Those dreams that I often don’t let myself contemplate, for fear that it will take my attention away from the practical steps that I am focused on now that may enable me to achieve those dreams in the future.

When I am contemplative, I sit back and consider the current plans of those who struggle along side me in Man’s efforts to escape Earth and what is on her.

SpaceX, Orbital, Blue Origin, Boeing, XCOR. Astronautical Engineering courses. Sweeping arcs showing Launch Vehicle Kilograms to circular orbits or escape velocity. Job postings for dynamic Loads engineer, Avionics Test Engineer, Solar Array Engineer. Rarefied Gas Dynamics, Shock Waves and dynamic pressure, nozzle expansion ratios, Melting points, rotation rates, electric discharge arc voltages, power budgets, star trackers, Nickle hydrogen batteries, redundant wiring harnesses…

This is the swarm of brushes, paints on the palate, media types, artistic methods, and implements by which Man creates the works of art that are space exploration.

These are the building blocks of the dreams of spaceflight.

In Space, Man can reinvent society. Find solitude in a nature never beheld by man, and discover alien lifeforms and landscapes. He can plunge to great depths, explode to ultimate heights, insulate himself from the deepest colds and deflect the searing heat of stars far brighter than the sun. He can blast the new knowledge that he gathers through antenna dishes across light years of space or find complete isolation from any and all who could want to communicate. He can travel at incredible speeds or swing in spiraling arcs betwixt alien moons and super-massive planets.

Finally, Man can find himself and what it is to be man when the circumstances that crowd his home of Earth have fallen away leaving him singularly alone with his consciousness and ambition.

Mankind can roll the dice again on himself, his society, and world in a billion billion different places with as many new sets of rules and society-shaping constraints.

Water Jet Operator, Turbomachinery Engineer, Planetary Scientist, Ground Control operator, Mission director, Astronaut. We are legion.

I am John Wilson Benac. I am in the midst of a structured masters degree program from the University of Southern California to learn a coherent and synergistic set of skills to enable me to shape the machines to carry man’s dreams outward. I work 8 hours a day ensuring that the life support systems hardware that launches and returns from the International Space Station supports the mission requirements. I choose, along with thousands of others, the pursuit of space exploration as my careear’s work. And God willing, I shall move mankind outward into the void in which God placed us, to find the shores of distant lands which he created for his truly ambitions and blessed children to attain.

What paintings will be created with the pallet mankind so painstakingly prepares? The Space Shuttle, Space Station, Delta, Atlas, Proton, Soyuz, GPS, Arienne machines were once concepts alongside hundreds of other ideas which never were realized. As in the 1950s, countless tabletop designs ask for our limited resources to turn them into actual dream machines.

From Konstantin Tsiolkovsky’s 1903 “The Exploration of Cosmic Space by Means of Reaction Devices” to Jules Verne’s 1865 “From the Earth to the Moon” and Hermann Oberth’s 1923 “The Rocket into Planetary Space,” all the way through the countless college students, practicing engineers, and enchanted layman, we dream and imagine together what man may do in the limitless star filled expanse that is outer space.

Perhaps I should indulge in the pleasure and wonder by conceiving of a few paintings of my own rather than focus on the palate from which the paintings are created.

On Obama’s change in NASA’s direction:

First let me say that I am genuinely concerned for my buddies working the Constellation program. I pray for them that their families and their careers may be provided for. I’m really glad that Obama asks for $2.5 Billion in Constellation closeout costs, because I hope that that keeps paying for my friend’s kid’s baby food. I have already felt the same way for my friend’s valiantly supporting the shuttle throughout it’s glorious ULF5(7?) end. It’s like knowingly marching towards a cliff because you believe in what you are doing.

I hear a clang. The whirring stops. When the airplane overhead moves on, I expect to hear no man made sounds at all. Only the birds and crickets inhabit this place, along with the inanimate man made objects.

Two walkers approach me from behind, and give me a nod. They reach the gate, turn around, and return back down the winding wooded avenue.

