I didn't plan on being up this late, but OS upgrades have funny ways of distorting time. Anyhow, it's a quarter to 2, and there's a rocket launch from Vandenberg AFB at 3:22am. An hour and a half from now.

If I didn't have to leave the house at 8 or 8:30am I'd stay up. That is, if I'd gotten more than 4 hours of sleep last night, which I didn't. Drat. I haven't seen a rocket firing in a long time, and even though Vandenberg's 260 miles south of here, you can still see the rockets on a clear night like tonight. Then again, it might not launch at all today. Though by the time you're reading this, it's resolved either way.

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I love it when news sites publish scientific articles. They try to get people excited about the ephemeral or intangible, and they usually do a pretty good job. Then there's the exception to the rule. Today's CNN story about tomorrow's blue moon is one of the worst-written articles I've ever seen on CNN, barring when they accidentally insert the same paragraph twice in a row.

First, there's an image of a reddish moon with a caption explaining how soot from recent volcanos or fires can make the moon appear blue. Then the first paragraph talks about how tomorrow will be a 'blue moon' because it's the second full moon in a month. Next they explain how a 'blue moon' has nothing to do with a color change, but is purely a coincidental conjunction of the moon's orbit with the Gregorian calendar, and it happens every 32 months or so, except last year, when it happened twice in three months, thanks to a February without any full moon.

Then we go in to a long first-person (?!) discussion of where the term 'blue moon' came from, culminating by a reminiscence of that time that the author put forth a theory that it was a derivation of 'belewe' from Old English, which means 'to betray.' Allusions to Billy Crystal's rendition of Miracle Max in the Princess Bride ("He clearly said 'to blathe' which, as we all know means 'to bluff'!"), the author proposes that the 'belewe moon' is so named because it 'betrays the usual perception of one full moon per month.'

Then follow another few paragraphs explaining how the author's offhand hypothesis later proved to be false, and that the original term came from the Farmers Almanac in the 1920s, to refer to the one extra full moon in a season, and then was bastardized in the 1940s by a writer at rival publication Sky & Telescope (the author writes for space.com).

In closing, the author brings the subject back to this blue moon, or more exactly, to the first full moon of the month, four weeks past, and how it occurs when the moon coincidentally is at perogee with the Earth, making tides higher than usual, and warning, all in the present tense, that if there are any cosatal storms on the 4th of July weekend, it could mean big flooding in those areas. This is because the story originally appeared on Space.com on July 2nd, and someone decided to push it up to the CNN home page today, after changing a few words in the first paragraph while ignoring the context of the latter part of the article.

Don't mind me. I'm just having a bitter day and am taking it out on one less-than-perfect story...

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Paul Davies makes an interesting case for a realistic mission to Mars: Make it a one-way trip (NYT registration required).

It wouldn't be the first time explorers have gone on to new lands without expectation of coming back, and the potential gain is significant. Unlike the Moon, Mars can provide a sustainable habitat, with minimal supplies sent from Earth each time the 2.2-year window opens up.

Further, if we start with a crew of four, and add more people as the colony proves its viability, then this concept starts to look less and less like a suicide mission, and more like colonization.

Sure, there are tons of problems, not the least of which is that so far 20 of the 36 craft sent to Mars have failed en-route, which makes gambling on the bi-annual resupply from Earth a harrowing and possibly deadly game, but improving the reliability of the one-way trips is infinitely easier than trying to engineer a round-trip with current technologies.

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China's due to launch their first person into space before the end of the year, the third country to do so (after the US and Russia).

But are they really third? Or did a 16th century astronomer beat everyone else to the punch?

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Who has the biggest starship? Now you can compare!

The work that went in to this is truly impressive, as are the ships themselves. The only craft I looked for but wasn't there was the RingWorld. That would be a very cool addition, and a 'space craft' in the truest sense...

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Wow. CNN PDF'ed and published a packet of the emails (2.2meg PDF) that went around NASA in the days days before the Columbia disaster. Reading the exchanges is truly fascinating. I'm only on page 9 of 27 now, but it's really clear that a lot of relevant people were aware of the risks, and did what they could to work out disaster scenarios if the wheel well was breeched.

The undercurrent to most of the correspondence was that if it was a problem it could easily become a catastrophic problem, but if the Shuttle made it through the early stages of re-entry, they needed to have decisions regarding bailout or landings sans-gear already decided.

