Speaking of anniversaries, ten years ago today Elon Musk created SpaceX, the first wholly private rocket company.

[That's an artist's illustration of the SpaceX Dragon capsule pulling away from the booster; just sayin' because this kind of thing looks quite real... and soon will be.]

I remember the first launch of the Falcon 1 for a suborbital test. It got scrubbed, so I went to lunch with my family. I got a phone call from a friend halfway through the meal an hour later saying they had launched! I was so used to NASA taking at least a day to start things back up that it didn’t even occur to me that a small company might be more flexible. It was right around then that I realized Musk was on to something.

Now they’ve had several successful launches, have lots of funding from NASA and other private companies, and have big plans for a heavy lift booster. It’s still early in the game, but I have high hopes for this company… very high.

Congrats to everyone at SpaceX!

I’m a fan of simple infographics: illustrations that make a point clearly and cleanly. The folks at mgmt. design have made one for US manned spaceflight that does just that.

Click that to enboosternate it; I’ve put just a portion of it here. I like it because you can see a few things instantly, for example how short the Apollo program was compared to the total amount of time we’ve been space traveling.

Even more obvious are the gaps in flights. The biggest is post-Apollo and pre-Shuttle, when the Saturn V was essentially decommissioned before the Shuttle was anywhere near being ready. That might be something to keep in mind during the current gap in the US capability to put humans in space.

Also obvious are the pauses after Challenger and Columbia, when the safety of the Shuttle was reassessed. Now, of course, we’re in the second long gap.

I wonder how long it will last? And perhaps more importantly, just how it will end?

While taking pictures for a night sky timelapse video, astrophotogrpaher Babak Tafreshi got a surprise in his field of view: a tumbling satellite! He made a special video to highlight it:

Pretty neat. A lot of people aren’t even aware that satellites are visible at night at all, but really on any given night dozens of satellites can be visible passing through the sky; in fact the space station is so bright it’s actually now the third brightest object in the sky, surpassing even Venus.

The satellites come in a lot of flavors: communications, military, scientific, even old rocket boosters abandoned in orbit after their job was done. Sometimes those satellites have to maintain a specific attitude, or angle, as they orbit the Earth, but not all of them do (especially those boosters). These can tumble end over end, and so their brightness changes as we look at them. They shine by reflecting sunlight, so when we see a long booster end-on it’s fainter than when we see it from the side. As they tumble, then, they brighten and fade.

That’s what Babak caught here. I don’t know what satellite he’s seeing, but clearly from its behavior it’s tumbling as it orbits [UPDATE: Babak told me that it's been identified as a Cosmos 2364, a defunct navigation satellite, and it's most likely rotating, not tumbling, and the change in brightness is due to how sunlight is reflecting off its solar panels]. I’ve seen this myself many, many times and it’s fascinating to watch. In this time lapse it’s sped way up, of course, so it’s more stately when you see one by eye.

If you want to see satellites yourself, then I always suggest Heavens Above, which is my go-to site to find out what’s up. Just enter your latitude and longitude (you can get them from Google Maps, for example) and off you go! They’re also easy to photograph, too (check the Related Posts below for more). It’s fun, and actually pretty cool: you can get pictures of things screaming around the Earth at tens of thousands of kilometers per hour! And all you need is an inexpensive camera and a tripod.

And you don’t even need that to enjoy them. Just go outside at the right time, face the right direction, and look up. That’s all it takes.

In January, I was interviewed live on WHYY radio in Philadelphia about 2012 doomsday conspiracy theories. NASA astrobiologist (and my old pal) David Morrison was there as well, and we talked about some of the (wrong) ideas behind 2012 end-of-the-world prophecies, their impact, and why people believe them.

Here’s a direct link to the archived interview.

