Mystery Sky Phenomenon

I clearly remember exactly what I was thinking and feeling when I saw last night’s sky phenomenon. I was perfectly calm, which is astonishing given my panic when I was around 10 years old and saw a searchlight painting the bottom of the low clouds at a high rate of speed in Upstate New York. The encounter with the searchlight was the only time I recall feeling sheer terror. 



My first question to myself, last night, was, “What is this?” Is this a comet?  Seems too low… too close... to be a comet. It can’t be a meteor (or is it meteorite?) because the burn is too long. Perhaps a large satellite reentering the earth's atmosphere? I wasn’t seeing multiple pieces so it didn’t seem likely it would have broken cleanly, in half, unless by deign. But I couldn’t figure out the plume. It wasn’t debris. It seemed more like gaseous smoke or contrails. A long, thin jellyfish stretched out behind it, with some event that had happened a minute or so before I looked up into the sky; that event seemed to produced the puff of smoke. I imagine that was the reason why there was a second piece trailing and falling behind the lead object.

I was trying to figure out if the object was burning up from reentry or still burning fuel and climbing up. This is when I wondered if it was the sun that was illuminating the object's contrail. It was hard to judge direction. I couldn't tell if it was moving up and away, or was it moving up and to the direct left.

What was the second object, chasing it? For pure emotional reasons, it felt to me like it had been a part of the the other object. Then I realized it was definitely the sun illuminating this slow, powerful, silent dance in the sky. It didn’t seem at all like danger or a demonstration of war. All these thoughts went through my head in the course of 90 seconds as I snapped photos and recorded video.

What if this had to do with North Korea? We'd have nukes in subs on their doorstep, so this rocket wouldn't be outgoing. Hopefully not something from over there, headed in our direction. I don't want to be in a war that I'm not a part of. Plus, this didn't have the feel of a surface-to-surface ballistic missile.

I calmly got back into my car realizing that I would soon know what I saw since I was witnessing this with thousands of others.

These were my candid thoughts as I posted to social media while explicitly discerning fact from speculation. Social media lit up with photos and videos of the same event. At this point, this event had become a shared experience as I saw other’s view points. No one speculated conspiracy theories, that I saw. Although I did see comments that the vapor trail was self-illuminating, there was a pilot ejection, and someone thought they saw a chute. No reasonable person would think they saw the ejection, etc, if they actually knew what it was they were looking at. This is how human brains work – we speculate to fill in the blanks. We want answers – that’s a big part of what makes a loud cell phone conversation in a restaurant more annoying than two patrons speaking at the same volume. The listener can only hear one side of the conversation and the more of the conversation missed, the more annoying it becomes.

I realized that this didn't feel like a bad thing. It was an experience to share – it couldn’t help but be shared. This was a big event in the hands of a small number of people, so it better be good because otherwise we'd be glimpsing of the power of the gods as they battled it out over our heads.

About 20 minutes after last night's event, I learned that I witnessed a SpaceX rocket launch from Vandenberg AFB. It was seen from Southern California to Arizona to Santa Cruz. I got a little annoyed at myself for not even considering that it could be a rocket launch and staging. In 1996, as I was driving from San Clemente to UCI, I saw what I mistakenly thought was an F/A-18 flying straight up – I thought it came from El Toro MCAS. But it kept going up and up. It, too, was a rocket launch from Vandenberg into orbit. 

It’s a huge production to put a vehicle into orbit, which many got to see, last night. And when it catches you off guard, it feels alien.

Taking Inspiration from Others

Everyone wants to be an astronaut.

My college buddy is a Navy SEAL and astronaut. He traveled to the ISS in 2009, aboard the Endeavour, and then he went back to the space station, last March, where he remained until September. Even though I had nothing to do with his success – I only sat next to him in english class at prep school – I, like the rest of my classmates, take great pride in his accomplishments. After visiting him, in 2009, for a personal tour of Houston, he became my inspiration for learning to fly a few months later.
Last summer, NASA released a light hearted video of Chris shaving his head and growing a goatee in a move of solidarity to welcome Italian Astronaut Luca Parmitano.

What a great job and let's not forget the first step to becoming an astronaut.

Conspiracy Theories Abound

When I find myself writing a long e-mail explaining something or I repeat myself on the same topic then it's worthy of a blog post.

In the past ten days I've found myself responding to conspiracy theories from several different people so now I'm more than happy to pontificate on the topic.

Generally speaking, a large public conspiracy becomes very obvious after the fact.

Moon Landings
Did we really land on the moon? Of course we did – do you really think it would have been possible to keep so many people, who participated, quiet. (Remember Capricorn One)? What would be their motivation to remain silent so many decades later? At some point in the future we'll take tourist trips to the moon to visit the Apollo 11 historic site which will look the same as it did when Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin departed in 1969. But there's no shortage of people who think the Apollo moon landings were a conspiracy. These people end up getting punched in the face, literally, by a former astronaut.

