Atlantis and Mir

As I wrote two days ago, the last time the photo of a space shuttle docked to a space station was taken, it was in 1995, when Atlantis docked with Russia’s Mir. In the photo above, taken by a Mir cosmonaut as Atlantis departed, five astronauts bid farewell to Mir after a three-day visit in November 1995. It was the third Mir-NASA missions, during which the shuttle used its robotic arm to attach a docking tunnel to the Mir, so that future shuttles could dock without getting too close to the station’s delicate solar panels.

On June 29th 1995, Atlantis became the first US spacecraft to dock with a Russian spacecraft since the Apollo-Soyuz mission two decades earlier. During the Cold War, Mir-NASA would have been not only unthinkable, but also antithetical to what the space shuttle stood for.

In fact, even the International Space Station was initially conceived as a Cold War venture; when he greenlit the project in 1984, Ronald Reagan harbored Kennedyesque ambitions to one-up the Soviets and their puny Mir. With their enormous cargo bays, the shuttles became a crucial tool for these ambitions. (Nothing revealed these Cold War ambitions more than the names of these space stations. Mir meant Peace, while throughout the 1980s, NASA planned to launch another space station called Freedom).

Then suddenly, the space race was history, and nine Mir-NASA missions were carried out between 1995 and 1997, with Atlantis only flying seven straight missions. Last months of the joint project were terse, as the mission battled near-disasters; the aging Mir posed many problems to the shuttle astronauts. When Mir was launched into orbit on Feb 20th 1986 — less than a month after the Challenger exploded, it was planned to be in orbit for only five years, but flew for thrice that length of time.  The Russians had initially planned to deorbit the abandoned Mir in early 2000, but thanks to some private investors, it lived for a year more. It finally came down on March 23rd 2001.

To Boldly Go ….

A Texan neighborhood gathers around Columbia's debris in 2002.

Editorial: You can just look at the photo above and skip this post if you want.

I have been receiving many messages — mostly negative, obviously, because only people who are seriously pissed about something bother to write complaints, although i appreciate the polite tone of most, if not all, of emails — regarding my criticism of “NASA”.

Unless you have been living under a rock, or doing something more productive than reading a blog (which is more likely), you would have noticed that I have been posting space photos lately. My commentaries accompanying most of them tend to point out shortcomings of the space shuttle program.

May be I wasn’t really clear; may be people just skim, but the readers miss the point. My criticism was solely targeted towards the space shuttle (and yesterday, the ISS), not against NASA and other spacefaring programs in general. I think Hubble was great (btw, it could have been delivered without space shuttles). I think Mars Rovers performed admirably. I don’t think NASA’s budget is bloated, but time, effort and money it devoted to space shuttle was unnecessary and unwise.

Unlike Apollo, Saturn or Gemini, the shuttles failed to deliver. Everywhere else, projects of such scale would be accompanied by failure standards; but the shuttle didn’t appear to have any, for if it had, it would have broken many of them (see the first post). As much as I hate to type this, I must admit the failure of space shuttle is the failure of capitalism and politics. Aerospace contractors loved that the shuttle launches cost so much. Boeing and Lockheed Martin which control the shuttle business through an Orwellian sounding consortium called the United Space Alliance, consistently lobbied against unmanned rockets as cheaper shuttle replacements. They were also helped by congressional delegations from Texas, Ohio, Florida and Alabama, where shuttle-flight-centers are based.

There are two additional issues I would like to discuss here; many point out that military budget far outpaces NASA’s. That’s true and I am no fan of huge defense budgets either (it’s another area where Orwellian consortia thrive) but this is a straw man argument. Secondly, many point out sidebenefits of space programs. Assuming that the same amount of budget that went to NASA had gone to other science projects, we can delve into hypotheticals. But I am not going to. This article which discusses myths and realities surrounding those sidebenefits will do a better job than I would.

Ciao.

Shuttle and ISS

Space travel involved taking risks and making sacrifices. Among many sacrifices were really expensive cameras. When astronauts came back from the moon, they left their Hasselblads on the moon to make space for moon rocks. After Paolo Nespoli took the above photo, he left his three Nikons to fiery destruction.

It was the ultimate photo-op: the first ever – and the last possible – photo of a space shuttle docked to the International Space Station. (Previously, only photos of  Atlantis docked to the Mir Space Station were taken — back in 1995.) It was taken on May 23rd 2011, during Endeavor’s last mission, and months of preparation and negotiation went into the making of this photo. Officials from the US and Russia arranged to overlap Endeavor’s mission with Soyuz’s, so that someone can take these photos.

