Intergalactic Toys

Ho hum.  I'm starting to think my brain may shortly explode out of frustration that it is forced to operate inside a humanoid whose existence is so mind-numbingly dull.  Trapped in a life of averageness, it is.  Poor brain.  It has so many dreams and aspirations, and I make it go to the public service every day.  FFS I am so bored with it all.    

I have been feeling this way inclined for some time now, but I blame my latest bout of angst firmly on Felix Baumgartner, that Austrian daredevil, spacetravelling nutjob, who jumped from the egde of outer space to earth.  As one does sometimes.  Flippin' mad, he is.     

The first thing I did on seeing the white-suited man who can jump footage was scold him mercilessly through the televisual set for being so damn irresponsible.  Everyone knows it's just lunacy to have Red Bull before you have your Corn Flakes.  Honestly, I don't know where his head was.  The second thing I noticed was how that crazy gravity thing is still working just ticketyboo.  And they said it wouldn't take off.

And after that I was just utterly pissed off that my life doesn't consist of intergalactic hot air balloon rides or random hurtlement through the atmosphere at 1,000-ish kilometres over the speed limit or the fact that there is never any doubt or vague concern whatsoever about whether my parachute will hold up until I get to the printer in my workplace.  Felix may be flippin' nuts, but at least he's living it and loving it.  Or maybe he was just a bored public servant in a past life.

The only reason 58 billion people watched the "show" anyway was because there was a chance of Felix's brain exploding during The YouTube's live(ish) feed.  Maybe I have more in common with him than I think.

I heart this photo.

Speaking of outer space and things not being where they ought, one of NASA's retired space shuttles rolled through the dodgy streets of one of the newly treeless, gang-ridden, ghetto regions of Los Angeles on its way to a museum to begin its new life as an oversized dust catcher.  

I'm surprised the shuttle made it through the 'burbs without being tagged by young hooligans.  The ultimate graffiti challenge.   I can't look at these shuttles without wondering how all that gaffer tape stays stuck on its nosecone.  There are many reasons I don't work at NASA, and that little thought bubble is presumably one of them.

RIP First Moon Man

I get goose bumps whenever I hear Neil Armstrong or Buzz Aldren talk about their mission to the moon; arguably one of the most famous days in history.   Armstrong has just passed away at 82 - much to the devastation of me.

He was a great, humble man, and I thoroughly enjoyed my time recently viewing the extensive tribute to him, his fellow astronauts and all the space missions at the Kennedy Space Centre at Cape Canaveral in Florida.

NASA have long stopped caring about the conspiracy theorists and the wacky accusations the space agency faked the moon landing in an elaborate U.S. Government publicity stunt.

The so-called evidence base for the nonsensical conspiracy claims were dubious mood lighting, dodgy radiation level readings, the silky, softness of the moon's surface, and impeccable camera angles and footage, all of which have been credibly explained through evidence of the technical variety that lovers of secret plots get all cranky about. 

All but the most passionate conspiracy theorists seem to have put the fake moon landing old wives' tale to bed, what with the fact that it would be practically impossible to cover up and Soviet Russia would have sniffed out a scam a long time ago.

Although in 1982 NASA hired a space writer to definitively debunk the hare-brained rumours but decided against it, because clearly they had better things to do.  Why indeed give the clueless conspiracy nutters any more air time? 

On my recent trip to NASA I noted some compelling evidence indicating an actual moon landing in the grainy footage of all the rocket scientists and engineers at Houston Mission Control, as they tried to hide their complete horror and devastation when communication was lost with Apollo 11 moments before the 1969 landing.

Obviously NASA have a fabulous central casting unit and hired the best actors and extras of their generation for the moon landing because the raw emotion with tears, hair-raising stress and then sheer joy and exhilaration is fairly difficult to fake even if you are a talented actor like Snooki.

