And Then There Was Four

Of the very special and exclusive club of the 12 men who have walked on the Moon, the death of Alan Bean brings the number remaining down to four.
The fourth man to walk on a land other than Earth, Bean was an astronaut on Apollo 12, the second lunar landing in November 1969. 
It is a sad fact that nobody has trodden on the Moon since 1972 and of the remaining four astronauts, the youngest is 82 so we could very soon have nobody alive who has walked on anything other than our own planet.  
After hanging up his Spacesuit, Bean became an artist specialising in Space art and using a speck of moon dust in all pictures, taken from his space suit.
'Im the only artist who can paint the moon' he said, 'because i'm the only one who knows whether that's right or not'.
With the focus now seemingly shifting to manned missions to Mars, we may not be adding to the 12 sets of footprints on our closest neighbour in space anytime soon and that not only seems such a waste of a practise site but a magnificent case of running before we can walk.

Buzz Aldrin 88
David Scott 85
Charles Duke 82
Harrison Schmitt 82

Alan Bean - Died 2018
John Young - Died 2018
Eugene Cernan - Died 2017
Edgar Mitchell  - Died 2016
Neil Armstrong - Died 2012
Pete Conrad - Died 1999
Alan Shepard - Died 1998
James Irwin - Died 1991

And Then There Was Five

The word hero is bandied about far too much but there are 12 men who could properly carry the title, the men who walked on the moon.
Unfortunately, the moon missions came to an abrupt halt in the 1970's and humans have not set foot on the ball of rock orbiting Earth since 1972 when Gene Cernan was the last to step off the lunar surface.
Of the 12 only five are still alive with the news that John Young, the ninth person to set foot on the lunar surface, died on January 5th aged 87.
Of the five remaining Moon walkers, the youngest is 82 so we could very soon have nobody alive who has walked on anything other the our own planet which is a shame because we haven't moved on to moon bases which should have been the next logical landmark.
With the focus now seemingly moving onto landing a human on Mars, neglecting our nearest neighbour where we could practise building bases and terraforming in an alien environment is a massive mistake of trying to run before we can walk.

Another One Bites The (Moon) Dust

For those of us with an interest all astronomy, it is a depressing fact that 1969 saw the first man to walk on the moon and 1972 saqw the last one because we haven't bothered going back since.
With the death of Eugene Cernan, of the 12 men who have walked on the moon, six are now dead and of the remaining half dozen the youngest is 81 so we could very soon have nobody alive who has walked on anything other the our own planet.   
Eugene Cernan was the last person to walk on the moon although that was due to his seat being closest to the door of the lunar module so he was last in and had to shut the door behind him.
During the interviews being shown during clips on the TV, he said something quite revealing, stating that to his mind man went to the moon 'too early considering what we’re doing now in space'.
He did make a good point because the next step should have been moon bases and manned landings on Mars but almost 50 years on we have abandoned our lunar partner and we are still trying, and failing, to successfully land probes on the red planet so landing a man on one of our nearest planetary neighbours is still a pipe dream.

Welcome Back Tim

As astronaut and Stoke City fan Tim Peake has just spent six months in space, the Britannia Stadium was the perfect place to train for spending six months in another place with no atmosphere. 
I guess i was one of many who held their breath as the capsule he and his fellow American and Russian astronauts sat in plunged at 17,400 mph towards Earth this morning, relieved that they would fine because he was in a 'special chair', not as safe as the chair that i was set in i bet.
Britain chips in £80m to the The European Space Agency (Esa) but there are some grumpy people who moan about that but Tim Peakes achievement has given the UK's space industry a massive boost but more importantly it has provided an inspiration for a whole new generation.
Then have been live link-ups in which Tim, floating in front of an ISS camera, could speak directly to children themselves in a project called The Cosmic Classroom which gave children the chance of posing questions, the most popular of which seemed to be around how he used the toilet.
There have been Space exhibitions touring the nation and 350,000 schoool trips to science centres around the country and with Tim pencilled in to tour the countries schools on his return, the excitement will continue for a while yet. 
With Britain, America and Russia coming together on the International Space Station, it appears after recent events that Space is the only thing that unites us but an amazing, remarkable and important achievement and each space mission takes us a step closer to leaving this polluted and rapidly warming ball of rock.

