I'm a regular joe living in a regular house in a regular town, just like you. I'm here to prove that people just like us can get to space too. Let me show you that space flight does not need to be limited to those who are super-qualified or super-wealthy, and follow me on my journey to reach the limits of human exploration! Oh, and political commentary. I do that too.
After some consideration, I've decided that I'm appalled by Obama's recent Oval Office speech. He said they're trying to figure out what caused the spill, but didn't call for the requirement of safety measures that would have prevented this spill. He said they're trying clean up the spill, but didn't call for BP to stop using the dispersants that are super harmful and making cleanup much more difficult. He mentioned that the House passed legislation to encourage clean energy development, but didn't call for the Senate to consider it, which they have not.
He talked up a lot of great-sounding plans, but didn't call for any of the measures that would be necessary for those plans to become reality.
What did he call for? He called for us to pray. And that is all.
I can't help but to notice that prayer doesn't reduce corporate profits. Just saying.
I can't understate the significance of this announcement.
I mentioned a couple years ago that Space Adventures, the provider of tourist flights to the International Space Station, were advertising that they were planning on providing suborbital tourist flights at $102,000 per ticket. I stated this because that's what appears on their website, but I doubted it would actually happen. I felt that way because, among other considerations, Space Adventures didn't appear to have plans to build, purchase, or charter suborbital spacecraft.
Today, that may all have changed.
I got an announcement in my e-mail today that Space Adventures is partnering with Armadillo Aerospace. Armadillo has done rocketry work for NASA and the US Air Force, along with competing in several X-Prize moon lander competitions. However, their plans have always centered around developing the expertise and capabilities necessary to build a suborbital tourist spacecraft. This announcement is a major step toward that goal, because Armadillo will finally have a major source of funding.
It appears that Space Adventures will be to Armadillo Aerospace what Virgin Galactic is to Scaled Composites; the source of marketing and funding necessary to make tourist spacecraft a reality. And at a lower price point, this makes for very healthy competition. I won't be changing my bars below to reflect the lower price because Space Adventures and Armadillo haven't yet announced designs for the potential new spacecraft, making Virgin Galactic still the best bet. It will probably be at least five years before anything is even ready for a test flight.
With that said, this is still amazingly good news.
Yes, you read that right. I'm experimenting with high-altitude amateur photography. I would have posted about it before, but I wasn't sure this was actually going to happen until last week. Here's the story:
Around a year ago, I read an article on the BBC News website (which I highly recommend) that described a way to make a spacecraft with close to the same capabilities of Sputnik using household items. I was fascinated by the concept of building an actual spacecraft by digging up junk around the house, and I briefly considered doing it. However, I'm fairly results-oriented, and because I didn't have a way of launching the resulting spacecraft, I wasn't really interested in putting the work into building it. Besides, I was arms-deep at the time building my second eight-foot light bucket, which I'll talk about in another post.
Then four months ago, I was contacted by a high-schooler named Megan who had found my name on an astronomical website. She wanted help building a simulated satellite as a science project. This satellite would take pictures and transmit them to the ground during flight. I was initially skeptical due to the fact that launching even a small device would take far more rocketry than I (and indeed most people) had the expertise or budget to handle. When she told me she wanted to use a weather balloon to lift it to the upper atmosphere, I thought that this might just be possible.
Around the same time, I read about a group of MIT students called 1337Arts who had successfully done something similar; they lifted a camera attached to a weather balloon 18 miles high, took pictures, then retrieved them when the craft landed. They did it on a budget of $150 and appropriately called it Project Icarus. That's when I knew this would be possible. And as a bonus, they mentioned on their website that FAA regulations state that you can launch a free-floating balloon without any kind of clearance so long as it is under four pounds (along with some other minor restrictions).
