Exploring Switzerland with MiGMan

I've been virtually exploring many cool areas in Africa and Europe with the help of a new series of VFR flight plans for Microsoft Flight Simulator, MiGMan's World Tour. They include a large number of locations with richly illustrated guides to help you decide where to fly next. The flights are fairly short (depending on the aircraft you choose) with an emphasis on the scenic and the unusual in the huge, detailed world of MSFS.

I made a new video (music by me) from a series of screen captures done on two flights around Lake Lucerne, Switzerland, both based on the same flight plan from MIGMAN'S FLIGHT SIM MUSEUM - EUROPE VISUAL VOL. 4. I first flew the plan in the "wrong" order, crossing icy Lake Lucerne to the east at fairly high altitude, and with Live Weather - lots of snow and frozen lakes in January. Then I flew it again in the published way point order, this time at low level, with "cloudy horizon" weather and with the date set to late fall. So different! Here's another version, full video flown and narrated by MiGMan. 

I was using Bijan's Four Seasons addon to add variety to the vegetation, as well as addons for powerlines and lifts (ski lifts and cable cars are everywhere in Switzerland). You can see those (and avoid them) when flying down low. I was in VR which makes it easy to judge your position when flying low in valleys and around obstacles. I chose a new aircraft I just bought, YSIM's SubSonex JSX-2 “personal jet” which is really fun in VR. A cozy little jet. I might build one! 

MiGMan’s World Tour series has many great flight routes throughout Europe and Africa, so there’s no special need to fly the same one twice. But as you can see from these screenshots and especially in the video, changing the weather, the altitude, and the direction brings out different aspects of the beauty of Switzerland’s mountains, valleys, lakes, and towns. I also enjoy getting familiar with the terrain as I explore an area from different perspectives. So the “replay value” of these flight plans is excellent.

Of course Switzerland is amazing and these flights show that well. But there are hundreds of less famous but still beautiful places all around Europe and Africa, and this series has surprised me many times with unexpected wonders. If you love geography as I do, Microsoft Flight Simulator is the biggest and best playground ever, especially if you also like airplanes (as I apparently do). 

Microsoft points out that you can fly anywhere in the world, but as with real-world travel, it’s helpful to have an experienced guide who can lead you to incredible places you might never think to visit otherwise.

The Joys of Virtual Travel

Is this thing on? This blog I mean. Since I haven’t written a post since 2018, I thought maybe the whole blog thing was over and nobody told me. We certainly seem to have passed the heyday of blogs if there ever was one. It was sort of cool back in 2005 when I was excited about Orbiter, a new space flight simulator I had discovered, and I decided to share my fascination with real and virtual space flight with anyone who cared to read those early posts. Cool to me anyway. I met a few other space bloggers and Orbiter fans and there was even a small online community of sorts for a while. Woo-hoo! If there are still any blog readers or old space blog colleagues around, welcome! Leave a comment! All my old posts seem to still be out there and we’ll soon see if this one joins them.

Of course, now it’s late 2021 and things have changed. You know what many of them are, but in addition, I retired from my job a few months ago, and between that and COVID, my travel has been sharply curtailed. But things have come full circle in a way. Last year I rediscovered an old interest, non-space flight simulators, and specifically Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020 (MSFS). I had played with various flight sims from 1994 to 2004, and between 1999 and 2004, I got my real private pilot’s license (2001). I didn’t fly as much as I hoped I would, but I feel lucky that I got to fly at all. For more information on that, please visit my other moribund blog, Flight SchoolRetrojournal.

When I say I didn’t fly much, I meant only as a pilot. As a passenger I flew constantly from 1983 until late 2019, just before COVID started. Hundreds of international business trips and a few cool vacations. I do miss that part of my working life, going places, seeing things, meeting people, doing things. It was great. In retirement, my wife and I plan to do some fun domestic and international travel once things settle down with COVID and a few other issues. Maybe next year.

