One Small Step....

If I've done this right, this post will appear at 20 July at 20:17 UTC -- 40 years to the moment from when a manned spacecraft from Earth first touched down on the surface of another world.

I was 12 years old and my family was on vacation, camping at Rocky Mountain National Park in Colorado, right up by the continental divide. We had been into town for something -- I don't recall what, maybe a restaurant dinner; I don't even recall which town -- and on our return in the evening, stopped at a little country store to pick up whatever. I stayed in the car while my parents went inside.

A few moments later my Dad re-emerged, beckoning frantically at me to come inside. In the store, I found a crowd of people gathered around a dutch door at the back that gave into the owner's living quarters. The upper half was open, and everyone was watching a small black-and-white TV perched on the kitchen counter. On that screen was Neil Armstrong taking his first few steps on the moon. Not that I could see much: by the time the low-bandwidth lunar signal had been received, converted to broadcast format (by pointing a TV camera at the slow-scan monitor in Mission Control!), been broadcast by the networks, filtered through the local weather (as I recall it was raining, maybe even thundering) and made its way to the rabbit ears of this little receiver way up in the Rockies, all that was left was a bunch of monochrome blobs that moved every so often.



Back at camp, I fell asleep in our tent trailer that night listening to the radio coverage. Before turning in I made a last visit to the washroom. At our altitude it was pretty cold for July; but the weather had cleared and the sky was crystal clear as only a high mountain sky, far from any city, can be. The moon was full and dazzlingly bright in my memory.

And a 12 year old boy looked up and realized: that's not just a light in the sky. It's a world -- and there is a man walking on it!

Way Cool....

This image, from the Lunar Reconaissance Orbiter, of the Apollo 14 landing site, in which you can see the LM, an instrument package, and the footpath where the astronauts walked:

This and more NRO Apollo images here.

I wish there were more of those.

The Shuttle is Carrying What?

Am I the only one to notice this? Or am I the only one whose mind is....well, the kind of mind that would point it out?

The current space shuttle mission, STS-124, is carrying two important cargoes for the International Space Station.

One, about 50cm long, is a replacement pump for the ISS's zero-g toilet. If you understand even a little basic physics, you can see that excretion in free fall has certain, um, unusual hazards associated with it, and as a consequence the toilet facilities have to be rather high-tech. And it's a bit of a nuisance when a piece of that technology goes on the fritz. So the ISS crew are looking forward to getting the space-loo working properly again.

The other, and much larger item (about 11 meters and 15 tonnes) is a Japanese lab module to be affixed to the side of the ISS. The name of the module is (wait for it).....

Kibo

In Japanese, this means "hope". So let's hope the crew makes sure to install the correct item in the correct place....

OK, I'll admit it's childish.