However, our task was a little more difficult than Project Icarus. We wanted not only to take pictures, but to transmit them to the ground during the flight. Project Icarus transmitted GPS data using a cell phone to track their craft's location, but I couldn't find a way to get a cell phone to transmit pictures along with the GPS data with limited bandwidth and the kind of control we needed. The solution we came up with was to get a lightweight laptop computer, attach a webcam, a GPS receiver, and a wireless internet adapter to it, and launch the whole works into the atmosphere. As a result, we may be the first amateurs to attempt to launch a laptop computer into the upper atmosphere. I haven't been able to find another example, but if you know of one, please post it in the comments.
The laptop chosen was an Acer netbook with Windows Vista. Using Vista wasn't an ideal setup, but the laptop came with it and Megan was using it for schoolwork. I didn't want to cause her problems by installing XP or Linux, so I decided just to work with what was already there. It weighed less than two pounds and had enough battery life and hard drive space to last the entire flight. We used a weather balloon and parachute purchased from a scientific supply website, and we took 1337Arts' idea of using a styrofoam cooler and hand-warmer packs to keep the components warm during the flight. We used a Sprint Wireless Broadband adapter so that we could transmit pictures and GPS data to cell towers, and we used basic sub-$30 USB GPS receiver and webcam models. We also used a modified BeepX rocket retrieval beeper to make retrieval easier once it landed.
The report is due Wednesday, and we just started setting it all up last week, so it was sort of a frantic weekend. I have a Xubuntu server at home running my security cameras, and I had set it up so that I could access the camera images from my phone. We decided that it would be an ideal way to store the laptop's images and GPS data as well, since it would allow us to access everything from my phone as we were chasing the balloon without dealing with the cost and hassles of a third-party service. So I set up my server to handle the task on Friday, then on Saturday, Megan and her mother brought the laptop to my house so that I could set up its software.
I used completely free software for the project, making this an inexpensive way to perform the experiment. I installed GPS TrackMaker to record the GPS data from the USB device to a file that was updated every 30 seconds, and I set up Yawcam (which I think Megan had installed) to save images every ten seconds for later transmission to the ground. I decided to go with cwRsync to load the data onto the server using an SSH connection. cwRsync is a piece of software that synchronizes a local folder with one on a remote server. I then set up a Windows scheduled task to run cwRsync every five minutes. The advantage of using this setup for data transmission was that if the balloon left Sprint's coverage area, the computer would start from scratch every five minutes to attempt to send new data to the ground, so there was much less chance of a permanent failure due to a temporarily lost signal. Also, cwRsync allowed the computer to send only new files every five minutes instead of sending all of them every time, so it cut down significantly on bandwidth requirements.
The software took about four hours to setup properly, though with the information I now have (most of which I presented above), it would only take me an hour to set it up if and when I attempt it again. When the software setup was complete, the three of us drove out to the countryside to test poor and lost signal conditions. There were a couple of minor glitches, but for the most part, it worked beautifully. We were almost ready for the real thing.
That evening, Megan and her mother assembled the craft, and then they picked me up at 6:00 the next morning. We checked the University of Wyoming's balloon trajectory forecast site, and decided to launch from a coastal town about two hours away from us, which the site predicted would cause the balloon to land within 30 miles of our homes. When we got there, it took a couple of hours for final assembly of the craft and to work out the last few bugs in the software, but we were finally ready to go. Here is what happened:
That's right, complete failure. We actually ran out of helium when filling the balloon, even though we were told that we would only need about a quarter of what was in the tank. We discovered later on that this was because the people who had helped us calculate how much helium we would need had misplaced the decimal point. We were wold we needed to use about 250 pounds of tanked pressure when we actually needed closer to 2500. There was only 1000 pounds in the tank. To make it worse, the town we were in didn't appear to have any helium suppliers. So we had to deflate the balloon and go home with the empty tank. Then an accident occurred on the 2-lane highway between towns only 20 minutes from home, and it completely blocked all traffic, so we had to drive most of the way back to the coast to take the other highway. That added over an hour to our trip. And on top it all off, it was pouring rain the entire time. Still, our spirits were surprisingly high when we got back and we decided to try it again.