In the meantime, MSFS allows me to experience some of the joys of flying and “virtual travel” from the comfort of my own office chair, with or without a VR headset. I’ll spare you the details you can learn from any number of websites or YouTube videos, but MSFS takes full advantage of the power of fast PC’s, graphical accelerators, and cloud computing to create a highly detailed simulation of the entire world, complete with “Live Weather” and stunning depictions of terrain, human-built structures, many different airplanes, and even other simulator pilots sharing the skies with you over the internet. It’s an amazing experience with a large high-res monitor, but even better with a modern virtual reality headset. I have the Hewlett-Packard Reverb G2 which works great with MSFS.

Where Have I Been?

I have spent some simulator time in a Cessna 152 flying around Central Massachusetts as I did in real life 15-22 years ago, and it’s fun to see how well Asobo has done recreating airports, towns, and terrain familiar to me (Asobo are the French makers of Microsoft’s current flight simulator). It is detailed enough to navigate “VFR” using familiar landmarks. You can usually even find your house! But with the whole world at my fingertips, and with a stable full of airplanes from ultralights to business jets to a Boeing 747, I’m not usually so close to home. When not flying a Beech Bonanza G36 or a tail-wheel XCub, I tend to favor an old Stearman biplane or the Aermacchi MB-339, an Italian-built jet trainer, both bought from third-party developers. 

Human and Robot Tour Guides

One thing I have enjoyed is a weekly group flight organized by Jules Altis, who happens to be an active private pilot as well as a simulator enthusiast. For months he focused on US National Parks of which there are many worth touring from the air. He would research the history and special features of each park and share those presentations and videos along with the flight plan for all of us to follow in the simulator and on Twitch or Discord. Olympia National Park, Washington, was my personal favorite. More recently he switched to a more informal format with international destinations like the Amalfi Coast of Italy, the Great Rift Valley of Africa, and the Tokaido Road in Japan. He makes use of a great free add-on developed by others called Bushtalk Radio which provides computer-narrated tours within the simulator of over twelve-thousand points of interest around the world. I’ve helped in small ways with Bushtalk Radio, especially with this brief trailer video that introduces it in the same synthetic “English lady” voice used for the actual tours (the music is mine).

Favorite Places

In addition to the “standards” like the Grand Canyon, Mount Fuji, and New York City, there are so many lesser-known mountains, lakes, cities, bridges, and dams, not to mention so many great airports. If you love airplanes you’ve got to love airports! Many of these sights are beautiful right out of the box, but there is also a facility for “add-ons,” both free and paid. In addition to an expanded air fleet (fancy a Spitfire or F-14 Tomcat?), you can find hundreds of airports with added details. Duxford Airfield, England is a current (free) favorite of mine. Scenery enhancements are also popular, many free, but many great commercial ones that are well worth a few dollars, like this improved version of Seoul, Korea which reminds me of my many visits there over the years.

I have created many videos which are usually short flights in some cool area I’ve discovered. I’ve experimented with adding my own music to a few, like this one of a Spitfire (White Cliffs of Dover, of course) or this flight around Tokyo. One of my favorite videos is this one (not mine) of many beauty spots, set to an instrumental version of “What a Wonderful World.”

This is already a long post so I will end here. I’ll probably write another one talking about what it is that makes the Microsoft Flight Simulator experience so engaging for me.

MSFS screenshots above, from the top (* add-on aircraft):

1. Stearman* over north Australia; 2. Dorand AR.1* (WWI) over Minnesota; 3. Stearman* passing through Tower Bridge, London; 4. Diamond DA-40NG over Sphinx Observatory, Jungfrau, Switzerland; 5. Cubcrafters XCub, Milford Sound, New Zealand; 6. Cessna 208 on a group flight in Iceland; 7. XCub on floats, Nahuel Huapi National Park, Argentina; 8. Beechcraft G36 near Lotte World Tower, Seoul, Korea; 9. Nieuport 17* (WWI) over Duxford Airfield, England; 10. Aermacchi MB-339* somewhere over Ireland

Here's a link to a shared Google Photos album with a few other screenshots from Microsoft Flight Simulator.

Carnival of Space #316

The 316th Blog Carnival of Space is running now at Next Big Future. I especially liked the one about colonizing Venus with balloon-like floating cities some 50 kilometers above the surface, where the atmospheric pressure is roughly the same as Earth at sea level (though the atmosphere itself is not exactly breather-friendly). This idea was floated some years ago, but it was fun to hear about it again.

