Ah, well -- there are so few of us! It's a burden that Doug and I gratefully share...



-the other Doug

As for the football itself, you're exactly right -- you just fill it with enough air (or nitrogen or whatever) so that, when it's exposed to the vacuum, it is properly inflated. The same approach was used on the tires of the MET (wheeled toolcart) flown on Apollo 14 -- they were rubber tires, and were launched with the proper amount of air in them to inflate them exactly right when exposed to a vacuum. The system worked quite well.

The helmets on the Apollo suits (and on the current Shuttle EVA suits) were made of Lexan (a plastic not unlike Plexiglass), not glass. And they were covered by two Lexan-based visors, one of which was specifically designed as a micrometeoroid shield. They could sustain a fair impact without cracking. However, they tended to scratch easily. I'd be more concerned about getting my helmet and visors all scratched up than I would about them getting cracked.

-the other Doug

Actually, Buzz made use of his UCD well before the Nixon phone call. He says, IIRC, in his autobiography that he used it within a minute or two of setting foot on the surface.

-the other Doug

Look -- by refusing to provide funding for the Mars portion of VSE, this Administration and Congress have tacitly killed that portion of the initiative. The CEV/CLV is the only portion of the VSE that is currently active, and is being developed pretty much solely as a Shuttle replacement for reaching LEO. Yes, its *form* is compatible with being used for a return to the Moon, and possibly with a manned Mars mission... but there will be no money spent on a manned Mars mission for at least ten years, if not longer. There won't even be any significant money spent on the return-to-the-the-Moon phase (i.e., on the LSAM or CaLV) for another three or four years -- if ever.

Remember, the Shuttle was initially funded as the first phase of a major LEO exploitation program that assumed the immediate development of a permanently manned space station as soon as the Shuttle was flying. Without a destination, the very concept of the Shuttle was hard to justify. We can see how that plan ended up playing out.

All I'm saying is that y'all need to separate the CEV/CLV development from VSE -- it's a Shuttle replacement, to retain an American capability to place humans into LEO. Without further spending and development, the CEV will never be more than that. There is, realistically, not any significant political support for spending the money needed to send CEVs and additional mission modules anywhere outside of LEO. Unless a lot of things change, I'd bet a pretty tidy sum that once CEV is well into development, any additional work on the lunar and Martian mission options will be put on hold... for at least another decade or two. (I'm not happy about that, but I'd bet that's the direction we're heading.)

To be perfectly clear, here -- I'm predicting that, once we get a CEV up and running, CaLV development, LSAM development and Mars mission planning will quietly be de-funded. No manned return to the Moon in my lifetime. That's what I'm predicting. The CEV and CLV will be the *only* things developed out of the VSE initiative, and they will serve simply as a partial Shuttle replacement. We'll end up using Delta IV-Heavies and Atlas V-Heavies for whatever high-mass cargo launch requirements that come up -- the CaLV will be put on indefinite hold.

In my opinion, that's sad... but that's what I see happening.

As for the cosmic ray issue, I think that's a matter of exposure time. Seems to me that the best way to minimize the problem is to minimize travel times. Travel to the Moon is not a huge issue -- a lot of people proved that eight- to fourteen-day trips outside of the Van Allen belts aren't deadly, and we can always bury habitat modules in the dirt if we want to stay on the Moon for long periods. Mars missions are another matter -- but this means that, instead of spending money on figuring out how to shield passengers against 18 months or more of cumulative exposure to high-energy cosmic rays, we instead need to work on new propulsion technologies that will expose them to only six to 12 weeks of such risk. And, again, once we get to Mars, we can bury habitats (either on the Martian surface or, for orbital expeditions, inside Deimos or Phobos).

So, yes, the cosmic ray issue may make it unjustifiably unhealthy for humans to travel to Mars and back, using current propulsion and shielding technologies. To me, that means we need to develop better propulsion and shielding technologies.

If I were Mike Griffin, trying to juggle the things I've been tasked to do with the money I've been given to do them, I think I'd lobby to drop the LSAM, CaLV and Mars mission development and give a fair proportion of that money to the propulsion research people. Emphasis on constant-thrust, high-energy systems that will move us around the solar system a lot faster than we can manage right now... THEN I would start thinking about building the vehicles that will take us to Mars. Not before.

