Overflow's Great Thread of NASA Knowledge

[Overflow]

Then don't watch this yet.. Save it for the rest stop.

I will say this straight up: The bits of the pre shows that I show are NOT the full shows! And I left a lot of stuff in the Atlantis exhibit out of this just to focus on Atlantis.

And with that.. I present you the short film "Atlantis: The Beginning of a New Journey"

[Overflow]

LEGO "Master Builder" Ed Diment attaches the tail to his LEGO model of space shuttle Enterprise before its debut at the Intrepid Sea, Air and Space Museum in New York, July 26, 2013. (Intrepid)


July 26, 2013 – The New York City home of space shuttle Enterprise has a new model of the prototype orbiter made completely out of LEGO toy bricks.

On Friday (July 26), Ed Diment, a LEGO "Master Builder," was at the Intrepid Sea, Air and Space Museum to reveal his latest creation, a 1/35th scale LEGO replica of space shuttle Enterprise.

"It's a fully detailed model," Diment told collectSPACE. "It has working landing gear that comes out [including] doors that open so you can pull the landing gear in and out. The flaps, the elevons on the end of the wings, operate. And the payload bay doors open and close, so you can put a payload inside if you wanted to."

Diment designed and built the model based on photos and drawings using about 16,000 of the toy bricks.

"It was a question of working out each shape — the nose, the wings and so on — and figuring out how you make those out of existing, normal, regular LEGO bricks anyone can buy in the shop," Diment explained.


The Intrepid Sea, Air and Space Museum's LEGO model of space shuttle Enterprise features working landing gear and elevons, as well as payload bay doors that open and close. (Intrepid)


The 3.5-foot-long (1.2-meter) replica of the black and white test orbiter debuted as part of the Intrepid's second annual SpaceFest, now underway in Manhattan.

The public celebration, which also features NASA exhibits and astronaut appearances, follows the reopening of the Intrepid's "Space Shuttle Pavilion" earlier this month. The Enterprise exhibit had been closed for eight months due to damage suffered from Hurricane Sandy.

Like the real Enterprise, the LEGO space shuttle made a trans-Atlantic crossing before becoming a museum piece. Diment constructed the model, brick by brick, at his home in Portsmouth, England and then shipped it to New York.

"It pretty much shipped in one piece," he said. "We had to remove the tail because it sticks up a bit too much."

In 1983, NASA flew the full-size Enterprise to the Paris Air Show atop the same modified Boeing 747 jumbo jet that it used for the orbiter's atmospheric approach and landing tests in 1977. Although Enterprise never flew in space, it was the only shuttle in history to tour Europe, stopping in France, Germany, Italy and the UK before returning to the United States.



Using 52,914 LEGO bricks, Ed Diment will build a mosaic of this photo showing Enterprise flying over Central Park. (NASA)
In addition to building the Enterprise model, Diment is also overseeing the public's assembly of a mural-sized mosaic this weekend, using thousands of LEGO bricks to recreate a photo of the space shuttle. The image, which was taken in 2012, shows Enterprise, flying atop NASA's 747 carrier aircraft, as it soared over Central Park.

Visitors to the Intrepid are invited to help Diment build the mosaic using 52,914 LEGO pieces.

"It breaks down into 784 squares and each person builds his own square following a pattern and using one-by-one bricks of various different colors," he described.

This is not Diment's first collaboration with the Intrepid. A professional LEGO builder whose portfolio includes brick replicas of London's Olympic Stadium (with 10,000 LEGO minifigure spectators) and a 9-foot-tall (2.7-meter) Osprey "Audrey" women's handbag, Diment previously built a 22-foot-long (6.7-m), 250,000 brick model of the USS Intrepid aircraft carrier.

The 550-pound (249-kilogram) LEGO model of the Intrepid was displayed on the World War II ship-turned-museum in 2011.

Diment's shuttle Enterprise and the mosaic mural will be on public view through Sunday (July 28). According to the Intrepid, the two LEGO creations will then be placed into storage at the museum as the decision is made as to the best way to display them.


The LEGO space shuttle Enterprise was built to the same scale as an earlier model of the USS Intrepid aircraft carrier. Like their real counterparts, the two may be exhibited together. (Intrepid)
The LEGO Enterprise is the not the first space shuttle to be created out of the toy bricks. Diment earlier built similar models of Discovery and Endeavour for private collectors.

"The challenge with Enterprise was that we had to do the [tail]cone on the back," Diment said.

Other LEGO shuttle models have been assembled for the LEGOLAND parks and the Denmark-based company has released 10 different shuttle toy construction sets over the past two decades.

Two LEGO-built shuttles also launched on the real orbiters to the International Space Station in 2011.

-CS

[Overflow]

The Soyuz TMA-11M emblem includes a depiction of the Olympic flame in reference to the unlit Sochi 2014 torch flying aboard the mission to the space station. (Roscosmos/SpacePatches.nl)


July 29, 2013 — Russia is injecting outer space into the 2014 Olympics — both literally and figuratively. The host nation for the next Winter Games will launch an Olympic torch on a spacewalk and embed meteorite fragments into a special set of gold medals.

