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.
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!
As some may already know, my day-job is at a company called Webroot Software, based in Boulder, Colorado. Apart from being a space-nut and budding runner, I am the manager of a development team working on the company consumer anti-malware set of products.
In the software industry like in the space industry there are launches. Usually software launches are much more frequent and take less to prepare for than space launches, especially compared to rocket launches when humans are on-board.
Webroot Internet Security Complete 2011
Over the past weekend we launched a set of products with more similarities to the space industry than other releases we've had in the past. This new version entails a new architecture, building on parts of the old architecture and technologies while learning lessons from prior products. Kind of like the next step in human space exploration, it took us longer than expected (close to two years, much longer than we originally expected and longer than usual software release cycles of products this size), went over budget, incorporated third party sub-contractors who delivered varying levels of responsiveness and initial quality and all that during what will not be known as the best two years in the history of U.S. economy.
I guess it is no surprise, then, that I feel great satisfaction and at the same time the concern of rocket designers when their rocket is making its first few full launches rather than static or partial tests (in the software industry we call these "betas").
Like space-access systems, maybe even more so in software, there are always patches and improvements and more to be developed, but the initial launch occurred. As of now the rocket didn't explode on the pad, always a good sign. Unlike a rocket (at least with current low-Earth-orbit launches), though, knowing nothing major went wrong may take a week or two, but so far reports are looking good - it feels like a successful launch.
Among all the anniversaries these past couple of weeks (41st of Apollo 11 and 60th of the first Cape Canaveral rocket launch are two of them) there is one that is noteworthy for the computer geeks among us (you know who you are).
In the dark ages of the mid 1980s, when IBM compatible PCs had 4 color screens, beeps that barely passed as sound and an operating system that looked like a '>' symbol, out came a computer with preemptive multi-tasking (in layman terms, real multi-tasking, which Macs didn't have until years later), thousands of colors, stereo sound and a graphical user interface - the Amiga 1000. To reminisce in case you're an Amiga fan or to learn more about the Amiga tumultuous life, PCWorld provides a very nice walk down memory lane in this article.
No, I don't want to start a "Who was first" debate here (we all know it was Xerox). I was one of those geeky kids with an Amiga computer, playing games, creating boot floppy disks that contained entire development environments and had a SCSI 120MB hard-drive while everyone else had the beeps and poor graphics on their huge IBM-compatible PCs.
What does the Amiga computer have to do with space? Woman: "Aren't you astronauts?" Buzz Aldrin: "Yes, Mam. We'd like to compare notes with Stevie on the new space station."
Yes, back in those days (1986) the planned space station wasn't international, it was called "Freedom" and had a centrifuge module for artificial gravity research. Neither Freedom nor the centrifuge ever materialized, just like the Amiga never took the world by storm and about ten years later became all but a thing of the past.
I'm sitting in a plane (OK, I'm not while editing this post, but I was while writing these words). It's not very comfortable and it seems very long. I watched a movie, helped the kids with their food, put a pull-up on the little one, slept a little, and woke up.
From my position here over the Atlantic ocean, at 624mph at 35000ft, I marvel both looking back and forward in time.
A veteran software innovator, family man, amateur photographer, violinist and co-founder of Astronauts4Hire on a new/old path to be involved in research and space exploration.
Space Shuttle Launch Poll Results