30 minutes ago I stood in front of the Jupiter C, Redstone, Saturn 1, Hermes, and V2 rockets lined up in a row about a mile north of where I sit. The Jupiter was riveted together, like a vintage airplane with round rivets that protruded from the metal, unlike modern airplanes where the rivets are flush. It looked like something that was put together a long time ago. These rockets weren’t that big, either. I looked up at the Redstone rocket, which carried Allan Sheppard into his suborbital flight so long ago. I could be on top of that, I thought. It’s not even that tall. I did a full walk around the Jupiter C. The V2 Stood next to the Hermes. It’s comical bulbous pointy shape pointed to the sky. “I aim for the stars” was the name of the movie made about Von Braun. “But sometimes I hit London,” a satirist suggested as an addendum to the title. That V2. Here in Alabama. Far from Penuumbre where it was conceived and manufactured. It came to these woods in Alabama with the designers to show the hunters how to begin the ascendance above the atmosphere. This same machine above me at the time served as a beacon along the trail to the stars, whereas if it had been picked before one of the other V2 rockets in the final days of World War Two at Penuumbre it could have been one of the rockets that killed 168 people at Woolworths in New Cross, London. Its brother V2, which actually struck Woolworths, could be the one standing erect at the Redstone arsenal in 2009. Would it feel survivor’s guilt like the Apollo moon walker Eugene Cernan felt guilt for not being shot at in fighter planes over Vietnam because her was flying in space missions to the moon?

The V2 rocket and Von Braun both came here to Alabama to shake their dark past of fatal slave labor from Jews and merciless arbitrary killing against the people of London. They came to Alabama, with no pretentions about their past, but a dogged determination to make good with the evil gift that had been a mainstay of Nazi desperation in the waning days of World War Two. Still, here at the Redstone armory, both Von Braun and V2 were saddled side by side with the development of the nuclear-carrying ICBM missiles. Hitler had pushed rockets for war in the 1940s, and in the 1960s, Von Braun was not free from the clutches of a country that used every advance in space exploration to further the military technology of missiles.

I pondered on the simple calculations that I had done the night before as I took my propulsion midterm exam. Those formulas that I employed to answer the arbitrary questions, did the engineers who built this hardware really know them much better than I did when they were grappling with the Redstone rocket design? I saw the smooth tubular shell of the rockets. “How complicated is it in there?” I wondered. As I looked carefully, I saw a bird pecking about inside the rocket inside the mesh. That bird was more familiar with the inner workings of the rocket than I was. When I draw my sketches on paper for a homework problem, they are so simple. I know that there are mysteries that the engineers had to discover and uncover as they built these rockets. The unseen intricacies underneath the white painted skin are what has become ingrained in these Alabama hunters. It’s that mystery that has been frozen into these steel webbed towers that rise before me. They wait for us to build again.

I hear a rocket firing to my left. It is still going. Is it an engine? It sounds throttled back. The birds complain, breaking out into shrieks. I still hear the sound. It sounds like metal being dragged across the floor. It sounds like a waterfall.

The rocket is throttled up again. It sounds like sparks flying. It sounds like standing under a shower head, echoed through the hilly wooded countryside. I can’t imagine anything other than a rocket test that could make that noise. Now I hear crows in front of me beyond the trees beginning to caw. Perhaps they have had enough. Or maybe they are going to go and see what I can only imagine as I sit here.

These test stands wait here. They stand ready for America to build new engines, to try new technologies never before built by man. These towers are sleeping giants ready to roar to life with the birth of the engineering artifacts that will carry other men’s dreams, other men’s fears, and other men’s pride forward and upward through the atmosphere to unknown worlds and lands..

Men like Von Braun, who walked this very road countless times from the time that the government brought him here to this army base in 1960 with a mandate to put America on the Moon. Some of the Alabama country folk stopped hunting deer in the forests to start building rockets. They never stopped hunting deer, they just moved to other forests. One of the first things that I heard here in Alabama was when I got my security clearance at the Arsenal entrance: A group of locals were standing outside the security post and one said: “When I was gutting a deer this weekend…” in a deep southern drawl. I smiled as I headed to the rental car. These Alabamans didn’t put down their guns when they picked up their tools to construct this oddity in the universe; this portal to change. Where hunters ascend to Knowers. Doers. Makers. Be-ers.

