I needed a break from the Lunar mineralogy, so I decided to delve into the Cultura Lunaris section of the Lunar Library to see if I could find something interesting. I’m not terribly interested in reviewing the Moon-hoaxer books, in part because I have no desire to attract that kind of commentary to my website. I probably should have gone with one of the “Moon in human history” books, but decided that it might be interesting to look at a Christian perspective on Moon science.
For full disclosure purposes, let it be noted that I was baptized at St. Eleanor’s in Collegeville, PA (and my dependent dogtag notes Catholicism as my religion), went to Anglican Church (on occasion) while dad was stationed in England, and was confirmed at Palm Valley Lutheran Church in Round Rock, TX. Still have the Bible, too. That having been said, let it also be noted that I have been an atheist since about the age of 12. I’ve done varying degrees of study of various religions from around the world, and have tried to guide my path through life using the ‘best practices’ that I’ve found therein. I do not see the ‘hand of a creator’ in our universe that others see, although I have to tell you that quantum mechanics does baffle me.
So I pulled a pair of tomes from the bookshelf by Mssrs. John C. Whitcomb and Donald B. DeYoung. We’ll start off with the first of the two, “The Moon: It’s Creation, Form, and Significance”, published in 1978 by BMH Books and weighing in at 180 pages all-in.
We begin with a foreword by a Mr. Larry Redekopp, PhD, an Assoc. Professor of Aerospace Engineering at USC. He summarizes the premise of the book as follows:
“By the title alone, the authors manifestly declare their underlying tenet which is carefully and distinctly elaborated in the text; i.e., they accept the entire Biblical record as authoritative in regards to beginnings, history, science, and ultimate meanings. The Bible teaches explicitly that the Moon was created instantaneously as a functioning body in the heavens and at a time simultaneous with the sun, planets, stars and galaxies, but three days subsequent to the creation of the earth. Furthermore, the Bible states clearly the intended purpose for the moon’s existence and its proximity to the earth. Their literal acceptance of these truths is amply evident in the text and comprises the cornerstone on which the geology, lunar data, observable phenomena, and origin of the moon are discussed.”
“The Once and Future Moon”by Paul Spudis. Published in 1996 by the Smithsonian Institution Press, it weighs in at 308 pages all-in. No errors noted.
I decided to re-visit this one for a review when I realized that I couldn’t remember when I first read it, having read so many Moon books subsequent to this one. Paul autographed the copy in the Lunar Library on October 17th, 2002, which IIRC was at the World Space Congress, where he had just gone head-to-head with Bob Zubrin on the relative merits of our Moon and Mars respectively. So I would have read it before then. I’m pretty sure it was back in ‘99 that I picked it up, back when I was still working the Wall Street Desk as a credit analyst for BNP, juste nouvellementBNP Paribas. This is an important point that will touched upon later.
“Lunar Mineralogy” written by Judith Frondel, published by Wiley-Interscience, and weighing in at 323 pages with index.
Whereas the last Moon rocks book reviewed here at OotC, “The Lunar Rocks” was in large part the story of the study of the first samples from the Moon, by the time this book was published there had been copious amounts of supplemental materials to study, and many early hypotheses had been dropped. Really, this one is best described as a catalogue of what was found in the samples.
The book begins with a chapter on the Geochemical and Geological History of the Lunar Rocks, and a general overview of the Moon’s environment, such as the atmosphere so tenuous that it can be considered a collisionless gas, or the frequent small Moonquakes that occur about 800km down, which appear to have a tidal association. Don’t worry though, there are no plate tectonics on the Moon.
Moon 3-D by Jim Bell, published in 2009 by Sterling Publishing, it weighs in at 148 pages. One edit error noted.
This book bills itself as bringing the Lunar surface to life, and boy is it not kidding. Through a variety of techniques the author presents a large number of 3-D anaglyphs relating to our Moon exploration of generations past and present. As I noted in this book’s filecard in the Lunar Library:
The craters - wow!
They just pop out at you, and your eyes start wandering across the view, trying to judge the relative elevations, looking for features of note, and generally just enjoying a more natural perspective on things.
The book facilitates this by building the blue-red 3-D glasses into the cover, so that the image will always be the correct distance from the glasses, and a convenient nose hole makes the process comfortable. A large number of 3-D images are presented throughout the book, accompanied by a lengthy text by the author
The first chapter looks at the Moon Lore associated with our Lunar companion, from ancient times to modern media, while the second looks at the Space Race, from Kennedy’s challenge, through the robotic probes that reconnoitered the Moon prior to Apollo’s arrival. The third chapter, Shoulders of Giants, takes an extensive look at the Apollo missions, visiting each one in turn and highlighting notable details. Next up is Old Moon, New Moon, which describes the aftermath of the Apollo program, the science being done, and follow-up missions that rounded out the 1970s.
The ‘Modern’ era of Moon exploration began with the Galileo fly-by of the Earth-Moon system, which offered a serendipitous opportunity to test out the instruments with a little Lunar science. In Back to the Moon, the author looks at the series of probes that started with Clementine, then Lunar Prospector, using the chapter to talk about some of the resources that have been identified, and finishing up with the latest round of spacecraft - SMART-1, Chang’e-1, Kaguya, Chandrayaan-1, and LRO. We end up considering the Future Moon, which chapter explores many of the considerations for moving forward and poses the question:
“Can we seize this moment to eventually become citizens of the entire solar system? Let’s find out!”
