Herschel detects water in Jupiter's stratosphere. Image: ESA/Herschel/T. Cavalié et al.; Jupiter image: NASA/ESA/Reta Beebe (New Mexico State University)

The Herschel Space Telescope was never meant for hot astronomy topics. It was meant for the cool ones. The European Space Agency spacecraft officially ended its observations yesterday when the last of its liquid helium, used to keep the telescope’s temperature close to absolute zero, was exhausted after three years of operation.

Herschel was launched in 2009 and spent its mission orbiting at L2, one of five Lagrangian points in the Earth-Sun system that are gravitationally stable. L2 is nearly a million miles farther from the sun than Earth is — ESA’s Planck Space Telescope, among others, is already stationed there, and it’s the future location of NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope. That far from the Sun is an ideal place to look at cool objects.

Observing in a broad spectral range from the far infrared to submillimeter wavelengths, Herschel could study dim objects, like asteroids in the Kuiper belt at the edge of our solar system, or debris disks where planets are forming around other stars. It also saw red-shifted light from early and active star-forming galaxies. Herschel hunted for water around the universe, finding ice particles heated by ultraviolet light from stars in many protoplanetary disks, and discovering that nearly all the water in Jupiter’s atmosphere was brought to the planet by comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 in 1994.

Herschel had the largest infrared mirror ever launched into space — at 3.5 meters in diameter, it’s more than a meter bigger than the Hubble Space Telescope’s. (JWST’s mirror, however, will be almost twice as big as Herschel’s.) Scientists are still reviewing data from the space observatory, so even though the spacecraft has gone dead, discoveries will likely still be made. Indeed, astronomers are hoping that a brand new ground-based observatory can leapfrog off of Herschel’s contributions in studying the “cool” universe: ALMA, the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array in Chile, began operating earlier this year and should be fully operational in September. Combining their data should tell us much about the early universe and galaxy formation.

Astronauts head out to meet up with an asteroid, somewhere beyond the Moon, ca. 2021. (NASA artist's conception)

This week NASA announced plans to capture a small asteroid in 2019 and bring it back to the vicinity of the Moon for later study by astronauts. It’s a good idea, for several reasons.

It’s of real importance to society.

The asteroid threat is sometimes overhyped, and it’s no wonder politicians don’t consider it an emergency when the last Extinction Level Event (to borrow a term from Deep Impact) happened 64 million years ago. Still, the fireball over Chelyabinsk in February demonstrated that even a small space rock can do damage, and hinted at even scarier scenarios. The rock that NASA plans to retrieve would be just half the size of the 60-foot Chelyabinsk object, small enough to burn up harmlessly if it entered our atmosphere. But learning to deflect or move even a mini-asteroid should give us valuable experience.

The 2012 DA14 asteroid that bypassed Earth last February compared to the (smaller) object that entered the atmosphere over Russia on the same day. The rock to be retrieved by NASA would be half the size of the smaller asteroid. (Art by Michael Carroll, courtesy B612 Foundation)

Public support for asteroid research is a no-brainer, yet NASA has had trouble allocating even a few million dollars a year (in an $18 billion budget) for a comprehensive search using a modest, space-based telescope. This new mission would help get the hunt started, because it requires an inventory of even smaller objects than we’ve tracked in the past.

Meanwhile, NASA still struggles to find a compelling destination for future astronauts that will sell with the general public. Expeditions to Mars or setting up an outpost on the Moon are fascinating projects, but hardly essential, and many taxpayers still consider them frivolous. Understanding asteroids and learning how to alter their course, on the other hand, are critical to humanity’s ultimate survival.

It advances space technology.

A mission that sounds straightforward, and is expected to cost no more than NASA’s latest Mars rover, would nonetheless require several new technologies that could also be applied to other projects. Solar electric engines for the unmanned tug that retrieves the asteroid can be used on future planetary spacecraft. Robotic tools for snagging an “uncooperative” target like a tumbling asteroid might also be used to clean up space debris or refuel satellites in orbit. After the rock is retrieved, astronauts will have to learn to live and work in what’s called cislunar space, something they’ve never done. In short, there’s plenty of cool and useful technology in an asteroid retrieval mission.

It sends astronauts farther than they’ve ever gone.

Does human spaceflight have a future?  In 2013, the answer is not obvious. The technologies of robotics and telepresence are advancing far faster than rockets and space capsules, which are still spinning off ideas developed in the 1950s. Those who doubt that humans will ever be content to explore deep space virtually, as opposed to going there in person, should consider Skype and Oculus Rift. Behaviors deeply embedded in human culture are changing before our eyes. Military forces are rapidly evolving from a centuries-old model of flesh-and-blood warriors facing off on battlefields to drones fighting drones. Why should space exploration be any different?

