The Cosmic Window

History will be made today as the SpaceX Crew Dragon launches from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The details you need to know are below:

• What’s happening? The first manned rocket to launch from US soil in nearly 10 years will take place today. Additionally, SpaceX is a private company and will be managing the majority of the launch and control operations as opposed to NASA.
• Where’s it going? The Crew Dragon is scheduled for a nonstop flight to the International Space Station. Federal regulations prohibit smoking on the spacecraft at all times (sorry, lame aviation-geek humor there). It will take approximately 24 hours to arrive at the ISS orbit so that docking can take place.
• Who’s onboard? NASA astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley will be on the craft. Interestingly, Astronaut Hurley was the pilot of the last Space Shuttle flight (STS-135) in 2011.
• What else do I need to know?
  • Scheduled liftoff — 4:33pm EDT (20:33 UTC)
  • Backup launch opportunity-1 — Saturday 3:22pm EDT
  • Backup launch opportunity-2 — Sunday 3:00pm EDT
  • Weather Go/No-Go — 60% chance in favor of launch
  • Weather forecast — Chance of storms, hot and muggy
• How to watch: SpaceX (coverage starts at 12:30 EDT) or any news network closer to the scheduled launch time.

I hope all of you and your families are well. Good news seems to be in short supply these days, but I have some for you later in the post. As the COVID-19 pandemic has turned our world upside-down, we’ve been forced to live our lives much differently. Some have been lucky enough to only have some new inconveniencesin their routines. Others are without work and having trouble gaining access to unemployment benefits as they struggle to make ends meet. People are ill; some mildly, some critically and there have been many, many deaths. Bringing up this sad reality was not my intent when I started thinking about this post, but I’ll do my best to bring it all together for you. First off, a healthy dose of perspective is always needed, especially in situations like this. No matter where you are on the COVID-19 spectrum, it may help to read my last post on the subject of perspective. The collective situation of the world is pretty bleak right now, but we’ll get through it and the only choice is to get through it together. I honestly see beauty in the fact that for once in our lives, the entire planet is dealing with the exact same thing. It is my hope that we beat this dreaded virus together and use this cooperative spirit in future endeavors. I envision this global teamwork being used to confront climate change and again when we determine its our time to venture further out into space. NASA is already doing this in a scaled down manner with the 2024 Artemis manned Moon mission. Speaking of space (after all this is a space blog) does the date May 27, 2020 sound familiar to you?

You may have missed it in the news because of the aforementioned COVID-19 coverage, but American Astronauts will again launch into space from the United States on our own advanced spacecraft. Astronauts Robert Behnken and Douglas Hurley will be the pioneers on the SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule atop a Falcon-9 rocket that will take them to the International Space Station in what is the first crewed demonstration flight of the system. There aren’t many things to look forward to it seems, but you should be looking forward to this. It’s been 9 years since we’ve had any manned launches from the USA and while its no Moon shot, it will be incredible to see again. The last time you would’ve had the opportunity to see a manned launch was on July 8, 2011 when Space Shuttle Atlantis (STS-135) lifted from Launch Pad 39-A, the same pad all of the manned Apollo missions used as they traveled to the Moon. Crew Dragon will depart from this same historic launch pad which is fitting because its the start of the next chapter in manned spaceflight that culminates in 2024 when we return to the Moon.

It may not seem like it right now, but the future is still bright for all of us. As time passes, so will this crisis. As the spring blossoms into summer, leave your phone inside so that you can lie down in your backyard, look up at the countless stars, and remember we’re all part of something bigger. Stay safe and be well.

If you’re anything like me, you probably think that today’s society is crazy AF. Middle grounds seem to exist only in the past and many subscribe to the idea that “you’re either with me or you’re my enemy.” We make hasty assumptions about others based off of political beliefs, surround ourselves with like-minded people because it’s the easy thing to do, and swipe away the precious time we have here on Earth as we gaze past our sad reflection in a phone screen (its okay if you’re on your phone for this). Now you may not agree entirely and these statements may just be an author’s introspection but I’m sure you’d agree in some respect. Complaining about problems without offering solutions is very chic at the moments as well, but I’m not one for fashion. After all, my summer attire typically consists of an untucked polo shirt with khaki shorts (I’ve just recently moved to the cargo-less pocket version) and either sneakers or flip-flops, arguably stylish in 2006, but I digress. Now to heal modern society malaise, I recommend the 250 mile, 250k mile, or maybe the 4 billion mile perspective.