It's horrible that this happened, and worse that more data wasn't available, especially now that detailed investigation found what was probably several tiles in orbit near the orbiter after an orbiter translation (not sure if it was an OMS burn or just an RCS adjustment).

Anyhow, if you're curious, or just morbid, it makes for very interesting reading, both from a historical and an organizational perspective. All in all, I feel this is a different NASA than the one that decided to launch Challenger, but accidents can still happen.

If you decide not to read it, don't worry, I'm sure the movie-of-the-week special will probably be out by September.

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Getting out of bed and walking to the bathroom I flipped awake my sidekick to read the email dreams that it collected as I was busy gathering my own. Sifting past the spam that always seems to fall heavier at night, I noticed the 'CNN Breaking News' that always grabs my attention. I'm always timid about reading these emails: will it be as benign as the FAA ordering an airline to inspect their planes, or was it a declaration of war on Iraq?

"-- NASA reports losing contact with space shuttle Columbia at 9 a.m. EST prior its scheduled landing at 9:16 a.m."

Reading the first few words, I thought I knew how to feel. 'Oh. NASA lost contact with another probe. Sheesh.' Then, 'NASA lost contact with the Shuttle. Wow. That's embarrassing. Reminds me of Spacecamp.' And finally, '16 minutes before landing? Shit.'

And of course, the next email from CNN was sitting there in my inbox, five minutes old:

"-- The space shuttle Columbia, carrying a crew of seven, broke up Saturday morning 200,000 feet above Texas. More soon"

I woke up Rachel to tell her what was going on, remembering just over a year ago on Sept 11 when Ammy woke me up to tell me that 'the world just got crazy.'

Rachel got up and we turned on the TV to a random channel.

Fixating on Rather and Blitzer, by the video clips and the developing story, there was a part of my head sitting in the back of the theater, so to speak, thinking I should feel differently than I did. Yes, I was horrified. Yes, I was stricken. Yet all the while I was comparing this experience to the morning of the Challenger explosion, looking for the reasons why this time the whole morning seemed somehow muted. I didn't need help coping with the tragedy.

I already know what to feel.

And I don't think I'm the only one: Over the course of the day I interacted with a bunch of people, and the only time Columbia even came up was when, after several minutes of talking without any mention of the accident, I asked them if they'd heard the news, just to be sure.

Challenger prepared us for the reality of a shuttle disaster. It reminded us that an astronaut's bravery isn't a hollow thing, and that accidents really can happen. As much as Tufte might have shown that Challenger was preventable, it wasn't because shuttles were inherently safe. Last year there were 15 million commercial aircraft flights in the United States and not a single fatality. When the shuttles were designed, they estimated that there could be a serious mishap (resulting in an RTLS, TAL, AOA, ATO or contingency abort) once every 50 launches.

Beyond Challenger though, 9/11 was the real primer for today. Beyond the fact that Challenger eliminated the surprised shock of such a tragedy, 9/11 gave us a sense of scope. Here was a shock that not only stretched wider, with initial estimates of 20,000 dead lowered to 6,000 and a month later to 3,000, but deeper, as it was just a starting point of a whole new world, and not the shiny kind. I didn't realize just how much we all grew up in the last 16 months until yesterday. Maybe jaded is a better term.

It's terrible to say, but there is some relief in experiencing a closed-end tragedy. The loss of seven lives, a three billion dollar spacecraft, and a dent in space exploration that could last from one to three years; these are all things to make us sad. But at the same time there's a salve in knowing it won't instigate UN resolutions, a half-trillion dollars in new military spending, killing of thousands of enemy troops, and the threat of Weapons of Mass Destruction from enemies we're only learning to hate because they hate us.

The tragedy of a space disaster is something I already know how to feel. The emotions it evokes are emotions I can respect within myself and in others. This is sorrow, grief, and moving on. I only wish more tragedies could so easily be dealt with.

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Damn. If you somehow have been hiding from the news, turn on the tv or visit your favorite news site.

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Last June, astronomers discovered a new planet, one tenth thie diameter (and one hundredth the volume) of the Earth, but is bigger than all the asteroids put together.

Hopefully this won't turn into another 'it's a planet, it's a comet, it's an asteroit, it's a moonlet' astro-pissfight. True, it's smaller than Pluto, but it doesn't have Pluto's ambiguous orbit, and a rock 800 miles in diameter in a regular circular orbit in the planetary plane isn't a trivial mass.

The discoverers dubbed the planet 'Quaoar,' after the 'great force of nature that summoned the world into being' worshiped by the Tongva people who inhabited the Los Angeles area before Western infiltration.

