Interview: Jonathan McDowell’s Space Chat

By Slacker on May 6, 2005 at 2:55 pm | In Slacker Astronomy Archival Podcasts |

Jupiter is on the left, the rocket is the moving speck on the right. Images are roughly 10 seconds apart. Pictures by Aaron.

Title: Slacker Extra Interview With Jonathan McDowell
Disembodied Voices: Jonathan McDowell and Aaron Price
Engineered: Aaron Price
Subjects: Space exploration, rockets, orbits,satellites, spy agencies, chandra, dark matter, amateurs

Our new mics and iRivers are here and we’re testing how to use them best. Jonathan sounds great, Aaron is just a bit quiet. But he has nothing to say anyway!

• Aaron’s animation of satellite separation (500K) It is very faint but look closely to the right 1/3 of the frame for a starlike object moving then dissapearing in a fan shaped spray.
• Jonathan’s Space Report
• Jonahan McDowell’s Home Page
• Chandra X-Ray Center
• Heaven’s Above
• Hobby Space- Satellite Watching

A Note From Aaron: I have been a stutterer all my life. It is one reason you never hear me host the main shows with Travis and Pamela. As a child it was bad but 8 years of speech therapy did wonders. Now many people don’t know I stutter the first time they meet me. However, today I had one of the worst episodes of stuttering in a long time. The way to combat these situations is for me to take a minute and relax and then focus on a technique called “prolonging” where you stretch out the first vowell sound in a word. As a kid I HATED it when adults kept reminding me to “slow down and PROLONG”! But now it is a life saver. However, when you are “live” how do you ask an interviewee to “please give me a minute to get ahold of myself”.

Anyway, I just throw that out there so you know why I STUTTER LIKE A MAD BANSHEE today. Well, I guess banshee’s don’t stutter. But they should! A stuttering Siouxie Sue would rock my world. (If you don’t like old school punk, you won’t get that.)

Back to your regularly scheduled slack…

Here is a list of topics in order as they appear:

 Aaron explaining what he saw
 The Titan IV launch summary
 Explanation of different orbits, launch tactics
 Scared canadian oil platforms
 Explanation of Titan IV launch and boosters in detail
 Spy agencies
 Importance of spy satellites through history
 What the Titan IV launched
 No secrets
 Importance of amateurs in satellite tracking
 More orbit talk
 Jonathan's Space Report
 Building an open international community of trackers
 Day job: Chandra X-Ray Observatory
 Virtual Observatories
 PhD's, population 3 stars that don't exist and Olber's Paradox