Infospigot: The Chronicles

Quadrantids 2012

Kate and I got up at 3:26 a.m. -- that's what the clock said -- to see if we could get an eyeful of the Quadrantid meteor shower last night. (Why so late/early? It was after moonset here, and meteor visibility would be better.) We each saw one pretty good streak before crawling back into bed. Of course, I stayed out for half an hour hoping to get one on camera--and in fact the one I saw flashed by while the lens was open, but it was outside the frame. In any case I got a couple of OK star shots, including this one of the Big Dipper, which was virtually overhead; Polaris, the North Star, is just above and to the right of the tree on the left.

Fly-By

We've been having a string of clear evenings in the Bay Area, perfect for watching the nightly fly-by of the International Space Station and the shuttle Atlantis. When the shuttle and the station are docked, they appear as a single, bright star moving from (roughly) west to east. The Atlantis undocked early this morning and rapidly moved away from the station. This evening one of the ships appeared in the northwest, then the other--the space station trailed by the shuttle, I think. From San Francisco, they seemed to move nearly straight overhead, then rapidly vanished into the Earth's shadow when they were still high above the horizon.

It always surprises me a little not to see others out staring at these objects as they pass over, or that passers-by don't ask what I'm looking at. A big-city rule, I guess: avoid the harmless-looking guy staring into the sky just in case he's a lunatic. One time, a co-worker happened upon me watching the space station go over a nearby park. "What happened?" she asked. "Did a bird shit on you?" I told her about the space station and pointed at it. She glanced toward the sky, gave me a look that said she didn't quite believe anything like that was up there at the moment, and moved on.

Tonight in Berkeley, meantime: Kate knew the twin apparitions of space station and shuttle would become visible at 6:22. She called several neighbors to alert them. While I watched from the lower western edge of Potrero Hill, she had nearly a dozen people out in the street here in our neighborhood for the three-minute show. That's just one of the things I love about this block: that people will come out to see a night-time sky display--lunar eclipses, comets, meteor showers, whatever's on tap--and just hang out for a few minutes.

There's another double-viewing Thanksgiving night. Check your local listings on NASA's Satellite Sightings Information page.

At Night

By way of an Open Salon blog: a recent composite view of the Earth at night, courtesy of NASA (click for bigger images). There's lots to reflect on here. For example: Look at the Korean peninsula, and check out the difference between South and North (for more on night-time lighting in North Korea, see this).

Technorati Tags: photography

Solstice Notebook

In six minutes -- no, five! four! -- something will click into place somewhere out there in the big celestial machine and we in the Northern Hemisphere will be at summer solstice. Get out and enjoy that daylight, everyone. ...

(Official solstice time: 11:06 a.m. PDT.)

And then later: The space station and space shuttle went overheard at quarter to 10 tonight, with the solstice twilight still bright. This (below) is the shuttle, which trailed the space station by about a minute (at least 300 miles, I figure). Both flew right through the Big Dipper. Great Bear Transit.

Technorati Tags: space, space shuttle

Space Visitors, Again

As I just wrote to my brother John;

"... I wasn't so lucky with the pictures last night. It

started clouding up about an hour before sunset, and
the space station and ISS were crossing well to the
north (maximum elevation was about 27 degrees). So it
was doubtful they'd be as bright even if they were
visible. At the scheduled time -- the shuttle was
supposed to appear at 6:03, the ISS at 6:04 -- I
couldn't see anything, but I released the shutter
anyway. After about 30 seconds, I could see something
moving dimly above the clouds in the northwest. After
the first 60-second shot, I reaimed the camera further
east, and realized there were two objects moving by; I
had missed the first, the shuttle, but both were
clearly visible as they crossed through the north to
the northeast. I tried another 60-second shot and got
both of them, though they don't look nearly as bright
as they did just looking at them. Looking at the shots
now, there was so much ambient light that the sky
became very washed out, and a shorter exposure might
have shown them better Something to remember for next
time.

