Kurt Leucht’s Blog

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.

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:

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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 are some medium and high bandwidth links to the finished compilation video. They are all in Windows Media Player 9 (WMV) format. Enjoy!

Kurt

STS-117_SRB&ETLaunchFootageCompilation (Light Broadband Quality - 300 Kbps - 320×240 - 10fps - 25 Megs)

STS-117_SRB&ETLaunchFootageCompilation (Medium Broadband Quality - 550 Kbps - 640×480 - 15fps- 43 Megs)

STS-117_SRB&ETLaunchFootageCompilation (Heavy Broadband Quality - 850 Kbps - 640×480 - 30fps - 66 Megs)

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.

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.

• Bumper Historical Video and Video Interview with Norris Gray
• Norris Gray’s Oral History

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.

Kurt

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.

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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

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.

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

If you’re kinda geeky like me, and don’t mind looking through a virtual microscope for the good of science, you need to check out StardustAtHome! It’s pretty cool!

What’s in it for me?

“The discoverer of an interstellar dust particle will appear as a co-author on scientific papers by the Stardust@home collaboration announcing the discovery of the particle. The discoverer will also have the privilege of naming the particle!”

I’ve looked through my fair share of microscopes in my old failure analysis job, and this is actually quite fun for me. I would suggest that anyone who has 10 or 15 minutes to spare every day during their lunch break ought to review stardust samples too. You might just discover something “out of this world”!

Kurt