On another note, I found one paragraph in BBC article amusing:

However, Quaoar is not an official name - at least not yet. In a few months, the International Astronomical Union, astronomy's governing body, will vote on it.

I like the wording they used. It just reminds me of Enterprise last season, when T'pol says that the Vulcan Science Directorate has established that time trave doesn't exist. Astronomy isn't like football, the stock market, or Paraguay. A science can't have a governing body. Sure they can vote on what to call a planet, or whether to even classify it as a planet, but I'd like to see them try to vote on Kepler's laws of planetary motion, the gravitational constant, or Chandrasekhar's limit.

So: Another planet. First new one in 76 years. Nifty, but I wouldn't want to build a summer home there.

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When an astronaut is in space, their time is worth $400/minute.

That's why NASA spends more per user for usability research than any other company in the world...

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Err, um, yeah. Anyhow:

There's a solar eclipse on Monday! The western half of the US will be treated to a partial eclipse in the evening hours, with Los Angeles seeing 80% of totality and San Francisco seeing a 68% occlusion maxing out around 6:20 PM.

For more details on viewing conditions and times in your neck of the woods (including the total (well, annular) eclipse for those in the south tip of Baja or the Mexican mainland), check out NASA's full eclipse info page.

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Kudos to How Stuff Works for a timely, useful, and informative article about Digital Satellite Radio (aka XM-band radio).

Just like the net is starting to move from the ever-weakening advertising model into subscription services (Salon, Yahoo! and Slashdot are prime examples), mainstream media is following suit. HBO is a purveyor of fine serial content instead of just movies, people pay monthly fees to ditch commercials via TiVo, and streaming ad-free audio in your car is available now, and will probably be everywhere in the next 18 months, with low hardware costs, designed to lure you into the $9.95 monthly fees.

Anyhow, an interesting article. Hope you enjoy it, and that your Thanksgivings are going well!

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Reminder: Don't forget about the Leonid Meteor Shower this Saturday night/Sunday morning. If you're in the San Francisco area, watch the Eastern skies from 1am to 2:30am for a spectacular show with hundreds or thousands of meteors per hour. Other areas in the US, adjust your timezones accordingly. It'll be pretty simultaneous for North America.

This photo, taken during the 1999 Leonids Shower, is just amazing. This year's is forecast to be the biggest shower 'till 2099.

Incidentally, Lorenzo Comolli, the photographer who took this picture, has quite a collection of astronomical photographs, including a fascinating movie recorded earlier this month of Saturn being occluded by the Moon and reappearing on the other side (warning, it's in Div-X format, so it requires a special codec (linked to on the site)).

If you can't make it out of your city, then just stay up late and look skyward anyhow and you're sure to see some streaks, as long as it's not cloudy.

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Ever wonder what water would look like if it was boiling in zero-gravity (well, microgravity, anyhow)? No? Okay, you're normal.

But just in case you're a geek, here's a story all about Shuttle experiments of microgravity boiling, with some cool MPEGs.

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I've never been in a big meteor shower before. I may not be able to say the same thing next week.

The Leonid Shower is coming to town, and by all accounts it should be huge. It's going to reach its peak shortly after midnight on Saturday night (Sunday morning) the 17th/18th.

Sadly, I'll be spending Saturday afternoon leaving one of the best places to see the event, Lake Tahoe. At that altitude, there should be roughly 2700 visible streaks per hour (or one every 1.3 seconds) at its peak at 2am. The good news is that I'll be at Crystal's birthday in Vallejo, so we won't be in the thick of light pollution, and if we're feeling motivated we can still take a short drive and get away from most of the background light and still get around 2200 streaks per hour (compared to about 350/hr in urban areas (which is still nothing to sneeze at)).

Want to find out when and where is the best time to watch? Grab your latitude and longitude (or pick the biggest city close to you) and take it to NASA's Leonid Flux Estimator. It'll tell you the best time to watch, and give you a rough idea of what you can expect.

This should be quite incredible. Just the thing for a birthday party.

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Thanks go to Eden and James for pointing out that we merely tied the record for the most people in space last week.

It seems we did the same thing (with a fully-loaded Shuttle, Mir, and Soyuz capsule) in 1995, and again in 1997. I guess this time it's just ho-hum. It's interesting to note (if you're an anal trivia freak) that the Endeavour was involved in each of these events.

