Hello everyone. I hope you had a good Christmas.
I did, so I’m going to talk about it, with advance warning of a side-track in which I talk about the future of space exploration. It is relevant, as you will see if you wish to continue reading.
For Christmas we were kicked out of our dorms for three weeks (not literally, before you get worried), so that meant I had to find places to stay. First stop was to my friend Dan’s house, whom you may from a couple of posts ago. I spent Christmas day and the day after (not Boxing Day here), with his family, meaning I got to see another state, Indiana.
Indiana is flat. That’s pretty much all there is to say about it. And I mean really, really flat. Where ever one road crosses another there’s always a manmade lake closely where they had to dig out the earth to make the banks.
After that little adventure, with a bit of snow in Michigan to see me off, I headed to Detroit and caught a plane down to Atlanta, where I met my parents and brother who flew over from Britain.
Why Atlanta? Well I did suggest they might like to come here, so they could see where live and all that, but for some reason the idea of really cold days and snow didn’t appeal as much as Georgia and Florida…
Not that I’m complaining. It was really interesting to compare the South with the North. Similar but different. The roads were better than here, although having said that Georgia had rubbish direction signs, leading to us getting slightly lost a couple of times. I suppose the main difference was the heat, it being somewhat closer to the equator. And the churches, lining the roads, each with a more over-the-top religious scrabble name than the last.
The holiday started in Atlanta, and then we drove down to Brunswick in southern Georgia to stay with a friend. Interesting place, featuring the church where John Wesley, founder of the Methodist movement, first came to in America. We accidently walking in on their healing service, meaning I can add another church onto my list (Episcopalian).
After that we travelled down into Florida and to the Space Coast (the diversion is fast approaching), so we could have a trip to the Kennedy Space Centre. I last went there ten years ago, which was ten years too long a gap in my opinion. It is an amazing place. The highlight of the day was the Saturn V moon rocket, which I had a childhood memory of staying at in wonder over how big it was. I was fairly sure that, being ten at the time, my impression of it’s size was exaggerated. Nope.
It’s huge. Really, Really big. The setup of the hanger it’s in is such that you walk out behind it, right into its main engines, and look down the length of it. The base is over ten meters wide, with five engines that I could easily stand up in. It is a hundred and tem metres long. Now I’ve seen bigger buildings and bigger boats, but they really don’t have the same effect as this. This is displayed in such a way that you don’t think, “wow that’s big”, you think “wow that’s so much bigger than me.” Also you have to remember that this thing can fly. Buildings and boats aren’t built to fly over one hundred tons of stuff into space. Some people think that that’s exactly what should be done, that this rocket should be taken out of its hanger and flown, but I’m glad it hasn’t. You’ve got to have something to aim for.
And on that note, the diversion. For the Saturn V is soon to loose it’s crown as the most powerful rocket ever built, which I think is a bad move.
Many people here have got the impression that the end of the space shuttle meant the end of Nasa, probably due to an overenthusiastic media. Not so, the space shuttle wasn’t decommissioned because Nasa isn’t doing anything anymore, but because it isn’t good enough for what they’re doing next.
The space shuttle could operate only in low earth orbit, about 400 kilometres up. It was very good for doing stuff there, but it was nowhere near powerful enough to get to, say, the Moon. Or to a near-Earth Asteroid, or Mars. And these places are where Nasa wants to go next.
To do this George W Bush ordered them to build a new set of rockets, known as the Constellation program, which would give both the ability to fly to the Moon and address some of the fatal safety flaws of the shuttle by separating crew and cargo. Good plan, but unfortunately what he didn’t give them was the money they would need to do it. When Barack Obama came to power he commissioned a review of the program, which recommended he cancel it. Instead Nasa would concentrate on developing new technologies that would be needed for journeys beyond Earth whilst the job of ferrying astronauts to and from the International Space Station would be turned over to commercial companies.
The private sector has risen to this challenge, with several innovative, advanced and above all cheap spacecraft on the drawing board, in prototype stage or, in the case of my personal favourite, the Space X Dragon, already flying. This is a really important step in opening up space exploration: after all, there are no government airways. I was lucky enough to see the Space X Falcon 9 rocket that will launch the first commercial spacecraft to dock with the space station, waiting for its launch sometime in February. Space X are also working on another rocket called Falcon Heavy, planned to launch later this year, which will hopefully break the holy grail of rocketry: a price of less than $1000 per pound to orbit.
Unfortunately the cancellation of Constellation caused lot of jobs to be put at risk, and a lot of work lost for some of the big defence companies. Because of this policy changed again and Nasa was told that it would continue to develop the spacecraft that Obama had cancelled, the Orion. They were also told to develop a new rocket, the Space Launch System, or SLS.
This rocket, which is basically a hybrid between the Saturn V and the space shuttle, will be the most powerful ever built. It will be able to launch 130 tons to low earth orbit, enough for a trip to the Moon or an asteroid. Although it will be a superb, useful rocket, I think it is a mistake. Space X rockets will be ready much sooner and be much, much cheaper, and although it will take two or three Falcon Heavies to do the same job as one SLS, Nasa has plenty of experience of assembling stuff in orbit. I’m worried that this rocket, like Constellation, will go over budget and be cancelled, wasting money that could have been spend on going somewhere interesting. It’s ugly too.
But anyway, the point is that Nasa hasn’t stopped and the future of space flight should be very interesting so long as sensible funding decisions are made. Diversion over.
The rest of Kennedy was very interesting, with a collection of old rockets, exhibitions about various Nasa missions and, best of all, a full size Lego model of a Mars rover.
After Kennedy we drove back up through Georgia and Florida, stopping over at Macon where there were some quite interesting Native American historical sites. I don’t know very much about Native American history, so I may read up on some stuff for a future post. After Macon I flew back up to Detroit, stayed a few nights at pastor Bill’s house then came back here. The end!
I also lost my hat, which is a bad thing.
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