The picture here is not exactly a floating city, but it is the only graphic I could quickly locate purporting to show something navigating the clouds of Venus. Simulated clouds of Venus with an Orbiter add-on "space yacht" based on the cover art for a 1970's album by Yes called Yessongs. Google any of that that doesn't make sense to you.

P.S. There are many strange and marvelous add-ons available for the Orbiter space flight simulator. I have pictures of many of them on my Flickr site.

Skylon in Orbiter

So Wikipedia tells me that the Reaction Engines Skylon proposal has been around for a very long time - how did I miss it? I guess the idea has heated up mostly since 2009 with the emergence of some funding. The new UK Space Egency/ESA report gives it another boost. It will still need a lot of funding, but Reaction Engines claims that it "will be able to repay its development costs, meet its servicing and operating costs and make profits for its operators whilst being an order of magnitude cheaper to customers than current space transportation systems." Here's hoping that all pans out (and that there's sufficient launch business to support this project as well as SpaceX and other private space ventures - so much depends on the costs-to-orbit they achieve). It would be really great to see a true space plane taking off from a runway, flying to orbit, and returning to the same runway - just like in the movies (and even without a pilot).

This article clearly explains some of the hybrid engine challenges. The Wikipedia article explains some of the smart thinking that has gone into keeping Skylon cool and safe for reentry (cool enough to allow an integral ceramic skin to do most of the work, although active cooling will probably be needed for the wings).It will still land as a glider like the space shuttle - no plans to retain fuel and re-start the air-breathing engines for landing.

I may have missed Skylon (until this very recent blog post), but members of the Orbitercommunity didn't and there is already a cool add-on version as well as some additional work based on that model. I downloaded the basic one by "inzane" and tried it out just a bit (mainly for screenshots). I wasn't able to make orbit on my first try - probably missed some steps in the instructions. Hey, it's new technology! It's also a very cool-looking 3D model.

Although Skylon is an unpiloted launch vehicle (essentially a huge UAV with some serious autopilot smarts), there have been some studies on possible passenger capabilities, and the Orbiter add-on features a passenger module which is visible in the screenshot above. I posted a few more screenshots on my Flickr page.

New Shuttle Fleet for Orbiter

In my not-so-copious spare time, I am working on the 2010 update to Go Play In Space, the tutorial and exploration guide e-book that I wrote for the free Orbiter space flight simulator (with help from Andy McSorley on the second edition in 2006, and now from Mark Paton on the 2010 edition). Orbiter has a 2010 edition described here, with enough new and changed features to justify a new edition of Go Play.

The new edition will add a chapter on re-entry (written by Mark), and the rendezvous and docking chapter will use the supplied shuttle Atlantis spacecraft rather than the more powerful (but fictional) Deltaglider spacecraft used in the second edition. It's more realistic in that it's based on a launch (using a launch autopilot written in Orbiter's new scripting language), rendezvous, and docking scenario that happens in real life, although sadly not for much longer. I'm glad to finally be adding some shuttle operations to Go Play In Space.

Speaking of flying the shuttle in Orbiter, there's a brand-new edition out of the amazing Shuttle Fleet add-on for Orbiter 2010-P1 (Shuttle Fleet 4.7 by David413). I've only just downloaded and installed it, but it looks great. It includes support for local light sources which should improve the already impressive visuals. I will be discussing the Shuttle Fleet in the add-on chapter of the new Go Play In Space. The picture above is a nostalgic Shuttle Fleet screen shot of STS-1, the very first flight of the first operational shuttle, Columbia, April 12, 1981. Notice the white-painted external tank that was used on the early shuttle missions (they stopped painting the tanks on later flights to save weight, leaving the now familiar rusty orange color of the insulating foam).

2001: Aries at Clavius #3

2001: Aries at Clavius #3, originally uploaded by FlyingSinger.

I just renewed my Flickr Pro account for another year and was looking through my "photos" (most of them are actually Orbiter screen shots). This is one of my favorites, recreating a scene from 2001: A Space Odyssey (using the great World of 2001 add-on). The Aries moon shuttle is making a near-vertical approach to Clavius Base. The animated dome is retracting.

