Iran, Space Monkeys and The Pixies

I wanted to try something a little different with this post.  Perhaps it is the result of a few years spent as a DJ, but a lot of times when I see a story in the news, a song will pop into my head, a song that is usually related to the story in some odd way.  That was the case when I read this report about Iran's nascent space program and their successful attempt to launch a monkey into space. The song this conjured up was, of course, The Pixies “Monkey Gone To Heaven”.  So the idea of this post is to talk a little about the story and then a little about the song.

Space, The Final Frontier

With news from and about Iran dominated by that country's nuclear research program, the story of their space launch came as a bit of a surprise.  But Iran has ambitions to become a space-faring nation in their own right.  In 2009, Iran launched their first home-built satellite into orbit.  The Iranian government has stated that their goal is to launch a man into space by 2019, using domestically designed and produced equipment.

By comparison, the mission announced this past Sunday was quite modest – a capsule carrying a single monkey as a passenger was carried aloft by a Pishgam (or “Pilgrim”) missile to an altitude of 75 miles before returning to Earth.  In a good sign for Iran's future astronauts, their monkey passenger apparently survived the flight unharmed.

Though modest in scope – both the US and Soviet Union were doing this sort of thing more than 50 years ago - this mission passed a couple of important milestones for Iran: they crossed the threshold of space (typically defined as any altitude above 62 miles) and managed the G-forces encountered in descent well enough for their primate passenger to survive.  Since man too is a primate, the monkey's survival is indication that Iran has solved some of the basic technological problems associated with returning a manned-capsule safely to Earth.

But there was likely a subtext for Iran's monkey mission.  A rocket that can carry a capsule into space is also capable of carrying a warhead thousands of miles to an enemy's territory.  The United States slipped into a full-blown panic in 1957 after the Soviet Union successfully orbited the Sputnik satellite – not only had US pride been hurt by being beaten into space by the “Reds”, but it was also a clear indication that the Soviet Union now possessed ICBMs capable of reaching the United States.  In this time of high tensions with the US and Israel, a similar message could be drawn from this weekend's Iranian journey into space.

 

Monkey Gone To Heaven

 

From the mid-1980s through the early 1990s, The Pixies would become one of the bands that defined the college radio/alternative sound, at least before the genre was largely consumed by the Grunge scene out of Seattle, though The Pixies would influence that genre as well. They were a band that specialized in the sound that Nirvana's Kurt Cobain would describe as “quiet, then loud”.  The Pixies were aided in this expression by the smooth lead vocals of singer Black Francis (later Frank Black), with backing vocals by guitarist Kim Deal. They layered lyrics that often trended towards the bizarre over music that could range from light and melodic to crashing walls of sound – sometimes within the same song.

“Monkey Gone To Heaven” is an apt expression of this songwriting formula.  From the album Doolittle, the track is an example of The Pixies at their highest point as a band.  The lyrics of “Monkey Gone To Heaven” go off on explorations of environmentalism, religion and man's relationship with the divine - a relationship that Francis seems to believe the divine will get the worst of.  Early on, the song talks about Neptune, Roman god of the seas, being “killed by 10 million pounds of sludge from New York and New Jersey” (and as someone who grew up in NJ, I can totally see that happening).  In this respect, the conceit of the “monkey gone to heaven” is an indication of man's diminishment of the divine through the elevation of a primate - and keep in mind that man too is a primate – to the realm of the gods.

You have to wonder what Iran's ayatollahs would make of that?

Russia To US: Let's Go To The Moon

According to Russian media last week, Vladimir Popovkin, the head of Russia's space agency Roscosmos, is proposing that the United States and European Union join forces to build human colonies on the Moon.  Popovkin's vision would include a series of outposts in lunar orbit, along with human exploration of the Moon's surface and using deposits of ice at the lunar poles as a source of water.  Russia also has two unmanned missions of their own on the drawing board, set to fly before 2020.

Popovkin's comments are surprising for two reasons; first is that NASA seemed to be unaware of his desire to team up on a lunar mission.  “We believe Popovkin may be referring to the work of the International Space Exploration Coordination Group (ISECG) and its Global Exploration Roadmap,” NASA spokesman J.D. Harrington told SPACE.com in response to an inquiry about Popovkin's suggestion.  NASA went on to explain that the ISECG was more of a framework for ideas rather than setting down plans for man's conquest of the Moon.  The other reason why Popovkin's comments are so surprising is that just a few weeks ago Popovkin was all but accusing the United States of sabotaging Russia's Phobos-Grunt mission to Mars, which ended on January 15^th with an inglorious crash into the Pacific Ocean.  According to Popovkin, the probe – which was suppose to land on the Martian moon Phobos, grab a sample of soil and return it to Earth – was vulnerable to “foreign influences”, building on speculation in some Russian media that Phobos-Grunt was blasted by a radio signal from an American radar installation either in Alaska or the Pacific (take your pick) that rendered it inoperative.  You would wonder then why Popovkin would want to team up with the country that he thinks ruined Roscosmos' most high-profile exploration mission since the end of the Soviet Union.