Armstrong was instrumental in landing the lunar module without any really useful assistance from Mission Control.  The spot that Houston had programmed in for the landing turned out to be replete with massive craters, gigantic speed bumps and deep potholes.  Obviously the local council just couldn't be arsed fixing the area up.  I guess that's a whole of solar system thing.  Plus it was the middle of the night and there were no street lights or, um, moonlight so he couldn't see very well.

So Armstrong decided to travel a bit further to find a place where he could parallel park without falling into a ditch or being carjacked by E.T.  By the time he landed, there was only about 30 seconds of gas left in the tank, so there was that too.  There isn't a petrol station close to you when you run out of gas on earth so good luck with that on a lunar space mission.  On top of that there was the whole first-man-on-the-moon expectation, so no pressure there.

RIP Mr Armstrong.

I've been NASA'd

Last week I went to the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, which makes me more of an astronaut than you'll ever be.  I had been summoned by NASA to undertake some astronaut training and also to channel my extraordinary engineering abilities.  I have a keyring that says rocket scientist to prove it.  They don't just sell those things at the merchandise shop, you know.

As I walked through the door at Kennedy I was bombarded by a real-life fake astronaut at the entry to the facility.  He so desperately wanted to have his photo taken with me, so I obliged.  He was a great big ball of fun but his space backpack looked like a 24 pack of toilet rolls covered in white paint. Hmm.

The first thing budding astronauts do on arrival at Kennedy is jump on the tour bus.  But of course.  We headed on over to the LC-39 Observation Gantry, which is just a fancy name for a rather high tower made of steel, ladders, elevators and ice cream stands that one climbs to take a gander at the launch pad in the distance.  The launch pad area is fairly awesome, even though it is a good few clicks away.

Just near the gantry is the Crawler Transporter, which is just a fancy name for the sandy, gritty road that is used to roll space shuttles along on the initial stage of their journey to the moon.  Or on their journey to test piloting if their flight commander only got 99% in their astronaut entrance exam.  The concrete underneath this road is apparently 16 inches thick, which is helpful as the contraptions that carry the space-going machines weigh, like, a shitload.

We also saw the Vehicle Assembly Building where they put all the nuts and bolts together in a hideously complicated fashion.  This building is massive, but fairly non-descript, if you discount the Starship Enterprise-looking thing hanging around inside it. 

Just kidding, you don't get to see Space Shuttle Atlantis at all.  They just tell you it's in there and you are supposed to act all excited as if you can see it.  The final mission of Atlantis was July 2011, the last flight of the now defunct NASA space program. Good one, Obama; you tool.

To be honest, the whole Space Centre is filled with the same boring, beige concrete structures that house Bureaus of Statistics' in government cities, and the only thing that makes them vaguely interesting is the NASA logo.  Although many of them have cool names, like Integrated Booster Retrieval Area.  I made that one up, and I don't even know if that's a thing, but it sounds legit and spacey.

I then popped on over to the Apollo/Saturn V Center, where you can stand underneath the rather humongous Saturn V rocket that hangs off the ceiling.  It was the backup for the famous moon mission.  I guess NASA did a how-to-hang-a-rocket-ship-on-your-ceiling Saturday morning workshop. 

I can't get bluetac to hold my Christmas tinsel on the walls in my workplace so kudos to them.   Maybe I shouldn't have dropped out of Advanced Aerodynamics at university.  At this point of the day I was fairly confident that my trip to the moon was just around the corner.

Me walking in Neil Armstrong's moonboots.

I also touched some black lunar rock, which raised my suspicions, what with the moon being white and all.  Maybe NASA were pushing the affirmative action thing.  This is America after all.  Or is the moon black?  Or grey? I don't know. Who cares.  I'm sure I'll know it when I see it when they send me up.  The Americans have been there many times, so I'm sure they've put up welcome to the moon signage and a Starbucks.

I was super busy for the rest of the day, such is the life of a rocket scientist slash astronaut.  I bought freeze-dried icecream balls, which were completely disgusting.  IMAX is there too and provided two amazing presentations, with actual footage of the Hubble telescope and the international space station in 3D.  Incredible.

