Cosmic Log
The last Thursday of January is NASA’s time to pay tribute to fallen astronauts, including 1967’s Apollo 1 astronauts and the Challenger shuttle astronauts who were lost in 1986. Today, there’s an added emphasis on the shuttle Columbia’s last crew, due to the 15th anniversary of that tragedy.
Retired astronaut Bruce McCandless II, the first astronaut to fly untethered from his spacecraft, has died at the age of 80. NASA said McCandless passed away on Thursday in California, but gave no cause of death. The former naval aviator flew in space twice. During a spacewalk in 1984, McCandless tested a hand-controlled maneuvering unit that took him more than 300 feet away from the shuttle Challenger. He jokingly referred to Neil Armstrong’s moonwalk: “That may have been one small step for Neil, but it’s a heck of a big leap for me.”
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.
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.”
Almost four months after his death at the age of 95, the mortal remains of former astronaut and senator John Glenn were interred today amid Marine Corps pomp and circumstance at Arlington National Cemetery. Glenn became the first American in orbit in 1962, and the oldest human in space in 1998.
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.