In other space news, another Russian scientist is out with a  bold claim of his own – that he has detected possible signs of life on Venus.  The second planet from the sun has long been ruled out of the search for life in the solar system because of surface temperatures that are hot enough to melt lead.  But now Leonid Ksanfomaliti of the Space Research Institute at Russia's Academy of Sciences contends that he has seen evidence of what he thinks could be life by reexamining a set of 30-year old photographs from a Soviet space probe that survived the hellish conditions on the surface of Venus long enough to snap a few photographs.   Ksanfomaliti identified structures within the photographs that resembled a disc, a black flap and even a scorpion.

“Let's boldly suggest that the objects' morphological features would allow us to say that they are living," Ksanfomaliti wrote in a scientific journal.  Lacking any other proof, or evidence of life from other probes that have studied Venus, NASA analysts suggest the items are just data artifacts in the images beamed back from Venus combined with an active imagination.

Russia's Space Paranoia

The Russian space program faced a massive and embarrassing setback at the end of 2011 when their centerpiece Phobos-Grunt mission to Mars got stuck in low Earth orbit shortly after launch, destined for a fiery re-entry into the atmosphere sometime later this month.  Now the head of Russia's space agency, Roscosmos' Vladimir Popovkin, says he knows what went wrong - “foreign forces” interfered with Phobos-Grunt, sabotaging its mission.  “I wouldn't like to accuse anyone, but today there exists powerful means to influence spacecraft, and their use can't be excluded,” Popovkin said.  His comments seem to echo an allegation made by a retired Russian general back in November, shortly after Phobos-Grunt ran into problems; he cast the blame on a high-power radar array operated by the US military in Alaska.

Popovkin told Russia's Izvestia newspaper that “some Russian [space]craft had suffered 'unexplained' malfunctions while flying over another side of the globe beyond the reach of his nation's tracking facilities.”  While meant to blame foreign powers, Popovkin's comment gets to the heart of what really seems to have doomed Phobos-Grunt (along with explaining several other recent Russian space program failures), rampant cost-cutting in the Russian space program.  During the heyday of Russian exploration during the 1960s, the Soviet Union maintained a network of ground tracking stations and specially-outfitted communication ships so that Russian space missions were in near-constant contact with Russian ground controllers.  Today that network is gone.  When something went wrong with Phobos-Grunt, Russian controllers could only attempt to talk to the probe in blocks of time just a few minutes long when it was orbiting directly over Russia; Russian controllers later borrowed the use of a few radio-telescopes around the world to better their chances of reaching Phobos-Grunt.

Today though the once mighty Russian space program is being hit by budget cuts and a loss of experience as older engineers retire, without younger ones to replace them.  The result, predictably, has been a series of mission failures during the past year.  Still, according to noted space analyst James Oberg, “the urge to shift blame seems strong.”    

Santa's Soyuz Sleigh

The Russian space program inadvertently gave western Europe a Christmastime treat during the evening of the 24^th.  People all across Belgium and Germany reported seeing a strange, bright object streaking across the nighttime sky.  The object was alternately thought to be either a meteorite or Santa's sleigh.

In reality, the streaking object was the third stage of a Russian Soyuz rocket, which a few days earlier had delivered a new crew of astronauts to the International Space Station.  Still, the timing of the reentry was fantastic.

The Russian space program managed to chalk up another amazing coincidence last Friday, though this time not as the result of a successful mission.  On Friday, an unmanned Soyuz-2 rocket carrying a military satellite failed moments after launch from Kazakhstan.  Debris rained down over an area of central Siberia, including a small tank from the rocket, which crashed through the roof of a house in the village of Vagaitsevo.  The house was located on Cosmonaut Street – seriously, what are the odds of that happening?

Which Way To Mars?

Shooting a rocket across 100 million miles of empty space is about as daunting a task as it sounds, a fact the Russian space program is once again learning.  Russia's first interplanetary space mission in over a decade is currently stuck in orbit around Earth, with its prospects of heading off to Mars looking increasingly dim.