Youngstown to DC – Vertically

If you were to get in your trusty old automobile and head southeast from Youngstown, you’d arrive in our nation’s capital after about 250 miles. This is of course assuming you could do it in a straight line and miss all of the curvy Pennsylvania roads and the wonderful I-95 traffic. Now, if we could somehow do this same exact trip into the sky, you’d arrive at the altitude of the International Space Station’s (ISS) low Earth orbit. From this vantage point, the curve of our planet is clearly visible (sorry flat-earth peeps) and the view is absolutely breathtaking. It’s so incredible, that nearly every astronaut reports their initial view of Earth as nothing short of life-changing. The below image gives you an idea of a typical view out of the ISS, but it certainly doesn’t give it justice.

As you look at this portion of the majestic Great Lakes, would you believe that you’re looking at an area where approximately 15 million people live? Each and everyday for the last 20+ years, human beings have been perched 250 miles above the Earth zipping around at 17,500 mph and circling the globe every 90 minutes with the entire world’s population passing casually below. I don’t know about you, but I’m insanely jealous of the extraordinary humans that get to experience this. They’re few and far between. The next view is arguably more incredible and one that fewer humans have experienced.

The Good Earth

During the Apollo 8 mission in December 1968, the crew became the first human beings to leave the Earth’s sphere of influence as they journeyed to the Moon for a dress rehearsal of the Apollo 11 landing that would occur in 1969. As they orbited the Moon, they were presented with one of the most amazing views of the Earth as it rose above the Moon. The incredible picture is below.

The astronauts were deeply affected by this site and during subsequent interviews, they noted that despite all of their training and the mission parameters, they kept discovering Earth. I think we can all appreciate this feeling. Can you imagine watching your home a quarter-million miles away appear over an alien landscape with nothing but emptiness between the two? The Earth is nothing short of stunning in the image, but its still pretty obvious that its the Earth. What do you think our home looks like from much deeper in space? Stay tuned…

Do me a favor. Take a moment to reflect on the images you’ve seen. What comes to mind? Do you come to any realizations of what you’re actually looking at?

Pale Blue Dot

The world seems pretty big. I know that if I want to get to Las Vegas from here, I can drive 50 miles to an airport, hop on an airplane for four hours and fly 2,000 miles away. That’s pretty incredible, hell I’d even venture to say “that’s badass.” Its not Voyager 1 badass though. This space probe launched on September 5, 1977, is still in operation today (42 years) and is drumroll please, 14 BILLION MILES away from the Earth. This man-made marvel has left our solar system and is currently in the interstellar medium as it travels at around 38,000 mph. During it’s mission, Voyager 1 did some incredible things. It flew past Jupiter, Saturn, and Saturn’s moon Titan and yielded valuable scientific data of these gas giants and Titan including weather data, magnetic field analysis, and incredible imagery. Voyager 1 also took probably the most prolific photo of the Earth (below) in existence on Valentine’s Day 1990.

That tiny, insignificant speck floating in nothingness is our world, our everything, the only home we know. Nothing that I could ever write would touch what Carl Sagan wrote after his reflection on this image so I wont waste my time:

“Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there-on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam….

It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.”

Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space

The goal of this post was not to minimize the problems we go through during our lives, but to open one’s eyes to the fact that we’re all in this together. Our existence is remarkable yet insignificant. Our entire lives will play out on this humdrum rocky planet orbiting our common star. This star floating along with hundreds of billions of other stars in our average spiral galaxy that shares this universe with hundreds of billions of other galaxies, all spread out among astronomical handfuls and handfuls of time. Treating each other better and respecting the Earth aren’t much to ask considering all we have in this infinitely large universe is that pale blue dot.

