Really Rocket Science

Well, that didn’t take long. Even before the space tourism industry has taken off (no pun intended), there’s already a first class upgrade that is out of reach for us hoi polloi. From the AP:

You don’t have to be an astronaut anymore to experience walking in space. All you need is $35 million and the willingness to risk your life.

A private Virginia firm that already has sent three super-rich men to the international space station for $20 million each announced Friday it would offer an even rarer adventure: A stroll outside the space station for an extra $15 million.

"It is the holy grail of spaceflight; it’s something very few of the astronauts and cosmonauts have done," said Eric Anderson, chief executive of Space Adventures Ltd.

Added former NASA spacewalker Kathy Thornton, who is on the firm’s advisory board: "It’s just sort of the feeling of freedom, that you are your own satellite."

With the blessing of the Russian space agency, Space Adventures is arranging for the first spacewalking tourist to go into orbit in about a year or so, Anderson said. The trip would involve a launch in a Soyuz capsule, an eight-day stay aboard the international space station and a 90-minute spacewalk in a Russian spacesuit. An extra month would be added to the six-month cosmonaut training.

More information is available directly from the Space Adventures website, where they feature their advertising slug for the offering: "Think outside the spacecraft." 

Rumors have been going on for months about the two big U.S. satellite TV providers (DirecTV and EchoStar) merging. The buzz grew louder earlier this week after the Los Angeles Times quoted EchoStar CEO Charlie Ergen at the Allen & Company annual media-mogul-fest in Sun Valley, Idaho saying that combining the two largest satellite TV providers could save $3 billion in expenses.

The comment set off a renewed flurry of press speculation of a potential merger. The Rocky Mountain News (EchoStar is based in Englewood, CO) reported yesterday:

EchoStar Communications Corp. shares were raised to "buy" from "sell" at Citigroup Inc. because of an increased chance that the No. 2 satellite television provider may combine with rival DirecTV Group Inc….

"It reflects our belief that there is a greater chance that EchoStar and DirecTV may attempt to merge," Bazinet said
of his rating change.

A merger is more likely since EchoStar and DirecTV formed a joint venture to bid for wireless spectrum in an auction next month, Bazinet said in the note. Satellite TV companies are also facing rising competition from cable companies such as Comcast Corp. as well as from telephone companies such as Verizon Communications Inc. that are starting TV services.

Propelling the talk is the growing awareness that IPTV will fundamentally change the media landscape and the balance of power between satcom- and telco-delivered content, as well as growing evidence that Rubert Murdoch’s News Corp is set to receive approval for a project that could create a national WiMAX network. As The Hollywood Reporter writes:

Approval is imminent for the project that could take at least two years and $2 billion, providing News Corp. and DirecTV a valuable wireless interactive broadband loop with consumers to directly sell content, advertising, goods and services. WiMax is a wireless a broadband technology often referred to as "WiFi on steroids" with a much wider 30-mile range than the more limited access offered by WiFi services. WiMax, which is short for World Interoperability for Microwave Access, also promises to provide more security and speed than traditional wireless connections.

"If we can pull something off … there is no reason why that shouldn’t link in with everything," News Corp. chairman and CEO Rupert Murdoch said in a recent interview….

High-level sources say the unprecedented undertaking will involve strategic equity partners that bring WiMax spectrum, equipment and other expertise to the mix. In one of the most likely scenarios, News Corp. and DirecTV have been in advanced talks with Clearwire Corp., a WiMax venture of Craig McCaw, in which chipmaker Intel Corp. and equipment manufacturer Motorola Inc. recently invested $900 million.
McCaw has been amassing one of the largest stables of licensed radio spectrum to build his own national wireless WiMax network. Intel, which has a vested interest in the commercial success of WiMax, particularly for PC users, has been one of Clearwire’s partners from the start….

Some sources say that EchoStar could join DirecTV in providing a united domestic satellite-backed WiMax alternative to cable and to telephone competitors such as Verizon, Cingular and Sprint Nextel. Sprint Nextel is working with a consortium of cable operators including Comcast and Time Warner to assist them with a much-needed wireless out-of-home extension.

Still, not everyone is convinced that the coming WiMAX wars will lead to consolidation on the SatCom side. Al Lewis in the Denver Post says that "anybody who believes EchoStar and DirecTV are about to merge should remember the forgotten tome "The Essential Guide to the Echo- Star/DirecTV Deal:"

Australian media mogul Rupert Murdoch had his team of lobbyists canvass Washington with this 123-page diatribe in 2002.

