Virgin Galactics

For 200.000 dollars you can be an astronaut. Sounds funky, doesnt it? Now Virgin Galactics offers it.

After the Ansari X Prize in 2004 (like GoogleMoon X Prize, but for launching cheap and reusable spaceships out of the Earth ), Virgin decided to invest in the winning group. Since then, they have been working hard to offer travels out in space.

The travel consist of the following:

- duration 2,5 hours.

- A big plane carries the small spaceship until 18km altitude, then the small spaceship is launched with a rocket until 120km altitude (only in 90 seconds!, match 3 speed). Then the spaceship is out of the atmosphere, and it will describe a suborbital flight. That means that the spaceship will be launched out of the Earth, but the gravitational forces of the Earth are strong enough to make the spaceship to return again. Like throwing a stone to the sky that returns.

-In the apogee(point where the spaceship stops going further of the Earth, and starts to come back), there is no gravity then for the passengers. For 40 min they will be experiencing the Zero Gravity. They can leave their seats and belts, in order to play around in the room (just watch the following video). There are also some windows to observe the Earth. The spaceship will not be so far that the whole Earth is visible, but at least, the roundness of Earth will be noticeable.

Well, I leave you two videos to enjoy and understand a bit more about Virgin Galactic. The first is a the official trailer(with the hateful Richard Branson). The second one is about the SpaceOne flight, the winners of the first X-Prize, impressive :)





For further information: www.virgingalactic.com !

Motivation

Have you ever experienced being an astronaut? It is hard to describe or even to imagine it precisely, but nothing better to get into the skin of an astronaut. I recommend you to :

- watch "Apollo XIII", a Hollywood movie about the failed mission to the moon. I know that is not a movie for the general public( a bit tedious if you do not understand the technical words) but if you have a mininum of interest about the details of a real mission to the moon, this is movie is really realistic! Due to the special effects is easy to believe that we are in there... flying by the moon. And also describes really well the engineering job in the Ground station. When there is a certain problem and there is also limited time and limited resources... lets solve it anyhow, men!!

-reading "2001, A Space Oddysey". I can not still believe that this book was written on 1969. The author, Arthur C Clark, predicts many kinds of artifacts not yet implemented at that time (as internet ) and also describes really precisesly the following topics:

- problems of the space travels ( excesive time duration, cryogene, lonelyness, communication delays with earth...)

- possible contacts with other kinds of life and possible forms of them.

- technical maneouvers like shifting the orbit or landing in a remote planet.

- long etc.

Now I am studying in my masters about the space missions and the orbits calculations, and I can definitively say that Arthur knows really well about the space technology. In the book it is described a mission to Saturn and one of its moons, Japeto. Really, the mission is almost exactly as the Cassini-Huygens, launched in 1997. The difference is that the last one in not manned, and that the Huygens probe was launched to Titan, and not to Jupiter, as decribed in the book.

If you want to motivate about the space exploration, I sincerely recommend you "2001", the book. I have not watched the film already. When I have done that, I will comment the differences.

PD. Too much workload in my studies already. That is why I have not written here for almost one month. Meanwhile I have gathered some information for future posts!

News source: Space.Com

Sometimes is a bit hard to have enough actualized information about one topic, and much more about the space missions and technology. That is why I want to recommend you this website:

http://www.space.com/ , where you have the last news of the most important events and missions. I have just recently found it, through a friend in my university, and I can not give you a totally precise opinion about it, but seems to be really well organized, in order to catch the most important news at first glance.

Of course, If you want to check for more detailed information of one specific mission, it is worth to visit http://www.nasa.gov/ or http://www.esa.int/ . The information there is really complete, with maybe some specifications, documents and multimedia presentations.

Cassini - Huygens

This mission consisted in launching a SpaceCraft (Cassini, created by NASA) and one probe attached to it (Huygens, created by ESA). The spacecraft had to fly by Saturn and one of its satellites, Titan. The Cassini-Huygens was launched in 1997, and in 2004, they reached Titan. There, the probe Huygens was launched from the Cassini to the Titans surface.

