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  Field ExperienceMay 05, 2011 3:13 AM PDT | url
 
Added 1 new A* page:An astronomy snippet I've been skipping over for a week or so, but hopefully it's still valid--since, according to the article on space.com, six planets will be aligned in the dawn sky for another week or so--and if you time it right, you can maybe get the Moon in there, too. Hm and the Earth would make the seventh planet, since you'll see that one at the same time if everything's close enough to the horizon as seen through your binoculars or telescope--neither of which I have. Plus I'm not much for getting up in the morning--darn these early rising planets!
 
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This article on bigthink.com led me over to Wikipedia's asteroid mining page, which says that even a "relatively small" asteroid of 1 mile (1.6 km) in diameter could contain more than $20 trillion worth of metals--and that's in 1997 dollars, since that's when John Lewis published his book "Mining the Sky: Untold Riches from the Asteroids, Comets, and Planets" which apparently added things up.
 
That's...a lotta dough. And good confirmation for A*! I've always figured a large part of the economy in this society at the galactic core was based on mining, but I was always somewhat uneasy, thinking it might cost more to get to, extract, and move the stuff than the stuff would end up being worth...but with dollar amounts like $20 trillion for a smallish asteroid being flung about, I'm thinking it's probably going to be a pretty profitable industry after all. Yay for story validation! :D
 
And wait, that's not all! Because according to a bit at the bottom of that Wikipedia article, a 1980 NASA publication called Advanced Automation for Space Missions discussed the possibility of automated, self-replicating lunar mining stations. Well, I didn't think of the self-replicating part, but remember that just eight pages ago, Selenis revealed that the job she's applying for (undercover, of course) at Andiran Robotics has to do with "robotics in autonomous long-range mining operations." Sweet! So I thought of that only over thirty years after NASA thought of it in a much more profound way. ;)
 
Here's a funky concept image of asteroid mining that NASA made:
Image
image by NASA (source)
 
It does make me wonder if self-replicating robots wouldn't get out of hand, though. I mean, there certainly haven't been any Hollywood movie plots along those lines or anything. >_> And if you can't trust writers for popular entertainment, who *CAN* you trust? So I think in A* they're wise to that, and don't do the self-replicating bit with their robots. :P
 
Oh! But that reminds me that self-replication--or large-scale maintenance and repair, anyway--forms the basis of something else very important to the plot in A*...which we'll get to eventually. Mm-hm! So it's good to know that smart people like NASA approve of such things, and I can safely hit it with my (very generous) "hard sci-fi" stamp of self-approval.
 
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The Wikipedia source page for that image above had a link to The Space Review, which appears to be a site where articles about space stuff are written--sort of like some of my news blog things here, only by people who actually know what they're talking about! For instance, their latest article is a history of the Redstone rocket, just in time for (according to the article) this week's 50th anniversary of the first American in space: a Redstone rocket pushed the Mercury capsule "Freedom 7" into Earth orbit with Alan Shepard aboard, a month after Yuri Gagarin's landmark flight for the Soviet Union.
 
And that isn't the last time the Americans and their rockets rushed for parity after the Soviets did something cool in space. For instance, (I got this from Wikipedia, not The Space Review), the US tried to launch their own satellite, the Navy's Vanguard TV3, on December 6, 1957--rushing to get it going several months after the USSR had shocked the Americans--who, typically, thought they were number 1--by launching Sputnik 1, the first man-made satellite. Well, the Vanguard rocket carrying the American answer to Sputnik got off the ground--four feet off the ground--before falling back and exploding rather spectacularly on the launch pad:
 
Image
image by US Navy (source)
 
The poor thing was called nasty names in the US press: "kaputnik," "flopnik," "puffnik," and "stayputnik." Ouch!
 
So, on to round 2. The Space Review article mentions that just five days after the Soviets launched Sputnik 2--the first spacecraft to carry a living animal--the doomed dog Laika--on October 4, 1957, Wernher von Braun and his Army spaceflight team were given approval to attempt another satellite launch, and they succeed on January 31st, 1958, with the Explorer 1, kind of bailing out the Navy I suppose.
 
The Navy eventually succeeded, though (this is me from Wikipedia again), launching the Vanguard 1 on March 17th of that same year. As satellites go, it was a pitifully dinky, ugly thing, just six inches (16 cm) in diameter (contemporary Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev called it "the grapefruit satellite" :P)
 
Image
image by NASA (source)
 
but it kind of had the last laugh: it's still in orbit--the oldest satellite still up there, in fact! And its orbit it expected to last for another 200 years before it falls down into the atmosphere--originally it was thought that it might last 2000 years, but part of its scientific purpose was to test atmospheric drag at high orbits, and indeed it turned out that the atmosphere pulled on it more than expected; also, radiation pressure will apparently have played a role in shortening its life span. Still, it and two other Project Vanguard satellites are still orbiting, and have provided a great set of data for studying atmospheric drag. Vanguard 1 was also the first solar-powered satellite, maintaining a signal until 1964.
 
The other two Navy Vanguards (there were 11 Vanguard launch attempts, from 1957-59; only these three succeeded) that are still sailing around up there above our heads are 1959's Vanguard 2 and Vanguard 3; these two were bigger--20 inches (50 cm) in diameter, but they look a lot cooler; here are some mockups:
 
Vanguard 2 (mockup)
Image
image by NASA (source)
 
Vanguard 3 (mockup)
Image
image by NASA (source)
 
So anyway, back to that Space Review article and the Redstone rocket line: the article says that the first test with the to-be-manned Mercury capsule design, MR-1, only got about 10 cm off the launch pad before the engines cut out; in this case, though, the rocket just settled back to the pad without exploding--BUT the launch escape system (remember how I mentioned last week that all manned US spacecraft have had launch escape systems, EXCEPT for the Space Shuttle?) on the Mercury capsule activated, shooting the escape rocket off--but leaving the capsule behind! Oops.
 
