Houston News Blog

​The long-awaited report on NASA's future has come out and, as expected, it's bad news for anyone hoping for a return to the moon.

"Panel Says NASA Should Skip Moon, Fly Elsewhere" is the headline on AP's report:

Norman Augustine, chairman of the White House-appointed panel reviewing the agency's spaceflight plans, said it makes more sense to land on a nearby asteroid or one of the moons of Mars. He said that could be done sooner than returning to the moon in 15 years as NASA has outlined.

"Land on a nearby asteroid"? Been there, done that. The accompanying music sucked.

The Obama administration is now facing some tough decisions on NASA and its budget. We're not betting they're going to go on a spending spree

Still, NASA will stay in business in some form. What might it be?

1. Focusing on the SpaceCenter Houston museum/IMAX theater/gift shop. Hey, someone's got to escort those fourth-graders around. Why not an astronaut? If an MIT engineering diploma doesn't give you the necessary skills to herd rambunctious, bored kids, we don't know what does.
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You've probably seen some version of this headline: "NASA to Bomb the Moon Friday."

All we've got to say is, what took them so long? Mr. Show tackled this issue long ago.

We doubt the event Friday will feature country singer C.S. Lewis, Jr.'s "Blew Moon" ("Look out moon, America's gonna get ya; Gonna go kaboom, it was nice to have met ya -- Because you don't mess around with God's America.") Not to mention a cameo from Sarah Silverman as a protester chanting "We're earthlings; let's blow up earth things."

Photo courtesy NASA

​Astronaut Jose Hernandez, just back from two weeks in space, is gathering some attention for his statements on immigration policy.

The Los Angeles Times reports that "NASA went ballistic" over comments Hernandez made on Mexican TV, comments which were definitely not along the lines of "build a fence and shoot the climbers."

Hernandez -- who lives in the Houston area; his wife owns the Tierra Luna Grill near the Johnson Space Center -- is a huge media star in Mexico, the Times said. So he's been appearing on their talk shows.

Hernandez was back this week on Mexican network Televisa's popular morning chat show, where he has seemingly been a fixture, to update host Carlos Loret de Mola on how he was adapting to life back on Earth.

Loret de Mola asked Hernandez, 47, about the controversy, and the astronaut said he stood by what he had said earlier on the same program, advocating comprehensive immigration reform -- a keenly divisive issue in the United States.

"I work for the U.S. government, but as an individual I have a right to my personal opinions," he said in a video hookup from a Mexican restaurant owned by his wife, Adela, near NASA headquarters in Houston. "Having 12 million undocumented people here means there's something wrong with the system, and the system needs to be fixed."

​The latest space shuttle mission opens up a new, bold era in NASA history -- the desperate attempt to remain hip and relevant and therefore worthy of federal budget dollars.

Commentators have pointed out how the agency seems to be embracing pop culture, but it seems to be getting to the point where it's less like NASA and more like NASCAR -- but instead of cars festooned with sponsor decals, we've got space stations packed with publicity-generating machines.

Let's take a look at what this latest mission involves:

1. The COLBERT treadmill. We'll give NASA points for this one; they played it pretty well. Stephen Colbert famously won a write-in campaign to have a new space-station node named after him; NASA refused to do that, but came up with a stretch of an acronym so that the new treadmill being installed is called the COLBERT. Of course, NASA officials didn't really seem happy with it in a pre-flight press conference. Asked if NASA should do more "fun" stuff like the COLBERT, one replied "You should answer that yourself. We're engineers. It's the Combined Operational Load Bearing External Resistance Treadmill."

So the memo about the new, hip NASA hasn't gotten full distribution yet.

​Nowadays, being an astronaut just doesn't have the cachet it once did. But back in the 1960s, astronauts were celebrities, and an obscure neighborhood near Clear Lake was their Beverly Hills.

Timber Cove was a development of what today would be considered smallish homes -- no McMansions here -- on small cul-de-sacs and streets, surrounded by water and trees. Astronauts flocked there.