Tim Peake Astronaut

Christmas is a time when many people travel around to visit family and friends and many of those would clock up more than 250 miles in a round trip but hardly anyone will do it the way Tim Peake has done it today
as he went straight up and will be donning his Christmas jumper 250 miles above our heads at the International Space Station.
Along with his Russian and American colleagues, he took off in the Soyuz rocket from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan this morning for a 6 month stint aboard one of mankind's greatest achievements which skims along at an average speed of 17,500 mph.
I am sure that we will be treated to many pictures of Tim and his fellow astronauts in space appearing weightless but as many people believe it isn't because there is no gravity, if that was the case then the moon and planets would have floated away a long time ago, they are actually falling around the Earth.
Imagine shooting a cannon, (A in picture left) the cannon ball will fly along until friction slows it down enough and gravity pulls it towards the Earth and it drops down and hits the ground.
Imagine now using more gunpowder and shooting the ball even faster (B) so it travels further until friction and gravity drag it down to the ground.
So the faster you shoot the cannon ball, the further it goes so what would happen if you could shoot a cannon ball out of the cannon at such a speed (17,500 mph) that as the ball fell to Earth, the earth curved away so the ball would be falling but the Earth at the same time would be curving away at the same rate that the ball was dropping (C).
With no friction to slow it down in space, the ball would continually be falling and the Earth curving away so the ball would never actually be able to fall to the ground and so it said to be in orbit around the Earth.
As the International Space Station is travelling at 17,500 mph around the planet (falling towards the Earth like our cannon ball but remember at the same time the Earth is falling away from it) the astronaut is also travelling at 17,500 mph, and is therefore also falling around the Earth.
So, when you are in orbit, you are in free fall but going so fast that you won't actually reach the ground which is continually moving away from you at the same speed that you are falling.

Aug 7 1961 - Gherman Titov Circles Earth

A post taking real life incidents from this day in history and my view of them as if they were happening today and what my honest view would have been then on that day ignoring hindsight or knowledge of how it ended.

The United States Space Agency called it 'an important technical achievement' which seems particular underwhelming as the USSR have taken Space Exploration to another level with Major Gherman Titov spending the whole day in orbit over the Earth aboard his Vostok II spacecraft. 
Information from Moscow say he is due to land tomorrow morning after completing 20 orbits around the globe.
Humans have taken another stride towards dreams of man landing on the moon and setting up bases to use as a launchpad for Mars and spreading out across our Solar System and beyond.
Just four months after the USSR launched the first human, Yuri Gagarin, into space and with the USA having already sent an astronaut skywards, this is a wonderful time for people like me who look up to the night sky and wonder.
If only they were not on opposite sides, the USSR and Americans could achieve so much more if they combined their talents or at the very least they could stop the confusion and decide if it is Cosmonaut (universe traveller) or Astronaut (star traveller).  

Celebrating Yuri

There has been a spate of Space related programmes this weekend to mark the 80 years since the birth of Yuri Gagarin, the first man in space.
There have been plenty of interviews with astronauts, and almost all mentioned the wonder of gazing down on the Earth in all its majestic beauty and just seeing our World with no borders, a sight that had a profound effect on them.  
There was one interview, with Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield, who mentioned something that struck him profoundly and something that i never really considered before, the complete silence.
In our World, there is never complete silence. Even in the dead of night there is the tick of a clock, the distant sound of a car, your partners breathing or even the wind outside, never is there absolute silence.
Gagarin is arguably one of the most famous Russians that ever lived, less arguably he left one of the greatest human legacies, the giant whose shoulders fellow astronauts have stood on ever since.
What had me thinking as i listened to the astronauts from all different countries living and working aboard the International Space Station is that when we cooperate, we can achieve so much more. Neil Armstrong's famous words 'One giant leap for mankind' says it all, it isn't for America or Russia, it's for all of us together.
If we can take the approach and work together in Space to such great effect, why is it so hard to do it down here?

Moon Landing Conspiracy Theory

One of the saddest things about the death of Neil Armstrong is that the conspiracy theorists are back out of their box again with their list of why we have never made it to the moon and it was all faked in a desert.
Listening to the conspiracy theorists on the radio, television and comments on the Internet, there seems to be few repeated lines of 'proof' that America fibbed about the whole thing, so let's ask the people who should know.

