Late Saturday night (1 February 2025) while I was out walking Annie, I happened to look up and noticed the planet Venus next to a new crescent Moon. It’s hard seeing anything like this where I live because of the humidity and haziness of he surrounding air as well as the light pollution created by neighborhood street lights and the near-by Universal Studios Orlando theme park. Nevertheless I was thrilled to see it, and when I got back home I selected my Panasonic Lumix G9.2 and put the Olympus Zuiko 2.8/40-150 PRO zoom on the front with the 1.4 teleconverter, opened the zoom up to f/2.8, zoomed out to 150mm, or 225mm with the teleconverter, for an effective focal length of 450mm. And then I hand held the assembly to take the photo.

Not bad for an amateur to be sure. And another photo of the wonders of the skies above my head.

Last Monday, 16 January, Space X launched a Falcon Heavy from Canaveral with two payloads for the United States Space Force. These payloads were eventually delivered to geostationary orbits. I was out in my front yard watching the launch. I did see, and capture, the initial fiery launch. And I was about to head back in again because I thought I was too far away to see much of anything else. But I stuck around anyway out of curiosity more than anything else, and as the Heavy continued to ascend I saw the twilight plume as the rocket rose above the Earth’s shadow. That’s when I put the camera back up to my eye and began to track it in the viewfinder. I had enough presence of mind to start zooming in and out and managed to capture a few more images, such as the one leading this post where the side boosters had separated from the core and had begun their trip back down to the Space X landing zones.

I’ve seen the official images taken by many at the launch site, and of course their work is better than mine. But there is considerable satisfaction on my part at having captured this particular moment in time, and hand-held. Especially given that I’m almost 100 miles away from the Canaveral launch site.

I used my Lumix G9 with the Olympus Zuiko 40-150mm PRO attached. I would have used my E-M1.2 body except the batteries I had were pretty much drained at having just sat in my bag for too long. I’ve since charged them both back up, and I’m making a strong effort to use the E-M1.2 a lot more than I have up to this time. When I looked at the EXIF data on the image I discovered I’d only had the zoom out to 100mm, which means I could have used my 12-100mm PRO as well. But the 40-150mm is a stop faster, and I’m glad I had that extra stop as I had the zoom opened to f/2.8, its maximum aperture. And it appears that the G9 and 40-150mm PRO worked together just fine. But I still prefer to use that zoom with the E-M1.2.

And sometimes, when the opportunity presents itself, I photograph more than cats and flowers.

I walk my two big girls, Ruby and Annie, twice per day, once right before sunrise and again right after sunset. This gives all three of us plenty of exercise and allows us to avoid the heat of the day. It’s also a good way to at least get in one walk, as the summertime days in Florida are punctuated with afternoon and evening thundershowers.

This morning was a little different. On the leg of the walk heading back home I spotted the launch trail of ULA’s Atlas V catching the rising sun. I wasn’t expecting this launch, but then, I’ve fallen away from tracking launches like I used to. I suppose it’s my old age. I’m too old now and too poor to even think about getting involved in the industry as either an employee or even entertaining the thought of riding on one, such as a SpaceX Crew Dragon.

I guess the meek shall indeed inherit the earth, while the billionaires and trillionaires head into space.

For those who might want to purchase a copy of their own, here’s the link to get you started: https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/programming-with-micropython/9781491972724/

The book is nearing four years after initial publication, which is a very long time in the business of dead-tree computer texts. If the author worked with a then-current release of MicroPython, then that would be one of the version 1.9 point releases. Today, MicroPython is at 1.18, and quite a bit has been fixed and added along the way. Let me illustrate by way of an example using the Raspbery Pi Pico with the RP2040 dual-core microcontroller.

One of the very first programs that is offered in any language is “Hello, World!” It’s usually anywhere from a single line, up to several, depending on the language. To illustrate how easy it is to get started in physical computing and IoT programming, all languages ported to computers such as the Raspberry Pi or the Pi Pico have extensions and modules that allow you to interact with external electrical devices, such as an LED. Thus the equivalent of “Hello, World!” in this context is blinking an LED. Using a Raspberry Pi Pico with MicroPython version 1.18 installed, this is what that looks like. I’ll be typing this in to the REPL.

