Juno launched!

For the first time in fifteen years, there is a probe inbound to Jupiter*. On Friday, after a last-minute hold at t-4 minutes, NASA's Juno probe left Kennedy Space Center at 12:25pm aboard a Atlas V heavy-lift booster.

Two years from now, the probe will pass very close to Earth for a gravity assist. Via this quirk of orbital mechanics, it will steal some orbital momentum from the Earth and reach Jupiter in just three more years.

It's set to study Jupiter's water ratio and core mass - which will help determine how it formed - and precisely map its gravitational and magnetic fields. It will also study the polar components of Jupiter's magnetosphere and the massive auroras it creates. However, the main purpose of the mission is to better understand the cloud systems that cloak Jupiter. In fact, the mission is names for the goddess Juno, wife of Jupiter, who could see through his veil of clouds - just like the probe will.

It's the first solar-powered probe to reach the gas giants, made possible by new advances in solar panels. Previous craft, like Galileo (the previous Jupiter mission) used radioactive thermal generators, which generate more power than solar panels. Juno's instruments are designed to use less current than previous probes.

Many spacecraft carry an interesting tribute. Many have CDs containing names of project members; the Voyagers carried the famous golden records. Juno is carrying three Lego minifigures: Jupiter, Juno, and Galileo.

42 years ago...

Men were walking on the moon for the first time.

The Shuttle and what it means to me

In less than three days, the orbiter Atlantis will land back on Earth. It's a bittersweet moment for me.

On one hand, the Shuttle program has been a good thing, if not a total success. We never got even close to the weekly launches originally envisioned, nor can 14 lives be brought back, but there were 133 safe launches. Science was done; satellites were launched, and the Hubble Space Telescope was brought to space.

The Chandra X-ray Observatory, which did for X-ray astronomy what Hubble has done in visible light. Magellan, which mapped Venus. Ulysses, which showed us the poles of the sun and explored cometary tails. Galileo, which explored Jupiter. All of those probes were launched by the Space Shuttle; without it, they could not have done their missions, and science would be weaker.

The Hubble Space Telescope has done more than any other telescope in history. By accurately measuring distances to Cepheid variable stars, it has provided the (then) most accurate estimate of the Hubble Constant and thus the age of the universe. It has provided crucial evidence for the acceleration of the universe's expansion. It has found black holes in the center of galaxies and proto-planetary disks in the Orion Nebula; it has watched a comet impact Jupiter in our own solar system, and taken the Hubble Ultra-Deep Field, the deepest (furthest-looking) image of the universe yet. It's discovered optical counterparts to Gamma-Ray Bursts (GRBs). And it was launches and repaired (5 times) by crews on the Space Shuttle.

The International Space Station has been brought up and maintained in large part by Space Shuttle missions; the Shuttle has also provided occasional orbit-boosting burns. We now have a miniature city in Space, and even without the Shuttle we might be able to keep it a while.

But it's a sad day for NASA. For the first time since October 7th, 1958, (when the Mercury program was announced), the agency has no real program for human spaceflight. The NASA Authorization Act of 2010 suggests a new booster by 2016, but funding is in doubt. The Constellation project was canceled after going far over budget. There's not public nor governmental support like there was for the Apollo program.

The Shuttle, like I said, also was not perfect. 14 astronauts died aboard on two separate incidents. Preventable accidents. 14 of 359 is a one-in-25 fatality rate, a death rate comparable only to heads of state. Officials estimated the chance of a fatality at one in 100,000; Richard Feynman (when serving on the Challenger investigation panel) was closer when he said one in 100.

Costs skyrocketed, always and every time. The original estimate was $640 (adjusted to 2011 dollars) per pound to orbit; the actual figure was more like $27,000. Russian rockets can do it for $2250 per pound.

But it's just about over. NASA is left with a nearly blank slate. Hubble's successor, the James Webb Space Telescope, is in big danger and may never leave the ground. NASA's budget is being razed for political purposes. There are serious questions as to whether NASA will have another program like Mercury, Gemini, Apollo, or the Shuttle program. There are even those who question whether NASA will ever launch another astronaut.

