Missing Believed Wiped

I don’t know if anyone caught ITV3’s affectionate documentary Those Were The Days about the Apollo 11 Moon Landing last night, with interviews and footage about the momentous event. (It's currently available on ITV's CatchUp service and to be repeated on 27 April).

The documentary was interspersed with interviews with others in the news at the time, including marathon runner Reg Hill, Miss British Isles beauty competition Pat Wheeldon, members of one hit wonder band Thunderclap Newman and Portsmouth's Leigh Park Six activists, who fought for the right to keep their local park’s admission free and were sent to prison for their protest.

Anyway, I just received a newsletter in which an anonymous poster relates that a lovely old chap at the BBC who'd been in charge of covering the first moon landing once told them that if the NASA mission had gone wrong, the only tape the Corporation had lined up to cut to was a Warner Bros Porky Pig cartoon!

On the plus side, I assume the BBC probably still have a copy of the cartoon, unlike the recordings of the studio coverage of the first moon landing, which, much to Sir Patrick Moore’s chagrin in the documentary, are lost! (Missing, Presumed Wiped?). How stupid is that...

Yuri's Night Celebrated in Style

Supporters of space exploration were busy celebrating this weekend, with annual Yuri's Night events across the planet on Saturday, marking Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin's first human space flight on 12th April 12th, 1961 and the first launch of the US Space Shuttle on 12th April 1981.

Yuri's Night is regarded like a St Patrick' or St George's Day for space. It's one day when all the world can come together and celebrate the power and beauty of space and what it means.

Almost 200 parties took place across the globe, with several in the UK, including one in Manchester to help raise money to save the world-reknowned Jodrell Bank Radio Telescope, under threat of closure thanks to penny-pinching government idiocy, a plan widely condemned by scientists (including Sir Bernard Lovell and The Sky at Night's Sir Patrick Moore), celebrities (Queen's Brian May, for one) and many others. (More on the campaign ot save Jodrell Bank here).

The largest Yuri's Night celebration on the planet drew an estimated 7,000 people to the tarmac at NASA's Ames Research Center in California, as young-minded people celebrated space exploration with music, dance, technology and art.

The celebration - the largest of 178 held around the world - was co-hosted with the Space Generation Advisory Council.

"When humans go into space, we take with us not just our science and technology but our hopes, our dreams, our art and our personal interactions," said Ames Director S. Pete Worden. "At Yuri's Night 2008, we celebrated all of these, and the enthusiasm of our guests was gratifying and reinvigorating."

More than 20 speakers including Apollo 11 Astronaut Buzz Aldrin, Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak and SimCity game creator Will Wright addressed participants and demonstrated cutting edge technologies. Musical acts including Telstar, a new trio led by former Grateful Dead basist Phil Lesh and DJ phenomenon Amon Tobin of Montreal performed on four stages. A trio of American and Soviet-era aircraft demonstrated aerobatics over Moffett Field, and San Francisco's interdisciplinary dance company Capacitor displayed human acrobatics.

Pictured above: One of many wild costumes at Yuri's Night. Photo courtesy of NASA Ames Research Center / Paul Langston

Our Own Space Odyssey

With the sad passing of Arthur C Clarke much has been said of the future that he envisaged with television news showing his fictional spaceships dancing to the strains of the Blue Danube from 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Yet we do live in a future of space travel and exploration, be it the communications satellites in the 22,240 mile high geostationary orbit that Clarke accurately predicted in 1945 or the ten year old International Space Station in its rather lower orbit of around 250 miles.

Today there are ten humans in orbit in the ISS, its own crew of three and the shuttle Endeavour’s crew of seven. Waiting in orbit for Endeavour to depart is ATV-1 Jules Verne, Europe’s first unmanned space truck launched on an Ariane 5-ES. It will dock with the station when Endeavour is safely away, and let us not forget the station’s own ship, Soyuz TMA-11, which took its core crew up there in the first place.

In the inner solar system Messenger continues its journey to Mercury where it is due to arrive in 2011, while the Mars Exploration Rovers, Spirit and Opportunity, continue to drive around the surface of the red planet as they have been doing for the last four years. In the outer solar system the Cassini probe continues its flypasts of Saturn and its numerous moons. A week ago it flew to within 30 miles of the surface of the moon Enceladus.

Beyond our solar system the Pioneer 10 probe is heading for Aldebaran and, assuming a Klingon Bird of Prey doesn’t use it for target practice as seen in Star Trek V, it should be there in about 2 million years. Meanwhile of the other interstellar probes, Pioneer 11 is heading for the constellation of Aguilla, Voyager 1 is heading in the direction of the constellation of Ophiuchus, and Voyager 2 towards Canis Major. Both Voyager craft continue to transmit data.