>>> from machine import Pin, Timer>>> led = Pin(25, Pin.OUT)>>> timer.init(period=500, mode=Timer.PERIODIC, callback=lambda t:led.toggle())>>>

In three lines of code, we imported libraries that are part of the main MicroPython installation, set up a variable to manipulate the built-in physical LED attached to GPIO pin 25, and then used a Timer class instance to toggle the LED every 500 mS, or every 1/2 second. When you look on the Pico board after executing timer.init(...), the on-board green LED is indeed flashing every 1/2 second. You would not have found any of this in the current book. I found it quite by accident while looking for something else in the current MicroPython online documentation here: https://docs.micropython.org/en/latest/rp2/quickref.html .

This isn’t to say the book is bad. it still has a large amount of good information to convey if you approach the material as a starting point. Chapter 13 in particular gives excellent advice on how to write good idiomatic MicroPython on these microcontrollers, advice which is still relevant today. What needs to be done to produce a second addition is

• cover updates to some of the micro controller boards, for example
  • micro:bit version 2,
  • Adafruit’s Circuit Playground Bluetooth,
  • an updated ESP32,
  • the ESP32-C3 with RISC-V that replaces the ESP-8266,
  • and the Raspberry Pi Pico/RP2040 (and Adafruit’s Feather RP2040).
• cover the updates from MicroPython v 1.9 to today’s version (which is currently at 1.18),
• add coverage to Adafruit’s Circuit Python
• document real examples of CircuitPython/MicroPython on real space hardware, citing PyCubed ( https://pycubed.org ) and the V-R3x space mission ( http://vr3x.space ), just to name two examples here.

Quite a bit has advanced over the last four years, and needs to be captured in a second edition. I wish I could help, but I don’t have the original document to work from. I’m not about to say writing a second edition would be easy. I’ve written enough proposals and technical manuals in my days to appreciate the effort required to write clearly, correctly, and engagingly to your audience. But I do wish I could help bring about a second edition, if nothing else by supporting the original author.

My youngest daughter found an extra Animal Crossing DIY recipe for a lunar rover and gifted it to me in-game. The recipe calls for ten star fragments, ten iron rocks, and four old tires. The old tires have to be found randomly while fishing, and they take a while to collect. But collect them I finally did, and so here we are, my avatar with his lunar rover in front and satellite in back.

The lunar rover is part of the Animal Cross Space Theme (  https://nookipedia.com/wiki/Space_Theme ). So far it looks like I have three in the Space Theme: the satellite in back, the lunar rover in front, and the flying saucer on the back part of my island. I don’t know how many more are left to collect, or when the recipes will show up. But having just these two together is a bit of fun.

In a world awash in bad news (climate warming, the Ukraine, Omicron, insurrection, etc, etc, etc) it’s nice to read some very good news. Such is the case of the JWST reaching its stable orbit around Earth’s Lagrange 2, or L2 point. I’ve been following the progress of JWST from its launch on the Ariane 5 through each step of its deployment and final orbital injection burn. It was a $10 billion dollar gamble, but an incredibly engineered gamble, and it all paid off by paying attention to the most minute engineering and science detail. All the naysayers kept saying how it was a waste of resources, that there were too many things that could, and would, go wrong. But as the time passed through its construction and testing, the launch, and each little deployment step, all the criticisms were slowly and methodically knocked down.

Now the JWST is in orbit around L2, its science packages and instrumentation continuing to cool down towards near absolute zero for the telescope’s sensor. There will still be tiny, tiny, tweaks to be made to each of the mirror’s subsections, a final tuning, but that also appears to be going well.

I’m amazed at what’s been accomplished, and so thankful that NASA shared the voyage out to L2 with us. JWST goes to reassert what we can accomplish if we just decide to do it and then do it right.

I watced the night launch of Inspiration 4 from my front yard here in Orlando. The sky had managed to clear looking east towards the space coast, so I stood and enjoyed the spectacle. I then went back inside and watched the live stream until they successfully achieved orbit (I had no doubt they would).

