STS-51-L

Tonight I will drink a toast to these brave adventurers, as I did last night for the crew of Apollo 1.

Review: The Martian (Spoiler Free)

Director Ridley Scott's The Martian opened this weekend (currently sporting a 94% fresh rating at Rotten Tomatoes), and I got to see a morning matinee. I saw it without 3D. Even before lunch, the theater was nearly full, which is saying something. I can easily say this was the best movie I've seen all year, handily beating out Avengers: Age of Ultron, and Ant Man, both of which I really liked. In fact, I would put this as one of my top ten films I've ever seen.

To give the briefest possible synopsis: Matt Damon is astronaut Mark Watney, a member of the Ares III expedition to Mars. When the mission is aborted because of a powerful sandstorm, Watney is left behind, presumed killed by the storm. But he's very much alive, and stranded on Mars, with only his wits and the leftover equipment from the base camp to survive.

From such a simple premise, which has been used in movies before this (1969's Marooned and 1995's Apollo 13), comes an absolutely wonderful movie. Much of the film revolves around Watney's attempts to stay alive long enough for the next scheduled Mars mission to arrive in four years. But every time he (and the audience) feel a little confident that he'll make it, a new problem (or catastrophe) arises that has to be overcome.

The parallel story on Earth, where NASA (once they realize Watley's still alive) need to find a way to communicate with him, and then to rescue him, is beautifully handled, with the conflicting needs of the government bureaucracy to maintain a good public face, to the technical problems they face, to the issue of dealing with Watley's crewmates, who are on their way home and still think he's dead all played out realistically.

The characters are all well-written and well-acted, and there's a surprising amount of humor thrown in throughout the film, much of it coming from Damon (he keeps a video log which serves as a sort of self-commentary narration, but it's not constant enough to be intrusive), but a lot of it just being the sort of normal banter that you'd expect a bunch of engineers and people dealing with engineers to toss back and forth.

The tension is maintained throughout the whole film, which doesn't waste any time in putting the situation into play. There's a little back-and-forth between the crew to establish the sort of relationships that any six people would have after 400 days together in space, and five minutes later they're running for their lives to get off the planet. The commander's sense of loss at having to leave a crewman behind is well played, and the film (wisely, in my opinion) doesn't play the "I have to get back to my wife and kids" angle; as far as we can tell, Watley's a bachelor. That keeps everything focused on survival.

This is definitely a pro-science, pro-space movie. It makes me grieve for the state of our current space program, and the fact that what seems like pretty sensible, feasible technology (even the Hermes, the base ship that shuttles between Mars and Earth, seems plausible, if expensive) makes what we can, or can't, do all the more poignant. Hell, it makes me regret my own life choices, that I didn't angle for a career at NASA somehow, coming out of college.

The film is about the triumph of human ingenuity, the sense of scientific cooperation crossing international rivalries, and the sense that if you just keep solving one little problem at a time, methodically, you'll eventually wind up with no more problems to face. Until Mars tries to kill you again, that is.

Five stars out of five. Go see this film. It's a masterpiece.

Space Shuttle Columbia

Ten years ago today, NASA mission STS-107 ended in tragedy as the Space Shuttle Columbia disintegrated on re-entry in the skies over Texas.

rest in peace

Commander: Col. Rick D. Husband (USAF)

Pilot: Cdr. William C. McCool (USN)

Payload Commander: Lt. Col. Michael P. Anderson (USAF)

Payload Specialist: Col. Ilan Ramon (IAF)

Mission Specialist: Kalpana Chawla

Mission Specialist: Cpt. David M. Brown (USN)

Mission Specialist: Laurel Blair Salton Clark

RIP Neil Armstrong

Neil Armstrong, the first human being to walk on the surface of the moon, died today at the age of 82. He had served in both the Gemini and Apollo space programs, and was an inspiration to an entire generation of young Americans who would be fascinated with the idea of space travel and the colonization of other worlds.

Farewell.

UPDATE: From the family's announcement: "For those who may ask what they can do to honor Neil, we have a simple request. Honor his example of service, accomplishment and modesty, and the next time you walk outside on a clear night and see the moon smiling down at you, think of Neil Armstrong and give him a wink."

Space That Might Have Been: Rombus

Considering what a space geek I am, I certainly should have known about this before today, but I never heard of this!

Back in 1964, Phil Bono of Douglas Aircraft (which later merged to become McDonnell Douglas) came up with a bold proposal for a reusable single-stage booster. The Reusable Orbital Module, Booster, and Utility Shuttle (ROMBUS) consisted of a large central core rocket surrounded by eight disposable hydrogen fuel cells (that would drop to earth by parachute and thus be themselves reusable). It would have had a payload of 990,000 lbs. (compare to the 52,600 maximum payload the Space Shuttle could bring to LEO) and have cost $195 per pound in 2010 dollars (compare to the Space Shuttle, which ended up costing around $9,000 per pound). The Rombus would have been recoverable at sea.

