NASA’s First Woman in Space Marks her 29th Anniversary of Mission Launch

On June 18, 1983, Sally Ride became the first woman astronaut to launch in space. NASA marks Monday, June 18, 2012 as her 29th Anniversary as she was one of the three astronauts to launch their rocket to the stars – this act of Ride showed that women can do a lot of things that even the sky wasn’t the limit.

A Los Angeles native, Ride was a nationally ranked tennis player and became a professional right after her college years. At 31, Ride was also the youngest American to go in space. Ride said she was back in school, earning a Ph.D. in Physics at Standford University in 1977 when she spotted a “Help: Wanted” Ad in a college newspaper. It said that NASA was looking for scientists to work on a new project: a reusable spacecraft to be called the Space Shuttle. It was the year NASA finally started accepting women in the astronaut training corps.

Of the 8,000 applicants, only 35 were chosen and just six were women. “Out of roughly 4,000 technical employees at the Johnson Space Center, I think there were only four women, so that gives you a sense of how male the culture was,” Ride later said in an interview for the Academy of Achievement. Ride was also still a newlywed when she went to space: she had married fellow astronaut Steve Hawley a year earlier.

In 1983, after working on two previous missions, she became the first American woman tapped to go to space, part of the crew of five assigned to the Space Shuttle Challenger. Her flight was the seventh shuttle mission and Challenger’s second trip into space.

“I don’t think I appreciated how much of a trailblazer I was for women and how much women would look up to me as a role model and the things that I had done until after my first flight, after I landed,” she said. “I wasn’t face to face with women until I came back from my flight, and then it hit home pretty hard how important it was to an awful lot of women in the country.”

One male reporter asked her, “Do you weep when things go wrong on the job?” Others wanted to know if she’d wear a bra or makeup in space. Johnny Carson joked that the flight was delayed so Ride could find a purse to match her shoes. The one person who wasn’t really impressed with all the Sally Ride phenomena was Sally Ride, who was so busy training she didn’t pay attention.

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Source: http://www.nydailynews.com

Amazon CEO Wants to Recover Apollo 11 Engines from the Ocean

Jeff Bezos, founder and CEO of Amazon.com, revealed his plans to recover the F-1 engines used on Saturn V rocket that carried the Apollo 11 crew members to the moon.

“I’m excited to report that, using state-of-the-art deep sea sonar, the team has found the Apollo 11 engines lying 14,000 feet below the surface, and we’re making plans to attempt to raise one or more of them from the ocean floor,” Bezos wrote.

“We don’t know yet what condition these engines might be in; they hit the ocean at high velocity and have been in saltwater for more than 40 years,” he added. “On the other hand, they’re made of tough stuff, so we’ll see.”

Bezos shared that he watched the original mission on televison when he was five years old. It had inspired him to dream big, and now he wants to venture on this huge task of recovering the engines.

Each of the spacecraft engines approximately weigh about nine tons and they are clustered into five. Every second, they burned 60,000 pounds of fuel to produce 32 million horsepower. The five engines propelled the largest rocket in history 38 miles up in just under three minutes.

After launching the rocket into space, the engines plummeted into the ocean where it stayed for four decades. NASA had a general idea of its location and a piece of debris landed on a German merchant ship that provided more clues.

Robert Pearlman, a space memorabilia expert, said that there are 65 of these engines launched. Once the engines had been brought back to surface, it can be authenticated by their serial number. But bringing the spacecraft engines up would be a challenge. It can be liken to bring up a big part of the Titanic.

But this venture is hardly the first in retrieving spacecraft memorabilia, in 1999, NASA’s Mercury 7 space capsule piloted by Gus Grissom was found and recovered.

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News source: edition.cnn.com

Rocket Launch Delayed by NASA

NASA‘s Anomalous Transport Rocket Experiment (ATREX) faced a setback as the rocket’s payload problems caused its delay.

Five rockets were planned to be launched this Thursday, but NASA officials announced that it will be moved to Friday night. The ATREX aims to use the rocket to study the jet stream’s current at the edge of space. The rockets will contain chemicals that will test the wind flow and electrical currents at high- altitude. The chemicals will release a bright milky white trail that will be very visible against the night sky. The white trail will make it possible for scientists and the public to “see” the high-altitude wind flow. NASA will use three different types of rockets for ATREX: two Terrier Improved Malemutes, two Terrier Improved Orions and one Terrier Oriole.

The rockets will be launched from NASA‘s Wallops Flight Facility on Virginia and the milky white trails can be seen from New Hampshire, Washington, Boston, Philadelpia, New York and Baltimore.

 

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Source: online.wsj.com and http://www.msnbc.msn.com

Japan’s HTV-2 to arrive from Space Station

HOUSTON — Japan’s HTV-2 cargo capsule departed the International Space Station on March 28, signaling a post-earthquake resumption of command and control over major ISS operations by flight controllers at the Tsukuba Space Center, northeast of Tokyo.

The trash-laden freighter, christened Kounotori, is scheduled to make a destructive plunge into the Earth’s atmosphere over the Pacific Ocean on March 29 at 11:09 p.m. EDT, concluding a 10-week mission for the second Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) automated cargo craft. The departing space freighter was filled with discarded packing materials protecting additional cargos launched aboard Discovery as well as other station trash. Japan’s HTV, the European Space Agency’s Automated Transfer Vehicle, Russia’s Progress and emerging U.S. commercial cargo craft will shoulder all of the responsibilities for station resupply once NASA’s shuttle is retired this summer.

The HTV-2 departed at 11:46 a.m. EDT, after astronauts Catherine Coleman and Paolo Nespoli unberthed the 33-ft.-long capsule from the orbiting laboratory’s Harmony module, using the station’s robot arm.

Japanese control over the station’s Kibo laboratory and HTV-2 operations was lost when the March 11 earthquake and tsunami damaged the Space Station Integration and Promotion Center at Tsukuba and cut an undersea communications cable. Japanese personnel re-established temporary control of the facilities through NASA’s Mission Control Center in Houston. JAXA resumed control on March 22.

The HTV-2 was launched from Tanegashima Space Center on Jan. 21 with nearly six tons of external and internal supplies, including research equipment and spare parts for thermal control and electrical systems.

The spacecraft was captured and berthed to the Harmony module of the station’s U.S. segment on Jan. 27 and later repositioned to provide clearance for the arrival of NASA’s shuttle Discovery.

 

-aviationweek.com

Rocket Fuel Experiment Blows Up

A retired NASA engineer, Jim Akkerman, looking to develop an inexpensive way for people to travel to space goes back to square one after one of his experiments exploded Saturday, September 6. No one was injured and no property was damaged at the accident in Hitchcock, located about 40 miles southeast of Houston.

Too much methane-oxygen fuel mixture accumulated in the rocket engine when the engine wouldn’t fire causing the explosion, said police Chief Glenn Manis. Authorities said Akkerman committed no crime, however, Akkerman – president of Houston-based Advent Launch Services could not immediately be reached for comment Sunday.

Advent is trying to develop a spacecraft that launches vertically from water and lands horizontally like a seaplane. The winged rocket is designed to glide down to the ocean surface for a safe, controlled landing.

“We believe that creating a low-cost, reliable delivery system will lead to more commercially viable space programs,” according to the company’s web site.

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