Rather closer to Earth, as the Shuttle programme winds down, we will have to put the name Apollo-Saturn out of our heads and start to think about the next generation of manned spacecraft and launchers, Orion-Ares.

Alternatively there will be the opportunity to make short hops high into the upper atmosphere in Virgin Galactic's SpaceShipTwo, as advertised on the back pages of Virgin's Dan Dare comic, or maybe even EADS-Astrium's space plane.

We do live in a future of space travel and exploration, we just tend to forget about it.

Go Weightless!

How cool is this - the chance to experience zero gravity in the only way possible without going to space.

Commercial, weightless flights will be offered this weekend at Moffett Field, California, under the terms of an agreement between NASA and the Zero Gravity Corporation, the company behind the mission last year which enabled Professor Stephen Hawking to experience weightlessness last year out of the Kennedy Space Center.

Although corporation officials said the first flight scheduled for tomorrow (Saturday 16 February) is already sold out, additional flights will be scheduled later this year.

A Reimbursable Space Act Agreement between NASA's Ames and Zero-G allows the corporation to park its aircraft on the airfield while flight operations are being conducted and during scheduled flights. The agreement also calls for NASA and Zero-G to develop research collaborations, starting in the autumn.

During its flight operations at NASA's Ames, the company will use a modified Boeing 727-200 aircraft, G-Force One, and fly from the Moffett Field runway. Passengers aboard the aircraft will experience brief periods of the same weightlessness that astronauts encounter while orbiting the Earth, as well as the same gravity conditions they would experience on the moon and on Mars.

While new to NASA's Ames, this is not the first time that these weightless flights have taken place at a NASA center. In 2006, Zero-G reached an agreement with NASA's Kennedy Space Center, Florida., to use the space shuttle runway for similar weightless flights for the public. Zero-G began operating weightless flights for the public at Kennedy in 2006, flying up to seven flights per week, up to a maximum of 280 flights a year.

As part of the agreement, the corporation, which was recently awarded a contract from NASA to conduct research and astronaut training, will reimburse NASA for the use of the runway and support costs.

Both NASA and Zero-G say scheduling of flights at Moffett Field will not interfere with NASA missions, other resident federal agencies, or with airfield operations or other activities, and will only take place in daylight hours and, hopefully to allay long-running concerns from local resident groups in Mountain View about aircraft noise, say the Boeing used is one of the quietest developed.

• For more information about ZERO-G visit: www.GoZeroG.com

Space News: Last Lunar Eclipse until 2010

The last Total Eclipse of the Moon before December 2010 will begin in the small hours of Thursday 21 February in the UK.

The entire event will be visible from South America and most of North America (on 20 February) as well as Western Europe, Africa, and western Asia (on 21 February).

This NASA web page explains that during a total lunar eclipse, the Moon's disk can take on a dramatically colorful appearance from bright orange to blood red to dark brown and (rarely) very dark grey.

An eclipse of the Moon can only take place at Full Moon, and only if the Moon passes through some portion of Earth's shadow. The shadow is actually composed of two cone-shaped parts, one nested inside the other. The outer shadow or penumbra is a zone where Earth blocks some (but not all) of the Sun's rays. In contrast, the inner shadow or umbra is a region where Earth blocks all direct sunlight from reaching the Moon.

In Western Europe and the UK the time of the eclipse on the 21st is as follows:

• Partial Eclipse begins 0143
• Total Eclipse begins 0301
• Total Eclipse ends 0351
• Partial Eclipse ends 0509

• For more information, visit this NASA page, and to find out more about lunar eclipses visit the agency's special web page lunar eclipses for beginners.

• Image above: this picture of total lunar eclipse was captured on 20 January 2000. by Mr. Eclipse/Fred Espanack (www.mreclipse.com).

Happy Birthday Sputnik!

Space flight is 50 years old this week and although the space race may well have been borne by the desire to develop bigger and better nuclear weapons - according to the accounts of Russian scientists reported in USA Today - the actual exploration of space, which began with the launch of Sputnik on 4 October 1957, continues to capture the imagination of many.

For me, it continues to inspire new writing - I'm working with ace artist Bill Storie on a new SF series, Ex Astris, which you can read via ROK Comics.

• There's more information on the project at www.exastris.co.uk

• New Scientist magazine has a special web section on the legacy of Sputnik here