believe it

I always believed that's what he said.
http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/front/4225505.htm

podcast competition

Another NASA contest:

Podcast (audio or video) competition, for ages 11-18:
http://www.explorationpodcast.com/
Deadline: Oct 10 or when they get 1000 entries in each of the caterogies (11-14 Audio, 11-14 Video, 15-18 Audio, and 15-18 Video)

All kinds of info about making your entry at that website. Tell some kids about it!

SGC delegates

Three of my GRC RAs are in Valencia for Space Generation Congress 2006 and International Astronautical Congress. Kevin is one of the organizers, and I was talking to him online when I saw the three of them sitting in the lounge on the hostel webcam. I asked him to go down and tell them I was watching over them again, and he did, and I got screen caps :-) I'll always be watching over my RAs.

NGEC

Ryan wrote a piece on the Next Generation Exploration Conference (NGEC) that we went to a month ago for space.com. Big mentions of awesome Melissa, who invited me, too :-)

Back from Pasadena again. Hopefully I'll be spending a lot more time there in the near future...

There's a contest with very little publicity going on called "NASA's Biggest Fan." (There are so many things we wouldn't know about if not for NASA Watch.)

Anyway, the deal is if you're 13-24 years old and really like NASA, you can make a 30-second video about how cool space is to you, and the winner gets a trip to KSC for a launch. More info and rules at the website (linked above).

More NASA in the pop culture, on the Colbert Report.
http://www.comedycentral.com/sitewide/media_player/play.jhtml?itemId=75472

We get a "Wag of the Finger" but from his world of super parody, that's usually a good thing.

Interesting links

Dr. Mike Griffin on Science, Exploration, and NASA
http://www.spaceref.com/news/viewsr.html?pid=22033
I really trust this guy to make *the right* decisions for exploration. There's probably only one thing more complicated than making the hardware and software for exploration work. That's making the several hundred people representing the several million people whose money you have to use happy with how you're doing it. Oh, and the several million have to at least be interested, too. It's going to be impossible to make all of your employees happy with the limited money you have, so you have to make hard decisions, or else everyone's going to end up with $1.50 and no one can do anything. I especially like this part, and it's brave (or at least not typical of people who have to play political games) of him to say it:
"...[Exploration] is about the expansion of human activity out beyond the Earth. Exactly this point was very recently noted and endorsed by no less than Stephen Hawking, a pure scientist if ever there was one. Hawking joins those, including the Chairman of the NASA Advisory Council, who have long pointed out this basic truth: The history of life on Earth is the history of extinction events, and human expansion into the Solar System is, in the end, fundamentally about the survival of the species."
You'd think everyone would be interested in that, wouldn't you? I think it's important enough to dedicate my life to it.


An older link that Kevin sent me is about light reaching "superluminal speeds."
http://archives.cnn.com/2000/TECH/space/07/20/speed.of.light.ap/index.html
"Researchers... sent a pulse of laser light through cesium vapor so quickly that it left the chamber before it had even finished entering."
How cool is that?


NASA Watch linked to some old surface pictures from Russian Venus missions, and they're pretty amazing.
http://www.mentallandscape.com/C_CatalogVenus.htm


The second space tourist is making an OS available for free, especially for places that can't afford MS products.
http://www.cnn.com/2006/TECH/09/11/space.tourist.microsoft.reut/index.html


And the next space tourist is female, which is pretty cool.
http://www.anoushehansari.com/

More trivia. 

Then some space trivia for prizes... although someone might have been rigging it... 

More learning. 

Learning 

Then workbooklets were handed out so the students had something with info in it to take home. 

Every group at one RA to help. 

Rocket explanations. 

Then they broke out into groups to put together the model rockets. 

Hard at work. 

The RAs handed out paper to the kids and asked them to draw what they thought the next spaceships to replace the Shuttle would look like. 

Week 9 brought the actual group project outreach, at a YMCA day camp in Megan's town.  

Cool buildings 

Hey, look, it's Cleveland. 

I got to see a freakin' Harrier demo, which was the highlight of my day. 

Lots of cool airplanes. 

That weekend we went to the Dayton Air Show, and it was cool.  

Btw, this was at a place in the Metro Parks that we drove past everyday on the way to work. I called it Bear Field because it has AWESOME lighting that really makes you feel like there should be a bear in it every morning as you pass it at 7:30 am.  

Setting up, much enthusiasm. See how much cooler it was to take pics into the sun?  

I think this is probably one of my top 5 favorite pictures (of the 5000 or so I took) for the summer. 

Here they go. 

Teamwork. No, they're not actually going to launch it from the hood of the car.  

And now a series of my favorite pics from the summer, when the RAs did their test launch for their outreach rockets... look at that light; it was very pretty. 

Kathryn expertly handled the elevator. 

I love 3D printers.  

They let a couple of the students try it out.