Posted by Michael Pinto on Feb 16, 2010 in Science
Watching this video on the history of the Space Shuttle Endeavour is very depressing to me. For starters the shuttle was rolled out during the Bush administration: No I don’t mean George W. Bush Jr. but his father! That’s right Endeavour came out the first year that Nirvana scored a hit with Nevermind about 19 years ago, a time before any living high school was born. Of course the construction of Endeavour was kicked off in 1987: This means the last time America was serious about NASA was when the film Dirty Dancing came out. Read more…
Posted by Michael Pinto on Feb 13, 2010 in Science
This cute video shows a chat between astronaut Mike Massimino on the ground feeding questions from Twitter to astronauts Nicholas Patrick and Robert Behnken who are hanging out at the International Space Station. As a sci fi fanboy what I love about this chat is how they go into detail on what outer space smells, sounds and looks like when you take a space walk.
Posted by Michael Pinto on Feb 10, 2010 in Science
The shuttle looks like an aircraft and lands like one, yet we tend to forget that it’s a real spaceship — and flying a spaceship doesn’t look like an X-wing jetting into to the Death Star. And that’s what I love about this recent video footage from the current shuttle mission which shows the Endeavour performing a rendezvous pitch maneuver so that the crew members aboard the ISS can photograph the orbiter for any signs of damage it may have incurred during liftoff. By the way if you missed the launch of Expedition 23 here are some highlights of the dramatic night launch: Read more…
Having grown up watching science fiction shows you get the feeling that you’re not looking at a real spaceship crew unless there’s a lot of adrenaline being thrown about. However the reality is much different as real world astronauts are quite a cool quite group — more Spock than Kirk if you know what I mean. NASA produced these two short videos which give a nice glimpse at some of these unsung pioneers who deserve to be household names. Shown above is Eileen Marie Collins who was the first woman to pilot a space shuttle and below is Guion “Guy” Bluford, Jr. who was the the first African American in space back in 1983: Read more…
Posted by Michael Pinto on Jan 29, 2010 in Science
This interesting video clip author Wade Davis attempts to answer the question of what would alien anthropologists think of humans? His answer is that they might be impressed with our technology but not with our social structures. Actually my guess is that they might also see us a technologically backwards as a species that could achieve interstellar space travel would be eons ahead of what we think of as cutting edge.
Posted by Michael Pinto on Jan 29, 2010 in Science
I just came across this tribute video from NASA which to me underscores how much we owe to those who put their lives on the line to travel into space. With the advent of space tourism we tend to forget that sending up a spaceship into orbit is in fact going into harms way. It’s sad to me that we don’t honor these brave folks by investing in NASA.
Posted by Michael Pinto on Jan 29, 2010 in Science
From what I’m reading the upcoming NASA budget will do three things: Give up the underfunded quest to return to the moon, keep the ISS flying until 2020 and push to outsource a shuttle replacement which would mean scrapping the Ares I rocket. This is all unconfirmed at this point, but the it looks like NASA funding will increase by $6 billion which sounds good on paper, but may not be enough to replace the shuttle soon enough. Read more…
Posted by Michael Pinto on Jan 27, 2010 in Science
I think an octopus is about as different as you can get from being a human — eight legs, lives underwater and a hard beak at the center. Yet this video shows clear evidence that they’re quite bright creatures who are quite capable of using tools. This makes me realize that as humans we might have a bias towards thinking that only humanoid creatures have intelligence — and often the worst offenders I see are science fiction films. Read more…
Posted by Michael Pinto on Jan 24, 2010 in Science
This is a nice video that sums up the work of the Opportunity rover on Mars which was expected to be a 90 day mission, but that has been going string for six years. Of course my frustration watching this video is that one wishes that humans had made the trip instead of a robot — but the images are still impressive.
Posted by Michael Pinto on Jan 22, 2010 in Science
This video shows an interesting interview with Evan Thomas works for NASA on “water recovery systems” which means converting urine to drinkable water. Although it should be pointed out that similar systems are already used on here on planet earth. What I found interesting about this interview is that the NASA technology can also be applied to helping folks who are living through a drought.
