US Metric/Imperial

 https://www.theregister.com/2023/01/22/retro_metric_imperial/

Gravitational Waves

Fermi Paradox

Great video on the Fermi paradox on youtube:


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sNhhvQGsMEc

Studio interview with Sagan, Hawking, Clarke

Great piece of history here a television interview from 1988 with Carl Sagan, Stephen Hawking, and Arthur C Clarke.  The interviewer is Mangus Magnusson who asks some great questions about modern science, and existence of god.

One fascinating piece is Arthur C Clarke demonstrating the Mandlebrot set on a high end Amiga computer.  I spent some time recently writing my own generator as an exercise in Qt programming.  Clarke loading the pre-generated images (which apparently took 12 hours or more) worked as fast as my program generating it on the fly.

That is a great observation of modern computing power, and not my programming skills.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HKQQAv5svkk

Saturn V Rocket

Interesting article about NASA going back to the designs of the F1 rocket:



http://arstechnica.com/science/2013/04/how-nasa-brought-the-monstrous-f-1-moon-rocket-back-to-life/

SpaceX Launch

With the retirement of the space shuttle, the ISS is being resupplied by Russia and now a first launch by a commercial rocket company SpaceX.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-18165913

So the start of a new era of commercial space flight, it clearly has been coming for several years - and maybe manned flight is not so far away. The question of what NASA concentrates on, pure research and exploration - private industry can concentrate on lucrative satellite and low earth orbit applications. The launch seems to be a joint partnership with NASA - who are presumably providing the launch control.

Space Shuttle Retirement

Some interesting photos of the Space Shuttles as they transit to go into museum retirement:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-17749899 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-17874273

Atlantis Final Launch

Link to the final launch of Atlantis on the BBC news site:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-14085502

I can remember being at primary school and the class being taken to the "TV room" to watch the first launch of the shuttle. I remember it being delayed a couple of times and it was history in the making (at the time it was NASA getting back into manned space flight):

http://video.google.co.uk/videoplay?docid=8147866533180818812

Although much critiscised for not delivering the cheap reusable service, I think sometimes we forget that getting into space is still non-trivial. It will be interesting to see how the private companies do at delivering the same idea.

A high point for the shuttle must be the repair of the Hubble space telescope, and audacious repair from which it took some stunning pictures of the galaxies.

There is now a gap of a few years before any potential next generation launcher, so we are back where we were in the late 1970s. It remains to be seen whether nations such as China or India overtake the stranglehold that the US and Russia had on space flight.

Discovery Launch

Last launch of Discovery, good link on the BBC to the launch with mission control commentary:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-12573413

Still an impressive site any rocket taking off, even though the space shuttle was always a bit of a mish mash of a vehicle.

I can remember the seeing the first launch! Several aborted attempts but at Primary School lessons were stopped so we could watch it on television.

Voyager 1 at Solar Wind Edge

Pretty incredible it has travelled this far and still returning information:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-11988466