As well as being an active space facility, Kennedy is also a theme park so there is the obligatory theme park ride.  Of course.  The Shuttle Launch Experience tips you upside down and tries to create zero gravity and that's a bit of fun.  I didn't get to go to the moon after all.  Maybe next time.  By then perhaps the next U.S. President may have reactivated the NASA space program.

Earth bound, fun-sized space junk

NASA have been putting various this and that made of titanium, aluminium, steel and probably candle stick wax into outer space for decades now, but they don't seem to be terribly adept at bringing much of their space junk back down to earth.

Thanks to the efforts of the United States and other rich countries with rocket ships and sputniks, the vast amount of objects in orbit around the earth, a strip also known as Greater Washington D.C. if you ask Washington D.C., is littered with random parts of old satellites, abandoned rocket boosters, Luke Skywalker's lightsaber and bits and pieces of broken storm trooper.  Thanks George Lucas.

True to form, the Russians have contributed to the problem, throwing endless empty oversized vodka bottles out of their shuttle windows while entertaining ogliarch after ogliarch in their makeshift supersonic grottos.

The people who research such things say there is so much space junk up there that it resembles peak hour around the Arc de Triomphe.  So it's probably a good thing that NASA are actually bringing down one of their satellites rather than leaving it floating through the world's biggest garbage dump.

NASA's doomed Upper Atmosphere Research Satellite (UARS) is due to 'touch down' to earth early Saturday 24 September 2011, Australian time (EST), but NASA doesn't really know when and it doesn't really know where.  It's all a big mystery to the government department that put man on the moon.  And NASA's Twitter page doesn't fill me with any confidence whatsoever.  They say it won't beach itself in Northern America, which basically tells me that they don't really give a shit where it lands, as long as it's not over Northern America. 

Given the brazillions of dosh that was poured into NASA over the forty year space program, you'd think one of their rocket scientists would think to attach a futuristic GPS tracking device.  I know the satellite has been dead since 2005, and I know that it was launched twenty years ago, but these people are paid to look into the future of space travel and come up with something better than "it's too early to estimate where UARS debris will land, but we know where it won't".  So basically their advice is to duck.

I suppose it doesn't really matters where it lands; it's only 5,900 kilograms.  NASA says the bus-size (which is slightly bigger than a fun-sized Mars Bar) satellite will break apart and "mostly" burn up on the way down, and they estimate these bit-sized chunks, some weighing 330 pounds, will hurtle unconrtollably toward earth, and will hopefully land on something meaningless like the Kardashians.

I heart NASA

On July 8, NASA's Atlantis zoomed up into outer space for the last mission in the cash hungry space program, creating an atomic-sized plume of rocketship pollution and producing a deafening racket through highly technical noise generating equipment that blew the crap out of anything resembling an eardrum that happened to be within a few miles radius of the launchpad.  In a nutshell, rockets are cool. 

Barack Obama decided to axe the 40-year-old space program because it was gnawing away at funds that he preferred to spend on useless government programs that did nothing but create more bureaucracy, more socialism and more welfare dependent citizens.  The U.S. spends about US$2.2 trillion on health care every year, with about US$1 trillion of that being squandered through wasteful practices in urgent need of reform. 

The U.S. space program has devoured US$196 billion over the years (around US$450 million per mission), but it is, without a doubt, one of the best things to come out of the United States.  You could almost forgive the U.S. for giving the world Paris Hilton, the Kardashians and other rampant trashbags, because they had cool space shuttles.  Well not anymore they don't. 

Apparently the 9,000 or so folk who work at NASA are out of a job tomorrow, so they'll be packing up their kevlar reinforced deskspaces and taking their plastic rocket booster stress balls and heading off to the local employment agency that specialises in genius rocket scientists, astronauts and world class aeronautical engineers.  Something tells me they'll be okay.  The Russian space program is about to skyrocket (boom boom).