"Still -- pretty amazing stuff. I was seeing them about
four hours after they had separated; if you assume
they were exactly a minute apart, that means the
distance between them was just under 300 miles (the
distance they travel in 60 seconds at 17,500 mph).
Looks like it will be too cloudy here to see the
shuttle again before it lands."

Technorati Tags: berkeley, space

Space Visitors

The International Space Station and space shuttle (docked) passing nearly overhead 5:42 p.m. this evening; they moved from southwest (bottom right) to northeast (top left). Forty second time exposure; pretty sure the brighter stars just to the left of the vehicles' path are part of the great square of Pegasus.

Technorati Tags: berkeley, space

Spaceman in Jail

Walter Anderson, who probably has spent more than anyone on trying to develop a private spaceship, is in jail in Washington for allegedly evading hundreds of millions of dollars in federal taxes. One of the conundrums about Anderson is that, unless you're a real space junkie, you're not very likely to have heard of him. Over the past 20 years, he quietly became very wealthy by starting and selling telecommunications companies. Then he turned around and ploughed tens of miillions into private space research, including a spectacularly unsuccessful venture called Rotary Rocket that tried to build a vehicle that would blast off from an airstrip like a rocket and land helicopter-style, but back end first. He also got behind an outfit called MirCorp that hoped to take over the historic and scary Soviet/Russian space station and send tourists there. Anderson's space ambitions came wrapped with an unpleasant, somewhat paranoid grandiosity that's profiled in an exceptionally well-done story Elizabeth Weil wrote for The New York Times Magazine in July 2000, and is touched upon in her exceptionally poorly executed book, "They All Laughed at Christopher Columbus."

After all that, Anderson's in jail. The government alleges he's hidden hundreds of millions of dollars in off-shore shell companies and other dubious tax shelters to avoid paying taxes. Anderson says his plan all along was to give his money away to space ventures; but all bets are off on that plan, he says, because he's broke now. In any case, Anderson might be realizing his long-expected martyrdom. In Weil's magazine story, he makes no secret of his dislike of the feds and concludes: "In my life, if the U.S. government doesn't try to kill me, I probably won't have succeeded in meeting my long-term goals."

How to Get Me ...

... to quit reading a book.

You could argue that it's not that hard. In one of my many guilt-ridden dimensions, the guilt grows out of not getting through as many books as I'd like to. Last one completed (a couple weeks ago): "To Conquer the Air," by James Tobin (the Wright Brothers' saga). As soon as I'd finished Tobin, picked up a book called "They All Laughed at Christopher Columbus," published in 2002 by Elizabeth Weil, a writer I've respected (used to see her stuff in Fast Company magazine, and in one of my former incarnations, as an editor at Wired News, I tried to get her to write some stuff for us, but she said she was too busy).

"They All Laughed" is the story of a failed space start-up called Rotary Rocket. The company tried to build a reusable launch vehicle to go to orbit and back. It turns out it's not as easy as it looks, and the effort just barely got off the ground, in a literal sense, while burning tens of millions of dollars. On forums like Amazon's reader reviews, "They All Laughed" got a mixed reception. Insiders from the new private-space launch community felt she'd caricatured their efforts, to some extent. But worse, in their eyes, she'd just gotten important facts wrong. I thought the comments sounded like sour grapes. So I bought a used copy online for about five bucks.

I got to page 47 (of 230, including two "acknowledgements" pages). I may get farther, but I've found reading the book to be disspiriting. It's just deflating to see something so ambitious and promising so full of simple factual errors. I actually outlined a few of the simple space-related ones on Amazon. But what makes me feel like quitting is the appearance of errors on workaday details such as the names of roads. We're told that there's an exit off Interstate 5 for Mercy Springs Road -- no, actually, it's Mercey Springs Road; or that the town of Mojave, very colorfully described as permeated by "a mood of repressed violence," is on Highway 57; well, no, it's actually Highway 58. And why should I take the author's word about the town's moods or the characters' quirks or how a rocket works or anything else if she can't get this elementary stuff straight?

