AirSpaceMag.com

Instead of the comforting red YOU ARE HERE dot that lost customers wearily seek out while wandering the halls of shopping malls and airports, soon they’ll just have to look to their palm for a little blue dot. Yesterday, Google released an update to their oh-so-useful Maps application, adding in interior maps of the gigantor buildings we find ourselves lost in so frequently. Now if you get turned around looking for Gate B34 during your frantic 4.5 minute layover, you can fire up the app and locate not just the gate but yourself, allowing you to sprint left at the Cinnabon and jump aboard — or, alternatively, realize there are three terminals between you and your flight, save yourself the heartache and wrecked knees, and go directly to an agent to change your flight.

The interior maps label stores and geographical features, identify your position to within a few meters (continuously updating as you walk) and, perhaps most impressive, change the floor plan automatically as you change floor levels.

The roll-out of the update is modest so far. It’s only for Android right now (v. 6.0), and only includes a handful of airports (ATL, ORD, SFO) and stores (Mall of America, IKEA, Macy’s, etc). The only way to know if an interior layout is available, aside from the few listed on Google’s blog, is to search the app and look for detail. (We looked for airports near the A&S office, but DCA, BWI and IAD aren’t available yet.) Businesses can go directly to Google and upload their floor plans to the app.

The kind of real-time location information that Google offers with Maps is possibly one of the best arguments for owning a smartphone, and this addition of interior floor plans just seals the deal. Especially when you get that Five Guys craving 10 minutes before boarding.

Ed White aboard Gemini IV, 1965, courtesy NASA

One day while searching around for cool space photos, as we do, we stumbled across this Bloomsbury Auction offering up nearly 300 vintage NASA photographs. They come from the collection of Victor Martin-Malburet, a savvy young French space buff who discovered the niche a few years ago and began snapping up 1960s-era prints, soon amassing one of the biggest collections outside of NASA. He eventually combined forces with fellow Frenchman Felix Winckler, and the two displayed their Mercury, Gemini and Apollo collection in Paris and Tokyo before cashing out in this month’s London auction.

While browsing, we were particularly interested in this photograph, captioned, “Ed White in the capsule, the first in-flight portrait of an astronaut, Gemini 4, June 1965.” We wondered, was it really? We know about these 1962 photos of John Glenn taken while he was completing the first American orbit aboard Friendship 7, but we’ll assume “in-flight portrait” specifically means a photo of one human taken by another, and Glenn, of course, was the only person aboard. Gemini III had the first American two-man crew, but an improper lens setting on their camera left history with almost no in-space photographic evidence.

There are also these images of cosmonaut Alexei Leonov taken by crewmate Pavel Belyayev during the world’s first spacewalk a few months before Gemini IV, but they’re actually stills from a videocamera (also, the auctioned photo’s caption says “astronaut,” so between that and not having access to all of Russia’s photograph archive, we’ll just stick with the Americans here). So might this photo of Ed White really be the first astronaut portrait photograph taken by another in space?

We dropped a line to Mike Gentry, a researcher at NASA’s Johnson Space Center photo archives and asked him what he thought. Part of the problem is knowing whether or not this photo was taken before or after White’s spacewalk, which was thoroughly photographed by crewmate Jim McDivitt. So we took a look at the few frames surrounding the auctioned photo, which was labeled with the negative number S65-30549 (49).

The previous negative, 48, is another, virtually identical photo of White inside the spacecraft, while the negative following the auctioned frame, 50, was taken during White’s spacewalk. We were about to feel confident that the in-spacecraft photo was taken before the spacewalk, until we kept going back. Frame 47? Nearly identical to 50. Gentry says it appears that this short series of negatives may be stereo pairs.

Ed White exits the hatch on the first U.S. spacewalk. Courtesy NASA.

So if the order of the negatives isn’t going to tell us anything, where else might we look? Some Googling took us to this exchange on CollectSpace.com, which refers to the mission transcript. On page 123, well after the spacewalk, White says to Mission Control, “You might ask … if they can work up some settings for inside-the-spacecraft pictures; we have 200 feet of film. I have taken a few in here already, but I thought they might give us a suggested light meter reading.” While certainly not conclusive, we might be able to infer from this exchange that McDivitt hadn’t taken any inside-the-spacecraft pictures yet, and therefore the close-up portrait of White was taken after the spacewalk. That would mean that McDivitt’s photographs of White during his EVA would truly be the first images of an astronaut taken by another astronaut. The photograph above at left (negative number S65-29730) of White floating out the hatch may indeed be the first.

We also noticed this exchange in the transcript:

McDivitt: We’ve got a lot of other kinds of film we better take.

White: The only thing, we’re not keeping good books on it right now.

McDivitt: You’re telling me! It’s lousy!

White: You keep books and then you miss other things.