Just last week, the good Earth came within 43,500 miles of a cosmic kiss with Asteroid 2019 OK. That seems like a healthy distance, but this was actually five times closer than the Moon. What’s even crazier about this is the fact that the asteroid was not discovered until the DAY BEFORE IT CROSSED OUR PATH. You may be saying “I wonder why they didn’t know about this before? Maybe it’s just a small asteroid.” You’re kind of right. The asteroid is about 330 feet wide. It’s not extraordinarily massive, but it would’ve caused major problems here. The energy released by this primordial solar system rock slamming into our crust would be on the order of 30 Hiroshima atomic bomb blasts. We’ll go over what effect this would cause on the Earth depending on where it hit a little later, but it would not be good. Can we just talk about the name of the asteroid for a minute? These bad boys are named using previously agreed upon conventions and it just so happened that this guy was to be named named “Asteroid 2019 OK.” Such a benign name when in fact this sucker almost made 2019 NOT OK.

Alright so lets get to it. Where do these asteroids come from? Is it the asteroid belt found out between Mars and Jupiter? Well sometimes… Asteroids should be viewed as our early solar system brethren who played a lot of video games, decided to hike through the solar system on their own path instead of growing up to be a moon or planet, and despite their parent’s best wishes just didn’t amount to much other than an orbiting space rock. In all seriousness though, many asteroids are leftover rock from the creation of the solar system or the leftovers of planetary body collisions back in the day. There are numerous asteroids found in our asteroid belt, but its a sparse collection. Nothing like the asteroid field Han Solo flew through in an attempt to avoid capture by the Galactic Empire. Anyways, occasionally these asteroids will be disturbed by the giant gravitational field of Jupiter or slam into another asteroid and be nudged from their original orbit and sent towards the inner solar system.

Even though we have a pretty good understanding of asteroids, they are extremely difficult to find. The majority of our detection work takes place with Earth-based visible light telescopes and as such, detection can only occur during the night. Once we find them, keeping track of them is a relatively easy thing to do as along as you’re well versed in orbital calculations. NASA actually has a Planetary Defense Coordination Office tasked with handling potential impact threats. They classify asteroids based on size parameters that tie in with potential destruction. Asteroids smaller than 460 feet are believed to only cause regional effects. Anything larger than that and up to 984 feet would have sub-global effects and asteroids larger than 984 feet would have global implications. Congress tasked NASA way back in 2005 with finding at least 90% of the 460 foot and up asteroids by 2020. Unfortunately, they are not projected to achieve this mandate until 2034 at the earliest.

So lets say just our old friend Asteroid 2019 OK did in fact slam into the Earth. What would happen? Again this depends on where it struck. If it were to have hit a major metropolitan area, hundreds of thousands if not millions would’ve been killed. If there was time to evacuate, may of those lives could be saved, but we would’ve had less than a day to do this. Well what if this asteroid or any asteroid for that matter struck the ocean, a far more likely scenario given that the Earth is 70% water? With a larger asteroid, the area immediately near the impact site would have waves 1200 feet high. As long as the impact was away from a shoreline, the mega-wave would diminish and not cause too much trouble (sorry Deep Impact fans). The impact would boil tons of water sending huge amounts of water vapor into the atmosphere. Similarly, a land based impact would send tons of dirt and debris into the atmosphere. In both cases, if we’re talking about a 984 foot or larger asteroid, our climate would begin to change. Air temperature would warm as a global greenhouse effect would take place. This is an event we’re probably not going to come back from. We’d likely go the way of the dinosaurs.

Well that sucks. Can we do anything to prevent something like this? Quite possibly… The idea of launching a bunch of nukes at an asteroid to blow it up will probably not work. The best way to stop an impact is to gently nudge the asteroid off-course. A 2020 launch of the Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) will hopefully give scientists some insight in how to further develop this method. The craft will intercept and collide with an approximate 500 foot asteroid hoping to throw its course off by a small margin, but enough of a change to be observed from Earth. There are a few other possible methods to prevent an impact; one would be using nuclear weapons in some capacity (not to blow it up, but help in nudging) or by using a spacecraft as a gravity tug to disturb the asteroid’s trajectory. No tests are scheduled to determine viability of either option.

