Sep 2006

Space tourism is hitting the headlines again this month, with Anousheh Ansari landing safely after her 10-day visit to the ISS to be met by her husband, a fur blanket and a bunch of red roses. Her opinion? She can't wait to do it again. The world's first repeat space tourist, perhaps? US astronaut Jeff Williams and Russian cosmonaut Pavel Vinogradov shared her safe landing, but didn't get the roses.

Richard Branson's Virgin Galactic airline unveiled the first mock-up of their 8-seater SpaceShipTwo. The grinning Branson revealed that the carrier craft White Knight Two (or Eve, depending on who is talking) dimensions are going to be not dissimilar to a 757. Branson has suddenly got green fever, deciding that he's going to donate billions to developing environmentally friendlier fuel. To that end, the're using a slightly different hybrid rocket fuel blend than the one that put SpaceShipOne in orbit to win the Ansari X-Prize.

Six of SpaceShipTwo's crew will be people who turn up a few days before the event and get a bit of zero gravity training - the White Knight carrier craft will be fitted out with a zero-g chamber looking much like SpaceShipTwo for training flights. But one of the passengers will turn up months in advance for an altogether more rigorous training, and presumably is going to need a pilot's licence - they're the co-pilot. That beats bragging rights over flying a helicopter or supersonic jet hands down. Alan Watts from Harrow in the UK is even managing to get his flight from his accumulated Virgin Air Miles!

Sadly, some bad news in space too. The Hubble Space Telescope is squinting once more, after yet another camera failure. This one does appear to be in the camera itself, rather than in the power supply as per last month's report. There are two more cameras in the "ACS" package, and worst case they expect to be able to continue with those. The one that is gone is the High Resolution Channel (HRC), which has the sharpest vision, but only used in around 10% of observations that use the trio of cameras.

This problem is not related to the issues the US is having with its spy satellites. Apparently those Chinese have had the temerity to shine bright lasers up at the secret US spy satellites as they fly overhead, preventing them from taking their harmless holiday snapshots of Chinese military installations. This has annoyed certain people in the US - the sort who usually go "no comment", "neither confirm nor deny", "take this one to Guantanamo" etc. - as they now have to hide the increased cost of the next generation of spy satellites from the US taxpayer.

New Mexico's budding new spaceport had its first launch this month, though not exactly a successful one. The UP Aerospace SpaceLoft XL rocket was supposed to fly to an altitude of 70 miles - about 110km, or just into space. Defining where space starts is a tricky exercise, as all sorts of countries are trying to avoid doing so. If you define space properly, you have to ensure anything above that complies with all sorts of treaties about weapons, access, insurance and so forth that they'd rather ignore when it's convenient.

Anyway, the SpaceLoft XL reached the grand height of 7.5 miles before corkscrewing around, flipping over and falling back to Earth in rugged desert terrain somewhere to the west of White Sands Missile Range. Nobody presented any roses to the landing capsule, mostly 'cos they've not found the pieces yet. About 50 private companies and students are wondering what happened to their payloads.

Good news on the Pluto front though. No, it's not been redeclared a planet just yet, but the New Horizons spacecraft just took its first picture of Jupiter as it approaches for a flyby (On the left, courtesy NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute). The half-tonne spacecraft used its Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) to take the photo on the 4^th September 2006, from a distance of 291 million kilometres. Though Jupiter is an easier shot than Pluto, it's nice to see the detail available in the clouds, the Jovian moons Europa (at left) and Io, and the shadows they cast on Jupiter.

No face on Mars, either. To the surprise of few sane people, photographs of the supposed face in the Cydonia region of Mars using ESA's high-resolution stereo camera on Mars Express showed no trace of face. The original NASA/JPL photo is shown here on the right. All that was visible was a lumpy mountain, and some scientific evidence of the ability of the human mind to recognise anything that looks vaguely like a face from birth. I frankly find it a little disconcerting that such trivialities absorb so much of the budget for of serious space exploration.

Those following the RepRap saga of the world's first practical self-replicating machine might like to know that it has made its first functioning part. I went to Vienna a couple of weeks ago to take part in the Paraflows '06 exhibition, and ended up being on TV on their "Taugshow" where I broke the good news. I'm still working with plastics, but now have an injection head that can do metal. Heavy metal. Yeahhhh! [ The author is now recovering from an excess of head-banging, lager-drinking and wrist injuries caused by playing the aerial guitar.]

This edition is also on the web, just point your web browser to http://olliver.family.gen.nz.   vik@olliver.family.gen.nz

"Man is a slave because freedom is difficult,
whereas slavery is easy." - Nikolai Berdyaev