If you’ve been thinking of launching your very own rocket into space, maybe you should wait until September. August, by all accounts, has been a dismal month for space agencies everywhere. Here’s a rundown of the month’s miseries:
August 2: The SpaceX company’s Falcon1 rocket, which was supposed to separate into two parts and propel one of the parts into space, does not.
This mission, SpaceX’s third unsuccessful attempt to reach orbit, was particularly disheartening for a couple reasons. First, NASA had hoped that private companies like SpaceX might be able to accelerate their development of space travel technology because soon the U.S. won’t have any of its own—after the last space shuttle is decommissioned in 2010, NASA will have to rely on the Russians for space travel because the Orion vehicle (more on this later) won’t be ready until 2014 at the earliest.
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Buzz Aldrin is going back to the moon. Or rather, his voice is.
Aldrin was in New York City yesterday for the premiere of Fly Me to the Moon, a 3-D animated retelling of the Apollo 11 moon landing in which the famous astronaut voices himself from almost 40 years ago. The movie, however, is told from the point of view of three young flies—Nat, Scooter, and I.Q.— who stow away inside the astronauts’ helmets in order to become the first flying insects on the moon.
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Break me off a piece, break me off a piece, break me off a piece of that trip to outer space.
A French flight attendant is headed to even further reaches of the Earth’s atmosphere than her normal job takes her, thanks to buying a Kit Kat bar at her local supermarket. Mathilde Epron had the company’s winning wrapper, but rather than admission to Willy Wonka’s Chocolate factory, she won a ticket on a spacecraft.
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Ask not what your country can do for you; ask how often you need to go to the bathroom for your country.
The creator of NASA’s new Orion space capsule, a company called Hamilton Sundstrand, needs to test out its design for an improved waste disposal system. And to do so, they’re asking NASA employees to collect and donate their urine.
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If you’ve been looking for a little more excitement in your wedding than a string quartet and a giant cake—and you don’t feel like being married by an Elvis impersonator in Las Vegas—a Japanese company might have just the right idea for you: Get married in space.
First Advantage, along with an American aerospace company called Rocketplane, wants to start offering space weddings in 2011. Happy couples will pay more than $2 million for the privilege of exchanging vows in outer space. Well, not exactly “outer” space—after takeoff from an Oklahoma airstrip, the ship should reach about 60 miles above the surface of the Earth.
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• Andrew Revkin reflects on his 1988 global warming cover story in DISCOVER.
• It’s too expensive to send humans up into space for repairs; let’s send robots.
• The “Pillars of Creation,” from the famous Hubble photo have already been destroyed. We just won’t see it on Earth for another millennium.
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