1 - The American flag appears to be flapping as if "in a breeze" in videos and photographs supposedly taken from the airless lunar surface.

Someone who should know is Spaceflight historian Roger Launius, of the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum in Washington D.C. so how does he explain it? 'The video you see where the flag's moving is because the astronaut just placed it there, and the inertia from when they let go kept it moving'. This was put to the test by the Mythbusters team who placed a replica of the American flag planted on the moon into a vacuum chamber at the Marshall Space Flight Center. They first tested at normal pressure and manipulated the flag and the momentum moved the flag around but the motion quickly dissipated. In vacuum conditions, manipulating the flag caused it to flap vigorously as if it were being blown by a breeze.

2 - No stars are visible in the pictures taken by the Apollo astronauts from the surface of the Moon.

Answer that Phil Plait of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center and Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph. 'All manned landings happened during the lunar daytime thus, the stars were outshone by the sun and by sunlight reflected off the moon'. Oh, okay then.

3 - The footprints in the fine lunar dust, with no moisture or atmosphere or strong gravity, are unexpectedly well preserved, as if made in wet sand.

The lack of wind on the moon means the footprints in fine, dry lunar dust aren’t blown away in the way they would be if made in a similar substance on Earth as explained by the clever chaps at the Marshall Space Flight Center when the Mythbusters team tested whether dry or wet sand made a more distinguishable footprint by stepping in them with an astronaut boot. It was clear that the wet footprint had more detail than the dry footprint. They then placed sand similar in composition to the soil on the Moon in a vacuum chamber and stepped on it with an astronaut boot, which made a clear print.

4 - The astronauts could not have survived the trip because of exposure to radiation from the Van Allen radiation belt.

The paper 'Review of Particle Properties' from the Particle Data Group at Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory state that due to the speed Apollo was travelling and as they passed through the narrowest part of the radiation belt, passage took about 5 min during which time the astronauts would have received a maximum of 50 mSv which would not be enough to make the astronauts even noticeably ill.

5 - Why have we not attempted a moon landing since 1972? It proves it never went there in the first place because it is just too difficult.

I'll take this one, beating the Soviet Union to the moon was always the main goal of the Apollo program but sending men to the moon is costly, the moon landing cost $24 billion and with the Space War won, which was the whole point, pressure to spend elsewhere curtailed any further moon landings after Apollo 17.

That's me convinced then, all that evidence and debunking of the conspiracy theories should force the last few lingering doubters to slink off quietly but it's unlikely, even when faced with photographs which show the Apollo landing sites complete with flag, footprints, buggy tracks, scientific equipment and even the lunar descent stage. Oh well, it would be boring if we all believed the same thing wouldn't it.

Gagarin, Armstrong & Laika

It's a shame that what Yuri Gagarin achieved will forever be equated with the Cold War and the Soviets and Americans ideological tussle rather than as one of our greatest achievements.
On the news channel RT (Russia Today) they were describing Gagarin's double of being the first human in space and the first human to orbit the earth as the most important achievement in the space race. As they would being proud Russians.
Over on CNN, it was acknowledged as a great achievement but they argued that the Apollo 11 mission and Neil Armstrong stepping on the moon as the pinnacle of the space race. As they would being rightly proud Americans.
Neil Armstrong is undoubtedly the more famous and his actions more symbolic but without Gagarin, Armstrong wouldn't have been stepping off that lander and into the history books.
Yuri’s space flight ensured that President John F Kennedy pushed the USA’s space ambitions up the list of priorities and there probably wouldn’t have been a man on the Moon just nine years later. Gagarin’s achievement could be said to have changed the course of world history.
Gagarin's could be the most important for mankind, he paved the way for every astronaut that followed, but Armstrong's the more significant because it showed man can leave our own planet, stand on other bodies in the solar system and return safely.
Unfortunately, once the moon was landed upon the space program cooled and the next giant step of a man on Mars, never materialised and due to financial constraints, is unlikely to be revived in our lifetime.
So instead of regressing back to the days of the Cold War we should celebrate both the Soviet and Americans feats, both as hugely important as each other and spare a sad thought for little Laika too who beat them both out of the Earths atmosphere.