But, just as something of a final thought, here -- do y'all really think we'll see any new American unmanned lunar exploration unless the strawman of a manned return to the Moon is maintained, at least for a while? I, for one, am still interested in further *un*manned lunar exploration, and if maintaining the strawman of actually following through with the VSE gets us two or three unmanned landings in the next five years, that won't upset me a bit...

-the other Doug

I have. You seem, how shall I say it, eager to see this as a prison sentence for humans on Earth?

I'm sorry -- I prefer to see it as a challenge.

There will be many ways we will be able to find to overcome this problem. I have utmost faith in that. If we decided not to try things because someone said it couldn't be done, well... you know the rest.



-the other Doug

OK -- the Apollo 17 exercise was to try and roll a rock down a slope, both to sample the soil underneath and to abserve the dynamics of the rolling rock. And to observe the trail it left in the dust -- on Apollo 17, the crew visited several rocks which had rolled down the sides of the massifs, which had left trails of their own in the dust. They wanted to observe tracks being formed, in order to better understand the dynamics of the much larger trails.

In the event you cite, Jack Schmitt was trying to get a rock to roll down the hill, and was having little luck. He was talking to the rock, telling it "Roll! Why don't you roll down this slope?! I would!" Cernan came over and tried to help Schmitt kick the rock over so that it would start to roll. They never got it to roll for more than about one turn... but the two of them trying to kick the rock down the hill could, I suppose, look a little like they were playing football with it.

Again, though, that wasn't the intent. There were several demontrations that various lunar crews planned -- the golf shot on Apollo 14, the hammer-and-feather "proof" on Apollo 15, the Lunar Olympics on Apollo 16 (which they ended up not doing)... these were planned to demonstrate the kinds of things you could do while moving in a low-G field.

In the unplanned category, there are things like Cernan on Apollo 17 loping down a slope and, realizing he was shifting his hips like a skier, started making "schussing" sounds. But, again, I don't think anyone would seriously allege that Cernan went skiing on the Moon.

-the other Doug

That will only be a problem, Bob, if someone brings a huge crock of baked beans to the BBQ...

-the other Doug

Several years ago, I was driving through Wisconsin at about 2 a.m. In the wilds of Wisconsin, it gets pretty dark out, and there was no Moon that night.

I saw a fireball that came over the horizon just at the left extremity of my windshield view and then arced across the sky, directly in my field of view. It was bright blue-white, leaving a greenish trail behind it. As it approached the far horizon, almost exactly aimed at the right visual limit of the windshield, it appeared to fragment and explode into sparkles.

There was, as I say, no Moon, so this thing looked very bright to me, but it might not have been super-bright. (I did see it very clearly over the glare of my headlights on the road ahead of me, though.) One thing I do recall, the *entire* trail glowed with a greenish glow for several seconds after the event. It was too dark to see a contrail after that glow dissipated, I'm sorry to say. The area where the fireball seemed to explode seemed to glow for several more seconds than the rest of the trail, maybe for as long as 10 or 15 seconds.

I'd guess that the whole traverse of my visual field took maybe one and a half seconds -- too fast for a re-entering satellite.

That was the brightest fireball I've ever seen, although the "meteor storm" a few years back was one of the most fascinating meteor events I've ever seen. You'd get clusters of trails, not just the occasional streak. I was looking directly at the source point in the sky when a starburst of five meteors flashed towards me, making a near-perfect five-pointed star in the sky... That was simply spectacular!

-the other Doug

The Discovery Science Channel has been running The Planets on Tuesday evenings for the past several weeks. I may be mistaken, but these may be updated versions. The episode on outer planet exploration, for example, included results from Galileo and a description of her death plunge into Jupiter. It still placed Cassini's arrival at Saturn in the future, though.

The Science Channel has also recently run an updated version of Sagan's Cosmos. Nice additional touches of MGS, Odyssey and MEX images, as well as a few Pathfinder and MER images. And some Galileo and Cassini images. But re-edited in such a way that the narration still made sense. Very nicely done.

