The Space Show this week – Feb.19.2018

The guests and topics of discussion on The Space Show this week:

1. Monday, Feb. 19 , 2018: 2-3:30 pm PST (4-5:30 pm CST, 5-6:30 pm EST): No show today due to President’s Day national holiday.

2. Tuesday, Feb. 20, 2018: 7-8:30 pm PST; 9-10:30 pm CST; 10-11:30 pm EST: We welcome the return of Mark Whittington to discuss the great Moon debate in Utah.

3. Wednesday, Feb. 21, 2018: Hotel Mars. See Upcoming Show Menu and the website newsletter for details. Hotel Mars is pre-recorded by John Batchelor. It is archived on The Space Show site after John posts it on his website.

4. Friday, Feb. 23, 2018; 9:30 am -11 am PST, (12:30 -2 pm EST; 11:30 am -1 pm CST): No show, non-Space Show work day for me.

5. Sunday, Feb.25, 2018: 12-1:30 pm PST; 2-4:30 pm EST; 2-3:30 pm CST. We welcome back Dwight Steven-Boniecki to discuss his new Apollo-Soyuz Test Project book.

See also:
* The Space Show on Vimeo – webinar videos
* The Space Show’s Blog – summaries of interviews.
* The Space Show Classroom Blog – tutorial programs

The Space Show is a project of the One Giant Leap Foundation.

The Space Show - David Livingston
David Livingston

2211 World – “The Best of Space Philosophy”

A new website seeks to inspire philosophical discussions on the expansion of humanity into space: 2211 World | The Best of Space Philosophy

Two of the co-founders – Frank White and Rick Tumlinson – talked about the new initiative on  The Space Show on Friday:

Here is the press release:

New Website Opens Discussion of Space Philosophy

(Denver, CO, February 15, 2018): Within 20 years or less, we expect that the first humans will be living in space, from the Moon to Mars and even beyond. 2211.world is the planet’s first open source platform dedicated to creating the philosophy for the opening of the space environment to humanity. Founded by well-known space leaders Dylan Taylor, Rick Tumlinson, and Frank White, 2211 is designed to encourage conversations about the “Why?” of the human expansion beyond the Earth.

“We’ve been exploring space for over 50 years and it’s time we had a discussion about why we are doing it and how we will shape it,” said Dylan Taylor, global executive, Co-Founder of the Space Angels investment group and of Space For Humanity. “Opening space is about more than science and engineering. It’s about people, life, and our human future.”

The name 2211.world raises the question of what life will look like 250 years after the famous flight of Russian Cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin in 1961. The flight, part of a Cold War “space race” between two governments, culminated with humans walking on the Moon more than 50 years ago – and once the race was won, seems to many to have led nowhere. After the explosion of the shuttle Challenger in 1986, Tom Wolfe, author of The Right Stuff appeared on television and said, “We have never had a philosophy of space exploration.”

“We need a system of fundamental principles and ideas to guide us as we migrate into the solar system,” said Frank White, author of the seminal book, The Overview Effect: Space Exploration and Human Evolution, in which he made an early call for a philosophy of space exploration, citing the Wolfe comment. “In this new Space Age, we need to be very clear on ‘Why’ we are going, as that will determine how we go and what the end result will be. If we are to avoid mistakes that have been made on terrestrial frontiers, this is the moment in history to have that conversation.”

The Founders of 2211 believe that humanity needs to develop a set of core principles as we begin the human expansion outward. There are scores of questions to be answered about both why we are going and how we will act when we are out there. There are high-level guiding concepts such as: What is the relationship between science, exploration, and settlement? What are the roles of the world’s governments, militaries, and the laws of Earth? Each of these opens other discussions. For example, how do we treat alien life, how do we treat each other, who has what rights and what are they?

“The last wave of exploration of the new worlds of Earth was about government and commercial exploitation, and while these will be involved, we have the chance right now to change the context in which it occurs, and to define what we want the outcome to be.” said Tumlinson, founder of the Space Frontier Foundation, Deep Space Industries, and one of the leaders of the commercial space revolution. “We are engaged in an act of creation. We can make this next chapter of human life about anything we want. For example, imagine if our motivation was to spread life to the dead worlds of space. How would it feel to be part of a culture with that as its driving goal?”