It was an interesting discussion. We took some calls from folks, including two from people who seemed to be trying to blame 2012 stuff on religious beliefs, which I think is misguided. Believing in something without evidence or despite evidence against it is human nature, and something we all need to be aware of. Religion falls under that category, as does any other belief system. Conspiracy theories and doomsday prophecies are all part of that larger umbrella. Now, you could make a point that our unquestioning tolerance of religious belief in the US supports the growth of things like 2012 belief. That would make for an interesting discussion, I think, but not one that’s easy to get into on a radio program where you need to keep things brief!

A woman called in and relayed the very sad story of her brother who joined a cult, and wound up killing himself over their doomsday beliefs. This was terrible to hear, and I wrestled with how to discuss it. The Heavens Gate cult came to mind right away, as did that of Jim Jones. I tweeted about it, saying:

"A woman called into WHYY and said her brother committed suicide over doomsday theories. Damn this stuff so much."

[NOTE: I got emails and tweets from people after I tweeted that saying that there's no evidence this woman was telling the truth, and that she may have made this story up. That may very well be true; we have no evidence either way besides her claims. However, David hears similar stories all the time, and I myself have first-hand knowledge of lots of people who are really scared by 2012 claims. So even if the woman's story is not true, the sentiment is relevant.]

It’s hard to convey depth and subtlety in a tweet, and I wrote that during a very short station break, so I didn’t have time to elaborate. I’m not blaming his suicide on doomsday beliefs per se (and note it wasn’t necessarily the 2012 stuff); clearly anyone who contemplates killing themself has deeper issues than that and needs to find help — by coincidence, the wonderful, wonderful Jenny Lawson, aka the Bloggess, wrote a moving blog post related to this topic the same day.

But certainly circumstances play their role. David has said that he gets a lot of emails from people with similar suicidal thoughts due to 2012. Let’s be clear: these people need to find help; neither David nor I am qualified to help them. And perhaps if this 2012 garbage didn’t exist something else would come along to take its place in their minds. But it is here, and it is influencing these people (a couple in Utah was arrested for a homicide and crime spree, and apparently 2012 doomsday thinking played a role there).

And think of this: unlike other issues, this one has a deadline. Having an actual date on this (imaginary) event makes it seem more solid, more real. I hate to write this, but I expect we’ll be hearing more about people going through with suicide over the next few months because of these doomsday claims. How many of them might have had a chance to seek help, to live longer, if the idea of a 2012 doomsday weren’t so prevalent?

And it’s not just this terrible circumstance of people contemplating or even committing suicide; I’ve started giving public talks about 2012, and hear from a lot of folks in the Q&A after about how they’re really scared about this. Most of them are kids. The other day I chatted with some kids about it, and the visible look of relief on their faces as I assuaged their 2012 doomsday fears was amazing.

I can’t say why specific people are out there plugging 2012 by writing books and making websites; perhaps they honestly believe something will happen, or maybe they are loathesome scummy immoral mind-parasites, not caring how they affect people as long as they get money or fame. But either way they are wrong. There is no evidence that any of the 2012 claims is true, and in fact plenty of evidence they’re all wrong.

I’ll be writing more about this, don’t you fret. I’ve been putting it off a long time for various reasons, but it’s long past time for me to hunker down and give this crap both barrels of reality.

Hat tip to Ian O’Neill for the Utah story.

[Update (February 13, 2012): The launch was a success! Congrats to the ESA for this achievement.]

The European Space Agency’s new launch vehicle, Vega, has its first "qualification flight" scheduled for Monday morning: the launch window is from 10:00 to 12:00 UTC (05:00 to 07:00 Eastern US time). ESA has a page where you can watch the launch live.

Vega is a smaller rocket, designed to haul 300 – 2000 kg payloads to low Earth orbit. It’s 30 meters tall by 3 meters wide (100 x 10 feet), so we’re not talking huge here. But this is a size needed for smaller payloads that don’t need huge thrust. This first launch will loft nine satellites in total: the AlMaSat demonstration satellite (30 cm on a side); another called LARES which is 390 kg in mass, designed to test an aspect of relativity called frame dragging (where a spinning object such as the Earth warps space by dragging it along with its spin, like a viscous fluid); and seven tiny satellites called picosats.