Anyone who's watched Apollo 13 remembers Kathleen Quinlan as Marilyn Lovell, telling a NASA flack that reporters who want to put an antenna on her lawn "Can take it up with my husband...He'll be home on Friday!!"

That happened on Lazywood Lane, a small street in Timber Cove. As one history of the development put it (scroll down to page 48), four of the original Mercury 7 astronauts moved there, and, "Sharing a common goal at work, the neighbors became friends; friends became extended family and the subdivision evolved into a close-knit community."

​Maybe this has come out before -- the list seems to be a year old -- but we noticed today a story in the British paper The Guardian about the list of DVDs NASA has provided to the International Space Station.

The actual list is here, released under the Freedom of Information Act. Movies are apparently selected by the crews, so they reveal the taste of NASA nerds.

There's the usual space stuff on there, but the list also includes some head-scratchers. For instance, there's Harold & Kumar, says NASA (not specifying which one)...are we sending a bunch of weed-heads up to space? Is that what our tax dollars are doing?!?!? Stern letter to follow.

Here, though, are the five absolute worst movies included in the Space Station's DVD library. You'd have to be awfully, awfully bored with the wonder of space to watch any of these:

1. 50 First Dates: Adam Sandler!! Drew Barrymore!! What could go wrong? Plenty. We think we'd prefer watching the Indian sub-continent go by for the 5,397th time than watch this thing.

Photo by NASA

In the old days of Hollywood, they used to talk of "the Jesus Curse" -- any actor who played JC on screen was thereafter doomed to obscurity.

Does the same thing happen to actors who play Neil Armstrong? There aren't as many Apollo 11 movies as you might expect, but the evidence still is strong:

5) Apollo 11 -- A 1996 made-for-TV movie, Armstrong is played by Jeffrey Nordling. Yes, the Jeffrey Nordling, the one who had played Coach Ted Orion in Mighty Ducks 3: Direct to Video!!, or whatever that movie was subtitled. From Apollo 11 he went on to play a lot of TV roles, perhaps the high point being Larry Moss in a 24. Absolutely uncharacteristic bit of dialogue from that show, according to IMBD:

Moss -- The rules are what make us better.
Jack Bauer -- Not today.

Oh gosh, Lisa Nowak's not going to take this news well.

(That's Lisa "I was not wearing diapers" Nowak to you; one-third of the wackiest astronaut love triangle ever.)

The other two parts of that triangle are getting married.

Bill Oefelein, the NASA stud muffin who simply loves the ladies, is tying the knot with Colleen Shipman, the Air Force officers who had the pleasant talk with a coiffed and composed Nowak in an Orlando airport that fateful day. ("Coiffed and composed" meaning "Looking like Nick Nolte's mugshot.")

The two will wed in 2010, various media reports say.

What to get the happy couple? We have some ideas.

1) A BB gun. You never know when you might need one.

Photo courtesy NASA

Score one for the British press.

We mentioned a while back that a London paper was reporting that NASA had discovered and restored tapes of the moon landing that had been missing for 40 years.

The timing seemed highly coincidental, but it's true. And NASA just now has released the restored video.

You can check it here, where they show side-by-side comparisons of the vintage footage we all know and the new, restored video.

It's not IMAX-like, but the "new" video is notably sharper, and details that have been shrouded in shadows emerge.

Photo courtesy NASA

Michael Collins, the man who orbited the moon while Neil and Buzz had all the fun, isn't doing any interviews, apparently, for the 40th anniversary. But through NASA he's put out a Q&A with himself answering what he says are the biggest FAQs he gets.

Most of it is predictable, and in fact many answers quote extensively from his (very good) book Carrying the Fire.

But he does cut loose a bit. At one point, ranting about celebrity culture in America, he says:

Celebrities? What nonsense, what an empty concept for a person to be, as my friend the great historian Daniel Boorstin put it, "known for his well-known-ness." How many live-ins, how many trips to rehab, maybe -- wow -- you could even get arrested and then you would really be noticed. Don't get me started.