As for Robinson Crusoe on Mars, yeah, it's a true classic. I guess I will always have a soft spot in my heart for a Mars with enough air pressure for liquid water at the surface, and enough oxygen for abundant plant life... *sigh*...

-the other Doug

To the point -- your friend is right, no one ever played football on the Moon, not even with a football-sized rock. Several missions, especially Apollos 12 and 14, had as a sampling goal a "football-sized rock," which was something of an overstatement -- they were looking for a rock with a long diameter of at least 15 or 20 cm. But they never actually played football with them.

However, there was one very memorable moment during the very first lunar EVA, during which Buzz Aldrin was demonstrating methods of forward movement in front of the TV camera. (Hey, this was the first time any human had ever tried walking in a low-G field -- they wanted documentation of how different forms of forward locomotion actually worked.)

Aldrin ran through several different stride patterns, including the "bunny hop" method of jumping with both feet together, and a more normal stepping walk.

He then demonstrated what most lunar astronauts adopted for traveling any distance -- the lope. It was a stepping stride in which you pushed off and floated with both feet in the air for a moment before setting down with the other foot, pushing off with it, floating for another moment, etc. As he approached the camera using this loping stride, he showed how you have to anticipate a turn by a couple of steps, saying that to "change directions, like a football player, you just have to put a foot out to the side and cut a little bit." He then performed a classic football-runner cut move to angle his mass in his new direction of travel before executing his turn.

This could be taken as Aldrin "playing football" on the Moon, but except for the reference of "like a football player," it was never intended to be such.

-the other Doug

I was at a local used book store (Half-Price Books, they have a couple of stores here in the Twin Cities) the other day, and ran across the National Geographic Society book, "Mars: Uncovering the Secrets of the Red Planet," by Paul Raeburn and Matt Golombek. Paid $15 for it.

Overall, a quite good book -- but it just sort of jars, now, when I read a book on Mars that stops short of the MER landings. Like there are a bunch of missing chapters. But Raeburn basically interviewed Golombek extensively and put the book together from the interview tapes. It has a lot of nice details on MPF.

One nice thing about the book -- in a plastic pocket on the inside back cover, were not one but two pristine, never-used sets of anaglyph glasses. Granted, they're just front frames with no ear pieces, you have to hold them up in front of your eyes while using them. But they'll be very useful in viewing on-line anaglyphs.

-the other Doug

Twenty-five quatloos on the Near Rim!

-the other Doug

I completely agree with you about the emphasis placed on IQ, Don. The classical IQ test is a test of pattern recognition capability, in my opinion. Since I've always been good at pattern recognition, I usually score between 140 and 160 on IQ tests, depending on how they're organized.

But there are a lot of things that people I know, who have far lower IQ scores, can do that I'm just not good at, at all. I'm good at manipulating systems, but I don't have any artistic talent, that I know of. And while I can pronounce foreign languages quite competently, I have a very hard time thinking in them, and thus only ever get so far (the constant-mental-translation level) when I try to learn them.

I am a natural mimic, and a fair dialectician... maybe that qualifies as an artistic talent...

I think that pattern recognition is a talent, that some people have and others don't. It comes in handy when trying to figure out complex problems, in our real lives as well as in our distractions. But it's only one of the talents that come in handy -- you can be a very generous person, or a very shrewd one, or a very charismatic one, and have great success without what would commonly be considered "high intelligence" (i.e., well-developed pattern recognition skills).

And, like my father always told me, it takes all kinds...

-the other Doug

I've heard the same thing, Bruce, but I've never heard exactly *what* about the Marius descent plan Scott found displeasing. Especially compared to the Hadley descent plan, which seemed to me to be a lot more dicey. I mean, at Hadley, they had to maintain a high, flat profile so they could clear 12,000-foot-tall Mt. Hadley, and then descend at a much steeper angle (something like 25 to 30 degrees, as compared to a 10 to 12 degree descent angle for previous landings) to reach the surface at a reasonably slow speed before the fuel ran out.