I sit here, surrounded by birds, the very creatures that moved Wilbur and Orville off the sands of the beach in Kitty Hawk. An airplane flies above me now, a creature of man’s making that further moved men to build spaceships and rockets. I sit in front of the towers with their mechanical whirr (it started up again). The towers are creatures that are moving me to some future transcendence. What is it? I can envision interplanetary voyages, as the Wright brothers and Da Vinci envisioned flight when seeing the birds; as Goddard, Oberth, and Braunn envisioned space travel after seeing the airplanes. I see the current day spaceships, the test stands before me right now… I envision permanent settlement on the Moon and Mars. I envision simplified reliable rockets bringing up satellites, experiments, people, and energy into space. I envision a people who identify themselves not with their country, but with their planet and solar system. I envision knowledge spread among the people.

The walkers return again. The same walkers, dressed in sweatshirts and jeans. How many times do they make this trip? I asked them what the noise was earlier. They didn’t even notice. They told me, in their Alabama accents, about how different parts of the arsenal were used to test army missiles and NASA motors. They didn’t notice the sounds. It is such a regular occurrence to them that it only enters their subconsciousness. Those sounds are as natural to them as the birds and crickets.

I set the laptop down and walk down a small street that comes off the dead end where I sit toward the sound that I heard earlier. Perhaps I will catch a glimpse of the source of the noise. Writing on the back of a receipt that I find in my pocket, I make note of these things: The street is covered with dead tree bits. I pass a white blockhouse with a silent diesel generator installed on the side. The blockhouse can’t be larger than 15 feet by 8 feet. Next to it stands a rusty radio tower, consumed with vines. The old-school antennas atop the tower point toward the source of the sound. In big blue letters 4692 is written on the side of the building. A little further down the road, I meet another rusted gate, this one marked with a small white sign with C-12 painted on it, the paint mostly washed away by years, rain and sun. The padlock is rusted, the barbed wire atop the gate is rusted. An old metal mailbox bolted to the gate has been bent to the point that it no longer closes. I see through the open top that the bottom has been rusted out. What type of letters were delivered here, next to the sign that reads “DANGER: Explosives Keep Away.” Perhaps the neighbors dropped off letters asking the workers to keep down the noise. Perhaps the wives of the engineers dropped off lunch in the little box? The gate itself has had vines growing from one side all the way to the other, only to die years ago. The dead vines now cross through the gate, past the padlock, as if to confirm the prohibition of access and the permanency of closure. The road continues past the gate in a straight line, ending in trees far away. Dead branches from the encroaching forest lay in the path, not even causing enough of a nuisance to warrant removal.

When I return to the car, a different walker passes by. He wears mesh shorts and is listening to headphones. He walks decidedly to the gate and taps the little white “C-18″ sign as a token of reaching the end of his lap. And this is the end of my lap.

This is Huntsville. This is the Redstone Arsenal. This is the Marshal Spaceflight Center.

For me it is, anyway.

As I ready to leave, I hear once again the sound of rushing water, sparks, a metal plate being drug along the ground, or whatever it is.

I guess this place isn’t sleeping after all.

According to Wikipedia, there are a few dozen Titan 2 rockets waiting to be scrapped or “turned into monuments” in Tucson Arizona.

How much payload could these send to the moon? Could this be a boon to Google Lunar X-Prize contestants? These can put 277 KG on an escape trajectory. That could get a real lightweight payload to the surface of the moon.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Titan_(rocket_family)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGM-25C_Titan_II

What other obsolete rockets are moldering about in warehouses?

Here is the option I promoted to the Augustine Commission:

NASA pay Boeing or SpaceX to send crew to the ISS until 2015, upon which they hand over the station to Boeing, pleasing scientists, taxpayers, international partners, and dreamers everywhere.