It was spectacular. It was historic, full of many firsts, and more firsts to come. And it was all SpaceX. Not NASA, or ULA, or Blue Origin, or Virgin Galactic, or Roscosmos. It was all SpaceX. And if you think that SpaceX won’t successfully launch and prove Starship and Superheavy, think again. We’re at least going back to the moon on a Starship, not anything else. And from there…

https://inspiration4.com/

I was outside in my front yard with one of my cameras and a long telephoto trying to grab a photo or two, but there was quite a bit of cloud cover to the east, and so I couldn’t. What was more interesting to me was to hear the distant low thunder of the first stage lifting off. I have from time to time, if the cloud cover is just right, been able to hear what I can’t see. Today’s distant rumble was a consolation prize, if you will, of not being able to see the launch. At least I got the opportunity to hear it. What’s more interesting is that I live near Universal Studios south of Orlando, so that was quite the distance for the launch sound to travel.

I’m doing this because I’m tired of my terrestrial service provider, Spectrum. They bought out Brighthouse Networks, which was a spinout of Time Warner Cable. So you can see I’ve been doing business with that entire group for some number of years. Spectrum keeps slowly raising my monthly rates so that I’m now back up to $124/month. Yes, this month they doubled my download rate to about 200MBS “at no extra charge!”.

I  think that Spectrum’s speed boost is more than just a coincidence with Starlink offering service in my area. And if I stay with Starlink, I’ll have to pay an additional $400 to purchase the antenna and associated equipment. But after that, my monthly fee is a flat $99/month, with speeds starting at $100MBS, which was where I was at before Spectrum boosted mine.

My only problem I need to solve is what to do with my house phone. That’s part of my cable package. I’ve already looked into using an AT&T device to in essence add my home phone to my wireless plan, for an additional $15/month. With my home line split out of my cable package, I have the freedom to pick whomever I want for data, and right now, that selection is Starlink.

I also want to make my home a bit more robust. Earlier this year I installed a UPS and put all my comm gear and one of my computers on it. Sure enough, Florida Flash and Flicker lost power on a clear and sunny day. Everything stayed up on the UPS for the two hours we were without power. Unfortunately Spectrum lost power as well (the loss hit over 1,000 customers). When my home power came back I was still out of Internet connectivity for another three hours as Spectrum fixed their equipment issues. So much for power backup; I still had to power cycle my cellular modem/access point to get everything sorted out.

So here’s to the future. Terrestrial service providers are going to get some real competition in the very near future. And I believe that many of us are going to move to Starlink, or something very similar.

There should be no doubt in anyone’s mind what Space X is capable of technically. They are a positive force in the space industry to be reckoned with. The Space X success stands in such stark contrast to the multiple failures of Boeing’s Starliner which “flirted” with disaster in January of this year.

Next launch will be the Crew 1 mission, with a crew of four composed of NASA astronauts Micheal Hopkins, Victor Glover, and Shannon Walker, and JAXA astronaut Soichi Noguchi. The compose the first operation mission, Expedition 64. They should launch some time in September if all goes as planned.

I am so happy to have watched Demo 2 unfold. After the unrelenting and unfolding disasters of the pandemic, which has triggered a major economic collapse, as well as the social unrest due to systemic racism, this success was such a wonderful and welcome change.

I came across this on Nasa’s Instagram feed. It’s probably one of the saddest photos I believe I’ve ever seen. I’ll quote Nasa to give you the details.

From 250 miles above Earth, orbiting the planet at 17,500 mph aboard the International Space Station (@iss), astronaut Ricky Arnold (@Astro_Ricky) captured this photograph of changing landscape in the heart of Madagascar. You can see drainage into the sea in the Betsiboka Estuary due to decimation of rainforests and coastal mangroves.

Credit: @Astro_Ricky

This is just one more example (out of an infinite number) of the incredibly destructive force we are on this planet. God help us all, if He wants to any more.

