Category Archives: Science, Space, Technology

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

Space Shuttle Challenger mural at my high school

When I was a student at Deer Creek Mackinaw (Dee-Mack) High School in Mackinaw, Illinois (1984 thru 1988) I was really into anything that was even remotely related to art. I loved drafting classes and all of the different art classes too. Our art teacher, Mrs. Schultz, organized some of the best art students there and had them paint a few organized and approved murals around the school. I was allowed to paint a Space Shuttle mural upstairs on the big 2-story wall just outside the library. I was also into space, and I had some NASA photos and mission patches and I basically just painted a collage of some of the items in that material. I dedicated the mural to the crew of the Challenger mission that was lost during their launch on January 28th, 1986. This large mural was a big project for a high school student … and I never actually technically finished the mural. I had intended to paint land masses on the earth, but never got around to it. I took these photos in the summer of 2002, so the mural was at least there for 14 years. I think they had to paint over it a few years ago, though.

01-overallmural.jpg

02-reverseangle.jpg

03-astronautdetail.jpg

04-ascentdetail.jpg

05-dedicationdetail.jpg

06-signaturedetail.jpg

Kurt

I’m a lab rat in a motion sickness study

I recently volunteered to be a test subject in a NASA/KSC study on motion sickness. I call it the “spinning chair of death” study for fun, but it’s really not too bad. Today was my turn in the chair and it was actually a breeze and I never even felt queezy. I guess I’m not very prone to motion sickness because I can count on one hand the total number of times I’ve ever felt motion sick.

Here are some details of the study:

The chair is actually a racing seat mounted on a wooden box. The wooden box holds all kinds of electronic gear (biological sensors) and a laptop PC powered by a car battery and an inverter. The wooden box is connected to a gearbox and a motor that spins it at 15 RPM’s or about 4 seconds per revolution. It’s not real fast. The whole contraption is also tilted from vertical 15 degrees. It’s this tilt combined with the rotation that gives your inner ear a real workout and causes most people to get motion sick.

After my test is complete.
Photo of me in the chair after my test was
complete and all the sensors were removed.

After filling out about 5 pages of medical history paperwork, the doc weighed me and then put 2 sets of EKG pads on my chest and side. One set was for local recording on the laptop PC that spun around along with the chair, and the other set was for wirelessly transmitting across the room so that the doctor could track my health during the test and stop the test if things went south. Then they sat me in the racing chair and strapped me in fairly snugly. It’s a pretty comfortable chair.

Then they hooked a constant blood pressure cuff on my left middle finger. This little cuff measures your blood pressure every single time your heart beats. It’s pretty cool. It inflates just like the standard cuffs do, but it pressure pulsates with your heartbeat and somehow the thing uses an infared beam or something to look at your blood flowing in your finger. I really don’t know how the thing works, but it’s a cool little device.

The last thing they hooked up to me was even cooler than the constant blood pressure cuff. It was a doppler blood flow sensor that was mounted against my right temple on my forehead. It’s just like the sonogram device a doctor uses to find the heartbeat of a fetus in the womb. And it sounds exactly like that, because they turned the sound up when they were installing the thing. They put this little helmet thing on my forehead and tightened it down snugly. Then they played around with the position of the doppler sensor on my temple until they found just the right artery and just the right position on that artery. The doctors and technicians were all crowded around the laptop watching the realtime plot waves while the sensor was being positioned. This sensor was difficult for them to get just right, but when they got it, it was rock solid … even when I moved my head around.

Then the doc gave me final instructions on the hand signals that I would be using during the test. Every minute during the test, the doc would ask me to rate my motion sickness symptoms on a scale from 1 to 5. With 1 being no symptoms, to 5 being “I think I’m gonna be sick so stop the test right now!”. Then they started the test with a 5 minute waiting baseline. I breathed deeply and tried to relax for the baseline measurements. 5 minutes is a long time when you’re waiting for it to pass in silence. They wanted all subjects to perform the rotating part with their eyes closed, so I closed mine for the baseline also.

Then the rotation started. It was to last 15 minutes or until I felt sick. Every minute the doc asked me to hold up fingers for my symptoms. For the first couple of minutes I felt like I was moving exactly as I knew I was moving. During the rotation, my body and head were being forced by gravity forward, to one side, backward, and then to the other side.

But then my brain kind of switched things around and it didn’t feel like I was spinning anymore. My head and body were still being pushed forward, to one side, backward, and then to the other side, but my brain made me feel like this motion was because I was being translated around on an air table and always facing the same direction. Imagine your hand on a hockey puck on an air table or on an ice rink. Now move (translate) the puck around in a large circle without rotating the actual puck. This is what I felt like I was doing now and it didn’t feel bad at all. As a matter of fact, I probably could have fallen asleep doing this if given another 15 minutes or so. After a while it was actually soothing. If my brain hadn’t switched me from feeling like I was rotating to feeling like I was just translating, I don’t know if I’d have made it.