"Live-ins"? Are they still having those?

There are some other highlights.

NASA is continuing its information dump for the 40th anniversary of the moon landing; now they have put on the `net digital recordings of some of the private in-capsule conversations of the Apollo 11 astronauts.

"You're in a spacecraft, on a mission to land on the moon for the first time in history, and the microphone to Earth is off," NASA's release says. "What do you say? Now you can listen in on a NASA Web site and find out."

Transcripts, which have been available previously, enable you to follow along when the audio is weak or Neil Armstrong, Mike Collins and Buzz Aldrin talk over each other. You can also sense the exuberance as they re-unite after Armstrong and Aldrin lift off from the moon.

And then there's this:

Collins: Oh boy you could spend a lifetime just geologizing that one crater alone, you know that?

Armstrong: You could.

Collins: That's not how I'd like to spend my lifetime, but -- picture that. Beautiful!

Aldrin: There's a big mother over here, too.

Collins: Come on, now, Buzz, don't refer to them as big mothers, give them some scientific name.

Aldrin: It sure likes a lot of them have slumped down.

Collins: A slumping big mother. The bigger they are, the more they slump -- that's a truism, isn't it?

Aldrin: That is, the older they get.

Photo courtesy NASA

A salute to Mr. Jablonski

Hey, guess what!! Monday brings the 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 Moon Landing!!

Oh, you heard? Well, get ready to hear more -- this weekend and Monday will no doubt be a "One small step for man" marathon.

Which is fine -- the moon mission was a crazy, awe-inspiring thing that could have gone wrong a million ways but didn't. Even though the Apollo program cost about a trillion dollars in today's money, it did give us Tang.

And it also gave us our five favorite myths about Apollo 11.

1) It never happened at all. The internet was designed for crazy conspiracy schemes, and the moon landing is the subject of one of the weirdest. It was all staged in a studio, according to earnest idiots and the producers of the terrible film Capricorn One. (The movie involved a faked Mars landing, but everyone got the point.) Evidence that it was a hoax ranges from allegedly odd shadows (NASA apparently couldn't hire competent lighting directors for their fake setting), the fact that no stars are seen in the moon photos, and even that the the footprints should have faded, as if they were on a sandy beach. Mythbusters, among many others, have exploded -- nay, busted -- these myths.

You know what sucked about the moon landing? They didn't Twitter it.

If it's not on Twitter, we're not sure we can trust that it happened. Even if the headlines say otherwise.

Now, however, the problem is solved, thanks to the John F. Kennedy Library in Boston.

They've put together an impressive "relive it as it happened" multi-media site and they've also got a "as if they were Twittering" account.

At 8:54 a.m. June 27, they Twittered forth to friend and foe alike "Associated Press just released that Neil Armstrong will be first to walk on moon. Correct." (We'd like to have seen Buzz Aldrin's Twitter page at that moment, given his comically elaborate efforts to be Numero Uno.)

Photo courtesy www.buzzaldrin.com

At a table near the cell-phone chargers, Buzz Aldrin, the world's third-favorite moonwalker, was still going strong, looking fresh and fit in his dapper suit and talking space.

July 20 marks the 40th anniversary of the day Aldrin and Neil Armstrong proved once and for all that the moon isn't made of cheese, and Aldrin had a couple things to say. One, buy his second autobiography, Magnificent Desolation, which came out last month (so did this rap video with Snoop Dogg!). And two, NASA needs to get its space groove back.

Aldridge used the phrase "magnificent desolation" to describe the moon as he walked its surface ("It's a very difficult place to set up housekeeping, really," he says), and it reminds him of how far mankind had come that day. It also makes him think of how complacent we've become since.

"We should shift our path to something more exciting," he says. "Long-duration life-support systems that can go out further, year-long missions ..."

This just in from the Department of Suspiciously Timed Discoveries: The Daily Express in London, which is in some country that is not the US, is reporting that the original, long-thought-missing tapes from Apollo 11's walk on the moon have been discovered.