A little over a year ago (April 2016) I wrote my second post about building a spaceship to go to the Moon. I wanted to get back to this particular thread, in part, because I needed to re-create the graphic in OmniGraffle. The reason for that is my migration from Windows 10 to a Macbook Pro running macOS 10.12. I’d created the earlier drawings in Visio, but for whatever reason Microsoft doesn’t release a version of Visio for the Mac. Furthermore, my version of Visio for Windows, release 2013, won’t work with Office 2016, and Microsoft has decided it won’t upgrade my 2013 version to work with 2016 office. I paid full price for Visio 2013. OmniGraffle for the Mac is much less expensive, and just as powerful for what I need. And it looks a lot better. From this point forward this is the graphic I’ll use, when I need to use it.

Budgetting

The biggest problem with amateurs such as myself talking about personal space ships is forgetting budgeting and logistics. Budgeting means finding the means to pay for everything, from raw materials (which are expensive) to manufacturing to running it and ongoing refurbishment and repairs when needed. The closest examples to this is civilian aviation, in which a small aircraft capable of being licensed is expensive to purchase up front, and then has a constant cost due to operations and maintenance. And that maintenance is important due to being able to maintain air worthiness. Your aircraft must be airworthy in order to be authorized by the FAA to operate an aircraft in flight. You pay for that, and more significantly, you make sure you have the necessary budgeted monies to pay for that. Budgeting is more than just collecting a big pot of money and then spending it. Money has to be managed and fed, in proper amounts at the proper time, to multiple cost centers in order to get work done. Budgeting means you make sure you estimate (and then get) enough money to start with, then tightly control how it’s used over time. Because without a well-funded and well-run budget, nothing gets built nor launched if it is built. Part of the budget feeds a critical capability called logistics.

Logistics

Logistics, with regards to spaceflight, is the detailed coordination of a complex operation involving many people, facilities, and supplies. Multiple companies involved in spaceflight (Boeing, Lockheed, SpaceX, Orbital Sciences, etc) have a large logistics component of their companies of almost mind-numbing complexity. They have to coordinate everything from gathering materials to building rockets to testing them, then matching them with paying costumers, to transport and setup through final launch. And with SpaceX, the landing and refurbishment of Falcon rockets (and subsequent re-use back into the launch process) is an added wrinkle to the whole logistical process. While doing all this everyone has rules and regulations that must be followed for proper safety and quality assurance, which adds more to the overall cost. And before the critics in the peanut gallery pipe up, you need those rules and regulations because of the harsh, unforgiving nature of space itself, let alone the act of launching a rocket with a payload.

And then there’s the logistics of the payload (satellite et. el.) manufacturers, who provide the primary reason for launching lots of rockets in the first place. They have their logistics systems, which must mesh with the rocket makers. And the rocket makers must mesh with NASA and the Air Force, who control the launch facilities through yet another complex logistics system which has been built up and tuned over decades of hard won knowledge and experience. Rockets just don’t go up on a whim. Launches are deeply planned events to minimize risk and maximize success. Poor planning often results in loss of expensive hardware, and sometimes, human lives. Rocketry boils down to the controlling of incredible energies to move material and humans off the surface of the Earth and into orbit. Science and engineering play vital roles in rocketry, but logistics and budgets are equally important. It might even be said that logistics plays the most important role of all.

Shuttle Challenger, flying mission STS-51-L, with seven astronauts on board, exploded 73 seconds after liftoff on 28 January 1986. On board were

• Francis R. Scobee, Commander
• Michael J. Smith, Pilot
• Ronald McNair, Mission Specialist
• Ellison Onizuka, Mission Specialist
• Judith Resnik, Mission Specialist
• Gregory Jarvis, Payload Specialist
• Christa McAuliffe, Payload Specialist, Educator

I was working directly for Martin Marietta (the future Lockheed Martin) at the east Orlando facility near Research Park and the University of Central Florida. MM had, and still has, a nice cafeteria facility with a large outdoor patio that allowed for great viewing of rockets lifting from Canaveral. I was watching because my wife was an English professor at Valencia College, and we were expecting our first child, a girl, in May. The launch had special meaning for me. I was there to cheer on, quietly in spirit, the women who were on that mission as well as the educator.