This may not, in fact, be the last hurrah for old-school (human) astronauts. But choosing a just-over-the-horizon destination like the lunar far side, while reviving some of the old Apollo mojo, will help us decide whether to continue sending people farther out into the solar system.

It encourages cooperation.

Groups including the B612 Foundation already are working to characterize the threat of larger incoming asteroids (“city killers” upwards of 100 feet in size), while others have announced plans to mine smaller rocks. NASA might be able to leverage these private ventures to keep its own costs down and encourage more players in the space business.

Within the agency itself, an asteroid retrieval mission would demand closer collaboration between the astronaut program and the science side of the house than at any time since Apollo. Meanwhile, partners in the International Space Station, who’ve shown only polite interest in the Moon or Mars, might be more willing to join in a smaller-scale mission with obvious benefit to all nations.

It’s doable.

Maybe the biggest advantage of all.

Every so often, a U.S. President (Bushes 41 and 43 most recently) proposes a grandiose go-to-the-Moon or –Mars scheme, which quickly peters out when everyone realizes, once again, that it costs way too much. Space advocates with long memories might be forgiven if they no longer expect Charlie Brown to kick the football.

Today the economic situation is worse than at any time in the space age. With millions unemployed and uninsured, and with public and private debt skyrocketing, no politician is about to suggest an expensive mission to the moon or Mars. Sorry, that’s not strictly true. Those representing districts with NASA centers will.  But don’t expect many others to join them.

That leaves NASA building a new rocket (the Space Launch System) and new vehicle (Orion), with no obvious place to go. Space agency managers rightly asked themselves what they could realistically do with the tools and money on hand, in a relatively short time. And the asteroid retrieval mission is what they came up with.

Some will say that grabbing a space rock – a tiny one at that – is not ambitious enough, not worthy of the nation that launched Apollo. “A man’s reach should exceed his grasp,” so this argument goes. Maybe. But while Robert Browning’s advice may be good for an artist, it can lead to frustration and failure for engineers and accountants.

So here’s a more pertinent line from the same poem: “Less is more.”

Let’s do something we can actually accomplish. And let’s get on with it.

Robert T. Bigelow, who made his money in the hotel business, got the idea for inflatable space habitats from NASA’s Transhab project of the 1990s. In fact, it was reading our April/May 1999 story on Transhab (here’s a downloadable PDF) and other similar articles in the popular press that inspired him. Practically everyone at the time thought Transhab was cool, and potentially very useful. But it didn’t fit into NASA’s plans for the space station, and was abandoned. Bigelow was eccentric enough, or maybe visionary enough — we’ll see how it plays out — to pick up the concept and see it through to launch his twin Genesis modules.

Only one thing bothers me about yesterday’s announcement. Bigelow is often held out by the New Space faithful as a key player in a would-be private economy based in Earth orbit. SpaceX and others would provide the rides, and Bigelow would provide the hotel/lab space. Once again, though, the only one stepping forward with money to make things happen is the U.S. government. Bigelow seems to still have plans for a private orbital module, but so far it’s just that — plans.

By the way, NASA apparently doesn’t like using the word “inflatable” anymore, since it conjures images of party balloons and Jiffy Pop.

Whatever. You fill it up with air.

Detail from a unique wide-angle hand mosaic of Surveyor 1's shadow on the Oceanus Procellarum, June 13, 1966. The mosaic is made of 66 gelatin silver prints in all, and measures 18 by 59 inches. (Each image mounted on the mosaic is approximately 6 by 6 inches.) The piece (lot #62) is estimated to go for $80,000 to $100,000. Photograph courtesy Bonhams auction house.

If you grew up near Bethpage, New York in the early 1960s, you probably were obsessed with the Apollo Lunar Module built by the Long Island-based Grumman Corporation. And if you were an extremely prescient teenager, you might have started amassing your own world-class collection of space-related items, including photographs, manuscripts, and prints.

Pierre Henri Puiseux and Maurice Lowey's large-format quadrant of the moon. Photograph courtesy Bonhams.

This Wednesday, Bonhams is auctioning off one such private collection. In a video on Bonhams’ Website, the collector (who wishes to remain anonymous) explains that he grew up “during the height of the windup to the Apollo era,” just a few miles from Grumman, and many of the fathers in his neighborhood worked on the Lunar Module. “I was working towards a goal fairly early on,” he recalls in the video. “In my early- to mid-teens, what I wanted to do was to have an exhibition focusing on unmanned space travel.”