As the tabloid paper tells it in a "World Exclusive," the original, "amazingly clear" tapes were found when "scientists looking for other data stumbled across a number of Nasa tapes in a storage facility in Perth, Australia."

The original video was downloaded to an observation in Perth from the moon, where it was fiddled with before it could be shown, the paper says.

From the moon, the signal was beamed to the Earth's closest tracking station at the Parkes Observatory in Australia where, along with other important data, it was recorded on to high-grade magnetic tapes.

From there, the raw images were downsized to American television resolutions by a special scanner in Sydney, heavily compressed so they could be transmitted live, and then relayed to the US via the Intelsat III satellite.

The final loss in quality came when Nasa made its US recording of the event--the one always seen in archive footage--by simply placing a 16mm film camera in front of a television monitor in the US.

However, it is the original magnetic tapes recorded back at the Parkes Observatory in Australia that contained the unadulterated and highest quality images.

In case you don't realize it, you soon will -- next month brings the 40th anniversary of man landing on the moon.

If you were older than eight years old in 1969, you no doubt remember where you were the moment One Small Step happened (Me: In a rental house down the shore in New Jersey, more interested in going to sleep than in following my Dad's orders to stay awake to see history.)

Expect lots and lots of media coverage of this. Much of it will be fascinating -- the moon trip was indeed mind-boggling, depending on winging it to a large degree, not to mention technology that today would be laughably backward.

One of the first out of the block is GQ magazine, which today offers a lengthy look at NASA then and now.

Photo courtesy Space Center Houston

Science fact and science fiction come face-to-face at the "Cinema of George Lucas" and "Live the Adventure" exhibits currently at Space Center Houston. Comprised of  the personal memorabilia of filmmaker George Lucas (much of it never seen before in public), and an interactive center, the exhibits have been drawing large crowds from their opening last week.

"It's interesting to meet astronauts and talk to them about how science fiction has inspired them in their careers," Jack Moore, the exhibits developer for Space Center Houston, tells Hair Balls. "Look at George Lucas's career...when he did Star Wars they literally had to invent new technology to fit his vision and that's a parallel to NASA. They both have these big ideas, these big dreams. People would tell them, 'You can't do that because it's impossible,' and they would say, 'It's not impossible because I'm going to invent the technologies to make it happen.' It's that spirit of innovation that we're celebrating with these exhibits."

The exhibit includes props -- R2D2 and 3CPO are featured stars -- and costumes from a variety of Lucas films, as well as his handwritten notes when he first outlined the Star Wars series. "To be able to have the [documents] from when he first put pen to paper to create the story, is really incredible," says Moore. "You can see where his handwriting gets a little sloppy when he gets excited and see where he scratched through something."

Photo by bobbymond

Today NASA made history again, breaking down barriers: For the first time (that we know of), astronauts drank their own urine in space.

The piss was said to be "purified" and "recycled" and all that, but the bottom line is the bottom line: They might as well sign up for this website. (Note: About as not, not, NOT Safe For Work as humanly possible. Unless you work at NASA.)

NASA gave the International Space Station astronauts the go today to drink water from the finally fixed "Water Recovery System," and the debauchery began.

"Expedition 19 Commander Gennady Padalka and Flight Engineers Mike Barratt and Koichi Wakata celebrated the decision with a toast in the Destiny laboratory," NASA reported.

"This has been the stuff of science fiction," Barratt said, but we were thinking it was some other kind of fiction. (Note: Same warning applies. As does the same exception.)

Photo courtesy NASA

You thought you had some crummy honey-dos this weekend? You could have been Mike Massimino, Mike Good, John Grunsfeld or Andre Feustal.

Their job was to fix some long-past-its-prime, but still working, POS vehicle. The nuts were rusted and sheer brute force was needed.

Oh, and they weren't in the driveway working on a Trans Am -- they were orbiting and spacewalking, doing one last repair job to the Hubble telescope.

