Kako astronauti idu u WC u svemiru? :D :D

[zakk]

Shuttle's Toilet Requires Special Training

[džin tonik]

"... female crew members have three choices ..."

[Meho Krljic]

Nije on topik, ali ajde

Apollo 1: The Fire That Shocked NASA

        The Apollo 1 Command Module after the fire that claimed the lives of Gus Grissom, Ed White, and Roger Chaffee. Credit: NASA. NASA s Apollo program began with one of the worst disasters the organization has ever faced. A routine prelaunch test turned fatal when a fire ripped through the spacecraft s crew cabin killing all three astronauts. Today marks the 45th anniversary of the Apollo 1 fire, a tragic and preventable accident. There were warning signs, similar accidents that had claimed lives both in the United States and abroad. The Apollo 1 crew could have been saved from a gruesome death.
Plugs Out
Gallery_Image_6447 L-R: Roger Chaffee, Ed White, and Gus Grissom training for their Apollo 1 flight. Credit: NASA. The commander for Apollo 1 was Gus Grissom, one of the original Mercury astronauts whose first spaceflight was marred by his capsule s sinking after splashdown. He flew again in Gemini in a spacecraft he named Molly Brown. Senior pilot on the Apollo 1 crew was Ed White, a Gemini veteran who made America s first spacewalk in 1965. Rounding out the crew was pilot Roger Chaffee, a talented rookie more than capable of holding his own with his experienced crew mates. He was a notoriously good guy who took pains to thank everyone for their contributions to Apollo right down to the janitors.
By the end of January 1967, the crew was going through their final prelaunch tests; barring some major setback, they would make the first manned Apollo flight on February 21. One routine test NASA had done since Mercury was the plugs out test, a final check of the spacecraft s systems.
Apollo_One_CM_arrival_KSC The spacecraft - Command Module 12 - arrives at the Kennedy Spaceflight Centre clearly destined for Apollo 1. Credit: NASA. The spacecraft was fully assembled and stacked on top of its unfuelled Saturn IB launch vehicle on pad 34. The umbilical power cords that usually supplied power were removed the plugs were out and the spacecraft switched over to battery power. The cabin was pressurized with 16.7 pounds per square inch (psi) of 100 percent oxygen, a pressure slightly greater than one atmosphere. With everything just as it would be on February 21, the crew went through a full simulation of countdown and launch.
A full launch-day staff of engineers in mission control also went through the simulation. The White Room, the room through which the astronauts entered the spacecraft, remained pressed next to the vehicle. A crew of engineers monitored the spacecraft and were just feet away from the astronauts.
Bondarenko_valentin spacefacts.de Cosmonaut Bondarenko. Credit: spacefacts.de Grissom, White, and Chaffee suited up and entered the Apollo 1 command module at 1pm and hooked into the spacecraft s oxygen and communications systems. For the next five and a half hours, the test proceeded with only minor interruptions. Grissom s complaint of a smell like sour buttermilk in the oxygen circulating through his suit was resolved after a short hold, and a high oxygen flow through the astronauts suits tripped an alarm. But these were minor problems and didn t raise any red flags in mission control.
The real problem was communication. Static made it impossible for the crew and mission control to hear one another. An increasingly frustrated Grissom began to question how they were expected to get to the Moon if they couldn t talk between a few buildings.
GPN-2000-001159 The Apollo 1 official crew portrait. L-R: Ed White, Gus Grissom, Roger Chaffee. Credit: NASA. Just after 6:31 that evening, the routine test took a turn. Engineers in mission control saw an increase in oxygen flow and pressure inside the cabin. The telemetry was accompanied by a garbled transmission that sounded like fire. The official record reflects the communications problem. The transmission was unclear, but the panic was obvious as an astronaut yelled something like they re fighting a bad fire let s get out. Open er up or we ve got a bad fire let s get out. We re burning up. The static made it impossible to hear the exact words or even distinguish who was speaking.
But flames visible through the command module s small porthole window left no doubt about what the crew had said. Engineers in the White Room tried to get the hatch open but couldn t. It was an inward opening design, and neither engineers outside the spacecraft nor the astronauts inside were strong enough to force it open. The men in mission control watched helplessly as the scene played out on the live video feed.
S66-24522 The Apollo 1 crew in a less formal setting. L-R: Gus Grissom, Ed White, Roger Chaffee. Credit: NASA. Just three seconds after the crew s garbled report of a fire, the pressure inside the cabin became so great that the hull ruptured. Men wrestling with the hatch were thrown across the room as flames and smoke spilled into the White Room. Many continued to fight their way towards the spacecraft but were forced to retreat as the smoke grew too thick to see through. In mission control, the telemetry and voice communication from Apollo 1 went completely silent.
An hour and a half later, firemen and emergency personnel succeeded in removing the bodies; Ed White was turned around on his couch reaching for the hatch. Over the next two months, the spacecraft was disassembled piece by piece in an attempt to isolate the cause of the fire. The full investigation lasted a year.
Apollo 1 recovery training The Apollo 1 crew floats around during water egress training. Credit: NASA. The Apollo 1 accident review board determined that a wire over the piping from the urine collection system had arced. The fire started below the crew s feet, so from their supine positions on their couches they wouldn t have seen it in time to react. Everything in the cabin had been soaking in pure oxygen for hours, and flammable material near the wire caught fire immediately. From there, it took ten seconds for spacecraft to fill with flames.
The crew s official cause of death was asphyxiation from smoke inhalation. Once their oxygen hoses were severed they began breathing in toxic gases. All three astronauts died in less than a minute. Many who had tried to save them were treated for smoke inhalation.
The Chamber of Silence
9600918 Astronaut Frank Borman's official Gemini era portrait. Borman was the astronaut's representative on the Apollo 1 accident review board. Credit: NASA. The fire that claimed the lives of Grissom, White, and Chaffee is eerily similar to one that killed cosmonaut Valentin Bondarenko in 1961. Bondarenko was known to his colleagues as a congenial and giving man with great athletic prowess who worked tirelessly to prove he deserved the honour of flying in space.
Part of the cosmonauts training was done in an isolation chamber designed to mimic the mental stresses spaceflight. The room, which the men called the Chamber of Silence, was spartan to say the least. It was furnished with a steel bed, a wooden table, a seat identical to what they would have in the Vostok capsule, minimal toilet facilities, an open-coil hot plate for warming meals, and a limited amount of water for washing and cooking. The chamber was pressurized to mimic the capsule s environment in space. In this case, the oxygen concentration was 68 percent.
07pd0180 Ed White III touches his father's name on the Apollo 1 panel of the Space Mirror Memorial at the Kennedy Space Centre visitor complex. Credit: NASA. During the test, cosmonauts would exercise mental agility with memory games using a wall chart with coloured squares. They would keep busy by reading or colouring subjects were supplied with some leisure material. The silence was frequently interrupted by classical music to see how the subjects reacted to a pleasurable shock. Aside from these distractions, sensory deprivation inside the chamber was absolute. The room was mounted on thick rubber shock absorbers that muffled any vibrations from movement outside, and the 16-inch thick walls absorbed any sound. The cosmonauts communicated with doctors by lights. A light told the subject to apply medical sensors to his body, and a light outside the chamber signaled to doctors that they could begin their tests. A different light would signal the end of the isolation test.
The environment was designed to challenge the cosmonauts mental stability and adaptability. But the hardest part was that no subject knew beforehand how long his test would last. It could run anywhere from a few hours to weeks.
070127_apollo1_crew_02 The Apollo 1 crew walks across the gantry before entering the spacecraft on January 27. Credit: NASA. Bondarenko was the 17th cosmonaut to go into the Chamber of Silence and on March 23, his ten day test came to an end. A light signaled that technicians outside had started depressurizing the chamber to match the atmosphere outside. It was a routine part of the test, but this time it was interrupted by a fire alarm.
While he waited to leave the chamber, Bondarenko removed his biomedical sensors and wiped the adhesive off with rubbing alcohol on a cotton pad. In his haste to leave, and exhibiting the lack of concentration expected after ten days of mental testing, he didn t look where he threw the pad. It landed on the hot plate s coil. Cosmonaut Pavel Popovich theorized that he had been standing next to it at the time. Many subjects left the small heater on all the time to warm up the chilly room.
