Florida 6: Vignettes.

A selection of photos from the Kennedy Space Centre:

They were told how to put their hands on their hips (if they must).  The thumbs should be to the rear and the fingers forward.

Tom Wolfe, The Right Stuff

Legends.

PA announcer:  "Of course, the Smithsonian doesn't have one of these..."

How the mighty are fallen:  a fern grows in a Titan rocket engine.

Mercury capsule seat.  To my eye it looks crude and unfinished - but someone sat in this chair, on
the top of a controlled explosion, and successfully made it to Earth orbit.

The Apollo 11 capsule.  It looks roomier than the Mercury capsule, until you realize that three men
in bulky spacesuits were wedged into that space like sardines in a can.

The six million pound crawler-transporter used to transport rockets to the launch pads.  Frankly,
I expected to see a bunch of jawas jump out and offer to sell the tour group some droids.

Counting down in the Apollo Saturn V Control Room.

President John F. Kennedy:  "We must be bold."

The business end of a Saturn V - five F-1 rocket engines, 7.5 million pounds of thrust.

And the complicated plumbing required to control those engines.

The looming first stage of the Saturn V.

Mars Explorer Barbie.  I'm reasonably certain that pink spacesuit is going to clash horribly with
the surface of Mars.

Atlantis:  33 missions, 4848 Earth orbits.

Every heatproof tile on the Atlantis is numbered to indicate its position.

The red-hot ramp to the Re-entry section of the Atlantis exhibit.

Shout out to the Canadarm!!

EVA - Extra Vehicular Activity. 

The elite: the Astronauts' Hall of Fame.

  - Sid

Florida 5: Pilgrimage.

It is a bright and sunny day in Florida as Colin parks our rental car in Zone 5 and we make our way to the ticket window - welcome to the Kennedy Space Center. Welcome to the history - and the future - of a dream.

For me, this trip is very much a pilgrimage.  I'm a child of the space age, born six months after Yuri Gargarin's first trip into orbit in May of 1961.  My entire childhood was spent immersed in the space race, and I have clear memories of the fuzzy black-and-white footage of Neil Armstrong taking that first step onto the surface of the Moon in 1969.

The Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex offers a comprehensive overview of the space program, complete with the actual equipment used for the missions.  These are not mockups or duplicates, these are the spacesuits that were worn, the capsules that returned, and the control rooms that guided their paths.  As such, it's an evocative experience to see - and in some cases touch - the tools used to explore space.

The entrance delivers us directly into the Center's Rocket Garden.  These are literally names out of legend - Saturn, Mercury, Titan, Atlas - and it's interesting to note that NASA chose to use the names of gods, of beings who ruled the heavens, for their rockets and mission names.

From there, we go into the Early Space Exploration exhibit, which details the early days of the space program.  The control room for the Mercury flights seems small and primitive - I'm reminded of that oft-quoted statistic that I have more processing power on my iPhone than in the computers used for the Apollo missions.

In The Right Stuff, Tom Wolfe characterizes the first American astronauts from these missions as modern equivalents of single combat warriors, facing their Soviet equivalents as part of the battle for global dominance during the 1960s.

It's easy to see these men in that role, helmed and gauntleted in their clumsy armour of synthetic cloth and metal, faces invisible and anonymous behind golden faceplates.

The weather looks doubtful when we leave the building, so we decide to do the bus tour of the launch sites before it rains.

The tour bus doesn't stop anywhere near the actual launch pads  - in fact, the only stop in the circuit is time limited for security reasons. We drive past the Vehicle Assembly Building, built in 1967 to assemble Saturn V launch vehicles, and the tallest single story building in the world.  We circle around Launch Complex 40, where Space X launches civilian supply missions to the ISS, and take a quick look at Launch Complex 39.

Unexpectedly,the bus doesn't take us back to the Visitor Center.  Instead, we leave the bus at the Apollo Saturn V Center, where we're seated us in the bleachers for the Apollo Control Room and watch a surprisingly evocative countdown to the launch of a Saturn V.

After the video presentation, we proceed to the main event:  a 363 foot Saturn V launch vehicle on its side, broken into its separate stages. I'm awestruck - for me, this is the high point of the entire trip.  Words fail to express my wonder and amazement.

The bus takes us back to the Visitor Center, where we run through pouring rain to the Space Shuttle Atlantis building.

The Atlantis exhibit starts with a video presentation detailing the challenges faced by the designers of the space shuttle, culminating in the launch of the Columbia in 1981. As the echoes of the launch fade, the screen slides up to reveal Atlantis, the workhorse of the space program's five-shuttle fleet with an epic record of 33 missions, 4,848 earth orbits, and 125,935,769 miles travelled before its retirement.

The three-story exhibit is built around the suspended shuttle, allowing visitors to see the entire vehicle from top to bottom.  As I wait for the presentation audience to disperse through the exhibit so I can take an unobstructed picture of Atlantis, I see someone stretch their arm over the railing and brush the edge of the shuttle's open hatch.