Asteroids are an obvious concern to us. Not to be cliche, but an impactful collision of an asteroid with the Earth is a “not if but when” type of situation. In 2013, a small 66 foot asteroid exploded around 100,000′ above Chelyabinsk, Russia causing thousands of injuries from broken glass. The flash from the explosion was brighter than the Sun and was seen up to 60 miles away (be sure to watch the video below!). Some crazy facts, especially considering this was a pretty small rock and it didn’t even hit the Earth. Hopefully we can be play our cards right and by the time we are to cross paths with a potential killer, we’ve already figured out how to push it off course.

Finding yourself alive at a time where you have the opportunity to witness the pinnacle of human achievement is quite a blessing to say the least. I don’t know about you, but I’d be lying if I didn’t say I was jealous of my parents and grandparents for having this opportunity on July 20, 1969. I still appreciate all the technology that has developed over the 31 years of my existence. My generation remembers life before the internet and embraced this technology to enhance our capabilities, hell that’s how you’re reading this post. We have access to any piece of information, byte of data, bit of fake news, or hilarious meme within seconds. Furthermore, we’re each carrying around pocket-sized devices that allow us to pull this info up at anytime and almost anywhere around the globe. There is both good and bad in this advance, many might argue the bad outweighs the good, but it’s an indisputable fact that the internet has changed the world. This is probably the biggest technological improvement my generation has experienced among many smaller ones, and it’s absolutely amazing, but I long for a July 20, 1969.

“For all our failings, despite our limitations and fallibilities, we humans are capable of greatness.” – Carl Sagan

From his book “Pale Blue Dot”

In a previous post, I mentioned that to many people including myself, it might seem as though the NASA human spaceflight program has been wandering around aimlessly since the final Space Shuttle flight (STS-135) in 2011. Despite the shuttle program ending, we still have had American astronauts in space aboard the International Space Station (ISS) continuously, they just have to catch a ride on a Russian Soyuz rocket to get there. Can you believe that these Soyuz rockets were originally developed in the 1960’s to, you guessed it, take Russian Cosmonauts to the Moon. Oh how the times have changed… So I mean that’s cool right? We’re working together with our former Cold War and Space Race rivals who are also our on-again off-again frenemies? While the cooperation is definitely a positive thing, how does one conclude any differently that we’ve gone backwards a bit. Thankfully there is light at the end of the tunnel. We’ll be sending our astronauts, along with our allied space agency astronauts back into space and to the ISS on some good ol’ American rocket muscle. Even more interesting is the fact that there is a major push (fingers crossed) to send humans back to the Moon in 2024!!! So how are we going to do all of this?

I’m glad you asked… Before I get into meat and potatoes of the missions, I want to give you a small glossary of some spacecraft names that will be appearing frequently that can be confusing as you may hear them used interchangeably in the media even though they all mean different things.

• Moon Mission Terms
  • Artemis – This is the overall mission to return humans to the Moon. In Greek mythology, Artemis was the sister of Apollo and ties in nicely with the fact that the Artemis missions should be viewed as sister missions to Apollo.
  • Orion – This is the capsule where the astronauts will sit and live on their assorted missions. It will be attached to the SLS rocket (See below) or a different rocket depending on the mission.
  • Space Launch System (SLS) – This is the gigantic rocket that we will use to send astronauts back to the Moon and possibly to more distant destinations (M.A.R.S…. RED ROCKS!). It will also be the most powerful rocket ever created.
• Low Earth Orbit/ISS Mission Terms
  • Commercial Crew Program (CCP) – NASA has empowered private enterprise to develop the solutions to get our crews into low Earth orbit and the ISS. Boeing and SpaceX are the two entities involved in this.
  • Starliner – The Boeing capsule of the CCP that will be mounted to a United Launch Alliance (Boeing/Lockheed Martin partnership) Atlas V rocket.
  • Crew Dragon – The SpaceX capsule of the CCP that will be mounted to their own Falcon 9 rocket.