Dummy in Vostok seat Associated Press A dummy rides in a Vostok capsule seat. Credit: Associated Press. A fire sparked and spread in an instant; everything, including Bondarenko, was saturated with a high concentration of oxygen. Technicians wrenched the door open and exposed the chamber to air, killing the fire instantly, but the damage was done. Doctors pulled a huddled and severely burnt Bondarenko from the room. It s my fault, he whispered when doctors reached him, I m so sorry no one else is to blame. The severity of the fire was immediately obvious. Bondarenko s wool clothes had melted onto his body and the skin underneath had burned away. His hair had caught fire. His eyes were swollen and melted shut.
In Moscow, surgeon and traumatologist Vladimir Julievich Golyakhovsky got a frantic call at his office; the severely burned patient was on his way. Ten minutes later, a team of men in military uniforms arrived carrying the blanket-wrapped cosmonaut. They were accompanied, Golyakhovsky later recalled, by an overwhelming smell of burnt flesh.
GPN-2000-001834 The damage to the Apollo 1 crew cabin, after the bodies were removed and before the disassembly began. Credit: NASA. Bondarenko pleaded for something to kill the pain. Golyakhovsky obliged and gave the patient a shot of morphine in the soles of his feet. It was the one unscathed part of his body thanks to his heavy boots, and the only place the doctor could find a vein. There was nothing he could do to save the man s life. Bondarenko died the next morning. The official cause was shock and severe burns.
Lessons at Home
Parallels between the Apollo 1 crew s and Bondarenko s deaths are obvious, but how each space agency dealt with the deaths was very different. Grissom, White, and Chaffee were each given very public funerals in accordance with their respective military traditions. Bondarenko s death was kept secret, his identity covered by a pseudonym. Not until 1986 did the world hear the true story of his death. This has bred speculation that had the Soviet system been more open, NASA would have know about the dangers of training in a pressurized pure oxygen environment and could have saved the Apollo 1 crew. Former cosmonaut Alexei Leonov even suggested that the CIA knew about Bondarenko since the US had pierced the Iron Curtain before the accident.
But this is unlikely. And besides, NASA wouldn t need to look to the Soviet Union to know the dangers of testing in a pressurized oxygen environment. There were enough incidents in the US to make the danger very clear. Four oxygen fires in the five years before the Apollo 1 accident were proof enough.
ap1-apollo_1_noID_mc800x666 The Apollo 1 spacecraft nearing the end of the disassembly. Sometime towards the end of March, 1967. Credit: NASA. On September 9, 1962, a fire broke out in a simulated spacecraft cabin at Brooks Air Force Base. The cabin was pressurized to 5psi with pure oxygen. Both subjects were protected by pressure suits. Neither sustained burns, but both were treated for smoke inhalation.
Two months later on November 16, four men had been inside the US Navy s Air Crew Equipment Laboratory for 17 days in an environment pressurized to 5psi of 100 percent oxygen when an exposed wire arced and started a fire. It spread rapidly over the men s clothing and hands for 40 seconds before they were rescued. All were treated for severe burns, and this was the only instance in which the source of the fire was identified.
Two Navy divers were killed on February 16, 1965 in a test of the Navy s Experimental Diving Unit, which was pressurized to 55.6psi to mimic conditions at a depth of 92 feet. It was a multi-gas environment: 28 percent oxygen, 36 percent nitrogen, and 36 percent helium. Somehow, the carbon dioxide scrubbers that were designed to remove the toxic gas from the air caught fire. Pressure inside the chamber rose making it impossible for technicians outside to open the door and remove the men.
funeral Gus Grissom's funeral procession. Credit: NASA. A 1966 oxygen environment fire came frighteningly close to anticipating the Apollo 1 accident. A fire broke out during an unmanned qualification test of the Apollo Environmental Control System on April 28. The cabin was pressurized to 5psi of 100 percent oxygen, just like the spacecraft would be in flight. The fire was blamed on a commercial grade strip heater inside the cabin and the incident was consequently dismissed. The commercial material would not be onboard any manned flights. The board that investigated the accident made no mention of the hazardous environment.
A Lack of Imagination
Apollo_1_patch The Apollo 1 mission patch. Credit: NASA. These accidents weren t secret. NASA knew the dangers of a pressurized oxygen environment, which has prompted conspiracy theorists to suggest that the space agency intentionally put the Apollo 1 crew in danger. But this was hardly the case. In truth, no one at NASA gave much thought to a fire in the spacecraft.
In the early 1960s when Apollo was in its preliminary stages, a dual gas system (likely oxygen and nitrogen) was proposed for the crew cabin. This would have been safer in the event of fire, but more difficult overall. A mixed gas environment requires more piping and wiring, which in turn adds weight. Pure oxygen was simpler, lighter, and was already familiar to NASA. The dual-gas idea was scratched.
NASA did address the possibility of a fire in the spacecraft, but only developed procedures for an event in space when the nearest fire station was 180 miles away. Apollo, like Mercury and Gemini, had no specific fire fighting system on board. The 5psi of oxygen in space was considered too thin to feed a significant fire. Anything that could spark in that environment could be taken care of with a few well aimed blasts from the astronauts water pistol.
grissom-funeral-life-cover-1967 Grissom's, White's, and Chaffee's death are the cover story of Life Magazine's February 10 issue. Credit: Life. There was no procedure for a fire on the ground. With so many engineers on hand for every test, it was assumed that the astronauts would safe so long as fire extinguishers were nearby. But more importantly in the case of Apollo 1 is the plugs out test s status: it wasn t classified as dangerous.
Frank Borman, a Gemini veteran who would go to the Moon on Apollo 8, served as the astronaut s representative to the Apollo 1 accident investigation board. He made this point about the plugs out test s status abundantly clear. I don t believe that any of us recognized that the test conditions for this test were hazardous, he said on record. Without fuel in the launch vehicle and all the pyrotechnic bolts unarmed, no one imagined a fire could start let alone thrive. Borman himself hadn t thought twice when he went through the plugs out test before his Gemini 7 mission. He was confident in NASA and its engineers and stated on record that he would have gone through the Apollo 1 test had he been on the crew.
A1prayer The Apollo 1 crew expressed their concerns over the Apollo spacecraft in a joke crew portrait. They said a little prayer, and gave the picture to the manager of the Apollo Spacecraft Program Office Joe Shea in 1966. Credit: NASA. Borman alluded to the Apollo 1 crew s shared confidence. There had been problems with Apollo w development, and every astronaut had the right to refuse to enter a spacecraft. Although there are sometimes romantic silk-scarf attitudes attributed to this type of business, in the final analysis we are professionals and will accept risk but not undue risks, explained Borman. The Apollo 1 crew felt the dangers were minimal.
With that statement, Borman identified what he considered the crux of the problem and the real reason, however indirect, behind the death of the crew. We did not think, he said, and this is a failing on my part and on everyone associated with us; we did not recognize the fact that we had the three essentials, an ignition source, extensive fuel and, of course, we knew we had oxygen.
LC34plaque2 A plaque commemorating the Apollo 1 crew on what's left of launch pad 34. Credit: Christopher K. Davis (via Wikipedia). Gus Grissom serendipitously wrote his memoirs during the Gemini program. He addresses the inherent risk of spaceflight in the book s final passage. There will be risks, as there are in any experimental program, and sooner or later, inevitably, we re going to run head-on into the law of averages and lose somebody. I hope this never happens but if it does, I hope the American people won t feel it s too high a price to pay for our space program. None of us was ordered into manned spaceflight. We flew with the knowledge that if something really went wrong up there, there wasn t the slightest hope of rescue. We could do it because we had complete confidence in the scientists and engineers who designed and built our spacecraft and operated our Mission Control Centre... Now for the moon.
Though tragic, their deaths were not in vain. The substantial redesigns made to the Apollo command module after the fire yielded a safer and more capable spacecraft that played no small role in NASA reaching the moon before the end of the decade. It is a fitting tribute to the crew that the plaque on the pad where they perished reads ad astra per aspera a rough road to the stars.
Suggested Reading:
- Official Apollo 1 site: http://www.hq.nasa.gov/office/pao/History/Apollo204/
- Colin Burgess and Rex Hall. The First Soviet Cosmonaut Team. 2009.
- Gus Grissom. Gemini. 1968.
- Apollo 204 Accident. Report of the Committee on Aeronautical and Space Science, United States. 1968. Available online: http://klabs.org/richcontent/Reports/Failure_Reports/as-204/senate_956/index.htm
- Report of the Apollo 204 Review Board to the Administrator, National Aeronautics and Space Administration. 1968. Available online: http://www.hq.nasa.gov/office/pao/History/Apollo204/content.html
- Hearings Before the Subcommittee on NASA Oversight of the Committee on Science and Astronautics. 1967.
Follow Scientific American on Twitter @SciAm and @SciamBlogs. Visit ScientificAmerican.com for the latest in science, health and technology news.
© 2012 ScientificAmerican.com. All rights reserved.