It was right before lunch, the day was cool, crisp, and clear out to the coast, and there were about two dozen of us standing and waiting on the patio. As Columbia’s launch plume cleared the tops of the trees we all started to talk excitedly. When the big bloom of smoke and the devil’s horns appeared about a minute after liftoff, the whole patio went silent. We knew. The patio cleared pretty quickly. Inside the facility all the TVs were tuned into the local news stations, and we all walked by constantly trying to hear the news. I went home that night numb.

Over the ensuing months we would learn what happened. It would come out formally in the Rogers Report. Nearly three years would pass before another shuttle launch. By then a lot had changed, and not for the better. One of the primary requirements drivers for the Shuttle, the Air Force, walked away from the Shuttle when they decided it too unreliable for their use and switched back to “dumb” rockets to loft their payloads. Belief in NASA’s invincibility was shaken, and drove an already slow internal bureaucracy to go even slower. This led to Shuttles continuing to fly, but failure after failure to find a substitute for the Shuttle. When all the Shuttles were retired in 2011 and mothballed to museums, the only way into space and specifically to the ISS was by buying expensive seats from the Russians on Soyuz.

Challenger has a special place in my heart and soul, for who and what we lost.

Grissom, White and Chaffee. I was a seventh grader when their names became permanently etched in my mind like no other astronauts. On 27 January 1967, during a ground rehearsal inside the sealed Apollo capsule, all three died due to a flash fire in pure oxygen inside the Apollo capsule. The fire was so hot and so fast, and the original Apollo capsule so poorly designed for emergency egress, that all three astronauts died before the hatch could be opened. Over the years America would go on to loose two more astronaut crews in the pursuit of space; Shuttle Challenger on 28 January 1986 (today’s date) during launch, and Shuttle Columbia on 1 February 2003 during re-entry. I’ll write about Challenger and Columbia in a later post. It’s the uniqueness of Apollo, its successes and tragedies, I want to touch on here.

I continue to pay special attention to the Apollo astronauts, especially those who landed on the moon, because they are the most unique of a unique class of individuals. Not all of them set foot on the Moon, but enough of them did, and humanity, as well as America, is far better and greater for their achievements. They truly where the “best of the best” as some want to mockingly remark today. All three of the Apollo 1 crew weren’t just test pilots, they were accomplished engineers as well. Grissom was a mechanical engineer, and White and Chaffee were aeronautical engineers. Those men didn’t just know how to fly, they knew intimately what it was they were flying. It was that knowledge that led Grissom to rightfully criticise what he saw as defects in the original Apollo capsule, defects that no one would listen to, and that contributed to their fatalities on that fateful day. But all of that’s now 50 years in the past.

The bigger problem is that those that went on to land on the moon have now reached an age where they’re beginning to die due to natural causes. We’ve now lost both the first man to walk on the moon and the last man.

Neil Armstrong passed away 25 August 2012 and Gene Cernan passed away a few weeks ago on 17 January 2017. We’ve now lost, through age, both the first and the last men to walk on the moon. We’ve thrown away an entire generation of technology and men that allowed us to literally stand on the edge of limitless space. I don’t know which is the greater tragedy, Apollo 1 or what we did to the legacy of Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo. We could have literally planted boots on the surfaces of multiple planets other than the moon, be building a permanent presence on worlds other than earth, and pushing the boundaries of our knowledge of the universe in ways unimaginable to us now.

Instead we have Trump World and Brexit.

While I was sleeping early this morning, SpaceX launched JCSAT-14 on its way to a geosynchronous orbit. And then, after first and second stage separation, SpaceX landed the “hot” first stage on its drone ship in the Atlantic.

What makes this landing special is two-fold. First, it’s the second consecutive first stage landing and intact recovery. Second, this was a hot and high launch of a large satellite into geosynchronous orbit. That meant that a lot less fuel was left for a first stage landing, and the first stage was traveling a lot faster before it turned around and came home. In spite of this it did and it came back successfully, as can be seen above.

This is the point where the management of United Launch Alliance (ULA) and Arianespace should be seriously concerned about their organization’s future. Both have dismissed SpaceX’s attempts to create truly reusable rockets, downplaying every successful step (moving the goalposts back). The next step in SpaceX’s march to stage reuse is to actually reuse one to send another payload into orbit. Ideally these stages would be used multiple times.