A small child sits at a nearby mockup of the space shuttle controls, screaming, "We're going to crash, we're going to crash!"  He's too small to realize that it's inappropriate to play that particular game of pretend in this environment: the loss of lives in the Challenger and Columbia accidents still presents a tragic resonance to the space program.

After Atlantis, both Colin and I are ready for a break.  We have a late lunch, and decide to give ourselves some down time by watching the Hubble IMAX movie. 

Unfortunately, it's not showing that day due to technical issues, so we call it a day - we haven't seen everything the Center has to offer*, but we're just burned out.  As we drive back to our Cocoa Beach hotel, I look back at the day and my only regret is that we didn't have another day to spend there.  I wish there was some way to send a message back in time to my 12-year old self to tell him about what I've just seen.

Space flight finds its origins in politics, as much a part of the Cold War as the Berlin Wall or the Cuban Missile Crisis. However, unlike those artifacts of the post-war conflict with the USSR, the exploration of space has continued, and developed over time into a purer phenomenon. Space travel is now a global pursuit: the United States works co-operatively with the Russian space agency, and the astronauts visiting the International Space Station come from around the world.

Which is as it should be.  When we leave Earth, it shouldn't be as Americans or Canadians or Russians, we should enter space as representatives of humanity.

- Sid

* The Visitor Center sells two-day tickets - if you decide to visit the KSC, I strongly recommend scheduling the extra day.

Florida 4: Tourist Trap.

Although I do most of my travel reading on my iPhone, I always pack some paper books to fill in those gaps when the airline may request that I not use my electronic devices, or in case of battery exhaustion on flights without recharge sockets.  Because the highlight of my Florida trip is a visit to the Kennedy Space Centre at Cocoa Beach, I thought it would be appropriate to bring thematically suitable reading material:  The Right Stuff, by Tom Wolfe, and A Fall of Moondust, by Arthur C. Clarke.

I've started my reading with A Fall of Moondust, which is a conveniently short read at 215 pages.* I chose this novel for a very simple reason:  it tells the tale of an accident involving tourists - tourists on the Moon.

The cruiser Selene offers a unique experience for lunar visitors: a boat excursion on a world without water.  Except it's not really a boat, and the Sea of Thirst is aptly named -  it's not made up of water, but of moondust, a powder so fine as to be almost liquid.

As the latest group of tourists embark on their tour of this unusual ocean, a moonquake opens a sinkhole in the dust beneath the cruiser and swallows it, marooning the 22 passengers and crew of two beneath a blanket of metallic powder that blocks all radio communication and diffuses its heat signature.

The book alternates between the trials faced by the trapped travellers and the efforts by their rescuers to locate the ship, discover its fate, and then invent some way of reaching the people on board before lack of oxygen renders their efforts irrelevant.  As it turns out, there are more subtle perils to threaten the lives of the buried sightseers...

To be honest, Clarke is not at his best working with romantic subplots and personal drama, and as a result that part of the story never quite rings true. However, that's not really what interests him.  The key to the story is the battle between the ingenuity of the rescuers and their relentless opponents:  vacuum, the dust, and time.

The most astonishing thing about Clarke's tiny perfect tale of disaster and rescue is that no one dies.  I strongly suspect that in a movie adaptation, the irritating spinster reporter would be lucky to make it to the end of the first act, let alone be the first one out of the boat when they open the escape hatch.

- Sid

* It's interesting to compare the length of SF and fantasy novels from the 50s, 60s and 70s with the current offerings, there's been a definite upward slope in terms of page counts.  I remember when The Lord of the Rings was viewed as epic not only in concept but in length, with 481,103 words in the story  - not including the appendices - and now we have things like The Wheel of Time series, which clocks in at almost ten times the length at 4,410,036 words.

Florida 3: "Research at beach resorts".

Welcome to Cocoa Beach, and its somewhat faded memorial to the first American in space, Alan Shepard.  Hmmm...come to think of it, what did they name after Neil Armstrong?

- Sid

Florida 2: Does anybody really know what time it is?

We've always defined ourselves by the ability to overcome the impossible. And we count these moments. These moments when we dare to aim higher, to break barriers, to reach for the stars, to make the unknown known. We count these moments as our proudest achievements. But we lost all that. Or perhaps we've just forgotten that we are still pioneers. And we've barely begun. And that our greatest accomplishments cannot be behind us, because our destiny lies above us.

Cooper, Interstellar

I'm just starting the first leg of my Florida vacation - I'm en route to Toronto where I'll be joined by my friend Colin, aka Cloin of the Campbell Brothers, and we'll fly down to Miami together before heading for Key West in the morning.

It's a big full plane, which would make the Civilization Game quite playable, but I'm more intrigued to see that Interstellar is on the list of options for in flight viewing.