[Meho Krljic]

What The Apollo Astronauts Did For Life Insurance

This week, Americans have been remembering Neil Armstrong. But before he walked on the moon, he had to solve a much more prosaic problem.
"You're about to embark on a mission that's more dangerous than anything any human has ever done before," Robert Pearlman, a space historian and collector with collectspace.com, told me. "And you have a family that you're leaving behind on Earth, and there's a real chance you will not be returning."
Exactly the kind of situation a responsible person plans for by taking out a life insurance policy. Not surprisingly, a life insurance policy for somebody about to get on a rocket to the moon cost a fortune.

But Neil Armstrong had something going for him. He was famous, as was the whole Apollo 11 crew. People really wanted their autographs.
"These astronauts had been signing autographs since the day they were announced as astronauts, and they knew even though eBay didn't exist back then, that there was a market for such things," Pearlman said. "There was demand."
Especially for what were called covers -– envelopes signed by astronauts and postmarked on important dates.
About a month before Apollo 11 was set to launch, the three astronauts entered quarantine. And, during free moments in the following weeks, each of the astronauts signed hundreds of covers.
They gave them to a friend. And on important days — the day of the launch, the day the astronauts landed on the moon — their friend got them to the post office and got them postmarked, and then distributed them to the astronauts' families.
It was life insurance in the form of autographs.
"If they did not return from the moon, their families could sell them — to not just fund their day-to-day lives, but also fund their kids' college education and other life needs," Pearlman said.
The life insurance autographs were not needed. Armstrong and Aldrin walked on the moon and came home safely. They signed probably tens of thousands more autographs for free.
But then, in the 1990s, Robert Pearlman says, the insurance autographs started showing up in space memorabilia auctions. An Apollo 11 insurance autograph can cost as much as $30,000.

[Meho Krljic]

Moondoggle: The Forgotten Opposition to the Apollo Program 

For most of our lunar adventure, a majority of Americans did not support going to the moon. On the 50th anniversary of JFK's "We choose to go the moon" speech, we examine why.

Today, we recall the speech John F. Kennedy made 50 years ago as the beginning of a glorious and inexorable process in which the nation united behind the goal of a manned lunar landing even as the presidency swapped between parties. Time has tidied things up.
Polls both by USA Today and Gallup have shown support for the moon landing has increased the farther we've gotten away from it. 77 percent of people in 1989 thought the moon landing was worth it; only 47 percent felt that way in 1979.
When Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landed on the moon, a process began that has all but eradicated any reference to the substantial opposition by scientists, scholars, and regular old people to spending money on sending humans to the moon. Part jobs program, part science cash cow, the American space program in the 1960s placed the funding halo of military action on the heads of civilians. It bent the whole research apparatus of the United States to a symbolic goal in the Cold War.
This chart from the Congressional Research Service shows just how extreme the Space Race's funding levels were, even in comparison to the Manhattan Project or the brief fluorescence of energy R&D after the OPEC oil embargo of 1973.

Given this outlay during the 1960s, a time of great social unrest, you can bet people protested spending this much money on a moon landing. Many more quietly opposed the missions. Space historian Roger Launius of the National Air and Space Museum has called attention to public-opinion polls conducted during the Apollo missions. Here is his conclusion:

For example, many people believe that Project Apollo was popular, probably because it garnered significant media attention, but the polls do not support a contention that Americans embraced the lunar landing mission. Consistently throughout the 1960s a majority of Americans did not believe Apollo was worth the cost, with the one exception to this a poll taken at the time of the Apollo 11 lunar landing in July 1969. And consistently throughout the decade 45-60 percent of Americans believed that the government was spending too much onspace, indicative of a lack of commitment to the spaceflight agenda. These data do not support a contention that most people approved of Apollo and thought it important to explore space.