Unless there is another politically-based race to space - and there may yet be with China, a country that has shown interest in weaponizing space - there will not be another program like Apollo where the whole country and all the politicians throw their hopes on it. Not unless there's something extraordinary, on the level of extraterrestrial contact or the creation of a faster-than-light drive.

The future, it seems, is the private space companies. Scaled Composites made SpaceShipOne, the first private spacecraft, and now they're creating space tourism. SpaceX is making the first new heavy booster in a decade, and the first one not created directly for NASA or the military. They plan to fly humans before 2020 in a reusable spacecraft.

This fall, I will be entering college, majoring in mechanical engineering with a concentration in aerospace engineering. At this point in time, it's what I want to do with my life. I love rocketry, I love designing things using mathematics, and I love solving problems. I can't guarantee that in four or five years I will still want to design space boosters or turbopumps, but I can guarantee that I will have a solid background in physics, mathematics, computer modeling, and design, and a degree that gives me a lot of flexibility to do what I want.

I also can't guarantee that I'll be able to get a job in aerospace engineering come 2015. The industry is going to be reeling from the end of the Space Shuttle program, and this is an industry that goes through heavy contractions on a periodic basis anyway. It's questionable how quickly private space launches of people and goods are going to grow the market for young engineers. It's a growth market eventually - lots of people and things are going to be sent to space, and they will need a lot of engineers to design a lot of rockets - but the question is when the sudden uptick begins.

And China has shown an interest in weaponizing space, which is problematic for someone who considers himself a pacifist. I haven't entirely codified my morals yet, but I think I would be very conflicted if I was to work on something that might be used not to launch a GPS satellite or a telescope or Captain Kirk, but instead to attack the other guy's astronauts or communications satellite.

But ultimately, this chronic pessimist is pretty hopeful. Whether or not NASA survives in anything like its present form, there's going to be a lot of space launches, and I believe I may be part of that. I'm definitely going to be doing something interesting. There is so much cool stuff out there, and I'm just optimistic enough to believe that space will be occupied, space will be colonized, and if we're very very lucky that it won't get weaponized. I believe that space will be revolutionized, revolutionized within my lifetime, and this revolution WILL be televised, in full-color 1080p 3D holo-screen view. I believe that the future can be as shiny as Star Trek even while the people are as real as Firefly. I want to be the one who designs the machines that make that future.

My name is David Sindel, and I'm going to be a rocket scientist when I grow up.

Sidewalk astronomy

Tonight was "Aerospace Night" for the elementary school club - Aerospace Adventurers - that I help out with. They had all sorts of stuff in the gym - boomerangs, robots, space suits, and more. Patrick McConnell form CATO came down and brought some of his rockets to show the kids. I did too, though I broke a fin on the Sudden Mach. There were also some incredible paintings from a sidewalk artist in Brooklyn - he creates these incredible drawings of alien planets and landscapes, in just ten minutes, using spray cans and a few basic scraping tools.

There was a representative there from the Aldrich Astronomical Society there; he had a number of impressive meteorite samples. He decided not to bring a telescope because the weather wasn't too great up in Worcester. I volunteered to bring my 8" scope down; I live only five minutes away and I figured it was about time I actually got any use out of it.

I set it up around 7:10; I quickly had a steady stream of kids and their parents, and a handful of passerby who were at the school for unrelated reasons. Altogether, I probably had about 80 people in 80 minutes, all of whom saw the moon, Jupiter and its four largest moons, or both. The seeing wasn't great, but you could still see lots of detail on the moon and some belts on Jupiter. Many were quite wowed by the sights.

It was really neat; I'd never showed people astronomical objects en masse before. Just seeing Jupiter - a billion miles away - floored some people, especially when I pointed it out in the sky. It felt really good, and it warmed even my cold black hole of a heart.

