. And that makes some people nervous about deliberately advertising our presence by beaming messages to other stars. Maybe we shouldn’t “shout at the cosmos,” for fear of who’d come running.

The folks at the SETI Institute in Mountain View, California, who patiently listen for radio signals that might hint at alien intelligence, have no plans to send messages into space. But they’d like to know what you’d say if they did. So they’ve invited the public to upload words, pictures, songs, or whatever to a site called “Earth Speaks.” The project explores a critical question, according to the researchers: “If we discover intelligent life beyond Earth, should we reply, and if so, what should we say?”

No doubt some people will strain themselves trying to be profound or all-inclusive, as Carl Sagan and colleagues did when they created the Voyager Golden Record, which contains, among many other things, the sound of thunder and whales, and greetings in 55 languages, from Czech to Sotho. (What, no Guaraní? Come on!)

My advice? Don’t worry about it. When communicating with imaginary beings, any message is as good as any other. And let’s hope that the aliens—who learned eons ago to merge their consciousness with the fabric of space-time and are watching us all the time, anyway—will look on our efforts with amused sympathy.

I just read the manuscript for a book to be published in the spring of 2010 by the University of Nebraska Press. Never Land: Adventures, Wonder, and One World Record in a Very Small Plane is written by Scott Olsen, whose most recent book is Hard Air: Adventures from the Edge of Flying. (Disclosure: I wrote a blurb for Never Land’s back cover, so I’m blatantly biased.) Here’s a tiny slice of the chapter titled World Record.

There ought to be music.

Big music. Fast music. Heavy on drums and bass. Lots of brass. Trumpet screamers. Trombones.

This is world record time. This is world speed record time. A world aviation speed record for “Speed Over a Recognized Course.”

And I am the pilot.

If only I could stop laughing.

Cessna 152, Two Nine Bravo, is hardly a speed machine. But looking at the National Aeronautic Association website, just curious about records in my own backyard, I discovered there was no record, no record at all, for the fastest flight across North Dakota. None. Zip. Nothing. There was a record for a round trip flight from Fargo to Bismarck and back, but otherwise the state seemed wide open. No way, I thought. Then, I thought, of course. Of course, this could be done. Of course, this had to be done. And, of course, I had to be the one to do it. A few phone calls and emails later it was clear; I could set a world speed record in an airplane often passed by cars on the highway.

Three hundred and fifty nine miles. The Space Shuttle covers this trek in one minute and twenty seconds. The X-15 in four minutes flat. A fast 747 could make the leap in thirty-eight minutes. The flight plan for Two Nine Bravo shows a little more than four hours.

The world, and then the whole universe, can be expressed in terms of speed. If one meter per second becomes a constant for measuring magnitude, then the speed of a garden snail is 0.013 m/s, or 1 x 10^-2. The average speed of continental drift is 0.3 x 10^-9 to 3 x 10^-9. The typical speed of a Moreton wave across the surface of the sun is 1 x 10⁶ or 1,000,000 m/s. The speed of my hair is 4.8 x 10^-9.

Two Nine Bravo has only one radio, so I use my cell phone to open the flight plan.

“Welcome to Lockheed Martin Flight Service, this is Princeton Minnesota.”

“Hi,” I say. “I need to activate a flight plan, please. This is Cessna Five Three Two Nine Bravo.”

“November Five Two Three Niner Bravo, is that close, sir?”

“Five Three Two Nine Bravo,” I repeat, slowly.

“Five Three Three Nine Bravo.

“No…Five Three Two Nine.”

“Five Three Two Nine.”

“Yes.”

“Ok, that’s off of Williston, is that correct sir?”

Lord, I think.

“Yes it is.”

“Just a second here. Ok…I’ll activate at this time sir, and monitor Automated Weather for the current altimeter. Is there anything else I can help you with sir?”

Of course, what I want to tell him is I’m setting a record, that I’m flying fast, that I need him to clear the skies for the lightning streak that is me, but I do not. There is a seagull up here, at my altitude and in front of me. I’d swear it is flying faster.

“That’ll do it,” I say.

“Ok sir, you have a good day.”

Then the radio comes back to life.

“Williston traffic, maintenance vehicle entering two nine, one one, Williston.”

A few moments later, “Maintenance vehicle clear of two nine one one, Williston.”

Yes. I am blistering across the sky.

It dawns on me that there are people watching this landing. At least two people in the control tower. At least two television crews, one of them a sister station to the one in Williston. They have already been running footage. A newspaper reporter. A newspaper photographer. My family, waiting at the Jet Center. The other pilots on the taxiways. Those guys in the Seneca, who are already parked. And I remember the controller telling me, just a few minutes ago, “Make it a good one.”

Instinctively, I pull back on the yoke to begin a flare.

Too high!

I bounce the damn landing.

“What did you think of that?” I ask tower.

“That’s called putting it down with authority,” he says.

“God, I hope no one saw that.”