Grilled Cheese in Space

Earlier in the year, I covered the space teams that said they planned to launch for the X Prize -- the $10 million purse offered for the first privately financed space launch.  Burt Rutan's SpaceShipOne won the prize in October, and was the only team to try a launch. A group in Toronto, which came to be known as The GoldenPalace.com Space Program Powered by the da Vinci Project (the name of the volunteer effort tacked onto the name of their online-casino sponsor), got itself lots of media attention by declaring it would try to beat Rutan's group to the punch. To be more accurate, it was the da Vinci Project's leader, astronaut, and chief spokesman, Brian Feeney, who promised a launch.

Common sense suggested it was a long shot: Feeney's team, which envisions launching its manned rocket from a balloon floating 15 or 16 miles above the prairie of western Saskatchewan, set its first X Prize launch for Oct. 2 without ever flight-testing its gear. Feeney would just climb into his capsule, light the rocket, and see what happened (the plan was to fly to 100 or 110 kilometers, then parachute back to the wide open spaces below; GoldenPalace.com also wants Feeney to play some sort of casino game loaded on a laptop in the capsule). The apparent lack of preparation aside, Feeney was always adamant: all sorts of computer modeling had been done, safety was assured, and  no one outside the project could possibly know the state of readiness.  Da Vinci would make its launch date; just wait and see.

In late September, Feeney backed off his October 2 launch date because da Vinci's vehicle wasn't ready. SpaceShipOne made its X Prize-winning flight on Oct. 4. Feeney was in the crowd of spectators at Mojave, still insisting he'd fly before the end of October. But his ship still wasn't ready,  and the launch was rescheduled for an indefinite date before the end of the year. Which brings us to today, in late November.

Now, Canadian media outlets (the CBC and the Globe and Mail, for instance) are reporting that the da Vinci project is putting off its first launch until January. This time the upcoming holidays are to blame: "Over the holidays some people become extremely available and other people become totally unavailable. Although we are planning for an unmanned test flight, we still need a lot of logistical support."

Just a minute: unmanned test flight? Feeney used to talk about a full-on test of the launch system as though it were a frill and dismiss those who suggested at least one test flight was needed as if they were killjoys, people without a sense of adventure or imagination or who were tied to the tired old NASA way of doing things. OK, now he says there will be a test flight; he says it will go up by late January, with a manned flight to follow in the spring. Just a hunch: The January test date will be the next thing to go: Feeney's always insisted that weather -- cold, wind, whatever -- is no factor for the da Vinci launch. He'll think better of that when faced with reality. 

The best da Vinci Project tidbit in the Canadian papers right now comes from Andy Ogle of the Edmonton Journal. He's got a story speculating that Feeney's historic flight, whenever it occurs, will carry a 10-year-old grilled-cheese sandwich upon which some see the image of the Virgin Mary.

X Prize News: $10 Million Check

Just for the record: Yesterday in St. Louis, the X Prize Foundation awarded Paul Allen and Burt Rutan the $10 million check they won for their SpaceShipOne launches of Sept. 29 and Oct. 4. (Other significant X Prize booty: a 200-pound, 5-foot-tall trophy.) I thought about going, but what with the election and other little things nagging at me (plus the reluctance of what I'll call my freelance sponsors to pick up expenses for out-of-town trips, meaning I would have gone on my own dime) I didn't make it.

The stories I see (I've only read a couple of them) don't answer my biggest point of curiosity about the award: How the cash is going to be split up. Rutan has been very upfront that all the investment for SpaceShipOne came from Allen (no one but the principals knows exactly how much money went into the project; but after the second successful X Prize flight in October, Rutan remarked that winning the $10 million prize recouped 40 percent of Allen's outlay, which would put the investment figure at $25 million. Anyway, Allen said he'd be sharing the jackpot with Rutan's company, Scaled Composites; and Rutan said, in turn, that everyone at Scaled would share in the cash. I just wonder how much everyone got.