Given that this is the dead of night my time, I’ll watch it in reruns, but if the timing is more amenable to you give it a look! It’s not often you get to see the maiden voyage of a new rocket.

I’m getting email and tweets about a Flash-based interactive tool where you can zoom in and out on the Universe, getting a scale of things from the tiniest fluctuations in the quantum foam of space to the size of the Universe itself. It’s done logarithmically, using factors of ten, and does a pretty good job. It’s called The Scale of the Universe 2. It takes a few minutes to load, so be patient!

What’s funny is, no one who has linked to it seems to have remembered that the two brothers who created it, Cary and Michael Huang, made a very similar tool a little over a year ago (which itself owes its existence to the Eames’ venerable "Powers of Ten"). The new one is better in many ways, of course (though I like the music in the old one better; everyone’s a critic). There are some nice improvements, like some animation, more objects, things that are relatable to kids (the size of the Minecraft world, for example), and more.

One of the things I like about tools like this are the surprising little bits that you learn if you’re really paying attention. For example, at a scale of a few billion kilometers, the only familiar object displayed is the orbit of Neptune. Everything else is a star, and all those stars are red. That’s because the only stars that can get that big are massive red supergiants, stars at the ends of their lives that are far heftier than the Sun. If someone notices that oddity and looks it up, hey, they found out something cool!

Which brings me to one minor thing I’d change about this: clickable links. It’s not hard to stop at someplace along the scale, see something you don’t know ("thou", and "twip"? I had to look those up) and then search for it, but having embedded links to the names would be cool.

I’d also love to see something like this tested in classrooms. I have a pretty decent grasp of scale, so this is fun for me, but I wonder if a kid would get the same feel for it? Right around the one meter mark, where you can see a human, a flower, and an elephant, the scale gets odd. That’s because the scale isn’t linear, it’s logarithmic, changing dramtically quickly with a small movement of the scrollbar. To me, that throws off my internal scaling sense. I wonder if this kind of thing might actually give people a false sense of scale, making very small and very large, distant things seem nearer in size to us? Most people already have a squashed sense of scale — even logarithmically, the Universe is vastly difficult to appreciate; most of it is empty even over large degrees of factors of ten. It’s hard to appreciate even how far away the Moon is, and it’s the closest thing in the sky!

Again, I’m just curious. But I do see this as a nice way to get people hooked on cool stuff, and to get them more curious about the Universe around them. And that’s fine by me.

I love the idea of returning to the Moon, and the idea of going back there to stay I love even more. Having said that, I want to stress it must be done the right way. This has been back in the news lately because Newt Gingrich made a speech about it before his doomed Florida Republican presidential primary run.

What bugs me is that we’re talking about it in context of what Gingrich said; I’d rather we were talking about this on its own merits. There are reasons to go to the Moon, and reasons not to do it Newt’s way… all of which I went over in an interview on CBC radio’s Day 6 show with Brent Bambury that aired Saturday. The interview is archived on their site, and you can listen to it there. I was unusually lucid, IMO, and I think the points made were valid.

I was also interviewed on The Alonya Show, a TV news/opinion program on Russia TV:

[UPDATE: I also did an interview with Globo TV in Brazil that's online as well. The show is in Portugese, but I'm in English with subtitles.]

I want to add to what I said on these two shows. In all this discussion, I wasn’t thinking about the idea of fuel depots. Instead of lobbing big heavy payloads all the way to the Moon with gigantic Saturn V-like rockets, you use smaller rockets to loft tanks of propellant into Earth orbit. Then you can use that smaller rocket to lift the astronauts to orbit, meet up with the tanks, install them, and off to the Moon they go! I don’t know if this saves in money, since it means lots of launches, but it does mean you can get to the Moon without having a huge rocket — one that as yet does not exist.

Anyway, the point is: it’s not fantasy, it’s not (haha) moonbat stuff, and it’s not even science fiction.

Well, check that: it is science fiction. For now. But realistically, we can do this. We have the ability. All we need is the will to do it.