What Was Not to Be: The Apollo 18, 19 and 20 Landing Sites

From Footprints in the Dust, chapter 11, by Colin Burgess, pg. 336:

Apollo 18’s Lunar module was scheduled to land in Schroter’s Valley, the site of intriguing transient lunar phenomena and possibly even volcanic activity. The two-man landing crew of Apollo 19 would then have explored the collapsed lava tubes of Hyginus Rille. The most hazardous but ultimately benficial mission of all would have

Read More

How (Not) to Launch the First Satellite

“If Project Orbiter had gone ahead as planned, the United States would have placed a satellite in orbit during the summer of 1956.”
From Rockets, Missiles, and Men in Space by Willy Ley, 1968 edition, pp. 304-323:


In the spring of 1954 the Space-Flight Committee of the American Rocket Society had worked out a satellite proposal which had been submitted through various channels. The time was

Read More

Man in Space? “Utter Bilge!”

From Rockets, Missiles, and Men in Space by Willy Ley, 1968 edition, pg. 361:


In 1959 the newly appointed Astronomer Royal of England, Australian-born Richard van de Riet Wooley, told the British press that space travel was “utter bilge.” Ever since, the British Interplanetary Society has had a fine time giving him reports such as “An American named Carpenter has penetrated utter bilge for the

Read More

Knocking the Atlas Missile – With Hammers

The Atlas missile was a highly capable launch vehicle due to its very low structural mass. The place where the greatest mass saving was realized was in the fuel tanks which were, in effect, giant, load-bearing, stainless steel balloons whose strength came not from their dime-thin walls, but from their internal pressure. Without that pressure, the Atlas would have collapsed under its own weight,

Read More

Astronaut Benefits

From Walter Cunningham’s forward to In the Shadow of the Moon, page xii:


[....] When I went to work as an astronaut, in 1963, I earned a little over $13,000 a year. I once calculated that, during my Apollo 7 mission, I had earned the great sum of $660. But we weren’t doing it for the money—nobody does a job like that for the money. Any one of us would have paid NASA to have the job!
[....]

Read More

Video: Bats’ Morning Return to the Bamberger Chiroptorium

I had the opportunity last week to watch the bats return to the Bamberger Ranch Preserve’s chiroptorium. The morning return isn’t as dramatic as the evening emergence, but it’s still something to see. Realizing that, for the first time, I had a device that could capture high definition (720p) video, I propped up my iPhone 4 on the fence at the mouth of the chiroptorium and let it record for about

Read More

Java Text – A Closer Look at the Ugly

Because the failings of the native Java text renderer have had such an adverse impact on my recent work, I think additional examination of the issue is merited. So, to further illustrate the difference between text rendered by Java 6 on Mac OS X and Linux, I’ve taken two paragraphs of text and written a program that fits them on-the-fly into an image of a specified size. Text fitting is vital to

Read More

Java Text - When Platform Independence Fails

I‘ve recently been working on a Java web application that does server-side rendering of complex graphics that include text. Having sweated all the details to maximize the quality of the application’s output; having finally made the application sufficiently stable and feature-complete to enter beta testing; and having jumped through some unrelated hoops to make the production host usable, I

Read More