Maybe once we get the habitat module up in the ISS we'll be able to up the number, as 7 and 3 are the max for Shuttle and Soyuz transport ships respectively. Then again, since the Soyuz ships are the escape ships for the ISS, I wonder how they'll manage with a crew greater than 3. The X-38 project was supposed to fit that bill, but it's been scrapped...

Oh, unless NASA sends up two Shuttles at the same time... But as anyone in Houston (or anyone who watched Armegeddon) could tell you, if NASA had to try to keep two Shuttles running at the same time, it's collective head would explode.

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So I haven't read anything to this effect, but from last Saturday through this Tuesday there are seven astronauts on the Endeavour Shuttle, three in the International Space Station, and three in the Soyuz capsule. I don't know this for a fact, but it seems likely to me that thirteen people is the highest number ever in space at the same time (alien abductions notwithstanding ).

Can anyone corroborate this? I'm surprised that in a society that keeps track of the most trivial sporting statistics, this kind of record could go unnoticed.

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So as I was discussing in an earlier post about Christa McAuliffe's inadvertant role in the Challenger Disaster, it's becoming clear how 'space tourist' Dennis Tito's trip to the International Space Station could result in a disaster having nothing to do with his experience, training, or lack thereof.

I hadn't expected the departure from standard operating procedure to be so similar to Challenger, but there it is. Tito's Soyuz craft took off this morning for the space station, over NASA's objections, as the Endeavour is still docked to the station, pending repair of its computers.

Endeavour is expected to leave on Sunday, but this is by no means a certainty. The Soyuz ship plans to dock with the Station on Monday. Because of the high profile of this mission, and the Russians' need to demonstrate that they have some measure of control, instead of simply taking directives from NASA, they refused to delay the launch by a day or two, to ensure Endeavour's departure.

If Endeavour is still there on Monday, the Russian Space Agency has implied that they'll dock anyhow (the station has more than one docking port). This hasn't been adequately prepared or trained for, and there's a possibility of shearing problems, as you have three very heavy bodies all connected by two relatively small sealed joints (the docking connectors and airlocks).

If I could tell you what could go wrong, it probably wouldn't be a problem, but there are just too many unknowns. In addition, astronauts spent the last few days 'tourist-proofing' the station, an unplanned act that all by itself could initiate a critical unexpected problem.

And of course, the irony is again that if so much pressure hadn't been centered around Tito's 'mission' then there would be a far less likely chance of disaster than there is with all the minor and major changes taking place at the same time in order to accomodate the mission.

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Causality is such a weird thing. I'm starting to think that the whole concept of causality serves to confuse predictions and understandings of events, whether they are physical, neurological, or social. I'm sure I'll write a long speil about it at some point, but one thing hit me again today...

With this whole blowup (pardon the term) about letting Dennis Tito visit the International Space Station as a tourist, a CNN article made a loose reference to the Challenger disaster and Christa McAuliffe, the last 'space tourist' to attempt a space mission (if you don't count Senator John Glenn). The article quotes NASA officials who think sending Tito up would be dangerous because he's not sufficiently trained and could endanger himself and others.

Well, obviously it wasn't Christa McAuliffe's lack of training that precipitated the Challenger disaster, but it's also fair to say that the disaster wouldn't have happened if she wasn't on the mission.

Back on that fateful day in January 1987, a shuttle was launched in far more adverse conditions than ever attempted before. Morton Thiokol, makers of the solid rocket booster that failed, spent the 12 hours before the launch trying to convince NASA officials that the launch in such cold weather wasn't a good idea. It was the first time the manufacturer had ever given a 'no-launch' recommendation in 12 years of rocket development for NASA.

So why did NASA launch anyway? Well, Edward Tufte would say that it was because Thiokol did an abyssmal job of data visualization and presentation, and true as that may be (this is what I mean about causality. A billion things need to align for something to happen, and you can point to any one and say 'that's why it happened. What a flawed concept), as bad as the data visualization may have been, NASA decided to override the recommendation because this was a media-driven mission.

Like the Moon shots, which NASA used to gain funding for planetary research (mainly the Pioneer and Voyager missions), the Challenger mission was supposed to renew waning excitement over the Shuttle and other initiatives NASA had planned including, ironically, a space station to compete with Mir.

Okay, back to the point, if Christa hadn't been on the Shuttle the nation wouldn't have been watching, and if the nation wasn't watching, NASA wouldn't have had so much pressure to launch on schedule, better conditions would have been waited for, and the launch would have gone off without a problem.

Sort of Murphey's Law and a Catch-22 rolled into one..

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