Many of the items are one-of-a kind. The lunar photomosaic above (see the full image here), was made as a five-foot-wide presentation piece in 1966, and was painstakingly assembled by Kay Larson of the U.S. Geological Survey using images captured by Surveyor 1. “I’m lucky to have found this—it would have been thrown in the trash, eventually,” the collector notes.

John Russell's lunar globe, circa 1797. Photograph courtesy Bonhams.

There are objects relating to Mars, Mercury, Venus, and Jupiter, but Earth’s moon is the centerpiece of this show. Some of the items predate the space age. One particularly lovely object is a photograph made up of four large-format quadrants of the moon, taken in 1899, and probably created for the 1900 Paris Exposition. The photogravures, by Pierre Henri Puiseux and Maurice Loewy, were taken at the Paris Observatory. “It was only with NASA’s Lunar Orbiters in the 1960s,” reads the collection note, “that images substantially better than those of Loewy and Puiseux were obtained.” The plates are from Puiseux and Loewy’s Atlas photographique de la lune. The two men were able to photograph the moon only during perfect weather, the catalog notes, which meant just 50 or 60 nights each year—explaining why the Atlas took 14 years to complete. These may be the first oversize plates from the Atlas to come up for auction, and are expected to bring $12,000 to $18,000.

British pastel portraitist John Russell (the appointed painter to the King and the Prince of Wales) was so fascinated with the moon that he created a lunar globe in 1797, which he called a Selenographia. Russell spent many years drawing and observing the moon; his globe even accounts for lunar motion, or libration. No more than 11 Selenographias are believed to exist; six are in public collections. This example, lot number 23,  is expected to fetch between $200,000 to $300,000.

NASA has published another one of their cool, interactive roadmaps, like the one from last February that we enjoyed. Be sure to click through to the interactive full-size version to learn where NASA is headed in technology fields ranging from space power to nanotechnology and, of course, new launch systems.

The view out Wally's window. (NASA/ASU)

The Mercury astronauts, with their Corvette racing and drinking, were the apotheosis of Guy Culture, and their humor often stalled at about the seventh-grade level. Wally Schirra, especially, was a big fan of the practical joke, like the time he left a giant fake urine sample on astronaut nurse Dee O’Hara’s desk.

So 50 years ago today, during his Mercury Atlas 8 flight, it came as no surprise that fellow astronaut Deke Slayton, the “capsule communicator” in Mission Control, pulled a “gotcha” on Schirra.

The astronauts had a little game whereby if one asked “Are you a turtle?” the other had to answer “You bet your sweet ass I am!”, no matter how public the setting. Here’s a transcript of the air-to-ground conversation, a little over three minutes into the flight, with the whole world listening in. Schirra (P) is the pilot, and Slayton (CC) is the Capcom.

According to Schirra, “After splashdown, several of us were in the admiral’s quarters on the recovery ship, Kearsarge. Walt Williams, in his fast-chatter way of talking, demanded to know what my answer to Deke had been. I flipped on the flight recorder and there it was: ‘Wally are you a turtle?’ ‘You bet your sweet ass I am.’”

If it was all bathroom humor with the early astronauts, maybe they can be forgiven. The NASA doctors, who in those days were obsessed with learning every physiological reaction to spaceflight, allowed the astronauts very little privacy. An excerpt from a NASA medical report published after the MA-8 flight:

…No untoward sensations were reported by Astronaut Schirra, and the assigned inflight tasks were performed without difficulty. Specifically, he was not nauseated and did not vomit. Although the astronaut was never hungry during the flight, he ate the contents of two tubes containing food, one of peaches and the other of beef with vegetables, without difficulty. He experienced no urge to defecate during the mission, but he did report a moderate amount of inflight flatulence unaccompanied by eructation….

During the flight the pilot drank about 500 cc of water. He urinated three times before lift-off and three times during the flight, the last time just before retrofire. Bladder sensation and function were reported to be normal. Unfortunately, on landing, the urine collection device failed at its attachment to the body and all but 292 cc of the urine was lost.

Founder and Chief Technology Officer Dave Masten said of the test, “I could not be happier.” As for Xombie’s next steps:

We are discussing going a bit faster and further downrange, but the real purpose of Xombie is to be useful as a testbed. Where we hope to go with this is enabling NASA, NASA contractors, and others to more effectively test their new technologies. Next for Xombie will be to fly similar trajectories but with new technologies to demonstrate that those technologies are ready for use in mission critical applications, such as landing on Mars.

JPL [one of Masten's clients for Xombie, among others] will be releasing their take on what they can do with Xombie in the near future and I don’t want to steal their thunder, so I won’t say much more along those lines.

Here’s another view of Xombie’s flight.

