A few things caught my eye in the last few days.  First, this article from The Space Buff points out the unveiling of the new Orion spacecraft -- without any actual missing to fill or a booster to lift it into space:

Then, the Constellation project—of which Orion was a part—was cancelled. Orion’s mission was over before it began, and it looked like Orion itself was a goner. But, for whatever reason, the Obama administration was persuaded to retain the craft…which no longer had a mission, or even a booster to send it into orbit. (The planned booster, Ares, was cancelled.) It’s mission now appears to be as an escape pod for astronauts living on the International Space Station. But without a booster, how will it get there?

Good point, and it seems to be reminiscient of the design tradeoffs that accompianied the Space Shuttle itself.

Secondly, SpaceX accounces the Falcon Heavy.  The largest American launcher since the Saturn V.  Now, I understand that until this thing actually flies it's still a "paper rocket", but, will we ever see this kind of progress from NASA itself?  Given the history since the end of the Apollo program, it would appear not.

I came across this list at Wikipedia (not surprisingly, about spaceflight).  It lists *every* human spaceflight since April 12, 1961 (Vostok 1).  And the total surprised me: 282 Only 282 flights with humans in over 49 years.  Less than 6 per year on average.  This includes 3 flights from the X-15 program and 3 flights from SpaceShipOne  -- both non-traditional spaceflights. After Yuri Gagarin orbited the Earth almost 50 years ago, I wonder how many flights the people at Roscosmos and NASA thought there would be at this point.

@NASAhistory just posted to twitter that this pictures was taken 33 years ago today: I love pictures like this, the Earth and the Moon in one frame.  This image was taken by Voyager 1, the first to look back from such a distance (7,250,000 miles away), and the right equipment, that the Earth and Moon could be seen together as a pair. There's more information about the photo here. A more recent photo was taken by the MESSENGER spacecraft en route to orbit Mercury: This photo was taken from about the same distance from the Earth as the orbit of Mercury and was just recently released. Many people have remarked about its resemblance to the Pale Blue Dot photograph (also from Voyager 1).

Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. --Carl Sagan (from his book Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space)

Here are the photos from the NASA Tweetup at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, TX.

NASA announces tweet up to view the launch of Atlantis.  NASA will pick 150 people at random that sign up on their site. Hrm, I'll be signing up -- and if I'm one of the 150 picked -- I think that's too good of a deal to pass up.  There's also a second place tweet up at JSC. Count me in. http://www.nasa.gov/connect/tweetup.html

Yesterday's Astronomy Picture of the Day was pretty neat.  It was an astronaut grabbing a rather large satellite in an untethered spacewalk.

The picture doesn't capture really what's happening here.  The satellite is rotating while being captured.  The video shows this better. Shannon couldn't believe what she was seeing.  "Is he crazy!" seems like what Not surprisingly, NASA stopped the practice of untether spacewalks after the Challenger accident. This reminded me of an interesting anecdote from Mike Mullane's Riding Rockets on risks in spaceflight.  The shuttle engineers had found a very rare but potential flaw with the shuttle that might prevent the solid rocket boosters from separating (which would be fatal to the crew).  They had asked the astronauts if they would still launch knowing the risk.  That astronaut's response:

They might as well have asked a three-year-old if he wanted to eat his candy now or wait until tomorrow.  If the engineers said, "We forgot to install the center engine.  Do you still want to launch?" Hank (astronaut Hank Hartsfield) probably would have said, "No problem.  We'll just burn the two we have."  Nothing was going to get in our way.

The business of being an astronaut is extremely risky.  I wonder if I could fly in the face of those risks.

Great post by NASA's Wayne Hale on his blog regarding conjuctions, or close encounters between the Space Shuttle and space junk.  When a conjunction is going to occur during the crew sleep period and there is sufficient reason to believe there will not be a collision, mission controllers will set a timer to expire at the Time of Closest Approach and everyone would hope they did their math correctly.  This happened three times during Wayne's tenure in Mission Control.  His quote:

So as we waited for the clock to count to zero, there was plenty of time to contemplate metaphysical topics:  life, death, courage, risk, achievement, probability, dishonor.  They are all fellow travelers, intimately bound together.  No great accomplishment comes without difficulty or risk.  Miscalculation or failure results in death and dishonor.  But it is what it is; you do the best you can, make the best rational choice you can given what you know, and then wait for the result. Going to Las Vegas holds no enticement for me.

I follow Wayne Hale on twitter (@waynehale) and I am always impressed with his insights and thoughts on the space program.

I tried to stay up to watch the start of the rollout live - scheduled for 12:01AM this morning, but it got delayed about an hour, so I'm glad I didn't.  The last bit of the rollout is happening right now. Someone on the nasaspaceflight.com forum this morning noted that the last rocked to rollout from the VAB that wasn't the shuttle was ASTP (on a Saturn 1B), which rolled to pad 39B on March 24 1975.  It was an interesting sense of scale.  And it's neat to finally see something new. Spaceflightnow.com Gallery

Before launches at Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, Helicopters search the downrange path of rockets to find any nomads in the vast grasslands of Kazakhstan.  If any are found they are warned of the upcoming launches. Link This picture of this activity was particularly interesting: (image from russianspaceweb.com, copyright noted) The americans launch with ocean downrange. and a similar search is performed for boats that are in the wrong spot.

One of the things I've been looking forward to recently is the rollout (on 10/20) and the launch (scheduled for 10/27) of  Ares I-X: NASA's first test flight of the new rockets in support of the Constellation Program (created by Bush II in his Vision for Space Exploration). It's been exciting to read about the development, creation, and assembly of the new rockets -- the first new thing from NASA since the launch of STS-1 in 1981.  Even more exciting, in a different sort of way, is to read the debates going on right now on the web and trying to figure out what's going to happen next.  There's been a review of the entire program by the Augustine Commission -- and the future direction of NASA is going to announced soon by new NASA administrator Charles Bolden. Whether or not Ares I continues development, it's still an exciting time in Human Spaceflight...even if you only get to watch from the sidelines.