But the best part about the Rombus design, efficient and innovative as it was at the time, were the spin-off projects that were built around the basic design.

Ithacus was designed using the basic concept of Rombus, but as an intercontinental troop carrier capable of transporting 1,200 troops with full combat gear anywhere in the world in 90 minutes. Yes, that's right. A drop-ship design from 1964. There was also an Ithacus Jr. that would be able to transport 260 soldiers or 33.5 tons of materiel. They would be launched in pairs from nuclear-powered aircraft carriers to deploy troops and equipment. Pegasus was a civilian version of the concept.

Bono figured out that, if there was a capacity for refueling the rocket in Earth orbit, one of his Rombus ships could make it to the moon and back. That realization was the basis for Project Selena, which would have had a permanently manned lunar base with a crew of 25 by 1978, and a thousand-man base producing rocket fuel from the lunar regolith by 1984 (damnit, that's what SHOULD have been happening when I was graduating from high school!). The base itself would be constructed out of spent fuel canisters, which would be brought to the moon as shelter material rather than discarded once the hydrogen fuel was spent.

Project Deimos was similar in concept, although grander in scope; a Rombus vehicle could take a Mars Excursion Module on a 200-day journey in 1986. The expedition would remain on the surface for 20 days and then return. Later expeditions would have a much longer staying-time, owing to unmanned Rombus vehicles which would drop off supplies for future manned exploration missions.

Alas, the Rombus never got past the design stage and multiple-stage rockets won out over SSTO's (with more work the overly-optimistic estimates of capacity and cost would probably have been made more realistic), and we got the space program of Apollo, Skylab, the Space Shuttle, and the ISS. Which are spectacular achievements in and of themselves of course, but it does make me long for a manned lunar colony and men on Mars...

All images in this post credit: NASA.

Neil DeGrasse Tyson on Privatization of Space Travel

I've removed the embedded video because it was set on auto-play and would start blaring every time I refreshed my blog. You can find it here, and it's well worth watching.

End of an Era

I got to see the shuttle atop the 747 transport aircraft back in 1990, when I was in basic training in the Air Force and the plane flew over Lackland AFB. My wife got to see it today, as she was in Washington, D.C. on a field trip with her class. Coincidentally, we both got to see the shuttle Discovery.

I am a huge supporter of manned space exploration, and it's one of the few things that breaks my normally libertarian sensibilities to say it's worth the expenditure of large amounts of public money, because the payback really is enormous, as opposed to the tens of thousands of ratholes Washington normally finds to pour the public purse down into. (For those who buy into the "robots can do it cheaper" argument, I invite you to read this article by Jared Keller in the Atlantic Monthly; it ain't just Tang and tinted sunglasses.)

So this is an enormously bittersweet time for me, as not only are we seeing the symbolic end of an era of American manned spaceflight (especially with the International Day of Manned Space Flight just 5 days behind us), but that it's a self-inflicted wound that the smallest smidgen of political will could have overcome. That said, I'm greatly heartened that SpaceX has been given approval to do a cargo run to the International Space Station. If we can't have both a private and a public space program, I'm glad that the government is at least getting out of the way of private industry on this one.

R.I.P. The United States Space Shuttle Program, 1976-2011

• 134 missions, including construction of the International Space Station, the Magellan space probe, the Galileo space probe, the Ulysses space probe, the Chandra X-Ray Observatory, repairing the Hubble Space Telescope, deployment and servicing of dozens of satellites, and countless experiments in microgravity.
• 14 lives lost. (Challenger's STS-51-L Crew) Commander Francis "Dick" Scobee, pilot Mike Smith, mission specialists Judy Resnik, Ellison Onizuka and Ron McNair, and payload specialists Greg Jarvis and Christa McAuliffe; (Columbia's STS-107 Crew) Commander Rick Husband; pilot William McCool; mission specialists Michael Anderson, David Brown, Kalpana Chawla and Laurel Clark, and payload specialist Ilan Ramon, Israel's first astronaut.
• $209 billion over its lifetime of 35 years (approximately the same amount spent on the U.S. Forestry Service).
• 3.5 millions pounds of payload lifted into low Earth orbit.
• Almost 200,000 man-hours in space (1,323 days for various shuttles aloft).
• 355 different astronauts participating in various Shuttle missions, including 49 women, and all hailing from 16 different countries.

11 Years Later, and We're Still Nowhere Close

On this day in 1968, one of, if not the greatest science fiction film of all time debuted. I was but a wee lad of 2, but seeing this movie in the theater is one of my earliest memories.