April 20, 2023 Quick space linksCourtesy of BtB’s stringer Jay.
- Blue Origin touts its “nozzle room in our Huntsville engines factory”
What I see is a room with not a lot going on.
As Jay notes, not much else on Twitter as everyone is talking about the SpaceX Superheavy/Starship test launch.
On Christmas Eve 1968 three Americans became the first humans to visit another world. What they did to celebrate was unexpected and profound, and will be remembered throughout all human history. Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8, Robert Zimmerman's classic history of humanity's first journey to another world, tells that story, and it is now available as both an ebook and an audiobook, both with a foreword by Valerie Anders and a new introduction by Robert Zimmerman.
The print edition can be purchased at Amazon. from any other book seller, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit.
The ebook is available everywhere for $5.99 (before discount) at amazon, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. If you buy it from ebookit you don't support the big tech companies and the author gets a bigger cut much sooner.
The audiobook is also available at all these vendors, and is also free with a 30-day trial membership to Audible.
"Not simply about one mission, [Genesis] is also the history of America's quest for the moon... Zimmerman has done a masterful job of tying disparate events together into a solid account of one of America's greatest human triumphs."--San Antonio Express-News
Courtesy of BtB’s stringer Jay.
- Blue Origin touts its “nozzle room in our Huntsville engines factory”
What I see is a room with not a lot going on.
As Jay notes, not much else on Twitter as everyone is talking about the SpaceX Superheavy/Starship test launch.
On Christmas Eve 1968 three Americans became the first humans to visit another world. What they did to celebrate was unexpected and profound, and will be remembered throughout all human history. Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8, Robert Zimmerman's classic history of humanity's first journey to another world, tells that story, and it is now available as both an ebook and an audiobook, both with a foreword by Valerie Anders and a new introduction by Robert Zimmerman.
The print edition can be purchased at Amazon. from any other book seller, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. The ebook is available everywhere for $5.99 (before discount) at amazon, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. If you buy it from ebookit you don't support the big tech companies and the author gets a bigger cut much sooner.
The audiobook is also available at all these vendors, and is also free with a 30-day trial membership to Audible.
"Not simply about one mission, [Genesis] is also the history of America's quest for the moon... Zimmerman has done a masterful job of tying disparate events together into a solid account of one of America's greatest human triumphs."--San Antonio Express-News
I don’t suppose China has released any of the photos their “weather balloon “ took on its jaunt over the US?
Gary,
The party is waiting till December to release them for their new holiday Mao-mas! Xi will give the good girls, boys, and the PLA the photos, while the bad ones are sent to labor camps. Merry Mao-mas!
Blue Origin shows off a room with about a dozen engine nozzles. to indicate what they can do.
Space X just dumped 39 Raptor engines in the ocean and they’ll have another 39 ready to go in a few months – no sweat.
Oh, the same day as an attempted first Starship/SH launch they also launched 24 satellites into orbit on a F9 (how many F9 launches have there been, including some manned, while they developed Starship/SH?) and they run a broadband satellite network with many thousands of users…
It’s not just gov’t space vs private space, there is a different operating philosophy.
Every time I see the name Space X I kind of cringe because I feel strongly about Starlink and the satellites that are spoiling our astrophotography with those horrible dots that stretch across our images. Can’t he just stop sending those up before our skies are full of them?
Astro Imagery,
You wrote: “Every time I see the name Space X I kind of cringe because I feel strongly about Starlink and the satellites that are spoiling our astrophotography with those horrible dots that stretch across our images. Can’t he just stop sending those up before our skies are full of them?”
You may be the right person to ask these questions.
1) Don’t these Starlink satellites shine and spoil the photographs only shortly after sunset and shortly before sunrise? The sun does not shine on them once the satellites are in Earth’s umbra. Doesn’t this give several hours of Starlink-free viewing and photography? When I go satellite watching, I am limited to observations at these times when the satellites are not yet in Earth’s umbra.
2) Aren’t the times that these satellites are not yet in Earth’s umbra mostly times when it is not yet dark enough to do good time-lapse photography? Since doing this astrophotography requires long exposure times, don’t your photographs begin toward the east, where the satellites are already in the umbra, so that as your camera moves toward the west, the satellites will already be in the umbra when your camera gets there? When I go satellite watching, I observe that the satellites first lose their visibility toward the east, then this loss of visibility drifts westward as the evening wears on. In the morning, I imagine, visibility should return toward the east before it does in the west, but when the Sun is about to rise, isn’t it better to not start photographing long exposure times?
3) Don’t large numbers of satellites already pass through your field of view during these same times that Starlink satellites interfere with your viewing? Even before Starlink, when I went satellite watching, I observed many satellites that have yet to enter Earth’s umbra. A quarter century ago, there was the phenomenon with the Iridium satellites when they would occasionally shine brightly during these times as one of their solar arrays briefly would be angled just right with the sun to reflect the light onto parts of the Earth, where viewers could see them as temporary, very bright lights in the sky. It was called an Iridium flare. They looked like flashes in the sky, and photographed as bright streaks. Do they still do this, or are the next generation Iridium satellites doing something different with their solar arrays?
4) Don’t airplanes already fly at night and spoil your photography and viewing with their flashing lights? Don’t these airplanes fly all night long rather than only near sunset and sunrise? They do in my area. Airliners, cargo planes, military aircraft, and the occasional nighttime private plane. Despite being inside Earth’s umbra, when passive objects would not be lit up, these airplanes are actively lit with “see and be seen” navigation lighting. Don’t these planes spoil your photography even after Starlink and the other satellites enter the Earth’s umbra and are no longer visible? When I go satellite watching, I see all kinds of airplanes in the sky during the times that the satellites are visible, before they enter the Earth’s umbra.
5) How do you photograph areas of the sky in which geostationary satellites would interfere with the photographs. These satellites only spend about 2% of their time inside Earth’s umbra (a greater percent of each orbit within a few weeks of the equinoxes, and no time spent in the umbra for several weeks on either side of the solstices).
6) Why are the Starlink satellites singled out? Each year, literally hundreds of other small satellites are taken to low Earth orbit, yet these others are not the subject of complaints for spoiling photography of the stars. Neither are OneWeb satellites. Will the Kuiper constellation likewise not be the subject of complaints?