NASA, rockets, and a few famous figures...

Right now, the participants of the program are in the final stretch of the Team Project. The last week has seen students working until 6am in the computer labs on: their 126 page reports, their 'flashy' executive summaries and their hour-long final presentation. Needless to say, after countless edits of our work, I am shattered. 

Tomorrow is the submission day for the team project and I am using the extra time I've got from this relatively, surprisingly early night (1.30am) to catch up on my blog.

Three saturdays ago (gosh, has it been that long?), the 14th, the participants on the program had the 'mammoth' tour of Kennedy Space Centre.

We kicked off the day with something pretty awesome. I may have mentioned that I was part of the 'Business Department' at the SSP, well there is also an engineering department. As part of this, the students involved got to design and build some model rockets, pretty cool huh? Wait until you hear this...they got to launch them from Pad 39A, the launch pad that launched most of the Apollo missions and plenty of Space Shuttle Missions. In fact, the student launches were the first launches from this pad since the Space Shuttle was retired! Needless to say, there was plenty of media coverage.

The rockets were really cool and they had to launch (maximum height of 1000 feet, set by the Air Force) and safely land using a parachute - the catch was they had an egg on board which had to return safely. Not all rockets worked perfectly, but they were all spectacular to watch.

NASA scientists helping the engineering department also built a model rocket. They designed a model rocket fashioned after the concept design of NASA's next launch vehicle, the SLS. Awkwardly, the rocket got 10feet off the ground before falling back to Earth... hopefully not a portent of the future.

The model SLS, before its fateful flight.

Onto the tour. We went to the Vehicle Assembly Building (VAB). This is the building (essentially one giant room) where the Saturn V rockets for the Apollo program and the Space Shuttles were prepared for missions and stored. This building dwarfs cathedrals in enormity; the feeling of wonder inside of it is immense and I am sure it is a feeling that would not diminish with repeated exposure to the building.

Whilst walking around the cool facilities of the VAB, we bumped into an old friend...Space Shuttle Atlantis.

After the VAB, we headed to one of the Orbiter Processing Facilities. These are the buildings that serviced the Space Shuttle - fixing tiles, performing maintenance and just generally making sure the Shuttle is in a fit state to fly. Here, we got small, intimate tours around Space Shuttle Endeavour! (Yes, it even has a 'u' in it, despite being American! Endeavour is being fixed up before being shipped off to California to be displayed in a museum (Its a little sad to see one of Mankind's greatest accomplishments being decommissioned...)

One of the coolest things here was being given a talk about the tiles used on the outside of the Space Shuttle. We had a demonstration showing just how absorbent the tiles were; the demonstrator help the tile at a steep angle (70 or so degrees) and poured lots of water over it...not a dropped touched the ground (Surely there are some cool spin-off capabilities with this?). Unfortunately, we weren't allowed to take in phones (my camera) at this point.

Our final stop was the Saturn V centre, home of the most powerful rocket ever built. The videos shown here are very touching, exploring the history of the Apollo missions in excellent fashion. The Saturn V is enormous when you see it laid down in front of you, 110.6metres...

Thats about it for now. I'm now in the final week of the SSP which is very hectic, but I'll be sure to post some more about the cool events we have coming up.

Liftoff!

It's a pretty vicious cycle, trying to blog about the SSP in Florida; the program is so busy that you can't find anytime to write a blog post; but the longer you delay writing the post, the more things you do in the mean time and so the more time you need to actually fit everything into a post..! a vicious, vicious cycle.

As a result of this, I've got about two weeks jam-packed with activities that I'm yet to write about, but to save my typing hands, and sanity, I'm only going to mention a few of the more spectacular things which I've experienced recently.

To date, there have been 24 Space Studies Programs ran by the ISU, this being the 25th, all held in different locations across the world. Maybe it's just bias but I really don't see how the other venues could compete with the space coast of Florida for the ultimate reason that in the last two weeks alone, I have seen two spectacular rocket launches!
Two NRO top-secret satellites have been launched into orbit whilst I've been here. Although information on the payloads is classified, the rockets used to launch them is very freely shared information. I've witnessed the launch of an Atlas V rocket and  Delta IV Heavy, the most powerful rocket in use in the world! Both of these have exceptionally positive launch histories and are very reliable. It was pretty cool being able to watch these launches from the same balcony that the President uses to watch launches when he comes down.

Atlas V

Delta IV Heavy

Another highlight in recent days was the TEDx event organised by the ISU. TED talks have a reputation for excellence and they have since expanded to allow independent organisations to host TED talks (this is signified by the 'x'). At this event, we had speakers such as Astronaut Colonel Ron Garen and Jeff Manber, the ex-CEO of MirCorp. On top of this, Davy Knowles, a Rhythm and Blues guitarist, gave a great musical performance. I helped out as a volunteer during the event, working to register the guests and then I moved backstage to simply hang out with the speakers and make sure they had everything they needed - a pretty cool job!

Some of the TEDx volunteers along with the event organiser and some speakers. I'm second from the left, on the top.

In my blog posts, I have a tendency to overlook some of the academic events at the SSP and seem to focus more on the fun, social trips that we go on. Recently, our core lecture series (60 lectures in total) came to an end. The lectures were given by a host of experts and were definitely a lot more interesting than your standard University lecture (no offence Imperial College London lecturers...). To round off the lecture course and to ensure everyone followed what was being taught, we were set a 4-hour (ouch!) exam on the subject material; consisting of one question focusing on each department (7 departments in total) and one multidisciplinary question. The whole 4-hours were not needed and the exam is actually quite engaging, asking very interesting questions - for example the multidisciplinary question was more or less asking 'what problems need to be overcome for SpaceX to take people to Mars?' (You need to draw points from all 7 departments to get a good mark on this question). In the end, I managed to achieve 89.5% in the exam.
Our Department activities are now in full swing and I am assigned to the Business and Management department. So far we have had a swathe of fascinating talks from guest lecturers; ranging from CEO's to scientists to journalists. One talk in particular that was great was from the Vice President of Special Projects for Virgin Galactic. Space Tourism is definitely an interesting topic and I plan on writing a super short blog post on a few aspects of it in the coming days.
We're also currently working on our Team Projects. As mentioned previously, I am a member of a team exploring the 'Next Generation Space Station'. Recently, we sub-divided the project into a few areas that need addressing and people have been volunteering to work on specific areas. I am working on the engineering aspect, focusing in particular on the Power and Thermal systems that we will need to consider. My final year project at University was on Space Radiation and its associated health effects, so I am hoping to apply some of this knowledge to the design of a Space Station as well.

Although there is much I haven't covered, tiredness and some computer issues are persuading me to sign-off for the night. Keep an eye out for a post in the next few days regarding Space Tourism and be sure to check out my Flickr account for some new photos that I have uploaded (http://www.flickr.com/photos/spacejosh/).

P.S. Tonight I saw a screening of the film/documentary 'Orphans of Apollo' which follows the events surrounding the formation of 'MirCorp', a company which leased the Mir station for commercial use by a group of visionary entrepreneurs; spurning the wishes of NASA and the US government. It's a film showing a fascinating story which should not be forgotten. I highly recommend watching it.