We've told ourselves a convenient story about the moon landing and national unity, but there's almost no evidence that our astronauts united even America, let alone the world. Yes, there was a brief, shining moment right around the moon landing when everyone applauded, but four years later, the Apollo program was cut short and humans have never seriously attempted to get back to the moon ever again.
I can't pretend to trace the exact process by which the powerful images of men on the moon combined with a sense of nostalgia for a bygone era of heroes combined to create the notion that the Apollo missions were overwhelmingly popular. That'd be a book. But what I can do is tell you about two individuals who, in their own ways, opposed the government and tried to direct funds to more earthly pursuits: poet and musician Gil Scott-Heron and the sociologist Amitai Etzioni, then at Columbia University.
Heron performed a song called, "Whitey on the Moon" that mocked "our" achievements in space.

The song had a very powerful effect on my historical imagination and led to me seeking out much of the other evidence in this post. The opening line creates a dyad that's hard to forget: "A rat done bit my sister Nell / With Whitey on the moon." I wrote about this song last year when Scott-Heron died, reflecting on what it meant for "our" achievements in space.

Though I still think the hunger for the technological sublime crosses racial boundaries, [the song] destabilized the ease with which people could use "our" in that kind of sentence. To which America went the glory of the moon landing? And what did it cost our nation to put whitey on the moon?

Many black papers questioned the use of American funds for space research at a time when many African Americans were struggling at the margins of the working class. An editorial in the Los Angeles Sentinel, for example, argued against Apollo in no uncertain terms, saying, "It would appear that the fathers of our nation would allow a few thousand hungry people to die for the lack of a few thousand dollars while they would contaminate the moon and its sterility for the sake of 'progress' and spend billions of dollars in the process, while people are hungry, ill-clothed, poorly educated (if at all)."
This is, of course, a complicated story. When 200 black protesters marched on Cape Canaveral to protest the launch of Apollo 14, one Southern Christian Leadership Conference leader claimed, "America is sending lazy white boys to the moon because all they're doing is looking for moon rocks. If there was work to be done, they'd send a nigger."
But another SCLC leader, Hosea Williams, made a softer claim, saying simply they were "protesting our nation's inability to choose humane priorities." And Williams admitted to the AP reporter, "I thought the launch was beautiful. The most magnificent thing I've seen in my whole life."
Perhaps the most comprehensive attempt to lay out the case against the space program came from the sociologist Etizioni, in his now nearly impossible to find 1964 book, The Moon-doggle: Domestic and International Implications of the Space Race. Luckily for you, I happen to have a copy sitting right here.

Etzioni attacked the manned space program by pointing out that many scientists opposed both the mission and the "cash-and-crash approach to science" it represented. He cites a 1958 report to the President from his Science Advisory Committee in which "some of the most eminent scientists in this country" bagged on our space ambitions. "Research in outer space affords new opportunities in science but does not diminish the importance of science on earth," he quotes the report. It concludes, "It would not be in the national interest to exploit space science at the cost of weakening our efforts in other scientific endeavors. This need not happen if we plan our national program for space science and technology as part of a balanced effort in all science and technology."
Etzioni goes on to note, and the chart above attests, that this "balanced effort" never materialized.

The space budget was increased in the five years that followed by more than tenfold while the total American expenditure on research and development did not eve ndouble. Of every three dollars spent on research and development in the United States in 1963, one went for defense, one for space, and the remaining one for all other research purposes, including private industry and medical research.

He keeps piling up the evidence that scientists opposed or at best, tepidly supported, the space program. A Science poll of 113 scientists not associated with NASA found that all but 3 of them "believed that the present lunar program is rushing the manned stage. Etzioni's final assessment -- "most scientists agree that from the viewpoint of science there is no reason to rush a man to the moon" -- seems accurate.
But that's just the beginning of the book. He has many other arguments against the Apollo program: It sucked up not just available dollars, but our best and brightest. Robots could do our exploration better than humans, anyway. We would fall behind in other sciences because of our dedication to putting men on the moon. There were special problems with fighting the Cold War into space. And even as a status symbol, the moon was pretty lousy.

But the space program was great in one way: politically. He notes that President Kennedy sought to help the poor and underprivileged but Congress blocked him. So, as Etzioni tells it, you get a massive public works program cleverly disguised as in conservative, flag-waving garb:

Put before Congress a mission involving the nation, not the poor; tie to competing with Russia, not slashing unemployment. Economically the important thing was to spend a few billions -- on anything; the effect would be to put the economy into high gear and to provide a higher income for all, including the poor.

But the space program didn't really work out that way. "NASA does make work, but in the wrong sector; it employs highly scarce professional manpower, which will continue to be in high demand and short supply for years to come," he argued.
He laid out an alternative plan with long-term, science-based goals for research funding, a rational peace with the Soviets, and the creation of palatable social programs to develop rural America and help out the poor. But his voice was lost, and in his last few pages, he may have even predicted why.
"In an age that worships technology, when man is lost among the instruments he has created, the space race erects new pyramids of gadgetry; in an age of materialism, it piles on more investments in things when what is needed is investment in people; in an age of extrovert activism, it lends glory to rocket-powered jumps, when critical self-examination and reflection ought to be stressed; in an age of international conflicts, which approach doomsday dimensions, it provides a new focus for emotional divisions among men, when tasks to be shared and to bind them are needed," Etzioni thundered. "Above all, the space race is used as an escape, by focusing on the moon we delay facing ourselves, as Americans and as citizens of the earth."
The race to the moon may not have been wildly popular among scientists, random Americans, or black political activists, but it was hard to deny the power of the imagery returning from space. Our attention kept getting directed to the heavens -- and our technology's ability to propel humans there. It was pure there, and sublime, even if our rational selves could see we might be better off spending the money on urban infrastructure or cancer research or vocational training. Americans might not have supported the space program in real life, but they loved the one they saw on TV.


 

[Meho Krljic]

New Comet Discovered—May Become "One of Brightest in History" 

Next year comet 2012 S1 might outshine the moon. 

Andrew Fazekas
for National Geographic News
Published September 27, 2012
  If astronomers' early predictions hold true, the holidays next year may hold a glowing gift for stargazers—a superbright comet, just discovered streaking near Saturn.
Even with powerful telescopes, comet 2012 S1 (ISON) is now just a faint glow in the constellation Cancer. But the ball of ice and rocks might become visible to the naked eye for a few months in late 2013 and early 2014—perhaps outshining the moon, astronomers say.
The comet is already remarkably bright, given how far it is from the sun, astronomer Raminder Singh Samra said. What's more, 2012 S1 seems to be following the path of the Great Comet of 1680, considered one of the most spectacular ever seen from Earth.
"If it lives up to expectations, this comet may be one of the brightest in history," said Samra, of the H.R. MacMillan Space Centre in Vancouver, Canada.
So what makes a comet a showstopper? A lot depends on how much gas and dust is blasted off the central core of ice and rocks. The bigger the resulting cloud and tail, the more reflective the body may be.

