Rockets, Real & Imagined

        Photo: Bill Ingalls, NASA

ROCKET WATCHERS: We had our eyes on NASA TV most of the day, as  we do on any manned launch day.

Today's event was the launch of a Soyuz from the Baikonur Cosmodrome to the International Space Station. On board were Soyuz Commander Fyodor Yurchikhin of the Russian Federal Space Agency (Roscosmos), Flight Engineer Karen Nyberg of NASA and Flight Engineer Luca Parmitano of the European Space Agency.

In the NASA photo above, you can see the vehicle on the launch pad, with an airplane shaped wind vane in the foreground. By the time the rocket shot off, it was 1:31 p.m. our time, but the wee small hours (2:31 a.m.) in Kazakhstan, so the lift off lit up the night sky.

                       Photo: Bill Ingalls, NASA

The trio who took off today will be on board the ISS until mid-November. Yurchikhin, Nyberg, and Parmitano will remain aboard the station until mid-November. Pre-launch coverage on NASA TV included taped interviews with each of the astronauts. 

We learned that Parmitano, a major in the Italian Air Force, will be the first Italian to live aboard the International Space Station. We figure he must be very proud to hold that distinction.

NASA's Nyberg grew up in Vining, Minnesota, a town of just 100 people. She was the fifth of six children, so her family made up a significant part of the town's population! Nyberg has a PhD in mechanical engineering, is married to astronaut Doug Hurley, and has a three year old son. It's her second spaceflight, but her first long duration mission. She hopes to do some drawing while on the ISS.

Today's launch was notable because it's just the second time the Soyuz took the rapid approach to the ISS. Instead of taking days to get there, it made a six-hour run. We watched the docking after dinner, and everything appeared 'nominal,' our favorite word on launch days.

HARSH REALITY:  We started watching the final lectures for our "Einstein: The Special Theory of Relativity" class today.  One of the lectures today dealt with the harsh realities involved when it comes to being able to travel at the speed of light.

For instance, let's say Alice wants to fly to the center of the universe, which is 30,000 light years away from Bob, who's waiting back on Earth. The good news is, Alice has technology which allows her to fly at .99999999777778 of the speed of light, so she takes off, and it takes her 2 years to reach the center of the universe, and two years to fly back home.

However, when she gets back, Bob is nowhere to be found. That's because to Bob, the center of the universe was always 30,000 light years away, and Bob's loooong gone, as is Bob Jr., Bob III and so on. It's hundreds of generations later, if there are still Bobs on Earth at all. In Annabelle's illustration above, you can see Alice returns to find some Bobs with their eyes Xed out, which means they're toast.

Another interesting thing we learned today is that if Alice was able to go warp speed, like Star Trek, or into hyperdrive, like Star Wars' Millennium Falcon, she wouldn't see the stars become streaks, passing her ship. Rather, when traveling very near the speed of light, the starlight would be shifted from visible wavelengths to X-ray wavelengths. Also, as she was looking in the direction of travel, she'd see a fuzzy glow from the cosmic microwave background radiation (a remnant of the Big Bang) shifted into the visible spectrum due to her speed.

We also learned that even if Alice could somehow travel at the speed of light, it would take a tremendous amount of energy to get her to accelerate up to that speed - energy that's beyond our capabilities of producing at the present and for the foreseeable future. Unless, of course, we can find some dilithium crystals, per Annabelle's picture.

SWIMMING IN THE RAIN: We spent the morning getting some homework and errands done, including applying for new passports for the kids for our trip to England this fall.  This afternoon, even though the weather wasn't particularly nice, I suggested Christian take the kids to the public pool. (In fact, when it's not nice is the time to go, as it keeps others away.)  The big pool has a 50-foot corkscrew slide and is heated to 85 degrees. The little pool is 94 degrees, and often full of parents and their toddlers and infants in swim diapers. Christian and the kids pop into that pool just often enough to get warm.

The trio had the place practically to themselves, and enjoyed 90 minutes of splashing around. The kids' swimming skills are making great strides this year.