The honor was given to the Italian astronaut Paolo Nespoli who was leaving the ISS with Soyuz. Cape Canaveral and Moscow also agreed to rotate the ISS 130 degrees to give Nespoli the full view. However, Soyuz allows no extra weight aboard the descent module. After taking out the SD cards, Nespoli left $20,000 worth of cameras in the orbital module, which destructs in the Earth’s atmosphere. Since Soyuz is also not equipped to transmit the photos, the world didn’t see the photos until Nespoli landed back.

You can see all the photos and videos he took here. One day, they will no doubt be in textbooks, showing two of the most expensive things mankind has ever built.

And we will say, never was so much spent on so few things to achieve so little.

And we will say, what a wonderful age it was. What a wonderful age it is.

The Things They Carried

In addition to astronauts and satellites, the shuttles hauled many mementos into space.

With countless telecommunication flotsam and jetsam drifting there, the space now resembles the Earth’s attic. Space shuttle mission took many a cherish keepsake, both personal and communal, into that shared space: monopoly pieces, the Olympic torch, a replica of the golden spike from the Transcontinental Railroad, and rocks from the top of Mt. Everest and the surface of the moon. The doomed Challenger carried with it a drawing of the earth made by a kid inside a concentration camp during the Holocaust. On the 400th anniversary of Jamestown, a cargo tag from the colony accompanied Atlantis.

There were often corporate sponsors too. Since the very first space shuttle flight in April 1981, M&Ms accompanied every mission, right up to the final one that’s currently underway. In 1985, at the giddy peak of the Cola Wars, Coca-Cola and Pepsi both went up, ostensibly to “test packaging and methods of dispensing the liquids in a microgravity environment”.

In the recent years, as the public support over the shuttle program slowly dwindled, the PR campaigns were stepped up. Luke Skywalker’s original lightsaber, Buzz Lightyear from Toy Story, and ashes of Star Trek’s creator Gene Roddenberry were sent up, highlighting the fine line between fantasy and reality. For fanboys everywhere, the last shuttle mission will carry an iPhone and an Android Phone skywards.

Sport fans are appeased by a wide variety of memorabilia that went up: the home plate from Shea Stadium, dirt from Yankee Stadium, jerseys if every shape and color, including Lance Armstrong’s Tour-de-France-winning yellow one. An astronaut threw a first pitch via video from the ISS. Three green NASCAR starter flags were included in a shuttle mission that began with: “Gentlemen, start your space shuttle main engines.”

The Challenger Disaster

I have previously written about it, but no history of shuttle program will be complete without one of its low points: the Challenger Disaster. 

Hours after the Challenger disaster, President Ronald Reagan addressed the nation. The astronauts had “slipped the surly bonds of Earth … to touch the face of God,” he said, quoting the poet-aviator John Gillespie Magee. But a more memorable quote that day was that of the mission control; as the shuttle exploded with seven astronauts onboard, an oddly detached commentary came: “Flight controllers here are looking very carefully at the situation. Obviously a major malfunction.”

Writing in the Washington Monthly five years before the disaster, Gregg Easterbrook warned that the shuttles’ solid rocket boosters were not safe. On that fatal day, the cold air created a rupture in a seal on one of the boosters, letting a jet of flame escape and igniting the fuel. The last words from Challenger were “We are go at throttle up!” — this application of maximum thrust turned out to be a fatal act.

It was assumed that some survived the initial explosion but subsequently perished during descent and impact. The crew’s remains were flown from Kennedy Space Center to Dover Air Force Base for formal identification. The above photo was taken at that poignant moment as seven fellow astronauts accompanied the caskets on the journey. The crew was buried in the Arlington National Cemetery. NASA buried all the remains of the Challenger in an old missile silo and sealed it with tons of concrete so the debris would never be auctioned off or commercially exploited.

The subsequent investigation, the Rogers Commission, was a revelation; engineers who knew about the boost-joint problem asked NASA not to launch that day and were ignored. NASA and its private contractors had at first failed to recognized the design flaw, then “failed to fix it and finally treated it as an acceptable flight risk”. In short, the commission noted that it was an “accident rooted in history”.

But interestingly, the committee recommended that essentially nothing change. No one was fired; no additional safety systems were added to the rocket boosters whose explosion destroyed Challenger; no escape-capsule system was even discussed. Easterbrook wrote, “Post-Challenger “reforms” were left up to the very old-boy network that had created the problem in the first place.”