The Hubble became a running joke when it was sent up in 1990 with a damaged lens, but it has since far exceeded the fondest hopes of NASA.

They decided to send up one last mission to give it new batteries, some other updates, and freshen it so it's good for another five or ten years.

But it wasn't easy.

Houstonians have always had a special place in their heart for Apollo 13, the Tom Hanks movie that chronicles the only moon mission that didn't make it.

(And for the mission itself, of course, which unfortunately enough gave us the "Houston, we have a problem" cliche that leads to lots and lots of lazy writing.

One of the scenes in the film depicts Commander Jim Lovell's son, who is at military school, being told of the accident that's put his dad in harm's way.

In a feature on the restaurant that the son, Jay Lovell (who was raised in Houston), owns in a small Illinois town, we find that the scene was a little overplayed.

"Actually, at the time, I didn't really appreciate how serious the Apollo 13 incident was," Lovell told the reporter. "Not until I saw the movie and realized exactly what had gone on."
 

How serious was Stephen Colbert about having that new NASA space node named after him? Pretty darn. We think.

Hair Balls recently spoke with Nick Prueher, who runs the Found Footage Festival that's making its first trip to Houston in a few weeks (more on that to come). Prueher also works production at the Colbert Report, and he was on hand Tuesday night when NASA announced its decision. (Quick recap: NASA had an online vote to decide the node's name. Colbert had his viewers win it for him. NASA went with Tranquillity--and named a treadmill after Colbert instead.)

We asked Prueher for some insight into Colbert's reaction.

"At the show [Tuesday] night, he was legitimately excited about this. He's not feigning enthusiasm when stuff gets named after him. He's like a school boy. He's really excited when he talks to people from space and astronauts."

The Colbert Report	Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
Space Module: Colbert - Sunita Williams
colbertnation.com
Colbert Report Full Episodes Political Humor NASA Name Contes

In case you missed it, the new node to the space station is not going to be named after Stephen Colbert, even though he won the write-in vote in the naming contest.

Astronaut Suni Williams went on the show last night to announce the node will be named Tranquillity, in honor of Apollo 11 and spell-checkers everywhere.

"We don't typically name U.S. space station hardware after living people and this is no exception," NASA official Bill Gerstenmaier said in a press release issued late last night.

But Colbert didn't come away empty-handed.

Photo courtesy The Colbert Report

Tonight's the night!

On tonight's Colbert Report, the nation will learn whether NASA has a sense of humor or not.

They famously had a contest to name the new node on the space station; they didn't take any of our suggestions. But Colbert's fans put him over the top through write-in votes, and the space agency will declare tonight just what the name will be.

Of course, some are outraged. There was this painfully earnest op-ed in the Chron.

But NASA has not always been so dreadfully serious about naming their craft. In the days when astronaut crews got to pick their own names, they were some outliers.

Among the craft that either landed on the moon or circled it are Gumdrop, Charlie Brown, Snoopy, Casper and, in the age of Hair, Aquarius.

Lisa Nowak, the former Houston astronaut whose lovesick, (possibly) adult diaper-enabled 1000-mile drive from Houston to Orlando made international news in 2007, has been ordered by a Florida judge to undergo psychiatric testing.

According to an Orlando TV station, Nowak's attorneys might be planning an insanity defense. They claim she suffers from depression, obsessive behavior and Asperger's syndrome, and thus was not in her right mind when she confronted romantic rival Colleen Shipman.

One of her attorneys previously claimed that she also suffered from partner-relational problem, insomnia, brief psychotic disorder with marked stressors, loss of body mass, problems with primary support group, marital separation, problems related to social environment, inadequate social support system and inability to confide in social contacts. Surely one of those will stick...

In the meantime, Nowak sought and was granted the right to travel to all but three states - Alaska, Pennsylvania, and California.