It argued, in exhaustive detail, why Douglas County-based EchoStar should not be allowed to acquire DirecTV from Hughes Electronics….

In October 2002, the Federal Communications Commission [sic– it was the FTC] blocked Ergen’s deal. The Justice Department blocked it too.

Then Murdoch’s News Corp. acquired a controlling stake in DirecTV for $6.6 billion…

And now – four years later – there are continuing rumors that DirecTV, the nation’s No. 1 satellite-TV provider, will acquire EchoStar, No. 2.

EchoStar and DirecTV are working on several joint projects that involve the two-way transmission of voice, video and data. But if Murdoch were to bid on EchoStar, he’d have to argue against his previous arguments. Or he’d have to argue that the satellite-TV business has changed significantly over the past four years.

The results of the August auctions for additional WiFi spectrum will give observers a clue as to who is coming out ahead in the inevitable rush to bring WiMAX to market. And whether the DirecTV and EchoStar rumors are just rumors or not, we’d expect to hear more talk of consolidation on both sides as emerging technology further alters the old divisions between cable, satcom and telcos.

Pop quiz. Where were you 37 years ago today? Where were you 30 years ago today?

In the first case, I’m not sure where I was, but I was probably learning how to sit up. Meanwhile Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin were becoming the first humans to walk on the moon.

Seven years later, I was walking, talking, and probably getting underfoot around the house when Viking I became the first spacecraft to land safely on another planet.

Via Respectful Insolence and MetaFilter.

Remember that urban legend about how you can save your life in a plummeting elevator by jumping just before impact? According to the experts, it doesn’t work. But that doesn’t seem to be stopping some people from trying a similar trick to stop global warming today, on World Jump Day.

Apparently the jump was scheduled for 11:39:13 Greenwich Mean Time, so if you’re reading this you’ve already missed it, which is fine because apparently it’s a hoax.

But just for laughs, here’s how it’s supposed to work.

Hans Peter Niesward, from the Department of Gravitationsphysik at the ISA in Munich, says we can stop global warming in one fell swoop — or, more accurately, in one big jump.

The slightly disheveled professor states his case on WorldJumpDay.org, an Internet site created to recruit 600,000,000 people to jump simultaneously on July 20 at 11:39:13 GMT in an effort to shift Earth’s position.

Niesward claims that on this day "Earth occupies one of the most fragile positions in its orbits for the last 100 years." According to the site, the shift in orbit will "stop global warming, extend daytime hours and create a more homogeneous climate."

And according to Phil, here’s why it wouldn’t work.

First, there’s the problem with mass. 600 million people sounds like a lot, but the Earth is big. Really, really big. Let’s say each person weighs 100 kilograms to make it easy (that’s 220 pounds, so we’re already being generous). 600 million people times 100 kg = 60 billion kilograms. That’s a lot of meat! But the Earth masses 6 x 1024 kg, or 6,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 kg. In other words, the Earth weighs (well, masses) 100 trillion times the total mass of all those people!

…The second problem is one of placement. Even if 600 million people could move the Earth, they’re located all over the world. The Earth being a ball, that means that people in, say, northern Spain will be perfectly canceled out by people in New Zealand. You’d need to get all 600 million people in one place on Earth to do this. Not only that, you’d have to find the right place so that when the Earth moved, it went in the right direction. Global warming won’t be stopped if you accidentally move the Earth closer to the Sun. That also means timing the jump perfectly, since the Earth rotates.

…Finally, there is another basic reason this won’t work, even if everyone on the Earth weighed 100 trillion times as much. The problem is that we’re a closed system. If we get everyone to jump up, they’ll fall back down. So even if we were able to push the Earth in one direction by jumping, when we come back down we’ll move the Earth back to where it was!

Are there more reasons it wouldn’t work? Anyway, it sounds like fun, and if my timing hadn’t been off I might have joined in. The physics of it all are a bit beyond me, and I’m willing to bet that’s true of most people. So, if I’d jumped how many people would have been jumping with me?

MSNBC has some good video coverage as well.