It was about the only thing that warmed me, too. It was twelve degrees out (-11 C), and I was outside for seventy-eight of eighty consecutive minutes, in a winter coat and jeans. Thank goodness for ski gloves. (It took an hour afterwards for my toes to be back to normal, though.)

And it prompted an impromptu Taco Bell run with mandachan (my lovely assistant and fellow geek <3 ). Always fun.

Voyager 1 has left the building

After thirty-three years, Voyager 1 has left the first layer of the Sun's domain - the first manmade object to cross the termination shock.

The sun puts out a huge volume of charged particles - protons and electrons, mostly - massing 6.7 billion tons every hour, the equivalent of five Empire State Buildings every second. This is known as the solar wind; it can bring a devastating amount of radiation, and Earth's magnetosphere shields us and makes life possible. The solar wind interacting with the upper atmosphere forms the auroras.

The solar wind eventually begins to peter out at around 90 AU (Astronomical Units, the earth averages 1 AU from the Sun. 1 AU is about 93 million miles), a boundary known as the termination shock. Phil Plait brings the awesome news that Voyager 1 has reached a point where the solar wind equals zero velocity. Within a few years, it will reach the heliopause, where it will feel the wind from other stars. At that point, it will be officially out of the sun's domain, and into interstellar space.

And, what's crazier: this was launched thirty-three years ago. There were no cell phones (only a few giant prototypes), no real personal computers. No internet. It's a marvel of technology. It is expected to have enough power to operate some instruments until 2025, 48 years after launch. Nothing that we have made will catch it - thanks to the gravity slingshots it received from Jupiter and Saturn, it is going faster than the Pioneer probes, faster than its twin Voyager 2, and faster than New Horizons which will visit Pluto in 2015.

This wasn't even its primary science mission. It was just supposed to last a few years, take pictures of Jupiter and Saturn. It discovered Jupiter's rings, volcanic activity on its moon Io, and took thousand of scientifically important images of the two planets.

Perhaps the most important image that it took, though, was the Pale Blue Dot image - which shows the Earth as exactly that, a pale blue dot. Seeing how all of human life ahs taken place on and around that tiny dot reinforces the need to protect it.

This is why I want to go into aerospace. To create things that go where nothing has explored before. To see what's out there. To create the rockets that show us what exists beyond that pale blue dot.

Comet Hartley 2 and EPOXI

Yes, I know this is old news. I'm a slow blogger, okay?

Anyway, chances are that two years ago, you heard of the Deep Impact mission. NASA sent up a small impactor and a larger space probe, and then smacked the impactor into comet 9P/Tempel (Tempel 1) at a combined closing speed of around 14 kilometers (9 miles) per second. The impact was the equivalent of five metric tons of dynamite, and produced a huge bright dust cloud. NASA got a huge amount of information out of the mission, huge success. And, oh yeah, they got pretty pictures too:


But wait. There's still a fully functional space probe up there, and it's got cameras and spectrometers, and plenty of fuel. It's time to science!

The University of Maryland joined in the project. They initially intend to fly it near comet 85P/Boethin, but it didn't return periodically as expected, and has probably broken up. So, they put the spacecraft on a holding pattern near Earth, and used it for other stuff. They used the telescopic cameras to scan for extrasolar planets, and the spectrometer to confirm observations of water molecules on the moon.

Then, in May, they had the craft, now titled EPOXI, fire its engines for 11.3 seconds, enough to change its velocity by around 3 inches per second. That was just enough that its July flyby of Earth, instead of continuing its holding pattern, flung it off into the black. Right into the path of comet 103/P Hartley (Hartley 2). It passed just 435 miles from the nucleus, revealing incredible sights:


Yep, it's a peanut, as was suspected from ground-based radar observations. The waist is smooth, but the two balls are rough, with craters and boulders, and a huge groove.

It's the fifth comet to be visited by a spacecraft; the next flyby will be when the Stardust spacecraft (which collected samples from comet Wild 2 in 2006) visits Tempel 1 in 2011.