Now that we’ve gotten that out of the way lets talk about our “non-Russki involving” return to Space. Both Boeing and SpaceX have been working on their respective designs since 2010 and 2011 respectively. All of their hard work should come to fruition later this year. Why only a “should” and not a “will” you ask? There have been some delays and technical difficulties in both programs. Boeing suffered a launch abort engine system anomaly in 2018 and SpaceX had a thruster fire during a test earlier this year. Despite these issues, the programs are continuing on as lessons are learned and improvements made. The launch schedule is as follows:

Boeing Starliner:	SpaceX Crew Dragon:
9/17/19 – Uncrewed orbital flight test	11/15/19 – Crewed flight test to ISS
12/1/19 – Crewed flight test to ISS
5/2020 – First official mission?	5/2020 – First official mission?

The schedule is tentative to say the least and the reason for the May 2020 question mark is that NASA has not announced which platform will receive the honor of carrying out the first true mission of the CCP to the ISS. Regardless of who gets the distinction, it will be a welcome improvement to the NASA manned space program. This portion of the program (CCP) will likely be overshadowed by Artemis though.

Fly me to the Moon…

The United States has considered going back to the Moon many times and then backed out. It occurred under both Bush administrations with the elder Bush having the most developed plan. Before I go any further I want to make clear that this blog has no intent on being political or having political discussion. I simply want to inform the reader about the cosmos and our space program and any inference you arrive at is neither an endorsement or opposition to a political candidate or party. Now back to live action… The Trump administration has proposed a manned mission to the Moon in 2024. A lot has to be done in order to achieve this goal, but it seems totally doable. NASA maintains that an uncrewed orbital flight to the Moon will take place in 2021 followed by a crewed orbital flight in 2022. The major “return to and land on the Moon” flight should occur in 2024. I say this seems to be doable as the Orion capsule is essentially complete despite it still requiring major tests. The SLS is a major component that is not ready to go and is behind schedule, but a late 2020 test flight is still planned. Only time will tell if tests pass, deadlines are hit, or if the funding will be there to support the program.

My goal is to be at the launch site in 2024 when we return to the Moon with my wife and son. My wife was the major inspiration for this blog (and proofreader) as she began to watch the NASA channel and developed a fascination with the ISS crew and the Universe. My son will be 6 years old if all the stars align to allow for this mission to launch on schedule. I can’t think of a better way to inspire him to follow his dreams, cultivate his curiosities, and give him a front row seat to what I hope is the beginning of our next giant leap. I hope we’ll all get our July 20, 1969 then.

If only it were that easy… 250,000 miles isn’t just “a couple blocks away” and it can be a pretty hard number to grasp and appreciate by a human (just wait until we start talking about astronomical distances in future posts). I broke out some “common” distances to help you grasp the shear distance Apollo astronauts traveled on this perilous journey.

Dose of perspective:

• 10 trips around the Earth’s equator.
• 20 day nonstop flight at 525 mph.
• 45 round trip NYC-LA drives.
• 139 day nonstop drive at 75 mph.
• 80,456 5k runs.

Did I mention that this distance was just to get TO THE MOON?! I think you probably get the point that the trip to and from the Moon is pretty damn far. Thankfully rocket engines can provide a bit more power than a jet engine, so the Apollo astronauts only had a 3 day flight to the Moon. The danger of any spaceflight, especially one leaving the Earth’s orbit, are immense. The crew has the safety of their cabin and on the other side of the cabin wall, there was absolute nothingness. They had the Earth behind them and the Moon ahead of them, but in every other direction there was darkness with extremely distant stars speckled across this black landscape.

While space is essentially a vacuum of nothing, there are still plenty of things that traverse across it that can kill you pretty fast. A small, couple centimeter meteoroid could potentially puncture the hull of the spacecraft causing it to rapidly depressurize. A solar flare eruption could expose the astronauts to unhealthy or potentially lethal levels of radiation. An incorrect reentry angle to the Earth’s atmosphere or a computer malfunction could send the astronauts off course to a point past correction. Despite all of these risks, any one of which would mean certain death to the crew, the astronauts still went on the trip. Whats more, all of the Moon missions successfully returned their crews to the Earth (Apollo 13 did not land, but against insane odds were able to return to Earth safely). Quite an achievement and something NASA should be proud of, especially since they accomplished President Kennedy’s requirement of doing all of this prior to the end of the 1960’s. While all of the flights were successful, there was a significant loss of life just as the Apollo program was getting started.

