Escape Vehicle no.6 presents the journey of a domestic chair from the earth to the edge of space. The film started as a live event in a disused aircraft testing site. The live audience first witnessed the launching of a weather balloon with a domestic chair dangling in beneath it. Once the apparatus had disappeared into the sky they then watched a live video relay from the weather balloon as it journeyed from the ground to the edge of space (30km up).
Space Program
Backyard rockets
This reminds me of the shuttle launch I saw last March. An awesome thing to experience in person.
22 million horsepower solid rocket engine test
For the impatient. skip to the 1:40 mark.
NASA and industry partners lit up the Utah sky on Sept. 10, 2009, with the initial full scale, full-duration test firing of the first motor for the Ares I rocket. ATK Space Systems conducted the successful stationary firing of the five-segment solid development motor 1, or DM-1. ATK Space Systems, a division of Alliant Techsystems of Brigham City, Utah, is the prime contractor for the Ares I first stage. Engineers will use the measurements gathered from the test to evaluate thrust, roll control, acoustics and motor vibrations. This data will provide valuable information as NASA develops the Ares I and Ares V vehicles. Another ground test is planned for summer 2010.
Today is Carl Sagan Day
Back in 1980 the US space program was in the doldrums. Apollo was fading into history and there hadn’t been a US astronaut in space for five years. The quirky space shuttle, much diminished from its initial vision, was still waiting to make its maiden flight.
But that fall came Cosmos, a revolutionary documentary series with a compelling host. Both the television universe and the real one have never been quite the same.
Carl Sagan, by equal measure professorial and childlike, offered space enthusiasts a new paradigm. Buck Rogers was out; refined and groovy cosmic citizen was in. Here was a visionary whose perspective dwarfed the politics of the space race and who spoke of humanity as a brotherhood with a common past and a transcendent future in the heavens.
“We are star stuff which has taken its destiny into its own hands,” he told us. “The loom of time and space works the most astonishing transformations of matter.”
Sagan, who died in 1996, would be turning 75th today, an occasion which has prompted the celebration of Carl Sagan Day.
