A Crummy Commercial

I still enjoy the serendipity of the internet, I was looking for a science fiction story from Galaxy magazine (The Discovery of Morniel Mathaway by William Tenn) but then started reading the next article which was a "behind the scenes" about the Disney TV program: Man in Space source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WFXza9RH7-E Again this was mentioned in Willy Ley's column in Galaxy magazine from October 1955 starting on page 61: https://archive.org/details/galaxymagazine-1955-10/page/n61/mode/2up Man and the Moon was the 2nd program in the TV series mentioned in the Ley article. source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S_N3EYMgya4 Mars and Beyond was the last program in the series mentioned by Ley. source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dk7lf2D848I   And of course since it's Disney this guy appears: still without pants. Anyway, the article and the three shows were very interesting to me.  Maybe rather than presenting an exact forecast of how things actually unfolde...

. https://arstechnica.com/science/2023/04/a-japanese-company-is-about-to-attempt-a-moon-landing/ Also, dealing with dust is hard: https://www.cnet.com/science/space/chinas-first-mars-rover-may-have-run-into-trouble-on-the-dusty-planet/ This has already been covered: https://wb9kzy.blogspot.com/2022/06/dust.html Best Regards, Chuck, WB9KZY http://wb9kzy.com/ham.htm

Yes I know this video is baloney, but higher grade baloney, the Mortadella of alien x Apollo videos :) source:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YpZKwbdbsJ4 Hecklefish is kinda the 21st century equivalent of Albert the Alley Cat (a puppet doing the weather on channel 6 in Milwaukee): source:  https://www.mpl.org/blog/now/milwaukee-s-menagerie-albert-the-alley-cat Best Regards, Chuck, WB9KZY http://wb9kzy.com/ham.htm                  

. . source:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OuDsX8atSUk This was a really neat video pairing the actual voice transmissions of Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and capcom: Charles Duke with an animated rendering of the Lunar Module Eagle landing on the Moon.  Even though I knew the ending the video gave me the chills ! One question: Neil and Buzz are standing in the Lunar Module but when they were in free fall were there stirrups or magnets on the soles of their boots to hold them in place ?  I've never thought of that before - in the command module about the only time they would stand would be before launch or after splashdown - otherwise they'd either be floating or strapped down. Shortly after the landing I bought a 45 RPM record of the audio from the Apollo 11 landing.  I remember hearing:   "4 forward . . .  4 forward, drifting to the right a little"   I also bought a photo of the Lunar Module Eagle on the moon from WTMJ-TV channel 4 in Milwaukee....

 Maybe it's because I was Moon crazy as a kid in the 1960s but Moonrise, Hernandez New Mexico was always my favorite Ansel Adams photo: source: https://blog.madame.lefigaro.fr/stehli/M2008_40_56.jpg There's even a wiki page about it, about a single photograph !  : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moonrise,_Hernandez,_New_Mexico I remember going to a photo exhibition as a young person, it was at the Riverview school on the Milwaukee river in Glendale, WI.  I think by then Riverview had closed and the Layton School of Art had moved in.  Anyway, the exhibition had a lot of photographs, the only two I remember now were Moonrise and also a pepper still life by Edward Weston: source: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/3b/Pepper_No._30.jpg I'm telling you folks, resist colorization:  black and white is elemental: just paper, silver and gelatin - no dyes or pigments required ! Best Regards, Chuck, WB9KZY http://wb9kzy.com/ham.htm

. Billions of dollars spent but the can with no spam came back A-OK on 2022-12-12.  Although some parts of the mission didn't work (some of the cubesat batteries may have aged out over the delays ?) or were weird (phantom breaker trips) the overall mission hit almost all of their goals ! Here is an overview and comment on Artemis 1 by Eric Berger at Ars Technica: https://arstechnica.com/science/2022/12/after-decades-of-false-starts-nasa-really-is-returning-to-the-moon-this-time/ And another article about the heat shield test and the skipping stone landing trajectory by Marina Koren in the Atlantic: https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2022/12/nasa-orion-spacecraft-returns-from-moon/672433/ I managed to see the last view seconds of the splashdown looking up at the parachutes and then boosh into the water. Now to wait until 2025 before the Artemis 2 mission which will be similar to this mission except with astronauts.  But when they do go back I bet we see lots of pictur...