9/11
What does a real life conspiracy look like? To answer that question we needn't look any further than 9/11 which was clearly a conspiracy. It's no small coincidence that four planes were highjacked at the same time with the same mission — those 19 highjackers were working together. That's what a conspiracy looks like.

On the flip side, conspiracy theories postulating that explosives were used to bring down the World Trade Center towers couldn't be further from the truth. I've heard arguments about how elegant and controlled the collapse of the towers looked, but, realistically, skyscrapers are like a house of cards. They're mostly filled with empty space and they fall in on themselves much like a house of cards we built as kids – there's no toppling them over like a tree.

Inside of a tree: rock solid; inside of a skyscraper: mostly empty.

Tin Foil Hats
Of course there are more extreme conspiracy theories where people believe the government is listening in on all of our conversations... um... you know... I hate it when they're right for the wrong reasons.

How to Become an Astronaut

What's the first step to becoming an astronaut? Apply.

Click to enlarge

It was fairly obvious, last month, that I wasn't accepted as an AsCan when the Astronaut Class of 2013 was announced, but this letter I received today makes it official.

I've never been so fond of a rejection letter for a job I truly wanted.

Surprisingly, the basic qualifications to become an astronaut are fairly simple.

New Job Prospect: Astronaut

STS-127: Endeavour 

NASA just announced their newest class of astronauts – I wasn't one of them.

Everyone wants to be an astronaut but few actually apply. The basic requirements for a mission specialist or flight engineer are simple:

1. American citizenship.

2. Bachelor's degree in engineering, biological science, physical science, or mathematics.

3. Vision of 20/100 or better correctable to 20/20.

4. Blood pressure of 140/90 or better, sitting.

5. Height between 62" and 75".

While there's no age limit, I would have been one of the oldest astronaut candidates selected – a daunting statistic considering only Russia and China currently have the ability to put people into orbit. Obviously, beyond these basic requirements, it gets highly competitive. Astronauts have resumes and experiences that are humbling. 

Once an astronaut class is selected, the astronaut candidates (affectionately referred to as ASCANS) begin two years of basic astronaut training which includes learning Russian. After that, they're officially called astronauts and they're assigned to a mission, usually a few years in the future, which begins with more, specific, training.

As glamorous as this job sounds, it involves very little time in space with a lot of time, training, and travel away from home and family.

Application

I applied to be an astronaut in January of last year. I was contacted by NASA a couple times to provide some additional information. After reviewing the basics, NASA selected, from over 6,000 applicants, a group of one or two hundred highly qualified (HQ) candidates to visit Johnson Space Center. That group was whittled down to several dozen for another week of interviews and medial exams until NASA officially announced their eight ASCANS for the NASA class of 2013.

NASA doesn't disclose specifics figures at each step, but I realized when a college buddy, Karl, got the call, last fall, to visit NASA several months ago that I hadn't made the HQ cut. After Karl didn't receive a call back, he too realized that he hadn't been selected. But it's not set in stone until a new NASA class of ASCANS is officially announced.

Despite my disappointment – tempered with the realization that it was a long shot – I do get a huge source of pride in the fact that another college buddy, Chris, is currently orbiting aboard the ISS. I was very fortunate to watch Chris launch into space on his first mission, aboard the space shuttle Endeavour, in 2009 accompanied by a college ball cap that I presented to him the previous year.

Chris Cassidy shaving his head in space last month.

Soyuz Launch of Expedition 31

Last Night's 23:01 EDT Launch

Last night (aka today, if you were in Russia) I watched the lift off of Expedition 31 which put three men into orbit aboard the Russian Soyuz rocket. Although it only takes about eight or nine minutes to get into orbit, it'll be about two days until they rendezvous with the ISS. One member of the crew, Joe Acaba, was the only American and he'll be spending a few months aboard the ISS.

Last night's 23:01 EDT liftoff was the first time that I watched a live launch of a Soyuz rocket. Since it doesn't have solid rocket boosters, like the space shuttle, it burns very clean like the old Saturn V rockets.

Astronauts Shane Kimbourgh (L) and Joe Acaba (R)

I was amazed at the elegant simplicity of the entire Soyuz launch system. It's moved out to the launch site via a railroad just a few days before launch and it's propped up on what are essentially a few pegs. The pegs act as the levers of its tower support systems (imagine stepping on the tines of a rake - the wooden shaft of the rake will pop up). At lift off, once the weight of the rocket is no longer on the pegs, the towers fall back just like stepping off a rake.


What makes this launch system so elegant is that it inherently works - you don't have to rely on electrical or hydraulic systems for the supporting towers to move away at launch.


The video of the ride to orbit looked very smooth inside the capsule. The only downside that I could see is that it's cramped. I hear that the return landing is very bumpy for the crew since the capsule lands on the ground, not in the ocean, like the Apollo capsules, or on a landing strip like the space shuttle.