TOPIC: Mike and Dave get together right before Halloween this year to tell you spooky tech stories … well, maybe not so spooky, but Dave does apologize for his comments about Steve Jobs from a few weeks ago, and an apology from the TechTalk show can seem almost supernatural in it’s rarity. Tablets and a possibly too-long discussion of IVR rounds out the show before …
Jay “Encyclopedia Garmonica” treats us to a totally a propos Halloweeny geek trivia question:
Image via WikipediaOn Oct. 4, 2004, SpaceShipOne completed flight 17P, its second manned spaceflight in five days, thereby securing the Ansari X Prize as the first viable private manned spacecraft in human history. To get there, SpaceShipOne first had to get US Federal Aviation Administration approval to fly -- which was somewhat complicated given that there was no existing registry category for a private passenger spaceplane.
Scaled Composites, the manufacturer of SpaceShipOne, applied for the registry number N100KM. N is the prefix for all US-registered aircraft. The 100KM was a reference to the 100-kilometer altitude that SpaceShipOne needed to achieve to qualify for the X Prize. Unfortunately, N100KM was already listed, so SpaceShipOne instead got the registry number N368KF for 368 kilo-feet, which is roughly equal to 100 kilometers.
To get that aviation equivalent of a license plate, SpaceShipOne had to be shoehorned into an existing passenger aircraft classification.
What class of aircraft does the FAA consider SpaceShipOne?
SpaceShipOne -- the first viable private manned spacecraft -- is officially classified as a glider by the FAA.
Yes, the FAA's Office of Commercial Spaceflight licensed SpaceShipOne's rocket motor for suborbital flight. Yes, you wouldn't expect anything with a rocket motor to be called a glider. That said, for most of SpaceShipOne's independent flight, it is an unpowered glider.
After the White Knight parent launch aircraft drops SpaceShipOne, it engages the rocket motor to achieve suborbital flight. Once space altitude is achieved, the motor disengages and SpaceShipOne deploys its "shuttlecock" glide planes that allow it enter a controlled glide back to Earth. For the entire descent portion of its flight, SpaceShipOne is a glider -- if a wildly unconventional one.
That's not just some non-traditional technical taxonomy, it's an aerodynamically extraordinary example of the Truly Trivial
Cosmonaut Gherman Titov owns a lot of records in the spaceflight history books: Youngest human to ever enter space (he was 25 during his Vostok 2 mission), first person to orbit the earth more than once (he did 17 orbits), and first person to vomit in outer space.
Most historians don't bring up that last bit, but it may be Titov's most important historical contribution. Titov's zero-g upchuck was the first documented case of space adaptation syndrome, known colloquially as space sickness. NASA records show that roughly 60 percent of all astronauts suffer from space sickness on their first flight. Symptoms include dizziness, disorientation, and the aforementioned vomiting, which can collectively render a space traveler useless or, worse, a danger to his vessel and his crewmates.
NASA actually has an informal scale for measuring the severity of any specific case of space sickness, one which is named in "honor" of a particularly ignominious victim of space adaptation syndrome. And no, it's not Gherman Titov.
Who does NASA's space sickness scale openly make fun of?
If one were to construct a Mt. Rushmore of rocket scientists, almost any quartet of visionaries enshrined there would have to include Wernher von Braun, architect of the early American manned spaceflight program. (For this geek's money, von Braun would be joined by Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, Robert Goddard, and Hermann Oberth, though you could also make a good case for Sergei Korolev as first alternate.) Fifty-one years ago tomorrow, President Eisenhower transferred von Braun and his team of engineers from the U.S. Army Ballistic Missile Agency (ABMA) -- where he built the famous Redstone rockets -- to the newly formed NASA, where von Braun would create the launch vehicles for the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo programs.
All of that, however, very nearly never came to be.