Phobos-Grunt is an audacious mission, a decade in planning.  If all goes according to plan, the Russians will land a probe not on Mars itself, but on one of Mars' two moons, Phobos.  There it will scoop up a sample of soil (“grunt” in Russian) which it will return to Earth.  For good measure, a small Chinese satellite is also hitching a ride, to spend two years orbiting the Red Planet.  That is if all goes according to plan, which sadly so far it is not.  Phobos-Grunt lifted off perfectly from Kazakhstan on Tuesday, but problems started about 11 minutes into the mission when the main rocket that would propel the mission to Mars failed to ignite, leaving Phobos-Grunt circling the wrong planet.  One theory is that the probe failed to detect the stars it would use to align itself for Mars, and rather than rocketing off into space, the probe went into a safe mode. 

Russian controllers are currently scrambling to get Phobos-Grunt pointed towards Mars to fire off its engine before the rocket's batteries die, which could occur in a few days.  The task is not impossible, but it does require the controllers to remotely override Phobos-Grunt's programming and get the rocket pointed in the right direction.  If they can't accomplish their task, Phobos-Grunt will go down as another in a long string of failed Martian missions that includes Mars 96, Russia's last interplanetary mission, and a NASA mission that slammed into Mars when NASA controllers failed to convert a key command from miles to kilometers.  And, according to former NASA scientist and space analyst James Oberg on MSNBC, if Russian controllers fail to send Phobos-Grunt to Mars, it could also become the most  dangerous piece of space junk ever.  The booster rocket currently contains seven tons of toxic fuel, which could survive Phobos-Grunt's re-entry into the Earth's atmosphere.

Ironic since Phobos is Latin for “fear”.  

The Coming Alien Invasion

Apparently in their spare time NASA scientists and university astrophysics professors like to speculate on alien invasions (while also rehashing sci-fi plotlines). That's the one conclusion to draw after seeing this story about a new report: "Would Contact with Extraterrestrials Benefit or Harm Humanity? A Scenario Analysis", published by NASA's Shawn Domagal-Goldman and researchers from Penn State University, though Domagal-Goldman was quick to point out that he was doing this in his spare time and that the report was not an official NASA study.

The authors say that global warming might serve as a sort of interplanetary “welcome” mat – that any extraterrestrial intelligence (or ETI for short) monitoring the Earth would be able to detect the concentration of greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere, infer that it was the result of industrial processes and further infer that this indicated that we Earthlings were reaching a critical level of development that would suddenly warrant the ETI's attention. What that attention would be is the subject of the 33-page report, which at times reads like a compendium of sci-fi plots. One option is that the ETIs could take a beneficial tack, offering to use their superior technology to help us solve Earth-wide problems, like famine, which is in part the plot of the excellent Twilight Zone episode, “To Serve Man” (which if you have never seen, you should do so immediately). On the other hand, the authors warn, that ETIs may see us as a potential threat to galactic order and may decide to try to destroy us now before humankind achieves the technology to travel beyond Earth in any meaningful way, which is roughly the plot of Plan 9 From Outer Space, Star Trek: First Contact, and a host of other movies.

The authors go on to make the rhetorical leap that the potential for an alien invasion should be reason enough for us to get a handle on greenhouse gas emissions, stating that: “these scenarios give us reason to limit our growth and reduce our impact on global ecosystems. It would be particularly important for us to limit our emissions of greenhouse gases, since atmospheric composition can be observed from other planets,” since, according to the authors, the Earth would not be able to resist a large-scale alien invasion.

Apparently they never watched Independence Day.

Nixon's Unmade Speech

In case you were unaware, today happens to be the 42nd anniversary of men landing on the moon. Human history changed forever once Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin set foot on our celestial neighbor, but despite a decade of planning, training and testing there were no guarantees that the mission would be a success. In fact, there was more than a little concern that the engine on the lunar module might fail to ignite – after all, blasting men off from the surface of another world was something that had never been tried before – marooning Armstrong and Aldrin forever. The possibility was considered so real that a speech was prepared for just such an occurrence for President Nixon to read to the nation. “Fate has ordained that the men who went to the moon to explore in peace will stay on the moon to rest in peace...” went the first line of the speech Nixon thankfully never had to give. The Los Angeles Times has the rest of the text of the speech and more about this forgotten bit of American history over at their website today.

Journalism or “Just a Blog”?