The next hundred or so pages are the photo galleries. While some 3-D images were scattered through the text, the Gallery goes hardcore, with the left page showing a smaller Lunar photo, two columns of descriptive text underneath, and on the facing page a 3-D image. Page after page after page. Craters and tools and rocks and machines and astronauts and more craters and oblique views and more craters and scientific instruments and even some ISS and Shuttle shots. Just mesmerizing stuff, and sure to keep the kids occupied for hours.
It finishes up with a bibliography and brief index.
At the Moon Day celebration here in Dallas, NSS of North Texas had a copy of this book as part of their Moon display, and time and again I heard the same response - Wow! Grown-ups, kids, it was all the same - Wow! I would like to note that Sterling Publishing was kind enough to donate two copies to our event to be given away as door prizes to a couple of very lucky individuals. Their support of our community was a part of the success of the event.
Alan Boyle over at the Cosmic Log recently featured a story recently entitled Space in 3-D that features links on where to procure/make a pair of 3-D glasses. If you’d like to check out some more Lunar anaglyphs, you can wander over to the National Air & Space Museum website where they have a number available for your viewing pleasure.
Not as many as in Moon 3-D, though. I counted 59, enough to keep you occupied for a while. Going on a family road trip? You might want to think about a copy for the back seat. At less than 50¢ per image it’s great value for the money.
I really can’t think of any reason to give this delightful book anything other than a Full Moon rating.
Written by Brian Mason and William Melson of the Smithsonian Institution, The Lunar Rocks was published in 1970 by Wiley-Interscience and weighs in at 179 pages all in. A couple of errors noted.
The book describes itself as:
“an attempt to provide a concise and coherent account of the scientific effort on the lunar [sic] samples and the interpretation of the results.”
Which it is, in spades. The Apollo program marks a definitive leap in our understanding of our Moon, and so what came before usually gets lumped into a single chapter, as is the case here. We start with the first great leap in Moon understanding when Galileo trained his instrument on the Moon and saw some unusal things that no one had noticed before. This started an optical arms race to try to produce better instruments to better see the Moon. In the early 1960s, the U.S. Geological Survey did some Lunar cartography, and identified four main periods in the Moon’s past:
While the mainstream media fixates on history from two generations past (what most would call the Apollo program), I thought I’d offer up some forward-looking visions of our Moon. One of the neat things about having an enormous collection of Moon-related materials is that I can just pop over to the media section of the Lunar Library and start pulling DVDs and VHS tapes.
We’ll start out with a trilogy of suspense movies which remain available only on VHS tape. Given the B-movie nature of these titles, it is questionable as to whether they will ever become available on DVD.
2009 is the International Year of Astronomy, and oft told is the tale of when Galileo turned his telescope from terrestrial objects to heavenly bodies, an ongoing view of amazement and wonder that helped to change the nature of astronomy forever.
Most astronomers have wandered far afield from Galileo’s first celestial destination, our Moon, and spend their time with black holes and galaxies and supernova and other objects far, far away. In many respects the Moon becomes the enemy of the deep-space astronomer, as it light pollutes the night sky and blocks a fair-sized chunk of it.
Some of us, though, become enamored of the ever same yet ever changing Moon as she circles us in the sky, and tend not to wander too far afield. This surprisingly large bunch of folks is typically found over at the Lunar Photo of the Day, run by the world-famous Charles Woods.
The study of heavenly bodies is of course a global phenomenon, and while I was in France back in 2000 for my studies at ISU, Bordas published the book ‘Découvrir la Lune‘, a debutant level guide to Moongazing that is now out-of-print. I was, unfortunately, too poor a grad student at the time to afford both it and Rükl’s ‘Atlas de la Lune‘. Years later, as my infatuation with our Moon grew along with the Lunar Library, I would oft regret that unmade purchase, and could sense there was something missing from the La Lune section of the Library.
To be released on May 19th, 2009, it weighs in at 124 pages. No errors noted.
I first learned of Jim Ottaviani’s work when I picked up a copy of the graphic novel Two-Fisted Science. Later I found Dignifying Science, and was quite pleased to learn that there was someone out there using the comic form as a way to teach about some of the scientists of history. Adding to his oeuvre, Mr. Ottaviani now brings us a fact-based graphic novel of the inside story of the first trip to the Moon, just in time for the 40th anniversary of Apollo 11. As with his previous works, he takes full advantage of the medium to teach all kinds of facts that sharp young minds will gobble up.
We open at T-minus 12 years. The location is the NACA facilities in Langley, Virginia. (Great place, by the way, and still doing interesting research, and with the coolest urinals I have ever seen) The department head is fiddling with the radio knob to get a good signal from the orbiting Sputnik, noting that President Eisenhower had called a Rand Corporation report on the ‘Preliminary Design of an Experimental World-Circling Spaceship‘ hooey. Not all the engineers saw it that way, and were already pondering the possibilities.
We open with a launch of a Saturn V, forever an emblem of the Apollo program. Space activist Rick Tumlinson provides his view of why it ended, and author Tom Clancy notes what we’ve foregone. A whole host of individuals in space business and activism were interviewed for this documentary, from James Muncy to Dr. Chirinjeev Kathuria.