Wernher von Braun was the leader of a handful of German scientists that developed the infamous V-2 rockets that the Nazis used to bombard London during World War II. As Germany began to fall at the end of the war, various factions were vying to capture von Braun and his compatriots in order to secure the German rocket expertise for themselves. Moreover, von Braun rightfully suspected that the German SS had orders to execute the rocket scientists should it become likely that they would fall into enemy hands. Thus, von Braun and his team decided they should actively surrender to Allied forces before they could be killed; the only question was to which Allied nation?
Von Braun's group surrendered to the Americans, with von Braun's brother Magnus literally flagging down a U.S. infantryman riding a bicycle and shouting: "My brother invented the V-2. We want to surrender." Von Braun noted that they chose the Americans in part from fear of how they would be treated as POWs by the Soviets, who were also advancing on the position where the German rocketeers surrendered. Still, had von Braun's team been sequestered elsewhere (as nearly happened) or been forced to abandon their research and take up arms in defense of Germany (as other scientists were forced to do), he may never had made his way to NASA.
Once captured, the U.S. military had to "bleach" von Braun's record in order to clear him for service, as President Truman stipulated that no German war criminals could work for the United States. Wernher von Braun was an SS officer, and his V-2 rocket program employed slave labor, though von Braun himself claimed both actions were forced on him the Nazi power structure. After he was "cleared" to design rockets for the U.S., the military assigned him to build missiles, rather than space vehicles -- despite the fact the von Braun actively campaigned for a manned spaceflight program.
Thus, von Braun resorted to a rather unusual public relations maneuver in an attempt to "jumpstart" public demand for manned spaceflight in 1949 -- nine years before NASA existed.
How did Wernher von Braun try to jumpstart a US space program a decade before NASA?
Sensawunda (n.) - Sci-fi slang term for sense of wonder, used to describe emotionally stirring or intellectually stimulating concepts depicted within speculative fiction. Golden Age science fiction is often lauded for its surplus sensawunda, with point-of-view characters constantly amazed at the scope, scale, and strangeness of creatures, locales, and technologies featured in these sci-fi stories. A.E. Van Vogt's Empire of Isher series is often cited as a classic example of a sensawunda tale, as are the various Heinlein juveniles like Rocket Ship Galileo and Farmer in the Sky. To this day, the original Star Wars is held up as the paramount cinematic example of sensawunda, even if its various prequels utterly failed to live up to this standard.
Contemporary science fiction is often criticized for lacking sensawunda, especially as concerns fashionably cynical or jaded protagonists who are never amazed or inspired by their objectively fantastic and extraordinary experiences. Many critics have cited this sensawunda deficit as the reason why fantasy has overtaken science fiction in mainstream literary success, with the Harry Potter phenomenon -- and its willing embrace of sensawunda -- serving as exhibit A. Moreover, many modern characters are meta-aware, often acting as if they know they are in a fictional setting and using their knowledge of standard spec-fic tropes to navigate and outsmart the challenges of their own stories. This has the effect of being alternately hilarious (in the case of Terry Pratchett's Discworld series) or diminishing of the story; if the main character does not take it seriously, how can the reader? Iain Banks and John Varley have consciously tried to recapture the sensawunda flair of these classic sci-fi tales, with Varley explicitly channeling Heinlein juveniles in his Red Thunder and its sequels, and Banks engaging in gleeful Golden Age romanticism in his novel Feersum Endjinn.
I bring it up because: Today is the 51st anniversary of the incorporation of NASA, and if ever a real-world entity attained and then lost a sensawunda, it's the American space agency. While NASA is objectively doing faster, better, cheaper space exploration today with its advanced satellites, deep-space probes and robot rovers, it has lost the pioneer flare (and bottomless Cold War budget) that captured the imagination during the heady days of the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo programs. The upcoming Project Constellation and its Ares V rockets and Altair and Orion spacecraft harken back to the golden age of manned spaceflight, but no one is certain they will ever actually get built and, if they do, whether they'll feel just like a remake of a classic tale that has, sadly, loss it originality and sensawunda. Let's hope the critics are wrong, because the world is a brighter place when our reach exceeds our grasp, and the sky is filled with manned rockets daring for the stars.
Image via Wikipedia
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