Orbiter 2010 Patch 1

 To top off an already busy and exciting year (my older daughter's wedding, finishing my second CD, building an addition on our house), my company was acquired a month or so ago, and now I am busier at work than I have been in years. Evenings, weekends, sleepless nights, travel, culture shock, O.B.S. (Obsessive Blackberry Syndrome) - it's quite a ride. I'm hoping the major transition will only last for a few months so I can eventually get some brain cells back for other things like songwriting and blogging (seeing as this is only my second post in November and it's the 29th).

In the meantime, I did spend a little time this past weekend catching up on Orbiter 2010 developments, including the release at the end of August of the first patch for the 2010 version (I only missed it by three months). In addition to various bug fixes and minor improvements, Orbiter 2010-P1 offers optional celestial background images (not my cup of tea) and the surprisingly dramatic feature of localized light sources, such as docking lights on a spacecraft (see Flash video capture above), or rocket exhaust lighting up the launchpad. As an "optics dude," I especially admire these dynamic lighting effects.When combined with higher resolution Earth textures (L11 for all of Earth, L14 for Florida) and other visual tweaks, Orbiter's 3D space world is more beautiful than ever, and as always, free for the downloading. I haven't had time to look at add-ons, except to notice that the always amazing Shuttle Fleet and ISS Fleet have already been updated for Orbiter 2010.

I've got a couple of weeks off from December 20 to 31, so I'm thinking of running through my Go Play In Space book in Orbiter 2010, to make sure everything works and maybe even do some minor (or even major, if I get inspired) updates to create a third edition of Go Play for Orbiter 2010. Stay tuned...

The picture below shows the improved Earth surface night lighting, at least for Florida (where daylight L14 textures are provided). It looks pretty cool.

My Own Ariane 5 Launch

Seeing the full-size Ariane 5 launcher at the space museum in Toulouse last week reminded me of my own Ariane 5 launching days back in 2006. Of course those were virtual launches in Orbiter, and at the time I was working with Andy McSorley, Mark Paton, and Grant Bonin on an Orbiter simulation of the proposed "Mars for Less" approach for getting humans to Mars sooner rather than later. This involves launching the Mars-bound spacecraft in modules using a "medium" booster (of which Ariane 5 is a good example, with a payload to LEO of around 20 metric tonnes).  The modules would be designed to assemble in orbit essentially by docking, without the complex, EVA-based construction methods used for the ISS. The whole project became a rather complex add-on for Orbiter (there's also an "extra" package for it here). Andy and Mark came up with some great models and programming for it.

I wrote a number of blog posts on this at the time and posted many pictures on Flickr. I also presented the technical paper (PDF, PDF slides here) that we wrote about this at the 2006 Mars Society Convention in Washington, DC. It was fun. The Orbiter screen shot shown here is one of my favorites. The Ariane 5 carries the logos of various space agencies since we assumed that a human Mars mission would be a multinational effort.

Orbiter 2010 has "Shipped"

Great news for space flight fans - Orbiter 2010 has been released and is available for free download. This is the first new version of Orbiter since fall of 2006. There's also a nice update to the main Orbiter web site. Things are continuing to be crazy busy for me, so I've just managed to download the new version and haven't even installed it yet. But I plan to delve into it over the next couple of months. My first priority will be to test all the scenarios and tutorial steps in my Go Play In Space book to make sure they still work well with the new Orbiter version. I'm also considering doing an update to Go Play In Space specifically for the 2010 version (as I did when I created the second edition for the 2006 release of Orbiter).

This version of Orbiter has some cool new features, but the majority of Martin Schweiger's development efforts were devoted to internal and architectural changes which separated the "orbital mechanics engine" from the graphics and user interface components, to allow other developers to create "front ends" that take advantage of new developments in graphics software and hardware without requiring Martin to do all of that himself. This was major surgery for a program of Orbiter's complexity, but it will offer benefits in the long run. This press release (PDF) summarizes the other changes, which are substantial (including support for much higher quality planetary surface textures, more accurate atmospheric models, and a powerful built-in scripting language).