I know there are a lot of low domes as you approach the Marius landing point, but they can't have anything like the relief that Mt. Hadley and the associated massifs of the Appenine Front provided.

-the other Doug

The very first thing eaten by a human being while on the lunar surface was a communion wafer, eaten by Buzz Aldrin during a communion ceremony he held for himself about two hours after the landing.

All of the astronauts who landed on the Moon ate at least a little something while they were on the surface. Meals were very similar to those in the CSM, but some of the items -- like the tomato bisque soup, the beef and potatoes, etc. -- that you rehydrated with hot water aboard the CSM were only able to mixed with cold water in the LM. (The LM couldn't afford the weight of a heater simply to heat water.) So they weren't all that great.

Now, these were meals taken inside the LM. On the last several flights (the J missions), there was also a fruit "jerky" snack placed inside the suit, attached to the neck ring, that a moonwalking astronaut could munch on while out walking on the surface. This went along with in-suit drink bags, which offered a quick drink of water or reconstituted fruit drink to a thirsty moonwalker. The drink bags had been provided in-suit since Apollo 13, although the Apollo 14 crew were the first to be able to use them while walking on the lunar surface.

-the other Doug

This is a subject I brought up several years ago on Usenet, and I still have an interest in it.

There were several landing sites heavily scrutinized for Apollo landings. There were four alternate landing sites for the G mission, for example. There was an alternate landing site for Apollo 12. And there were landing site proposals for many places that never 'made the cut' for an actual mission. Several of these sites had detailed planning put into them, including traverse planning.

It seems to me that it is now possible, with our knowledge of how the lunar surface looks in general and of how major terrain features look in specific, to use CGI techniques to create panoramas from landing sites and traverse stops from Apollo missions that never flew.

For example, the Apollo 14 crew spent several months training for a landing at Littrow -- a site out on Mare Serenitatis about 45 km from the later Taurus-Littrow site -- which was designed to sample the dark mantling unit and to visit a wrinkle ridge. It was a nice H-mission landing site, available in late summer and early fall of 1970. (Had Apollo 14 flew later than this, the landing site would have been near the crater Censorinus -- for which similar detailed planning was done.)

There were also detailed plans made for Alphonsus, Davy, Gassendi, Copernicus and Tycho landings. All included a number of traverse plan concepts and sampling site recommendations.

I would really enjoy seeing these vistas that, for the roll of the dice, might have been seen by American moonwalkers in the 1970s.

I know that Phil Stooke is working on a book... any idea if we might see something like this in it..?

-the other Doug

You know, I got a book nearly 20 years ago that detailed the Mariner 10 mission, which included very nicely rendered airbrushed maps of the viewed portions of Mercury. It had a nice timeline in it which discussed events on Earth as they occurred during the Mariner 10 mission. (Unfortunately, the book was lost in a basement flood several years ago... *sigh*...)

It also had a very well-researched analysis of the Mariner 10 Mercury observations, including the terrain unit that you really don't see on the Moon -- the inter-crater plains. It seems very clear from the information wel already have about Mercury that the LHB didn't scar Mercury as badly as it scarred our own Moon. The population of large craters on Mercury is smaller than on the Moon, as witnessed by the fact that there are no places on the lunar surface where inter-crater plains still exist. On the Moon, the ancient crust has all been impacted at some point or another, with only a fairly minor exhibition of non-cratered mare surface here and there. The ancient crust of Mercury has been preserved without being marred by large cratering events in several places.

I can't wait to see what Messenger finds when it arrives...

-the other Doug

OK, OK -- here's a somewhat old image of me, so I can join the party. I no longer have the beard, but you get the general idea...



-the other Doug

Interesting comment, since it's fairly well documented that the first Soviet fission devices were the result of espionage. While I have extremely little patience for "commie hunters" and their McCarthyistic ilk, it *was* true that the design details of early American fission weapons were transmitted to the Soviet Union by, well -- the correct term would be spies.

Not that the Soviets wouldn't have come up with the bomb themselves in another couple of years -- just that it would likely have taken them more like 10 years, and not the four we saw, had they not "borrowed" some American information.