The ISS passes over London. Image: NASA

If the spirit of the Olympics lies in nations coming together, than what better place to celebrate that spirit than the International Space Station? As current crew member Suni Williams told CollectSpace, ”I think the International Space Station and Olympics are very similar in that they bring together countries from all over the world. They work together, they compete and they bring out the best in each other.”

For as long as the station has been inhabited, astronauts have been sending messages to the athletes almost every summer and winter games. For the upcoming London games, the six astronauts in low-Earth orbit recorded a prime-time, go-get-’em hurrah with Brian Williams of NBC’s Nightly News that will air on an upcoming show, and another that will run during Friday’s opening ceremonies.

And that’s not the only way NASA has made its mark on the Olympics. In Beijing in 2008, Michael Phelps became the winningest Olympian ever, wearing a swimsuit that had design help from an aerospace engineer at the Langley Research Center in Virginia. The 1998 U.S. Speedskating team brought home two medals thanks in part to a polishing process created by a former NASA engineer, one of the many space program innovations put to use elsewhere, called “spin-off technologies.”

When Atlanta hosted the 1996 games, NASA and the FAA used the chaotic air traffic as an opportunity to test new developments in communications, navigation, and surveillance systems. Fifty helicopters providing support for the Olympics were part of Operation Heli-Star, whereby they were equipped with newly designed digital data-link systems and GPS, providing a real-world test before the equipment was put into general aviation use.

In the less practical, but more visually awesome category, NASA created these killer zooms of Olympic sites from space. Using a combination of images from Terra, Landsat 7, and the commercial satellite Ikonos, we got a “camera dropped from space” view of the 2002 winter games in Salt Lake City, Utah. Our favorite is probably this drop to the summit of the Snow Basin Ski Area…which almost makes the skiers high-speed race down the mountain seem easy by comparison. (Alright, not really.)

And of course, astronauts freed of the bonds of gravity usually can’t resist staging some athletic competitions of their own. We’d be surprised if Williams, a marathon runner, doesn’t have something similar in mind for the London games.

The shuttle mock-up in 1974 inside the original Rockwell plant in Downey, California. Photo: NASA (courtesy Aaron T. Harvey @geekfilter)

If anyone in Dayton or Seattle (or with a large backyard and a pipe-dream) got their hopes up about the mock-up shuttle in Downey, California, that needed a home, we have bad news: the city plans to keep it.

As we mentioned in an earlier post, the Downey city council met this week to decide the fate of an aerospace artifact that not many knew even existed. The mock-up orbiter was built by Rockwell/Boeing in 1972 as part of the shuttle contract process, and was used for the next couple of decades as a model “to help validate the size of items and rehearse wire runs for actual orbiter construction,” according to NASA public affairs officer Michael Curie. After the Boeing plant closed in 1999, the mock-up was moved to another building on the property to make room for a film studio, and has been sitting inside that small room ever since, covered in Tyvek sheeting, with its back-end spun around to fit in the space. Now that the property is being developed again, Downey needs to find a new — and with any luck, permanent — home for the shuttle.

On Tuesday, the city council agreed to move the mock-up to a temporary shelter in the parking lot of the Columbia Memorial Space Center, which is also owned by the city. (The new commercial development and the space center are on the same former 160-acre Boeing site, so the shuttle won’t be moving far.) They don’t want to take it apart piece-by-piece, as happened in 2003 when it was carefully examined and moved to its current location. But even in two large pieces it’s too big to fit through the door, so the plan is to remove an entire wall of the room to pull it out. With $100,000 from the developer and an additional $70,000 from the city, the center plans to erect fencing and a large tent for it, and hopes to allow visitors in to see it within the next couple of months, according to the center’s Executive Director, Scott Pomrehn.

The shuttle mock-up in 1974 inside the original Rockwell plant in Downey, California. Photo: NASA (courtesy Aaron T. Harvey @geekfilter)

We wanted to know a little more about the mock-up, so we spoke with some folks in Downey and at NASA to fill in some of this interesting space shuttle-era history.

According to Curie, when the Boeing plant closed, NASA decided to “abandon the shuttle in place,” thereby allowing the city of Downey to “inherit it.” There have, actually, been efforts to loan the mock-up out, and Pomrehn told us he has spoken with museums in San Diego and Colorado. But in the end, it’s considered too cost-prohibitive to move the mostly wooden orbiter any great distance. And to make it more difficult, as noted by the conservator in 2003 and recounted in a recent grant proposal by the space center:

Some deterioration processes are already underway. The outer skin of the shuttle, made of plywood on a wooden frame, is buckling slightly and showing signs of internal delamination. Paper components representing insulation or other lining of the sub-deck are disintegrating. Adhesive mounts and backing for a range of fasteners have become yellowed and embrittled. Delicate plastic components also appear to be degrading slightly. Clear plastic, prismatic ceiling panels have fine crazing cracks, and are starting to become detached at their fasteners.