Posted by Michael Pinto on Jan 15, 2010 in Science
According to this article at the BBC News website the European Space Agency’s Director General Jean-Jacques Dordain is pushing to keep the ISS going until the year 2020. This is critical as support for the station is up for review, and signs are pointing to pulling the plug by 2015: Read more…
The video below shows the Space Shuttle Endeavour being moved from the Vehicle Assembly Building to Launch Pad 39A for its February 7th mission. The one thing that amazed me about this video is that gives you a good taste for just large the space shuttle is in scale. You get a great feeling for this looking not just at the scale of the automobiles driving by but also by how slow the rollout goes: Read more…
It’s impressive to see NASA send these cute toys to explore Mars to wander about — but the damn things always seem to break down. It’s frustrating to watch knowing that humans wandering about in spacesuits could be much more productive. I’ll grant you that the cost is much great, but it’s sad to me that the United States doesn’t seem to be serious yet about going to Mars. I’m still keeping my fingers crossed that Obama gives NASA a budget boost, but NASA needs more than a gentle increase: It’s time to aim high again…
Posted by Michael Pinto on Dec 26, 2009 in Science
I’m increasingly of the mindset that it may be too late to do anything about climate change as we’re already starting to watch the glaciers melt away. Add to this the fact that there’s too much infrastructure in place with no quick global replacement to fossil fuels and the picture becomes worse. So it’s interesting for me to watch this video with Stewart Brand interviewing archaeologist Sander van der Leeuw and talking about this critical topic. Read more…
Posted by Michael Pinto on Dec 25, 2009 in Cinema, Science
My problem with Avatar is that the humans are smart enough to achieve interstellar space travel, but their technology feels like it belongs in the early 21st Century. I’ll grant you that you can make this critique of quite a few science fiction films, but frankly Avatar seems to become a giant plot hole when you think about this. Read more…
Posted by Michael Pinto on Dec 24, 2009 in Science
Having been a child of the 70s I witnessed what America looks like during an energy crisis and it wasn’t pretty. And many of the alternate energy sources like solar that I heard about back then are coming back into the popular conscience. But all these years later nuclear fusion still seems like science fiction. In this video physicist Steven Cowley does his pitch for why he thinks fusion will work. There are too many arguments as to why fusion would be great, so my hopes are that this power stuff becomes a reality.
Posted by Michael Pinto on Dec 23, 2009 in Science
Shown above is footage of the Expedition 22 Soyuz docking at the International Space Station — what’s interesting about this mission is that it includes Soichi Noguchi of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency. Noguchi will be hanging out at the ISS for a six month stint in orbit and you can follow him on Twitter if you’d like to ask him some questions.
Posted by Michael Pinto on Dec 19, 2009 in Science
As a child of the 21st Century I had a clear set of expectations on what the future would look like thanks to watching too much many science fiction television shows. Now of course even as a child I had a clear understanding of what was and wasn’t going to be possible in terms of technology: For example anything you’d see on Star Trek was pretty much off limits — as the show took place in the 23rd Century. So while I knew that interstellar travel, transporter devices and even time travel might occur — sadly for yours truly that would happen after I was history. Read more…
Posted by Michael Pinto on Dec 13, 2009 in Science
On this day in 1972 astronauts Eugene Cernan and Harrison Schmitt went out for their third and final Extra-vehicular activity (EVA) — which is known to us civilians as a moonwalk. The Apollo 17 mission would mark the last time in the 20th Century when humans would walk the surface of the moon. While the close of that century would start a new golden age of astronomy with many planets outside of our solar system being discovered, it’s been a dark age of space exploration. And yet least we forget: The nation that went to the moon was in the middle of an expensive Cold War, was fighting an actual war in Asia and was enacting new healthcare programs — and yet they still had the gumption to go. Read more…
Posted by Michael Pinto on Oct 29, 2009 in Science
Shown above is the breath taking footage of NASA’s Ares I-X test rocket from yesterday. As usual NASA kicked ass with the six minute flight of a next generation space craft. Sadly for NASA everything went well, so now just a day later nobody in the mainstream media even mentions this story which got very little mention yesterday. Had the rocket blown up the chattering classes would be hard at work on this story this minute and for weeks to come — and this is a symptom of a larger problem. The mainstream media isn’t covering the real story which is that NASA is dying from negligence. Read more…
Posted by Michael Pinto on Oct 23, 2009 in Science
In this video Bethany Cobb does a great job of explaining how astronomers search for planets in orbit of stars. In the full video she further explores NASA’s Kepler Mission and its search for Earth-like planets in other solar systems. Here’s a previous video with Cobb talking about the expanding nature of the universe: Read more…
What shown above is both wonderful and terrifying if you’re a fan of NASA. On one hand any successful launch of a spacecraft is a good thing — and in this case the September 30th launch of the Soyuz Expedition 21 is a vital link to the International Space Station. On the other hand with the upcoming retirement of the Space Shuttle fleet this might be the only way for Americans to get into orbit. In a sense we’re lucky that Russia still has a decently funded space program, but on the other hand not having a backup plan is always a bad idea. Read more…
Posted by Michael Pinto on Sep 19, 2009 in Science
This is a promotional video for the upcoming Nova episode Hubble’s Amazing Rescue which looks amazing. To me the irony of this documentary is that both NASA and PBS are examples of amazing government backed programs that deliver high quality results yet are terribly underrated and ultimately underfunded by constant budget cuts.
Posted by Michael Pinto on Sep 16, 2009 in Science
I don’t think that most folks have any idea what kind of bang for our buck we get out of NASA. Every day folks at that agency kill themselves to do a wide range of tasks in an underfunded program that’s doing so much with so little money. Shown here is just one example: This is time lapse video showing the building of the Ares I-X flight test rocket.
Shown above is the breath taking footage of NASA’s Ares I-X test rocket from yesterday. As usual NASA kicked ass with the six minute flight of a next generation space craft. Sadly for NASA everything went well, so now just a day later nobody in the mainstream media even mentions this story which got very little mention yesterday. Had the rocket blown up the chattering classes would be hard at work on this story this minute and for weeks to come — and this is a symptom of a larger problem. The mainstream media isn’t covering the real story which is that NASA is dying from negligence.