I ended up just not getting to Interstellar in commercial release, but it's been on my list of catch-up movies.  It generated a lot of geek buzz when it debuted, with physics luminary Neil deGrasse Tyson publicly weighing in regarding the accuracy - or lack thereof - of the wormhole and black hole science involved in the plot.

Interstellar presents us with an Earth which is no longer on the edge of starvation but past it, with a reduced population living in a global dust bowl à la The Grapes of Wrath. Widowed spaceship pilot manqué Cooper, played by Matthew McConaughey*, grows corn and drinks beer while mourning the loss of the pioneer spirit in favour of survival.

Enigmatic messages from an unknown force point Cooper and his daughter Murphy toward a hidden NASA base which is covertly planning a trip through a mysterious wormhole in hopes of finding a habitable planet.  Cooper decides to abandon his family and pilot the mission, even though time dilation makes it impossible for him to tell his family when he will return.  Elderly physicist Michael Caine promises to have solved the mysteries of gravity manipulation before Cooper's return so that mankind can emigrate to their new home in space - once Cooper finds it.

The other side of the wormhole is a sort of physics playground, with a black hole causing all sorts of peculiar problems for the explorers. 

Even as an amateur physicist**, there were aspects of those problems that I found to be questionable.  For example, at one point the crew visits a planet which is orbiting a black hole closely enough that time dilation has slowed time to a crawl: seven years pass on Earth for every hour spent on the planet's surface.  They leave one crew member in orbit and take a lander for a hit and run visit to the planet in order to determine the fate of previous explorers.  Of course problems ensue, and when they make it back to the ship 23 years have come and gone for the solitary crew member***, and Cooper's distant daughter is now the same age that he is.

But...if the ship is in orbit, it would have to be orbiting in line with the plane of the planet's orbit so that it wouldn't get any closer to the black hole at any time, or else it would suffer from fluctuating time dilation effects.  Actually, why not get the ship into a position so that exactly the same amount of time passes on the ship as on the planet? Or less time?

Similar moments of fuzzy logic continue throughout Interstellar, and the climax is a confusing mix of 2001: A Space Odyssey and arbitrary, illogical deus ex machina intervention by future versions of humanity.  A little advice to our distant descendants:  if you need to twist time and manipulate space so that information crucial to the survival of humanity is transmitted, maybe do your twisting and manipulating so that the information goes to a scientist instead of a pre-teen girl's bedroom?

- Sid

* It used to be that if you wanted to cast someone as an archetypal American, you picked Kevin Costner.  In the fullness of time, Mr. McConaughey has taken over the job.

**  Reading science fiction is like getting a really strange education in the sciences.  With aliens on the side.

*** Who is a little quiet for the rest of the movie, not a huge surprise after more than two decades of solitary confinement.

Florida 1: "We choose to go".

I've actually been back from my trip to Florida for a week now, but I'm going to exercise my prerogative as a science fiction fan (and the owner of a time machine) and do a bit of time travel. I'm just catching up on the blog postings from the trip now on May 2nd, but I'm going to post them for the dates in April when the events discussed took place.

Overall, the trip was fabulous - my friend Colin and I had a great time hanging out and photographing cemeteries in Key West, alligators in the Everglades, beaches in Cocoa Beach, and all things NASA at the Kennedy Space Centre. My thanks to Colin for continuing to provide tireless and uncomplaining* transit services for a single passenger even though he was on vacation - as a non-driver, I would never have been able to cover that kind of territory on my own.

I have to admit that the last destination was really the focus of the trip for me, and it completely lived up to all my expectations. But we'll get to that in due time.  For now, let's turn back the clock and sit down on Air Canada Flight 142, going from Vancouver to Toronto...

- Sid

* Okay, in the interests of full disclosure, he was getting a bit little worn out by the time we were got back to Miami for our return flight.  But only a little.

Spock's Beard.

Dr. McCoy:  Jim, I think I liked him with a beard better. It gave him character. Of course almost any change would be a distinct improvement.  

Mirror, Mirror:  Star Trek, The Original Series

I've mentioned several times that our HR department doesn't seem to be asking enough questions about Star Trek when hiring people, and this fundamental lack of due diligence has reared its ugly head again.

One of my co-workers is optimistically working away at a beard, and it changes his appearance substantially.  I suggested that if he just trimmed it down to a goatee, he would look very much like the evil mirror version of himself.  He frowned at me, and I said, "You know, evil alternate mirror dimension Spock?  With the beard?"  He gave this some consideration and finally said, "Sorry, no, I don't get it."

A sad conversation, but one which clearly illustrates the fleeting nature of pop culture fame. It's interesting to think that there's a point in the future when no one will understand why it's necessary to wave your arms up and down when saying, "Danger, Will Robinson!", when the significance of "No, I am your father!" will be lost, and if you Google™ "Spock's beard", the only results will say, "Los Angeles based band formed in 1992..."

- Sid