The Columbia Memorial Space Center was established at the “former manufacturing site of the space shuttles” by Congress in 2004. By the time it was operating in 2009 — it is largely an educational venue for schoolchildren, featuring a Challenger Learning Center — the staff was hard at work trying to find ways to repair and house the shuttle mock-up. That year, they applied for a $700,000 grant from the National Park Service’s Save America’s Treasures program, but it was poor timing: it was the same year the program was de-funded by Congress. In the grant proposal, the center says the total cost of the shuttle’s preservation and restoration is $1,880,000, with about half needed for repair work, and half for a building to house it; the city would have provided the remaining funds.

We talked to Downey councilmember Deacon Mario Guerra over email, who told us the plan now is to keep the mock-up in the tented parking lot for about 18 months, which will give them time to find funding for an addition behind the space center — though he does note that they also remain “open to anything that will do it justice and preserve such a part of our legacy and that of our country.”

Downey councilmember Mario Guerra visiting the mock-up in its current location. The back-end of the shuttle is turned around to fit inside the small room. Photo courtesy Deacon Guerra.

Director Pomrehn has ambitious hopes for funding sources. A few years ago, Tesla Motors, owned by SpaceX’s Elon Musk, considered moving into the old Boeing plant, but those plans fell through. Now, Pomrehn says, Musk “kind of owes us one…he knows of the significance of the site and the possibilities it has.” Pomrehn is “pretty confident” that SpaceX — whose headquarters are just 12 miles down the road in Hawthorne — will step up to fund the space center’s new building, which could house not just the mock-up but maybe a Dragon or two, as well.

And the cost of restoration might not be as high as once thought. Pomrehn has been tracking down the  Rockwell/Boeing workers who built the mock-up in the early ’70s, and many of them are excited at the prospect of coming down to volunteer their services to fix up the shuttle and make it safe for visitors to climb inside. He’s also been talking to people at the California Science Center, 15 miles away in Los Angeles and the future home of Endeavour. Pomrehn would like to see the training for teachers and tour guides and anyone else involved in the celebration that will happen upon Endeavour‘s arrival later this year to happen at his space center. As he says, piggybacking on the excitement of the NASA orbiter’s arrival could boost hopes for the mock-up’s future.

Deacon Guerra is happy there are options for keeping the shuttle in Downey. “We are honored to have this mock-up of the shuttle,” he says. “It is a source of pride for our community and goes along with our amazing history of contribution to flight and space exploration.”

Asked if the city planned to give the mock-up a name, Guerra admitted, “I had never thought about it before, and I think that would be cool for us as a community to name it as we roll it out in the next few months.”

Sounds like residents of Downey will have some work on their hands this summer.

The shuttle mock-up in its original home inside the Downey plant.

Inside a warehouse in Downey, California, a one-winged space shuttle sits underneath a blanket of Tyvek sheeting. It’s not a real space shuttle. Well, it sort of is? Let’s just say it played a real role in shuttle history.

While space museums around the country were competing fiercely to be the next home for Discovery, Atlantis, Endeavour, and Enterprise, and even a couple months ago, when Houston was finally rewarded with the mock-up Explorer shuttle that used to greet space fans at Kennedy Space Center Visitor’s Center, this unnamed shuttle in Southern California went largely unknown and un-fought for.

It’s a full-scale mock-up that was built in 1972 by Rockwell International (now Boeing) as part of the original space shuttle Request for Proposals process. When NASA awarded Rockwell the contract, the mock-up was kept on site and became the hands-on model for much of the shuttle’s design. Each time a new instrument was built, it was placed into the mostly plastic and wood panels to make sure it would fit properly with the existing structure. Model payloads were fitted in the cargo bay; it even has an aluminum (and non-functioning) Canadarm. The mock-up only has one wing because, of course, two would be redundant for a bird that wasn’t flying anywhere. Over the decades, this artifact lived the history of the space shuttle’s evolution.

The building where the shuttle sits now has an even longer aerospace history. The original hangars in Downey, just outside of Los Angeles, were where North American Aviation developed the P-51 Mustang and the XB-70 supersonic bomber. Later, when the company became North American Rockwell, they built the Apollo command module there. Boeing took over the facility during the shuttle years, and held the aerospace factory until 1999, when the Downey plant was closed. The next year, the city purchased the shuttle mock-up from NASA, and eventually sold the buildings and airfields to the Industrial Realty Group, which leased it to a film studio (which then built a six million-gallon fake lake on the property). IRG agreed to keep housing the shuttle, but it would have to be moved out of the way of the cameras.

