Space Forum / Space History / December 2007

The future is officially here!
The robot is vacuuming the floor, the flat screen TV is on the
wall...but something is missing...The Nuclear Reactor In The Basement of
course!:

    There's a little piece on Huntsville, Alabama, in the leadup
to 50 years since Explorer 1 running in the International Herald Tribune
(so it's probably a reprint from The New York Times).  Little here would
likely surprise regulars, but it has got a picture of an S-IVB renovated ...

2007 was a nightmare of criminal incompetence and High Treason:
a)   Congress took  out most  of the  tax help from the Energy Bill
for Wind and Water turbines, Solar, the http://www.iter.org/  fusion
reactor project, electric and hidrogen cars and the excuse that S.

Once again, the 1938 rocket transports zipping around the world, via
Modern Mechanix:
http://blog.modernmechanix.com/2007/12/29/10000-miles-an-hour/?Qwd=./MechanixIll
ustrated/8-1938/10000mph&Qif=10000mph_0.jpg&Qiv=thumbs&Qis=XL#qdig

Very strange story indeed:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7130014.stm
I can see a real problem here... projectiles this small would lose
velocity very fast once the parent body exploded, so it's hard to

Comedian Bill Dana was popular in the early 60's for his Jose' Jimenez
character, the reluctant space voyager who debuted on the Ed Sullivan show.
All accounts, including the reunion of the (then) surviving Mercury
astronauts shower the comedian with accollades from the Original ...

I wonder if this had anything to do with the recent GAO report?
http://www.nasawatch.com/archives/2007/11/cev_management_1.html
Pat

    Dave Michelson said, ``We could do worse than "The Best of
Sci.Space", I suppose'' over in the _really_ strange space suit thread,
and so we could.  If it wouldn't delay the holiday substantially I
wonder if anyone would care to nominate ...

Just wondering on the moon how much of a slope the LMs could have
landed with.  And was this a limit for tipping over, or was this a
limit based on a controllable blast off.  Ideas?  
Stan

Getting a bit more Apollo-like all the time:
http://www.nasawatch.com/archives/2007/12/esmd_cannot_ans.html
I think going with the scaled-up Apollo CM concept was a bad move right
from the get-go due to the diameter of the heatshield it requires. A

Santa was good.  Got Spacecraft films' "Man in Space".  The DVD
has some fascinating imagery both of practice ingress/egress through
the Gem B hatch modification, and of the dummy mole made up for the
Titan 3 lauunch.  The practice ingress/egress took place in 0g

http://www.spaceref.com/news/viewnews.html?id=1255
 Aviation Week and Space Technology. Craig Covault/AviationWeek.com
 Monday, December 10, 2007
    Internal NASA Emails Reveal Atlantis Safety Debate

You could see this coming from from quite a ways off:
http://www.nasawatch.com/archives/2007/12/weldons_push_to.html
A few days ago I mentioned my suspicion regarding how fast those ET LH2
sensor emails surfaced after the scrubbed launch, and speculated that

I've been reading about how they planned a manned flight in the 1960s on the
little Joe but scrubbed it because the g-load was too high.
or was it because Gagarin made it to space? the first explanation seems a
little too PC for me.

Recently encountered some photos of this project. Would like to learn
more about content and context, and possibly arrange to donate pictures
to an appropriate institution.
TIA-