Peace and Joy at Christmas

I am signing-off now for a day or so over Christmas, but wish all who pass this way a Joyous Christmas and a Peaceful, Happy and Prosperous New Year. For my music this year I am embedding a short video-clip of images taken from the Hubble Telescope and using the music of Johnann Pachelbel's Canon in D Major, highly appropriate at this time of year. Enjoy!

An era of spaceflight ends with the last Shuttle flight scheduled later today

(Please see UPDATE at end)

Later today, if all goes as planned, Shuttle Atlantis will be launched on the last ever Shuttle Mission, designated as ST-135. Full details of all Shuttle missions are listed here, from the first test flights until the later operational flights.

I am lucky enough to have been on vacation in Florida during the time of one of the launches in 1985 and because my itinerary was flexible I extended my stay in the Daytona Beach area for a couple of extra days, staying at an hotel on Cocoa Beach just south of Cape Canaveral (aka Cape Kennedy) so that I could line up on the beach with several hundred others to watch the launch and even although we were in fact some miles away from the launch site it was quite impressive. A couple of days earlier I had in fact visited the Kennedy Space Center on a regular tourist bus picked up through my hotel and enjoyed it very much - quite apart from visiting the various exhibition halls there (for example the displays relating to the Apollo moon missions and the old mission control room used for them) we were taken on a tour of a small part of the base, which is vast, with the various launch sites pointed out in the distance even although for security reasons we were never taken very close to them - but because the assemble halls and launch structures are so huge one never had any difficulty in seeing them.

So that was pretty exciting, but a few months later my memories of watching the launch of mission STS-61-A on 30th October 1985 (the 22nd Shuttle mission) became somewhat bittersweet, because that was the penultimate mission of Shuttle Challenger, which exploded soon after its launch on 28th January 1986 (Shuttle mission 25).

Now the International Space Staion will be reliant on manned flights provided by the Russians and in future it seems possible that the major space-faring nation will be China. Who knows? All of this will probably come when I am far too old to know or care, or perhaps after my demise. Near-Earth flights seem to be what we will be limited to for the forseeable future.

My hope of course is that today's planned launch of Shuttle Atlantis will see its 12-day mission completed successfully and safely.

UPDATE (Friday 08JUL2011 16.40 BST) Shuttle Atlantis was successfully launched about 10 minutes ago, I am very happy to record.

Film review: Star Trek

As I have mentioned here before, I am an unashamed Star Trek 'addict', not sufficiently obsessed to have ever gone to an ST 'convention' or to have dressed in costume, but I do like the show and have done so ever since I saw the original Star Trek in the late 1960s on the black-and-white television we had at home then (colour television transmissions were available to most of the UK only from about 1968 if I recall correctly and colour televisions were pretty expensive then).

Anyway, at the weekend I took myself off to see the latest movie (the 11th I think) in the Star Trek series. The official website for the new movie is here and a cast-list is here. The main official Star Trek website is here.

This movie is supposed to be a new take on the Star Trek saga, set sometime before the time-frame of the original television series when the characters from that series were in their younger years (and therefore played by completely different actors, as all the original actors are either dead or quite elderly now) and sometime after the most recent television series Star Trek: Enterpise. I had never seen most of the actors before, but there are a few familiar faces from other movies and television series and of course Leonard Nimoy, 'Spock' from the original series and a number of the earlier Star Trek movies, has a cameo role as a time-shifted 'Spock'.

Basically the new movie is a very slick production indeed and I think the transition into a new storyline is handled very well for a new generation of younger 'addicts' as well as being readily-acceptable to people of my generation who watched the original series as teenagers. CGI plays a big part in the new movie, a technology which simply didn't exist in the 1960s or even really when Star Trek: The Next Generation kicked-off an earlier revial of the franchise on television. As with a lot of newer movies, I found the whole experience very loud and noisy - cinema sound systems are so much more powerful than in earlier years, but an extremely enjoyable 'wheeze' and no doubt it is a platform upon which Paramount can build in future years if they think it will prove commercially viable - and based on the evidence of this latest movie I think that is pretty likely. More please!

Different views on gun control in the US - and far above it

A quirky one this. Through a one-line link in Andrew Sullivan's blog I came across this story which strikes me as rather bizarre, even if very understandable.

It seems that Russian spacecraft, including the Soyuz module attached to the International Space Station, are equipped with emergency kits which include guns; US astronauts who fly in Russian craft are trained in their use, although none are carried aboard US spacecraft. Former NASA engineer Jim Oberg thinks guns have no place in space and that they would be better left on Earth.

Jim Oberg's views on this matter seem to me to be uncontroversial and quite sensible. However, juxtapose this with the fact that he comes from a country in which the 2nd Amendment to its Constitution states: A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed. - and is moreover a country in which, within the past week, there have been four shoot-outs in educational establishments in widely different areas. Bizarrely enough I visited the most recent venue for this presumably extra-curricular activity at Northern Illinois State University in De Kalb, Illinois, many years ago whilst spending a few days with a former school friend who was at the time lecturing there; I recall it as being a very sedate mid-western town set in a rolling countryside of grain fields.

There are two ways of looking at this story. Either Jim Oberg is using his knowledge of what can happen when guns happen to be to hand when someone decides, for whatever reason (or if mentally unhinged, unreason), to shoot him-/herself or others dead and prefers to keep such a possibility out of reach of astronauts who, however well trained and disciplined they are, are also human beings subject to the same range of emotions as the rest of us - as was graphically displayed a couple of years ago by Lisa Nowak. The other more cynical interpretation of his comments is that he is being somewhat hypocritical, although on this occasion I don't think that is the right one - I am sure he said what he did out of a fear that what is so commonplace in the US might one day be replicated in space.