Astrophotography | Thierry Legault

They look just like specks of dust on the surface of the sun, but those black dots were the silhouettes of the space shuttle and the International Space Station.

From this distance, you can really appreciate the immenseness of the sun and the space. The sun is 93 million miles away – several orders of magnitude farther than the shuttle and the space station’s orbital distance of some 250 miles. But comparison, the Hubble Telescope orbits at some 350 miles. Further still is the Earth’s much cluttered geostationary orbit – over 22,000 miles — the distance at which an object takes 24 hours to orbit the Earth, and usefully hovers consistently over the same point of planet and thus the home of many communication and geolocation satellites.

The above photo was taken by the French photographer Thierry Legault, whose specialty is in taking pictures of solar eclipses, planetary and satellite transits. Earlier this year, he caught the moment just 50 minutes before Atlantis docked with the ISS; to take the photo, he traveled to Madrid so he would be inside the narrow five-mile wide visibility band that stretched across Spain, southern France and Northern Italy.

It is an extraordinary image, considering that the actual event was visible for just 0.54 of a second, because of the speed of two spacecrafts. To catch the event, Legault had to use an extremely fast shutter speed, combined with a pin hole-sized aperture.

Follow me on twitter   — or better yet, follow Thierry Legault on Flickr.  

Space Walks

It was one of the most famous images of the Space Age. What many people didn’t realize was how far that “untethered space walk” travelled.  

Spacewalking was nothing new by the time space shuttles began to soar. In March 1965, the Russian Alexei Leonov became the first person to take a “walk” in space in an exercise that nearly went wrong. Three months later, American Ed White followed his lead, but  both were tied to their spacecraft.

It was left for two astronauts on the shuttle Challenger, Bruce McCandless and Robert Stewart, to try an untied version. With Robert Gibson taking photos from inside the shuttle with a Hasselblad, McCandless achieved this on February 7th 1984, becoming the first “human satellite” traveling at some 17,500 miles per hour.

He reached a distance of 320 feet, with the azure Earth 150 nautical miles below, but McCandless spent just a little more than an hour free-flying. Even today, spacesuits are awkward, unwieldy and uncomfortable; while spacewalks typically lasted no longer than three hours, the astronauts are often trapped in their suits for as long as 10 hours, and had to drink through straws.

Although McCandless’ photo inspired many sci-fi fantasies, his spacewalk would amount to nothing more than a stunt. After McCandless and Stewart, four other astronauts on later shuttles flew untethered, but after 1984, NASA stopped producing the nitrogen-powered jet pack (in that inelegant space jargon, known as Manned Maneuvering Unit). The shuttle’s robotic arm precluded the need for such daring spacewalks.

Today, a modified version of the jetpack is worn only as a emergency backup during spacewalks. It was smaller but by no ways capable of reaching the distances previously travelled.

 And there in a way is a metaphor for the American space programme.

 

Space Shuttle Program (1981 – 2011)

After three decades, Atlantis which was launched on Saturday will be NASA’s last space shuttle mission. For the next eleven days, it will be orbiting the Earth, and for the next eleven days, the Iconic Photos will feature the most breathtaking images from the shuttle’s career.

Nixon and NASA administrator James Fletcher redefined the space program after the Apollo missions

First, a disclaimer: I am not a fan of the space program; my friends go so far as to say I have “deep-seated mistrust in science and scientific community”. Many articles and pundits this week noted — and will note — the space shuttle program’s extraordinary achievements. While I do not deny this, it is worth reflecting on its failed promises.

When first conceived in the 1970s, the shuttle was to launch once a week. However, since its first mission thirty years ago, only 135 flights were launched, a dismal average of one every three months. So much for a vehicle envisioned as an everyday freight truck.

But it is not very good at freighting either; initially, it was estimated that each kilogram sent into orbit will cost $1,400. Costs spiraled to $1.5 billion a mission, at the cost of $60,000 per kilogram. Although its big selling-point was reusability, extensive maintenance needed after each mission meant that it was never truly reused again.

Its supporters point out that actually less than 1% of the federal budget went to NASA. It is true but in three decades, at the cost of $192 billion, the shuttle program has cost American taxpayers more than the Manhattan Project, the Apollo Programme and the Panama Canal combined. Its safety record — 1.5 per 100 flights — is also not topnotch.