Note that Orbiter itself still does not include sound, so be sure to download and install Dansteph's Orbiter Sound 3.5 which works with Orbiter 2006 and 2010. Note also that while Orbiter includes a number of built-in spacecraft and many scenarios, there are hundreds of free add-ons that expand upon its standard features, most of them available from Orbit Hangar. Also be sure to check the Orbiter Forum to keep in touch with the world-wide Orbiter community.

Orbiter On My Mind

I haven't been doing too much with Orbiter the last year or so, but I've recently been in touch with a couple of Orbiter friends and have started thinking about it again. One thing that's cool is the possible translation of my Orbiter tutorial book Go Play In Space into Russian. I heard about this from Andy McSorley, my co-author on the second edition, and I got in touch with "Kulch" through the Orbiter Forum (Kulch is the creator of many great Orbiter add-ons including the cool TX Winged Space Launcher shown above). He confirmed that he and some other Russian Orbiter users had started the translation project, and I offered to help out by sending my original Word and graphics files. I studied Russian for two years in college, but that was a long time ago and I've forgotten almost everything but the alphabet and a few words and phrases. But it would still be great to have a Russian version of my book, and more importantly, for prospective Russian "Orbinauts" to be able to use my tutorial more easily. Oчень хорошо!

Speaking of using my tutorial, I haven't been on the Orbiter-Forum much recently, so I spent some time looking around and catching up. While there hasn't been a new Orbiter release since 2006 (there are rumors of a 2010 version coming soon), there is still plenty of activity with add-ons, challenges, videos, technology discussions, etc., and with new people joining the forum and asking questions about how to dock with the ISS, get to the moon, navigate to Mars, etc. It's cool to see that people are recommending Go Play In Space as the basic tutorial for Orbiter, and that new users are still finding it useful. I originally wrote it to help myself learn Orbiter, but I'm glad that it's helping other people to climb that fairly steep learning curve (into orbit!) and enjoy this challenging, fun, and still free space flight simulator.

Launching the Space Age in 1926

On this day in 1926, Robert Goddard launched the world's first liquid fueled rocket in a field in Auburn, Massachusetts. It reached an altitude of 41 feet and traveled 184 feet downrange. At the time, Goddard was a professor of physics at Clark University in nearby Worcester, MA. He had published papers on rocketry and had discussed the possibility of a rocket reaching the moon. He was ridiculed for these ideas, most famously in a 1920 New York Times editorial which questioned Prof. Goddard's understanding of basic physics, "since there is no air in space for the rocket engine to push against." It wasn't until 1959 that Goddard would be recognized as the father of modern rocketry and the space age, and it wasn't until July 1969 (after Apollo 11 had landed on the moon) that the Times would correct its 1920 editorial and say "the Times regrets the error."

There's more on this historic event at Mass Moments. Thanks to my main Clark University contact for reminding me of this historic day!

If you'd like to try your (virtual) hand at re-creating Goddard's first launch, you can install Mark Paton's "Early Rockets" add-on for the Orbiter space flight simulator. One of my test flights is shown below.

Solar Power Sats

I've written a few times before about space solar power, and I was pleased to see a post about developments in this area on Friday's  Cosmic Log. After reading Alan Boyle's post entitled "making space power pay," I wondered if anyone had yet created an Orbiter add-on to model a solar power satellite. Orbiter add-on developers have simulated many futuristic systems such as space elevators and the Stanford Torus space colony, and solar power satellites are probably a better bet for the next 20 years (Orbiter add-on developers tend to favor manned spacecraft, but there are many examples of historic, current, and futuristic unmanned spacecraft as well).

