AirSpaceMag.com

We’ve been loving these new time-lapse views from the International Space Station ever since the ISS crew started posting them last summer.

Now artists like Berlin-based Michael König have started improving and remixing the originals. Man, is this pretty.

Most of you know about the Google Lunar X Prize already: the race for “the first privately funded team to safely land a robot on the surface of the Moon, have that robot travel 500 meters over the lunar surface, and send video, images and data back to the Earth.”  Google is offering up $30 million in prizes to the 26 teams from around the world who joined the competition by the December 2010 application deadline.

In their efforts to “ignite a new era of lunar exploration,” GLXP wants more than just to send hardware to the moon. Along the way the teams must record their work and reach out through blogs and social media so that the rest of us (including the passionate but less engineering-inclined) can follow their progress. According to the rules, each team must write one blog post a week and post 45 minutes of video each quarter; Facebook and Twitter are not required, but many of the teams have incorporated them as well.

Amanda Stiles, GLXP’s Online Community and Google Liaison, says this about the online outreach requirement:

We hope that by encouraging the teams to tell their stories, the public will have the opportunity to get to know the personalities of the people involved with the competition and understand their motivations for pursuing the prize. These teams are pushing boundaries and doing great things in many arenas — technical, political, educational, and business, to name a few — all around the world, and we hope to showcase those efforts. And ultimately, when the winning teams eventually claim the prize purses then there will be well-documented stories of their trials, tribulations, and successes along the way.

GLXP recently redesigned their website so that it focuses more on these outreach efforts, with a streaming feed of all the competitors’ updates and pages for each team. Naturally, some of the output is better than others; many of the Twitter feeds don’t really seem to “live-tweet” the experience the way an observer might hope. Team Astrobotic Tech has one of the better Twitter feeds, with lots of interesting updates and links to pictures and video of their two Personal Exploration Rovers (PERs), Juno and Kosh.

Team Astrobotic Tech's Twitter update, featuring their GLXP rovers.

Here’s a particularly informative video from Team Italia describing their rover engineering.

Space exploration outreach group Evadot has been keeping a running scorecard for each section of the GLXP competition, which puts team Part-Time Scientists in the lead for social outreach, though we’re not sure if that’s for strictly following the quantity requirements or if it takes into account quality, as well.

The online outreach is just one part of an obviously much bigger and more difficult challenge. But as Evadot notes, GLXP “is NOT just a simple race to the moon. The point is the change it can bring through the competition. It’s not the race, it’s what happens because of the race.” And the hope is that this kind of outreach will, as Stiles puts it, ”encourage teams to be seen as modern-day space heroes,” inspiring not just by reaching a goal, but by bringing us all along for the ride.

Ahoy there, Matey! Lately it seems that everywhere you turn, there’s a pirate. There are pirate-themed children’s books: Do Pirates Take Baths? and Pirates Don’t Change Diapers (honey, they don’t even change socks). There’s “International Talk Like a Pirate Day” on September 19, founded by Cap’n Slappy and Ol’ Chumbucket. Your car can sport a pirate bumper sticker (“Grog is my Co-pilot”) and your dog can wear a pirate outfit. So it was only a matter of time before NASA began sending pirates to the International Space Station.

Actually, the idea was the brainchild of Sean Collins, the graphics technical lead at NASA’s Johnson Space Center. We profiled Collins in July, for his work with the astronaut unofficial crew posters. NASA crews customarily take a series of photographs near the end of their pre-mission training, all shot on the same day, and the last 15 minutes of the photo shoot are set aside for what has come to be known as a “fun photo,” usually a parody of a popular movie. When we last spoke to Collins, he already had the idea for Expedition 30′s unofficial crew poster: He wanted to use the 2011 film Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides, and title the parody “Pilots Over the Caribbean.” (Click here for a high-res version.)

While Captain Jack Sparrow (Johnny Depp) has an “X” tattooed on his cheek, Expedition 30 commander Dan Burbank has a small International Space Station tattoo. And the bone dangling from Sparrow’s head scarf has been replaced with a Soyuz rocket. The roman numerals for 30 have been inserted throughout the poster: across Burbank’s eyes, wrapped around his dreadlock, tattooed across European astronaut André Kuipers’ chest and arm, and pinned to Russian cosmonaut Oleg Kononenko’s hat.

From left to right: Cosmonauts Oleg Kononenko and Anatoly Ivanishin, astronaut Dan Burbank, cosmonaut Anton Shkaplerov, ESA astronaut André Kuipers, and astronaut Don Pettit.

Courtesy Sean Collins, Devin Boldt, Robert Markowitz, and NASA.

Virgil Tracy (foreground) flanked by bro Gordon (orange sash), and engineer "Brains" (who designs the team's equipment).

