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Today is a historic day in space flight. Approximately two hours ago, Space Exploration Technologies (SpaceX) successfully launched its Falcon 1 into Earth orbit. It was the fourth attempt for the Falcon 1, the three previous attempts ending in failure.

This is tremendous news.

NASA has been the leader in space flight for more than fifty years. Originally created fifty years ago, its purpose was to guide America into space. And while we’re going there, we might as well go fast — our mortal enemies, the Soviet Union, surprised the heck out of us by putting Sputnik 1, the first man-made satellite, into Earth orbit before we even had a clue what was going on.

Much of the early work in space flight was done for the purpose of national hubris. There was no real need to go into space, other than for national defense. Weapons in space hadn’t been outlawed (until 1967), and leaders of both nations recognized that it was real easy to attack the other from directly overhead. This fear propelled both nations to work incredibly hard at their space programs.

President Kennedy famously promised in 1961 that America would put men on the moon by the end of the decade. This mandate provided a meaningful goal (on a very tight time schedule).

As you already know, we did it. Six times, in fact. The Soviets never managed to pull it off. That was about it for the space race — the Americans were superior.

The Space Shuttle program was begun in the mid-1970s to produce a reusable vehicle that could be used to reach orbit. The Space Shuttle has been a great success. While there have been two notable accidents, there have also been about a hundred successful flights. Some Shuttles are nearing 30 years old and are in need of retirement.

NASA’s done a great job in getting us into space, but it’s not without its problems. The Challenger disaster in 1986 has been blamed primarily on political pressure to get the Shuttle off the ground at all costs. Engineers who felt the boosters’ shrunken O-rings should have been inspected were silenced. Columbia’s 2002 breakup on re-entry was also due to management — a few engineers had debated the problem, but were eventually convinced by superiors that the problem of foam breaking free of the external tank was not a serious problem.

NASA has suffered the same plight of any other governmental organization — politics. Politicians have tried to use NASA to further their political causes; either to its ultimate benefit (Pres. Kennedy and Nixon, most notably) or to its detriment (our current President). Currently rumors abound that NASA is being censored by the Bush administration because some the key tenets that scientists know are true are at direct odds with fundamentalist Christian beliefs that the Earth is only 6,000 years old.

NASA is expensive. All those checks and balances needed to be completely and absolutely sure that NASA isn’t wasting taxpayer money? Yeah, they cost taxpayer money.

NASA can’t be risky. A government project can’t afford failure. Bush mentioned a few years back that it should be NASA’s goal to put men on Mars by 2020. But why is this necessary? Manned missions are dangerous and exceptionally costly. When lives are at stake, no one can afford failure. Bush’s insistence of sending men to Mars is reckless, and severely disturbs NASA’s priorities. We’ve had rovers basically doing the work of men on Mars since Sojourner in 1997. Rovers are effective because the missions were (relatively) simple — get off the ground, land on Mars (admittedly the hard part), deploy the rover, beam data back to Earth, go out for celebratory drinks. Rovers don’t require life support or a vehicle to return home, so the missions are inherently much less complex. Requiring that men travel to Mars is unnecessarily dangerous and detours NASA from more attainable goals that will benefit more people.

Besides, what’s wrong with failure? So long as lives are not on the line, failure is an acceptable (and necessary) part of any large-scale project. Organizations learn a lot from failure. Any entrepreneur will tell you that she has failed multiple times on the road to success. Business can allow this failure; government programs cannot. Government progress must therefore be slower and much more expensive than business’ so as not to allow failure in any way.

NASA has had its day, but there’s got to be a better way to do all this. Why does each shuttle flight cost a billion dollars? Can’t we do it more safely for less money? Of course — privatization. Have companies compete and see who can do the best job for less.

Privatization of space travel is important. Companies can take risks that lead to cheaper rockets and more daring design decisions. Corporations can bargain for deals on parts in the way that the federal government can’t. Companies don’t have to impress politicians, administrators, and citizens — only their owners. Finally, companies can afford to hire top talent without being restricted to a government salary scale. The laws of supply-and-demand are in full effect.

Congratulations to owner Elon Musk and SpaceX for their accomplishment. Today’s first step is a huge one in making privatized space flight a reality. The world and I wait anxiously as the next era of space flight begins.

Such a wonderful game concept, I’m upset I didn’t think of it myself: Reference Games‘ Relativistic Asteroids!