During a ground test of their Apollo 1 systems, Gus Grissom, Ed White, and Roger Chaffee perished in a fire caused by shoddy wiring in their hastily developed spacecraft. The lethal carbon monoxide atmosphere suffocated the astronauts prior to the fire. Time was running out on the 60s and because of this, shortcuts were taken in developing the Apollo craft. As in many cases, the needed changes did not occur until after the tragedy, but this incident caused NASA to refocus and acknowledge the perils of human spaceflight. As mentioned previously, no American astronauts were lost during the remaining missions.

The technology used during the Apollo missions was state-of-the-art at the time, but pales in comparison to modern technology. Since this is the case, you may be wondering why we haven’t gone back to the Moon or gone further. I’ll cover this topic in the next post, but let’s learn a few more astounding facts about these Apollo missions:

• Your phone, laptop, and even smart light bulbs are more powerful than the flight computer used.
• Armstrong landed Eagle on the Moon with only 45 seconds of fuel left.
• The Saturn V rocket used to launch the Apollo missions burned fuel at a rate of 13 metric tons per second!
• The Saturn V was and is still the most powerful rocket ever flown. If you’re bored, you can read the Saturn V flight manual here!

President Kennedy and his speech writers seemed to have a way with words during his presidency. If he had Twitter at his disposal back then, I’d imagine that he would toss around some hashtags like the ones in the title after he made his famous “We choose to go to the Moon” speech at Rice University on September 12, 1962 in an attempt to get the nation pumped up about going to our pockmarked neighbor. For those of you who aren’t familiar with the speech, the President declared that the top priority for NASA was to land men on the Moon and return them safely to Earth before 1970. If you haven’t done the math already, he gave NASA about 7.25 years to achieve this task! The same NASA who had just successfully launched a human being into space a little over a year prior to this announcement and the same NASA who just put a man into orbit for the FIRST TIME seven months ago! I think it goes without saying that President Kennedy was taking quite a risk by mandating this mission and timeline, so why did HE and why do WE care about space so much to begin with anyways?

Well, the meme should be the dead giveaway to one of our questions. The Soviets were beating us to nearly every “First xyz in space” and it was making Americans uncomfortable. This fear began when the USSR launched Sputnik on October 4, 1957. The thought that the Soviets were able to send something into space above our heads and there wasn’t a damn thing we could do about it scared the hell out of the USA. The USSR then launched a dog into orbit the following year. Keep in mind that both of these events took place prior to the USA successfully launching ANYTHING into space! Then on April 12, 1961 the unthinkable happened… Soviet cosmonaut Yury Gagarin orbited the Earth in his Vostok-1 spacecraft. It seemed that at every step of the way, the Soviets were beating the good ol’ USA to the punch. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist (pun intended) to see that Kennedy’s announcement was the USA’s attempt at winning the space race.

I mean obviously we won the race, but it was not without much sacrifice of time, money, and even life. It’s absolutely amazing that NASA was able to pull this mission off in the short amount of time that they had to do it. This will all be covered in the July 20th post that will commemorate the 50th anniversary landing date. On July 22nd, we’ll talk about NASA and the enormous benefits the organization has brought to us, as well as their future missions and endeavors. While our unmanned space missions have been nothing short of astounding and are a vital aspect of NASA’s programs, I would argue that NASA has been looking for a sense of purpose since the last flight of the Space Shuttle in 2011. We’re also living in a climate of anti-science sentiment, a need for instant gratification, and a desire to have gizmos and gadgets to no end. If that all sounds familiar, you’ve probably seen it in one of my favorite movies Interstellar (clip below). I pray we don’t find ourselves in similar circumstances one day…