After the 15 minutes were up, I had given them 15 motion sickness symptom scores of 1 with my hand signals and had no symptoms at all anywhere. No dizziness or anything going on in my stomach. During the last cycle, the chair slowed down and then finally stopped in the same position it started in. When it finally stopped completely, I felt my brain for just a couple of seconds continue to want to rotate and I’ll bet my head even twitched a couple of times towards the direction of rotation. But that passed after just a couple seconds and then I felt perfectly normal. They had another 5 minute period of waiting and then the test was complete.

The test was fun and I would do it again if given the opportunity. If I wasn’t having so much fun in my current organization, this department would actually be a pretty cool place to work. My buddy Dave works in this department and actually built the “rotating chair of death” and put together all the electronics that go with it.
Kurt

NASA is retiring the Space Shuttle

Disclaimer: These are my personal opinions, not official NASA statements!

For those readers who don’t follow NASA news closely, NASA publicly announced recently that the Space Shuttles are slated to be forced into retirement in 2010. This is due to many factors, some of which are listed below:

  • Space Shuttles and associated ground infrastructure are getting quite old and harder and harder to maintain and enhance.
  • Their design is fairly dangerous and we’ve lost two already and the chances of losing others increase with age.
  • The Space Shuttle system, although reusable, is a money pit. Due to budget cuts and design compromises in the 1970’s, the Space Shuttles have never lived up to the hopes and dreams of the engineers who conceived them. I believe that the costs per pound to orbit are worse than if we had stuck with “disposable” rockets.
  • President Bush in 2004 gave NASA a new direction. Enough of this low Earth orbit stuff. His Vision for Space Exploration (VSE) speech suggested that we build a new “crew exploration vehicle” to take us back to the moon, and to Mars, and even beyond.

NASA plans to spend $100 billion over the next 12 years to design, build, and launch the new spacecraft and rockets it needs to put humans back on the Moon by 2018.

For those who think we should only stick to robot exploration:
We already did the robots to the Moon thing. NASA calls this the “Exploration” program because the whole point is to get ourselves off the Earth and out exploring other planets. The NASA Exploration Program tagline for marketing purposes is “Moon, Mars, and Beyond!” Whenever you use a robot, your science is very limited, and your ability to cope with problems that crop up is almost non-existant. Using humans is risky and expensive, but the payoff can be enormous when successful.

For those asking why do we want or need to go back to the Moon:
One possibility is that we can extract precious oxygen from lunar regolith and/or from lunar ice. This act would help a moon base to be a little more self-sustainable and require less logistics missions. Scientists would like to set up large telescopes on the moon where there’s no atmosphere to look through like on Earth and no potential for decay of orbit and reentry, like we have with Hubble Space Telescope. There’s lots of other science that can be done on the Moon.
Once we’re comfortable living on the moon, we can raise our sights and try it out on Mars, and Beyond! Of course, the flights to the Moon planned for 2018 will be similar to Apollo … where we just go, do some science for a few days and then return. It will take a while longer to get into a position to actually set up a long term Moon base. I imagine it will take 2 or 3 times as long to build a Moon base as it is currently taking us to build our Space Station. And that’s been going on for quite some time now.

sizecomparison20.jpg

The publicly released NASA image above shows a relative size comparison between the Saturn V rocket used for Apollo Moon missions, the Space Shuttle used today for low Earth orbit missions, the new Ares I rocket which will be used to send humans into low Earth orbit, and the new Ares V rocket which will be used to send large cargo into low Earth orbit and beyond.

By putting the humans and the cargo on two separate launch vehicles, NASA is hoping to make it much safer for the astronauts. A vehicle required to take a small crew capsule into space is much safer than a vehicle required to take a huge and heavy payload into space. Also, the Ares I vehicle is derived from today’s Shuttle Solid Rocket Boosters, which have a good history after the post-Challenger improvements. Also a single inline vehicle is safer than the piggyback configuration that we used for Shuttle.

After both crew and cargo are launched into low Earth orbit, the crew capsule will attach itself to the cargo and use rockets attached to the cargo to make the trip to the Moon. The plan is very similar to the Apollo Moon missions after that. The crew capsule actually looks a lot like the one used in Apollo, only bigger. Most of the new vehicles are expendable and the only thing that will actually re-enter and land on Earth is the crew capsule, similarly to Apollo.

The Space Shuttle was a great Engineering feat. But it was just too fragile and the overall architecture design was too costly to maintain and also very dangerous for the crew. NASA has decided that it’s not going to trade safety for reusability in it’s new space system architecture. They’re playing it safer this time around. After losing two Shuttle Orbiters along with their astronaut crews, can you blame them?

Kurt