Because 2012 S1 appears to be fairly large—possibly approaching two miles (three kilometers) wide—and will fly very close to the sun, astronomers have calculated that the comet may shine brighter, though not bigger, than the full moon in the evening sky.
(Also see "New Comet Found; May Be Visible From Earth in 2013.")
Refugee From the Edge of the Solar System?
First spotted late last week by Russian astronomers Artyom Novichonok and Vitali Nevski of the International Scientific Optical Network (ISON), comet 2012 S1 was confirmed by the International Astronomical Union on Monday.
But while we know what 2012 S1 is, it's still unclear where it came from. Its orbit suggests the comet may be a runaway from the Oort cloud, where billions of comets orbit about a hundred thousand times farther from the sun than Earth is.
"For astronomers, these distant origins are exciting," Samra said, "because it allows us to study one of the oldest objects in the solar system still in its original, pristine condition."
(Related: "Comet Is Cosmic Snow Globe, NASA Flyby Shows.")
New Comet Bound for Glory?
Right now, 2012 S1 appears to be about 615 million miles (990 million kilometers) from Earth, between the orbits of Saturn and Jupiter, astronomers say.
As the sun's gravity pulls the comet closer, it should pass about 6.2 million miles (10 million kilometers) from Mars—possibly a unique photo opportunity for NASA's new Curiosity rover.
Current orbital predictions indicate the comet will look brightest to us in the weeks just after its closest approach to the sun, on November 28, 2013—if 2012 S1 survives the experience.
As the comet comes within about 1.2 million miles (2 million kilometers) of the sun, the star's intense heat and gravity could cause the ice and rubble to break apart, scotching the sky show. (Related: "Comet Seen Vaporizing in Sun's Atmosphere—A First.")
"While some predictions suggest it may become as bright as the full moon, and even visible during the day, one should be cautious when predicting how exciting a comet may get," Samra said.
"Some comets have been notorious for creating a buzz but failing to put on a dazzling display," he said. "Only time will tell."
More: See the first pictures of a peanut-like comet >> 

[Meho Krljic]

I malo o crnoj rupi u središtu galaksije M87, ma koja to bila...

A Spinning Black Hole at a Galaxy's Center 

  Like all invisible things that are only partly understood, black holes evoke a sense of mystery. Astronomers know that the tremendous gravitational pull of a black hole sucks matter in. They also know that the material falling in causes powerful jets of particles to shoot out of the black hole at nearly the speed of light. But how exactly this phenomenon occurs remains a matter of conjecture, because astronomers have never quite managed to observe the details.
Well, now they have. Sheperd Doeleman, an astrophysicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Haystack Observatory in Westford, and his colleagues have taken the closest look to date at the region where matter swirls around a black hole. By measuring the size of the base of a jet shooting out of the supermassive black hole at the center of the M87 galaxy, the researchers conclude that the black hole must be spinning and that the material orbiting must also be swirling in the same direction. Some of the material from this orbiting "accretion disk" is also falling into the black hole, like water swirling down a drain. The finding appears online today in Science.
For the past few years, Doeleman and his colleagues have been working to link up radio dishes around the world into a virtual telescope with unprecedented magnifying power, which would enable researchers to observe the immediate vicinity of the black hole in the heart of M87—a favorite target for astronomers, as it is one of the brightest objects in the sky. So far, the researchers have linked radio dishes at three sites. That hasn't provided enough resolution to see all the way to the edge of the black hole. But it enabled the researchers to measure the area through which the jet is being emitted.
The size of this emission region fits with only one particular theoretical model of how these jets form. The base of the jet "reduces to the size we measured only when the black hole is spinning and the accretion disk is orbiting in the same direction," Doeleman says. "What we find so exciting is that we are now finally able to measure structures so close to the black hole." He and his colleagues hope to use the Event Horizon Telescope—the instrument being created by linking the radio dishes—to test "whether Einstein's theory of general relativity is valid at the one place in the universe where it might break down: the event horizon of a black hole."
The paper "is very interesting," says Meg Urry, an astrophysicist at Yale University who was not involved in the study. "Measuring the launch point for the jet is absolutely critical for understanding how jets form, and indeed how jet energy is extracted from the black hole-disk system." However, Urry points out, the conclusions rest on a number of assumptions that are "difficult to confirm"—such as whether the measured area does lie directly on top of the black hole rather than off to the side or elsewhere.   

[Meho Krljic]

http://creativetime.org/projects/the-last-pictures/the-pictures/

This fall, Creative Time will launch The Last Pictures, an archival disc created by artist Trevor Paglen, into outer space, where it will orbit the earth for billions of years affixed to the exterior of the communications satellite EchoStar XVI. To create the artifact, Paglen micro-etched one hundred photographs selected to represent modern human history onto a silicon disc encased in a gold-plated shell, designed at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Carleton College.

The complete set of one hundred images can be found in The Last Pictures book, co-published by Creative Time Books and University of California Press, available for purchase in bookstores nationwide and online.

Vanzemaljci će, bojim se, umreti od smeha što nismo razvili tehnologiju kolor fotografije 

[Meho Krljic]

Kreće dvogodišnji projekat potrage za Dajsonovim sferama:

The Best Way to Find Aliens: Look for Their Solar Power Plants

A team of astronomers is now looking for Dyson Spheres, massive star-scale solar power plants that extraterrestrial hunters hope alien civilizations employ.


In 1960, mathematician, physicist, and all-around genius Freeman Dyson predicted that every civilization in the Universe eventually runs out of energy on its home planet, provided it survives long enough to do so. Dyson argued that this event constitutes a major hurdle in a civilization's evolution, and that all those who leap over it do so in precisely the same way: they build a massive collector of starlight, a shell of solar panels to surround their home star. Astronomers have taken to calling these theoretical megastructures Dyson Spheres. Dyson's insight may seem like nothing more than a thought experiment, but if his hypothesis is sound, it has a striking implication: if you want to find advanced alien civilizations, you should look for signs of Dyson Spheres.
Last month a trio of astronomers led by Penn State's Jason Wright began a two-year search for Dyson Spheres, a search that will span the Milky Way, along with millions of other galaxies. Their project was just awarded a sizable grant from the Templeton Foundation, a philanthropic organization that funds research on the "big questions" that face humanity, questions relating to "human purpose and ultimate reality."
So how do Wright and his team aim to find a Dyson Sphere? Though the word "sphere" summons to mind a solid structure, Wright says his team won't be looking for solid shells. "Even though there is enough mass in our solar system to construct a solid sphere, such a structure would not be mechanically feasible," Wright told me. "It would probably have to be more like a swarm of collectors."
This wild speculation about futuristic alien tech probably seems unscientific, but the search for extraterrestrial civilizations has always depended upon such speculation. Think of all the predictions that are baked into SETI, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, which uses telescope arrays to scan the heavens for alien radio communications. At present, humans have nowhere near the excess energy you'd need to send the kind of radio signal that SETI is looking for. Earlier this year, astronomer Robert Gray told me that "to operate a radio beacon that is on all the time, broadcasting in all directions, strong enough to be picked up from many light years away, you need an enormous amount of energy -- something in the range of thousands and thousands of big power plants." SETI is betting that advanced civilizations will value communicating with other civilizations a lot, or at least enough to justify huge energy expenditures. It's also betting that such civilizations will communicate via radio waves, and that they will transmit their signals on one of the frequencies that we monitor. For us to find intelligent extraterrestrials, it's not enough that they exist; they have to develop and use technology in predictable ways.

