Lehigh Valley Space Alliance
We welcome you all to the Lehigh Valley Space Alliance Web Page .... The Public Voice on the Cutting Edge of the Future.
On March 16, 1926, Dr. Robert H. Goddard successfully launched the first liquid fueled rocket. The launch took place at Auburn, Massachusetts, and is regarded by flight historians to be as significant as the Wright Brothers flight at Kitty Hawk.
If you love the idea of space exploration...track the latest
innovations...study the accomplishments of Space Age luminaries
and legends and share in the thrill of their discoveries...then you'll
want to be part of the forming LEHIGH VALLEY SPACE ALLIANCE
LVSA will be a community of people who advocate the creation of
a spacefaring civilization; understand the benefits that accrue from
space exploration; promote further probing of the next frontier;
and encourage commercial space enterprise, research, and
development.
We will become one of the umbrella groups of the Philadelphia Area Space Alliance ... Those intereted in coming part of The Lehigh Valley Space Alliance contact Dennis L. Pearson at 610-434-1229 or dpearson@enter.net
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NASA RELEASE: 45-07
NASA Spacecraft Heads for Polar Region on Mars
CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. - NASA's Phoenix Mars Mission blasted off Saturday, August 4, 2007 aiming for a May 25, 2008, arrival at the Red Planet and a close-up examination of the surface of the northern polar region.
Perched atop a Delta II rocket, the spacecraft left Cape Canaveral Air Force Base at 5:26 a.m. EDT into the predawn sky above Florida's Atlantic coast.
"Today's launch is the first step in the long journey to the surface of Mars.
We certainly are excited about launching, but we still are concerned about our actual landing, the most difficult step of this mission," said Phoenix Principal Investigator Peter Smith of the University of Arizona's Lunar and Planetary Laboratory, Tucson.
The spacecraft established communications with its ground team via the Goldstone, Calif., antenna station of NASA's Deep Space Network at 7:02 a.m. EDT, after separating from the third stage of the launch vehicle.
"The launch team did a spectacular job getting us on the way," said Barry Goldstein, Phoenix project manager at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. "Our trajectory is still being evaluated in detail; however, we are well within expected limits for a successful journey to the red planet. We are all thrilled!"
Phoenix will be the first mission to touch water-ice on Mars. Its robotic arm will dig to an icy layer believed to lie just beneath the surface. The mission will study the history of the water in the ice, monitor weather of the polar region, and investigate whether the subsurface environment in the far-northern plains of Mars has ever been favorable for sustaining microbial life.
"Water is central to every type of study we will conduct on Mars," Smith said.
The Phoenix Mars Mission is the first of NASA's competitively proposed and selected Mars Scout missions, supplementing the agency's core Mars Exploration Program, whose theme is "follow the water." The University of Arizona was selected to lead the mission in August 2003 and is the first public university to lead a Mars exploration mission.
Phoenix uses the main body of a lander originally made for a 2001 mission that was cancelled before launch. "During the past year we have run Phoenix through a rigorous testing regimen," said Ed Sedivy, Phoenix spacecraft program manager for Lockheed Martin Space Systems, Denver, which built the spacecraft. "The testing approach runs the spacecraft and integrated instruments through actual mission sequences, allowing us to asses the entire system through the life of the mission while here on Earth."
Samples of soil and ice collected by the lander's robotic arm will be analyzed by instruments mounted on the deck. One key instrument will check for water and carbon-containing compounds by heating soil samples in tiny ovens and examining the vapors that are given off. Another will test soil samples by adding water and analyzing the dissolution products. Cameras and microscopes will provide information on scales spanning 10 powers of 10, from features that could fit by the hundreds into a period at the end of a sentence to an aerial view taken during descent. A weather station will provide information about atmospheric processes in the arctic region.
The Phoenix mission is led by Smith, with project management at JPL and development partnership at Lockheed Martin, Denver. The NASA Launch Services Program at Kennedy Space Center and the United Launch Alliance are responsible for the Delta II launch service. International contributions are provided by the Canadian Space Agency, the University of Neuchatel (Switzerland), the University of Copenhagen (Denmark), the Max Planck Institute (Germany) and the Finnish Meteorological Institute. JPL is a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena.