So I checked on Orbit Hangar and did a Google search. I didn't find a powersat add-on, but I found a request for one in an Orbiter-forum post back in May. The requester was William Maness of PowerSat Corp., whom Alan Boyle quotes in his blog post. Maness was looking to contract an Orbiter add-on developer to create a powersat model for Orbiter that could be used in some visualizations and simulations of their proposed powersat system (a very cool deployable/inflatable concept). There was some interest and a lively discussion, though wasn't clear from the forum discussion whether he got someone to do it. But based on this video from PowerSat, it looks like they did, at least for visual purposes. Some parts of this video really look to me like Orbiter scenes (from 0:31 to 0:57 -  probably enhanced with video editing mainly to show the microwaves beaming down to Earth). Maness mentioned in the post that he hoped to simulate a launch to LEO on a SpaceX Falcon 9 as well as more specific technical aspects such as sun tracking and continuous thrust engines (presumably electric ion engines) to gradually boost the powersat from LEO to to its operational GEO orbit. Orbiter can do that sort of thing with some clever custom add-on programming.

There are obviously many challenges to developing and deploying solar powersats, but it's pretty exciting to be seeing even such early commercial development, and to think that Orbiter may have a small role to play in developing and promoting these systems.

Nice to Know It Works!

A few years back, I worked with a few far-flung fellow Orbiter enthusiasts to develop an Orbiter add-on package called Mars for Less (MFL). I wrote about it quite a bit in 2006-2008 and even presented a paper (PDF) on it at the 2006 Mars Society Conference in Washington, DC. Fun stuff, especially since Andy McSorley and Mark Paton did most of the heavy lifting (and re-entering). I mostly did a lot of testing and writing (scenarios, blog posts, and the MSC paper). Mark has quite a knack for spacecraft design and especially for EDL (entry, descent, and landing in the trade). Since MFL is all about saving weight (well, it's also about medium-lift boosters, modular orbital construction, and living off the land on Mars), we wanted a very light heat shield. Mark decided to go with an inflatable one. He'd read some stuff about them, and since Orbiter isn't exactly rigorous about the structural integrity of spacecraft models anyway, he decided to give it a shot. It seemed to work within the aerodynamics of Orbiter. I entered the Mars atmosphere and safely landed dozens of times (mostly thanks to Mark's spiffy autopilot work).You can see a bunch of my Mars for Less screen shots on my Flickr site and a nice 7 minute video (not mine) of the MFL mission here.

So I was really pleased to learn recently that someone has actually tried out an inflatable heat shield. NASA did a suborbital flight test of a 10 foot (3 meter) inflatable heat shield and it worked. Of course this is a lot smaller than what we would need for our manned Mars lander, but hey, it's a start!  Thanks to Colony Worlds for the tip and the photo.

My Brief Mars Vacation

Mars needs some work as a fun destination. Speaking in virtual terms, I've orbited and landed on Mars countless times in Orbiter, but once you land somewhere in Orbiter, there really isn't much to do (this is not always true - if you use the AMSO add-on to simulate Apollo Moon missions in Orbiter, you can do EVA's, drive the rover, and collect samples). That's OK - Orbiter is all about launches, orbits, and landings.

But what about living on and exploring Mars? I downloaded a free early alpha version of Mars Colony Simulator from HyperKat Games and spent a couple of hours playing with it on my own (there's a new multiplayer aspect that I didn't try). It seems to be directly inspired by Mars Direct, with a two-story tuna can COHAB and a nearby ERV (Earth Return Vehicle). It's got a 3D first-person interface that's fairly intuitive, and you start out in a space suit on the second floor of the COHAB, with several mission 1 objectives to complete.

You have to worry about things like making sure the water separator is running. Of course it's not (because it needs water), and you need to first find water you can drill for, which means you have to walk around outside and take a bunch of GPR (Ground Penetrating Radar) readings to find the water. So you go outside and start to do this for a few minutes, but watch out, dust storm warning! Get back inside, get out of your suit and top off the power and oxygen while waiting for the storm to pass. Suit up again and go out, but first you need to clean the dust off the solar panels (both units). Take a few GPR readings until, what's this? Another dust storm? It's accelerated time, but jeeze.

A real Mars crew would be 3 or more people, so I guess multiplayer is the way to go here, but I'm not ready for that. The simulation has food, water, and a bathroom, and you have to watch out for your player's health, sort of like the Sims (I guess). There's also agriculture (I only saw the algae tanks, but there's a greenhouse in mission 2, once you accomplish mission 1 and have a water supply - mission 2 also has a rover). There is some limited documentation. It looks like it will eventually be a cool and educational sim, but it's a bit too alpha for me right now. I'm not sure I'm cut out to be a virtual or real Mars colonist at this point in my life, but I'll keep an eye on this sim as development continues.