Armadillo Lander Commercial

Just thought I'd beat Dick to the punch.



Blackberry commercial, featuring Armadillo Aerospace. Armadillo is an expert in vertical-takeoff, vertical-landing liquid-fueled rockets. Incredibly cool stuff; they're in the X-Prize Cup and are working on developing lunar landers.

Though, apparently everyone isn't on the Blackberry bandwagon...

The NOVA Project

Bayourat Rocketry talks about the NOVA Project. It's way cool. It's like the super-Apollo Project. Rockets as tall as 137 meters (450 ft) [the Saturn V was 363 ft], capable of delivering 459,000 kg (over a million pounds / 500 tons) to escape velocity*.

Once we had gone to the moon, the next logical step was to send astronauts to Mars. That requires a lot of cargo, because you have to feed and house a crew of perhaps ten for a year, rather than three for a week. The Saturn V, with 5 F-1 engines and capable of lifting 45,000 kg (100,000 pounds / 50 tons) to escape velocity, was simply not capable. Enter such rockets as the GD-B, with 16 F-1 engines, and the GD-F, with 4 larger motors. 450 feet tall, lifts a million pounds. It would have used the gigantic M-1 motor.


(image from Bayourat; of unknown ancestry)

On Wikipedia

Cosmonaut Alexi Leonov

So, you may be asking, why did I name the Alexi Leonov as such?

It's named after one of the greatest Russian Cosmonauts - Alexey Arkhipovich Leonov. (Alexi is one of several English transliterations).

He was the first man to walk in space in 1965. For 12 minutes and 9 seconds on March 18 of that year, he stepped outside the Voskhod 2 spacecraft, connected only by a thin 17-foot tether. He had the world's greatest view, but he soon encountered problems. His suit soon ballooned, costing him mobility and preventing him from operating cameras. The temperature rose; he was 'up to his knees' in sweat and his body temperature rose 3.2°F (1.8°) - a dangerous rise.

He could barely get back in the airlock; he got temporarily stuck. Much longer, and he would have been forced to swallow his suicide pill. He had to risk decompression sickness by releasing air from his suit. Their automatic reenty computer failed and they had to land manually, then spend a cold night in a forest surrounded by wolves. When asked later, though, he modestly downplayed the danger.

In 1975, he flew on Soyuz 19 - the Russian part of the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project. The ASTP, with the symbolic handshake in space, effectively ended the Space Race and was a major moment in achieving detente. During the mission, the crews spoke in each others' languages; Leonov joked that there was "Russian, English, and Oklahomski", referring to Tom Stafford's pronounced accent whilst speaking Russian.

He is now perhaps the most famous Cosmonaut, and still alive at 76.

From Wikimedia

His name was given to the central spacecraft in 2010 by Arthur C. Clarke.

He's also an accomplished amateur artist; his most famous work is "Near the Moon", painted in 1967. Interestingly, it's almost identical to the opening of 2001: A Space Odyssey, which Leonov noted to Clarke at a 1968 screening.

From Wikipedia

Mike Dorffler

A few days ago came the sad news that Mike Dorffler, one of the giants of rocketry, has severe terminal pancreatic cancer. Dorffler started at Estes in 1969 and designed a number of famous kits, including the Cineroc (an 8mm movie camera mounted in a rocket looking down, and the Apogee Aspire and Saturn IB and V kits. The Cineroc even inspired NASA to put a similar camera on one of their flights:



It's suggested in the article to write to the Dorfflers, to let him know just how much he will be missed. Here is my contribution:

Dear Mrs. Dorffler:

I would like to express my deepest sympathy for you and your husband. It saddens me greatly to hear of his illness. Regretfully, I've never had the chance to meet him, but I've seen so much of what he's done for rocketry. His designs are legends, and I consider myself lucky to have been inspired by him.
Thank you for allowing all of us to share the benefits of his work. He is in my thoughts every day, and I wish both of you the very best.

