StarFest, Spaceships, and Hubble, Oh My
My good friend and colleague Dr. Steve Lee and I had a standing-room-only crowd at StarFest 2007 in Denver last weekend. We took turns showing off the exploits of various robotic explorers of the planets to an enthusiastic and interested crowd. I started things off with a superficial overview at breakneck speed of Cassini’s many discoveries at Saturn, and a preview of upcoming visits to Pluto by New Horizons and Mercury by the MESSENGER spacecraft. Steve followed with an overview of the intrepid Mars Exploration Rovers, now operating after more than 10 times the duration of their nominal mission. Although Leonard Nimoy didn’t make it to our talk (incredible though that may seem), I attended his entertaining Q&A. Here he is shortly after I asked him about a ride on SpaceShipTwo, the sub-orbital hop being offered by Virgin Galactic at $200 grand a pop starting in 2009. You can tell he’s not overly enthusiastic about the prospect.
The next day I was off to D.C. where I got a chance to visit the National Air and Space Museum where the original SpaceShipOne craft that won the X Prize is on display. I was expecting it to be smaller than it was, though when you think about riding it to the edge of space it by no means seems big.
What did seem positively gigantic, on the other hand, was the full-scale mockup of the Hubble Space Telescope. I tend to be a bit cocky in boasting that Cassini is the largest interplanetary spacecraft. Hubble positively dwarfs it. Part of that comes from the nature of the beast: Hubble is a telescope with a lot of empty space inside that tube, while Cassini is a more densely packed beast. Nevertheless, the mass of HST at 11,000 kg is almost double the mass of Cassini at launch (6000 kg), and half of Cassini’s mass at launch was fuel to use in deep space maneuvers, breaking at Saturn, and trajectory correction maneuvers.
My last stop at the Smithsonian was to see the 3-D IMAX film Magnificent Desolation about the Apollo moon landings. The movie does an impressive job of rendering actual Apollo photos (many of which I recognized from the originals) in 3-D. Having grown up with Apollo and dreams of going to the Moon myself one day, and seeing the children in this movie announcing their determination to go there, I found the film surprisingly moving.