NASA Calls a Cab

According to this article, NASA is looking for a "space taxi," or more accurately, proposals for a commercial passenger transportation system to space. They plan to use $50 million of economic stimulus funds as "seed money" for this program. Such a system could help fill the gap in astronaut transportation to the ISS between the 2010 retirement of the space shuttle and the 2015 (probably later) availability of the Orion spacecraft and the Ares I launch vehicle (or whatever NASA ends up developing after the Augustine NASA Review Panel makes its recommendations). The current plan is to buy seats on Russian Soyuz spacecraft at $50 million a flight until a US-based system is available.

It would seem that SpaceX has a leg up on this program with its private Dragon spacecraft program, currently in development (with some NASA funding) to carry cargo to the ISS. Dragon was designed from the start to be extended to carrying passengers, with the addition of a few critical parts like seats and a crew escape system. But the escape system is a big ticket item (estimated at $300 million to develop), so $50 million won't go very far, assuming SpaceX wins the competetive bid. But as Elon Musk says, at least it's a step in the right direction, calling people's attention to the post-shuttle gap.

Of course it's not likely a real "space taxi" will look like my picture. This is an Orbiter add-on called "Space Taxi 2" by "lumpiluk," inspired by a German movie.

Super-Cool Spacecraft

The Hubble Space Telescope is a cool spacecraft, and the STS-125 astronauts are busy working on making it better than ever. Despite difficulties with some bolts, yesterday's EVA team removed the workhorse WFPC2 and replaced it with the new WFC3 camera system. Today the second EVA team has replaced RSU's (Rate Sensor Units, part of the telescope's attitude sensing system) and is now working on replacing batteries.

Update: I wasn't following the EVA earlier in the day and I missed the trouble that Mike Good had with installing one of the new RSU's, requiring the installation of an older but refurbished unit that was carried as a backup. Those NASA folks think of everything, but the trouble put them significantly behind schedule and required extending the EVA duration to allow enough time to do the critical battery task. I bet those guys sleep well tonight! Even for well-trained astronauts in great physical shape, a 7.5+ hour space walk has got to be exhausting.

As cool as Hubble is, the Herschel spacecraft that was launched by ESA earlier this week is super-cool. Literally. This advanced telescope for far-infrared and millimeter-wave observations has a supply of liquid helium on board to keep its sensors cooled below 2 K (less than 2 degrees above absolute zero). As an optical engineer, I'm impressed that this Cassegrain telescope has a 3.5 meter primary mirror, the largest yet launched into space (Hubble's primary is 2.4 m in diameter). Using these long wavelengths, Herschel will be able to image very distant, cold, and dust-shrouded objects to investigate the early history of the universe.

Herschel was launched with a companion spacecraft called Planck, which is a microwave observatory designed to study tiny fluctuations in the cosmic microwave background radiation (CMB), allowing scientists to infer the structure of the early universe as early as 380,000 years after the Big Bang (that's only about 0.003% of the estimated age of the universe, 13.5 to 14 billion years). ESA has a lot of online information on both Herschel and Planck.

Both satellites will operate quite far from Earth, at the Sun/Earth L2 Lagrangian point. They will be established in separate Lissoujous orbits around the L2 point. If you would like to see what this looks like for yourself, you can do so in Orbiter, courtesy of Brian Jones and Papyref, whose latest add-on simulates the Herschel and Planck spacecraft and also provides a special tool for viewing their orbits around the L2 point (screen shot at top). The models and included materials for this add-on are quite detailed. There is one L2 scenario provided, plus two launch-related scenarios (these require additional add-ons for the Ariane 5 launch vehicle and the ESA Kourou launch site.

Super cool!

LRO Preview

There's a cool preview of the LRO (Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter) mission today on the Planetary Society Blog, written by guest blogger Jim Bell of Cornell University, a participating scientist on the LRO mission. The launch window for LRO opens on June 2.