Scheduled for Feb. 7 through 23, 2014, in Sochi, Russia, the 22nd Winter Olympics will be preceded by a traditional torch relay to begin on Oct. 7. A total of 14,000 people will carry the torch from Moscow to Sochi, including Valentina Tereshkova, who 50 years ago became the first woman in space.

On Nov. 7, a month into the torch relay with the flame still being run across Russia, an unlit Olympic torch will lift off with three new crew members for the International Space Station.

Flying on Soyuz TMA-11M with Roscosmos cosmonaut Mikhail Tyurin, NASA astronaut Richard Mastracchio and JAXA astronaut Koichi Wakata, the Olympic torch will be handed off to Expedition 38 commander Oleg Kotov and flight engineer Sergey Ryazansky to be taken outside the orbiting laboratory during a spacewalk on Nov. 9.


The Olympic torch for the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia will go where no torch has gone before: out on a spacewalk from the International Space Station. (NASA/Sochi 2014/cS)
"The story of the Olympic torch is part of our mission," Kotov told reporters during a press briefing held earlier this month. "We are going to take... the Olympic torch out with us on our first EVA [extravehicular activity] and we'll take a few pictures and video and downlink them to the ground. And maybe we will have some activity [inside] the station with the Olympic torch."

Olympic torches previously flew twice on board the space shuttle, even entering the International Space Station, but have never ventured outside until now.

"Nobody has done this before," Dmitry Chernyshenko, the president of the Sochi 2014 Organizing Committee, said in a statement. "The spacewalk by two Russian cosmonauts with the [Olympic torch] will be a historic moment in the history of the Olympic Torch Relay."

"Conducting a spacewalk with the torch is unprecedented in the history of the Olympic movement and the world of astronautics," added Roscosmos chief Vladimir Popovkin. "Its in-orbit delivery and the spacewalk by cosmonauts will be a bright new page in space history."

The aluminum and red colored torch — red being the color of Russian sports — will return to Earth two days later on Nov. 11, landing aboard the Soyuz TMA-09M capsule with cosmonaut Fyodor Yurchikhin, NASA's Karen Nyberg and Luca Parmitano with the European Space Agency (ESA).

Three months (and four days) later, on the ninth day of the Olympics, it will be something that fell from space, rather than landed, that will take the Winter Games' center stage.


An example of the gold medal that will be awarded to athletes at the 2014 Sochi Olympic Winter Games in Russia. (Sochi 2014)
The athletes who earn gold on Feb. 15, 2014 will receive a special medal featuring a chip of the meteor that exploded over Russia a year earlier. The meteor strike, the largest recorded fall in more than a century, resulted in buildings being damaged and more than 1,000 people being injured.

"We will hand out our medals to all the athletes who will win gold on that day, because both the meteorite strike and the Olympic Games are global events," said Alexei Betekhtin, culture minister for the Chelyabinsk region, in a statement.

Pieces of the recovered space rocks will be inserted into the medals for presentation.

Seven of the meteorite-embedded awards will be given to the gold medal athletes competing in speedskating (men's 1,500 meter), short-track speedskating (women's 1,000 m and men's 1,500), cross-country skiing (women's relay), ski jumping (men's K-125), Alpine skiing (women's super giant slalom) and skeleton (men's).

-CS

[FenwickHockey65]

I just found this.

https://kerbalspaceprogram.com/

I might look into buying this at some point.

[Overflow]

Some VAB facts..

[FenwickHockey65]

Been poking around Mars for a year now.

[Overflow]

More pictures of the Space Shuttle Atlantis exhibit. Feel free to click on the pictures and take a closer look.

Here is a picture of Bob Cabana looking at his old friend, Atlantis. Cabana is currently the director of the Kennedy Space Center.



















And some pictures during construction of the exhibit.

[FenwickHockey65]

Selfie.

[Overflow]

NASA's space shuttle mission control has undergone a redesign and upgrade to support the agency's future spaceflights. (NASA)


September 3, 2013 — NASA's Mission Control is gaining a new "look and feel," trading the "big blue consoles" that were iconic during the space shuttle program for upgraded "clean" workstations.

The extensive improvements, which are now being tested in what was the flight control room (FCR) for the shuttles' final missions, are to prepare the Christopher C. Kraft, Jr. Mission Control Center (MCC) at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston for the space agency's next-generation spacecraft and missions.

"The control center itself is in a big evolutionary process where we are moving from the current architecture, which everybody is familiar with...into what we are calling MCC-21 or 21st Century Control Center," William Foster, ground control officer in Mission Control, said in a recent NASA interview.


Then and now: On the left, NASA's flight control room at the end of the space shuttle program in July 2011. On the right, the same room after its MCC-21 upgrade, as seen in August 2013. (NASA)


The MCC-21 flight control room retains the general front-screen, rows-of-desks layout that the public has come to expect from Mission Control, but with a decidedly-different decor.