True, its achievements — like delivering the Hubble Telescope and countless other satellites — should not be ignored, but the space shuttle was costly, both in terms of money and human life. Other nations and robots will perform the shuttle’s duties, and American astronauts will hitch rides with Russian rockets. Those are cheaper, safer alternatives, even if they are less magnificent.

The News of the World (1843 – 2011)

The News of the World, Britain’s leading peddler of scandal and schadenfreude, is dead, aged 168.

It is Sunday afternoon, preferably before the war. The wife is already asleep in the armchair, and the children have been sent out for a nice long walk. You put your feet up on the sofa, settle your spectacles on your nose, and open the News of the World. Roast beef and Yorkshire, or roast pork and apple sauce, followed up by suet pudding and driven home, as it were, by a cup of mahogany brown tea, have put you in just the right mood.”

With these words, George Orwell opened in his essay, Decline of the English Murder. Over the years, many have questioned its coverage, credibility and practices, but there is no denying that The News of the World, like cucumber sandwiches and cricket on the green, is a British institution. Founded 168 years ago, to bring news to the newly literate working class, the paper reflected whims, anxieties and schadenfreude of Middle England.

Its first historic scoop was on May 18th 1900, when the paper reported the successful Relief of Mafeking during the Boer War, a day ahead of its rivals. During its first decades, it covered real news — from funerals of Queen Victoria and Churchill, to Russian invasion of Eastern Europe.

But soon, it slipped into more lucrative news covering the salacious and the macabre. During the prim 1940s and 50s, it offered sexual assault-trial transcripts. In 1949, it serialized the story of John George Haigh, the “acid bath murderer”. The paper paid his legal bills in return for the handwritten notes he scribbled while in prison.

And Middle England enjoyed it. On June 18th 1950, the paper set the world-record — never broken, and probably never will –for the largest print-run: 8,659,090 copies. Even the paper’s takeover by puritanical Rupert Murdoch in 1969 didn’t change its direction. In 1960, it paid ₤ 36,000 (₤ 600,000 today) for lurid memoirs of Diana Dors, whom the Archbishop of Canterbury called a “brazen hussey”. Three years later, it was the turn of Christine Keeler.

It exposed its fair share of paedophiles, murders and white slavers, but in pursuing its scoop, News of the World never shied away from illegal practices — hidden microphones and cameras, wiretappings, bribery, etc. In 1973, it outrageously installed its own cameras to expose Lord Lambton’s affair when the pictures it obtained were not good enough. Its “named and shamed” campaigns led to mobs attacks on convicted paedophiles (and sometimes, innocent bystanders). The paper always snubbed its nose not only at authorities but also at the principle of “presumption of innocence”, once going “undercover” inside a jail to take photos of a man who was later convicted of murdering two girls.

Vicars, politicians, actors and sportsmen were stalked and scrutinized with a zeal unseen outside totalitarian dictatorships. Their private lives were exposed and denounced. It ruined the careers of Frank Bough (“I took drugs with vice girls”), Angus Deayton (“drugs romp with vice girl”), Jeffery Archer (“pays off vice girl”), Alan Clark (“affair with a judge’s wife and her two virgin daughters”), Mark Oaten (“hires male prostitutes”) and Max Moseley (“Nazi Orgy”). A familiar tag often was “See pages 2, 3, 4, 5 & 6″.  In recent years, “sting operations” by the “Fake Sheikh” — an undercover reporter who posed as a wealthy Arab businessman caught the Countess of Wessex making candid statements about Tony Blair and the Duchess of York selling access to Prince Andrew.

*

If its life was the story of fetor and contempt, its demise was that of betrayal and hypocrisy. In the past, the public has gleefully, salivatingly followed the paper’s transgressions – when they were directed against private lives of public figures — but when the families of murdered girls, dead soldiers and terrorism victims became targets, News of the World seemed to have crossed an invisible line.

The public once condoned the paper’s illegal practices as long as they were targeted upon those who “deserved”, blithely ignoring the fact that no one — not even the most hated celebrity — deserves having his/her privacy invaded. And the public revels in this hypocritical (and often indiscernible) divide between “them” and “us”, and it’s this divide that News of the World obligingly exploited.

For most of its life, News of the World hid behind sensational headlines, “justifiable intrusions”, and false incentives; nowhere was the paper’s “end-justifying-means” attitude more clear than in its proud announcement that it was responsible for more than 250 convictions in recent years. Ironically, in coming weeks and months, that figure is likely to go up.

News of the World is survived by its equally sordid brethren across the world, and tens of millions of enablers.