We’re introduced to the Rocket and Space Corporation Energia (RSC Energia), which has been operating the Russian space program since the beginning, and we learn of the precarious position of the Mir space station subsequent to NASA’s practice runs for ISS in the 1990s. (which, admittedly, had left NASA a bit spooked about the aging Russian station)
Russia was still recovering from the collapse of the Soviet Union, and a small group of entrepreneurs shows up on the doorstep with a basket of cash. Their goal - commercialize the Russian space station and save a tremendous asset that’s already in orbit. Thus is born MirCorp.
Richard Branson, as you might guess, is on my list of people who I would love to interview for EVA Interviews: The Business of the new Space Age™. I haven’t yet asked him to be my guest as I have a few glitches in the process of conducting these interviews that I need to work out. Until then, I thought you might be interested in a taste of what such an interview might be like with a review of his latest book Business Stripped Bare: Adventures of a Global Entrepreneur.
So the LPSC conference threw me off my stride, and I forgot that the movie Moon was being screened in Dallas at the AFI film festival until Chris, one of my fellow NSS of North Texas chapter members, sent out a reminder that there was going to be a second showing last night. The tickets were sold out, but there was something called a rush line where I could wait to see if there would be any empty seats. Arriving about an hour before the show I was about number 30 in the line. This was not looking good. The line wouldn’t open until five minutes of eight after everyone else was seated. By quarter of eight there were about 50 people and some young lady came around with a camera to record us losers who hadn’t gotten tickets. The AFI coordinator came down to announce that there was a 99.9% chance that no one would get in…but we do have these other fine movies with plenty of room that are starting right now. Now I’m down to about number twenty. Folks behind me start peeling off, but hardly anyone in front.
Quarter after eight and I’m down to about fifteenth in line. The coordinator pops back down to announce that they are still seating folks with AFI passes and it looks like a full house…but these other fine movies are just starting, so if you can hurry you can see them. More of the cineastes peel off. Tenth…seventh…fourth. The trio in front of me is talking it over. I tell the guy I am here until the bitter end because the only reason I am there is to see Moon. Finally, it’s down to me and the young lady behind me. Are we together? Um…no, but we can be. He announces that there is one single seat left. Every fiber of my being is screaming that it is my duty as a gentleman to allow the lady to see the film. I… She allows that I was before her in line. I thank her profusely and bolt for the escalator. I got the last seat on the far left of the front row. Thank you again, Miss, if you’re reading this.
Continuing the recent spate of Moon-related movies, director Duncan Jones brings us the philosophical musings of Moon, starring Sam Rockwell as Helium-3 miner Sam Bell stationed on the far side of the Moon at Sarang Station. He’s nearing the end of his three-year contract, and good thing too, as he’s starting to get a little loopy from the isolation and lack of human companionship.
The work is not too bad. The mining machines, reminiscent of the spice harvesters from Dune, are largely automated, and Sam only needs to go out to visit them every now and then to collect the full canisters of He-3. On one such trip he starts seeing things, a strange dark-haired girl near the harvester, and the distraction leads to an accident.
Sam awakens in the infirmary, and that’s where things start getting convoluted. The plot is fairly complicated, and I don’t want to give too much away, but it has been revealed that one of the twists is the fact that Sam has to deal with a clone. There are plenty of plot twists and turns after that to keep you guessing as to just what exactly is going on, but slowly Sam puts the pieces together and the truth is rather ugly.
The bloodline of this movie spans the science fiction genre, and it pays homage to and evokes more films than I can name. The opening of the movie is an advertisement for the corporate operator of the Moon facilities, Lunar Industries. The structure of it gave me a wicked flashback to GaiaSelene: Saving the Earth by Colonizing the Moon. I don’t know if it was intentional, but just like the documentary, the ad’s first half talks about the energy issues we face here on Earth, and then the second half on how the resources of our Moon can address those issues, with the corporation claiming to supply 75% of Earth’s power from their Lunar Helium-3 operations.
Moving into the film, the design of the sets strongly reminded me of sci-fi classics like Space: 1999, Outland, and 2001: A Space Odyssey (the Director also mentions Silent Running and Alien in his Space Center Houston Q&A). There was a strongly industrial and corporate feel to the scenery that seemed very appropriate. When Sam was taking the rover out to the crawlers I was remembering scenes from Star Cops. There was one interior scene that might well have been lifted directly from Space: 1999, the similarities were so striking.
The main plot delves deeply into the director’s interest in philosophy, in this case as applied to clones. Here the film pays homage to films from Blade Runner to, dare I say it, Metropolis. There’s a fascinating sci-fi twist to it that I don’t think I can discuss, as the gentleman speaking before the movie said there’s a twist that we’re not supposed to disclose, and I honestly am not sure which particular twist he was talking about, but that they would hunt down and find anyone who did so.
There’s comedy hearkening back to Dark Star. There’s disquieting horror, and more than once you’re just like, whoa, dude, that’s inhuman. But oh so terribly corporate.
I should mention GERTY, since it’s voiced by Kevin Spacey and acted via emoticons. It’s Sam’s robotic assistant, traversing the base by means of tracks in the ceiling. This is one of the areas where they used CGI, and it’s quite discretely done (at least from the perspective of the far left seat of the front row). Mostly, though, the equipment was real life heavy-duty industrial type stuff.