Originally I set out to write a simple post about London erecting a statue to honor cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin on the 50th anniversary of his becoming the human being to ever travel in space, which occurs next week on April 12. As part of that post I intended to include a bit about a new book called Starman by authors Jamie Doran and Piers Bizony, which adds a new chapter to the mythos surrounding Gagarin, who became an iconic figure both in the old Soviet Union and remains one in today's Russia. Starman, however, paints a disturbing picture of the Soviet space program in the late 1960s. Noted journalist Robert Krulwich, formerly of ABC and now of NPR, received an advanced copy of the book and made it the subject of a lengthy blog post two weeks ago where he recounted in detail the book's more explosive allegations surrounding the death of cosmonaut Vladimir Komarov during the flight of Soyuz 1. In short, authors Doran and Bizony allege that the flight of Soyuz 1 was pushed to coincide with the 50th anniversary of the Russian revolution, and that the ship was in no shape to fly in space, a fact known to Cosmonaut Komarov, who was sure that he would die if he went up on the mission. He tried to get the mission delayed to no avail. While he could have simply refused to fly, his back-up was his good friend and now Soviet icon, Yuri Gagarin. According to the authors, Komarov decided to take the flight, sacrificing himself for Gagarin. After launch, when it became clear that he would not return alive, Komarov allegedly had a tear-filled conversation with Soviet Premier Alexei Kosygin, before “crying in rage” against those who sent him up as his ship began its final, fiery plunge to Earth.

Soon after Krulwich's NPR blog account appeared, its veracity was attacked by members of the international space historian community, who pointed out that Starman contradicted the well-documented historical account of Soyuz 1 in many areas, and that certain key details – like the teary conversation with Kosygin – likely never happened. It turns out that the account in Starman is almost entirely from a single source, a former KGB agent and “friend” of Gagarin named Venyamin Russayev. The only problem is that there is no record of a Venyamin Russayev ever appearing anywhere before his inclusion in Starman. To make matters worse, there is evidence now that Doran and Bizony may have never even directly spoken with “Russayev”, whomever he may be.

While authors Doran and Bizony were quickly criticized by the space community for their lax approach to history, so too was Krulwich for his verbatim retelling of their tale without ever bothering to verify if any of it was in fact true. Sadly, despite his distinguished journalistic career (Krulwich has a knack for breaking complex issues down into easily understandable, yet still intelligent, TV packages), Krulwich decided to both pass the buck by blaming Doran and Bizony for feeding him a potentially false story sold as history, and to tell his critics to calm down since because of the “informal” nature of blogs, basic tenets of journalism – like fact-checking – apparently do not apply. “It's not an NPR news story. A blog is a blog,” Krulwich said via NPR.

It is both a disheartening and disturbing reply to a botched bit of reporting. First, one would hope that a journalist - the craft at which Robert Krulwich has earned his living for many years - would apply the same standards to their reporting no matter what the platform: television, print magazine, or yes, even a lowly blog. This implication that because something is “just a blog” is even more disturbing when one considers the trend among major media outlets to rely on “citizen journalists” to augment, or even replace, their traditional coverage. Blog posts, YouTube clips, Tweets, and cellphone videos are now a routine part of the reporting mix of most major media operations. If we look at the coverage of the “Arab Spring” revolts across the North Africa/Middle East region, we see that a preponderance of the coverage, particularly the early coverage of the uprisings, came not from paid correspondents, but unpaid “citizen journalists”. If we are going to give these public submissions the same weight as the formal packages filed by paid reporters, is it too much to expect that they should/would follow the same basic journalistic tenet of factual accuracy? That because something may be “just a blog” and “informal” does not absolve it of a duty to be accurate or for its writer to at least attempt to verify the salient details of the story he/she reports? And if we are not willing to hold these sources to these standards, then is it not time to remove them from our news-gathering mix?

Rather than traditional journalistic ethics, Robert Krulwich preferred to follow the one-time diktat of the famed supermarket tabloid, The Weekly World News: don't fact-check yourself out of a good story. The authors of Starman made some bold, and apparently dubious claims that were easily challenged, let Krulwich did not bother to attempt to check them before running with the story. Sadly he should realize that for journalists - real journalists - the same standards must apply, even if you are writing for “just a blog”.

Life On Titan

Last weekend I spent some time reporting for The Mantle from the World Science Festival. During a presentation titled “The Science of Star Trek”, one of the panelists said he believed we would find fairly conclusive proof of life outside of Earth within the next 20 years. That’s why this story from Russia’s RIA Novosti caught my eye: according to the report, NASA scientists analyzing data from the Cassini spacecraft currently orbiting Saturn has discovered what they think might be signs of primitive life on the planet’s moon, Titan.