-the other Doug

Not looking for the unexpected is a slippery slope. If you have the time and luxury to develop and use a multi-approach instrument suite, designed to gather as much possible information about as many characteristics of a phenomenon as possible, then it is, indeed, a cardinal sin to ignore all results except the ones that you wanted to see.

But planetary probes, in specific, are so mass-limited that you have to design your instruments carefully. You inevitably design your instruments to constrain existing theories, or to look for a very small subset of the available information that directly relates to what's seen as a pivotal prediction of a given theory.

We have two fabulous little robotic geological explorers on Mars right now, and yet they are incapable of analyzing the oxidation properties of the soils. They couldn't find organics if they were strewn over the surface liberally. They are designed almost solely to identify hydration effects on the rocks and to identify a *limited* range of minerals in the rocks and soils. Because they were designed to constrain current theories on the effects of water on the Martian surface.

So, with the MERs, we're not ignoring unexpected information -- we designed them to return *only* information about expected conditions. At least on several levels. (I admit freely that the Pancam returns a wide variety of data, and we see in its images not only what we expected but much that we didn't. I'm really speaking only of the non-imaging experiments, here. But that really does show you the value of imagery...)

This is not a condemnation of the process. Planetary probes are so mass-limited that you *must* tailor their instrumentation suites to gather that subset of the available information you think is going to be the most valuable and worthwhile. You just can't afford to put every sensor you can think of on such probes.

The trap here is in the phrase "information you think is going to be the most valuable." The only path to that kind of judgment is illuminated by best theories. So, we get trapped into designing our probes to constrain, prove or disprove best current theory. Which works against looking for the unexpected.

-the other Doug

There is always the LPI's "Digital Lunar Orbiter Photographic Atlas of the Moon," available online at:

Digital Lunar Orbiter Photographic Atlas of the Moon

-the other Doug

China made a decision, about 20 years ago, to catch up with the industrial capabilities of the West. To do so without destroying their economy, they have ignored basic controls on pollution and environmental damage. Methinks the Chinese are aware that they will have to spend a lot of money retrofitting their industries to protect what's left of their environment before they can commit the kind of funding needed to place people on the Moon -- hence their very slow and careful progress in their manned spaceflight program.

-the other Doug

Good idea! Perhaps the early slides ought to contain the best images of the planets available from Earth-bound telescopic sources, and as we see exploration occurring, replace such poor-resolution images with those made possible by the listed missions? That way you get a feeling for the expansion of knowledge as our efforts have proceeded?

For future missions to places we haven't yet visited, you can place a question mark over the current best-resolution images, to indicate that we don't know what we'll find when we get there...?

-the other Doug

Hmmm.... the FOIA defines areas in which "compelled speech" is allowed -- about subjects where a beauracracy of some sort has determined such compelled speech does not threaten national security.

Also, patent laws provide protection against secrecy and require "compelled speech" after a certain period of time. For example, pharmaceutical companies are only allowed to maintain trade secrets for a certain period of time before they are compelled to share information about the production of a given drug. The same holds true for other trade secrets held by both individuals and corporations.

The American system has historically differentiated between secrets that protect U.S. military interests and secrets which simply give one individual or corporation an advantage over its competitors. We have, with some reluctance, protected military secrecy, but have insisted that individual and corporate secrecy be strictly bounded and given only as much protection as is absolutely necessary to encourage research and development.

Keeping secrets is contrary to the scientific method, and *always* inhibits scientific progress (something that, as a student of the Soviet system, I would think you would recognize). I can see the need for something like ITAR, if you are dealing with weapon systems. But when you're dealing with non-American PIs on U.S. planetary probes (a process which ought to vet the PIs and determine that they are not working to try and steal American technology to build weapons), making it as hard as possible for them to just get data between their instruments and the American comm systems... that's just stupid.

In my humble opinion, if you are willing to take on international partners as part of a planetary exploration mission, the process involved in clearing such partners for security risks ought to be sufficient to allow you to give them needed access to the rest of the spacecraft systems.

-the other Doug

'Is not' is not 'not is'...

-the other Doug