AirSpaceMag.com

When Marlon Green wanted a flying job with Continental Airlines more than 50 years ago, the company wouldn’t give him the time of day. Now they’ve named an airplane after him.

Green, who died last year at the age of 80, had to take his case to the U.S. Supreme Court to get hired as the first African-American pilot for a major airline in 1965. As Continental CEO Jeff Smisek said during a February 9 naming ceremony for the company’s new Boeing 737 , “He sued us. We fought him. We fought him for six years….and on behalf of my 41,000 co-workers, I’m so glad that he won.”

On hand for the dedication at Houston’s Bush Intercontinental Airport were members of Green’s family, including his daughter Monica, a historian at Arizona State University, who praised the idea of making a “living exhibit” of the airliner named for her father.

To further honor Capt. Green, Continental is flying a group of 140 Houston area school children to the National Air and Space Museum next week—aboard the Capt. Marlon Green.

The Arecibo Observatory under construction in 1961...

...and as it looks today. (NAIC / NSF)

William Gordon, the Cornell University engineer who dreamed up the world’s largest dish antenna, died this week at the age of 92. His recollections of the Arecibo Telescope’s early days were included in a story that ran in our October 1997 issue, not long after the observatory was upgraded with new telescope feeds:

When Bill Gordon first hiked into the mountain hollow in central Puerto Rico that today cradles the giant Arecibo Radio Telescope, it was nothing but tobacco fields and a small leaf-drying shed surrounded by tropical forest. It was 1958, and Gordon, then a professor of electrical engineering at Cornell University, had come up with a clever idea. His sponsor, the Pentagon’s Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), wanted a radio antenna—a really big antenna—to study the thin upper atmosphere through which ballistic missiles would travel. But the 1,000-foot dish ARPA required would likely collapse under its own weight. Why not use the Earth itself for structural support, Gordon thought.

After searching through textbooks on karst topography—natural limestone depressions found throughout the world—and considering sites in Cuba (“Thank God we didn’t do that in 1958”) and elsewhere, Gordon and his colleagues settled on this particular bowl-shaped valley in Puerto Rico. Five years later, with funding from the Air Force, the Arecibo radio telescope opened for business.

The other night, while most Americans were sleeping, the astronauts on the International Space Station decided to have a little fun. The Winter Olympics were on, the crew had a few hours of free time, and here’s what they came up with:

A couple things strike me about this scene, and the rest of the crew’s video highlights for that day. One is the complexity and roominess of the space station. The damn thing is bigger than a five-bedroom house, and it’s in orbit. I don’t think it has sunk in yet what an engineering marvel the station is, but now that the pieces are all in place, it will.

Watching the astronauts around the lunch table (at the 3:49 mark in the highlights video) also made me appreciate the unique society that’s been one of the hallmarks of the (soon-to-end) shuttle/station era. Despite the more alarmist reactions to NASA’s new budget, human spaceflight isn’t coming to a halt. (If anything, it may become more affordable.) But it is about to change gears, and after the space shuttle retires this year, it could be a while before we have a dozen or more people living together in space at the same time.

Back in the golden age of Apollo, space crews were small, focused, disciplined. The shuttle loosened things up, and the station even more so, with guests arriving every so often like visitors to a frontier outpost. There’s actually a small society living in space right now, 200 miles over our heads. And I’m glad to see them acting like human beings. Otherwise, we might as well just send robots.

The United States Parachute Association has released the good news that 2009 marked the lowest skydiving fatality rate for one year in almost half a century: 16 deaths in nearly three million jumps by over 32,000 USPA members at 220 drop zones across the U.S. Of those three million, 400,000 were by people making their first jump. Not since 1961 has an annual fatality total been lower, at 14. But there were only 3,353 members then. Total jumps that year weren’t tallied, but suffice to say there were far fewer. So the death rate was surely much higher.

The 1970s averaged 42.5 fatalities per year, but that 10-year average has steadily dropped: The 1980s saw a 34.1 average; the 1990s, 32.3; and the 2000s 25.8. The USPA attributes the decline to safer equipment, better training, and the personal commitment of each skydiver, instructor, rigger, and drop zone manager.

Sixteen in three million is about one death for every 62,500 jumps. Not quite as good as the 2008 rate of one airline passenger death for every eight million airplane passengers who flew that year. But we’d all agree that skydiving may always be a little riskier than simply flying on an airplane. They’re better than the odds that you’ll die accidentally from a fall due to snow or ice: 1 in 1,270, something people in the mid-Atlantic are thinking about, maybe, right now after getting three feet of snow this week. They’re also better than the odds that you’ll become employed as a fashion designer: 1 in 7,990.

Frankly, I’ve never understood odds, and struggled with the probability and statistics class I took in college. That professor would probably tell me that just because you can divide three million by 16 and get one death for every 62,500 jumps doesn’t actually mean the odds are one in 62,500. That just happened to be the rate last year.

Niklas Daniel (above) swoops across a pond during the canopy piloting competition at the 2009 U.S. Parachute Association's National Skydiving Championships near Houston, Texas. Photo: Craig O'Brien/USPA. Jessica Edgeington (right), one of the top female swoopers in the U.S., goes for distance over a slalom-like course laid out over a pond at the same 2009 National Championships. Photo: Joao Tambor/USPA

I’ve never skydived. I did bungee jump once, 20 years ago, and was somehow comforted by the fact that I was attached to the bridge the whole time. Didn’t have to rely on the mysterious function of a rip cord, or the proper unfurling of the chute. To this day I can’t seem to find firm numbers on fatalities per million bungee jumps, or whatever. I’m oddly comforted by that too. There are numbers all over the place on the web. Helen, a student in Mr. Varsava’s Grade 11 Physics class back in 2004, somehow dug up information that the odds of death by bungee jumping are one in 500,000. I’m going with that, even though I’m done bungee jumping.

By the way, the folks shown here aren’t skydiving over water for safety reasons. They’re  swooping, which is a popular event at skydiving meets. Swooping is part of canopy piloting competitions, the most extreme discipline in the sport of skydiving. Competitors are judged on speed, distance, and zone accuracy. The swooping part, which obviously comes last, also provides some giddy fun, particularly when an overambitious swooper touches down on the water too far from shore and sinks before getting to dry land. That’s called “chowing.”

Sorry, no data available on the odds of chowing.

Quick, what’s the most photogenic object in our solar system? Earth? Yeah, pretty. Saturn? Lovely rings. But for sheer drama and majesty, it’s hard to beat pictures of the sun taken from spacecraft like SOHO and STEREO.

Those satellites are about to be eclipsed (sorry) by the Solar Dynamics Observatory, which launched this morning from Cape Canaveral, Florida on an Atlas V rocket. The SDO will observe the local star across multiple wavelengths, at higher resolution and with a faster frame rate than any of its predecessors. In other words, we’re about to see the best high-definition movies ever made of the sun.

Oh, and there’s science, too.