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Space Exploration II: Always Looking up

Fun trivia. Houston was eventually picked for Mission Control out of a list of finalists. Why Houston was picked is a story but it's no coincidence that it's the Johnson Space Center, hint hint.

Other finalists:
  • Jacksonville, Florida (Green Cove Springs Naval Air Station)
  • Tampa, Florida (MacDill Air Force Base)
  • Baton Rouge, Louisiana
  • Shreveport, Louisiana (Barksdale Air Force Base)
  • Houston, Texas (San Jacinto Ordnance Depot)
  • Victoria, Texas (FAA Airport; formerly Foster Air Force Base)
  • Corpus Christi, Texas (Naval Air Station Corpus Christi)
  • San Diego, California (Camp Elliott)
  • San Francisco, California (Benicia Arsenal)

I love that it was almost San Francisco. Star Fleet Academy, anyone?

And then there is the Great Kendall Square Urban Legend.

TBH it would have been amazeballs to have mission control adjacent to MIT.
 
A Florida site was never going to be picked in the first place due to redundancy. Houston was a backwater third-tier city at the time, so it made sense to give the economic boost to Texas or Louisiana. And yeah, LBJ might have had his thumb on the scale. ;)
 
Scarlet said:
So, pardon my ignorance here. I’m certainly not trying to downplay this mission by any means. Is the International Space Station in the Earth’s orbit? Because there have been several missions there over the last several years. Was watching the news this morning about how Artemis II will be leaving the Earth’s orbit as it heads towards the Moon. Got me wondering where the ISS is.
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So kep should have nerded out on this, but *technically*, Artemis never leaves earth's orbit. It does get dominated by the moon's gravity, and partially orbits the moon. But the moon is very much in earth's orbit, so anything orbiting the moon is in earth's orbit as well. They should know there are nerds out there that know that detail.

And it's not a small thing- the moon is a very key part of life here on earth. So it being in earth's orbit is a big deal.
 
Kepler said:
Fun trivia. Houston was eventually picked for Mission Control out of a list of finalists. Why Houston was picked is a story but it's no coincidence that it's the Johnson Space Center, hint hint.

Other finalists:
  • Jacksonville, Florida (Green Cove Springs Naval Air Station)
  • Tampa, Florida (MacDill Air Force Base)
  • Baton Rouge, Louisiana
  • Shreveport, Louisiana (Barksdale Air Force Base)
  • Houston, Texas (San Jacinto Ordnance Depot)
  • Victoria, Texas (FAA Airport; formerly Foster Air Force Base)
  • Corpus Christi, Texas (Naval Air Station Corpus Christi)
  • San Diego, California (Camp Elliott)
  • San Francisco, California (Benicia Arsenal)

I love that it was almost San Francisco. Star Fleet Academy, anyone?

And then there is the Great Kendall Square Urban Legend.

TBH it would have been amazeballs to have mission control adjacent to MIT.
Click to expand...
Power has it's privileges. NASA has places all over the country that don't make much sense.

In Boston next to MIT and Harvard or in the Bay with Cal and Stanford, those make a ton of sense. In Cleveland or Huntsville where there wasn't a technical base prior- not so much. Heck, Austin makes more sense than Houston. Alas...
 
MichVandal said:
Power has it's privileges. NASA has places all over the country that don't make much sense.
Click to expand...
Getting funding approval of congressmen from those regions (read: The South) meant greasing the wheels and offering up things in return. Facilities in Louisiana and Mississippi could easily have been built along the east coast piggybacking off existing DoD bases (ie: Norfolk) but greasing the wheels gets you a few more votes.

A tale as old as time...
 
aparch said:
Getting funding approval of congressmen from those regions (read: The South) meant greasing the wheels and offering up things in return. Facilities in Louisiana and Mississippi could easily have been built along the east coast piggybacking off existing DoD bases (ie: Norfolk) but greasing the wheels gets you a few more votes.

A tale as old as time...
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At the same time, I will defend that action all day long.

From an economic standpoint, adding high skilled job demand in an area that has not had it will raise the overall economic level of the area. So all of the skilled engineers that moved to Huntsville has a greater impact than if they moved to Boston. And in some ways, help situations a lot, too- so instead of Boston needing more expensive housing, that demand doesn't go up- helping housing in that area.