I rather enjoyed it, and will certainly see it again when it comes to theatres this summer to delve a bit more into the philosophical side of it. The science was fairly high-fidelity, and it’s obvious that film-makers are starting to learn about the benefits of using the silence of vacuum space to their advantage. Still, a hatch does not make a clanging sound in a vacuum, and there are a few other inconsistencies as well. You have to admit that it is tough to replicate things falling in 1/6th gravity in terrestrial movie studios. Maybe they should rent out the Zero-G plane like the Mythbuster guys did.
As good as Moon is, it’s not quite a Full Moon (subject to revision when I can see it from a decent perspective). I’m going to go with a strong waxing three-quarter Moon rating for this fine film.
“Who Owns the Moon” by Virgiliu Pop. Published in 2009 by Springer as Vol. 4 in their Space Regulations Library, it weighs in at 175 pages all in. A handful of editing errors, mainly in the last half.
While this could be considered a follow-up to Virg’s earlier work “Unreal Estate”, which was as thorough a Title Search on who owns the Moon as you’ll find, really it stands alone by taking a different approach. While the prior book looked backwards at who was trying to do a land grab of Lunar real estate over the years, this one instead looks at how we can move forward by taking a look at how the law stands now, its context, including historical, and how it is interpreted.
After my last review, I wanted to read a bit of Moon science. As I perused the titles in the Selenology section of the Lunar Library, my eyes paused upon “The International Atlas Of Lunar Exploration“ by Philip Stooke, but I hesitated. It’s a big book, weighing in at 440 pages all-in. I was daunted, and that’s what decided it for me, so I dove right in.
I’m glad I did. This is a fantastic book. The volume of data conveyed is just stupendous, purveyed in a straightforward, no-nonsense and factual manner. The large volume of images is just overwhelming, showing the gradual accumulation of better and better images that helped pathfind the way for Apollo.
I’ve been trying to think of how to approach this review. From the title, it would seem to be a nice complement to existing Moonbase references like Eckart’s “The Lunar Base Handbook“, or Schrunk et al’s “The Moon: Resources, Future Development, and Settlement“. In the end, the content choices of the author may have left this book as an interesting historical footnote in the Moon-reference oeuvre.
For I dipt into the future, far as human eye could see,
Saw the Vision of the world, and all the wonder that would be;
Saw the heavens fill with commerce, argosies of magic sails,
Pilots of the purple twilight dropping down with costly bales;
from ‘Locksley Hall’ by Alfred Lord Tennyson
These words kept winging through my head as I read “Solar Sails: A Novel Approach to Interplanetary Travel” by Giovanni Vulpetti, Les Johnson and Gregory Matloff. Published in 2008 by Praxis Publishing, it weighs in at 243 pages with the glossary. A fair number of errors scattered throughout, the kinds of errors you find when someone is not writing in their native tongue. (you should see my written French - deplorable)
The book starts at the beginning of humanity’s efforts to fly farther and higher than ever before, with the story of Icarus and Daedelus, and their primitively engineered Bronze Age efforts at flight. We forward to the classical age, when scholars like Pythagoras began the historical data gathering of motions of the Moon and planets, which may have inspired Lucian of Samasota’s “True Histories”, his story of a trip to the Moon and his witness of a titanic battle in the heavens. The authors also note Hero of Alexandria, whose aeolipile is a direct ancestor of the modern rocket, Chinese advances carried to the Occident by Marco Polo, British Naval ‘rocket ships’ that rampaged around Europe and the U.S. Eastern seaboard in the early 1800s. Various fantastickal writers are noted before we reach the end of the 1800s and Tsiolkovsky’s advances in working out the rocket equation and the many people who worked around the world to help make rockets a reality in the first half of the 1900s.
Chapter two delves into the physics of rockets and rocket travel. Nothing too deep, about high school level. Various types of rocket motors that turn the math into reality are considered, from chemical solids and liquids to nuclear. The next chapter looks at the myriad problems and limitations of the different rocket motors and some nuclear options. Next considered are some non-rocket in-space maneuvering techniques, from planetary gravity-assists to Mag-Sails to Interstellar Ramjets.
The book then takes a step back to look at one of the older technologies of humanity, that of using sails with our watercraft. Looking at some physics and history, we then wander into whether the Solar wind could be used to similar purpose. We get an introduction to some of the amazing properties of light, and it’s noted that Tsiolkovsky wrote on the subject of using Solar light pressure to propel a thin sheet at high speeds.
Next up is Section II, Space Missions by Sail. Here we look at the principles of how space sailing works, and the systems that would make up a sailcraft, including the ever important payload. There’s a rather lopsided comparison of rockets and sails, with simplicity the ultimate reason that Solar sails should be considered for application and use in space. Some different mission scenarios are considered, and the section closes with some more speculative applications, such as laser and microwave sailing.
Section III focuses on the Construction of Sailcraft. The elements of design are considered, and the different types of materials that might be used, including real world examples that were developed in the 1990s and into the 2000s. Maneuvering and attitude control are considered. There are descriptions of a number of projects that were undertaken to prove out the concept, including ODISSEE, COSMOS-1, and Russian Solar mirrors, and some emergent technologies are considered. The section wraps up with a look at what might lie ahead in the next 25, 50 and 100 years.
Section IV jumps into the Technical Aspects, and this is where the book jumps to the college level as the formulae start coming fast and furious. A thorough look is taken at light and its sources in space, giving consideration to such things as the affect of reflected light from Earth on Solar sail ops in LEO. Chapter 16 looks at how to model the thrust from Electromagnetic Radiation Pressure, while 17 looks at the orbits that would be traced by Solar sails. Finally, the space environmental effects are considered in how they would affect the sail itself, and some mitigating strategies.
