The Heavenly Palace

OK, I think it's time to come back online, sorry I haven't posted anything for a while.

Something I didn't know until a few nonths ago is that China has never been granted access to the International Space Station (ISS) since the beginning of the program.
I guess they never liked not being part of this international project. And this must be why they launched their own space station program, which should be fully operational by 2020, about the time at which the ISS will be decommissioned, and for at least 10 years after that.
On september 29th, the first of three modules, Tiangong 1 has been successfully sent to space. It will then be de-orbited in 2013 and replaced by the tiangong 2 and 3 modules. In the meantime, Tiangong 1 will be visited by three shenzhou missions (shenzhou 8, an unmanned mission will dock with it in november and shenzhou 9 and 10, two manned missions in 2012).
Their aim is to get a permanent three person crew, just like in the ISS.

I wish China and its taikonauts luck, as the beginning of such a program only a few years after their first manned flight (2003) means a lot and shows how fast China is catching up on all the western countries in terms of technology.

What music looks like

Amon Tobin has been one of my favorite artists, always part of my playlists, since my step-father introduced me to him about 6 years ago, when the Chaos Theory soundtrack was released. However, his first album (as Amon Tobin), Bricolage might have been the album I loved the most.
What a great surprise when I discovered that his new album ISAM was coming out. The surprise was even greater when I saw the preview of what had been built for the tour, this incredible 3D video montage of which you can get a preview in the video at the bottom of the article. I had to show it to my step-father, and literally a few seconds after it ended, he was on the "Roundhouse" website, buying 2 tickets for us.

This show blew my brain apart, and I could bet that I will still be in recovery mode by the time you read this. The montage merges perfectly with the music, really giving you the feeling that what you see is what you hear, which is quite a mind bogging experience. It appears that I am not the only one who appreciated it ("ISAM's live show looks like a mindfuck to the highest order", says a Wired reporter, and I couldn't have put it better). The tour might be extended. If you have a chance to see it, go for it, be one of the few thousands of people who will remember what this show sounded, looked and felt like. Seeing Amon live is a once in a lifetime experience, and the stage is just unbelievable.

I want to applaud once more Amon Tobin for his great works and V squared labs for their work on this show.

Chuck's movies #1

Directed by Duncan Jones (David Bowie's son), who brought us, earlier this year, "Source Code". Starring Sam Rockwell as Sam Bell and Kevin Spacey as GERTY, an AI, and a few other actors, but these two are the main (and almost only) characters.

As you might have guessed, the movie takes place on our good old Moon, where Sam is an employee of Lunar Industries. He's been alone on a lunar base for the last 3 years. His job is to oversee the machines harvesting Helium-3 from the Moon's surface. He then has to periodically send full canisters to Earth, where the helium is needed for fusion reactors, apparently providing for a big part of Earth's consumption of energy. He is, at the beginning of the movie, two weeks away from returning home to his wife and daughter.

This is a great movie, you can clearly see the influence of movies like 2001 or Alien. The plot is great, as you never really know what to think, but unlike the space odyssey, it does not leave you with the feeling of not having a clue of what just happened.

The Flying Train!

This is a project presented by a Chinese team at the 2011 edition of the International Conference on Robotics and Automation (IRCA), in Shanghai. It really caught my eye when I saw it, but there is not a lot to say about it, since they just unveiled it, and I'm not able to understand their website (click here to see it).
The Aero Train uses the aerodynamic interaction between its wings and the ground for its propulsion. It should be able to go at speeds around 200 km/h, about half the speed of other high-speed trains we have nowadays. However, as the presentation picture shows, it is a green train, as there is no energy loss in friction with the rails. There are other trains that do not rely on rails to move, because of this energy loss, maglev trains, that allow travel up to 430 km/h, quite a lot faster, but the use of high-power electromagnets to make the train levitate above the track consumes a lot of energy.
It is tricky to control - it moves a lot because there is no friction, and one would have less control over its movement, therefore, the prototype is controlled by computers for now, and it will be kept stabilized in a U-shaped channel.
I hope to see one of these flying trains one day, maybe in the next few decades.

Here is a video of the prototype:

Remember half a century ago

Yuri Gagarin

50 years ago, as american astronauts were getting ready to take their first flight up there around the earth and several monkeys and other animals had been sent already (successfully or not), Yuri Gagarin became the first human to ever enter orbit on april 12th 1961.
He flew in a capsule named Vostok 1 at an average height of 250 km completing a full revolution around the Earth in one hour and 48 minutes.
Since then, 520 men and women from 38 countries went into space. They were carried by russian, american and since 2003, chinese vehicles (India should launch its first manned flight in 2015).


After his, other milestones have been passed, the first woman in space, 26 years old Valentina Tereshkova, flew on the Vostok 6 mission in 1963.
Then came the first men on the moon, Neil Armstrong, Edwin "Buzz" Aldrin and Michael Collins. They landed onboard Apollo 11 and spent for 2 hours and 30 minutes on the moon over a 195 hours long mission.
The Apollo 13 mission (1970), famous for Jim Lovell's "Houston, we've had a problem". Due to this incident (explosion in the oxygen tank) they did not land on the moon, but travelled around it, 248 655 miles away from Earth, farthest distance travelled away from our planet by a human.
When will we see the first human land on Mars? Maybe by 2030. Who will be the lucky chosen one?

Edwin Aldrin photographed by Neil Armstrong

Plugged

Wired 08/2010 issue

There is a lot to say about Wired, I subscribed to it while I was still living in France; it was a great way to practice my English. I read it in my own very special way (and I guess everyone has a different way to read it): at first, I just browse trough it, reading a most of the short articles, the test section, what can be read in a few minutes… Then I leave it for a few days, maybe a week or two and then come back to it and read the more interesting and longer articles, always about very different subjects..

However what I like the most is to choose a previous issue at random, and read it all.

Finally, while waiting for the next issue to come out, you can just go read on the website (Here), which is daily updated with great content, or on an IPad, on which you will have more or less what's in the monthly issue.

By the way, things I read on Wired might inspire a lot of the articles I will post.

Very Disco

Photo: NASA

This is it; Discovery, NASA’s oldest space shuttle, re-entered earth’s atmosphere for the last time on Wednesday march 9th. Over a 27-year career and 39 missions, it spent 365 days in space; it orbited almost 8,600 times, travelling about 150 million miles and it has carried 246 people into space.

These are a few noticeable achievements of Discovery:

- It is Discovery that took Hubble (yes, you know him, he’s the satellite who gave us hundreds of incredible pictures from space => Gallery) in 1990. It flew back to Hubble twice for service missions since then.

- John Glenn, the first American in space flew it in 1998 and became the oldest person to fly in space, at the age of 77.

- After Columbia’s tragic accident in 2003, discovery became the oldest shuttle in the fleet.

Photo: NASA