I took a much deserved day off work on Friday and attended the Sun ‘n Fun Fly-In and Air Show in Lakeland, Florida with my buddy Les. It was a beautiful day for an airshow and this was quite an airshow.
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First we walked around and looked at all the homebuilt airplanes that were there for the fly-in. Then we walked around all the vendor exhibits for a while. Then we watched the airshow and it was quite impressive. Then after a dinner break, they put on a very cool night airshow. And after that, they put on the most spectacular fireworks display I think I’ve even seen in my entire life! It was quite a day. Here is a short video compilation that I posted to YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8UqFCnRzDso
Last week I was able to take part in an annual beach cleanup on the very remote beaches of the Kennedy Space Center. It was a lot of hard work, but it was pretty cool to take part in this worthy cause. I put a short video from the beach cleanup on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jjT6dTbacg0
This is an annual event at KSC and it is organized by the Fish & Wildlife Service, who owns most of the land that KSC sits on. They do this every year before sea turtle nesting season starts.
There were some pretty interesting items that were collected, in addition to a ton of bottles and bottle caps, which I noticed were the most frequent item found. A lady right directly in front of me found 2 separate messages in bottles. One of them was a letter from a 9 year old girl in the Bahamas who’s whole class had put messages into bottles for a “sea-pal” exercise. The lady who found the message said she was definitely going to write the little girl back. I found quite a few bottles, but none with messages.
It was hard work in the hot sun, but I’m going to sign up again next year.
Today I attended the Daytona Continental Historic Races at the Daytona International Speedway. This event is organized by the Historic Sportscar Racing (HSR) organization, and is just one of about 10 historic sportscar racing events that it organizes each year throughout the country. According to the HSR website, “Historic racing series such as HSR represent the fastest growing segment of motorsports in the United States and Europe.” It was an exciting day and I had a lot of fun watching these vintage cars compete against each other on the racetrack. I recorded a little bit of video with my pocket digital still camera and edited it into a four and a half minute compilation. You can watch my video compilation on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JGwrNkTx42o
Click on any photo below to go to my online photo gallery where you can download a higher resolution version:
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This is an event that I will definitely take my boys to when they are a bit older.
After a spectacular mission, Discovery and the STS-120 crew came in for a safe landing at KSC a few days ago. I work out at KSC, and I went outside my building to watch Discovery glide in. When the Space Shuttle lands from South to North, it glides pretty much right over the KSC Industrial Area, where about half of the KSC employees work. I happened to have my digital pocket camera on me, so I shot this footage. It’s not the greatest quality video, but it’s about all I can expect out of my pocket digital camera.
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Click here to watch the video on YouTube. You can hear the sonic booms in the footage and you can also hear it “whooshing” through the air as it passes close overhead. Remember the Space Shuttle Orbiter lands in an unpowered glide, so the “whooshing” is purely the sound of a large lifting body cutting through the air as it glides down to an unpowered landing.
I was at the NASA Press Site yesterday for the launch of STS-120. What an amazing launch that was to witness. I’ve seen a lot of launches, and this one was the loudest I can remember. I imagine the extreme loudness can be attributed to either the heavy humid air, or the wind direction, or the low cloud deck, or probably a combination of these atmospheric conditions. I took these photos of the launch while at the same time helping to make sure people didn’t “loiter” in front of the big countdown clock. When people stand directly in front of the clock, it has a tendency to annoy most of the TV stations who are using the footage from the countdown clock in their live launch feeds. Click on a photo for a larger version in my photo gallery.
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BLOG CONTEST: I will give one dollar via PayPal to the first person who can identify the white haired man in the white shirt in the second photo. Anyone that I know and have already told is obviously not eligible! Also, anyone who was actually at the NASA Press Site yesterday is not eligible. To enter, you must email me (Kurt only) via the web based email form on my website and tell me your name and your email address so that I can PayPal you the money. If you enter using this method, your email address will only be seen by me and nobody else. If you don’t mind sharing your email address with the whole world, you can enter by adding a comment to this blog posting. I promise I will not use your email address for anything other than sending you the one dollar.
Over the past few days, I’ve spent most of my lunch break looking for missing aviation pioneer Steve Fossett. Did I hop in a jeep/plane/helicopter and go cross country searching in the Nevada desert? No, I looked for Steve Fossett from the comfort of my office cubicle. If you want to help with the massive online search effort, just visit Amazon’s Mechanical Turk website, sign in, and start looking at the newly released satellite images: http://www.mturk.com/mturk/preview?groupId=9TSZK4G35XEZJZG21T60
NASA sent out a press release today about this cool art contest for college students:
Aug. 23, 2007
Sonja Alexander
Headquarters, Washington
202-358-1761
sonja.r.alexander@nasa.gov
Keith Henry
Langley Research Center, Hampton, Va.
757-864-6120/344-7211
h.k.henry@nasa.gov
RELEASE: 07-179
LIFE AND WORK ON THE MOON: WHAT IMAGES COME TO MIND?
HAMPTON, Va. - A new NASA contest encourages university art and design students to partner with science and engineering departments to create art representative of living and working on the moon. The goal is for students in the arts, science and engineering to collaboratively engage in NASA’s mission to return humans to the moon by 2020, and eventually journey on to Mars and other destinations in the solar system.
The Advanced Planning and Partnership Office at NASA’s Langley Research Center in Hampton, Va., is sponsoring the “Life and Work on the Moon” contest. Winners will receive cash prizes up to $1,000. Winning artwork also will be exhibited online and across the country.
Students in architecture, industrial design, computer design, the fine arts and other disciplines are invited to submit entries in one of three categories: two-dimensional art, three-dimensional art or digital art. To ensure artistic concepts reflect the realities of the harsh lunar environment, art students are strongly encouraged to consult with science and engineering students and use NASA’s online resources.
A volunteer panel of judges will represent NASA, other government agencies, universities, industry and the professional art community. Judges will evaluate artistic qualities and whether the entry depicts a valid scenario in the context of the lunar environment.
In sponsoring the contest, NASA hopes to encourage more collaboration among scientists and engineers and the artistic and creative communities. Such collaboration may generate new ideas for living and working in extra-terrestrial environments, resulting in more successful long-duration space missions.
Winners of the contest will be offered the opportunity to exhibit their work in NASA facilities and science museums. An online public gallery will be available through a partnership with NASA’s Classroom of the Future, maintained by the Wheeling Jesuit University Center for Educational Technologies in Wheeling, W. Va., and the Christopher Newport University Institute for Science Education in Newport News, Va. Christopher Newport University will provide cash awards for top prizes.
Entries are due no later than December 1, 2007, and results will be announced in February 2008. A high school version of this contest is planned for the spring of 2008.
For more details about the contest, including NASA’s resources about the moon, visit:
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:
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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!
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.