It was 1 PM by the time we were ready to give it a second shot. We didn't have enough daylight left to go back to the coast and still have a chance of retrieval before nightfall, so we decided to throw caution to the wind and launch right from the parking lot of the party supply place where we were getting our helium. We calculated that this would put the balloon in the mountains in very rough terrain, but there wasn't anything in the craft that we weren't willing to lose, and we wouldn't have time to try again another day, so that really was our best option. Here's what happened this time:
Forgive me for getting a little giddy in that video. See how much bigger the balloon is this time? Yeah, that helped. The scary part for Megan and her mom is there goes their brand-new laptop and if we can't find it (or it gets destroyed upon landing), they're out a whole computer. The scary part for me was that if there were any more software glitches, there was no way to fix them, no way to get any further data, and we would probably lose the whole craft. Everything hung on some sketchy assembled-at-the-last-minute free software. Yeah. Ouch.
Fortunately, that didn't happen. the data transmitted through the entire flight, and we got continual updates of images and GPS data every five minutes. However, we did have another glitch. It turns out that the balloon had a leak, and when it reached 766 feet, it hung there for a minute and then sank back to the ground. However, it did manage to travel about 30 miles (north instead of our predicted east) and it got so high that we couldn't see it anymore. As a bonus, as if to say "This was a really great try and you deserve a nice break", the balloon landed within a couple hundred feet of a major road near the next town over. But as if to say, "Wait wait, I'm going to throw one last challenge your way" it landed in a giant patch of blackberry brambles next to a big open field. It took us a half hour to fish it out:
We finally got it out after I hacked at the brambles for 10 minutes with a pocket knife, but not before the balloon popped on the brambles, preventing us from patching the leak and trying a third time. Still, it was a crazy fun project, and despite the fact that we only got about 2% of our desired height, we got some incredible pictures. Remember, all of these were transmitted to the ground from a laptop floating hundreds of feet in the air:
Not bad for less than $500 worth of parts and only two days to assemble them.
And if you think this is the end, you are sadly mistaken. Early on, my brother and I decided we wanted to try this too. He is a photographer, and he thinks he can get better pictures than the ones taken by 1337Arts. Our setup will be much closer to Project Icarus than Megan's was due to the fact that my brother wants to send up a professional camera, and we won't be able to transmit the images. However, if it goes well, I want to send up a spare laptop on a third venture and try Megan's experiment again. I would like Megan and her mom to come with us and help us out with these projects; it's only fair that after their hard work, they have their hands in some successful high-altitude photography. We have half of our parts already, and we are planning our first launch for spring.
The Math Modern theories on quantum mechanics predict the significance of something called the "Planck Length". The Planck Length is equal to approximately 1.616253x10^-35 meters. That's almost unimaginably small; somewhere near ten sextillionths the length of a single proton (yes, a sextillionth is a real number, and as far as I know, not the name of a porno).
The Planck Length has significant mathematical significance in most commonly accepted quantum theories; it is one of several units of measurement (all named after Max Planck) that are based purely on perceived universal constants and not on measurements of physical objects. In particular, the Planck Length is derived from the strength of gravity, the speed of light, and the relationship between the energy of a photon and the frequency of its electromagnetic wave. Note that these three constants are all derived from separate physical theories: special relativity, general relativity, and quantum mechanics respectively. Relativity and quantum mechanics contradict each other in many ways (this is one of the greatest unsolved scientific puzzles of our time) so to me, the significance of the Planck Length is already suspect.
The Physics Many theories on the behavior of the universe at a very small scale (most notably several forms of a theory called quantum gravity) also state that the Planck Length has special physical significance. In fact, some physicists seem to have a preoccupation, or at least an interest, in determining the physical significance of the Planck Length. This is part of the point I will eventually be making. Some quantum theories state that relativity breaks down at distances less than the Planck Length and the universe at smaller scales behaves as sort of a multidimensional foam (don't ask me; I don't understand that one either). Some state that the universe may be quantized at this length, much as an image on a computer screen is quantized, or becomes blocky, at the length of one pixel. Some state that the Planck Length may have influence on the speed of light.
