All posts by kleucht

R/C Helicopters Are Cool!

On my way to work the other day, I saw something out of the corner of my eye that caught my attention. It turned out to be a Remote Controlled (R/C) Helicopter in an old unused parking lot just a mile or so from my neighborhood. Not being in a huge hurry or anything, I pulled into the parking lot and watched for a while. I also took a few snapshots:

. Remote Controlled Helicopter

. Remote Controlled Helicopter

. Remote Controlled Helicopter

R/C Helicopters are pretty fun to watch and I bet they’re fun to fly too. These things can fly just about anywhere, too! That’s what really struck me when I was watching. To fly an R/C Airplane, you need an open field with a decent landing strip. But you can take off and land one of these babies from the bed of a pickup truck, if you had to! 🙂

Kurt

Pikes Peak & Hot Air Balloon

I took the below photo in Colorado Springs a few days ago. I was there for business and went outside to exercise the first morning I was there and this is what I saw. I had my Canon PowerShot digital camera in my pocket because I had promised my boys that I would take a photo of the mountains and send it to them that day. There were actually three separate hot air balloons that took off from this location that morning. I sure would have liked to go for a ride and see the mountains from the vantage point of a hot air balloon!

.Pikes Peak and hot air balloon

Click here to go to my photo gallery which
contains higher resolution versions of this image.

Nature meets launch pad

I took the below photo from the Kennedy Space Center Beach House (Conference Center) a couple weeks ago. We had finished up our meeting and I stepped outside to look at the approaching storm. I took this photo with my cell phone camera, so it’s not the best quality. I also tried to get some video of the lightning, but the frame rate was slow and it didn’t capture any good lightning strikes.

.Thunderstorm over launch pad

Click here to go to my photo gallery which
contains higher resolution versions of this image.

STS-117 SRB & ET Launch Footage Compilation

I recently merged some STS-117 NASA launch video footage from four of the six Solid Rocket Booster (SRB) cameras and also the External Tank (ET) camera into a single synchronized video compilation. Below are a few teaser frames from the compilation:

. Title frame

. SRB Separation frame

. SRB Splashdown frame

The video compilation is about 10 1/2 minutes long and runs in real time starting from launch all the way through SRB splashdown and even through Orbiter (Atlantis) separation from the ET. It’s a pretty cool video to watch because you get to see what happens behind the scenes with the SRBs after separation.

I used Adobe Premier Elements version 3.0 to compile the video. It’s a very powerful consumer video editor program, but it’s also quite user friendly so you don’t have to be a video editing expert to be able to use it. It costs a hundred bucks, and you can download and use a free 30 day trial here: http://www.adobe.com/products/premiereel/

Below is a high bandwidth link to the finished compilation video. It is in Windows Media Player 9 (WMV) format. Enjoy!

Kurt

STS-117_SRB&ETLaunchFootageCompilation (LAN Quality – 1150 Kbps – 960×720 – 30fps – 90 Megs)

Here is the lower quality YouTube version: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z-e0Fam-Za4

P.S. For those in the audience who are complete perfectionists, I did not attempt to synchronize the time counters in the corners of each of the videos to each other. That would have taken me much longer and would not have ended up looking very much different. All I did was synchronize major events (like liftoff and SRB separation) to occur simultaneously to my own eyes. Actually the video in the lower left appears to be a few seconds off from the rest on it’s time counter. Especially towards splashdown of the SRB’s. So synchronizing that video’s time counter would have actually thrown it off from real time.

Norris Gray: A Spaceport Legend

While at work today, I had the great pleasure of meeting Mr. Norris Gray, who helped bring Werner Von Braun and other German rocket scientists to the United States after WWII. He also helped launch the first Bumper rockets, which were derived from the German V-2 rockets, from Cape Canaveral.

Kurt Leucht and Norris Gray

Chief Gray, as everyone calls him, was the Fire Chief and Emergency Services Officer for the Bumper program here in Florida. He’s close to 90 years old now, but he’s as spry & spunky today as he was back in 1950 when he launched the first Bumper rockets from launch complex 3. He talks about his experiences and the history of the Spaceport with a gleam in his eye.
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Today, Chief Gray often volunteers to support NASA’s KSC Press Site for launches and landings. He absolutely loves the space program. It was a real pleasure to meet and work with Chief Gray today and I hope to work more with him and hear more of his early spaceflight stories again soon.
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Here are some good Internet links about Chief Gray:
Kurt