The landing system was based on a parachute, because in Titan the atmosphere is really dense, composed of mostly nitrogen, but there is also methane and many other organic compounds. In the moon for example, this landing system would not be suitable, due to the no existence of atmosphere.

There are many aspects to comment about that mission, that will be surely topics on following posts. But the most amazing one is this video:

Well, the Voice-over explains all that you must know to enjoy that video. I simply add one thing. The images of the descendant are a reconstruction, a put together of data from the Descent Imager/Spectral Radiometer. Those data where only about 12 Megabytes, limited by the temporal radio link with the Cassini Spacecraft. And with only that amount of data, the produced that sequence of video! (Compared with a single Picture taken with a digital camera, 900KB for example, 12 MBytes allows only 13 Pictures)

About the Cassini, it is now orbiting around Saturn. Since 2004, when the Huygens was launched, Cassini will complete in 4 years 74 orbits of the Saturn, 44 close flybys of the hazy moon Titan, and numerous flybys of Saturn's other icy moons.

One picture in true color of Saturn, simply cool! True color means that is a real picture, taken with a camera, wich has a sensibility equal to the human eye. That means that this is how you would see Saturn if you were inside the Cassini Spacecraft.

If you believed they put a Man on the Moon...

For those sceptical persons, who do not believe on the landing of Apollo XI on the Moon, I dedicate this post.
Certainly the human has not been once in the moon, but many times. From Apollo XI to Apollo XVII,the NASA has sent human beings to the lunar surface ( except in Apollo XIII due to a failure of the oxygen system). That is equal to 6 times! And not only humans, also rovers with them! Maybe not so many people are aware of this fact, as I was one year ago.

The proof: The entire collection of pictures of all the Apollo Mission. Link: http://www.hq.nasa.gov/alsj/picture.html

Check out some pictures like:

http://www.hq.nasa.gov/alsj/a15/AS15-86-11603.jpg
This is from Apollo XV mission. That picture is much more amazing than any other of the famous Apollo XI, but does anyone comment about them? At that moment, the Apollo missions had no interest any more for the TV and the common people, and it seems that they never were realized, or at least, they had not such a diffusion as the ApolloXI. But those astronauts were there, the seme as Neil Armstrong!

http://www.hq.nasa.gov/alsj/a14/ap14-70-HC-793.jpg
Developing such a huge mechanic monster, is not for free. Would they create those rockets only to launch a ... lie?

I strongly recommend you to download (with FlashGet or any Download program) all the pictures of any of the missions (Apollo XI, for instance). And then slide all the pictures... simply awesome.

The "Path Finders"

Thats the first part of a really interesting documentary. It is about the Pathfinder robot that took samples in Mars. The interesting about the documentary is not the skills of the robot or the Mission description. It goes about how a small group of people designed that mission and finally accomplished a fantastic goal. Nothing would be better than having such a Job!

Links to the following parts:

Second:http://es.youtube.com/watch?v=K98e6v3Ort0

Third:http://es.youtube.com/watch?v=PPRz2zGHa5M

Fourth:http://es.youtube.com/watch?v=Mr2cCy7tkek

Lift Port

Have you ever thought about constructing such a big tower, so high so high, that it even reaches the space? Well, its possible. Instead of a tower, place a cable made of a special nanomaterial, called nanotubes, and you will have one.

Would it be useful? When you want to send a Spaceship to the space its neccessary to scape to the strong forces of the earth gravitation. The actual method is using expensive rockets, and needing big amounts of fuel. But using that cable we would have a different option. An elevator, attached to the cable, would lift the spaceship really far away of the Earth, where the gravitational forces are really low. There the spaceship could use its own propulsion system to easily travel through the space.

That proyect of constructing that tower is not something utopic. The technology nowadays is good enough to allow it. Even there is a Company that will do it. LiftPort is the name of the proyect, and they have a date for the first launch. 27 oct 2031. The main problem now is the financial support.

Its also amazing the way of sending energy to the lift. Take a look in the official website. More information here: http://www.liftport.com/

In my opinion, its basic having something like this, that will allow a much bigger transportation of elements to the space, with a notorious lower price. Its only a neccesary and big step in our Conquest of Space!

PD. As a friend of mine says, isnt that suspicious? Did Akira Toriyama predict something?