From the Earth to the Moon...




Composite image of lunar eclipse, as seen from near Ann Arbor, Michigan, February 21, 2008, taken with my Canon Digital Rebel XT. Other images here.


Though it all happened before I was born -- well, that's not entirely true, Apollo 16 and 17 went up shortly after I was born, but I was focused on other things, like crying and pooping -- I've always been fascinated with the NASA efforts to get to the moon, from Mercury through Apollo. I'm a nut for any good documentaries on the subject. The best, in my opinion, is the HBO miniseries From the Earth to the Moon, which is out on DVD and you really should see (and it has a great theme by Michael Kamen.) It's based on the book, A Man on the Moon, by Andrew Chaiken (a book so jam packed with uber-geek knowledge that it does sometimes drag a bit) which is probably the most authoritative narrative of the space program from those days.

Anyway, today is the 40th anniversary of the launch of Apollo 11, and just in time new video of the first landing has been released. The video that we've all seen was a low-resolution version that was the result of bad software that converted the raw data into a signal that could be broadcast to the TVs of the time. The raw data itself would have provided much clearer images with good processing software, but the tapes were lost, and were probably erased. However a new effort using the broadcast software from various stations and image enhancement processing has provided the clearest version of the one small step ever seen.

And in a few years, we'll finally be going back. We recently sent up a satellite to the moon designed to give us the highest resolution images ever of the surface, a key component of finding good landing sites. The new Ares I rocket is set for a test flight later this year. The Ares I is based on the Shuttle's solid rocket engines. It's the same design, but with one additional segment. The Constellation, the crew capsule, is under development and its MLAS (the Max Launch Abort System), a key safety component ,has already been tested. The Ares V, the most powerful rocket ever designed, more powerful even than the Saturn V, is under development (again based on off-the-shelf Shuttle technology and updated Saturn V engines.)

So with any luck, within a few years we might once again make that long trek from the Earth to the Moon ...

Posted: Thu - July 16, 2009 at 10:16 AM        

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