I suppose we can’t blame them for not wanting to “miss things” during their short time aloft, leaving us a mystery box of pictures. Our deduction is all a bit circumstantial, but we hope the buyer who laid down a cool 1400 pounds — a thousand pounds over the auction’s estimated value — for the vintage chromogenic print on November 3 was paying for the vintage-iness and the fact that it’s a gorgeous photo in its own right, and not necessarily its “first” status. Of course, since NASA’s photograph collection is not copyrighted, you can download the photo for free and print it out: 1400 pounds worth, except you’ll have to live with that new-print smell.

They fly more than a million hours a year, yet the more than 2,000 “public aircraft” operated by government agencies — from local police departments to the National Science Foundation — are  not subject to FAA regulation.  As with any aircraft, they have occasional accidents, like the police helicopter that went down in New Mexico in June 2009 (pictured), killing the pilot and one passenger. The National Transportation Safety Board has investigated 300 such accidents over the last 10 years.

The Board will take up the subject of public aircraft safety at a forum in Washington D.C. on Wednesday and Thursday, which will be webcast for those who can’t attend in person.

Board member Mark Rosekind gives an overview of the subject here:

Add two more stripes to this ingenious chart showing all the attempts over the past 50 years to send spacecraft to Mars. Let’s hope that the stripe for the Curiosity Mars Science Laboratory, which launched successfully on Saturday, reaches all the way to the surface of the planet.

Sadly, the stripe for Russia’s Phobos-Grunt Mars spacecraft, currently incommunicado in Earth orbit, appears doomed to end at the outside, “fail” ring, which may also spell the end of the country’s planetary program.

The apparent demise of Phobos-Grunt got me reading up on the history of Russian Mars exploration, looking for stories from happier days.  I hadn’t known about PrOP-M, the first rover (or maybe crawler is a better word) launched to Mars. It ended up failing , too, but it would have been fun to watch had it succeeded.

By 1971 the Soviets had already landed one Lunokhod rover on the moon’s surface. The 10-pound PROP-M, included as a payload on the Mars 3 lander launched in May 1971, was much more modest.  After Mars 3 touched down, the rover, attached to a 15-meter umbilical cord, was designed to shuffle away from the lander on two ski-like contraptions. The video below (queued up here at the 3:51 mark) shows how the rover maneuvered itself.  Unfortunately, Mars 3 went silent immediately after it touched down, and PROP-M was never heard from again. NASA didn’t land its own rover on Mars until 1997, when Sojourner rolled off of the Mars Pathfinder.

When Curiosity touches down on Mars next August, it should tip its electronic head in the direction of PROP-M, wherever it lies on the unforgiving plains of Mars.

Apollo 11

Where were you on July 20, 1969, when Apollo 11 astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin first walked on the moon? What were you doing on October 4, 1957 when the Soviets launched Sputnik? Do you remember April 12, 1981, when the space shuttle Columbia made its first flight?

In 2008, the Smithsonian’s Folklife Festival included the program “NASA: Fifty Years and Beyond,” and as part of that program, visitors were encouraged to document (written on note cards and recorded on tape) their memories of America’s space program.  A few of the festival-goer’s memories appear below.

As the 50^th anniversary year of human spaceflight draws to a close, we ask you to remember your own space milestones. After you read the remembrances here, leave a comment to tell us where you were, what you saw, and how you felt.

I had just learned to drive my husband’s stick shift car. He worked in the simulation lab with astronauts. I was stopped in front of their building to pick up my husband. As he got into the car, he said, “There’s Neil.” I said, “Neil who?” He said, “Armstrong! Who else?” At that point I went limp, the clutch jumped, the car lurched forward, and Neil just missed being hit.

I grew up in Huntsville, Alabama. I remember Werner von Braun was our most famous citizen. Huntsville was very sleepy until Sputnik was launched. All of a sudden, Huntsville became a hotbed of activity, all centered on the space program. Within three years, the U.S. had an active space program. Many of the engines for spacecraft were built in Huntsville. Huntsville calls itself “The Space Capital of the Universe” now. In 1950, it was known as “the Watercress Capital of the U.S.” Things change!

In 1957 Sputnik went up and the talk was that U.S. students had to catch up academically. I was 10 years old—the next day was the first time we ever had homework in school.

I was in second grade when the entire student body of Norfeld Elementary reported to the auditorium to watch a not-very-big portable black-and-white TV for a Mercury capsule splashdown in the Atlantic. We were all worried that it could miss and veer back into space forever. (It went OK.)

When I was in elementary school, a man came to the school and sang songs about Black Holes. Needless to say, I was terrified.

I’ve been fascinated by space exploration for my entire life. My family tells me that my first word was “moon.” Now I work as a NASA contractor, on a mission to the Moon (LRO). I’m grateful to be standing on the shoulders of giants, the men and women before and beside me that helped NASA and all space agencies achieve what they have. And we’re only at the beginning of the adventure.