The best that the old-school launch providers have provided as a competitive alternative to SpaceX’s reusable stages is Arianespace’s Adeline, a proposed reusable system that only return’s the first stage main engines, throwing away everything else. According to Airbus Defense and Space, Adeline’s return of the first stage and avionic’s package will allow “80%” of the first stage’s “economic value.” First made public in June 2015, nothing has yet to be built, let alone tested. It remains just a paper proposal.

There is only one other company that has come anywhere close, Blue Origin with its New Sheppard launch vehicle. New Sheppard comes closest to the idea of Single Stage to Orbit (SSTO), a design and philosophy that were last used with the McDonnell Douglas DC-X test vehicle from the 1990s. It was never meant to go to orbit, but was a first step in testing vertical takeoff and landing (much like New Sheppard) and the necessary technologies for rapid turnaround, and thus, extremely cheap space flight. MD provided some remarkable testing until funding dried up around 1995, when NASA took over. It was under NASA’s control that the DC-X finally met its doom, due in no small part to the demoralization of the engineering personnel picked up along with flight hardware, by NASA’s burdensome bureaucratic processes.

Jeff Bezos, who owns Blue Origin, has kept NASA at arms length, and has allowed his engineers the freedom necessary to produce a truly impressive reusable rocket that has flown three times, the last two up to the edge of space and back. The fundamental difference between Blue Origin and SpaceX is that SpaceX has placed payloads into orbit, while Blue Origin has not. That lack of orbital reach by Blue Origin should not diminish what New Sheppard has accomplished. Both Blue Origin and SpaceX represent two important lines of research, lines that will merge into a single fully reusable space transportation system for both human and cargo transport into space and back. We have to have a fully reusable STS that will provide the same low-cost access to space the way our current fleet of airliners allow for low-cost access to just about any point on our planet. We will get there, but only with companies like SpaceX and Blue Origin. Today’s SpaceX landing at sea, its second successive landing, is a vital step to that point in time.

The last post got me thinking a lot about energy, especially how we use it, and as a consequence, how dependent we are upon energy. So I put together this really simple flow chart that shows four general steps used in our civilization to go from raw material to final product. This is a very broad generality, as every specific example is a variation on this. For example petroleum production combines refining and manufacturing into one step, producing products such as diesel and gasoline (among other products). For something like an automobile that uses gas or diesel fuels, it will take many refined products to manufacture a final product (the automobile), which will then consume the petroleum product (the energy) producing waste (exhaust primarily).

And therein lies a fundamental problem of going into space. Our current civilization is totally dependent upon the profligate use of energy in order to transform raw materials extracted from the Earth and transformed into items we can use. There’s even additional steps in this basic flow, logistics, which consists of transportation and the energy required to move any of this “stuff” around and storage to hold it all until it’s finally used. Whatever we do, it requires some sort of material input, mixed with energy that produces a transformation as well as waste byproducts. It’s bad enough on Earth. But in space it’s an even worse waste. Consider that the ISS uses the resupply cargo ships as garbage incinerators. After pulling the new material out of the cargo ship, all waste is put back into the emptied ship, then allowed to undock and plummet back to Earth, where it’s incinerated. All that trash literally gets dumped back to Earth, usually over a lot of heads as finely burnt ash due to re-entry.

Going into space means more than just building the ships to get us there and the habitats to live there. It means a fundamental re-think of how we live off the universe. Because the way we do it now is fundamentally unsustainable, either on Earth, and especially off.

Over a year ago (November 2014) I wrote “personal moon shot – designing a personal spaceship to leave earth.” An awful lot has occurred since then, both personally and in the space industry itself. In particular were the launch failures of the Cygnus CRS Orb-3 ISS resupply and the crash of VSS Enterprise (with loss of life) in October 2014, followed the next year by the loss of Roscomos’ Progress 59 ISS resupply mission in early May, followed by SpaceX’s CRS-7 ISS resupply mission failure in late June 2015.