Titan is a bitterly cold (-300 degrees) place where there the seas are made of hydrocarbons rather than water (insert your own BP joke here). Scientists studying the chemistry of the surface from data collected by Cassini have found a lack of acetylene on the surface – some biologists theorize that because of the extremely low temperatures on Titan’s surface, life that uses liquid methane as a basis for their biological functions, rather than water like lifeforms on Earth, may have evolved there. These methane-based life forms would likely “eat” acetylene, which could explain the lack of the material on the surface.

Of course there could be a host of non-lifeform related reasons for the lack of acetylene as well, but scientists at NASA aren’t dismissing the idea of life on Titan just yet and are planning to collect more data from future Cassini fly-bys to try to sort out the mystery.

Delayed Criticism On Prompt Global Strike

It’s always nice to see the New York Times pick up on a story we covered here a couple of weeks earlier…

On Thursday, the Times published a long story on the proposed weapons system called “Prompt Global Strike”, something we covered here as part of the post on the signing of the new START treaty between the United States and Russia. MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow and nuclear reduction advocate Joseph Cirincione also picked up the story of Prompt Global Strike late in the week.

To recap PGS – the project would replace the nuclear warheads on some of the Untied States’ arsenal of Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles (ICBMs) with conventional ones, with the goal of being able to deliver a non-nuclear strike against a target anywhere in the world within an hour or two. The “target” described in PGS launch scenarios is one that is highly mobile and that won’t remain in place long enough for the US to strike with other weapons in the arsenal - say like cave-hopping Osama bin Laden (that is if the US ever got a bead on his location in the first place). Advocates say that only PGS could deliver a strike in a short enough time to take out such a target.

Critics, meanwhile, say that such a scenario is highly unlikely to occur and that the United States has such a military presence around the world it’s hard to imagine that there wouldn’t be other US forces in the region ready to strike a highly-mobile target using other means. The bigger problem, they say, is that it would be impossible for another nuclear power – particularly Russia or China – to know that a sudden American ICBM launch was really a PGS strike against some other adversary and not the prelude to a sneak attack against them, which could prompt them to launch their ICBMs at the US in reply. Such a scenario almost unfolded in January 1995, when Russia’s missile defense system almost mistook the launch of a scientific research rocket from northern Norway for the launch of an ICBM from an American submarine under the polar icecap. Only a quick decision by a Russian officer in their nuclear chain of command prevented the Russians from launching a retaliatory strike against the United States. According to the Times, the Obama administration would allow Russia and other interested countries to inspect PGS missile silos to ensure that there were not nuclear warheads aboard the missiles, though in the same article the Times also reports that the administration is looking at basing some PGS weapons on US submarines, which would negate the whole spot inspection idea.

And others wonder if PGS would be yet another case of the Pentagon throwing billions of dollars at a weapons system without knowing if it will ever work. That’s the gist of Cirincione’s piece in Foreign Policy magazine, where he reports that officials in the Pentagon have the PGS concept down, but really don’t know what the final weapon will look like. Both FP and the Times are reporting that the PGS vehicle would be some sort of “space plane” that would be able to maneuver in orbit and would carry a weapons payload that it would drop on its target. That has me wondering if PGS has anything to do with the launch of the Air Force’s super-secret X-37B (artist rendition above) earlier this week. The X-37B is described as a computer-guided mini-Space Shuttle. Like the Shuttle it is suppose to be reusable and can carry a payload within its cargo bay; but unlike the Shuttle it is entirely computer-guided, Air Force officials even claim to not know “when it’s coming back.” Since the Air Force is being so vague and since the X-37B fits the speculation surrounding the PGS so well, you have to wonder if the two are related.

Norway's Mystery Spiral A Mystery No Longer

You've probably seen the video of the bizarre blue spiral that appeared in the nighttime sky above Norway on Wednesday, but just in case you haven't you can watch it below thanks to YouTube:



The mystery of the spiral appears to have been solved. It was not a UFO, or as some wiseguys suggested a Star appearing in the Eastern Sky to herald the arrival of Barrack Obama in Oslo, but something much more mundane: a failed Russian missile test. The Christian Science Monitor went so far as to talk to a real rocket scientist about the Norwegian light show. Dr. William Dimpfl explained that the pinwheel effect was likely caused by a misfiring rocket motor spinning the rocket out of control.

That meshes well with the Russian Defense Ministry's account of the latest test of the submarine-launched Bulava missile, which they say went out of control when its third stage became "unstable". Of course the Russians built the Bulava to be the high-tech, interceptor-dodging next generation of their ICBM forces, not to put on spectacular light shows over Norway. And that's where the troubles start - so far the Bulava has failed in seven of its twelve test launches, one Russian analyst said that only one test flight was a "full success".

