It is amazing how quickly this has become routine.
Category: Space
Designing the LEGO Shuttle Discovery
This morning, a new LEGO space shuttle went on sale:
This model honors STS-31, the flight that put the Hubble Space Telescope into orbit for the very first time. I love the way the LEGO Hubble looks.
collectSPACE interviewed LEGO designer Milan Madge, who led the project that has resulted in my latest LEGO purchase. It’s a great read, but this bit jumped out at me in particular:
The thing that really inspired that scale was the Hubble Space Telescope and the STS-31 mission because normally, when we do a space shuttle, the payload bay is kind of, well, I don’t want to say an afterthought, but it’s often smaller than it should be because of the constraints of working with LEGO bricks.
Mars Perseverance Rover Powered by PowerPC 750 ⇢
Joanna Nelius at Gizmodo, writing about the CPU at the heart of NASA’s newest rover:
The PowerPC 750 was a single-core, 233MHz processor, and compared to the multi-core, 5.0GHz-plus frequencies modern consumer chips can achieve, 233MHz is incredibly slow. But the 750 was the first to incorporate dynamic branch prediction, which is still used in modern processors today. Basically, the CPU architecture is making an educated guess on what instructions the CPU is going to process as a way to improve efficiency. The more information that’s processed, the better the chip gets at predicting what it needs to do next.
NASA Releases Video of Perseverance Landing ⇢
Holy moly.
Inspiration4’s ‘Hope’ Crew Member Announced ⇢
Tom Charlier, writing for St. Jude, about just-named crew member Hayley Arceneaux:
Rocketing into space may be one of the few adventures totally new to Hayley. She’s packed a veritable lifetime’s worth of travel and experience into her 29 years. She’s studied in Spain, worked mission trips in Nicaragua and Peru, and checked off five continents on her travel to-do list. And she’s done it all with a titanium prosthesis in one leg — legacy of treatment for bone cancer nearly 20 years ago at St. Jude.
SpaceX Planning to Fly First All-Civilian Mission This Year; Two Seats Donated to St. Jude Backers ⇢
Darrell Etherington, writing at TechCrunch:
SpaceX has announced its first all-civilian private spaceflight mission, a high-priced galactic tourism launch that it hopes to fly by the fourth quarter of 2021. The mission, which will use SpaceX’s Dragon crew spacecraft and its Falcon 9 rocket, will include Shift4 Payments CEO Jared Isaacman, who is CEO of Shift4 Payments, as well as three crew members to be selected and donated by Isaacman, his company and St Jude’s Children Research Hospital. That’s one way to drive product adoption.
The Moon Rock in Biden’s Office ⇢
Every president gets to change the decor of the Oval Office, allowing them to personalize and put their own stamp on the room. I found it fascinating that apparently, President Biden requested the loan of a moon rock from NASA to put on display in the Oval Office.
According to NASA, this moon rock was collected on NASA’s last crewed voyage to the Moon, Apollo 17. This mission launched on December 7, 1972, and was crewed by Gene Cernan, Jack Schmitt, and Ronald Evans (who remained in the command module orbiting the Moon while the other two astronauts touched down on the surface). The sample was collected in the Taurus-Littrow Valley and is 3.9 billion years old.
Operating Systems ... In Spaaaaaaaace ⇢
The technology used aboard most spacecraft always has to be very robust to survive the harsh environment beyond our atmosphere, but often the software and hardware used are rather basic and usually fairly old by the time a launch takes place.
Part of the reason why is that spacecraft take years to develop, but reliability is the biggest reason. If something goes bad on a spacecraft that can’t be fixed remotely, the mission is put into jeopardy.
Trump Campaign Removes Video Featuring NASA Astronauts and Families ⇢
Marcia Smith at Space Policy Online:
The Trump Campaign took down an ad today that included footage from the launch of Crew Dragon on Saturday and touting what it claimed was the President’s role in the program. It included video of the two NASA astronauts, both civil servants, as well as their wives and young children waving goodbye. One of the spouses, a former NASA astronaut, strongly objected to use of the video of her and her son for “political propaganda.”
NASA, SpaceX Successfully Launch Astronauts from U.S. Soil Since Shuttle Program Ended in 2011 ⇢
After nearly two decades of effort, Elon Musk’s aerospace company, SpaceX, successfully launched its first two people into orbit, ushering in a new age of human spaceflight in the United States. The flight marked the first time astronauts have launched into orbit from American soil in nearly a decade, and SpaceX is now the first company to send passengers to orbit on a privately made vehicle.
SpaceX’s Starship Test Vehicle Explodes in Texas ⇢
SpaceX had just conducted yet another static fire test of the Raptor engine in its Starship SN4 prototype launch vehicle on Friday when the test vehicle exploded on the test stand in Boca Chica, Texas. This was the fourth static fire test of this engine on this prototype, so it’s unclear what went wrong vs. other static fire attempts.
This was a test in the development of Starship, a new spacecraft that SpaceX has been developing in Boca Chica. Eventually, the company hopes to use it to replace its Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy rocket, but Starship is still very early in its development phase, whereas those vehicles are flight-proven, multiple times over.
NASA Getting Its Worm On ⇢
The original NASA insignia is one of the most powerful symbols in the world. A bold, patriotic red chevron wing piercing a blue sphere, representing a planet, with white stars, and an orbiting spacecraft. Today, we know it as “the meatball.” However, with 1970’s technology, it was a difficult icon to reproduce, print, and many people considered it a complicated metaphor in what was considered, then, a modern aerospace era.