Space, in other words, is very, very hard. And its failures are heightened even more so because of the string of successes that lull us into a false sense of invincibility. The companies that do this already have incredible intellectual breadth and depth as well as a vast institutional knowledge built up over years of operation. Yet let your attention to detail waver just a little and you invite disaster. Who do this? Because when you succeed at space flight and space exploration, the rewards are immense and incredibly consciousness expanding in a very good way. Even for those of us on Earth doing this vicariously.

Which makes my little ramblings about building a personal spaceship appear even more ludicrous. But you never know until you at least investigate, and I have the history of space flight to imbue me with considerable humility.

Oddly enough, it was the success of this past Friday’s SpaceX launch and Falcon 9 first stage landing that re-invigorated my investigations. I’ve been wanting to go back and get re-organized and going again, and here was the perfect event to kick things off.

I’m using OmniGrapple to do my system diagrams instead of Visio. If you look at the high-level diagram from the first post it’s all over the place with oddball arrows connecting the various systems. This time I reorganized the diagram a bit, with easier to follow symmetry, and eliminated the arrows. I also want to stress that this is high level. As I progress in this exercise those high level systems may be changed, and in particular, we will be decomposing downward over time. As for dependencies, we’ll do that later.

Energy

Energy is one of those oh-so obvious needs, but one that’s always glossed over when talking about space flight and space craft. I’m always amused by the large and complex space craft in science fiction, especially on TV and in the movies. You see these huge artificial structures being driven across space with magical engines to faster-than-light speeds. And then there are the sybaritic living conditions on board these space craft. All of this demands vastly huge amounts of energy. Star Trek got away with powering the Enterprise with anti-matter, being deliberately vague on the details (along with those damnable dilithium crystals). So what exactly would a notional energy budget look like for a space craft built with more conventional technology? What would it involve?

• Kinetic energy. This is the energy required to lift the total spacecraft (craft, crew, fuel, and supplies) off the surface of the Earth, allow for transfers from Earth to a destination, such as the Moon, landing on said destination, then lifting off again and returning to Earth, where whatever is left lands back on Earth. Always remember we have to deal with Newton’s First Law of Motion. Getting going is only half the problem. You have to slow down in a controlled fashion, and no, simply slamming into your destination is not an option, due to the consequences of rapid unscheduled disassembly.
• Motive energy. This is the energy locked up in the space craft propulsive systems. I call it motive energy because it could be composed of many types propulsion systems. This is the energy used to satisfy the overall kinetic energy needs in the first bullet.
• Operational energy. This is the energy needed to operate the space ship itself. Electricity of some form comes to mind as that’s what is needed to power all the onboard computer systems as well as the electrical control systems and life support. Without operational energy the space ship is a lifeless unresponsive hulk, and you wind up dead very quickly.
• Thermal energy. This is a byproduct of the use of the first three bullets, as well as the thermal energy constantly coming from the Sun above the Earth’s atmosphere and bathing the spacecraft. That energy must be controlled, or else, once again, you wind up dead due to too much heat (Skylab had this issue) or too little heat (Apollo 13 had this issue). While it’s obviously important to maintain a comfortable temperature for the living passengers, complex computer systems also have their operational temperature limits. So you’re going to have to figure out how to manage heat by removing it from where it isn’t needed, to where it is, and somehow dumping the rest away from the spacecraft.

The next post will be about life support, specifically supporting humans in space. We’ll talk about daily fundamental needs and begin to look at how much is needed over time. It’s a logistical issue that the International Space Station has had to deal with on a large scale since Expedition 1 in November 2000.

Once again I had a ring-side seat to a bit of important history being made, the launch of the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket with CRS-8 mission and payload up to the ISS. I watched it simultaneously from my front yard (with the image taken above right after liftoff) as well as on my iPad Air 2 streaming from the SpaceX feed. Using that feed I watched the payload reach orbit and then watched the first stage land, on its drone ship, in the middle of the Atlantic. Talk about stoked. If I weren’t in my early 60s I’d make a bee-line out to Hawthorne California and SpaceX’s headquarters and do whatever I could to work there. This is the real future, real technological prowess, not the crap VR gear being pushed. We need to be forever pushing forward and outward, not turning inward and away from the challenges of the real world. What follows are screen captures from the Air 2. Capturing a bit of history for myself.