Scientists were recently able to test the latter.
The Problem The Fermi Gamma-Ray Space Telescope recently observed a gamma-ray burst called GRB 090423. Along with the normal smattering of high-energy photons, it picked up one that was truly exceptional. It came in at a whopping 31 giga-electron-volts. That's extraordinarily energetic. Energetic enough that its wavelength came to approximately 4x10^-17 meters. This was a far cry from the 1.6x10^-35 meters of the Planck Length, but it was just close enough so that the Planck Length's influence on its speed could potentially be measured when you consider the massive distance that the photons traveled. And what did they find?
Nothing.
When compared to the gamma-ray burst's other photons, it did not arrive at the predicted time differential.
Does this mean that quantum theory is wrong? Not at all. But it does mean that the physical significance of the Planck Length is highly suspect. To be fair, scientists are taking this a lot more seriously than the quasar problem, and are beginning to eliminate some forms of quantum gravity from theoretical models due to this discovery. However, they don't seem to be taking a second look at the big picture, which I believe suggests that mathematical models do an inadequate job of describing the nature of the universe.
Flawed Methodology Much of today's physics are based purely on mathematical models. All of string theory, for example, is based upon the idea that the behavior of subatomic particles seems to fit well with mathematical equations that describe the vibrations of multidimensional strings (hence the name). The science was born from the math. The Big Bang theory was based upon the perceived expansion of the universe, but many of the details that make up the theory are based purely on math. Originally, the Big Bang theory predicted a universe much older than it currently does. Then when observations showed otherwise, the underlying math of the theory was altered to fit the observations. This happened not once, but three or four times! The entire concept of the "inflationary phase" of the early universe was added to force the math behind the theory to fit the observations of the cosmic microwave background radiation.
This appears to be very different from the methods used to make discoveries in the past. They were made by coming up with an idea, then later finding math that fit that idea. Newton came up with the idea that all matter has a slight attraction to all other matter, then later discovered the math that became a successful model of gravity. Einstein came up with the idea that if you're traveling very fast and then shined a light ahead of yourself, the light is still traveling at the same speed as when you are standing still. Then later, he discovered the math that became a successful model of special relativity. Today's science is doing it backward; they are coming up with the math first, using the math as a theory of how the universe works, then changing the math when observed behavior doesn't fit the theory.
I suggest to you that this is a flawed method. I'm not saying that using this method can't come up with answers, but I believe that it will come up with a lot of mathematically-correct wrong answers (such as those rejected forms of quantum gravity) before it stumbles upon the right ones. Do the Planck Length and the other Planck units have mathematical significance? Probably. At the very least, they make it easier to express measurements on the levels needed for quantum theory. Do they have inherit physical significance? My guess is no.
This is actually a bit of old news, but I just stumbled upon it, so I figured I'd throw it in the mix.
British-based Excalibur Almaz Limited has announced some specifics concerning their plans to launch tourists into space. It plans to using Soviet-built reusable return vehicles that were used in the 70s to reach the classified space station Almaz (and suddenly the company's name makes a lot of sense).
The company bought the designs and the spacecraft from the Russian company JSC MIC NPO Mashinostroyenia (who originally designed the spacecraft). They are now updating them to be compatible with today's launch vehicles and to have improved capabilities useful for the orbital tourist (and scientific and educational) launches that it plans to conduct.
My dog sleeps in my room with me. Every morning, she steps over to my bed and puts her head on the edge waiting for me to get up.
So every morning, I open my eyes and see this:
Daddy? Are you awake yet? Daddy? Daddy? Are you awake yet? How about now? Daddy? Now are you awake? Daddy? Daddy? Are you awake now? How about now? Daddy? Are you awake yet? Daddy? Daddy? Are you awake yet? How about now? Daddy? Now are you awake? Daddy? Daddy? Are you awake now? How about now? Daddy?
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