So, Solar Sails is definitely a comprehensive treatment of the topic. There were a number of intriguing ideas, and I was most struck by the idea of a pole sitter spacecraft that basically orbits above a planet’s pole. This would have huge implications for a Lunar communications infrastructure that is trying to keep the farside of the Moon quiet for science purposes.
While reading the chapter on trajectories, I couldn’t help but note the similarity of many of the trajectories to those of spacecraft that make use of weak-stability boundary trajectories as outlined by Belbruno, Koon, Lo, Ross, and others. I can’t help but wonder if there might be some way for the two to be linked to greater effect.
The only complaint I would really have with the work is the distracting nature of the editing errors which pop up here and there. I’m actually a bit surprised that Springer and Praxis would let so many sneak through the editing process, as they are well-known for their higher level space books. It’s going to cost them a bit in the rating.
I’m particularly fond of the idea of Solar sails as a longer-term transport solution in space. I think it’s most immediate application will be the delivery of scientific packages to various targets of interest around the Solar system. A day when merchant fleets are delivering the wealth of our Solar system to Earth on argosies of magic sails seems a ways off, but I hope I’m mistaken. The open and close of Pierre Boulle’s novel “Planet of the Apes” takes place aboard a Solar sail yacht, evoking images of wealthy Earthlings cruising through our Solar system on sails of light.
Wherein your friendly Lunar Librarian looks at the best additions to the Lunar Library for 2008 and chooses the best of the best in each category.
This year the catch phrase is “value”. In a tight economy every ounce of value needs to be squeezed out of each dollar spent. One of the metrics we’ll be using this year is the MSRP compared with the number of pages (with some qualitative fudging for font size, line spacing, margins, &c.) or the number of minutes of video.
There were a lot of additions to the Lunar Library over the course of 2008 as it struggled with its sophomore slump[1], magnified by increased content responsibilities here at the parent OotC website. This was further impacted by your friendly Lunar Librarian taking the keys to the entire website[2] just in time for software upgrades and miscellaneous website issues to make things go kablooie. Still, I’ve soldiered through like I always do, and here we are at our third annual Best of the Moon. Like usual, we’re going to go through some of the miscellaneous categories before arriving at our Moon, so let’s get started.
“Rocket Girls” by Housuke Nojiri and Muttiri Moon, from 2007 and just released on DVD here in the U.S.
I am sitting here being gob-smacked by this incredible show. I heard about the series a while back, and even looked for the Japanese DVD while I was in Beijing on a business trip last year. The basic premise of Rocket Girls is that a private company, Solomon Space Authority (SSA), is trying to provide satellite repair services via crewed spaceflight. Trouble is, their upgraded booster isn’t working out and they’ll have to downgrade to a proven design with less performance. This means their astronaut is too heavy.
Young Yukari has grown up with her mother, a driven businesswoman, since her father walked out and disappeared the first night of their honeymoon in the Solomons. Her mother never looked back, but Yukari always has, and during the summer break from her exclusive high school she goes to the Solomons to track down her missing father and confront him. Via a strange set of circumstances, her petite frame and mass earns her a chance to be an astronaut for SSA. She gets a high-tech skintight spacesuit and the training begins. Soon, it’s time for the proving flight. One that shows how dangerous it can be to operate at the bleeding edge of technology in the relatively new (to humans) environment of space.
That is but the introduction for this fine twelve episode series. Based on the premise (and my past viewing of Stratos4, which I discussed at the Rocket Gyrls Reading Club), I expected far more cheese than was evident here. I was actually surprised by the strong portrayals of strong women with strong interests in things like chemistry, biology, and medicine. The note on the back that the producers had the cooperation of the Japanese Aerospace eXploration Agency (JAXA) is evident in a big way. There is a high degree of technical fidelity (comparatively speaking), once the story gets going, and it’s easy to envision being there. There’s real danger and challenges to overcome, and the girls learn valuable life lessons along the way. The climax is an edge of your seat dramatic thrill ride.
I haven’t enjoyed an anime this much since Planetes. The story is one of bravery and hope and scientific endeavor. The characters are sympathetic even if the little girl voices can be a bit grating at times. I particularly like the private enterprise aspect of the story, where businessmen and financiers step up to the plate and start doing the kinds of things in space that government space enterprises are just institutionally incapable of doing. While the concept of a triplet of 15-17 year-old girl astronauts might seem implausible at first, young ladies do benefit from certain physical advantages that, for example, make them such fine acrobats. I’ve also heard more than once from folks who are likely to know that women also have certain aptitudes that make them excellent space navigators. So I don’t find the idea entirely implausible (just mostly).
My question is why aren’t we doing this kind of quality storytelling here in the U.S.? Grounded in values like courage and determination, telling stories with philosphical profundity and characters that are firm in their convictions. I don’t really watch TV, so I’m not in tune with what’s on the kids’ channels except by occasional exposure. What I do see doesn’t have this kind of animation and story quality. When I place it in the context of other anime titles in the Lunar Library, the exceeding of my expectations raises it close to the top of the list.
I would really like to see more of this kind of near-Earth, near-future space story. Unfortunately they’re few and far between. This one is rated 13+ agewise, probably for some mild cussin’. There’s really not any nudity to speak of, other than, you know, high-tech skin-tight bodysuits. I may get in trouble for saying so, but I can see this as being of value for young ladies under 13. The level of maturity of the potential viewer is of course the judgement of the parents.