The city of Downey enlisted a conservation company to undertake the relocation project. The mock-up was carefully disassembled, during which time it was discovered that it wasn’t just used for instrumentation upgrades during the shuttle fleet’s lifetime, but was also used to work out changes in the original design. From a report by Griswold Conservation Associates:

Evidence of previous configurations of the mock-up was revealed upon separation of the wing from the fuselage. Black and white paint configurations and other markings made with adhered striping tape suggested an earlier configuration, seen in an early photograph. Further research showed that the meeting point of the OMS system housings flanking the vertical stabilizer with the back end of the cargo bay door reflected an earlier version, later changed by NASA.

Fast forward another decade, and the property is changing hands yet again. The studio has closed, and because IRG plans to build commercial developments on the property, they’re insisting that the city finally take possession of the shuttle. The Downey City Council will meet tonight to finalize those plans, (according to a local paper, The Downey Beat), which includes relocating the shuttle to a storage facility at a nearby parking lot — also owned by IRG, which will lease the space for $1. Between $100,000 from IRG and a federal community development grant, the city wouldn’t have to cough up much to house the shuttle, at least in the first year.  The Beat reports that IRG will lease the new site to the city for two years, and then the piece of aerospace history is going to need yet another home.

Where will it go then? The city of Downey could build a permanent structure for the shuttle and, since the mock-up isn’t a precious white-glove-only artifact like the three space-traveling orbiters, it could allow visitors to crawl around inside — which might make it worth visiting over its soon-to-be-neighbor Endeavour. Or they could probably make a bundle by offering it up to cities like Dayton, which desperately wanted an orbiter, but lost out in the competition.

What say you, Downey? What’s to become of this piece of American space history?

One of the Apollo program's iconic images: Buzz Aldrin standing on the Moon. Image courtesy Bonhams.

This well-known image of Buzz Aldrin, taken on July 20, 1969 by Neil Armstrong, went for $5,250. The 16 x 20 inch photograph was signed and dated by Aldrin, the Apollo 11 lunar module pilot and second human to set foot on the moon.

When Charles Lindbergh landed his Spirit of St. Louis at Le Bourget, completing the world’s first nonstop solo flight across the Atlantic, the aircraft’s fuselage fabric was badly torn by souvenir-hunters. “I could feel the Spirit of St. Louis tremble with the pressure of the crowd,” Lindbergh would later write. “I heard the crack of wood behind me when someone leaned too heavily against a fairing strip. Then a second strip snapped, and a third, and there was the sound of tearing fabric…. It was essential to get a guard stationed around my plane before more damage was done.” This 4 x 5 inch piece of fabric, below—which went for $2,000—is believed to be from that historic day.

Fragment of silver-coated textile with a black-and-white photograph of Louis Bleriot congratulating Charles Lindbergh on his transatlantic flight. Image courtesy Bonhams.

This 1964, 250-page Project Gemini manual—signed by Buzz Aldrin, Gordon Cooper, Gene Cernan, Richard Gordon, Wally Schirra, Dave Scott, and Tom Stafford—was issued to both astronauts and support personnel. The manual, which includes fold-out schematics and diagrams, went for $9,375.

This 1964 copy of a Project Gemini familiarization manual went for $9,375. Image courtesy Bonhams.

Looking for something a little larger? How about a nearly 8-foot-tall prototype lunar flagpole? Bonhams’ catalog notes, “About 3 months before Apollo 11, [director] Robert Giruth asked [the Manned Spacecraft Center's] Technical Services Division to design a flagpole that could support the U.S. flag in an environment with no atmosphere. It had to be lightweight, compact, and easily assembled by astronauts wearing pressurized space suits.

The prototype of the flag and staff placed on the Moon by the Apollo 11 crew fetched $43,750. Image courtesy Bonhams.

The team came up with a flagpole very similar to the present example. The Apollo 11 flagpole was attached to the left-hand side of [the lunar module] Eagle’s ladder, and was protected from the heat of Eagle’s descent engines by a special heatproof shield. [Buzz] Aldrin has commented [in Apollo Expeditions to the Moon], ‘It took both of us to set it up and it was nearly a disaster…. As hard as we tried, the telescope wouldn’t fully extend. Thus the flag which should have been flat, had its own unique permanent wave. Then to our dismay the staff of the pole wouldn’t go far enough into the lunar surface to support itself in an upright position. After much struggling we finally coaxed it to remain upright, but in a most precarious position. I dreaded the possibility of the American flag collapsing into the lunar dust in front of the television camera.’”