Fifty years ago today, Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Michael Collins launched from pad 39A at Kennedy Space Center atop the mighty Saturn V rocket. These human beings departed our beloved Earth and turned their sights to our closest extraterrestrial neighbor, the Moon. Over the next five days, we’ll talk about what led to the idea of landing on the moon, the benefits of a manned space program, the future of NASA, and the absolute insanity of what had to occur for these missions to be successful.  I hope that after reading these posts, you develop a sense of appreciation for the space program, what they’ve achieved, and hope to achieve in the future. You’ll also be formally introduced to everything that makes up our infinite Universe, from the very small (subatomic particles) to the very big (galaxies). What you will learn may sound crazy and you may not believe it, or want to believe it. You may feel intimidated, uneasy, or downright scared. If you don’t find yourself in at least one existential crisis after reading a post, I’ve failed you. All joking aside, I can assure you that you’ll be amazed and you’ll develop a greater appreciation for our Earth, our place in the Universe, and the concept of time (likely to be one of the biggest mind-blowers). Now that you have an idea of what to expect in the coming days from this blog, why don’t we dig in to a general understanding of what led to the creation of the Earth and the Moon.

Around 14 billion years ago, all of the material that makes up our Universe was compressed into an infinitesimally small point (singularity). This point began to expand rapidly and then yada, yada, yada here we are. You’re probably thinking, “This guy just yada yada’d 14 billion years!” Obviously many things had to happen in those 14 billion years for us to find ourselves here reading a Seinfeld reference, but that is going to require a series of posts to adequately explain it, so stay tuned. A quick SparkNotes explanation would show that this matter expanded out into the Universe and began to compress on itself in various locations to create stars, planets, and moons. It’s important to note that stars have a life cycle just like humans, albeit a much longer one. They can live from thousands to billions of years depending on their size, but they do die. When they die, they can go out with quite a bang as they more or less explode and spew their remnants outward. Our solar system likely formed because of the death of a fairly large star. The cosmic leftovers of this star began to coalesce around 4.5 billion years ago forming our Sun and the planets. Think of a bunch of particles spinning around. Some of these particles begin to group and clump together due to gravity. As the clumped particles gain mass, their gravitational pull grows bringing in more and more particles. Once enough time has passed and sufficient mass has been attained, either a star or planet(s) will have formed. I know this is a simple explanation, but rest assured that I’ll provide you with a more detailed one in the future. 

The Moon formed from a similar process, but it was after the initial formation of our solar system. It may surprise you that scientists aren’t totally sure where the Moon came from. They are fairly confident that it was due to a collision(s) of the Earth and another planet(s) that was destroyed in the collision(s). This collision or these collisions sent huge amounts of debris out into space, much of which began to orbit the Earth. This is where the process previously mentioned begins. I take this to mean that the Earth is the Moon’s parent. Lets see what Maury has to say, shall we?

The Moon has an inner core, a mantle, and a crust similar to Earth. Recently, NASA has determined that there is water-ice on the Moon’s surface and the amount present is significant enough that they plan on using this water-ice on future missions to the Moon and to separate the Hydrogen and Oxygen to be used as rocket fuel for deep space expeditions. Here are couple of cool Moon facts for you:

• The Moon is tidally locked to Earth. This means the same side is always facing the Earth (there’s no dark side).
• Just like a teenager inching away from their parents, the Moon moves away from the Earth about an inch every year!
• The USA considered nuking the Moon in the late 50’s because why not?! We considered doing this in an attempt to one-up the Soviets as they were crushing us in the space race at the time.

Hopefully you learned something new about our Moon. Did you ever wonder what the true reason(s) is that we went there? We’ll look into this on my next post. I’ll give you a hint: it’s mostly due to the last bullet point.

Welcome to The Cosmic Window. I hope you enjoy the coming posts in this blog. The Cosmos has always fascinated me since I was a child. I remember asking my dad how big the Universe is. He told me “It’s infinite. It goes on forever.” I probably cried after hearing that. Don’t judge me, this concept is incomprehensible to most adults let alone a child, but it’s also mesmerizing and makes me want to learn as much about our Universe as I can. Being that you’re reading this post, you likely want to as well.

FULL DISCLOSURE: I am in no way, shape, or form an expert on any of this stuff. I will cite references throughout my posts because I promise you that some of what you’ll read will sound like it came out of my ass because it is that mind-blowing and may seem more science fiction than reality at first (wormholes anyone?) I love being funny too, so I’ll try and sprinkle that in where I can because learning about Superstring Theory is a lot of fun, but somewhere between the 7th and 8th dimension a little comedic relief will be welcomed.

Enjoy!

Tom