Girl Hug in space after fixing the Pluto probe
I use a different set of ratings for High Frontier fiction versus the New-to-Full Moon technique I use for Moon fiction. This is in honor of Joseph Louis Lagrange, who mathematically mapped out the Lagrange points, those special locations in space with unusual characteristics. The Sun-Earth L-1 (about 1.5 million kilometers Sunward) is where we have the SOHO instrument watching the Sun for us, and SEL-2 (on the starward side of Earth) is where we want to put our next big deep space probe.
The Earth Moon L-1 (EML-1, or as I affectionately call it, Emily) is the gravitational hilltop between the gravity wells of the Earth and Moon. EML-4 is 60º ahead of the Moon in its 360º orbit around the Earth, while EML-5 is 60º behind the Moon in its orbit. A kind of gravitational mesa, objects placed at L-5 will wander around near the point, but won’t leave the mesa top unless impelled to do so (meaning very cheap station-keeping). In theory, but in actuality the perturbations that the Earth-Moon system experiences preclude any kind of natural accumulation of stuff there, but Jupiter is second only to the Sun in its gravitational influence in the Solar system, and the king of planets has some big stable gravitational mesas pushed up at its L-4 and L-5 points, and there are found the Trojan asteroids.
On this scale, L-1 is the lowest rating, while L-5 is the highest rating in honor of O’Neill’s desire to put space colonies at the Earth-Moon L-5 point. I hesitate to give “Rocket Girls” the highest rating, but it is certainly a very strong L-4.
This time around we look at one of the more advanced topics in space, that of navigation. Unlike the movies, where spacecraft go zipping around, behaving more like aircraft in an atmosphere than boxes of thrusters in a vacuum, space navigation is a bit more complicated and typically involves hurtling through space at high velocity on a trajectory that is difficult to change in any significant way. A good grasp of mathematics is required to explore this field, and for advanced studies calculus is an absolute requirement, especially in things like matrices (which I never got my brain wrapped around). I rely a good deal on my ability to visualize the geometry of objects moving in three-dimensional space (which is where the need for matrices comes in when you’re dealing with different frames of reference) as a crutch when the math gets too hard.
Pretty much the first reference that everyone notes is from JPL, entitled “The Basics of Spaceflight”. This was part of the background reading recommended to participants in the Space Generation Forum back in 1999, where I first learned of it. Somewhere in the depths of the Lunar Library I have my original copy. In 2001 it was updated and web-ified, taking advantage of the power of hyperlinks to flesh out many of the concepts by linking to more thorough explanations of particular topics. Mini-quizzes check comprehension as the student works through the text, helping to make sure they don’t get in too far over their heads. This reference should be comprehensible to brighter middle-school students.
Once you’ve got the ‘Basics of Spaceflight’ down, it’s time to move on to a more advanced text, and the best one around is “Understanding Space: An Introduction to Astronautics”, edited by Jerry Jon Sellers. Developed by the folks at the U.S. Air Force Academy, this textbook is the best one around for easing people into the complexities of orbital mechanics and space navigation. It’s written at the undergraduate textbook level, but should be easily comprehensible to bright high-schoolers on a strong math track. I read through the 2000 edition as part of my extra studies for International Space University (ISU), but it has been updated with a hardcover 2004 edition. Better graphics and more of them for the explanations help make the concepts a bit more understandable. This one remains one of my favorites.
From here the reference books start getting tougher as the topics move from the circular restricted 3-body problem to things like perturbation theory and rotating frames of reference. Some tools to help with this are a pair of very different software programs available over the internet. The first is the open-source freeware program Orbiter. It has been around at least since my days at ISU, and is continually updated and added to by its growing community of fans. It takes great pride in the accuracy of its physics engine, and Bruce Irving of the Music of the Spheres blog has prepared an introductory tutorial which has an accompanying teacher’s guide. As Bruce describes it:
“Orbiter (written by Dr.Martin Schweiger of University College London) is great for demonstrating concepts such as planetary rotation, orbits, relative motion, forces, Newton’s Laws, and more. Advanced students can use it as a lab for experiments in physics, including orbital mechanics and atmospheric flight. Using some of the hundreds of avaialble free add-ons, students can explore the history of rocketry and Space flight, from Robert Goddard’s early rockets to Apollo, the space shuttle, and beyond. Orbiter is also expandable - users can even use free 3D modeling software to build and fly their own spacecraft.”
Bruce (who goes by the name Flying Singer at the Orbiter forums) was also kind enough to give a presentation on using Orbiter at the ISDC I helped put together, so a special shout-out to him for that.
Moving into the realm of what the professionals use, we have Satellite Tool Kit (STK) from AGI. We had a seminar on how to use the software as part of our studies at ISU, and I think that might have been where I first started getting really keen on space navigation as an area of interest. So much so that when the Team Project rolled around I wanted to work on the Trans-Mars Injection and arrival calculations, which I did. AGI has recognized the value that this program holds in the classroom, and so have created a Educational Alliance Program to provide educators with support resources. I wanted to use the Astrogator module for the Team Project, but we were too poor to buy the license.
