Cosmic Log
The first Seattle-born astronaut to fly in space, Dick Gordon, passed away on Monday at his home in California at the age of 88, NASA and the Astronaut Scholarship Foundation reported.
He flew into orbit in 1966 as pilot for the Gemini 11 mission. Three years later, he was the command module pilot for Apollo 12, and orbited the moon while crewmates Pete Conrad and Alan Bean went down to the lunar surface.
What’s the best way to preserve the Apollo footprints on the moon, the Face on Mars, or the mysterious “white spots” on the dwarf planet Ceres? A pair of researchers argue that there ought to be an international treaty.
They say the Antarctic Treaty, which sets aside that icy continent and its mineral resources as a natural preserve, could serve as a model for what they call the Exogeoconservation Treaty.
“It is better if we do it ahead of the interest in space rather than after the fact,” Jack Matthews, a geologist at Memorial University of Newfoundland, told GeekWire on Sunday.
But an expert on space law said the prospects for such a treaty are dim, particularly in light of rising interest in commercial activities on the moon.
The 48th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing was payday for a Chicago-area lawyer who latched onto a moondirt sample bag from the mission and wouldn’t let go.
The Sotheby’s auction house said the 8-by-12-inch bag was sold to an undisclosed buyer for more than $1.8 million, including the buyer’s premium. That’s a bit less than the pre-sale estimate of $2 million to $4 million, but notable for historical reasons as well as the price.
Forty-five years after the astronauts of Apollo 16 rode out on a rover to look over a crater on the moon, NASA’s Opportunity rover looked over a crater on Mars – and sparked a chain of coincidences.
To mark the linkage, Opportunity’s science team named the feature on Mars “Orion Crater.” That pays tribute to the Apollo 16 astronauts, who named their lunar module Orion. It’s also the name of the future NASA spaceship that may help astronauts get to Mars someday.
Orion Crater is about 90 feet wide and thought to be no more than 10 million years old.
“It turns out that Orion Crater is almost exactly the same size as Plum Crater on the moon, which John Young and Charles Duke explored on their first of three moonwalks taken while investigating the lunar surface using their lunar rover,” the Planetary Science Institute’s Jim Rice, a member of Opportunity’s science team, said in a NASA image advisory issued today.
When Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos visited the Museum of Flight this weekend to answer questions from students, the kids did not hold back.
“That’s one of the great things about kids,” Bezos said on May 20. “There are always questions.”
Scores of elementary-school and middle-school students came from the Seattle area as well as from Deer Park, a city just north of Spokane on the other side of the state, to cram into the museum’s “Apollo” exhibit and meet America’s second-richest person (after Bill Gates).
The kids asked about Bezos’ successful expedition to recover sunken rocket engines from the Apollo moon missions, about his Blue Origin space venture, and about his own life story. One questioner picked up on a report that, as a toddler, Bezos dismantled his crib with a screwdriver because he wanted to sleep in a real bed.
“Have you always been that independent?” the boy asked.
“I’ve always been, uh, focused,” Bezos replied.
Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos came to Seattle’s Museum of Flight today to talk with students about the decades-old rocket engines he rescued from the sea – but he stayed to share some down-to-earth lessons for life on this planet.
“Be proud, not of your gifts, but of your hard work and your choices,” the billionaire told more than 100 kids and grown-ups who crammed themselves into the central gallery for “Apollo,” the museum’s new exhibit focusing on the 1960s space race.
The highlight of the show is a display of components from the mighty F-1 engines that powered Apollo astronauts on the first leg of their journey to the moon. Bezos backed a multimillion-dollar effort to recover the Saturn V engines from the bottom of the Atlantic.
Today, he stood between those artifacts and an intact F-1 engine, which was lent to the museum by NASA, as he answered questions from elementary-school and middle-school students.
Almost 50 years after they were fired up, rocket engines that sent NASA’s Apollo crews on the first leg of their trips to the moon have reached their final destination at last, in the spotlight at the Museum of Flight’s “Apollo” exhibit in Seattle.
During a press preview today, the museum showed off the mangled components from the Saturn V first-stage engines for two Apollo moon missions, alongside an intact 18-foot-high F-1 rocket engine on loan from NASA.
It was a bittersweet moment for David Concannon, who put together the team that found the engines in 2013 with backing from Amazon’s billionaire founder, Jeff Bezos.
“I didn’t see this until two hours ago, and I was overwhelmed,” Concannon told GeekWire today. “I still am. … It’s a really sad moment. I’m proud of what we and Jeff did, but it’s kinda like sending your son off to college.”
The Smithsonian Institution has officially put Seattle’s Museum of Flight on the schedule for an exhibit featuring Apollo 11’s moon ship during the 50th anniversary of the historic mission.
Seattle is the last stop on the four-city, two-year tour for the exhibition, titled “Destination Moon: The Apollo 11 Mission.”
Houston, St. Louis and Pittsburgh may get earlier looks at the 20 or so artifacts from humanity’s first moon landing, but the good stuff will all be in Seattle on July 20, 2019, exactly 50 years after that landing.
“It’s going to be incredibly exciting to be in Seattle and looking back at the 50th anniversary, but also looking forward and celebrating everything that’s happening in spaceflight today,” said Kathrin Halpern, project director for the Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibition Service, or SITES.
When historic rocket engine parts from the Apollo moon missions go on display in May in Seattle, museumgoers will be able to compare them with an intact F-1 engine.
The 50-year-old, 18.5-foot-tall engine arrived at one of the Museum of Flight’s offsite facilities today after a road trip from NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Alabama.
Just to be safe, museum spokesman Ted Huetter declined to say exactly where the rocket engine is being kept while it’s being prepared for display. “I think we’ll leave it as an ‘undisclosed location,’” he told GeekWire.
The intricately machined hardware will complement a set of beat-up components from the first-stage engines that powered Saturn V rockets spaceward during the Apollo 12 and Apollo 16 missions in 1969 and 1972, respectively.
Fifty years ago today, three NASA astronauts died in a launch pad fire when they couldn’t open the hatch of their Apollo command module to escape. Remains of that module have been held in storage for decades, but never put on display. Until now.
To mark the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 1 tragedy, the Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex opened an exhibit titled “Ad Astra Per Aspera: A Rough Road Leads to the Stars,” featuring the scorched hatch and other artifacts from the mission that never lifted off.
“I think it’s about time that we paid tribute to the crew with a memorial here at the Kennedy Space Center,” center director Bob Cabana, a former shuttle astronaut, said today during the exhibit’s opening ceremonies.
Astronauts Gus Grissom, Ed White and Roger Chaffee were killed during the pre-launch test on Jan. 27, 1967, after a spark from an electrical short ignited flammable materials inside the capsule where they were sitting.