Some in the Kremlin say that the Bulava's design itself is flawed and are pushing for the construction of more of an earlier generation, but reliable, missile. Others in the defense ministry are offering the excuse that the Bulava is failing because of poor production quality due to outdated, Soviet-era factories, which is a pretty lousy excuse if you think about it.

No word yet on when the Bulava's next test may be, but the Norwegians will likely be watching the skies when it happens.

Cosmonaut's Blog, The Funniest Thing in Space

Wired.com posted this story yesterday about Cosmonaut Maksim Suraev, blogger and current resident of the International Space Station. And unlike NASA's efforts on the Internet, Suraev's blog is pretty damn funny (thankfully RussiaToday is offering an English-language translation of Suraev's posts). Among his recent posts was the photo below:


Suraev described the gadget as a combination eavesdropping device for listening in on the American side of the space station and ray gun for fighting off an alien invasion - though the ray gun could come in handy if the Americans were to again ban the Russians from using their toilet (actually the thing is a pump Maksim and another astronaut had just replaced). In other posts, Suraev describes a panicky late-night wake-up call from ground control about a possible collision with some space debris, and some truly bizarre mis-translations of food packet labels. With his blog, Cosmonaut Suraev manages to put a very human, and occasionally hilarious, face on space travel.

One Giant Oops For Bangladeshi News

It should have been the biggest story of the decade - proof that the Moon landings in 1969 were in fact an elaborate hoax. The problem for Bangladesh's Daily Manab Zamin and New Nation newspapers was the source - the satirical American newspaper/website The Onion.

This week, The Onion ran one of their usual funny faux news stories: "Conspiracy Theorist Convinces Neil Armstrong Moon Landing Was Faked." In it Neil Armstrong, the first man on the moon, says he was convinced that the landing was fake after reading blog posts from a moon landing conspiracy theorist and admitted that he mis-remembered the events of July 1969.

The Daily Manab Zamin newspaper stumbled across The Onion story without realizing it was a joke, translated it into Bengali and ran it as front page news. The story was then picked up by the New Nation the next day. Hasanuzzuman Khan, associate editor at the Daily Manab Zamin, later admitted his paper's error and ran an apology. "We thought it was true so we printed it without checking," Khan said.

Of course checking your sources is Journalism 101. You can forgive the folks in far off Bangladesh for not knowing that The Onion was a joke newspaper (well one that's intentionally a joke, not like the New York Post say), but didn't they think that such a huge story would be the lead on a major news source like CNN or the BBC? The lesson for the Bangladesh news corps - always get two sources (some more J-school 101 knowledge).

Follow The Moon Landing Live (+40 Years)

It was 40 years ago this month that the first two humans - American astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin - first set foot on the Moon, one of the biggest achievements in human history and an event that ended the Space Race between the United States and Soviet Union.

The idea of the Moon mission was first proposed by President John F. Kennedy in 1962, after his assassination a year later, the country took on making his idea a reality as a way of honoring the slain president. Now the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library has come up with an innovative way of commemorating the 40th anniversary of the event, by using new media to report on the Moon landing like it was happening today.

The website wechoosethemoon.org (the name is taken from a line in Kennedy's Moon speech) will follow the mission in real-time (well, real-time, plus forty years), complete with e-mail alerts and Twitter updates of key moments during the mission as they happen (or happened). It's a pretty interesting way to relive one of the milestone events of the 20th century.

Sudan Tanks Found By DIY Intelligence

You might remember this story from last September about how the Somali pirates got more than they bargained for when they snatched the Ukrainian-owned MV Faina only to discover its cargo included 33 Soviet-built T-72 tanks. In addition to worrying that those tanks could find their way into the hands of terrorists, the bigger question was where were they heading in the first place? The shipping company in Ukraine said they were bound for Kenya, but there was some thought that they actually were heading for South Sudan, a claim denied by the governments of Ukraine and Kenya. Now, thanks to some investigative work, we now know their ultimate destination was, in fact, South Sudan.

This is sparking more fears of (another) upcoming war in Sudan. In 2005, rebels in South Sudan signed a cease-fire agreement with the central government in Khartoum. One provision of the cease-fire was that a referendum on the South's independence would be held in 2011. It would seem that the leaders of South Sudan are not only expecting the vote to be for independence, but also that Khartoum will ignore the will of the people and try to keep the South as part of Sudan by force, and they're now working to build up their military to prepare for a re-launch of the civil war.

How we got this information itself is pretty interesting - it was the result of two staff members of the magazine Jane’s Defence Weekly pouring over some commercially available satellite imagery and tracking down the 33 tanks. Wired.com's Danger Room blog makes the point that with a little knowledge and a good bit of patience, public satellite image services, like Google Earth, are making it possible for anyone to become their own armchair intelligence agency.

