One giant leap for man

If taking the final step off a ladder unto the moon just below you is "One small step for [a] man, one giant leap for mankind" what is jumping off a platform 39km above the earth?

In the last hour that is precisely what  Felix Baumgartner did.  Following the words from the man whose 52 year-old records he was setting out to break, Joe Kittinger.

"Item 38. stand up on the exterior step but be sure to duck your head down low as you go out that door....The rest is yours."

About to leap

He had already set the world record for the highest manned balloon flight merely to get himself this high. His leap became the highest altitude for a freefall, something that he did for the next 4 minutes 22 seconds before he deployed his parachute, not a longer time in freefall that Kittinger. Telemetry did indicate that he was traveling at the speed of sound but all the records need to be verified from the GPS and telemetry systems on both Baumgartner's suit and the capsule. But it looks like he's secured three of the four records he set out to achieve.

The delays to his attempt during the week meant that by being the first man to break the sound barrier in freefall Felix did so exactly 65 years after Chuck Yeager became the first man to fly faster than Mach 1 in 1947.

It took him 2hrs 21 minutes to get to the level he needed to start but he was back on earth within 10 minutes. You can watch his jump here. He even made a very impressive landing on his feet at the end of all that.

Update:  Ahead of the press conference back at Mission Command in Roswell this guy was spotted in one of the control seats.

  Update 21:34: Confirmation of the numbers of FAI preliminary data:

Highest freefall jump exit alti 128,100 ft 39,045m
Longest freefall without a drouge chute: 119,846ft 36,629m
Velocity maximum: 373 m/s 1342.8km/h 883.9mph Mach 1.24 breaking the speed barrier.

One small step....into the apres vie

I was quite a serious bump when on 20 July 1969 at 20:17:39 UTC Neil Armstrong commanded the Landing Module for Apollo 11 on the surface of the moon. With the famous words "The Eagle has landed".

There was an announcement that he and Buzz Aldrin would not be stepping outside the capsule for a number of hours so my father felt he could go to sleep. It was part of the official flight plan.  But Armstrong requested that the extra vehicular activity commence earlier so it would be in the evening Houston Time so at 2:56 UTC July 21, 1969 while my father was sleeping a footprint was made at the bottom of that ladder and the words.

"One small step for [a] man. One giant leap for mankind."

Entered into the whole world's consciences.

Tonight we learn that the first man to step unto the face of another body in our solar system has passed away just weeks after his 82nd birthday.

As a child of that time when space exploration was new and exciting I loved to learn all things about space. I of course later sat and watched the first space shuttle take off and landing. When I went to Florida I just had to include on my itinary a trip to the Kennedy Space Centre. As those who know me know I'm still a fan of science fiction as well as space fact and love nothing more than in the night sky to see the stars above and dream of where we might go next.

He truly too one small step for man, there is probably still a more gigantic leap for mankind that we have yet to take, but Armstrong along with that band of Gemini and Apollo Astronauts proved they had the right stuff to make us believe we could reach for the stars.

So long Neil, you will always be the first man on the moon.

Neil Armstrong 5 August 1930 - 25 August 2012

Space: Do you know where your trowel is?

Any fan of Time Team will know that a lot of actually archaeology* is down to the final trowel work. The geo-pys and all the other work is pure guess work it's not until you actually unearth something that you know what it really is, indeed on Time Team how often over the three day excavation does what is being looked at change in the eyes of the experts.

Well we now have taken archaeology to whole new heights. Infra-red images taken from space have revealed more than 1,000 tombs and 3,000 ancient settlements. Early excavations have shown that some of these finds are precisely what the archaeologists believe them to be.

So as this is Towel Day it seems appropriate that NASA is getting archaeologists all excited about knowing where their trowel is.

* Like the famous British Telecom advert from the 80s I too got one Ology (related to this story), though I did pass rather a lot of others unlike Anthony.

Is There Death on Mars?

Researchers have discovered some rocks on the surface of Mars which are similar to some in Australia which have revealed fossilised remains of the earliest life on Earth were discovered.

Yeah a team for the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence Institute in California (SETI) have identified a trench in the Nili Fossae which has rocks similar to those in Pilbara region of NW Australia. They contain carbonate which is what life turns into in many cases when it is buried.

The white cliffs of Dover contain calcium carbonate, limestone, to give them their distinctive white chalk colour.

The rocks at Pilbara contain some distinctive features (stromatolites) which scientists believe were causes by microbes. Dr. Brown from SETI said:

"The Pilbara is very cool. It's part of the Earth that has managed to stay at the surface for around 3.5 billion years - so about three quarters of the history of the Earth.

"It allows us a little window into what was happening on the Earth at its very early stages.

"Life made these features [stromatolites]. We can tell that by the fact that only life could make those shapes; no geological process could.

"If there was enough life to make layers, to make corals or some sort of microbial homes, and if it was buried on Mars, the same physics that took place on Earth could have happened there."

However, the Nili Fossae is not on the list of possible Mars landings in the foreseeable future the area being too risky to land at. So while robot geologists can look at other parts of the Mars-scape they may not get to this key site. It may have to wait until human geologists can get there.

Just wonder if we'll end up seeing Tony Robinson clad in a spacesuit presenting Time Team from the surface of the red planet.

One Small Step

So this is it. Forty years ago millions of people were glued to their TV sets as Apollo 11 made its final approach to the Sea of Tranquility and for the first time a manned vehicle landed on the moon. Of course what the world was really waiting for was the emergence of Commander Neil Armstrong to lead the way.

"This is one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind"

That was it. People of my generation and my parents were hooked on space. Even those of us who weren't around to see that first lunar walk live had the desire to follow suit. I was rewatching one of James Mays 21st Century programmes on Dave last night which started with him saying, "At the age of six I wanted to be an astronaut". Like many of us we did, until we realised when we got older me needed probably two science degrees to get unto the programme.

At 7 I wrote seven pages in my English jotter n one hour on the subject "Journey to the Moon" the teacher wrote at the end "Is this finished?". Hardly I'd barely got my Saturn 6 rocket out of Earth's gravity, but the monster had attacked the crew. Its hardly any wonder that when my father died I got offered his Arthur C. Clark and Issac Asimov collections.

But we watched sci-fi on TV Star Trek, Doctor Who, Blakes 7, Buck Rogers, not just as escapism but to wonder what was coming next. Many scientists were inspired by what they saw. My current mobile phone looks a lot like a trimmed down version of that first communicator from Star Trek. It was also made by the company that had allowed us to hear Armstrong's words from the surface of the moon.

It may well have been a giant leap for mankind when we put our first men on the moon. Since 1973 we haven't lept further. Indeed I heard one comment over the weekend (I think it was May again) the Saturn 5 rockets were the sports cars of the space age, since then we're merely pottered about opened the sunroof and peeked out into it. Not a bad description of the space shuttle really.

There is a lot of science we have done in space down the 40 years since. A lot of that is experimentation some of it is preparation. The preparation is to provide survival techniques for man to exist more than a few days away from Mother Earth and all the abundance she provides. But we've yet to aim for the third star on the left and keep going, but maybe that day will come.

Our one small step unto another world is all we've taken thus far. That's not a walk let alone a leap. Do we still dream of what going further may mean to an increasingly crowded, under-resourced, over-populated earth?

Forty years ago we did it because it was hard. We need to look after our resources now too not because it's easy but because it is hard.