Compared with SETI, a search for Dyson Spheres assumes a lot less about the goals of futuristic alien civilizations. In fact, most of its assumptions proceed directly from simple biology. As Wright, the project leader, explained to me, "life, by definition, uses energy, which it must reradiate as waste heat." The larger the civilization, the more energy it uses and the more heat it reradiates. Life also (by definition) reproduces, which introduces the possibility of exponentially increasing energy demands. If left unchecked, those increases will eventually outstrip the available energy on a planet. That would leave a growing civilization no choice but to mine energy from other planets and, eventually, their stars.
Let's use the Earth as a test case. As Oliver Morton has pointed out with a lovely metaphor, the sun beams a total of 120,000 terawatts per day onto our planet. That's 10,000 times the amount that flows through our industrial civilization. That's a lot of energy, but remember that our industrial civilization is young, and growing fast. In just the past 30 years, we've doubled our global energy supply. At that doubling rate, in 400 years we will be collecting or generating enough energy to match the total sunlight that comes to our planet. At that point, it may be time to draw up plans for a Dyson Sphere.
It's conceivable that an advanced alien civilization could be exponentially more energy-intensive than ours, especially when you consider that its industrial revolutions and energy doublings may have begun billions of years ago. Dyson Spheres could be an ancient and prolific phenomenon in our universe.

An artist's rendering of the "swarm" model of Dyson Sphere. (Wikimedia Commons)
Dyson Spheres also fit squarely within with another theoretical model of civilizational advancement: the Kardashev Scale. In 1964, Soviet astronomer Nikolai Kardashev tried to plot out a theory of technological advancement based on a civilization's mastery of larger and larger energy sources over time. Under the Kardashev Scale, a Type I civilization uses all of the energy available on its home planet, a Type II civilization uses all of the energy from its local star, and a Type III civilization makes use of all the energy in its galaxy. The search for Dyson Spheres is, in essence, a search for Type II civilizations. And because it is premised on a civilization's energy usage, it has another advantage over efforts like SETI's: It allows us to find aliens that aren't necessarily interested in talking to us.
That's because if Dyson Spheres exist, they promise to give off a very particular kind of heat signature, a signature that we should be able to see through our infrared telescopes. The solar energy collected by a Dyson Sphere would heat it, the same way that your computer heats up when it uses electricity. That heat would radiate off the sphere as infrared light rather than visible light. "A Dyson Sphere would appear very bright in the mid-infrared," Wright explained to me. "Just like your body, which is invisible in the dark, but shines brightly in mid-infrared goggles."
A civilization that built a Dyson Sphere would have to go to great lengths to avoid detection, either by getting rid of its waste heat in some novel way, or by building massive radiators that give off heat so cool that it would be undetectable against the cosmic microwave background, the faint afterglow of the Big Bang. Wright told me that the latter solution would involve building a sphere that was a hundred times larger than necessary. "If a civilization wants to hide, it's certainly possible to hide," he said, "but it requires massive amounts of deliberate engineering across an entire civilization."
Wright's project won't be the first search for Dyson Spheres. In the 1980's, researchers at Fermilab looked for Dyson Sphere signatures in the data generated by IRAS, the first ever space-based infrared survey of the sky. They found several candidate sources, but on closer inspection they turned out to be giant stars, or else dusty objects that absorb starlight and then reradiate it.

Wright's group will have access to data that Fermilab's researchers could only dream of. They'll be scanning three different infrared sky surveys, including NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) (pictured up top) which is hundreds of times more sensitive than IRAS. They'll be looking for Dyson Spheres in our galaxy, but also for whole galaxies with excess waste heat -- galaxies that may contain a large number of stars enshrouded in technological megastructures.
If Wright and his team find something outside the range of expected astronomical phenomena, a lengthy confirmation process will begin, a process that will likely involve astronomers and telescopes across the world. Wright was careful to note that no matter what the initial data indicates, he won't be jumping to any conclusions. "More than once some inexplicable object has been discovered that looked like aliens, and then slowly it became clear that it was a very interesting, but totally natural, phenomenon," he said. Indeed, Nikolai Kardashev once thought he'd identified several good candidates for Type III civilizations, which operate on a galactic scale. But in the end, they turned out to be quasars.
Near the end of our conversation, I asked Wright if Dyson Spheres and the Kardashev scale had any competitors, if there were other theoretical models that described what extraterrestrial civilizations might look like. "I'm not aware of any other scales in the refereed scientific literature," he said, "but there probably are some." In astrobiology, the line between science and science fiction is blurry. "Often the best discussions of these issues are in paperback novels," Wright noted. "I can tell you, it's strange to write a serious research proposal and have half of your bibliography be science fiction."

[Meho Krljic]

Ima na Devedesetdvojci, ali evo ovde live stream Baumgartnerovog skoka sa 36 kilometara:

http://www.youtube.com/user/redbull?feature=results_main

[Agota]

 

pa ja verujem da ovo svi prate danas  ,ne idem nigde iz kuce dok ovaj ne skoci !!!!!!!!

[Agota]

 nece ovaj skoro ... sad rekose  u narednih sat - dva ...

[Agota]

e da, a zasto on to radi ,da pokaze da ima jaja od celika ,mislim,jel ima ovo neki visi cilj ,posto kosta boga oca

[Meho Krljic]

Pa, on se generalno bavi bejz džampingom a ovo bi bio najveći bejz džamp ikad, a pritom želi da probije zvučni zid i tako. Nije to neki veliki cilj ali jeste neka vrsta probijanja granica ljudskog tela i tako to. A i sve plaća Red Bull.

[Biki]

-65 frikin degree celsius    u stratosferi

[Meho Krljic]

A nije još stigao ni do pola visine sa koje skače 

Evo, vele da ga je NASA okitila instrumentima, dakle, i nauka će valjda mati neke koristi od svega.

