Gus Grissom' Suit

Gus's surviving family and NASA have never really gotten on. Now a 15 year old girl has weighed in to their dispute.

MADISON, Conn. -- A 15-year-old girl with a Web site, a summer of free time and an astronaut for a hero is trying to resolve a three-year-old dispute over the fate of one of NASA's earliest space suits.

The family of pioneering astronaut Gus Grissom has been trying for years to get NASA to give them his 1961 Mercury space suit. NASA says the suit is government property and a valuable artifact that should be kept at the Astronaut Hall of Fame in Florida.
Enter Amanda Meyer, a Madison teenager, space enthusiast and co-captain of the Daniel Hand High School debate team. She believes she has a compromise and, after launching an Internet petition drive, she has spent the summer writing and calling NASA, the Smithsonian Institution, Congress and anyone else she can think of.

Meyer says the government doesn't have to give up its claim to the suit but should loan it to the Gus Grissom Memorial, a museum in his hometown of Mitchell, Ind.

"It just seems fair," Meyer said. "It should be in his museum because that's where he would want it."

There has been long-standing tension between Grissom's wife, Betty, and NASA since Grissom and two other Apollo 1 astronauts, Roger Chaffee and Edward White, died in a 1967 command module fire during a training exercise. The space agency, she feels, ignored her and her family after the tragedy, even as it honored the crews of Challenger and Columbia.

Grissom wore the space suit during his Mercury mission, in which his spacecraft safely landed in the ocean but sank after a hatch prematurely blew. Grissom escaped and said the hatch malfunctioned. But some, including author Tom Wolfe in his book "The Right Stuff," suggested he panicked and blew the hatch early.

After the Mercury mission, Grissom took the suit home and never returned it, NASA said. Family members have said he rescued it from the trash, a contention NASA denies. In 1989, Betty Grissom lent the suit to the privately run Astronaut Hall of Fame. But in 2003, after the government took over the museum, she and her son, Scott, tried to get the suit back.

NASA agreed to return 15 items, including a flight log and his commemorative medals, but refused to return the suit, saying it was government property belonging to the Smithsonian.

Meyer heard about the dispute in February, after she sent Scott Grissom a copy of a school essay she wrote about his father. When Scott Grissom called, Amanda's mother was so excited, she pulled Amanda out of school to return the call. Since that call, Meyer has worked to get the space suit moved.

"Gus Grissom is my hero," Meyer said. "I'd like to see his memory commemorated the way it should be."

Scott Grissom did not return phone messages seeking comment.

As the school year waned, she pledged to spend summer on the issue. Through her Web site and petition drives outside a local grocery store, she says she has collected about 2,000 signatures calling for the suit to be moved to Indiana.

"She's persistent," said NASA spokesman George H. Diller.

It's not the first time Amanda has thrown herself at an issue, said her mother, Carolyn Meyer. She raised money for a local no-kill animal shelter, worked on a state representative's campaign and, after growing out her hair to the point she could sit on it, she abruptly cut it off and donated it to make wigs for cancer patients.

Her Grissom petition has become fodder for space-related Web logs and message boards. Some admire her drive; others say she's being used in the Grissoms' dispute with NASA.

A representative from the Delaware North Companies, the government contractor that operates the Astronaut Hall of Fame, was to meet with Meyer this week but the company said only the Smithsonian can transfer artifacts.

"Amanda Meyer is a nice young lady, and as well meaning as she is, she's a third party in this," said Roger Launius, chairman of space history at the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum.

At the end of the year, the space suit's fate will be reconsidered, NASA said. The space agency plans to ask the Smithsonian to keep it in Florida. Meyer hopes she can convince the Smithsonian to move it to Indiana.

And I thought we had the right stuff. :) Go Girl.

Pleiades Mailbag-Drop

Permian Extinction
Here's something on the relationship between climate change and the mass extinction at the end of the Permian period.

The work gives support to a theory that an abrupt and dramatic rise in atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide triggered the massive die-off 251 million years ago. The research appears in the Sept. issue of the journal Geology.

"The results demonstrate how rapidly rising temperatures in the atmosphere can affect ocean circulation, cutting off oxygen to lower depths and extinguishing most life," says NCAR scientist and lead author, Jeffrey Kiehl.

Kiehl and co-author Christine Shields focused on the dramatic events at the end of the Permian Era, when an estimated 90 to 95 percent of all marine species, as well as about 70 percent of all terrestrial species, became extinct.

At the time of the event, higher-latitude temperatures were 18°F to 54°F (10°C to 30°C) warmer than today, and extensive volcanic activity had released large amounts of carbon dioxide and sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere over a 700,000-year period.

To solve the puzzle of how those conditions may have affected climate and life around the globe, the researchers turned to the Community Climate System Model (CCSM). The model can integrate changes in atmospheric temperatures with ocean temperatures and currents. Research teams had previously studied the Permian extinction with more limited computer models that focused on only a single component of Earth's climate system, such as the ocean.

