Techtalk Trivia: What was the only manned space flight mission to take off on Halloween day?

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My latest TechTalk podcast/radio appearance was suitably seasonal: Ep. 248 – Every Day is Halloween!

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:

What was the only manned space flight mission to take off on Halloween day?

And that leaves us ample time for some great seasonal coolsites of the week!

• PumpkinPatchesAndMore – Find all the local pumpkin patches in your area! Plus carving templates, recipes, and more.


• HalloweenPrintables – From the great folks at FreePrintables.net, come some cards, puzzles, and coloring pages just in time for Halloween!


• FantasyPumpkins – These are cool to look at all year, and include templates for many of the coolest pumpkins you’ve ever seen!

This week we treat your ears to a speed metal version of the classic “Every Day is Halloween” by Ministry.

Nerd word of the week: Human-rated

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Human-rated (adj.) - Term for a spacecraft that is capable of safely transporting human passengers. The term man-rated is often used interchangeably with human-rated. Human-rated craft are almost invariably more complex, more expensive, and thus rarer than mere cargo-rated craft.

I bring it up because: President Obama just pulled the plug on the the next NASA human-rated spacecraft, Project Constellation, in his recently proposed federal budget -- even as we edge closer to the retirement of the space shuttle program in September of this year with STS-133. (Whether this axing survives Congress remains to be seen, as the Bush-era Constellation program promised research dollars to several Congressional districts.) As it stands now, NASA is going to be out of the manned spaceflight business after this year, and may stay that way for years, even decades, and perhaps forever.

Scientists are torn over the Constellation shutdown: Upset that the promise of a manned presence on the moon, Mars, and even the asteroids has been nixed; relieved that an over-budget, backwards-looking retread of the Apollo program has been shut down in favor of more promising and practical telescope and robot-probe missions. Moreover, Obama is explicitly handing the human-rated baton over to private spaceflight, with the likes of SpaceX poised to pick up millions or even billions of dollars in NASA contracts if they find a commercial method of getting astronauts and cargo to and from the International Space Station. It could be a bold new era of affordable spaceflight, or just another decade or three of humanity trapped in the claustrophobic confines of Low Earth Orbit. Only time, and human-rated innovation, will tell.

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