"It's a different look," described NASA public affairs officer Josh Byerly. "It has a different sort of feel to it."

"It takes some getting used to," said Foster.

Flight Control Rooms

NASA's Mission Control Center (MCC), housed in Building 30 at the Johnson Space Center, is comprised of several flight control rooms, including FCR-1, FCR-2 and the Red, White and Blue FCRs.

"When the building opened up, these were [referred to as] MOCRs — Mission Operations Control Rooms," explained Foster. "After the first four shuttle flights, the decision was made we're no longer running missions, these were more flights, which is why we changed the name to FCR."

FCR-1 (pronounced "ficker-one") is an Apollo-legacy room upgraded to support the International Space Station (ISS). FCR-2 was retired and has been preserved to display its historical Apollo configuration. Red FCR is a training room and Blue FCR was previously used for the space station before the program moved into FCR-1 in 2006.

White FCR first went into use for the shuttle in 1995. The following year, beginning with shuttle Endeavour's mission STS-77, all the remaining flights were supported from that room.



STS-135 entry flight director Tony Ceccacci at his console in the White Flight Control Room (FCR) in July 2011. (NASA)


On July 21, 2011, hours after Atlantis landed, completing the 135th and final space shuttle mission, White FCR was shut down.

"The work done in this room and in this building will never again be duplicated," flight director Tony Ceccacci told his ground control team before signing off for the last time. "I believe the accomplishments of the shuttle program will become the next set of 'shoulder of giants' for the future programs to stand on."

Screen space

Work to transform the White FCR from its shuttle legacy configuration into the new MCC-21 began in January this year. By March, the room had been completely emptied of its blue consoles and the walls had been repainted.



The White Flight Control Room (FCR) as seen in March 2013, after its space shuttle-era blue consoles were removed. (NASA)


"They took all the plaques down and then put them back up," Foster said, referring to the mission emblem plaques that symbolized the missions that were "flown" out of that room. The insignias are traditionally hung after each flight and line the upper walls in each of the FCRs.

"We do like to keep a history of what was supported out of the room," Foster said.

Unlike some of the other, older FCRs where rear projection screens are used for the large displays at the front of the room, the White FCR uses a single screen with three front projectors mounted from the ceiling.

The new MCC-21 screen is still projected from the front, but encompasses more of the wall, leaving less space for the room's prior adornments.

"The screen got wider," Foster said. "In the [shuttle] White FCR, we had room on either side of the screen for [U.S. and NASA] flags to go up. Now they are going back up on poles."



Wide-angle photo (click above to see full frame) showing the new layout of the White Flight Control Room (FCR). (William Foster)


The widescreen at the front of the room is matched by the expanded use of flat panel displays at each of the wood-panel workstations.

"We have all the displays up," Foster said, "[though] most of the displays...are not functional yet. We're still starting to populate that with the new capabilities."

"On Tuesday (Aug. 27), we ran [the displays] for the first time with the upgraded training system simulator," Foster said. "That was very successful — able to command, able to get data in."

Moving Mission Controls

The MCC-21-upgraded White FCR is ultimately intended to serve as the mission control for future flights of NASA's Orion multi-purpose crew vehicle on missions beyond low Earth orbit. First though, it will serve as a temporary flight control room for the International Space Station (ISS).

"If things go as planned, then sometime in June or July of next year, 2014, the ISS support will move out of [FCR-1] down the hall to the White FCR, the shuttle control room," Foster explained.

The move will make way for FCR-1 to get its own MCC-21 transformation.

"It will end up looking very much like [White FCR]," Foster said.

The space station's previous control room, Blue FCR, has already undergone the upgrade. It is being prepared for the Orion capsule's first mission, the Exploration Flight Test-1 (EFT-1), scheduled to launch in September 2014.



NASA's Blue FCR was the first to be upgraded to support the first flight of the Orion capsule, the Exploration Flight Test (EFT-1), in September 2014 (as seen in May 2013). (William Foster)


"Orion will eventually fly off of the Space Launch System, NASA's new heavy-lifter," Foster explained. "But for this first mission, it is going to go off a Delta IV [Heavy] out of Cape Canaveral."

"It will not have humans onboard, but will do two orbits of the Earth, the second orbit going up to a high altitude of close to 4,000 miles [6440 kilometers] so when it re-enters [the Earth's atmosphere], it will re-enter close to the speed you would enter if you were coming back from the moon or way out there," he said.

Future missions of Orion are envisioned to fly astronauts to explore an asteroid and eventually visit Mars, hence the the needed upgrades to Mission Control.

"The story of this building has changed from the original days, through the mid-nineties to now — and this won't be the last one," Foster remarked. "The evolution [of Mission Control] will continue as technology improves."

-CS

[FenwickHockey65]

Meanwhile in the parking lot...

[Overflow]

Yeah they drive that thing around all the time.

[FenwickHockey65]

Oh look wallpaper.

[ShnOmac]

Originally Posted by FenwickHockey65

Oh look wallpaper.

You would be correct. You have been picture jacked.....

[FenwickHockey65]

What? Working fine on my end.