NASA cut the shuttle in early 2011

NASA ask Russia or Europe to build heavy launch vehicles to loft surface system elements

NASA build planetary surface elements

NASA sends people and surface systems to Mars, with people launched on commercial vehicles and systems launched on International Partner rockets.

Now it’s your turn.

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Participatory Exploration. Frednet. Lunar Boom Town. Open Luna.

These all deal with the concept that we are trying to take the brainpower of the interested public and use it to solve the technical, political, and business problems that confront our efforts to expand into space. Consider a tool that can facilitate this.

Look at Wikipedia. According to last year’s annual report (check it out in your spare time, Nick,) there were “approximately 100,000 active editors (defined as users who made more than 5 changes in the last month).” 100,000! That’s a huge number of people!

With the 11 million articles on Wikipedia, you can be sure that many of these editors are fueled to participate in a wide range of articles by the synergistic combination of articles that they can work on. In other words, editing in Wikipedia gets “sticky” (Check the definitions at the bottom)

So here is the point. Crowd Sourcing is good. Better Crowd Sourcing is better. Better Crowd Sourcing can be had by implementing a dedicated web based methodical structure that fosters and requires attention to the essential questions of systems design.

So I am hatching this idea for something that could be a Wikimedia project, specifically for designing things. It would work a bit like this:

You come to the wiki design sight and tell it that you want to start a new design. It asks you some basic questions like what your primary objective of need is, what kind of system it is (Vehicle, building, processing machine, etc.), Does it require data processing, etc.

The site shepherds your thoughts into a rudimentary top level systems architecture framework by asking you questions like: what does it do? And how might it do that?

It gives you some templates for functional and physical breakdowns, templates with high level headings for a system specification document, and you, the user get as detailed or a vague as you want at this point.

So then your site is live and anyone can come in and populate the content, like with Wikipedia, but unlike Wikipedia, some powerful organizing tools and templates are integrated with the content.

Some of the possible features:

• Integrated 3D modeling web app that helps with part numbers and hierarchy of parts
• Expired patent and journal search that lets you link relevant patents to functions or subfunctions
• Discussion and voting tied to specific elements of the system definition.
• Commenting on parts of the system definition (Saying things like: “This design is horrible. If it were 3 inches long it would have way more strength and only add a small amount of length”)
• Chat with other members of the project
• robust and targeted permissions to set “baseline” requirements, functions, components, interfaces, etc
• Automated quality check that alert users to possible functional overlaps, shortfalls, etc.
• Autocheck to make sure that users don’t give functions titles that are nouns or verbs as titles to items.
• Freedom of Information Act Request facilitation.
• Reuse of components, functions, etc from other projects. (Got an idea for something with wheels? Pick from a myriad of projects in which the wheel was defined already!)

The idea is that most people don’t know beans about systems engineering, requirements, or interfaces. Design by committee, forum posting, voting, or by blind feel with no knowledge or application of systems engineering is not an effective method of harnessing the domain knowledge that many people do have.

So who is with me? Let’s storm the Wikimedia foundation and get them to put this thing online so that we can go about the business of designing space vehicles in style!

So an hour ago, I showed up at the ISS Mission Evaluation Room to watch the shuttle launch. Last night, a friend of mine was asking me if I was going to get up at 6 AM to watch the launch. I wasn’t that enthusiastic about doing it, but realized that I had to option to go into my console in the MER and not only watch it on a nice big flat screen but I could also hear the other voice loops beyond PAO and CAPCOM if I watched it in the MER and used my headset.

This morning rolls around, my alarm clock goes off, and shortly thereafter I stumble into the MER, hoping that I didn’t miss the launch.

2 minutes later wondering why there weren’t more people in the room and I come to find out that the mission has been scrubbed. So here I am, 6AM on Saturday morning finding myself with some time to post my thoughts about the space program in an environment nurturing to such thoughts.