Cool Picture of the Day

The folks at NASA provide us with the cool picture of the day - a volcanic eruption as seen from space.



The International Space Station happened to be flying over Sarychev Peak, on the Russian island of Matua in the Northern Pacific, while it was erupting. Some quick camera work captured this awesome shot.

Politics, lack of vision muddle US space efforts

NASA announced on Friday that it had signed a $300 million deal with Russia's space agency Roscosmos to ferry astronauts to the International Space Station (ISS). It's a good thing too since without the deal after next year, NASA would have no way to get astronauts back and forth to the ISS.

That's because NASA is planning to retire the Space Shuttle - America's only manned space vehicle - at the end of 2010. Its replacement, the Orion, isn't scheduled for its first manned flight until 2014, and that project is said to be running behind schedule. So even as NASA is dedicating all of the remaining Space Shuttle flights to finishing the construction of the ISS, it won't have a way to send astronauts to and fro - hence the need to rely on Roscosmos as a taxi service.

It's typical of the lack of long-term planning and political will that has hampered the American space program since the Moon landings in 1969. Take the International Space Station for example. The space station idea goes back to the Reagan administration, only then it was dubbed space station "Freedom" that would have been an American-only affair (not to mention as large as two football fields). But there was little will among Congress to pay "Freedom's" huge cost, so the project was scaled back and eventually morphed into the International Space Station.

In the early 90's NASA struck a deal with Russia to gain access to Russia's expertise in operating orbiting space stations - something the Russians had been doing since the 1970's. NASA even contributed modules to Russia's Mir space station - the crown jewel of the Russian space program. But NASA soon took to viewing Mir as a drain on its resources and as distraction from the ISS, so they pressured Russia into abandoning it and backing the ISS - which Russia finally did in 2001, sending Mir to a fiery plunge into the South Pacific.

But now, even as NASA is rushing to finish the ISS, a task projected to wrap up in 2011, they are already making plans to abandon it as well, just four years later in 2015. The reason? NASA's interest now is in going back to the Moon and maybe then onto Mars, space stations, once vital to NASA's plans, now seem like a drain on resources (like Mir was seen to be in the late 90's).

And there's the problem - space projects, like going to Mars say, can take decades - but NASA doesn't plan and Congress certainly doesn't fund projects in terms of decades. So NASA acts in a herky-jerky manner - rush to finish the ISS then quickly abandon it - that in the end doesn't accomplish much, yet spends tens of billions of dollars in the process.

Meanwhile Russia is floating an idea for recycling on a grand scale - if NASA does abandon ISS in 2015, Russia is drawing up plans to pull their parts of the ISS off and use them to create their own just-Russian space station (likely to be named Mir-2). Russian officials say that their experience from Mir (Mir-1 that is) show that by replacing components as they wear out, a space station could, in theory, operate indefinitely.

Today in history: Volcanoes, Moon Men

It turns out that Monday is the anniversary of two big science events in recent history: The Apollo 10 mission to the Moon, and the eruption of Washington state's Mount St. Helens.

Apollo 10 was the dress rehearsal for the Apollo 11 mission that would land on the Moon two months later (the BBC published a good history of the Apollo 10 mission here). The main mission of Apollo 10 was to prove that the Command Module (the part of the spaceship carrying the astronauts) could successfully launch and recover the Lunar Lander (which would actually touchdown on the Moon). Docking two spacecraft outside of Earth's orbit had never been accomplished before, which is why NASA opted to try everything out in Apollo 10, before attempting to land on the Moon in the Apollo 11 mission.

The BBC notes that the whole concept of using two ships - an orbiter and a lander - to reach the moon was first proposed by a Russian named Yuri Kondratyuk back in 1916. It's ironic since the US and Soviet Union were in quite a race to the Moon during the 1960s; and it was far from a sure thing that the United States would get there first.

The Soviet Union proved that it had a ship capable of sending a cosmonaut to the Moon and back in 1968 with the Zond 5 mission that carried a menagerie of animals on the voyage - the first living things to make the trip. But the Soviets trailed in developing a ship to actually land on the lunar surface. The Soviet program suffered in the mid-1960s from the loss its chief designer, Sergei Korolev, and its chief patron, Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev; had they not lost these two men, it is quite possible that the Russians could have been the first to travel around the Moon at least.