[Biki]

Pa, on se generalno bavi bejz džampingom a ovo bi bio najveći bejz džamp ikad, a pritom želi da probije zvučni zid i tako. Nije to neki veliki cilj ali jeste neka vrsta probijanja granica ljudskog tela i tako to. A i sve plaća Red Bull.

"It's crack for the thinking mind " sto bi rekao Jason Silva

VICE/Motherboard meets Jason Silva - cool profile on Vimeo

[Biki]

"This is the return of the space cowboy, interplanetary good vibe zone
Say at the speed of cheeba, you and I go deeper
Maybe I'm gonna have to get high just to get by
You know I got that, I got that cheeba cheeba kinda space cowboy vibe"

Jamiroquai - Space Cowboy (Live at Montreux Jazz Festival | HQ | 1995)

[Meho Krljic]

Mene ovo ubija samo od gledanja. Kakva hrabrost!!!

[Meho Krljic]

Dakle... kakav podvig!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 39 kilometara!!!!!!!!!! Meni se stomak isprevrtao od samog  pogleda kroz hladno oko kamere kada je Feliks stupio na vrata. A on bre NIŠTA. Spustio se kao da je skočio sa drveta. Masiv rispekt.

[Josephine]

a kada je izgubio kontrolu nad letom? 

[Meho Krljic]

Posle će da priča da je to namerno uradio da bi dodao malo drame jednom za njega rutinskom, pomalo dosadnom skoku. 

[Josephine]

 

bogami, ni meni nije bilo svejedno. doskok - fenomenalan.

[lilit]

extra stvarno, orf ga je prenosio u HDu. impresivno. a s obzirom na cinjenicu da cemo za mog zivota tesko jos jednom do meseca, i ovo je ok. najbolji deo mi je bio sve ono pre skoka.

[Джон Рейнольдс]

Сјајан скок, скоро савршен. Гледао сам пре извесног времена документарац о оваквим скоковима, где је овај и најављен. Било је снимака упадања у ковит и они се увек догађају на почетку скока. Потом падобранац успе да исконтролише лет. Зашто се то догађа углавном на почетку, то мора да одговори неко стручнији. Мени се лаички чини да људско тело мора да се прилагоди тим екстремним условима кретања и да истренирани падобранац углавном успе да превазиђе кризу. Иначе, веома је брзо пада у несвест у таквим ситуацијама, петнаестак секунди је ваљда критична граница при бржем окретању. Мозак се пребрзо мућка. 

[Lord Kufer]

Nema vazduha i otpora pa zato krene nekontrolisano vrtenje. Evo kaže on kako to izgleda.

Skydiver Baumgartner survives a test jump from 96,000 feet

[Джон Рейнольдс]

Ево сад каже неки лик на Б92 оно што сам и претпостављао. Тело мора да се прилагоди, очигледно чак и овим најистрениранијима.

[Agota]

jedan od komentara na netu je ''ovan u horoskopu ''
pa, morao je biti ovan !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 

najfascinantniji momenat je kako se sabrao posle onih prevrtanja kad sam se uplasila za njegov zivot, pritom kako je SAM  aktivirao padobran .
zaradice milione ,i treba !!! SUPERMEN , ZIVEO !!! 

sad samo da ne pocne da divlja ,on je ovde imao maksimalno kontrolisane uslove.

[Dzimi Gitara]

Dakle... kakav podvig!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 39 kilometara!!!!!!!!!! Meni se stomak isprevrtao od samog  pogleda kroz hladno oko kamere kada je Feliks stupio na vrata. A on bre NIŠTA. Spustio se kao da je skočio sa drveta. Masiv rispekt.

Takođe sam laik, ali načuh da profesionalci pričaju kako na se na velikim visinama (1km<), potpuno gubi osećaj straha od visine. Da se vidi samo slika i da ne postoji osećaj blizine prostora koji bi trebao biti koban.

A doskok, šta reći a ne zaplakati. Svaka čast. Kako bih voleo da sam imao te skilove kada sam u osnovnoj išao svaki dan u školu 50-icom (ko zna šta je autobus 50, pripremljen je za pakao), pa si ako imaš sreće da se uguraš izlazio često i na dupe. Ali zato je zimi bilo gotivno.

Lilit kaže neće biti skorijeg spuštanja na mesec i to je verovatno tačno. Zato nam i uvaljuju ovaj surogat. Mislim, sve je to lepo kad se ima para, ali ovaj Šmajserberg ili kako već je heroj onoliko koliko i Novak Đoković. A doktor Šaran na B92, na kraju prenosa reče, prisustvovali smo stvaranju mita, rođenju heroja... E pa ne znam bi li se Elijade, Frejzer, Kembel, Grevs i ostali složili sa time, ali jeste istina da se u XX-XXI veku mitovi malo brže fabrikuju.

Nisam neki zagriženi konspirolog, nisam se posebno udubljivao u promišljanja o značaju ovog događaja za civilizaciju, ali eto, samo da napomenem da može ovaj događaj na puno načina da se čita. Jedan od njih je bez usplahirenih voditelja.

[scallop]

Ovo je veliki napredak za čovečanstvo. Sad putnički avioni neće morati da sleću. Ukrcavaćemo se iz balona, a izlazićemo sa padobranom.

[Barbarin]

Sad pogledah i ništa posebno, mislim "skočio" je na Zemlju, nije da je mogao da skoči na Mars.

Red Bull daje ti krila !!!!

[zakk]

"SAMO JE SKOČIO" SA 39 KM VISINE?

[Karl Rosman]

Pa, dobro, ima tu istine; dogodine ce neko da skoci sa "samo" 41km, pa cemo opet da se iscudjavamo. "Dokon pop i jarice krsti." 

[Barbarin]

Usput, gledali ste prenos uživo sa 20 sekundi kašnjenja. I malo je premašio planiranu visinu sa koje je trebalo da skoči, tričavih 3 km.

[Barbarin]

Mislim svaka njemu čast, al ovo mi je zanimljivije 100x

Jeb Corliss " Grinding The Crack"

[Melkor]

Pa u tome je i problem, vrednost nekog poduhvata ocenjujes na osnovu toga koliko je tebi zanimljiv.

[Barbarin]

Što je to problem?

Osim obaranja nekih rekorda, koje su još vrednosti ovog skoka?

[Meho Krljic]

Osim obaranja nekih rekorda, koje su još vrednosti ovog skoka?

Extensive research that went into this mission is expected to help scientists design safer and more effective space suits for future astronauts.

I druge stvari:

Kliketiklik

Felix Baumgartner stepped out of the space capsule an astonishing 128,100 feet, or 24.26 miles above earth, about three times the cruising altitude of jetliners. The skydiver plummeted for 4:20 seconds, but it seemed an eternity, because his faceplate was fogging up on the way down as he fell through harsh atmospheric conditions at a dizzying speed.

Baumgartner was also thrown into a dangerous tumble shortly after exiting. "It felt like a flat spin," said Baumgartner. "I had a lot of pressure in my head, but I felt I could regain control so we could go after the sound barrier."