First off, watching NASA TV and having them talk about the mission was really exciting. They are going to accomplish a whole heck of a lot during this mission. With all the battery changeover, installations, robotics, hardware transfers, the fix for that truss element that got stuck, and all the other stuff that is to small to make the highlight reel, the 13 astronauts on board are really going to do a lot of highly technical tasks.

On the ground, when we change the configuration of hardware, there is paperwork to process, signatures to have signed, inspection after inspection and test to perform, and schedules to coordinate. To put RTV on the screws for some Orbital Replaceable Units (ORUs) on the ground, there are half a dozen pieces of paper that need to be signed, multiple schedules that need to be coordinated, and other things also necessary but to boring to mention. So when I watch the highlight reel and consider the hugs impact to the station that this mission is for perhaps the first time I don’t take for granted the comparative massive amount of work that the 13 astronauts are going to perform.

And even though they are the first to admit that they couldn’t do any of what they are doing without the thousands of people on the ground that are doing all of the prep work, which is true, it is also true that they are not just warm bodies implementing an inevitable laundry list of planned to death tasks. These people know their stuff and have the stamina to implement a huge change while coordinating with themselves and the ground. No “SPAM in an can” here.

Ok. So on to the second thought.

Another friend and co worker who was over last night was sharing with me what he had done at work yesterday. Our mutual co worker is out of town so when an issue with a piece of hardware came up that is slated to launch for the 17A/STS-128 mission he was the backup to handle the issue. It turns out that this hardware need to be changed from something it is into something that it isn’t right now and delivered, packed, and stowed to go into this flight that is scheduled for 8/6.

NASA has a very necessary procedure in place to make sure that we don’t launch the wrong stuff, and that procedure involves somethings called quality, configuration management, engineering, contracting, shipping, um… the people who do the physical change… and a bunch of other groups. So my buddy from work is telling me how this morning he gets this email about how this thing that is supposed to fly isn’t actually what it needs to be… and that we need to send it to a company to modify it, but before that can happen, there is a mountain of paperwork that needs to be competed to include all the groups that I mentioned above. And after it is done there is another mountain of paperwork that needs to be completed. And my buddy has spoken to just about everybody who is going to touch this thing and they are all pretty much on board to implement a schedule that will actually make this thing be delivered and inside the space shuttle in time for the August 8th launch.

I think that that is pretty awesome. I mean, people rag on NASA for being all inefficient, and granted, sometime is can be inefficient compared to other private operations like Google or McDonalds that don’t involve explosives and multi-billion dollar machines in space and international partnerships and risk to human life, but hey, a bit of inefficiency to enable things to happen safely and correctly can be allowed for in such a case, right? The point is that for this particular piece of hardware that my friend is dealing with, when program management says “jump,” a whole bunch of people say “how high” and we are getting the job done lightning fast. Maybe the whole NASA system isn’t so ineffective after all. (Lets know the difference between efficiency and effectiveness)

Lets say that you were getting a college degree and you wanted to get straight As. You would have to work pretty hard. The marginal effort to get each question correct on your tests would be a lot lower than the marginal effort for the C student to get their questions right on their tests. You might consider your effort to get that last question on the test right not very “efficient.” Well, what if I told you that you might die if you got the question wrong and that you might destroy a billion dollars worth of equipment if you didn’t get every question on every test of your college career right? If you had the money and the inclination, you wold probably do some pretty inefficient things to get those grades, but if you spent the time and had the staff, you could probably accomplish that takes (Assuming that your teachers weren’t whacked.) So NASA is kind of like that. Going into space is digital. You either reach orbit or you don’t. You either install the module on the space station or you don’t. Things either blow up, rattle apart, pop, or they don’t. And you have to get pretty much every question right on the test to achieve success. And there is a ridiculously large number of questions. NASA spends the time and staff to make sure that things work. And sometimes, when they need to, they expedite to get the right answer on the test in a pinch, like what is happening with my buddy. And when they don’t need to, things can be rather “inefficient.”

Call it Kool-Aid if you will, but I think that what’s happening with my coworker is pretty cool.