Since they blasted the Atlantis out into the great whoop whoop earlier this month, NASA have been running a real-time stream from their Mission Control Centre in Houston, the nerve centre of all things NASA, where one can watch those crazy command centre kids racing about with toy rocket ships above their head, surfing Google and Facebook, and spending hours upon hours chatting to their fellow aeroengineering geek colleagues about all things rockety. 

Oh wait, that's my workplace; except without the rocket scientists and toy space shuttles and talk of sonic booms.  All you see on the NASA live stream is a bunch of very serious looking middle-age men doing actual WORK; or at least it looks like work because they have many serious looking screens with lots of serious looking graphs and mapping data on them.  Maybe, like any true public servant, they know how to look busy.

On this occasion, Atlantis' mission was simple; deliver a years worth of supplies to the International Space Station.  So basically they were just the delivery boys (and girl) of several tonnes of food and vodka that will tide the Battlestar Gallactica crew over until the Russians come for them.  

I don't know what the big woop is with astronauts.  Just minutes before she landed, the Atlantis was travelling ten times the speed of sound, which is actually slower than the speed most people do down Canberra’s Tuggeranong Parkway during the morning peakhour. 

All of NASAs shuttles (except the two that blew up) will be placed on eBay under reusable space vehicles, if you are in the market for one.  Which you might be.  I'm not judging, I just think perhaps you should try and fit it into your garage before you buy.  Because there are no refunds.  Barack Obama doesn't do refunds. 

Another version of the truth that is actually true is that the shuttles are heading to a museum to become oversized dustcatchers.  Very sad state of affairs.  It's high time we got a Republican back in the White House, before this idiot dismantles anything else that has inspired generations.

Grounded tigers, axed newspapers, rocket ships for sale

Please put up your hand if you have any actual certified training to fly an aeroplane. Games arcades do not count as credible training programs. Neither does any previous experience working for Tiger Airways.

Poor Tiger was clipped over the wings last week by the Civil Aviation Safety Authority (CASA), the body that oversees all things that fly in a civil fashion in Australian skies (except birds obviously), when CASA demanded DEMANDED! that Tiger ground all their planes.

CASA were a little miffed when they discovered that Tiger pilots do not really know how to fly planes properly. Which is actually kind of funny. Honestly, how can any airline possibly live up to CASAs safety standards?  That Flight Centre pilot is probably shaking in his boots because I don't think he even has a cardboard licence.

I wonder if the pilot of that French airliner that spun the other midget plane at JFK airport in New York earlier this year has ever worked for Tiger. Actually, it is just so typical of the French to barge through oncoming traffic and smack right into another plane that just happens to be sitting in their way. Didn’t even stop to exchange insurance information, which the pilot would have probably just pulled out of a ham and cheese baguette in lieu of a cereal packet.

Speaking of people who cannot do their jobs in a manner that is not, you know, legal in the eyes of the law...

The staff left standing at the News of the World who were not involved in the phone hacks of the world scandal are complaining that their employer's key headline-chasing workplace guideline, that being tampering and sticking one's nose into the personal phone records of people in the news, has made them lose all credibility.

Well, I’m not sure they BEGAN with any credibility; such was their choice to work for a newspaper that contains page three girls, and thinks important breaking news is covering the sex romps of English footballers. Perhaps these journalists (italicised for the purposes of sarcasm) could have fixed their credibility issue by working for a CREDIBLE newspaper.  Actually, probably not.  Maybe if they left the media industry altogether things would perk up for them.

Speaking of things being grounded and axed, NASAs Atlantis shuttle took off this week for the U.S. space program's final flight, after the Obama Messiah thought it a good idea to wrap-up one of the few good things to have come out of the United States.

All those young kids (who aren’t stoned) who stare at the night sky for hours, with dreams of being an astronaut, will just have to get a boring government job like the rest of us. Alternatively, they could get a gig at Tiger Airways.