For Orbiter users who want to preview or follow this mission, Brian Jones has created a great add-on for LRO. As usual, Brian has provided excellent models and user documentation to simulate this upcoming mission in substantial detail. The screen shots above show his Orbiter model in lunar orbit.

Brian has created Orbiter add-ons for a number of real-life space missions that I have tried out and written about in past blog entries. These include MRO, Dawn, Phoenix, Genesis, and Rosetta. I just noticed a more recent add-on that is very interesting, the IEAT (Ion Engine Attitude and Throttle) MFD, an Orbiter control panel that helps with guidance and control of continuous thrust spacecraft such as Dawn. No time to try this out now, but I just downloaded it. I saw a great display on Dawn at JPL's Open House on Saturday, including one of its ion engines.

Carnival of Space Turns 100!

This week's Carnival of Space is hosted by One-Minute Astronomer, and it's a big one, number one-hundred! It's also a really cool one, with quite a lot of new information for me, starting with One-Minute Astronomer itself. It's an excellent observation-oriented and educational astronomy site.

Other special points of interest for me:

Mang's Bat Page has an introduction to interactive orbit simulators available through JPL's Small-Body Database Browser (I searched for Eros) and other online resources.

Beyond Apollo has a great post on Wernher von Braun's 1969 proposal for a nuclear-rocket Mars mission. Of course this never happened, but this post shows well how it might have been done.

And most amazing of all (partly because I knew nothing of the 2008 Orbiter add-on that is featured) is a post and video on The Discovery Enterprise blog of another Apollo-based Mars mission that never was, this one based on Stephen Baxter's alternate history SF novel Voyage. I loved that book, and I knew there had been an Orbiter add-on based on the book, but it was for an early version of Orbiter. This new add-on is called Baxter's Voyage Beta and was uploaded by "belisarius" in May 2008. The video by "rseferino" is really cool. He has some other Orbiter-based videos that also look interesting including one based on the amazing 2001: A Space Odyssey add-on (Floyd's Journey).

STS-400 LON (Launch On Need)

There are two shuttles on two pads at KSC now. Atlantis is in preparation to launch on the final Hubble service mission on May 12 (STS-125), and Endeavour has been rolled out to serve as the rescue shuttle in the unlikely event that Atlantis is unable to return from orbit (due to heavy thermal tile damage or some other major problem). This would be STS-400 LON "launch on need," and it's needed because if Atlantis has such a bad problem, it would be unable to reach the ISS as a "safe haven." All other recent shuttle missions have been space station missions, allowing the visiting shuttle crew to take refuge in the ISS for up to three months should a severe shuttle problem prevent reentry. Universe Today yesterday published a good, brief explanation of how this rescue mission would work.

I actually played around with simulating this in Orbiter last summer (picture above, more here) when STS-125 was still planned for a fall 2008 launch. I just installed and tested the latest Shuttle Fleet add-on package (4.1.5) along with the necessary expansion and payload packs and a small service pack that was released today on Orbit Hangar, bringing it up to v4.1.9. There are no STS-125 or STS-400 scenarios yet, but the launch autopilot now allows targeting an apogee of around 600 km, the altitude necessary to reach the Hubble's orbit.

Solar Sailing Article

The May issue the The Atlantic has an interesting article on the solar sail test project sponsored by The Planetary Society (the article is already available online). Cosmos 1 was the first attempt to launch and deploy a spacecraft with a solar sail, and the first space mission by a privately-funded space interest group, but unfortunately the Russian launch vehicle failed shortly after launch on June 21, 2005, and Cosmos 1 never reached orbit.

The Planetary Society is still working to keep the project alive and raise the money needed to launch Cosmos 2 (estimated at $4-5 million). I'm a member of TPS and I've occasionally donated money for various projects in addition to the normal membership fees. I'm headed over to the solar sail donation page right now. If any of my Gentle Readers happen to be space-minded millionaires, your help would be especially appreciated, but any donation will help. Solar sails are probably the best bet for a technology that could eventually get us to the stars. That's certainly a long way off, but we have to start somewhere.

The picture above is a solar sail add-on model in Orbiter.