Ariane 5 Manual

The Arianespace Ariane 5 is one of the largest space boosters around. 151 to 170 feet (46-52m) tall, weighs 780 tons at liftoff. Capable of lifting 10 metric tons to geostationary orbit, or 20 metric tons to low earth orbit.

I now have the user's manual.

It's 238 pages, and you can get it for free in pdf form here.

I think it's the largest thing in the world with a user's manual. There's not a lot of, ya know, skyscrapers and aircraft carriers that come with a single manual. I may, in fact, have to print this out someday.

Introducing: the UKSA

On the 23rd, the British government announced the creation of the new http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UK_Space_AgencyUK Space Agency - the UKSA. It'll bring all UK government-funded space projects under one agency, like NASA in the US.

Scheduled start date is April 1st. (No, it's not a joke). The UK already contains 6% of the worldwide space industry valued at 6 billion pounds ($8.94 billion USD; 6.70 billion euros), with 68,000 jobs. The UKSA aims to grow that in 20 years to 10% of the world industry, with 100,000 jobs and a value of £40 billion ($59.57 billion USD; €44.64 billion).

They've got a really neat looking logo:

Pretty Phobos Picture

The Bad Astronomer points out a really cool image of Phobos, one of Mars's two moons:


They were taken by the Mars Express probe, which will be doing a series of flybys of the two moons, Phobos and Deimos. The lines are cracks in the moon.

Phobos is somewhat potato-shaped and about 22km (14 miles) on a side. it's weird and cool; I'll post more about it later.

Bloody Valentine's Day

Valentine's Day is known for smarmy Hallmark cards, candy, and red. Not just the sweet, saccharine red. There's also the sanguine bloody red. Turns out, there's been a lot of blood shed on February 14th:

It all started back in 250 CE (or 269, or 270, or 273...) when Saint Valentine got himself martyred. Turns out no one knows who he was, when he lived, or exactly what he did to get himself killed, but the Eastern Orthodox Church made him a saint nontheless. In 496 CE, Pope Gelasius I decided that a day for lovers should totally be on the day of some punk who got himself killed in some spectacular fashion. Then, in the 15th century, some punk named Chaucer decided it should be all about romantic love. Yeah, screw you, Chaucer. Your very special day got Hallmarked.

Folk waited for a while, and then they got bored again, and bored people love going on murderous rampages. So, in 1349, in Strasbourg, Germany, in what saner folk named the Strasbourg pogrom, over 300 Jews were killed and thousands of others expelled for really no reason.

The nastiness then shifted to the beautiful islands of Hawaii where in 1779 the explorer extraordinaire James Cook got himself killed by the natives. Possibly for trying to kidnap their king which, in retrospect, is never a good idea. Ever.

After that, the bloodiness got more and more frequent, at least what was recorded. In 1797 323 sailors were killed and some 880 wounded in the Battle of Cape St. Vincent. In 1804, the First Serbian Uprising began, setting off 13 years of nastiness between the Serbs and the Ottoman Empire. In 1831, there were "immense casualties" at the Battle of Debre Abbay in Ethiopia.

(Sense a theme here...?)

In 1879, Chile touched off the War of the Pacific, in which over 21,000 poeple were killed and as many wounded fighting over a rainless desert filled with saltpeter and... bird shit. In 1920, the CCCP started the Polish-Soviet war, which ended 3 years later, with no clear victor, after taking somewhere between 150,000 and 250,000 lives.

In 1929 came perhaps the most infamous of all these events: the St. Valentine's Day Massacre. Seven men, five belonging to Bugs Moran's North Side gang, were killed by the tommy-guns of four still-unidentified members of Al Capone's South Side gang.

World War II brought attrocities of a scale never seen before or since; one of those was the firebombing of Dresden which began on February 14th, 1945, and was not the Allies' finest moment. Happy Valentine's Day, Dresden. Because your city is still a center of industry, we're going to drop 7000 tons of phorphorus bombs on it, turning 90% of the city into a raging firestorm that kills 25,000 people. About 2% of the bomb force got off course and managed to drop bombs on Prague 100km away from their target.