And on to my final thought. Twitter and the Mission Operations Directorate (MOD). Hmm. MOD, the people who are tasked with “operating” that station in real time, makes a policy that MOD people can not release of non-public information via Twitter and Facebook. That makes sense, I guess, I mean, we wouldn’t want whoever is on the MERLIN console in the MER to tweet “Well, my day is over because the O2 Pressure is dropping on telemetry feed ISSOGAV02″ which makes people thing that the station is depressurizing when it means that the electrolysis machine in powering down.

But I hope that the recent efforts by many at NASA, including many in management, to expand the openness and “stickiness” of NASA’s programs can go forward with the accelerating pace that they are with efforts such as www.nasa.gov/collaborate, because putting humans and science in space really is the best bang for the governments dollar to inspire, enhance, and develop our nations technical and intellectual abilities.

So in conclusion, to my friend who gave me a hard time for not wanting to get up at 6 to watch the shuttle launch, I am a space nerd. I do think that NASA rocks (never mind the Kool-Aid), and I do wax philosophical from 6-8AM on Saturday mornings.

Well my wife just called me and asked what the heck I was doing seeing as how the launch was scrubbed. She wasn’t to satisfied when I told her that I was making a blog post, because she thinks that 5 days a week plus saturday taking care of two kids is a bit much, so I’m heading home now.

So the day before the trip, I called my dad and told him about this opportunity. Not completely sold on the idea myself, I found myself telling him about how special the launch would be and how there were only a few launches left. Before I knew it, I had convinced him and myself that we should go see it. We left Saturday morning at about 9 AM from Houston to go to Alligator Point. About 16 hours later, we pulled into the beach house driveway. It had been a sometimes-miserable trip, and my two year old had hardly slept at all. We were going to church in a few short hours, and if we were going to make the launch, we would have to leave directly after church for what would be about a 14-hour round trip (stops included). Nevertheless, the idea and opportunity of seeing a shuttle launch, encouraged by the momentum left over from the earlier conversation with Dad and fueled on by the excitement about the possibility from brothers-in-law, cousins, and nephews, and we had a coalition, a quorum, to make the long trip to the Cape.

Church ended and we drove back to the beach houses. As people were relaxing, we looked at the clock. 1 PM. We had to leave right then if we were to make it on time. I ran from beach house to beach house rounding up and riling up those who were serious about going. Finally, about 20 minutes later, we threw some junk food in one of the Suburbans and had 7 people who were willing to make the trek.

The drive out wasn’t so bad. Florida is beautiful. We had fascinating conversation about the Kepler mission, shuttle safety, Columbia, Challenger, the odds of the launch not being canceled, the fuel poppet and leak problems, etc. Cousin Joe had no idea that I was so into space. The nephews and family friends were totally engaged and interested. I called a co-worker at the Cape and asked him to let us know if the launch was canceled or slipped. I called another friend in Titusville and asked him where the best place was to watch the launch. We were stoked.

We showed up in Titusville about 7 PM, 45 minutes before the launch. We went to Space View Park, which was recommended by my buddy, and started looking around for parking. We hemmed and hawed before finally parking in from of some store driveway, risking a ticket but enabling us to get a good spot from which to watch before it was too late.

Ambling toward the water past the crowds, we found a spot on the seawall. Old people who had been there for hours were a little bit miffed that we grabbed such prime real estate right in from of them. Hey, It doesn’t matter how early you get there if you leave a bunch of space right in front of you. At least they could still see the launch. Cousin Joe jumped down from the seawall on a piece of torn up dock that didn’t look like it would hold his weight. We got our cameras out and waited. I thought of the seven astronauts fastened securely in their seats, waiting for the body smearing accelerations they would imminently endure.

Time marched by. The sun set. The launch pad was hazy on the horizon anyway, and when dusk settled, it was pretty difficult to see.