While the Founders of 2211 believe government bodies are important in setting the rules and laws that manage our interactions, they feel that philosophical principles need to be in place that guide those governments, ideas that transcend governments and that have not been set for the space environment. At this moment in time, space has no borders, no governments, and only a minimal legal order. In the past, the voices of Voltaire, Jefferson, and the others whose ideas helped inform policies and the creation of new forms of government and the culture of today were easily available to thinkers and decision makers, but in today’s world such ideas are scattered across a thousand platforms and publications. 2211.world hopes to give them a home.

From Elon Musk to Jeff Bezos building their own spacecraft, to NASA, ESA, and the Chinese planning settlements and villages on the Moon, to private space station and asteroid mining companies planning their first missions and facilities, the human expansion into the solar system is already underway. The founders of 2211.World believe that this marks the beginning of a spacefaring civilization. The new website offers all of us a place to think and talk through how we are going to shape this historic moment. Like 2211.world , space is a blank slate where new ideas and concepts can be tested and tried and old ideas can evolve in novel ways.

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Videos: ISS astronauts on spacewalk to work on robotic arms

NASA astronaut Mark Vande Hei and Japanese astronaut Norishige Kanai are currently on an EVA outside the International Space Station. They are re-positioning two robotic arm grappling mechanisms, which were repaired during spacewalks late last year. The astronauts can be watched live on NASA TV:

This animation shows the tasks they are undertaking:

From the caption:

The first task for spacewalkers Mark Vande Hei and Norishige Kanai is to move a Latching End Effector (LEE), or hand, for the Canadian-built robotic arm, Canadarm2, from a payload attachment on the station’s Mobile Base System rail car to the Quest airlock. This LEE was replaced during an Expedition 53 spacewalk in October 2017 and will be returned to Earth to be refurbished and relaunched to the orbiting laboratory as a spare.

Once they have completed that activity, they will move an aging, but functional, LEE that was detached from the arm during a Jan. 23 spacewalk and move it from its temporary storage outside the airlock to a long-term storage location on the Mobile Base System, which is used to move the arm and astronauts along the station’s truss structure.

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Middle school students/teachers can register for next Sally Ride EarthKAM session of ISS earth imaging

Mission 60 for the Sally Ride EarthKAM program is set for February 20-26. Sally Ride EarthKAM is a NASA educational outreach program for middle school students who select particular spots on earth for imaging by a dedicated camera on the International Space Station. See the gallery of EarthKAM images taken over the years.

A recent Sally Ride EarthKAM image of Australian coast.

The program “enables students, teachers, and the public to learn about Earth from the unique perspective of space”.

The Activities section explains the details of the program. For example:

How does a Sally Ride EarthKAM mission work?
A teacher starts by signing up for a mission on the Sally Ride EarthKAM website. Students use their class’s Mission Account to pinpoint locations and request images. To figure out where and when to request images, students can track the orbit of the ISS, refer to maps and atlases, and check weather reports to see if clouds are likely to be in the way. 

UCSD undergraduates at the Sally Ride EarthKAM Mission Control Center collect image requests from schools all over the world. NASA representatives at Johnson Space Center in Houston uplink the requests to a computer on the ISS. This computer sends the requests to the digital EarthKAM camera. Then, when the ISS is passing over the exact right spot on Earth, the camera snaps a picture. 

The images are sent back to the ISS computer and downlinked to Johnson Space Center. From there they are transmitted to NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena for processing and then sent to the Sally Ride EarthKAM Mission Control Center. Within hours, the Sally Ride EarthKAM team puts the images on the EarthKAM website. Students can investigate the images and make connections to subjects they are studying. 

To participate in the upcoming ISS session, students and teachers can register here.

A view of a frozen lake in Qinghai Nanshan, northern China taken with the Sally Ride EarthKAM. An entry in the Favorite EarthKAM images gallery

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