A steel surplus petal, identical to the four on Luna 9, sold for $4,000. Image courtesy Bonhams.

In 1966, the Soviets achieved the first soft landing on the Moon with their unmanned spacecraft Luna 9, which was also the first spacecraft to transmit images from the lunar surface. After the spacecraft landed, four petals that covered the top half of the vessel opened outward, helping to stabilize the craft on the Moon’s surface. One surplus petal, identical to the four on Luna 9, sold at auction for $4,000.

One of the most beautiful items at the auction was this lunar planning chart, signed by a member of each Apollo lunar landing crew. The chart, which indicates every Apollo lunar landing site, also includes written notes by the astronauts about their various flights. “A dream of mankind becomes true!” writes Buzz Aldrin. The 45 x 42 inch chart sold at auction for $62,500.

A lunar planning chart—signed by a member of each Apollo lunar landing crew—sold for $62,500. Image courtesy Bonhams.

The Saturn V rocket was moved outside the Vehicle Assembly Building for the U.S. Bicentennial celebrations. Photo: NASA / Kennedy Space Center

When the Apollo program ended in 1972, one lonely Saturn V was left at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The never-was Apollo 18 rocket was dismantled into stages, then reassembled in front of the Vehicle Assembly Building in 1975 as part of the U.S. Bicentennial celebrations the following year. And there it continued to sit for two decades, rotting in the Florida humidity. In 1996, the Smithsonian teamed up with NASA to restore the Saturn V and give it a new home, protected from the elements, with a full educational experience for Kennedy Space Center visitors.

But this wasn’t as simple as it was with the newly built rocket in the 70s. “The Saturn rocket was pocked with gaping tears, rusted rivets, frayed wire, and fungi and other plant growths,” writes Andrew R. Thomas and Paul N. Thomarios in their new book, The Final Journey of the Saturn V. And Thomarios would know: he’s the president of The Apostolos Group, the team that was hired to do the rocket restoration.

Thomarios shares his firsthand knowledge of the grueling process to clean, repair, and move the five-stage vehicle into its new museum-quality building. It’s depressing to read the state the Saturn V had been left in for so long:

The rocket parts were covered with mildew, chewing gum, bird feces, and other items that defied description, but stuck to the rocket’s exterior. The gunk was so think that Nick Bolea, a long time Thomarios employee, decided to get on his employer’s good side by using a power-washer to write “Thomarios” in five-foot-high letters… [The employees] stopped work one day because a mysterious purple runoff was oozing out of the rocket. A hazardous material team was summoned to investigate. After some analysis, the team discovered the material wasn’t dangerous after all, but was fruit juice from berries birds had stored in the rocket’s interior.

And that’s not including the difficulties in working with the rocket itself, even without the grimy handprint of Mother Nature: the asbestos in the heat panels, the detailed documentation required by the Smithsonian, the rigorous safety standards implemented by a post-Challenger NASA.

This largely untold story seems like a fascinating focus for a book. It’s too bad The Final Journey only really gets to it in the last chapter, and not in the kind of detail you’d expect for, you know, a book. The first hundred pages of the 120-page book are a brief summary of the space program, from President Kennedy’s 1961 moon speech through Apollo — presumably to explain to the reader why this massive restoration was embarked on, though it seems unnecessary for anyone who would pick up a book with “Saturn V” in the title. There are 24 pages of color photos, many provided by Thomarios and not seen elsewhere, from the restoration, which are worth seeing. A space program follower won’t get much more from it, unfortunately, but The Final Journey would be a nice read for the young burgeoning space fan.

What's underneath? And what's that red stuff? Thera Macula, as seen by the Galileo spacecraft.(NASA/JPL/University of Arizona)

The news that Russian scientists have finally drilled through the thick ice covering Antarctica’s mysterious Lake Vostok got me thinking, naturally, of Europa. Biologists hope to find previously unknown forms of life in Vostok, whose waters have effectively been sealed off from the outside world for eons. So, too, Jupiter’s moon might someday yield clues about — or even our first glimpses of — life beyond Earth. Europa is one of the first places to go if you’re searching for aliens, since it also has an ice-capped ocean.

Unfortunately, NASA’s planetary program is broke.

More about that in a minute. First, though, what could we do if we had the money? A team at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory has come up with a concept for a Europa Lander that could be launched as soon as 2021. There are other, competing Europa concepts — an orbiter and a multiple flyby mission — but the lander is to me (forgive my childishness) the coolest. And, as JPL’s Dave Senske told NASA’s Outer Planets Assessment Group yesterday, it would be the “most definitive way to assess what’s on the surface.”