Watching the take-off yesterday, it occurred to me that I didn’t know how space shuttles come back down to earth.  Well I imagined they didn't just hit the brakes at that speed because they’d likely burn up into oblivion on re-entry. So I ventured out into the great outer space of Wikipedia to suss it out:

The vehicle re-enters the atmosphere by firing the Orbital maneuvering system engines, while flying upside down, backside first, in the opposite direction to orbital motion for approximately three minutes, which reduces the shuttle's velocity by about 200 mph (322 km/h)... the shuttle then flips over, by pushing its nose down (which is actually "up" relative to the Earth, because it is flying upside down).

The vehicle then performs a series of four steep S-shaped banking turns, each lasting several minutes... in this way it dissipates speed sideways rather than upwards. This occurs during the 'hottest' phase of re-entry, when the heat-shield glows red and the G-forces are at their highest. By the end of the last turn, the transition to aircraft is almost complete. The vehicle levels its wings, lowers its nose into a shallow dive and begins its approach to the landing site.

That is friggin’ mad!  But I bet they can't parallel park.

NASA and nutrition

NASA, the world leader in space exploration, aerospace and aeronautics research and technology, and kids nutrition. Huh? Yes, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration has a program to encourage fats kids to stop eating so much and start exercising a lot more. Man, why hasn't anyone thought of that before? Thank god we have those NASA researchers to come up with this ground-breaking stuff.

Yesterday NASA launched a health and nutrition competition called "Mission X: Train Like an Astronaut." Nearly 4,000 kids in 25 cities worldwide will participate in the six week pilot. At first glance this seems a little out of NASA's gamut, what with their focus on outer space and all. And then I thought about it again and I said to myself, who the fuck came up with this idea? Well, I don’t know, but it has Michelle Obama’s spacefood bar-free fingerprints all over it.

Only Michelle could produce a kids health awareness campaign out of a department that has absolutely nothing to do with health or nutrition. If anyone could link two things so distinctly different, it’s the First Lady. I’d be pretty pissed if I got a job at NASA and had to spend my time working on obesity programs.

During the program, the kiddies will no doubt learn that the astronauts that have sucked up enough to actually venture into the great unknown must choose their meals about five months before lift-off. NASA convenes a “special taste panel” so these space cowboys can taste the food and spit it out in a safe, controlled environment. The idea is to pick the meals that they find the least repulsive, as they will need to stomach it for days or months at a time. I know, I wish that I had paid more attention in aerospace class as well, and then I too would be living the dream.

Personally I think astronauts are excellent role models for kids. How often do you see them groping cosmonautic women in dark corridors at the international space station, sniffing a line of cocaine through the air on a night out orbiting, or doing anything controversial or inappropriate that requires discipline or fines at the hands of NASA? Discounting the fact that their hygiene practices may not be the most sanitary in the universe, they are ideal role models. Perhaps a little time spent in the outer space sin-bin would be useful for the entire stable of NRL players, where there is no-one around to care about their lack of law-abiding behaviour.

Space and Military technology in safe hands

Imagine a laser beam so powerful and precise that it could push space debris the size of a pin head out of the path of a satellite. Or a war-zone hotshot being defended by a remote controlled system, mitigating the risk of casualties. While these fictitious ‘star wars’ settings belong in a Hollywood movie, the concepts make good business sense for Canberra-based business Optic Electro Systems (EOS). Their laser technology products are hot property and have the attention of the biggest players in the global space and military sectors.

An unremarkable brown brick building in Griffith is home to EOS, a quarter of a billion dollar success story and a world leader in the niche field of laser imagery technology. While the nearby dirt car park belies their success, the building interior is sleek, polished and minimalist, befitting a company whose key business partners include NASA and the U.S. Military.

The company is split into a space and military division, with offices in the United States and Europe. Although it began in more humble surroundings, in the industrial sector in Queanbeyan. EOS Group General Manager Ron Thompson says Queanbeyan’s appeal was the cheap rent and handy facilities, but the choice of location was also strategic. “No-one in Australia, let alone Washington, knows where Queanbeyan is”, says Mr Thompson.  The close proximity to Canberra means an assimilation with funding by an arm of the Federal Government.

