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Space travel 11/09/2012
A Soviet Rocketeer’s Secrets Rockets and People: Volume 1, by Boris Chertok. Published by NASA. PDF, free. Reviewed by Veronique Greenwood Cultural critics may bemoan the Internet's effect on our ability to remember, but one has to admit that, as a collective mental filing cabinet, it has its good sides.
This place we've built is immense and variegated, full of stray details and forgotten databases. It is a thick and tangled memory-bank, to mix science metaphors, full of brightly colored plants and stones and tiny parasitic mushrooms clutched in a net of sphagnum moss. For the intrepid e-naturalist, there are great treasures to be found here. Or at least great curiosities. I think that's what I'd call the memoirs of a rocket designer who was born in the age of the tsars and spent years in the secret Soviet space program, masterminding the control systems of some of the earliest spacecraft.
Continue reading "A Soviet Rocketeer’s Secrets" » Posted at 10:07 AM in History of science, pdf, Space travel | Permalink | Comments (1) Reblog (0) | |
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10/07/2012
NASA's 30 years of Shuttle missions is both dull and compelling Celebrating 30 years of the Space Shuttle Program Designed by Adam Chen, Edited by William Wallack and George Gonzalez. Available as a PDF or iPad application (free) Reviewed by John Timmer
It's hard not to have mixed feelings about the Space Shuttle. For over 30 years, it's been the only way the United States has put people into space. During that time, it's built the International Space Station, carried the Hubble to space, and made sure the telescope has stayed operational for decades. At the same time, the Shuttle's never really lived up to its promise to make access to space cheap and common. And, through its longevity, it has left us reliant on 1970s technology long past its sell-by date, and bred a complacency that's cost the lives of two Shuttle crews. Oddly, I ended up with a similar set of mixed feelings about a new eBook NASA has released to celebrate the retirement of the Shuttle. It's not a good book, either in terms of content or production values. In many ways, the experience was, in the details, a bit like reading a spreadsheet. But somehow I found myself going through to the end, and finding nuggets of enjoyment in the experience. Continue reading "NASA's 30 years of Shuttle missions is both dull and compelling" » Posted at 03:34 PM in Ipad, pdf, Space travel | Permalink | Comments (1) Reblog (0) | |
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08/14/2012
Interplanetary Cuisine Space Nutrition, by Scott M. Smith, Janis Davis-Street, Lisa Neasbitt & Sara R. Zwart. Published by NASA Nutritional Biochemistry Laboratory. iPad (iBooks 2 and iOS5 required), free. Reviewed by Veronique Greenwood A couple of months ago, I attended a trade show for the processed food industry. There, wandering among booths hawking hydrolyzed vegetable protein, phosphate, and guar gum, I learned that despite its implication in the obesity epidemic, the processed food industry views itself as a direct descendant of Louis Pasteur and his pasteurization process—a provider of safe food for millions. This was profoundly unsettling, and I was relieved when I happened across a pair of NASA food scientists standing before a poster. In space, how food is preserved and packaged isn’t a matter of merchandizing. It is still, as in the days of Pasteur, a matter of survival. This thesis and the science you need to know to understand it are presented in Space Nutrition, a free ebook put together by members of NASA’s Nutritional Biochemistry Laboratory. Though it makes extremely limited use of multimedia (warning: it only functions in the landscape orientation), Space Nutrition is a passable introduction to the special difficulties of getting a balanced diet in space, where bone loss is a given, nutrients are absorbed differently than on Earth, and everything must have a long shelf life. Perhaps more importantly, it's a window into the enthusiasms and curiosity of the scientists who wrote it. The book, which is pitched at children grades 5-8, grew out of a long-running space nutrition newsletter [pdf], and this heritage may be responsible for its poor organization. There are sections, for example, called “Space Food” and “Space Flight Research” in the chapter called Nutrition, but the chapter called Space Flight Nutrition has only one section, entitled “Being Healthy is not Just About Nutrition (even though we like to think it is!)” (caps theirs). Frustratingly, the details of how space flight affects the human body and the nutrients in food are never enumerated in one place. This hampers its usefulness as a primer. But for me, and I suspect for any kids reading it, the book's primary charm is in the photographs and asides that you can’t find in a Wikipedia article on the subject. One photogallery is full of snapshots taken by excited Nutritional Biochemistry Lab members as they drive to Kennedy Space Center to pick up astronaut blood samples from the ISS, which they use to determine the effects of space flight on nutrient absorption, bones, and muscles. The shots of the Experiment Payload truck that retrieves the samples and of the little blue NASA duffel bags they are carried home in give the process of space research a refreshing physicality. And spaceflight seen from a food scientist's point of view is endearingly kooky. Crumbs are a big no-no for space foods—they fly around and clog the instruments. Tortillas that last almost a year, on the other hand, are a very exciting development, the authors write, because you would need three hands to make a traditional sandwich with two slices of bread and a slice of baloney in space. The book's history of manned spaceflight missions reads like no other you'll find. Gemini: Shrimp cocktail, chicken and vegetables, pudding, applesauce. Apollo: bread slices, cheddar cheese spread, frankfurters, fruit juice. Skylab: steak, vanilla ice cream. These colorful details, at least for me, don't quite make up for the organizational problems. But the book is free, and if you or your kid are interested in space flight or astronaut food, it's certainly worth downloading. The book also raises the hope, however faint, that perhaps someday we will seek to turn the considerable power of food science not towards making potato chips fly off the shelves, or devising yet more uses for soy protein, but towards getting humans on other planets. Veronique Greenwood is a staff writer at DISCOVER Magazine. She writes about everything from caffeine chemistry to cold cures to Jelly Belly flavors, and her work has appeared in Scientific American, TIME.com, TheAtlantic.com, and others. Follow her on Twitter here. Posted at 07:00 AM in App, Biology, Chemistry, Space travel | Permalink | Comments (0) Reblog (0) | |
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