The landing of the Falcon 9 first stage, which spectacular, isn’t the only spectacular part of this flight. CRS-8 is carrying an inflatable habitat up to the ISS. If it works then it will attach to one of the ISS’ ports and be expanded. The Bigelow Expandable Activity Module, or BEAM, is an attempt to attach one of the expandable habitats onto an existing space station. Bigelow Aerospace has already launched two test articles into orbit, but this is the first time an expandable has been delivered as part of a cargo and attached to an existing structure. This is in line with what the future use of much larger expandables and will allow another way to lower the cost of building large enclosed habitable spaces on orbit. When (not if) this is proven to work later next week, then this flight will be remembered not for one milestone, but two: lowering the cost of launch, and lowering the cost of habitation. These are the true milestones that NASA should have been trying to solve ever since the end of the space race and the end of Apollo. We seemed to be trying to go there with Skylab, but it fell back to Earth before the first Shuttle could fly and help boost Skylab to a more stable orbit. Thus did incompetence and politics conspire to cripple our expansion into space from the 1980s up until now.

I find it interesting that these milestones are given short shrift on the regular news sites (BBC, NPR, Guardian, Reuters, etc). Perhaps I’m still stuck back in the 1960s and early 1970s, when every launch was something more grand than today. But no matter. We’re really headed back into space now, critics all around not withstanding.

Yesterday evening marked another SpaceX launch from the east coast of Florida. A Falcon 9 launched SES-9, a geosynchronous satellite to owned and managed by SES (Société Européenne des Satellites). Because it was right at sundown, there were interesting lighting effects, especially the launch trail. I spent too much time watching the flight before I remembered I had a camera with me. Or perhaps that’s the way I should approach it. The older I get, the less intent I am to photograph everything interesting I come across.

Towards the end of the observable part of the launch the vehicle arced over and began it’s orbital insertion downrange. You can see two small points of light in the second photo where the first stage and second stage (the brighter point) have separated. I managed to grab this photo, then just stood there watching the points continue on downrange until they just faded out due to distance.

One of the benefits of living where I do is the bit of vicarious living I experience when I watch a launch, especially a SpaceX launch. This certainly isn’t the first I’ve observed first hand since moving into this house back in 1985. I might not be closer to Canaveral, but I’m close enough to see the launch contrails and the engines burning in the night sky. I think I like night launches the best of all.

I’ve been sitting here following the launch of NASA’s Jason-3 satellite from Vandenberg AFB via Twitter and streaming feeds. The launch itself was successful, but based on my Twitter feed it looks like the first stage had a hard landing on the SpaceX barge. It appears one of the landing legs broke and the first stage isn’t upright on the barge. Trying to return that first stage booster back to land is hard enough, but trying to return the first stage to a barge in the middle of the ocean has to be an absolute nightmare.

If SpaceX can’t solve the sea landing, then they may have to restrict these attempts to where they can come back to dry land like their successfully landing here in Florida. At least SpaceX is trying. Everybody else want’s to talk about how tough it is without even attempting to solve the problems.

The primary mission, to launch Jason-3, has succeeded. The secondary mission, to land the first stage on the drone ship, has failed. So close on the secondary mission, and yet still so far.

My SpaceX feed has essentially dried up. Nothing left to read on Twitter except the usual social trash on a Sunday afternoon. I think I need to trim back again.

Here’s a blog post on what’s happened so far: Falcon 9 Launches Jason-3 Satellite, Landing Attempt Fails

Update 18 January

If you get a chance check out the SpaceNews link above. There’s a short clip showing how the first stage touched down on the barge, then tipped over when one of its landing legs failed. As Elon Musk would later tweet, “Well, at least the pieces were bigger this time!” After looking at the video clip I can’t believe how close they came this time to successfully pulling it off. It was so close it even made me hurt a little to watch it just tip over. My belief in their eventual success at sea-based landings is now a lot stronger.