CSS Space News - 11/18/94

by Ross Brown

Interesting Tidbits Edition

This week I have chopped all the news into fun bite-size pieces. I have thrown in both news and trivia for a flavorful reading experience. Enjoy!

Odds of Dying From an Asteroid Hitting the Earth:

1 in 14,000 to 1 in 20,000 (compare to the odds of dying in an airplane crash: 1 in 8,000)

Private Attempts to Get to Space

A Mr. Truax of California is working on his own Mercury-style rocket (the "Excalibur") and spacecraft to make a sub-orbital flight. Commonly called the "Volksrocket", the Excalibur's Atlas vernier engines were bought surplus from a junkyard. Mr. Truax planned to splash down in the Pacific off the coast of California somewhere, proving private citizens can do what Alan Shepard did with NASA back in the Apollo days. Unfortunately, he has since run out of money for this project.

Mir Passes Halfway Mark to Big Birthday

The Russian Mir space station will make its 50,000th orbit around the Earth today (Friday, November the 18th) at 2:37 in the morning. Mir is the only manned human spacecraft in space at this time.

Russian Space Agency Budget

The RSA has an annual budget of 167 billion rubles plus another 40 billion for military space projects. Translated to American currency: 100 million dollars! This is an amazingly low number (even with the hyperinflation problem there) considering that NASA's budget is hovering around 13-14 billion dollars currently.

Ulysses Spacecraft Results

The Ulysses spacecraft has completed its high latitude survey of the sun. The polar regions of the sun (not as cold and snowy as the Earth's polar regions) were found to have a faster output of "solar wind": charged particles, ionized gases, etc. Screaming out of the sun at 750 kilometers per second (that's right folks, 2 million miles an hour) this figure is double that of "normal" solar wind, what we experience at these Earthly equatorial latitudes. Also, Ulysses found a uniform magnetic field at the sun, not the polar fields we had observed from Earth.

Pluto Flybys

You may recall the excitement surrounding the Pluto Fast Flyby mission reported in earlier issues. There remains one big question: why did we not go to Pluto when we had the chance, i.e. with the Voyagers I and II spacecraft? Because to do so, Voyager II would have had to make a gravity-assisted U-turn at Neptune that would have taken it into the atmosphere. The closer something comes to the center of a planet, the harder turn it can make when it slingshots around. There was talk of a Voyager III set to go to Uranus, Neptune and Pluto, but the planets were not aligned correctly for such a trip.

Election Results

Well, it looks like George Brown will win his reelection bid for congress. George Brown is one of the greatest supporters the space program has had in congress. As of yesterday, the absentee ballots had Brown leading his opponent by a narrow margin. If he wins, he will probably not head the committee on Science, Space and Technology, though. This is the position that he used to rally support for space projects and science. Hopefully he will remain as a ranking member of the committee.

Nifty Quote

I will conclude with a very inspired and inspiring quote by JFK from a speech delivered at Rice University in Houston, Texas:

We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win...

- John F. Kennedy, September 12, 1962.

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