The Space Show this week – Apr.13.15

April 13, 2015 TopSpacer

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

1. Monday, April 13, 2015: 2-3:30 PM PDT (5-6:30 PM EDT; 4-5:30 PM CDT): We welcome ERIK CONWAY, the JPL Historian regarding his new book, Exploration and Engineering: The Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the Quest for Mars (New Series in NASA History).

2. Tuesday, April 14,, 2015:,7-8:30 PM PDT (10-11:30 PM EST, 9-10:30 PM CDT): We welcome back RAND SIMBERG for his take on space news and policy events of recent times.

3. Friday, April 17, 2015; 9:30 -11 AM PDT (12:30-2 PM EDT; 11:30-1 PM CDT): We welcome back DR. CHRIS IMPEY regarding his new book Beyond: Our Future In Space.

4. Sunday, April 19, 2015: 12-1:30 PM PDT (3-4:30 PM EDT, 2-3:30 PM CDT): We welcome DR. JOHN JURIST AND KOBI HUDSON regarding the recent ATK 5 Segment booster test and Kobi’s ISS project.

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.

Events, Space Music, Space participation

Yuri’s Night Space Parties

April 11, 2015 TopSpacer

It’s the weekend for celebrating space travel at a Yuri’s Night Space Party. The annual Yuri’s Night

is a global celebration of humanity’s past, present, and future in space. Yuri’s Night parties and events are held around the world every April in commemoration of Yuri Gagarin becoming the first human to venture into space on April 12, 1961, and the inaugural launch of the first Space Shuttle on April 12, 1981.

Yuri’s Night events combine space-themed partying with education and outreach. These events can range from an all-night mix of techno and technology at a NASA Center, to a movie showing and stargazing at your local college, to a gathering of friends at a bar or barbecue.

Check for a party in your area at Find a Yuri’s Night event.

Or have a party of your own. Find space-inspired tunes to play in the HobbySpace music section.

DIY space, Rockets, Space participation

Open source space exploration

April 10, 2015 TopSpacer

Lloyd Droppers of Project Earendel writes about various aspects of open source rocket and spacecraft development and about its benefits: Op-ed | Open Source Technology: A New Direction for Space – SpaceNews –

Open source software and hardware are rapidly decreasing the cost required to get systems up and running. A great example of this is NASA’s PhoneSat bus, which used commercial off-the-shelf parts and the Android operating system and reportedly cost only $3,500 to produce. With the use of open source software to design components and open source hardware to test components, the price of system development has the potential to be accessible to many hobbyists and small businesses.

The most important open source documentation in aerospace is probably the Defense Technical Information Center and the NASA Technical Reports Server. While not traditionally thought of as open source, many of the older technical reports (roughly pre-1980) have detailed documentation including drawings, test plans and results sufficient to duplicate the devices and test results, and are in the public domain. NASA also has released a variety of open source software packages on topics ranging from orbit determination to robot vision.

Science and Technology, Speculation

Video: Marc Millis, inertial frames, and space drives

April 10, 2015 TopSpacer

I pointed earlier to the set of videos from the Tennessee Valley Interstellar Workshop (TVIW) held in Oak Ridge last November. One of the talks was given by Marc Millis, who was chief of NASA’s Breakthrough Propulsion program, which ran from 1996-2002. Schemes to provide propellantless propulsion without violating conservation of momentum require some type of non-standard view of inertial frames. In his TVIW talk, he gave an intro to this topic. He also has this online tutorial: Breakthrough Propulsion Physics – a tutorial by Marc Millis – h+ Media