MASS

 

Blog for Sunday, May 28, 2023

This is the fifth weekly blog, I think it is a habit. Hope you enjoy. Any feedback is appreciated.

This week we took grandson Ian, who is graduating from grade school this summer, to our health club for a workout. To warm up, I started with a half mile walk, but he chose to run it and then did 19 flights of stairs on a step-machine while he waited for me to finish my walking. Then, I put him thru my weightlifting workout and finally Carol and I had him hit the racquetball around with us for a half hour. I consider the racquetball event an enormous success because no one got injured. When you get my 300 lbs moving, a racquetball wall could create enormous G-forces on a septuagenarian body.

On one of my daily walks this week, I was listening to Beth’s “Casual Space” podcast with Dr. Kirby Runyon who helps prepare people to identify Arizona geological landmarks while on their Virgin Galactic trips to space. He mentioned Arizona Meteor Crater and its $20 charge for admission. I remember, as a recent High School graduate back in 1967, a friend and I descending into the crater with no contact with anyone on the rim and then having some problems climbing back out. My friend was a better climber than me and I started to have a vision of my bones becoming part to the crater floor mystique. But eventually perseverance paid off and I made it out. Oh, the adventures of youth.

Virgin Galactic launch – On May 25, Virgin Galactic, got back in the sub-orbital launch business with the launch of 6 employees, including 2 pilots and 4 passengers, 3 of whom were space rookies. The 13- minute flight on VSS Unity began with a drop from the VSM Eve carrier plane, continued with a powered ascent to 87.2km (54.2 mi) and ended with a landing in New Mexico. This height qualified them as astronauts because most people recognize the McDowell line at 80 km (50 mi) as the boundary of space, not the more stringent Von Karman line at 100km (62 mi). The recent flight raises the count of people who have gone into space up to 653. This was the first sub-orbital flight in 2023. Blue Origin (BO), the other sub-orbital company, has been grounded since their anomaly with an unmanned mission on New Shepard on September 12, 2022. BO says its nozzle on its booster suffered a “structural fatigue failure”, meaning the nozzle fell apart. The capsule blasted away from the booster and landed safely. But the booster was a total loss. There is no word when they will resume launching people on sub-orbital flights. People in space for 2023 is a low total of 14, with the only other manned launches being 2 Dragon capsules with 4 people on each, the CREW6 mission on March 2 and AX-2 mission on May 21. This low count harkens back to 2021, when Carol won the MASS Prize by being closest in guessing that 49 people would go into space including 22 on sub-orbital flights. Last year, 2021, there were 38 people launched. We’ve got a way to go to break the record of 63 people in the calendar year 1985. That high count was due to 58 people launching on the Space Shuttle and 5 on Soyuz. As a final comment, Virgin Galactic should not be confused with Virgin Orbit that recently went bankrupt and had its assets sold off to RocketLab. Virgin Orbit was trying to launch satellites into space by dropping a rocket slung below the wing of their 747 named “Cosmic Girl’. Airborne launches have a lot of flexibility for launch location around the world but the constraints of the limited rocket size and payload made it a losing business case.

LIGO coming back on line – After a 3-year hiatus, the 2 LIGO gravitational wave observatories are back online with improved sensitivity. They should be able to pick up a signal every 2-3 days now compared to once a week during the 2019-2020 run. The Virgo detector in Italy also was upgraded but technical issues are forcing its shutdown to extend until early Autumn. KAGRA in Japan is also restarting on May 24 but its sensitivity is lower than LIGO. LIGO’s first detection was in 2015 and so far, 90 events have been recorded of black hole mergers, neutron star mergers or one occurrence of a black hole-neutron star combination merger.