There's been a number of assassinations and murders on this day. Finnish progressive politician Heikki Ritavuori was murdered in 1922, an event that shocked the nation. In 1979, American ambassador to Afghanistan Adolph Dubs was killed during a kidnapping attempt. In 1989 the Ayatollah Khomeini issued a fatwa against Salman Rushdie for writing The Satanic Verses, which resulted in the deaths of at least 38 people. Because clearly, a blasphemous book is worth killing dozens of people, mostly innocents killed in a bombing, over. In 2004 and 2005, terrorist bombings killed 22 and 7, respectively, in Lebanon and the Phillipines. In 2008, six were killed in the NIU shooting.

Not all the blood on Valentine's day is intentional, though. In 1981, 48 died in the Stardust disaster when the eponymous nightclub caught on fire and, once again, idiotic managers had chained fire exits closed. Indian Airlines Flight 608 crashed on February 14, 1990. In 1996, a Chinese Long March launch vehicle carrying Intelsat 708 went off course and crashed into a village, killing 6 (according to the Chinese government) and possibly as many as 500. Finally, in 2004, the Russian Transvaal water park collapsed, killing 28.

However, if you're reading this, you've survived another Valentine's Day, and it's a dangerous day.

History Day!

It's been over a year since I did a proper History Day post. Which means it's time for the tradition to start again...

1804: John Deere - yes, *that* John Deere - was born.

1812: The strongest (Magnitude 8.3) of the New Madrid earthquakes destroyed the town of New Madrid, toppled buildings in St. Louis, made waterfalls on the Mississippi and changed it course, caused a wave to run UPSTREAM on the Mississippi, and rang church bells all the way to Boston.

Also 1812: Charles Dickens, great and intolerably boring Victorian writer, was born.

1867: Pinoneering pioneer writer Laura Ingalls Wilder was born.

1889: Harry Nyquist, a founding informational theorist, was born.

1906: Oleg Antonov, Soviet aerospace engineer, designer of planes from small biplanes to the monster An-225, and the founder of the eponymous Antonov design firm; was born.

1926: Konstantin Feoktistov, cosmonaut and spacecraft designer, was born.

1932: Apollo 15 command module pilot Al Worden was born.

1935: Monopoly is invented. Rainy Sunday afternoons become a little less boring.

1959: Baseballer extraordinaire Nap Lajoie died at 84.

1960: Igor Kurchatov, father of the Soviet atomic bomb but also an advocate of peaceful nuclear power, died at 57.

1979: For the first time since Pluto's 1930 discovery, its orbit brought it closer to the sun than Neptune.

1984: On the Shuttle mission STS-41B, astronauts Bruce McCandless and Robert L. Stewart performed the first untethered spacewalks using the MMU.

1990: The Soviet Union ended when the Central Committee of the Soviet Communist Party relinquished its power.

1999: King Hussein of Jordan, a skilled diplomat, peacemaker, democratic and civil rights activist, ameteur radio operator, pilot, and all-around awesome guy; died at age 63 after having ruled Jordan since age 17.

2010: A large explosion at a power plant in Middletown, CT - near where I live - killed at least 5 workers.

All information except the last item from Wikipedia.

Paavo John Rahkonen

Via Rocketry Planet comes the sad news that Paavo John Rahkonen, a pioneer in solid-fuel rocketry, passed away in December at age 79.

He was born in Brooklyn, NY, on January 16, 1930 to Finnish immigrants Paarly Johannes Rahkonen and Linda Lujunen. He studied at the USAF Institute of Technology and worked for the Air Force for 6 years, as well as at Republic Aviation, Curtiss-Wright, and Martin (of Lockheed-Martin).

At Morton-Thiokol in Utah, he invented ammonium-perchlorate composite propellant, which powers the Space Shuttle's solid rocket boosters as well as most mid-power and high-power model rocket motors. He met G. Harry Stine in 1963, who introduced his work to the model rocket community, and in 1982 Gary Rosenfield of Aerotech introduced the first commercial composite propellant motor, a G30.