Finally, a cheer went up. A bright orange cloud billowed out from the launch pad, and then started to ascend. The only sound was the cheers from the crowd; at this point the launch was only a visual experience. The fireball was so bright that my impulse was to look away so that it didn’t damage my eyes. It rose up in the sky, a dazzling fireball leaving behind an almost indistinguishable smudgy contrail set against a dim gray-blue sky. The fireball looked almost like a comet, spewing out constantly-shifting orange flames as it inched incredible slowly upward.

But the fireball was amazing. I had been told that the sound rumbles you in your chest as you watch, and so I was a little disappointed that I couldn’t even hear it. But then, when I had reconciled myself to the fact that I was just to far away to hear it, the rumble came. A popping, deep, truly guttural groan and sustained explosion that made my hair stand on end. This was an awesome launch. Brilliant fireball, fine weather, sweet sound. It couldn’t have gotten any better.

Then the next surprise came. When the rocket was at about 25 degrees above the horizon, the disappointing smudge of a contrail came to life! As the shuttle gained enough altitude to achieve line of sight with the sun above the horizon, the contrail became instantly illuminated with a vibrant, potent deep red color. The smeared gray streak against the dim blue gray sky became an exquisitely sculpted marble column bathed in brilliant firelight, not from the explosions of the SRB boosters and cryogenic engines, but from the sun itself. The crowds cheered. The fireball rose on its self made column set against the highly contrasting sky. I was totally floored, and at this point didn’t even realize why it was so beautiful. Don’t tell, but I think this is the point where the tear started welling up in my right eye. The rocket rose. The color of the column shifted as the angle of the sun through the atmosphere changed. A veritable rainbow was formed as the shuttle arched through the sky and the colors shifted through all shades of red, orange, yellow, and finally to a milky white. At this point, the SRBs separated. My father, at my side, was amazed. We discussed how fast the vehicle was moving and at what altitude it was. At this point, I realized that the rainbow was climbing up the column as the sun continued to set. The column itself was dynamic and shifting with the wind. The shuttle was a bright point of light with two other points of light falling away. The contrail had reached its maximum length; with the SRBs expended, the H2O exhaust in the even-darker sky far away was invisible.

At this point we pulled our eyes away from the sky long enough to look at each other and marvel. We congregated together and expressed our wonder, surprise, and respect for what we were seeing. The shuttle finally disappeared behind a building.

What an amazing event. Totally worth the drive. The traffic out of Titusville was comically horrible. We used our smart phones to find crazy backroad detours that would get us a few blocks closer to US-95. The whole way, a new wave of enthusiasm poured from the back of the car toward the front where I answered a whole new array of questions about the operation of the shuttle, the activities of the station, and the history of the space program as launched from Cape Canaveral. By the time we got back to Alligator Point it was after 3 AM.

Amazing. The timing of the launch is determined by the orbital parameters of the space station. Because this launch was delayed, 7:43 was the right time for launch. If the time had been 20 minutes earlier, the contrail would not have been illuminated by a sun passing through as much atmosphere. If it had been 20 minutes later, the sun never would have hit the contrail at all, at any angle. This launch would not have been as eye-poppingly amazing if it had been at any other time. Also, if the weather had not been exactly as it was… a little hazy without a cloud in the sky, then the color of the sun would not have been as vibrant or as varied at the different angles. The “rainbow” on the contrail would have been shorter and less varied. If there had been a cloud in the sky, then the magnificent contrast of the contrail would have been diluted by the other clouds in the sky. It was like rolling triple sixes: the time of day, the absence of clouds, and the fact that I happened to be in Florida on my vacation during the launch.

As it was, it was the chance of a lifetime to watch that launch. God bless America and our shuttle program. May it rest in peace come 2011. I know that I will always be able to look back on the program with this glorious 5 minutes indelibly etched on my mind and this blog.

Back here at the beach house, I was about to hit the sack. You can imagine that I am totally tired after days of road tripping not helped by a full day of beach romping with an early- rising toddler and infant. However, I couldn’t go another day without expressing and recording my feelings on the experience. My wife is sleeping now (I promised that I would only be writing for 15 minutes!) and I’ll go to join her now listening to the sound of the waves crashing on the shore and with the excitement from the fresh memory of the glorious shuttle launch to accompany my dreams in what will no doubt be a very deep sleep.