Also, "pork barrel" projects are good for the general economy, too- as long as it end up in real people's pockets as opposed to stock bonuses. That's a pretty big IF these days, though. But my dad literally lived off of those kinds of projects which benefitted the power generation industry in the long run (nuclear if you were wondering). National labs are a good thing.
 
Disconnected thoughts:

1. Had a massive 3-day meeting at work this week, so didn't get to leave work until 5:30 pm last night, not nearly enough time to go home, grab my kids, and get back out to the beach to watch live, so we watched on TV with the rest of the hoi polloi.

2. With about 4 minutes to go, my 6-year-old decided she couldn't be "put on hold" so she made us pause the TV feed while she went to the restroom. She must have been gone longer than I realized, because by the time we saw the launch on TV and then went outside, all we could see was the smoke trail - the vehicle was already too far away.

3. I was in 8th grade for Challenger, and it was a snow day for my wussie school district in Tennessee (it was famously a bit chilly in the southeast that day, if you recall!). But the yearbook staff phone chain lit up, and those of us willing to go to school had a work day. We were listening to music on a transistor radio when they broke in with the Challenger news, so we watched the aftermath together on TV. Definitely traumatizing.

4. For Columbia, I was living in Ft. Worth Texas, and taking Saturday classes for a masters degree on site at Lockheed. Once again, my school activity was interrupted by the news. As I was driving home, the electronic signs on the Ft. Worth highways were displaying 1-800 numbers to call to report any debris found - sobering and made it very real.

5. I still love watching launches. I've been living on the Space Coast of Florida for 10 years, and it never gets old - I've probably seen 50 launches, which is a small fraction of those that have occurred over that span. Yes, it's a bit on the sick side - like NASCAR, it's most exciting when things go wrong.....but when they go right, I do get a little burst of pride in humanity, even for those that Elon Musk's grubby little fingerprints are on.
 
Almost time for the TLI burn.
strong-bad-homestar-runner.gif
 
MichVandal said:
So kep should have nerded out on this, but *technically*, Artemis never leaves earth's orbit. It does get dominated by the moon's gravity, and partially orbits the moon. But the moon is very much in earth's orbit, so anything orbiting the moon is in earth's orbit as well. They should know there are nerds out there that know that detail.

And it's not a small thing- the moon is a very key part of life here on earth. So it being in earth's orbit is a big deal.
Click to expand...

Certainly true. Humans have never been outside Earth's orbit. Even when the moon's gravity is dominant, the moon still orbits the Earth.

Which leads to the obvious... OK then, where does that orbit end? Well, you have to consider other gravitational bodies as well. In space, everything is always relative -- the Earth cannot be considered absent all other bodies. If it was, then our gravity well would be, theoretically, almost infinite. I assume there would be some distance at which the effects of Casimir Effect-like spontaneous virtual particle generation -- a.k.a., "that about wraps it up for god" -- would overwhelm our inverse square dwindling gravity.

First way to think of it: the Sphere of Influence (SOI) considers just the Earth and the Sun. It is 577,254 miles, more than 2x the distance to the moon. Given a large mass object x (Sun) and a small mass object y (Earth), will a tiny mass object z (Moon) find a stable orbit around y or fall into its own orbit around x? If z is beyond y's SOI, then it will orbit x independent of y. If z is within y's SOI, then will z orbit y which orbits x.

Second way to think of it: the Hill Sphere considers y1 (the Earth) and another similarly-sized body y2 (say, another planet), both of which are gravitationally "competing" within the gravitation of the much larger x (Sun). Both members of each pair (y1, y2) have their Hill Sphere figure with respect to the pair. For example, the SOI for the Earth with respect to Mars is 930,000 miles -- almost 4x the distance to the moon. If you put the moon farther from that distance from Earth, it would continue to drift away and eventually* become a moon of Mars. Which would be fun, because Mars is less than 2x the size of the moon. They would less primary and satellite than a couple, twirling about a common center.

tldr: Your choices are 577k mi, 930k mi, or infinity and beyond.

* Thinking about this more, inspired by the fact that Earth : Mars : Moon are almost the same ratios, I think there are 3 distinct cases:

(1) Moon close to Earth, moon is satellite of Earth
(2) Moon close to Mars, moon is satellite of Mars
(3) Moon some interval between Earth and Mars, moon breaks free of both orbits and becomes a planet
 
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Nice clean footage in living color from the capsule with the crew. Hearing them giggle about the excitement of seeing the Northern Lights from space was a joy.