 I thought that the pictures from Apollo 17 in this article by Eric Berger, Ars Technica were amazing: https://arstechnica.com/science/2022/12/fifty-years-later-remastered-images-reveal-apollo-17-in-stunning-clarity/   This one of Eugene Cernan taken by Harrison Schmitt was wonderful considering that the astronauts could only sorta guess how the picture would look: And the square format Hasselblad cameras from all the Apollo missions are still sitting there on the Moon, along with the rover and the gold foil covered bottom stage of the LM.  The flags are probably all bleached by the decades in the sun. Curious Droid did a video on the Apollo artifacts as they are now in the 21st century: He has also done other videos on Apollo including one on the Hasselblad cameras used: It will be so neat when Artemis III finally lands on the Moon, hopefully the first of many in the 21st century. Best Regards, Chuck, WB9KZY http://wb9kzy.com/ham.htm

  https://arstechnica.com/science/2022/11/orion-flies-far-beyond-the-moon-returns-an-instantly-iconic-photo/ Eric Berger at Ars Technica mentioned this photo of the Orion spacecraft - the payload of the Artemis 1 mission. way out   Since the Orion is in a pretty eccentric orbit around the moon it comes as close as 62 miles and as far as 40,000 miles. close up the far side Just amazing !   I just hope that when NASA returns people to the moon that the voice comm links will be better quality than with Apollo 11 when Neil Armstrong's first words on the surface were garbled. Best Regards, Chuck, WB9KZY http://wb9kzy.com/ham.htm

 I've had several blog posts on the failed attempts: https://wb9kzy.blogspot.com/2022/09/artemis-1-scrubbed-again.html https://wb9kzy.blogspot.com/2022/09/artemis-1-bad-sensor.html https://wb9kzy.blogspot.com/2022/08/artemis-1-launch-scrubbed.html But finally, last night we got this: source:  https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/Artemis-1-Nov-16-2022-0262-3.jpg There is still a long mission to complete.  But NASA is back ! Best Regards, Chuck, WB9KZY http://wb9kzy.com/ham.htm  

NASA scrubbed the launch of Artemis 1 again today (Saturday Sept. 3, 2022).  The reason was different, a hydrogen leak. A lot of the newer rockets have changed from liquid hydrogen fuel to liquid methane.  Tradeoffs exist depending on which fuel is used.  Hydrogen gives better performance but it's bulky and hard to handle.  Methane's performance isn't as good but it is easier to handle (temperatures aren't quite so close to absolute zero).  Methane does have one nasty property being heavier than other gases it will stay close to the ground.  If ignited, watch out ! (as Spacex found out in a recent Starship test in July 2022).  Hydrogen is lighter than nitrogen/oxygen so will tend to disperse up and away. But as Eric Berger says:  "hydrogen leaks": https://arstechnica.com/science/2022/09/years-after-shuttle-nasa-rediscovers-the-perils-of-liquid-hydrogen/ In the first year of the PBS program: NOVA there was a show about hydrogen's potential for the ...

 This was an interesting article: https://arstechnica.com/science/2022/08/nasa-will-make-second-attempt-to-launch-the-sls-rocket-on-saturday/ Bad sensor ?  Anyone who has owned a car knows about bad sensors.  And we've all waved something at a smoke detector after a cooking/toasting smoke event.  Nuisance trips from GFCI wall outlets, yup.   I hope that NASA is correct (and suspect they are).  I don't really know that much about sensors but it's got to be hard to verify that one inside of a big rocket is working correctly or not.  I think that current day rockets being designed have many advantages over ones from the 1970s (like the Artemis) due to the relatively small/cheap electronics that can be used.   Cheap video must be really handy for the engineers to add eyes/ears to potential problem areas.  Everyone could see stuff burning when Spacex was launching their Starship prototypes, but the engineers must have known whether the stuff on fi...

but not today  I was going to watch the Artemis 1 mission launch this morning (Monday 8-29-2022) but it got scrubbed.   I remember watching the space missions on TV during the 1960s.  Somtimes there were holds during the countdowns and a lot of conversation from the CBS hosts like Walter Cronkite (who always seemed to be talking to former astronaut Wally Schirra) to fill the empty air time. source: https://i2.wp.com/www.anecdotes-spatiales.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/Schirra-Cronkite-Apollo-17.png I'm excited about space exploration in the 21st century.  Hopefully it will also interest school kids.  It did when I was a grade school kid in the 1960s and kept a scrapbook on the Gemini and Apollo programs.  I can remember wanting to be an engineer in the 6th grade.  And solving the currently impossible engineering problems that will crop up along the way will be the task of NASA and their contractors.  NASA and the contractors will also need new e...