Once you’ve got some hands-on experience with how orbital mechanics is used in space navigation, it’s time to whip out the definitive reference for this category, and that would have to be David Vallado’s “Fundamentals of Astrodynamics and Applications”, a meaty tome that weighs in at 958 pages all-in (the 3rd edition from 2007 has 1055 pages). It’s the most comprehensive treatment out there, and even includes a section on continuous thrust trajectories like the one used to take ESA’s SMART-1 mission to the Moon. It has an online support page for software and errata relating to the book.
One thing it doesn’t really touch on is a newer type of spacecraft trajectory that takes advantage of the warps in gravity caused by the planets, and the linkages between these warps. Researcher Ed Belbruno, author of “Fly Me to the Moon”, was one of the early ones to actually figure out how to make these work to our advantage, and used it to rescue a Japanese mission that had been inserted into a bad orbit. Using the warp in the Earth’s gravity well created by our Moon, he was able, over time, to put the spacecraft into a relatively usable orbit. These were termed ‘weak stability boundary trajectories’ which is a mouthful, but a very simple idea in practice. A good way to think of it is in terms of a surfer who has ridden his board to the top of a wave. Small adjustments in where he points the tip of the board will have a significant result in where he ends up at the end of the ride. The SMART-1 probe took advantage of this phenomenon when it rode up Earth’s gravity well and then slipped over the gravity ‘hill’ at the Earth-Moon L-1 point and rode down into the Moon’s gravity well.
The different gravity wells of the planets are linked by ‘ripples’ that are constantly moving as the planets move. These can be imagined as long waves in the Sun’s gravity well, and spacecraft can be sent sliding along the crests of these ripples, riding them (very, very slowly) to different points of the Solar system along what is, in effect, an interplanetary highway system. The significance of this is that we can create Hubble-ized space instruments (i.e. people can repair and upgrade them) that we can send out to Jupiter or Saturn to, for example, keep an eye on incoming objects from the Oort Cloud and Kuiper Belt. When it’s time for servicing, the space probe is nudged back onto the interplanetary highway system and returns back to near-Earth space where it can be retrieved and serviced. In this way, we can get more value out of our space probes by reusing them and making them better instead of just throwing very expensive instruments into the void one after another.
These are the kinds of exciting new developments that are going on in the field of space navigation. Moonwalker Buzz Aldrin earned his doctorate for his work on the kinds of free-return trajectories that allowed us to conceive of a rescue for Apollo 13. We’ve come a long way since then as our mathematics, and computing heft, have advanced significantly, and so this is not a stale, dry field where we know everything, but rather one where there is significant work yet to be done. We can use these new understandings of space flight to change the way we approach how we design our space architecture.
And hopefully, there will soon be jobs for astrogators to take us to the Moon, the asteroids, Mars, the moons of Jupiter, and beyond…
This time around we’re going to look at a pair of high-speed topics - orbital debris and asteroids. This is a really exciting category in the Lunar Library, and not just for the drama movies! Asteroids can provide an enormous abundance of resources should we go out an learn to harvest them, just as we’ve learned to harvest many of the plants and animals of the Earth. This time around we’re doing it so that we can stop tearing up our own planet to get at these things that we need for our technological society. You’ll hear the ‘economic’ claim that dumping mega-tonnes of platinum or nickel on the market will collapse prices. From a basic Econ 101 theoretical perspective that might be true, but it has to be looked at in the broader context of economic and technological activity. One of the many constraints we have on mechanical efficiency in the objects we manufacture, from lightbulbs to internal combustion engines, is the economic necessity imposed on the engineers of constantly trying to find less expensive but almost as good substitutes. In an economy of abundance, the right materials can be used for each application for maximum efficiency. This will enable an enormous demand for re-engineering the products we have into the best that they can be, and for finding new applications for materials like platinum that have previously been constrained in their use by their rareness and therefore cost.
This is kind of far-fetched economics from our current perspective, but calls to mind the fact that we’ve cherry-picked all of the easy sources for most of this stuff throughout history, and we’re increasingly having to look further out on the margins for sources of obscure elements that are necessary for things like flat-screen TVs. There are several planets worth of materials available in the small bodies of the inner Solar system. We just need to learn how to go out there and get them.
There’s another purpose for doing this as well. The meteorite that recently burned up over the Sudan announced itself with less than 24 hours notice before its doom. (thank goodness we have a nice thick atmosphere) This is because when you use telescopes to look for asteroids, you’re looking away from the Sun. Things like radar (such as the Arecibo Dish) can look Sunward, but there are all kinds of issues there. I’m convinced we need instruments up out of all the garbage we’ve strewn out to GEO, that can look towards (but not at) the Sun on a regular basis to collect data.
Speaking of garbage strewn out to GEO, we’re going to start out this time around with orbital debris.
It was about a decade ago that the first pieces of the International Space Station (ISS) starting making their way to station on-orbit. It represents our toe-hold in space, and the latest evolution of flight models dating back to the 1970s, but unique in that the pieces have come from all over the world. It is our most advanced laboratory, yet one that we have a fundamental difficulty in reaching in a regular and reliable fashion. A lot of folks are working on solving that problem, but once it is overcome and we can start shoveling people up into space we’re going to find that there is a lot of work to be done, from sciences at space stations to freeflyer super-microgravity platforms to cleaning up GEO and prepping for solar power satellites. We need instrumentation in higher orbits (like EML-1) to look Sunward for near-Earth objects like asteroids. We need to start honing our Solar system exploration skills on the Moon. We need to start visiting asteroids to see how they can be tapped for useful resources.