The Colbert Report	Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
Space Module: Colbert - Democracy in Orbit
comedycentral.com
Colbert Report Full Episodes Political Humor NASA Name Contest

It took a while, but Stephen Colbert has finally gone on the offensive over NASA's hesitation to name its new space node for him even though his supporters won the contest to pick the name.

He's outraged NASA may go with the second choice. "Serenity? That's not a space station, that's an adult diaper," Colbert says.

He also notes that Philadelphia congressman Chaka Fattah has put out a statement saying Colbert won fair and square and "we insist" NASA use the name. (I wonder if Fattah thought he'd get any media coverage from a certain show for that.)

Colbert ends with a threat to become an evil tyrant overlord if democracy is ignored in this case, so we're all under the gun while NASA dithers.

Photo courtesy The Colbert Report

We're guessing this is something that just might get mentioned on The Colbert Report tonight: The winner of the contest to name a new room on the space station is "Colbert."

As we noted before, NASA's four suggested names were Serenity, Earthrise, Legacy and Venture.

But they didn't take into account the write-in vote.

As he's done with contests to name bald eagles or zoo animals, Colbert urged viewers to make their preference known.

Out of 1.2 million votes cast, the Associated Press reports, 230,539 went to Colbert. The second-place name, Serenityzzzzzzzzzzzz, received 40,000 fewer votes.

(Note: Fourth place in the write-in vote went to "Xenu," which we also would have accepted.

There's a conference here this weekend (according to the Times of London) that will discuss, partly, whether water in liquid form has been discovered on Mars.

Leading to the question, obviously, of whether there's life on Mars.

That, combined with the recent cancellation of the TV series Life on Mars, is a reed stout enough for this collection of versions of the classic Bowie song.

The original has been disabled for embedding, but you can click to it here. Here's another Bowie take on it, complete with crowd sing-along (they remember those words?) and waving arms:

 

Photo courtesy NASA

Here's something neat from NASA that will let you while away your cubicle hours waiting for the corporate ax to fall: live shots of Earth from the space station.

The International Space Station will be streaming live video from external cameras seven days a week at this website. The video will be shown mostly when the astronauts are asleep, from 1 pm to 1 am central time (WE PAY THEM TO SLEEP TWELVE HOURS A DAY??!!! Or maybe they sleep in shifts.)

When it's not streaming video, you'll see a pretty boring map showing the ISS's route over the planet and where it is at any given moment.

"The streaming video will include audio of communications between Mission Control and the astronauts, when available. When the space shuttle is docked to the station, the stream will include video and audio of those activities," NASA announced.

Photo courtesy NASA

NASA is asking for the public's help in coming up with a name for the newest module on the International Space Station.

The module will be "the world's ultimate observation deck":

Eight refrigerator-sized racks in the Node 3 module will provide room for many of the station's life support systems. Attached to the node is the cupola, a one-of-a-kind work station with six windows around the sides and one on top. The cupola will offer astronauts a spectacular view of their home planet and their home in space. In addition to providing a perfect location to observe and photograph Earth, the cupola also will contain a robotics workstation from which astronauts will be able to control the station's 57-foot robotic arm.

The bad news: You get to pick from one of the four most boring suggestions possible: Earthrise, Legacy, Serenity or Venture.

The good news: They're also taking write-in votes.

Women, Fire & Dangerous Things

Um, yeah, we really have no excuse for picking this image, besides its awesomeness, of course.

Remember when those two satellites crashed into each other? Really? It was just last week.

Anyway, Nature is reporting that the debris caused by the collision could have far-reaching consequences for science missions, in particular for the Hubble telescope (which up to this point has never had any troubles, nope, not one).

"The cloud of debris initially consisted of 600 objects large enough to be tracked by the US space-surveillance network, and experts expect that number to grow to more than 1,000 within the coming weeks," according to the article. That's a lot of space crap.

This development could jeopardize a mission planned for May that was supposed to repair the Hubble, which experienced a problem with its data router in September. The agency is currently figuring out if it wants to send the mission in light of the greater risk of collision with all that extra debris.