Like classic Asteroids, the player controls a spaceship in a deadly asteroid field. The player has to destroy all of the asteroids by breaking them into smaller pieces; when the pieces are small enough, the asteroids disappear. Just for fun, add in the occasional passing alien spaceship for a real challenge. The alien ships shoot back, so the player is forced to dodge their shots.

Asteroids is one of those games that should seem really easy, but takes a while to master. The difficulty isn’t obvious at first. The asteroids move slowly and the player can stand in place while taking them out.

The difficulty comes at the first close call. The novice player panics and causes the ship to accelerate away from the inbound asteroid. The game’s physics is purely Newtonian, and the player’s ship continues along a straight line in accordance with Newton’s first law. The only way to slow the ship is to fire the engine in the opposite direction of the ship’s travel — and that’s easier said than done when dodging giant space-rocks. This is the point in the game when my ship usually turns into a pile of two-dimensional vector-drawn space-rubble.

In Relativistic Asteroids, the player experiences the game as if they were able to accelerate from rest to a large fraction of the speed of light.

The default reference frame is that of an arbitrary outside observer. But in game, be sure to try the other available reference frame by pressing the ‘F’ key. The view will center on the player’s ship. Accelerating the player’s ship causes the asteroids to appear to change velocity, since the view on the screen is following the ship. Flip back and forth a few times and you’ll understand how there really is no preferred frame of reference — all that matters is the relative velocities between the objects.

When the ship starts to move too fast, the player will notice relativistic length contraction: the ship (or asteroids, depending on reference frame) will diminish in length!

More on special relativity in a future post. For now, I need to go work on getting a high score.

(Thanks to Uncertain Principles.)

One of the big stories in the media the past two weeks is the flight of the space shuttle Endeavour for mission STS-118, launched on Thursday, August 8, 2007 at 22:36:42 UTC.

As I watched NASA TV last week, Barbara Morgan was operating Endeavour’s robotic arm as the underside of the shuttle was probed for damage. Morgan is unique in her designation as an astronaut, as she is the second member of the Educator Astronaut Project (né Teacher in Space Project) to board a space shuttle. The first member, Christa McAuliffe, died as a result of the shuttle Challenger’s disintegration on January 28, 1986.

Space shuttle missions were lightly covered in the media until February 1, 2003, when the shuttle Columbia broke up on re-entry into the atmosphere. Since that tragic event, mainstream media have been watching the shuttle program like hawks. In my opinion, the media is more interested in getting the scoop for a fatal NASA mistake than they are in the actual mission objectives. Alas, I still don’t think it’s a bad thing that the space program continues to get media coverage, if only to remind the American public that NASA’s still there.

When I was first studying to be a teacher, I was unaware of the degree to which teachers weren’t given credit for their work. Most people don’t think of teachers as professionals. Of course, I’ve met teachers throughout my life that certainly were not professionals in the way they carried themselves and the way they performed their jobs. Overall, however, just like any other career, about 95% of teachers are truly qualified and good at what they do.

Just because we teachers work with kids, get summers off, and are predominantly female, does not mean that what we do is any less valid or useful than what a pediatrician or lawyer does. Overwhelmingly most people thing that teaching is one of the most valuable professions there is. Why is this generally not echoed in the media?

Take this story from USA Today, published on Thursday, August 9: Teacher-astronaut Morgan gets right to work. The headline was annoying enough: why shouldn’t she get right to work? Is it newsworthy when a lawyer has a 7:00am conference call?

Throughout the 10-day mission, news sources have seemed amazed at what Morgan’s done on the space flight. Morgan has been a first-class astronaut, and there’s no reason why she shouldn’t be. Having been involved with the Educator Astronaut Project for 22 years now, nine as an active astronaut, Morgan certainly has done her job.

Preparing to be an astronaut is the culmination of a long and rigorous training program. Upon selected to be an astronaut, candidates have at least one year (and likely two or more years) worth of training programs and rigorous physical regimens. Just because her past experience was as a teacher rather than as an Air Force pilot, there’s no reason to expect less of her.

At least NASA appreciates Morgan’s efforts. From the article:

“The way I look at it is, “One of my crewmembers used to be a teacher,’ not, ‘I have a teacher as one of my crewmembers,’ ” Endeavour commander Scott Kelly said before the mission.

I’m glad that Kelly made the statement, but it’s unfortunate that it even had to be said in the first place.

Space shuttle mission STS-118 is expected to land at 12:32pm Eastern Time (16:32 UTC) this afternoon.