AirSpaceMag.com

Wallops Island and I don’t get along.

Twice in the last two years I’ve made the long drive from my home in ex-urban Washington D.C., hoping to finally see an orbital launch from this quaint and historic launch site on Virginia’s eastern shore.

Twice I’ve come away empty-handed.

It happened for the second time Tuesday night, when the launch team at Wallops had to scrub the planned liftoff of a Minotaur rocket with the Defense Department ORS-1 satellite onboard, due to rainy weather. I couldn’t stay another day, so I missed last night’s launch, which went off (of course) without a hitch:

That should have been me cheering.

When Boeing revealed its new “Sky Interior” cabin for 737 airliners last October, most of the talk was about the design’s spaciousness and natural light. But when the public saw the cabin for the first time last week at the Paris Air Show, in a 737-700 built for Air Berlin, the focus was on a couple of tiny buttons. Specifically, the reading light and the flight-attendant call button.

They’ve been redesigned—and it’s about time.

The side-by-side placement of the two buttons has vexed fliers for a generation, and Boeing hopes that separating them and giving them different looks (the new call button is blue) will clear up the confusion. Many passengers avoid using the reading light for fear of accidentally calling the flight attendant, explained Boeing’s Blake Emery to Reuters.

But the change probably won’t settle another debate that has raged for decades: Is the call button just for emergencies? And who says my empty drink doesn’t qualify?

One camp holds that the buttons are there to be seen, not used. “Basically, you never want to press the call button,” says one flight attendant. More than a third of passengers fired back in a USA Today survey that surly, unresponsive fight attendants were their number one complaint. Most people agree that since the terrorist attacks of September 2011, safety is a big part of the flight attendant’s job, but passengers still want their blanky, and they want it now.

So, while Boeing’s new design may illuminate which button to press, we’re still in the dark about when to press at all.

The 737's new look: The blue button brings the flight attendant. (Photo: Boeing)

The Dawn spacecraft continues to close in on Vesta, one of the last unexplored objects of appreciable size between here and Pluto. Dawn is expected to go into orbit around the asteroid on July 16.

NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA/MPS/DLR/PSI

This is how Vesta looked in the navigation camera view as of June 20, when Dawn was 117,000 miles away. And here’s a time-lapse view of the approach so far.

Read more about the Dawn mission in our June/July issue, or listen to this recent talk by project co-investigator Carle Pieters (below), who describes what scientists hope to learn at Vesta.

How did he ever pass flight school, much less become a top gun pilot? I’m talking about the mascot from the University of Alaska at Fairbanks, of course. That’s right, the insane polar bear that hijacks an F-16 and rockets into space before each of the team’s hockey games (video below).

The University of Alaska at Fairbanks hockey mascot: Not your standard pilot.

Consider the facts: An adult male polar bear weighs between 750 and 1,500 pounds, and stands between six and eight feet tall. Can this unwieldy ursine even fit inside a (modified) F-16?

We looked to the Naval Aerospace Medical Institute in Pensacola, Florida, for guidance. The Office of the Chief of Naval Operations released guidelines (OPNAV instruction 3710.37A) in 2006 on the topic of “anthropometric accommodation in Naval aircraft.” The document notes: “It is essential to accurately match prospective and designated aviators to appropriate aircraft…. Because the consequences of assigning an anthropometrically incompatible crewmember to an aircraft can be both costly and potentially catastrophic, waivers shall not be submitted nor considered for prospective Naval Aviators/Naval Flight Officers. Designated Navy or Marine Corps aviation personnel identified with an anthropometric incompatibility in assigned aircraft shall be referred to Bureau of Naval Personnel…or Commandant of the Marine Corps…respectively for disposition.”

Characteristic postures of the polar bear. These poses seem at odds with the typical fighter pilot stance.

The document continues, “The minimum and maximum nude body weights allowed for those entering naval aviation flight training are 103 pounds and 245 pounds…. Certain characteristics of individual type/model/series aircraft, e.g., center of gravity limitations, or aviation life support equipment may result in further limitations.” A chart at the end of the document states that student pilots cannot be taller than 6 feet 4 inches. So while our polar bear friend might squeak by on the height requirement, he would be deemed “not eligible” for service based upon his weight.

University of Alaska at Fairbanks’ head hockey coach Dallas Ferguson referred us to Tim Bauer for a discussion of the mascot’s next career move. Bauer, the treasurer of the Face-Off Club (a group of hockey boosters), explained that the university has commissioned a new promotional video, which should be ready in late October. Sadly, the polar bear’s top gun days appear to be over. While we don’t know what his next occupation will be, it won’t include flying pointy jets.

How do you pack a $2.5 billion Mars rover for shipment? Here’s how.

This time-lapse video, covering a period of five days, shows the Curiosity Mars Science Laboratory being prepared for shipment from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory to its launch site in Cape Canaveral, Florida. The journey, scheduled for later this month, will be partly by truck, and partly by Air Force aircraft.