This sounded crazy so I had to go to Wikipedia and look up more info. Here's a photo to set the scene; the Redstone's engines have shut down and the rocket is settling back onto the pad, but you can see the escape rocket--that thingy way up at the tip of the nose--firing its thrusters to escape:
 
Image
image by NASA (source)
 
What's supposed to happen is that the small emergency rocket at the top there fires, pulling the manned Mercury capsule and its occupant away from the main Redstone rocket, then deploying parachutes to settle the capsule safely back to Earth. That's what was *supposed* to happen; what actually happened on this first test flight was that when the escape rocket tried to carry off the Mercury capsule, sensors on the capsule detected 1 g of acceleration (normal Earth gravity!), and refused to detach, since it was only supposed to detach when the main rocket was nearly done firing and thus at lower-than-1-g acceleration. So the escape rocket just launched itself off the tip of the Redstone, landing 400 yards away. Meanwhile, the capsule, still sitting on top of the Redstone on the launch pad, deployed its drogue, main, and reserve parachutes.
 
So there was the Redstone: stuck on the pad, escape-rocket-free-Mercury capsule sitting on it, draped in three parachutes, with its retrorockets and self-destruct system still live--this was dangerous, particularly since high winds could have caused the parachutes to act as sails, dragging the rocket and all its fuel over. Fortunately, that didn't happen, and by the next day, the batteries on the Redstone and the Mercury capsule had depleted, and its liquid oxygen fuel had boiled off, so it could be taken down safely.
 
And then there was Mercury-Redstone 2 on January 31st, 1961, a 16.5-minute suborbital flight carrying Ham the Chimp; here he is in his "couch spacesuit," "shaking hands" with the commander of the recovery vessel after his flight:
 
Image
image by NASA (source)
 
Ham, or "Number 65" as he was known until he became a successful space hero, had been trained to throw a lever after seeing a flashing blue light: if he didn't throw the lever within five seconds of the light, he got an electric shock to the soles of his feet; but if he did it fast enough, he got a banana pellet, whatever that is. And for his 16.5 minutes of flight, including 6.6 minutes of weightlessness as the rocket arced high through the sky, he threw levers like a champ: 50 times, in all. I don't think they did anything.
 
But the flight outside of Ham's control actually had a lot of problems. It went up at too steep an angle--one degree too steep--which meant that it ran out of fuel too soon; this caused the escape rocket to fire, giving the Ham-carrying Mercury capsule even more acceleration; and the retrorockets were taken away with the abort, so they couldn't be used to slow the capsule down. "A speed of 5,857 mph (9,426 km/h) was reached instead of the 4,400 mph (7,081 km/h) planned," Ham was subjected to an extra 3 g of acceleration on reentry (14.7 g total) and the capsule overshot its mark by 48 miles. Not only that, but the capsule had lost most of its pressure during the flight--fortunately, Ham was safe in his couch spacesuit.
 
The capsule came down in the ocean off Florida about 60 miles from away from the rescue craft, and by the time the rescue choppers got to it, it was on its side, sinking: the beryllium heat shield had been pushed into the titanium capsule bulkhead, puncturing it in two places. But they fished it out in time to save Ham, who was rewarded with that handshake, plus an apple and half an orange for his adventure.
 
I wonder if he considered that a fair shake--he'd also gotten a bruised nose from the flight. At any rate, I was glad in reading his story that he actually survived; many animals in space programs were not so fortunate, although the first animals sent into space--American fruit flies in 1947--lived. Monkeys seemed to have worse luck; the first monkey in space, the American Albert II, seen launching in his V2 rocket here
 
Image
image by US Government (source)
 
died on impact in 1949, his parachute having failed to deploy (that's more than Space Shuttle astronauts have, I suppose)--at least he'd got up to 83 miles high; Albert I only got to half that altitude.
 
...and apparently didn't live either, because the Wikipedia article notes that space monkeys didn't actually survive their missions until ten years later: in 1959, Rhesus monkey Able and squirrel monkey Baker survived a 360 mile altitude (for comparison, the International Space Station orbits just below 200 miles--so the monkeys got way up there), 16 minute rocket flight that subjected them to nine minutes of weightlessness, acceleration forces of 38 g (yikes), and a top speed of about 10,000 miles per hours. But Able died four days later from a reaction to anesthesia during surgery to remove an infected electrode.
 
Tough life being a space pioneer. It was the Space Race and the Cold War though, and I guess in the balance of things it looked like having bragging rights over The Enemy was worth more than the lives of however many dozens or hundreds of monkeys, mice, dogs, frogs, tortoises, rats, cats, fish, worms, and spiders--not to mention some humans--were sacrificed.
 
(Oh, that animal list reminded me of another detail: upon Ham's death 17 years after his flight, in 1983 at age 26 (some US research chimps have lived like 50 years, so I don't know if Ham reached what you could call a ripe old age), his body was designated for research, and to get a nice clean skeleton, they sent it to the Smithsonian, where it was subjected to the museum's colony of carcass-eating Dermestid beetles. Ewwww.)
 
So, yeah, The Space Review! It seems like a good place to start reading about space stuff. :)
 
 
 
 
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