"These results demonstrate the importance of treating Earth's climate as a system involving physical, chemical and biological processes in the atmosphere, oceans and land surface, all interacting," said Jay Fein, director of the National Science Foundation (NSF)'s climate dynamics program, which funded the research. "Other studies have reached similar conclusions. What's new is the application of a detailed version of one of the world's premier climate system models, the CCSM, to understanding how rising levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide affected conditions in the world's oceans and on its land surfaces enough to trigger a massive extinction hundreds of millions of years ago."

The CCSM indicated that ocean temperatures warmed significantly at higher latitudes because of rising atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas. The warmer temperatures reached a depth of about 10,000 feet (4,000 meters), interfering with the normal circulation process in which colder surface water descends, taking oxygen and nutrients deep into the ocean.

As a result, ocean waters became stratified with little oxygen, proving deadly to marine life. Because marine organisms were no longer removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, that, in turn, accelerated warming temperatures.

"The implication of our study is that elevated [carbon dioxide] is sufficient to lead to inhospitable conditions for marine life and excessively high temperatures over land would contribute to the demise of terrestrial life," the authors conclude.

It seems the underlying assumption of most people who think climate change is harmless, and that that we as humans, being smarter than amphibians of the Permian will somehow make it through whatever weather changes may come. Let's face it, storms by their nature, subside. So how bad could a spot of heating up be? Well, this thing will probaably impact our foodchain in ways we cannot begin to control, and so I have to say any post-Schumpeter observations about technological innovation overcoming the impacts of over-population might not be up to speed when the food we feed upon loses its food.

An Interesting Link
If you have time, check this one out too. It's a note of how far some people will stoop. In some ways, it's pretty funny, but I'm into gallows humour. Thanks again to Pleiades.

That's The Spirit

Mother Of All Martian Panoramas... So Far.
Mars Rover Spirit became the first Terrestrial to climb a Martian mountain. Spirit climbed 'Husband Hill', which stands 110metres above th Gustav Crater where Spirit originally landed. It should go down as a big moment in robotics history, if the rest of the rover missions already haven't. These two machines have shown the kind of tenacity of an errant R2-D2:

Steve Squyres, NASA's principal investigator for Spirit's science program, now visiting Australia, said that while the 110-metre-tall feature might technically be a hill, "to our little rover it's a mountain … Spirit's a Martian mountaineer".

Named after Rick Husband, the astronaut commander killed in the Columbia shuttle accident, the peak is the highest point in a range now known as the Columbia Hills. Spirit took almost 15 months to crawl more than one kilometre through the hills to reach the top.

"It's really been a struggle," Dr Squyres said. "In places the terrain was very slippery and in places it was very steep.

"When we landed on Mars and we saw the Columbia Hills off in the distance I thought just getting to their base was impossible."

He described the first low-resolution black-and-white images beamed by Spirit from the top as fantastic.

"You can see the plains to the east and plains to the west."

Peering north, Spirit could look down into terrain dubbed the Tennessee Valley.

Dr Squyres said Spirit would remain parked on the peak to snap the sprawling view in high-resolution wide-angle colour pictures likely to be made public next week. "We are taking the mother of all panoramas."

It's interesting how the expression "The Mother Of All..." has entered the English vernacular since Saddam Hussein's promise to deliver the Mother Of All Battles back during the first Gulf War. It's such a cool phrase and clearly, the man has some literary merit; apart from being an ousted dictator. They should give him an award or something.

While We're At It
This is an excerpt of Saddam Hussein's poetry in case you can't be bothered to click the link above:

Unsheathe your sword without fear, without hesitation,
Unsheathe your sword and let Saturn bear witness,
Unsheathe your sword, the enemy is smoldering, No one can (intrigue) him but a prudent hero, Saddle the horses and unleash them,
For in their wedding there is hope,
Let the lightening echo at the night of fire,
So that truth appears and injustice is defeated,
Shine, in the face of darkness as it turns deeper, Torches, whereas the frail and the weak,
Spark your lighter and keep the fire glowing Feared by the subservient vile,
Draw your sword and make it gleam, No winner but the determined man,
Make the banner fly on each pole, Pray to God, the wound will heal.

As the guy on the link quipped, it sounds like Iron Maiden's 'Run To The Hills' or something.

This Was In Technology news
Amazingly:

Google nicked my porn

Mens' mag sues search giant
By Nick Farrell: Friday 26 August 2005, 09:41

THE PUBLISHER of a men’s mag ‘Perfect 10’ is suing Google for nicking thousands of its eight by ten colour glossy pictures of girls with no clothes on.
In a statement, Perfect 10 said that it was going for a preliminary injunction against the search outfit to stop distributing its copyrighted images.

