A blog about getting there, and a blog about being there

By Aaron on September 23, 2006 at 4:45 pm | In Blog Posts | No Comments

Kwajalein
One of the cool things about the Internet is that it breaks down barriers. I’m a big believer in transparency. I think transparency can make almost any problem better, but more than that, it is even more influential in preventing problems in the first place.

A good illustration of this is the Kwajalein Atoll and Rockets blog. It’s a blog run by a user called Kimbal who is somehow associated with work at the Kwajalein Atoll. For those who don’t know, Kwajalein is a bunch of tiny rocks sticking out of the south pacific. The US department of defense has lots of military installations there, most associated with space exploration and signal intelligence. Private companies also have installations there. Among those is SpaceX, a new company founded by a co-founder of PayPal. Their goal is to create incredibly cheap space launch vehicles.

In February, Kimbal, who seems to be an employee of the company, started the blog to document the maiden test launch of one of their rockets scheduled for late March. Reading the nearly daily entries in the blog is mesmorizing! Kimbal discusses aspects of both the launch and of life on the tiny island. Each day you see the challenges and solutions they come up with. Over time you get a feeling of what it must be like preparing for such an important test. He gives detail examples of things that go wrong and those that go right. Then, on the day of the launch, he takes you through it minute by minute.

This is where it went from enlightening to down right entertaining. Not only did he blog the launch, but they put a web cam inside of the rocket. And it was a good quality cam to boot. So the rocket did launch. But I won’t spoil the surprise, read the blog to find an ending that you couldn’t have scripted with the best Hollywood writers.As a recent bonus, they’ve been selected as one of the contractors to possibly build the new crew exploration vehicle for NASA and they’ve posted concept images and info in the blog.

Side notes:
Here are a couple of links from the ASP meeting which I left out of the last post, but found while subsequently going through my notes:

The University of North Dakota is offering an online MS in Space Studies degree.

The Informal Science Education Research Group in Astronomy is asking the public to take a survey about the Pluto debate. They seem like an interesting group of students at Columbia University studying science education (mike type of crowd!). But the survey is more like a vote and there is no explanation as to why they are doing this and what it is for.