We’ve written before about the incredible growth potential of IPTV and mobile TV — both of which, after all, were all the buzz at this year’s NAB conference— but this snippet from Digital Trends really caught our eye:

Recent reports suggest that global IPTV subscriptions are expected to jump from 2 million to 34 million between 2005 and 2010. North America is expected to see the quickest growth with a forecasted 14 million households by 2010 accounting for 80% of these subscriptions….

What’s suprising is the slow IPTV deployments taking place in Asia as TDG predicts that Asia will only account for a mere 5.6 million subscriptions. This is primarily due to the impending launch of Digital Terrestrial Television (DTT)….

The Chinese government has stated publicly that this new standard (dubbed ‘Digital Multimedia Broadcasting – Terrestrial/Handheld’ or ‘DMB-T/H’) will eventually serve more than half of China’s TV viewers, especially those in suburban and rural areas. Until then, analog and broadband based services may well find a healthy market for the few years to come.

"IPTV market conditions vary widely depending on the country or geography in question, entailing that individual markets will evolve and behave in very unique ways," added Dixon. He also noted that a handful of individual service operators will account for 75% of the deployed volume with the remaining 25% split between hundreds of other operators. "These conditions will pose a challenge to all types of IPTV solutions vendors, one that requires detailed and flexible implementation and go-to-market strategies." 

Just in case you didn’t get enough video in yesterdays post, Phil over at Bad Astronomy points to even more NASA video of the July 4th space shuttle launch, with camera angles from on top and right aft of the starboard solid rocket booster.

The NASA videos area without audio, but here’s a YouTube video of the launch with a play-by-play of the launch.

If you’re reading this, chances are you’re doing so on a computer or laptop that’s plugged into an electrical outlet (or in the case of the latter, running on energy stored in its battery), so you should take a moment to thank the guy some say made it all possible. Nikola Tesla, born (according to A Blog Around the Clock) on this date, 150 years ago.

I have to admit that, although I knew Tesla’s name, I couldn’t claim to know much about his involvement with much of what I (and lots of others, I’m sure) take for granted about modern life. I haven’t often given much thought to who’s being the reality that I wake up in the morning in an air-conditioned house, turn on the lights, retrieve breakfast from the fridge and consume it while either sitting in front of the television or the computer.

Yet all of that’s possible due to alternating current; something Tesla contributed to developing. I had to do a bit of googling to find this PBS site devoted to Tesla, to learn that in fact the AC motor was among his inventions and that he’d patented some 20 different types of AC motors. And that’s not to even mention the radio and remote control. (Channel surfers of the world, we now know whom to thank.)

There’s a bit of irony in remembering Tesla’s birthday, as Archy points out. Tesla is credited with bringing electricity to the United States, of which he became a naturalized citizen. Yet, today many of the villages around his hometown have no electricity. But the occasion of his 150th birthday is bringing people together in Tesla’s homeland, and thus his memory may yet get the lights turned on again.

MSNBC has a cool interactive web page that allows you to watch Discovery’s July 4th from multiple camera angles. Click here to check it out.

There’s a new player in the tourism-fueled race for space.

As we mentioned back in February,  Amazon founder Jeff Bezos has been fueling Blue Origin’s New Shepard Reusable Launch system, according to Space.com.

[The] Blue Origin rocket concept is patterned after the DC-XA that was operated by NASA and the Department of Defense under the Reusable Launch Vehicle program. The flight vehicle was tested at White Sands during the summer of 1996, and demonstrated a 26-hour turnaround between its second and third flights, a first for any rocket. 

Evidence that Blue Origin is moving forward with the project came when the company filed a draft Environmental Assessment with the FAA for the company’s launch site north of Van Horn, Texas:

The more than 200-page draft EA is a necessary step required by the FAA/AST for Blue Origin to get the needed permits and/or licenses to fly their rocket hardware.

Blue Origin proposes to launch its reusable launch vehicles (RLVs) on suborbital, ballistic trajectories to altitudes in excess of 325,000 feet (99,060 meters) from a privately-owned space launch site in Culberson County, Texas.

As outlined in the EA, the Blue Origin launch site would be approximately 25 miles (40.2 kilometers) north of Van Horn, Texas. It lies within a larger, privately-owned property known as the Corn Ranch. Access to the proposed launch site is from Texas Highway 54, which is approximately five miles (8 kilometers) west of the proposed project’s center of operations.

Also on the group’s to do list at the site is putting in place a vehicle processing facility, a launch complex and vehicle landing and recovery area, as well as an astronaut training facility, and other minor support amenities…