The mag filed a complaint against Google in November 2004 saying that the site was displaying the images to draw massive traffic to its website, which it is converting into hundreds of millions of dollars of advertising revenue.

Perfect 10 claims that Google is only pretending to be a search engine and that it is displaying, free of charge, thousands of copies of the best images from Perfect 10, Playboy, nude scenes from major movies, nude images of supermodels, as well as extremely explicit images of all kinds.

Norm Zada, (no really) who is the magazine’s founder said that since most of the traffic to search engines is sex-related, Google's must be doing it on the back of a massive misappropriation of intellectual property.Or so it says here.

Tut tut. They should re-name it 'Ogle' (And I'm not being a Wowser). :)

Ozone Hole

The Verdict Ain't Good
In amidst all the bad ecological signs is one of the biggest doozies of them all - the hole in the Ozone Layer above the Antarctic. The pciture above is the size of the thing at its peak in 2003. The WMO is now reporting the hole has grown larger in the last year.

The UN agency's top ozone expert added that seasonal depletion of the protective gas layer, which filters harmful ultraviolet rays that can cause skin cancer, may become more pronounced in the near future before the problem diminishes.

Large reductions in the ozone layer, which sits about 15-30 km (9-19 miles) above the earth, take place each winter over the polar regions, especially the Antarctic, as low temperatures allow the formation of stratospheric clouds that assist chemical reactions breaking down ozone.

The WMO said meteorological data showed last winter was warmer than in 2003 but colder than in 2004.

"At this stage it looks like this year's ozone hole will be quite average or maybe a little above average," Geir Braathen, WMO's ozone expert, told a news briefing.

Scientists say the hole spanned a record 29 million sq km (11 million sq miles) in September 2003, exposing the southern tip of South America.

The WMO said on Tuesday the area where temperatures are low enough for clouds to have formed -- an indication of the potential hole size -- now covered about 25 million square km.

"This area is near the 1995-2004 mean and higher than observed in 2004 but somewhat lower than in 2003," it said.

I love how these articles read so clear of conscience. Sort of as if the journalist never had to think about the issue ever before. Anyway, I'm not here to slam the journalism. It closes with:

"We still expect the ozone hole to appear annually and it actually might be a little bit worse in the next five to 10 years, then the situation will start to improve," he said.

"It will still take several decades before these substances have disappeared from the atmosphere. We expect the annual recurring ozone hole to take place until maybe mid-century."

The Geneva-based WMO, which has 181 member states, bases its analysis on data collected from satellites, ground-based observations and balloons launched into the atmosphere.

The thing that gets me about this hole is that because it sits above Antarctica, nobody seems to care. If it sat right above Washington DC, then there might have been a more significant effort to fix it.

X-15 Pilots Get Their Wings

Never Too Late
NASA handed out astronautical Wings to the pilots who flew the bell X-15 back in the 1960s.
Here's the link

Retired NASA pilot Bill Dana, and family members representing agency deceased pilots John McKay and Joseph Walker, received the civilian astronaut wings. The wings acknowledged the fact the pilots flew the X-15 at altitudes of 50 miles or higher.

The men were honored in a ceremony at NASA's Dryden Flight Research Center, Edwards, Calif., site of their achievements. Dana was philosophical about it; "NASA pilots didn't wear wings anyway, and the concept of winning special wings was probably more crucial to a military pilot's career ladder," he explained.

During the turbulent era of 1960's Cold War confrontations, the moon race and war in Southeast Asia, eight test pilots quietly flew the radical X-15 rocket plane out of the atmosphere and into the record books, earning astronaut status. However, only the military aviators received astronaut wings, because NASA, a civilian agency, had no badge to award to agency pilots.

Dana's first space flight took him 58.13 miles above the Mojave Desert on Nov. 1, 1966. He tried to collect micrometeorite samples, while learning about issues of sky brightness.

Walker's third X-15 foray into space claimed the unofficial world altitude record of 354,200 feet (67.08 miles) on Aug. 22, 1963. Walker's unofficial record was the highest altitude flown by the X-15. McKay reached 295,600 feet (55.98 miles) on Sept. 28, 1965.

The X-15 program used three piloted hypersonic rocket planes to fly nearly seven times the speed of sound. Volumes of test data from 199 X-15 missions helped shape the successful Mercury, Gemini, Apollo, and Space Shuttle human spaceflight programs.

Retired X-15s are displayed at the National Air and Space Museum in Washington and the Air Force Museum, Dayton, Ohio.

For more information about the X-15 program on the Web, visit: History X-15 or Dydren Fact Sheets.

For more information about NASA's aeronautics research on the Web, visit: NASA Aeronautics.

For information about NASA and agency programs on the Web, visit: NASA Home.

Not too shabby after all these years.

The New Spacefreaks' Weblog

All New, All Splendid
Here's to new beginnings.