But that’s a little ways off, and we’re still at the first stages of creating a spacefaring civilization. The International Space Station is the most prominent result to date of that ambition, but also has a lot of issues to deal with. It would be great to use it as a staging platform to organize trans-LEO sorties, but that’s not what it was ‘designed for’. Its usefulness as a science laboratory is compromised by the very presence of the astronauts bumping into things and creating ‘jitters’ in the microgravity environment, which is why many scientists have long advocated the use of free-flyer platforms instead for their microgravity materials sciences experiments. EML-1 makes a great staging location for that activity for a whole host of reasons beyond the scope of this article. A limit of twelve dockings per year puts a very low ceiling on the amount of traffic at the ISS.
Regardless, the International Space Station is a triumph from many perspectives. The international cooperation alone is mind-boggling when you conceive of how much organizational effort was/is required. The engineering is phenomenal, with all kinds of spinoffs in things like couplings and seals and materials and so on. What do you make a cable sheath out of that can remain flexible from -100 F to +250 F? Can that kind of sheath find application here on Earth? The science is also great, though of course we don’t hear enough about it. Kids have even contributed their fair share, and I get to that later in the article. So without further ado, let’s start looking at some of the educational materials we have available to learn about the ISS. READ MORE…
To be distributed in 2008 by Blue Works, it weighs in at 233 pages. One homonymic error noted.
The time is the near future. 13 year-old Blair Kelly has a new life ahead of her, much different from the Nebraska farm on which she has grown up, reveling in the tales of her pioneer forefathers who tamed the savage frontier as told by her grandfather. It is her correspondence with her grandfather that opens each chapter in the book, providing the thread that binds the narrative together. Her mother has been working as some kind of electrical engineer on the Moon, and has petitioned together with her father, a teacher, to transfer the whole family to our Moon and renew the pioneer spirit on the next frontier. While awaiting the final decision, she has to attend a year of Moon School to learn the basics of how to live on the Moon. It’s not always easy, but there is this cute boy, Carl, that she may end up seeing on the Moon… READ MORE…
Your friendly Lunar Librarian has long been an early adopter of technology, and is a maven of useful advanced technologies. Flexible Solar cells? Great stuff that. Aerogel? That’s the shizzle right there.
One of my favorite tools for educational outreach is a Space Blanket. I use this to explain the importance of high technology industry and why we do R&D. I ask if they have a roll of aluminium foil in their kitchen, and explain that it is formed by running the aluminum through rollers that squeeze it into a sheet. Low tech, but reasonably effective. The Space Blanket, on the other hand, is made using ion sputtering and vapor -phase deposition, allowing the creation of a layer of aluminum that may be only tens of atoms thick as compared with hundreds or thousands for aluminum foil. It’s a more efficient way of using the aluminum, and allows for large numbers of Space Blankets to be manufactured at a reasonable price. We then wrap up the kids like burritos to demonstrate the effect of having 85% of the body’s IR thermal emission reflected back to the body by the aluminum. The best was at one event where Raytheon had an IR camera on display so we could show the differences between exposed skin and the blanket. These can be found at pretty much any sporting goods store.
Howdy all! Your friendly Lunar Librarian is back, this time to share some of the many educational support materials that are to be found in the Lunar Library. Teachers have a tough job, made more difficult by the fact that many communities chronically underfund and overburden the teachers. Homeschoolers also bear the burden of paying taxes to support a school system in which their child(ren) are not enrolled, which taxes could be used to purchase expensive educational supplies. I’m not kidding when I say that this stuff is not cheap. Some of the children’s reference books in the Lunar Library, ones designed for use in schools, have been shockingly pricey even with any discounts I could scrounge up.
Luckily, the space advocacy community is well-stocked with people who believe in our space future, even if it doesn’t necessarily make a buck today. This means that there are also a lot of reasonably priced and even free resources available for teachers and educators.
This book is designed as an educator’s guide to accompany the book “Kids to Space” (K2S) published back in 2006. As full disclosure, Lonnie approached me at the 2005 ISDC about helping out with the Moon chapter, given my avid interest thereof. Having the Lunar Library at my fingertips allowed me to ensure that I answered each question as accurately as possible. Working with Tom Matula, we worked through all of the questions and I think it turned out well. I can read through it today, knowing so much more about the Moon, and I’m still happy with the answers. READ MORE…
Frequent visitors to Out of the Cradle know that I have a soft spot in my heart for the women of our space future. (Astronautix’‘Women of Space’, past and present) Whilst preparing the Summer Space Reading Camp, Megan McArdle, a blogger at The Atlantic.com (and tall, brainy economist on whom I have a bit of a crush because I’m a tall, brainy banker) posted a blog entry on how sci-fi might be considered unfeminine entitled That’s for girls, he said scornfully . . . This got me to thinking (always a dangerous thing), and I decided to add a special edition to the Summer Space Reading Camp on Solar system science fiction in the Lunar Library that is geared towards a female as opposed to the ‘traditional’ male audience.
Please note, this time around we go all the way up to adult. It’s not just juveniles! In part this is so that I could include the pair of sci-fi bodice-rippers that I’ve found, but also so I can show some of the beautiful artwork of Pamela Lee. Additionally, I’ve had to throw in some video and other media because face it, there’s just not a whole lot of material to work with in this particular niche category.
