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U.S. Postal Service

This summer, the Boy Scouts of America celebrate their 100th anniversary, and the U.S. Postal Service has unveiled a spiffy new stamp to honor the organization.

One of my favorite Scouting quotes comes from Janice Hudson’s Trauma Junkie: Memoirs of an Emergency Flight Nurse. Hudson worked for many years as part of the air ambulance service in the San Francisco Bay Area. She writes:

“One of the more frightening community events for CALSTAR [California Shock/Trauma Air Rescue] was the Boy Scout Jamboree. Every year the dreaded memo arrived, followed by frantic phone calls by the scheduled flight crew, who begged for somebody, anybody, to take the loathsome shift….

“Why did everyone dread this particular event? Imagine, if you will, five hundred prepubescent boys, wired on Twinkies, rushing the helicopter. Their first target, invariably, was the antennas. We had a total of five external antennas mounted on the underside of the tailboom and belly, all of which were unbelievably expensive, fragile, and absolutely indispensable to the safe operation of the helicopter. One good grab and the antenna would snap off, leaving us out of service until it could be repaired. After they finished with the antennas, the Boy Scouts wanted in—in the helicopter, that is….

“As we circled overhead, we were filled with a sense of foreboding. The ground below was teeming with kids, who looked like small ants swarming over the large field. They were everywhere….

“When we began the landing, there was a brief bulge in the lines as the kids tried to surge forward. The Scout leaders, battling bravely, held them back…. The lines held, right up to the moment the rotors stopped turning. Despite the troop leaders’ gallant efforts, the kids broke free…. Two hours later, we realized we were lost. Kids continued to swarm over the helicopter like a plague of locusts.”

Hudson fakes an emergency call, and “we lifted off in a cloud of dust, leaving our tormentors behind.”

CALSTAR still makes an annual appearance at the Boy Scout Jamboree.

Scientists are keeping tabs on an asteroid called Apophis, an 820-foot chunk of rock moseying toward Earth at about 22 miles per second. Apophis—named after an ancient Egyptian god of evil, naturally—will pass near our planet in 2029. How near is near? Closer than our own communication satellites.

But don’t despair just yet. Apophis is far smaller than the asteroid that took out the dinosaurs. That bad boy was about 6 miles across, creating a 93-mile-wide impact crater when it hit.

In “Asteroid Trackers,” a Smithsonian Channel special, Jay Melosh, an astrophysicist at the University of Arizona, describes what would happen if a similar sized asteroid hit the Earth today. “The sky would turn bright red, we’d begin to feel oppressive heat as if there were six tropical suns in the sky. Clothing would ignite, you would suffer third-degree burns, newspaper ignites, plywood burns, deciduous trees spontaneously ignite, and grass ignites.”

If that doesn’t have you cowering under the bed, watch “Asteroid Trackers” to discover how scientists track the hazards of incoming asteroids. “Asteroid Trackers” will be shown on July 25. See local listings for more details.

See a sneak peek, below.

Some nice scenes here of Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo (now known as VSS Enterprise) on a recent captive carry flight—with a pilot (Peter Siebold) onboard for the first time.

Designers of spy planes have come up with any number of ways to increase dwell time over a target, from long-lasting UAVs to slow-moving airships to this hydrogen-powered craft called Phantom Eye, which was unveiled last week by Boeing Phantom Works.

According to Boeing, Phantom Eye will be shipped to NASA’s Dryden Flight Research Center in California later this summer, and will make its first flight (lasting four to eight hours) next year. The goal is to be able to stay aloft for four days.

My favorite detail: The engines are borrowed from a Ford Ranger pickup truck.

There’s a philosophical war going on in space policy circles these days, between those who believe that grand, ambitious missions drive invention (Apollo), and those who believe it’s the other way around (DARPA).

Honestly, I think either approach can work, given wise management. But NASA’s new direction tilts more toward the DARPA model, at least for human spaceflight, which has suffered from a lack of innovation. The new NASA budget invests in technology development, in the hope that it will enable flights to Mars down the road. In case anyone misses the point, NASA has proposed two new programs named after inventors: “Franklin” would develop new satellite subsystems, and “Edison” would demonstrate them in space.

Everything I know about the Edison program is contained in this short presentation to a NASA technology conference held earlier this week. But I’m already intrigued. The agency hopes by 2012 to have at least four small Edison missions going at any one time, each costing less than $10 million. The example given of a possible flight project is a demonstration of “flux-pinned” spacecraft, which I’d never heard of before. You can read more about the concept here, or watch the video below.

I have no idea if flux-pinning will be a breakthrough in spacecraft design, or if it will remain a laboratory curiosity. Some Edison projects will undoubtedly be dead ends, providing ammunition to critics of the technology-first approach. But engineers working on large NASA flight projects often find themselves having to back out of blind alleys, too (which puts the “plus” in cost-plus contracts).

I’d like to see programs like Edison at least given a chance. It has been a long time since inventors were allowed to flourish at NASA. To quote Bob Marley, every time they planted a seed, [NASA/Congress] said “kill it before it grows.”

Let’s hope it doesn’t happen this time, too.