According to Brian Utley, who's responsible for FIA certification, roughly one minute into his jump Baumgartner reached a top speed of 833.9 mph, a new record for a skydiver. That also means he successfully broke the sound barrier, reaching Mach 1.24.

He also broke the record for the highest manned balloon flight, unofficially reaching a height just shy of 25 miles. He did so in a balloon that's also the largest ever manned.

Baumgartner's long-anticipated leap from the edge of space was the Austrian daredevil's attempt at breaking all those records, most notably the highest successful jump and becoming the only skydiver to break the sound barrier.

Baumgartner is the first skydiver to ever break through the sound barrier, and remarkably, it comes 65 years to the day after Chuck Yeager, flying in his X-1A, first broke through the harrowing milestone.

As Baumgartner opened the hatch of his capsule and stepped out onto the platform, he said before jumping, "I wish the whole world could see what I see."

After landing, he said the only thing he was thinking about once on the platform was getting back to earth alive. "At that height you become so humble, you don't think about breaking records anymore. You just want to come back."

More about the Red Bull Stratos Mission on GrindTV
VIDEO: The story behind the record that stood for 52 years, and the man who held it
VIDEO: The perfectly good space capsule Baumgartner's jumped from
VIDEO: The incredible challenge of building a space jump suit that works
STORY: Behind the massive Red Bull Stratos balloon, and its climb to the edge of space

The Red Bull Stratos project had been seven years in the making. Baumgartner, 43, made the leap while wearing a pressurized space suit. He jumped from a pressurized capsule that was hoisted toward the heavens above Roswell, New Mexico, by a towering white stratospheric balloon.

During the marathon free-fall, Baumgartner's unofficial speed of 706 mph came while passing through sub-freezing air zones. While falling, he was communicating with mission control that his visor was fogging up, which is the likely reason behind his early parachute deployment, at 4:20.

The epic jump, the team has maintained, represents more than a mere stunt. Extensive research that went into this mission is expected to help scientists design safer and more effective space suits for future astronauts.

Family and friends were on hand, with his mother, Eva, describing the feat as Baumgartner's "biggest dream coming true."

Baumgartner, whose mission was planned cautiously and meticulously by a team of scientists, shattered a 52-year-old skydiving altitude record of 102,800 feet. That belonged to Joseph Kittinger, a former U.S. Air Force colonel, who joined the Red Bull Stratos project as chief of flight operations and safety.

Last March the skydiver and famous BASE jumper made a preparation jump from 71,580 feet (more than 13 miles) above Roswell. During that leap he set a world free-fall speed record of 364.4 mph. The free-fall spanned 3 minutes, 43 seconds, and included a plunge through temperatures as cold as minus-75 degrees.

Baumgartner became so cold that he could hardly move his hands, and the free-fall was so long that he had to fight the urge to deploy the parachute too early.

Remarkably, two others had survived jumps from similar altitudes--both in the 1960s. They were Russia's Eugene Andreev and American Joseph Kittinger.

In July Baumgartner made his final test jump, from 97,146 feet, also in Roswell.

The balloon was launched from the back of a pickup truck. For 52 years Kittinger, who also wore a pressurized suit, held the distinction of taking what had been described as "the highest step in the world."

It was during an era in which nobody knew whether a human could survive a jump from the edge of space. A handful of people died while trying to beat Kittinger's record.

Before Sunday's jump, Baumgartner said of the mental struggles: "You get claustrophobic fast in the pressurized suit. You start to let your mind go, and you think of people who lost their lives trying to do what Joe Kittinger did. You have to get your mind in a different place. Count backwards ... whatever you have to do."

Kittinger added: "Of course it's not easy. It takes a special combination [of talent]. The best partner you can have is Felix Baumgartner."

On Sunday, Kittinger had a special message for all the doubters at the post-jump press conference. "I'd like to give a special one finger salute to all those who said he'd come apart going supersonic."

When Felix Baumgartner was asked what's next now that he's achieved this long awaited dream, he replied, "Well, in forty years I'd like to be in the seat Joe Kittinger is in today, helping somebody try to break my record."

[Barbarin]

Znači, sad će astronauti imati bilja odela, ok. Druge stvari nisam našao u tekstu, možda sam slep, pa ne vidim.

Meni je sve ovo jedna velika reklama.

Što nisu stavili kameru na njega pa da gledamo ili vidimo kako izgleda padati s te visine. Ono što se videlo je bela tačka kako pada, ništa posebno, često vidim neke zvezde padalice.

btw Ovo može da se uzme kao tema za teorije zavere koje je Skrobonja raspisao za sledeču antologiju. Da li je on upšte skočio 

[Meho Krljic]

Pa, stavili su kameru na njega, koliko ja znam. Na prsa junačka. Samo nije prenosila u realnom vremenu. Valjda će biti neki snimak.

A i ja sam nešto razmišljao koliko će genijalno biti kad krenu teorije zavere, kako on uopšte nije skočio odozgo, nego iz helikoptera, kako je sve to namešteno iz ovog ili onog razloga   

I naravno da je ovo reklama prevashodno, pa ovo je finansirala privatna kompanija koja pravi energetska pića, ne država koja na umu ima socijalni, naučni ili politički progres, no, opet, rezultati koji dođu iz ovoga daće bolja odela kosmonautima a kažu da je istraživanje svemira korisno za razvoj tehnologija koje nešto kasnije imaju konkretnu potrošačku primenu, ima to gore u jednom postu na ovoj istoj temi.

[Barbarin]

Slično kao što dostignuća u Formuli 1 primenjuju u svakodnevnim kolima.

[Meho Krljic]

Ili dostignuća u porn... oh, ne, nešto sam pogrešno povezao, ignorišite me.

[Barbarin]

  ima i tu nečega

[Agota]

Barbarine,sto bi rekao Zmaj od Sipova: NAPUSTI , SARANU !!! 

[Josephine]

[Barbarin]

Dobro je pa posle skoka nije bilo sarane  , a kako bi je bilo da je ostao da pluta oko Zemlje, jel bila neka varijanta da se ode po njega u tom slučaju ili je pak skočio sa sigurne visine na kojoj još gravitacija ima uticaja.

[Josephine]

 

ozbiljan si? 

[Barbarin]

Ja da.

[Meho Krljic]

Pa, valjda je očigledno da ga je gravitacija povukla dole kad je skočio???

Edit: Tj. da su se on i Zemlja uzajamno privlačili gravitacionom silom.

[Barbarin]

Joj, pa naravno da ga je povukla, znači izračunali su sa sigurnošću na koju visinu može da otpluta i da se baci na Zemlju, iako je otišao 3 km više od predviđene. Bilo je nekih priča ako se pravilno ne odrazi da će ostati da pluta, zar ne.

Napuštam saranu (topik) uživajte i divite se Felixu.