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Happy Independence Day!

Better later in the day than never. Regrettably, I didn’t have much time today to do any celebrating (though I took care of that at a barbecue last night, from which we could see fireworks in several directions as if it were already The Day), being busy with deck construction and such.

And since I don’t have time for anything original today, I’ll link to a post from 2006 wherein I revisit the 1976 Bicentennial exhibitions at Kennedy Space Center…which I actually visited for real just a couple days before the Bicentennial day proper.

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Even Lighter Bloggage For Near Future

I’ll be on vacation in Iceland for most of July, so blogging will be even lighter than usual. Unless, of course, internet opportunities present themselves along the way.

Prepping for the trip and trying to get a new deck built before the building permit expires in late August have been sucking up all of my spare time for the past three months, so once those are finished, regularity should improve. Which is sorta ironic, given that there is actually quite a bit to blog about right now what with the new space policy — light blogging is certainly not due to lack of material.

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Raygun Gothic Rocket

Looks like someone’s got both Orion and Dragon beat…

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Coffman Pleads Case for Saving Orion (Jobs)

Nice to know my Congressman is looking out for my job…

Coffman urges Obama to protect Orion jobs

Rep. Mike Coffman, R-Aurora, sent a letter to President Barack Obama Thursday urging him to protect jobs in NASA’s Orion crew-capsule program.

I’d much prefer, however, that he get behind the commercial crew-cargo policy proposed to replace it, so that there might be more jobs created in the broader space industry. Clinging to the program of record after it has been shown to be unsustainable and unaffordable, merely forestalls the inevitable and squanders an opportunity (and resources) to shift to a more open-ended policy.

I’d expect a Colorado Republican to be more amenable to a capitalist policy than this. Especially an incumbent whose district includes several space-related companies which would benefit from growing markets and the creative influence of competition.

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Falcon 9 Maiden Launch Successful

UPDATE: added NASA’s coverage of the launch, from liftoff through (I’m guessing) max-Q.

Congratulations to SpaceX on a successful first launch of the Falcon 9. With any luck, they just drove a 180-foot-long aluminum stake through the heart of Ares-I. Heh.

It’s amusing, though, that a company founded by a dot-com millionaire can’t seem to get a webcast video to work properly. But I suppose there were other, more important concerns this morning.

Oddly enough, the launch was originally scheduled (the aborted attempt) at the same time as the biweekly all-hands teleconference with the LM Orion management team — otherwise known as the “everything is fine, don’t panic” meeting.  I missed the first part of the meeting, but the portion I sat in on was dominated by voices sounding like relatives of Milton from “Office Space”, asking tediously detailed and irritatingly petulant questions about layoff notices, benefit rollovers, job transfers and other HR matters “for when the time comes”. A very strange juxtaposition.

One of the good things about the Falcon 9 success is that it will help still some of the critical voices speaking out against commercial crew and cargo, and newspace in general. Or if not still them, at least force them to find something else to complain about regarding newspace, much as successful missile defense intercepts forced critics who claimed it was physically impossible to pull off an intercept to find some other rationalization for their opposition. Had the launch failed, it would have been much more difficult to establish credibility for newspace — with this success, however, the industry can probably tolerate a few less than successful follow-on launches before losing the credibility established by SpaceX.

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Bigelow Still in the Game, Backs Commercial Crew

Bigelow supports the new commercial-focused NASA manned-space policy. Not surprisingly, because it also helps their own business model — which, I think, is the best part of the new policy. Flights to ISS might pay the bills, but it’s the expansion into new areas of business independent of NASA that will make commercial crew services sustainable.

I just hope they don’t wait too long for a commercial provider to emerge. There’s scuttlebutt going around that they are working with multiple contenders to assure that they aren’t left without some means of getting to their station(s).

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And Now…Musical Tesla Coils!

[via Gina]

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Pad Abort Test Launch Video Compilation

Still no public pics of the LAS “lawn dart”, but there’s lots of fun eye candy in this video, especially the beautiful slow-motion footage at the beginning of the motor ignition:

A few interesting things to note:

  • The impressively crisp black and white footage of the reorientation and jettison
  • The docking-hatch-view of the forward bay cover jettison and chute deployment
  • The amusing (but very brief) cameo appearance of the jettisoned LAS in the background of one of the chute deployment cuts, weathervaning into a point-down attitude
  • The firing of the attitude control motor, which appears as eight skinny flames near the tip of the LAS stack
  • The fact that there is NO visible plume damage on the capsule or the LAS adapter cone (especially surprising given the incinerated appearance of the cone after impact with the desert floor)
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PA-1 Test – A Little TOO Successful?

A little bit behind schedule (it was supposed to launch before the 2008 Presidential election), the Pad Abort 1 test launched at White Sands yesterday — and would have subjected any astronauts inside to 16 gees. Oops.

The one-minute, 35-second test at White Sands Missile Range, N.M., took the capsule higher — 3,886 feet — and farther down range — 6,919 feet — than anticipated.

“That motor was quite a performer,” said Deputy Test Director Jay Estes. “You might not want to be riding in there.”

That’s the truth in more ways than he intended, I’m sure. (And I can’t be the only one who finds it amusing that one of the guys launching a big solid rocket is named “Estes”.)

Were the program to be continued, this excess capability might actually be a good thing to have, given how much the capsule has changed since the PA-1 design was frozen (more to the point: how much more it weighs now).

Landing was gentler than expected, but a heavier capsule would work against that:

The boilerplate capsule floated down to the desert floor under the three red-and-white main chutes, slowed enough by them that the telemetry system continued to operate after impact. Estes said test engineers received all of the data they expected to receive.

“It was a beautiful flight,” he said. “That went like clockwork from what I could see.”

Don Reed, the NASA test director, said the capsule touched down at about 24 feet per second (fps), less than the 33 fps impact velocity predicted at the outset. That sort of data will be helpful as NASA refines its predictive models for future developments.

The best part of the test, though, was that the discarded motor stack turned into an enormous lawn dart. I don’t have permission to share the pics that were floating around the office today, but the shots of the burning adapter cone sticking up out of the desert floor are awesome — since the entire 40-odd-foot-tall tower above it is buried nearly vertically into the ground, along with about 40% of the cone itself, with just a small bulge of dirt humped up around it. It’s such a perfect needle-jab that it’s ridiculous. As for the rest of the hardware, the early reports suggested that, given another LAS, the boilerplate capsule and even the separately-jettisoned forward bay (parachute) cover could have been launched again in short order.

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Pennsylvania Tax Ad Parody: Healthcare Food Police

The gals at WhoSaidYouSaid.com have turned the creepy Pennsylvania tax ad into an equally disturbing parody.

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