I don’t have the pictures and videos posted yet, but I will polish it later when I’m not so tired.

So here is the next big thing: Craters as huge satellite dishes for antenna feeds orbiting above them.

Think Arecibo, but a bagillion times bigger, and instead of that little white thing hanging on cables with winches you have a satellite flying above the dish.

Ceres, you big ball of radio wave reflective ice and rock, this is what you–and your equatorial craters–were made for! Orbital parameters copy write. (But if you must know: www.twitter.com/johnbenac)

Sometime during fall of last year, I was perusing the AIAA library and I came upon a paper that some Boeing guys had published in conjunction with the NASA Altair Broad Area Announcement (BAA) regarding the trade space for the physical configuration of the Altair vehicle. There were half a dozen Boeing authors, and one of them happened to be in Houston.

He also happened to be Boeing’s overall project manager for Altair, so it was a fortuitous chance that I saw his name on the paper. I looked him up and headed upstairs to where his office was.

Before this time, I had approached the functional manager for Systems Engineering at Boeing Houston and asked him what types of things I should do to be qualified for the Lunar Lander project. He answered some of my questions about the USC graduate programs, and also highly recommended that I do the Space Systems Engineering Masters Certificate from Stevens Institute of technology. Boeing pays for that sort of thing, so I jumped on it and started in the beginning of October.

All this meant that when I went to the Altair Project Manager’s office in October, I have a little bit of confidence and a broad topic to write a paper on some human space system from end to end from a systems prospective. I had read his paper (I had enough time to go over it thoroughly waiting in the chair outside of his office while I waited for him on several occasions.)

At last, I had my chance to pitch myself to him; our paths had crossed (thanks to his friendly OA.) He was pleasant and trusted me enough to show me some proprietary stuff that Boeing was cooking up in conjunction with the BAA. I told him that I wanted to be involved, that I had CAD and writing experience, and that I wanted to form my space systems engineering paper to support his business goals and objectives. I don’t know how much he really expected of me, but he politely accepted to give me some guidance for my topic. He also gave me access to Boeing BAA Share Point

I was off to the races. The Share Point was chock full of sometime up to the minute data as Boeing was preparing its final BAA report outs. The Master Equipment list, Q&As between NASA and the engineers, CAD models… I was in hog heaven. I printed off a 2 inch thick binder and marked it up thoroughly. This was all research for the first part of my paper.

A month went by, and I was ready. I had really put a lot of research and analysis into the paper, and even slaved away on butchering the NASA Design Analysis Cycle 2 CAD model to illustrate the concept that I explored in the second part of my paper. I proudly presented it to the project manager and the Systems Engineering Manager when I was finished. The project manager was excited to have it. He said he would read it.

I returned a week later and he had sent it on to some of his guys who were more closely working with the topic that I had focused on; he said that they liked it and I had done some good analysis that his guys were glad to have. Later I would actually meet these people and work with them on the ACDC proposal. The project manager said that I was a good writer, demonstrated a firm understanding of NASA’s Altair procurement philosophy, and said “we will use you.” He told me he would send my paper and instructions to the proposal manager at Boeing that I should be included on the proposal team. I was so totally stoked. I called my wife and everyone in my family. It was really what I had wanted for years and years. The proposal was the first step toward working on the design of the Lander.

By this time the draft RFP was coming really soon, and the team was assembling.

After a week went by and I hadn’t heard from the project manager or the proposal producer, I got the feeling that I was dealing with busy people who weren’t particularly motivated to give me a spot on the team. I was going to have to be a little pushier. I sauntering by the project manager’s office a couple of times a day until I finally met up with him (He wasn’t in his office very often.) When I finally met up with him, he acted surprised that the proposal producer hadn’t contacted me. That really made me worried that the impetuous had seemed to fall flat, and I figured that I would take matters into my own hands as much as I could to get the ball rolling.

(To be continued…)

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