Who can forget billionaire ex-spaceman Jeff Tracy and his five sons (Scott, Virgil, Alan, Gordon, and John), each named after a Mercury astronaut? Remember how they—through their organization (International Rescue)—um…rescued people…internationally? Ok, so they were puppets. Deal with it, people!

The Royal Air Force Museum (London) invites fans of the 1960s television show Thunderbirds to revisit their inner child (as well as the museum) on May 14 and “play with giant sized versions of classic children’s games whilst listening to music of the 60s and 70s.” The museum will also have on display original models, and will air episodes from Thunderbirds and Captain Scarlet in the museum’s cinema. Sylvia Anderson, the voice of Lady Penelope and the co-creator of the show, will discuss her career, the actors she worked with, and the inspiration behind the puppets. (Anderson and her husband are the creative team also responsible for Space: 1999, starring the wooden Barbara Bain and the over-the-top Martin Landau.)

Screenshot of Thunderbird 2 copyright Carlton International Media Limited.

Our marionette heroes use a variety of air- and spacecraft to carry out their missions. Thunderbird 2 (usually piloted by son Virgil Tracy, he of the intimidating eyebrows, above), is a large green VTOL aircraft used in most of the team’s earth-based rescue missions. The big bird can fly anywhere in the world without refueling, and cruises along at 2,000 mph, but can achieve 5,000 mph when needed. Amazingly, it is not the team’s fastest mode of transport. That honor goes to Thunderbird 1 (typically piloted by Scott Tracy), a hypersonic rocket that can travel 15,000 mph, or Mach 22.6. You’d think that a rocket capable of that speed would have extremely complex controls, but no. Thunderbird 1 is controlled by a mere two control levers. Life is so easy when you’re a puppet!

Screenshot of Thunderbird 1 copyright Carlton International Media Limited.

Late in 2014, a radically different type of rocket propulsion is set to show up on the International Space station for a period of experimentation.

The technology is called the Variable Specific Impulse Magnetoplasma Rocket (VASIMR). It’s a rocket engine that uses electricity to ionize a gas such as argon, xenon, or hydrogen. Ionizing means that an electron gets knocked off of each atom in the gas, creating a plasma, which then gets energized in another section of the engine by radio wave antennas. This superheats the plasma until it is 200 times hotter than the surface of the sun. The plasma shoots out the back of the rocket through a system of magnets that align it properly to create highly efficient thrust. Read more about it here.

While not able to provide the explosive power of a chemical rocket for getting loads off the launch pad, VASIMR can create a steady stream of thrust for days or weeks and continually accelerate a spaceship away from Earth. It still looks plenty explosive in this 2009 max-power test:

The company that created it, Ad Astra, was founded by 7-time space shuttle astronaut Franklin Chang Díaz. He claims that VASIMR could get astronauts to Mars in 39 days instead of the six-to-nine months needed with chemical rockets. Ad Astra is located in Webster, Texas, not far from NASA’s Johnson Space Center. A VASIMR rocket on the ISS would have many uses, one of which would be to reboost the station to higher altitudes. With the looming retirement of the space shuttle, which used to handle that job, NASA likes the idea. Ad Astra claims that a VASIMR rocket could do this work for about 1/10th the current cost of $210 million a year. Other tasks that VASIMR could eventually handle include propulsion to enable satellite refueling, repair, and disposal, payload delivery to the moon, Earth departure stages for deep space probes, and various uses as a space tug for future vehicles in Earth orbit or beyond.

So how’s the VASIMR going to get up there? Chang Díaz writes to us that he never intended for it to actually go to the station on the shuttle. “I knew that program would soon end,” he says. “We always planned to go on one of the CRS [NASA's Commercial Resupply Services] vehicles, Falcon or Taurus II. We are still on that plan and do not have to down select the carrier until next year, so we are carefully watching the evolution of the CRS program.” When the engine finally gets there, it will be the culmination of literally decades of work.

Chang Díaz is excited about the outlook for VASIMR. In March he signed his fourth support agreement with NASA to collaborate on research, analysis and development tasks on space-based cryogenic magnetic operations and electric propulsion systems. In particular, the support agreement means that Ad Astra will provide NASA with an assessment of VASIMR’s high-power, low-thrust trajectories over a number of mission scenarios ranging from near Earth to deep space, while NASA will support Ad Astra’s efforts to mature the design of their 200-kilowatt VF-200 demonstration engine planned for the ISS, including use of specialized NASA facilities and equipment for the testing.

Chang Díaz emailed us from the country of his birth, Costa Rica, where Ad Astra has a second location, and said he was headed to Europe. “There is a strong current of interest in VASIMR developing in the old world as well, mainly Germany and Italy,” he says.

Here’s a neat video of a VASIMR payload delivery to the moon, which shows the advantages of the technology over traditional, chemical rockets.