Betty Ford (1918 – 2011)

Betty Ford, briefly America’s quirky First Lady and its perennial therapeutic icon, is dead, aged 93. 

When we say the name Betty Ford these days, it almost always refers to her eponymous center in Southern California frequented by adulterous evangelists, drug-abusing athletes and misbehaving celebrities. Dubious though this honour was, it was something Betty Ford cherished.

If her husband’s road to the American Presidency was unconventional, Betty Ford’s First Ladyship was equally unconventional. In those heady days before rehab was “cool”, Ford openly talked about her breast cancer, then her mastectomy, and finally her addiction to pills and alcohol.

Betty Ford was a dancer and (like her husband) fashion model; she studied at the Bennington School of the Dance, joined Martha Graham’s company, founded her own dance troupe, and taught disabled children dance. During her short and mostly absent stay at the White House, Ford would dance through the halls of the White House. Her dance on the Cabinet Room table amidst ashtrays and notepads was a fulfillment of a long-harboured wish.

The moment was captured by David Hume Kennerly, who encouraged her to jump onto the table

I said, ‘Well, nobody’s around.’ She said, ‘I just think I’m going to do this.’ Then she’s on the table. She’s a tiny woman, really, in very good shape. Very graceful, as a former dancer with the Martha Graham company. She got up there…. Very few women have had a seat at that table. I bet you could count them on one hand at that point, and knowing her support for the Equal Rights Amendment, she was tap-dancing in the middle of this male bastion. She was storming the walls of the gray suits and gray-haired eminences….

I did not want people to put a martini glass in her hand and say here she is drunk on the Cabinet Room table. That would just be wrong. Because that is not what happened.”

It was Gerald Ford’s last full day in office and the picture disappeared into Ford Archives. It was first published only in 1995 with Kennerly’s book Photo Op . Kennerly remembers showing the photo to the former first couple before its publication:

And it’s like one of those cartoon moments where his eyes come bulging out, and he goes, ‘Oh, Betty isn’t going to like this.’ Remember, he knows her better than anybody. I’m sunk. But he doesn’t say anything when she comes in, and she looks at the picture and she starts laughing. She says, ‘Oh, I forgot all about this. That is so great.’ And I ask her, you won’t mind? And Mrs. Ford says, ‘No! It’s a terrific picture.’ Then President Ford says, ‘Well, Betty, you never told me you did that.’ And she smiles at him and says, ‘There’s a lot of things I haven’t told you, Jerry.’ “

 

(Kennerly interview from the Smithsonian Magazine) 

The Man Who Got bin Laden?

An internet spy-hunter named John Young uses the White House’s Flickr feed and an AP news story to guess the identity of the man responsible for bin Laden’s demise.

If this turns out to be correct, it is a great expose done with photographs.

7/7

Today marks the sixth anniversary of terrorist attacks in London; since the 1970s, Britain has seen terrorism — primarily from the Irish Republican Army — and London has braced itself for a potential terrorist attack since 9/11.

Nonetheless, when they arrived, the attacks were shocking not least because its perpetrators were homegrown terrorists but also because they arrived less than 24 hours after London won the bid for the 2012 Olympics. On 7th July 2005, four suicide bombers killed 52 people and injured over 700 people in four explosions, three inside London’s Underground and one on a bus.

At Edgeware Road Station, 24-year old Davinia Turrell became an unlikely icon. In the images that many photographers snapped of her as she was being led away from the emergency hospital inside the nearby Marks and Spencer, Davinia was faceless — or rather, it was covered with a white surgical gauzemask — but her face nonetheless lent an unforgettable visage to that tragic day. She was led away by an ex-firefighter Paul Dadge, who remembers:

We were the first out of M&S, and I remember vividly it was absolutely silent outside. As we ran across I could see people stood behind the cordon line.

The photographers hadn’t been able to see people coming out of the Tube station from their position – it was as if this was the ideal opportunity for these photographs.

The one thing I could hear was the sound of the shutters going. Then we started to realise something serious was going on. I remember saying to Davinia, ‘I think your picture’s going to be in the paper tomorrow’.”

Dadge was correct. Likened to Edvard Munch’s painting, The Scream, various versions of the picture were reprinted on the cover of more than 400 newspapers and magazines, including Time, The Times, The Daily Telegraph, Le Figaro and Corriere Della Sera. Dadge would also be interviewed for over 400 interviews.

At least eight photographers covered the event. Here, one photographer remembers her experiences covering the Edgeware Road bombing.