Free-Fall from space

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If a rocket didn’t carry people into space any more…

For those of a certain age, the American space program and the race to the moon remains one of our most cherished childhood memories.

For other people of a certain age, though, that is all ancient history.

They can easily remind you that a human being first set foot on the moon 42 years ago this summer.  He flew along with two comrades in a cramped spaceship that couldn’t be used again after the flight.

Thirty years ago, Americans started using a re-usable space plane to go into orbit and bring back not just three men, but a half dozen men and women on every flight.

2011 will mark the end of the American manned space program, at least as far as launches from the United States go. The shuttle program will end this summer. The planned return to the moon and eventual Mars missions are scrapped.  Anyone, Americans included, headed to the International Space Station will have to fly on Russian rockets.

When a rocket from the United States doesn’t carry anyone into space any more, will anyone notice?

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Further reading:

• Rocket men by Craig Nelson.
• “As astronaut Sally Ride turns 60, shuttle rides to end” by James M. Clash.

Skywatch 2010: UFO over Newfoundland

Seems like it is time for the quinquennial skywatch panic.

In 2005, it was a load of seemingly unending silliness about debris from a NASA booster rocket. That’s just one of a bunch of posts from April and May 2005, incidentally.

Now it’s this thing seen over portions of the south coast and the northeast coast.



Okay.

It isn’t a French missile launched from St. Pierre, apparently.

And it isn’t the maiden flight of a locally produced nuclear missile.

Odds are it is a bit of space junk or a meteorite burning up as it enters the atmosphere.

But why should that get in the way of a good yarn?

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Government on shuttle watch?

STS-127 will launch from Cape Canaveral in less than four hours.

The shuttle Endeavour will launch on an inclination of 51.6 degrees taking it over the Hibernia, Terra Nova and White Rose platforms.

Is our offshore oil safe from the possibility shuttle pieces will fall on top of them in some sort of fiery cataclysm?

Don’t laugh.

Only four short years ago, the Premier threw a very public and very ill-informed panic attack over rocket launches heading over the precious oil fields and the prospect one might drop and blow everything up.

It was one of the early dramas in what seems to have become  a drama-filled administration.

Not all have been so preposterous or as laughable.

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Weather Report Update:  They scrubbed the launch due to bad weather.

Mercury astronaut Wally Schirra dies at age 84

Wally Schirra, the only astronaut to fly each of the first three American spacecraft died on Wednesday in California. [Photo, right: the-rocketman.com]

Shirra was the fifth American in space, piloting Sigma 7 , left, [Photo: NASA] on a six orbit flight that lasted nine hours. He also served as command pilot on Gemini 6 and on Apollo 7, the first orbital flight of the spacecraft that eventually took men to the moon.

Retiring from NASA and the United States Navy in 1969, Schirra had a successful career in business, finishing his life as a consultant.

Schirra launched a website, wallyshirra.com, in 2005.

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