Rakhonen, with his company Propulsion Dynamics (Prodyne) introduced several motors to the market, including D2, E2, and F2 (!) 'Cyclone' motors, and in the early 1990s, a K700 composite motor. At Thiokol, he worked with Irving S. Wait, who with RDC produced the Enerjet motors, and with George Roos who founded FSI, which also made model rocket motors.

He is survived by his wife Francoise and five children, 13 grandchildren, and 6 great-grandchildren. Rest in peace, Paavo, and we salute you for helping make rocketry what it is today.

A New Era Begins

Ares 1-X
Height: 322 ft
Liftoff Weight: 1800000 lb

At roughly 800000 pounds of APCP, at typical White Lightning energy density of ~400 Ns per pounds, that's roughly 320 000 000 Ns, or somewhere in the high AB to low AC impulse range.

This represents one of the first major steps back to the moon. Congratulations to NASA for a picture-perfect launch.

By the time the first second-generation lunar landings come in 2019 or 2020, I will be out of grad school, hopefully with a degree in Aerospace Engineering. I could be there.

40 Years

There are few times that I wish I was old. This is one of them. My only consolation is that I'll get to men and women return to the moon. Because of their bravery and drive, I may be one who goes to the moon someday.

Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, Michael Collins, and the hundreds of thousands of engineers, scientists, builders, and astronauts who lifted them up, I salute you.

Watching the NRO launch

527 pm: watching the final countdown get ready. After a few weather delays, weather went green around 5:15 and they're currently finalizing for a 5:32 launch, the third of 3 launch windows.

529: off of 4 minutes and holding and into the countdown sequence. The images aren't too interesting- just the rocket sitting on the pad and venting steam ( or something else; condensation on the supercold propellant tanks), and inside images of flight control.

531: computers are now controlling the countdown. Almost there.

532: T-45 seconds....

533: Liftoff and everything looks good. Through the clouds, Mach 1, and Max Q.

536: Engine shutdown and clean separation. Well above the atmosphere.

538: Currently in 9-minute Centaur (upper stage) burn.

540: 12000 mph, 116 miles altitude, 7800 miles downrange.

542: 13740mph, 1300 downrange, 124 altitude. Jupiter (FL) tracking ends, Antigua station covering.

543: 14700 mph, 116 up, 1600 downrange.

545: 2 minutes to MECO (Main engine cutoff).

546: 108 up, 2092 out, 16250mph. Somewhere over libya. Antigua out.

547: MECO. Altitude 100 nautical mile (115 miles)

549: Still impressed that the animation on my screen is from the live transmitted data. In the coast period of 2:49.

551: Begining to ramp RCS motors for reorientation.

That's when I had to go to work. I was incredibly impressed by a number of things. First how NASA could make such a complex operation - launching a 2-ton orbiter to the moon - work absolutely perfectly. Second, I was impressed with the quality of what I was seeing. This was, streaming, live, a video feed that switched between several views of the rocket and launch control, then between the on-board cameras and ground cameras after liftoff. Once the groound on-board cameras lost tracking, It seamlessly switched to an animated version of the orbiter, showing its physical orientation, location on a digital globe, firing of thrusters, and continuously updated orbital data.
Third, I was simply amazed how all this is possible. Here I am, sitting my my living room, watching data transmitted from space to NASA, which is then put on the internet for anyone to watch, essentiall free to them. That's my tax dollars at work, and I'm proud.

Awesome Picture

Phil Plait points at quite possibly the coolest picture ever: a picture of Atlantis and the Hubble Space Telescope crossing the disk of the sun. Two objects - the 35m shuttle and the 13m telescope - moving at 7km/s, captured through a 130mm Takahashi refractor - top of the line, but far smaller than the giant Schmidt-Cassegrians used for most deep-sky shots. Congratulations to Thierry Legault.