I am deeply suspicious of cynical deflection from real change via the distraction of performative symbols ("for the symbol-minded" -- Carlin) but it is cool to see a lunar crew that looks a little bit more like our population.
 
Kepler said:
Certainly true. Humans have never been outside Earth's orbit. Even when the moon's gravity is dominant, the moon still orbits the Earth.

Which leads to the obvious... OK then, where does that orbit end? Well, you have to consider other gravitational bodies as well. In space, everything is always relative -- the Earth cannot be considered absent all other bodies. If it was, then our gravity well would be, theoretically, almost infinite. I assume there would be some distance at which the effects of Casimir Effect-like spontaneous virtual particle generation -- a.k.a., "that about wraps it up for god" -- would overwhelm our inverse square dwindling gravity.

First way to think of it: the Sphere of Influence (SOI) considers just the Earth and the Sun. It is 577,254 miles, more than 2x the distance to the moon. Given a large mass object x (Sun) and a small mass object y (Earth), will a tiny mass object z (Moon) find a stable orbit around y or fall into its own orbit around x? If z is beyond y's SOI, then it will orbit x independent of y. If z is within y's SOI, then will z orbit y which orbits x.

Second way to think of it: the Hill Sphere considers y1 (the Earth) and another similarly-sized body y2 (say, another planet), both of which are gravitationally "competing" within the gravitation of the much larger x (Sun). Both members of each pair (y1, y2) have their Hill Sphere figure with respect to the pair. For example, the SOI for the Earth with respect to Mars is 930,000 miles -- almost 4x the distance to the moon. If you put the moon farther from that distance from Earth, it would continue to drift away and eventually* become a moon of Mars. Which would be fun, because Mars is less than 2x the size of the moon. They would less primary and satellite than a couple, twirling about a common center.

tldr: Your choices are 577k mi, 930k mi, or infinity and beyond.

* Thinking about this more, inspired by the fact that Earth : Mars : Moon are almost the same ratios, I think there are 3 distinct cases:

(1) Moon close to Earth, moon is satellite of Earth
(2) Moon close to Mars, moon is satellite of Mars
(3) Moon some interval between Earth and Mars, moon breaks free of both orbits and becomes a planet
Click to expand...
IMHO, you can do the same for a space ship- once the earth isn't the dominant factor, then it's just the sun. Eventually, it will go into a domination of another planet. Or just stay with the sun. Voyager is just about far enough from the sun that it's out....

But I will point out that if the moon is not influenced by another planet, it doesn't become a planet. As Pluto about that.
 
MichVandal said:
IMHO, you can do the same for a space ship- once the earth isn't the dominant factor, then it's just the sun. Eventually, it will go into a domination of another planet. Or just stay with the sun. Voyager is just about far enough from the sun that it's out....

But I will point out that if the moon is not influenced by another planet, it doesn't become a planet. As Pluto about that.
Click to expand...

Pluto is still a planet the way a dwarf is still a human.

But okay, it would become the largest Near-Earth Asteroid by a factor of 100. The largest currently is 1036 Ganymed (not a typo), 22 mi diameter vs the moon's 2200 mi.

Edit: After further review, it might qualify as a full size planet after all. The criterion Pluto failed was "clear its orbit," because it is overwhelmed by the Kuiper Belt objects. The moon would only have to deal with its more sparse orbital neighborhood and over time it might. It would start as an NEA, but given a billion years or two...
 
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1000057944.jpg

Long exposure of Earth from Artemis capsule with moonlight lighting up the nighttime. South pole is top right (Aurora Australis visible), Spain/Portugal/Africa lower left (Aurora Borealis below them further lower left). And sunset on the Americas as seen by the peek of sunlight arcing around the lower right.

Artemis Astronaut Christina Koch said: "You guys look great."

Or, as Astronaut Edgar Mitchell once said: "Look at that, you son of a bitch."
 
There may still be one thing we can do right.

Integrity considering not conducting their second scheduled Outward Trajectory Correction Burn (OTCB) today because the first burn hit its mark that accurately.
 
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