Meanwhile Monday was also the anniversary of the 1980 eruption of Mount St. Helens. The eruption knocked more than 1,000 feet off the top of the mountain, killed 57 people and blanketed much of the Pacific Northwest with inches of volcanic ash. I've talked with people who lived in the Northwest at the time of the eruption and they all say the ash was incredibly hard to clean up - it was so fine it got into everything, sweeping it was nearly useless since it would blow into ash clouds once a broom touched it and would then settle back down on whatever surface you just tried to clean.

That's quite a lot of history for a Monday.

North Korea, 0-for-2 in missile launches

As expected, on Sunday North Korea fired the Taepodong-2 missile they've been preparing for the past two months, but like the first Taepodong-2 launch in 2006, this one also was a failure. According to tracking data gathered by the United States and Japan, the rocket’s second stage seems to have malfunctioned and the third stage never ignited, dropping the Taepodong-2 into the Pacific about 2,000 miles from North Korea, well short of it’s projected 5,000 mile range.

Of course this didn’t stop North Korea from claiming that the launch was a total success and for alleging that even now the satellite Kwangmyongsong-2 is circling the Earth, broadcasting patriotic hymns to North Korea’s Kim Jong Il and his father Kim Il Sung. Nor did it stop Dear Leader Kim from hailing the rocket’s “successful” launch, while, according to the North Korean state news agency, saying he “felt regret for not being able to spend more money on the people’s livelihoods and was choked with sobs.”

Uh-huh…I mean Kim could have spent money on feeding his nation’s starving citizenry, but why do that when there are dud rockets to launch?

Of course the whole reason Kim had the State sink untold billions into the Taepodong-2 project was to provoke exactly the type of response that he got from the world community. The launch was roundly condemned as a provocation by just about everyone, while the United Nations met in an emergency session to discuss what to do next about North Korea and the troublesome Kim. And, of course, right wing pundits and politicians in the United States took President Obama to task for not doing enough to stop Kim and for leaving the United States “at-risk” of North Korean nuclear attacks.

This, frankly, is a wild overstatement of North Korea’s abilities. So far North Korea’s nuclear ICBM program has consisted of two failed rocket launches and one dud nuclear weapons test, hardly a fearsome program. But this doesn’t stop some from presenting North Korea as an existential threat to the existence of the United States (including this gem from Neo-conservative spokesman Frank Gaffney, who takes a turn into science fiction by insisting that North Korea will not only develop a working ICBM, but also an electro-magnetic pulse [EMP] weapon that will destroy all of America’s electronics, plunging us back into the Stone Age).

So what to do about North Korea? My idea – nothing. Talk of more sanctions on North Korea were scuttled by China and Russia at the UN, mostly by China which fears that if the government in North Korea collapses, they’d have millions of starving refugees showing up on their border. Knowing this Kim has in the past used weapons test to scare the world community into concessions to North Korea on foreign aid to prevent him from developing more weapons (which he’s usually just gone ahead with anyway).

Knowing this, then perhaps the best move would be to do nothing, to basically ignore the Taepodong-2 test, realizing that as a weapon of war the Taepodong-2 is useless. Not only does it take months to get ready to launch (more than enough time to destroy one on the ground), it doesn’t work once it is fired. Maybe if we move away from the fear-based negotiations scheme with North Korea, it will open a path for a new kind of relations with the world’s most reclusive nation.

Russia to unveil new spaceship

Russia is ready to debut plans for a new model spaceship on Monday, a ship that could one day carry cosmonauts to the moon.

The as-yet unnamed spacecraft will replace the venerable Soyuz that has been the backbone of manned Russian/Soviet spaceflight since the late 1960's. The new ship would come in at least two versions - a six-seat model for flights in Earth orbit and a four-seater that could travel to the Moon, and possibly beyond. It will be designed to dock either with the International Space Station or a future Russian space station.

Unfortunately though its requirements like that last one, and the moon flight option, that show the International Space Station experiment has ultimately been a failure. Here's why - the whole idea of the ISS was to bring together the world's space-fairing nations (we'll count the European Space Agency as a 'national' program here for simplicity's sake) together on one common project. The rationale is simple, that by working together countries can achieve more than working individually. This is especially true for something as hugely expensive and complex as manned spaceflight.

But in recent years countries have talked less and less about collaborating. The United States has announced plans to return to the Moon, China also has their own lunar plans, so do (apparently) the Russians. The ESA has drawn up plans for its own manned space vehicle; India and even South Korea are working on their own designs as well.

It's a huge duplication of efforts, not to mention costs. A manned mission to Mars would be humankind’s next great step in exploration, and it would also be wildly expensive, likely costing far more than any one country would be willing to spend. It is the type of project that would require international cooperation on a broad scale, the type of cooperation looking less and less likely.