A remarkable senior

NASA
On this day in 1998, John Glenn Jr. returned to space.  He was 77 years old and became the oldest human to travel in space. 

He blasted off on a nine-day mission aboard space shuttle Discovery, almost 40 years after he orbited the earth in a Mercury rocket.

What an inspiration for anyone approaching their senior years. Who could have imagined, back in the 1960s, that people of pensionable age would be doing as much as they are these days?

Glenn, of course, had been one of America's first and most famous astronauts, orbiting the earth in Friendship 7 in 1962, at the height of the Cold War.  

He went on to become a long-serving member of the U. S. Senate before returning to space on his second historic flight on October 29th, 1998. On Discovery, he flew as a payload specialist and participated in a study on aging. It's remarkable that he was able to achieve a level of  mental and physical fitness that permitted him to endure the challenges of such a mission.

For more information on vitality in the senior years, see WebMD's Healthy Aging pages.

In Zanepost: NASA and the future of space exploration.

On Glenn's first flight that earned him a big ticker-tape parade,  see "Heatshield and Fireflies"

Photos of John Glenn are courtesy of NASA through Wikimedia Commons Public Domain archive.

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NASA and the future of space exploration

October 1st marks the 50th anniversary of the beginning of full operations for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, better known as NASA. While the organization accomplished some remarkable achievements in its first half-century, most notably placing men on the moon and building the long-running Space Shuttle program, the next 50 years look rather bleak.

Human desire and the imagination to explore the universe remains; but financing withers. Problems on earth are diverting funding. Back in NASA's glory days, when it was focused on reaching the moon, an estimated 4 per cent of the U.S. federal budget was earmarked for the space program. Now, the agency has multiple large projects (International Space Station, Hubble Telescope, robots in our solar system) but only one cent of every tax dollar is available to fund them all. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the United States' mounting national debt, an aging population and now the financial crisis are all taking a toll.

Sadly, NASA finds itself scrambling just to return where it once was. It's going "back to the future" with plans to send humans to the moon again by 2020. The promise of space exploration beyond our solar system remains a faint dream.

You can read more in an article entitled What Future for NASA?, the source of most of the facts outlined here.

Meanwhile, renowned astrophysicist Stephen Hawking, in a speech at George Washington University and in written arguments, makes an appeal for further efforts to explore space. He reminds us that in 1492 many people didn't think it was worth the effort to finance Christopher Columbus's voyage West across the Atlantic. But the discovery of North America by Europeans profoundly changed the world. Hawking says we should make interstellar travel a long-term goal. The future of the human race could depend on it.

With China and European countries recently stretching their technological ambitions into space, the answer to NASA's troubles may lie in not going it alone and instead joining other countries to work towards a common goal.

You can read Hawking's remarks in The Final Frontier, published in Cosmos magazine.

Other links:

NASA's 50th Anniversary lecture series

Photo courtesy: A. Sayed

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A long flight back to earth

If you like the sight of paper planes floating gently to earth, you will love the experiment being prepared by a Tokyo University professor: he's building 100 original origami planes, with specially-coated sheets, in a bid to record the longest flight ever for a paper airplane.

The plan is simple, but the execution is difficult. The plan goes like this: build the paper airplanes, ask an astronaut to take them into space, get him to launch them and then see how long it takes for them to come back down to earth.

The attempt is scheduled for later this year when a Japanese astronaut is scheduled to head to the International Space Station. Tokyo University's Shinichi Suzuki estimates that the 400-kilometre trip for the floating planes making their gliding descent through the earth's atmosphere will take several months. He hopes at least one or two will make it back and not get lost in one of our oceans.

I don't know about you but it seems like a really long shot to me.

The story was reported by the Times of London and you can read it here.

For a related post on oddities, see this item about a planned hotel in space

To an observer in space, does our planet even exist?

If intelligent life is out there, way out there, would Earth even be visible? The strange answer is "no," but not because we are small or hard to see; but rather because to an observer far away our planet may not exist - yet.

Yes, indeed, another mind-challenging concept from the world of science.

An astrophysicist held an interesting discussion on Canadian radio earlier this year. The topic was the expanding universe, the speed of light and relative distances.

The scientist reminded listeners that when we see light from the stars, we're actually looking back in time. When we look at our nearest star, our sun, we're not seeing how the sun looks now, but how it looked a full eight minutes ago. That's how long it takes light to travel the distance from the sun to the earth.

The really interesting concept relates to other solar systems and galaxies. If we turn the thought around and place ourselves in the role of an observer from far away looking at the earth, then that observer would also be seeing OUR past.

They say the Milky Way, our home galaxy, is about 100,000 light years across. If someone's out there watching us from the other end of our own galaxy, they may be seeing Earth not as it is now, but only as it was when our species, Homo Sapiens, was just distinguishing itself from our "cousins," the Neandertals. No cities, no technology.

And that's just our own galaxy. The universe has millions of galaxies. Any observer watching from any of the other galaxies in our universe would see Earth much earlier in it's history.

So all the observations in space are true only as measurements of the past. Since the size of space is so enormous, even at the relatively fast speed of light, at 300,000 kilometers per second (186,000 miles per second), it takes a relatively long time for light to travel across these vast distances.

Finally, then, if intelligent life were searching for us from 5 billion light years away, they would not see us at all ! To them, we still don't exist. That's because Earth is calculated to be about 4.5 billion years old.

5 billion years ago, our solar system probably was just a loose collection of gases.

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Photo: wpclipart.com

For more thoughts on our universe, see posts in August (Are parallel universes real?)