Tag: NASA

News Release: Satellites

Posted on by Brian Garthwaite
NASA press release of satellites in orbit
It’s a space race score sheet!

April 14th, 1961: NASA publishes a list of satellites and space probes orbiting the Earth, Moon, and Sun, and it all fits on a single, ordinary, typed sheet of letter-sized paper. Twenty-six in all.

Just take a moment to marvel at that.

Now, of course, we (as in humans, not the physics shop) are still sending scads of objects into space, and NASA maintains the ARES Orbital Debris Program to keep track of all the crap up there.

Remember: wishing upon the burning reentry of space debris is just as good as on the remnants of comet dust!

News Release: Metric System

Posted on by Brian Garthwaite
NASA news: metric system
‘Bout time.

NASA makes an effort to switch over to the metric system. (For some things.) Because when your day-to-day job involves a lot of calculations and unit conversions, decimal-based order takes a lot of irritation out of doing ordinary stuff.

NASA data with hand-written kilometers to miles conversion
Working units to brain-thinking units.

Of course, when you make the changeover from one system to another, it’s a challenge. Sometimes it’s necessary to use a few crutches before the comfort and ease settle in. (Note that this particular sheet predates the press release by the better part of a decade.)

Enlargement of handwritten note
We’ve all been there.

Odd observations:

  • It’s written out in plain English, rather than as a symbolic equation, like ” 1 km = 0.6214 mi. “
  • There’s no 0 before the decimal point.
  • The k for kilo is capitalized, and there’s a period after the m.
  • But there’s no period at the end of the actual sentence.
  • Love that old-school printed g.

News Release: Space Toilet

Posted on by Brian Garthwaite
Title: Bathroom Commode Design for Space Shuttle Passengers
Cannot overstate the importance of this project.

In cleaning out decades of old papers, attempting to determine what’s worth saving, one occasionally stumbles across the in-betweens: those bits worth remarking upon, but not worth keeping.

For those who’ve kept up on reading Mary Roach’s books, the importance and extreme engineering challenges of making a good space toilet are immense. Suffice to say, the problem was far from solved in 1972.

Ranger 4

Posted on by Brian Garthwaite
NASA press release details on the Ranger 4 launch
The rest were on white paper. Why yellow for Ranger 4?

We have several boxes of NASA press releases from the height of the space age, for the simple reason that it’s easier to pack things away than to sort and dispose of junk. None of them are worth much, really, but they can be entertaining. Take this, for example, a summary of the Ranger 4 launch. Not mentioned here, but interesting: Ranger 4 was the first US spacecraft to reach another solar system body.

By crashing into the Moon, as intended. You can read more in a brief summary by Leonard David, or by skimming Wikipedia.

Entertaining bits gleaned from the Space Activities Summary:

  • “Major Objectives Impact Moon”
  • “Major Results Impacted Moon”
  • Velocity is listed as “At lunar impact, 5,963 mph,” but can safely be assumed to be zero very shortly thereafter.
  • The “rough-land survivable seismometer” likely didn’t, although the fact that it crashed on the far side means we’ll never know.
  • There may have been “[n]o scientific data obtained,” but they did slam a space probe into the Moon, and before anyone else.

Old Press Releases

Posted on by Brian Garthwaite
NASA press releases from 1971
FOR RELEASE: February 1, 1971; FOR KEEPSIES: In Perpetuity

Do you ever set aside some papers, because you don’t need them right now, but they were maybe interesting for later? And then eventually there’s just a pile or folder or shelf devoted to these, because you’ve inadvertently started a collection? And then, half a century later, someone stumbles across these boxes and wonders, why?

Why do we have boxes of printed press releases from NASA in the early 1970s? Probably the same reason we have old math exams from the 1940s out at the Observatory. (That’s a post for another time!)

Honestly, if we’d been diligent about tidying this stuff, this blog would be way less interesting.