The team envisions a six-legged spacecraft weighing about 100 pounds, which could last on Europa for about a month (Jupiter’s intense radiation limits the lifetime). Equipped with cameras, spectrometers, and a seismometer, the lander would drill or jackhammer a few inches into the ground to collect samples from below the radiation-contaminated zone. One likely landing site, called Thera Macula (above), is streaked with intriguing reddish material that may indicate the presence of organics. There’s reason to suspect that pockets of liquid water exist less than two miles below the surface at Thera Macula. Reaching those underground lakes might be a job for some future Europa cryobot, but not this first lander.

Nobody knows how rough the landing site would be. Galileo and Voyager photos aren’t detailed enough to answer the question, and according to some thinking, Europa’s icy surface could be as rugged as Death Valley’s “Devil’s Golf Course” (pictured below), which poses an obvious risk to a legged lander. Potential sites would have to be scouted from orbit during the month before landing, using a camera similar to the HiRISE now orbiting Mars.

Rough landing zone. (Photo of the "Devil's Golf Course" by Lluís Ribes Portillo)

The JPL team tried very hard to design a mission using technology that’s already, or almost already, in hand. True, nobody’s ever done a precision landing on another planet using LIDAR for last-minute hazard avoidance. But as study team members pointed out at the OPAG meeting, such technology has been in development for more than a decade. They think it’s doable. Which is exciting.

Now the bad news. The Europa Lander would cost as much as $3.5 billion, not counting launch. And NASA has no money for such ambition. The agency’s planetary exploration budget has just been slashed, partly a victim of its own excesses. The Mars program has been among the biggest offenders of late, but advocates of missions to the outer planets have proven little better at bringing down costs. NASA’s top science official, John Grunsfeld, was briefed about the new Europa concepts yesterday, and reportedly liked what he heard. The orbiter and flyby estimates both came in under $2 billion, which is better than previous Europa concepts. Still, Grunsfeld could only quip to the JPL briefers, “Now we just need $2 billion.”

Until something changes, then, we’ll have to settle for Lake Vostok, or science fiction — like this upcoming film, The Europa Report, which takes place, presumably, in some distant, less economically pinched future.

Every ounce is counted on the Space Station: Before boarding the space shuttle Discovery, "Buzz went through incredible training to lose some weight," joked John Lasseter, Pixar's chief creative officer. Photograph courtesy NASA.

When John Lasseter, Pixar’s Chief Creative Officer, learned that a Buzz Lightyear action figure from the movie Toy Story was going to the International Space Station, “I thought I’d died and gone to heaven,” he said.

Lasseter was at the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum today for the formal ceremony presenting the action figure (which spent 15 months in orbit) to the Museum. “I started crying when Discovery connected to the International Space Station,” said Lasseter. “There’s a tube that the astronauts go through, to go from the shuttle into the space station, and they didn’t carry Buzz. They opened his wings, they put his arms out, and Buzz Lightyear flew, in space, himself, up that tube, into the International Space Station. I’ve got chills right now thinking about it.”

Lasseter remembers watching the televised Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo missions as a child. “They were my heroes,” he explains. So years later, when a script called for a flashy toy to replace a child’s favorite—Woody the cowboy—”I said we have to have the toy be the coolest one you could imagine. The origin of Buzz, in every way, comes from NASA,” said Lasseter.

Margaret Weitekamp, a curator in the Museum’s Space History Division, noted that the Pixar/NASA donation includes videos and educational materials produced by Disney and Pixar to inspire children to get excited about science and technology. Later in the summer, Pixar’s Mission Launch videos will help educate visitors about the concepts of rendezvous, reentry, and space science. And Buzz Lightyear will have a place of honor in the mockup of the space shuttle’s crew cabin in the Museum’s Moving Beyond Earth gallery.

John Lasseter, chief creative officer at Pixar; Lori Garver, NASA deputy administrator; and Museum director Jack Dailey hold Buzz Lightyear, the Museum's newest acquisition. Photograph courtesy Mark Avino/NASM.

After the ceremony, Lasseter and Weitekamp took questions from the audience. “If Buzz was actually alive,” asked a young visitor from West Virginia, “what would those three buttons [on his chest] be for?” Lasseter explained they were Buzz’s communicator and voice box: “When he’s on location in the Gamma quadrant of Sector 3, and he’s out there as a space ranger, those buttons work different kinds of communication back to Star Command.”

When a visitor wondered where Buzz spent his time between flying on the shuttle and being accepted into the Smithsonian’s collections, Lasseter replied, “He was at Walt Disney World, Florida, riding rides.”

“Today is, without question, one of the greatest days of my life,” said Lasseter, of the donation.

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.