The company was created in 1986 by current CEO, Dr Ben Greene. At the time, the United States President Ronald Reagan was espousing a new defence initiative, known as 'star wars'.  One of the roles of this initiative involved shooting down missiles in space. The Australian Government was opposed to this application of technology and abandoned its support.

“Space debris is the reason our Government of the day moved away from supporting star wars”, Mr Thompson explains. Dr Greene was a Commonwealth employee, working in aerospace, and saw a unique opportunity to take the technology that had been created in the government environment and turn it into a private enterprise. He predicted space debris would pose a big problem in the future.

Twenty years on, while experts around the globe are challenged by the environmental degradation on earth, EOS are confronting the issue in space. “We are working hand over fist to correct the mess in space”, says Mr Thompson. The company’s technology will enable them to locate space debris, catalogue it and, in the long term, to demonstrate the ability to move debris out of its current orbit and into the earth’s atmosphere where it will burn up.

In a star wars analogy, Mr Thompson explains, “the laser will give a glancing blow; it’s like pushing someone in the shoulder, it pushes you off track. You don’t need to use a lot of energy”.

It is a very advanced and costly program, but one EOS say is necessary. “We have environmentally screwed space”, Mr Thompson said. referring to the estimated 30 million pieces of man made debris that NASA say are orbiting earth, ranging from 1 millimetre to metres in size.

And the recently exploding Chinese satellite created an estimated 2 million pieces. “Space is now more valuable real estate than anything on earth. And unless we can do something about it (debris), then the demise of earth will only happen quicker”, says Mr Thompson.

Today, the approval process to launch a satellite is stricter than the cold war days. “Every satellite has to be launched into a particular orbit and there are treaties that impact, affect and control all of space; we all work in a very controlled environment”, says Mr Thompson. He believes that the data will invariably be of more interest to the insurance industry, as a risk mitigate, than it might be to other nations.

The military division of EOS is also heavily involved in global technological developments. Last year, the company earned wide recognition after winning a contract to supply the Australian Army with forty-four remote control weapon systems to support Australian troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. The product, called CROWS (Common Remote Operated Weapon Station) allows the operator to locate and identify the enemy and fire the weapon from a protected environment, not unlike a playstation.

The ADF wanted them because the U.S. had them and gave rave reviews. “They are so common with the US, there is commonality of operational training. They have the ability to understand the product of the other party quite well”, said Mr Thompson.

The company’s relations with the U.S. military began when the U.S. discovered EOS’ weapon systems research and wanted to test it in Iraq. “The U.S. troop carriers were armour plated and protected from underground explosion, but when they had people jumping out from behind a tree with a granade launcher, they had no defence mechanism for protecting themselves”, says Mr Thompson, and adds, “mobile granade launchers are now a real threat to people in conflict zones as they can be hoisted over the shoulder”.

EOS have designed and will soon test an anti-granade launcher weapon system. As the enemy gets smarter, the defence mechanisms need to be just as clever to counteract. And EOS knows, as well as any Government, that maintaining credibility with the customer means keeping troops out of harms way.

If the military world stopped fighting tomorrow, the world’s money would be focused again on space research, and EOS has that side of the game covered. “Our core technology is lasers and they are applied in two environments where they will always be in demand, space and military, although one maybe more so than the other”, Mr Thompson said.

While EOS compete for contracts with U.S. technology giants, part of the company’s appeal is its nimbleness. “We can change quickly to suit the end users needs, and we are usually aware of the need before they know that they have one”, says Mr Thompson.

Last year, EOS was recognised by the ACT Government as the Top Exporter of the Year, for their unique expertise in defence technology. “Not only has the company contributed millions of export dollars to the ACT economy, but through its Washington office it has also supported other Canberra businesses looking to break into the American market,” Chief Minister John Stanhope said. The future and security of international space and military technology is in safe hands.

For more information on Electro Optic Systems (EOS) go to http://www.eos-aus.com/.