Learning to Fly

Alongside everything I'm a part of (family, work, training, Astronauts4Hire), I've started taking flying lessons towards a Private Pilot license (FAA Part 141). As you can read in the post about my first lesson, this has been rolling around the back of my head for a while, and I finally decided to actually do it.

It's as exciting for me as starting to run last December, being so much out of character if you look at my first 36 years of life. But I guess so was starting to write this blog... In some ways, this is a step in building my skills and capabilities towards fulfilling my goals at Astronauts4Hire, though I will admit it - it is also an amazing, challenging and fun experience.

Being the engineer at heart that I am, a glutton for numbers, documentation and recording of data, I am using my Garmin 310XT GPS Watch (which I nicknamed Dream Catcher back in December) to record the flight paths and my heart rate during the lessons. Pretty mundane and insignificant data for other people, you may say, but it is a part of teaching this old dog new tricks, so I hope that at least for some of you this experience and data will become a catalyst, a boost of confidence that you can do rather than only imagine.

Pilot Lesson 2 - The 2G Experience

On Tuesday I had my second flying lesson. After a plan to fly north got scrapped due to the Fourmile Canyon fire near Boulder, we flew in the same general area of the first flight. Longer than the first and more demanding, I actually communicated with the tower, did more turns and experienced stalling on purpose.

Of particular interest for me was a sharp turn where for about twenty seconds I experienced about 2G. As a roller coaster lover, I am sure I felt 2G or even more in amusement parks but definitely not for a long period of time that would allow me to realize how my body was reacting or move my arms around to feel their extra weight. If you're a fighter jet pilot or an astronaut and you happened to drop in and read this, please step away from the keyboard, call your friend or significant other, joke about that poor dude getting excited over 2G and get on with your life. For me, it was definitely a new sensation and it makes me even more eager to experience how the high-G centrifuge at NASTAR or a rocket launch (which it can simulate) would feel like.

The last 10 minutes of the flight I felt nauseated. Not very pleasant, but I'm sure I'll become more resilient and less fixated on the plane instruments as I gain more experience.

Here's the GPS-recorded flight:

First Steps of Becoming a Pilot

The Cessna 172 and me after the lesson

Many kids want to be pilots at some point. I can't say for sure I was one of them, as honestly I don't remember much of my childhood, but it's one of those things that touches a child's imagination like magic does - being able to fly in the sky like the birds - be it in a tangible form like being an actual pilot or as a metaphore for being free and achieving great things.

The recent chapter of my thoughts about piloting started with my interest in space, though it took almost six months and getting laid off to make the first step. Back in March, in preparation for the NASTAR suborbital scientist training, I got my FAA (Federal Aviation Administration) Class 3 medical exam, which just happens to be what's required for private pilot flying lessons. From that moment the world of flying was getting shoved in my face again and again through pilot gear catalogs and AOPA (Aircraft Owners and Pilot Association) membership offers. The seed was sown, and being a pilot started taking hold of the back of my mind.

The Hockey Stick of Professional Astronauts

Note: This article has been updated to clarify its focus on the number of people getting to space, removing to my best capability what mistakenly came across as comparing suborbital systems with no track record to much more capable orbital systems in any other term than the fact of raising the count of people getting above 100km, the official border of space.

Astronaut is a general term for people who get to space, meaning beyond 100 kilometer (62 mile) altitude, also known as the Kármán line. Over the passing decades since the first astronauts, the title was worn mostly by government workers, hand-picked to do some pretty ordinary things such as install antennas and structural modules, measure blood pressure or grow plants (not counting the early days anomaly of going to the moon). Of course, doing these things about 400km above sea-level, relying on technology for life-support in an otherwise very hostile environment and all that after being strapped to a rocket. OK, not so ordinary after all.

For several years, and with more vigor than ever since the first X-Prize and SpaceShipOne, several companies (some of which presented at NSRC earlier this year) are working on a type of vehicle that will take people to space and back without completing an orbit (suborbital) and in between provide three to five minutes of micro-gravity, useful as a joy ride or for conducting science. As these vehicles become human rated, it is possible that after it took about fifty years to get the first five hundred people into the sixty two mile club, it may take a tenth of that or less to get the next five hundred in. I'll leave the economics aside, as I want to try and understand the nature of these next five hundred and ponder about their similarities and differences to the five hundred that saw the curvature of the Earth first.

Space Birthdays - Real and Science Fiction

Space birthday - Collage Greetings

Thanks to twitter and @thinkgeek I noticed that today is the birth date of Gene Roddenberry, the father of Star Trek. A short search leading to the Brainy History web site revealed somewhat of a statistical aberration - three Star Trek people and three astronauts were born on this date.
Apart from Gene Roddenberry, both Jonathan Frakes (Commander William T. Riker) and Diana Muldaur (Dr. Katherine Pulaski), both from Star Trek: The Next Generation, were born on this date.


On the NASA front, astronauts Franklin Story Musgrave (only astronaut to fly on board of all five Space Shuttles), Michael J. Massimino (shuttle astronaut, a.k.a. @astro_mike, perhaps the most active astronaut on social media, the first astronaut to tweet from space) and Charles F. Bolden Jr. (shuttle astronaut, NASA administrator since 2009) were all born on this date.
On the Russian side, Vladimir Borisovich Alekseyev was also born on that date (a Soyuz VI cosmonaut), meaning that out of the 547 astronauts (at least according to Wikipedia), four were born on August 19, about 0.73%, or about 2.7 times more than the statistical 1/365 chance of being born on a certain date (leap year excluded).


For those of you still in this world, Happy Birthday! Don't forget to look up!