Additional information on Phoenix is available online at:
http://www.nasa.gov/phoenix
Additional information on NASA's Mars program is available online at:
http://www.nasa.gov/mars
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The Planetary Society'S Phoenix DVD Project - Messages from Earth
In May of 2008, the spacecraft Phoenix will land in the northern polar regions of the planet Mars. One after the other, the spacecraft's scientific instruments will come alive, and begin their search for water ice in the harsh Martian environment. Nestled among busy instruments, a small and very special DVD will wait patiently for its turn. This unique DVD is made of silica glass, and designed to last hundreds if not thousands of years into the future, when its true mission will commence. It carries nothing less than a message from our world to one centuries away, when humans will roam the Red Planet
In a unique project called Visions of Mars, the Phoenix DVD carries personal messages from visionaries of our own time to future visitors or settlers on Mars. There is Carl Sagan near his home in Ithaca, New York, addressing the future Martians with a cascading water fall in the background. There is Arthur Clarke seated in the comfort of his home in tropical Sri Lanka. There is Planetary Society Executive Director Louis Friedman, speaking from Society headquarters in Pasadena, and there is Phoenix mission PI, Peter Smith, providing mission information and a greeting to the future.
Others speak to the future not directly, but through their visionary works, which shaped our imaginings of the Red Planet. A wealth of influential pieces are included in Visions of Mars, which was assembled and edited by Planetary Society advisor Jon Lomberg. Percival Lowell, in beautiful poetic prose, expounds his theory of the "Mars canals," and the intelligent beings that built them. H.G. Wells, in War of the Worlds, imagines what such desperate creatures might do to our own beloved Earth. The recording of Orson Welles' 1938 radio broadcast of this classic tale -- which set off a wave of panic across the United States -- is also digitally encoded on the Phoenix DVD. Louis Friedman contributed an afterword, describing the origins and history of Visions of Mars, and how it came to be.
Among those included in this remarkable message to the future are Isaac Asimov, Ray Bradbury, Poul Anderson, a musical production of Bob Derkach's "Winds of Mars," and many others. A collection of rare Mars artwork, reflecting our changing images of our neighboring planet can also be found on the Phoenix DVD. All this, and much, much more, from the visionaries of the past century, whose dreams of Mars shaped our own.
Thousands of People will be there with Them.
Thousands of people from around the world, joined our age's visionaries of space exploration by adding their names to this remarkable message to the future! The Planetary Society collected names, which are traveling to Mars on the Phoenix DVD. When the Martians of the future find and decode our message to them, their names will be there too, a permanent record of their part in the story of space exploration.
Including Dennis L. Pearson who was awarded 1.) Certificate number 1054162 --- December 6, 2006.
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SPACE SETTLEMENT --- From the National Space Society Website
The people of Earth have both the knowledge
and resources to colonize space."
That was the stated conclusion of this NASA-sponsored study — in 1975! There are two things you need to know about space settlement:
**** We can do it, starting now.
**** A future with space settlements is vastly better than one without them.
WE CAN DO IT !
When the first person landed on the Moon in 1969 after only eight short years of intense effort, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) proved that we could do nearly anything we put our minds and resources to that is consistent with the laws of physics.
A few years later, Princeton physicist Gerard O'Neill and others showed that large orbital space settlements would fall within the laws of physics [Refs. 1-4]. Dr. O'Neill's analysis strongly suggested that asteroids and lunar mines could supply the materials, the Sun could provide the energy, and that our technology had nearly reached the point where we could build space settlements. These communities could be placed almost anywhere in the solar system.
In 1990, Robert Zubrin and David Baker described a program called Mars Direct, an innovative approach to beginning the settlement of Mars. Zubrin's 1996 book The Case for Mars [Ref. 5] went on to outline a long term program to bring Mars to life with a vibrant human civilization. While certainly difficult, every step in this program is also achievable within the laws of physics.
Many plans for space settlement have been proposed — in orbit, on the Moon, on Mars, the asteroids, or elsewhere. All are extremely difficult and expensive, but not much more difficult and expensive than things we have already done. After all, construction of today's civilization was a mighty task indeed. However, if we are going to spend an enormous amount of time, effort, and money on something, we'd better know why.
A BETTER FUTURE
There are many reasons to move into space: growth, wealth, energy, survival, spiritual development, knowledge, diversity, to solve serious Earthly problems, to fulfill a sense of destiny and responsibility, and even to have fun. All of these boil down to a simple fact: A future with space settlement is vastly better than one without it.
This flows from another simple fact: There are far, far more resources in space than on Earth. For example:
The largest asteroid, Ceres, has enough material to build orbital space settlements with a total living area well over a hundred times the land area of the Earth.
One smallish asteroid, 3554 Amun, has about $20 trillion worth of metals [Ref. 6, page 112]. There are tens of thousands of asteroids.
The energy available for space settlements exceeds 2 billion times the total energy currently used by humanity.
There are potentially profit-making industries: space tourism, space solar power, space materials, and others that can pave the path to the first self-sustaining space settlements.
Furthermore, we more-or-less know how to exploit these resources without hurting anyone, oppressing anyone, or harming any living organism for the simple reason that there aren't any living things there — it's just rock and radiation, both of which are usable (and valuable) resources. We can bring life into space at great advantage to those who dare try, as well as to humanity as a whole.
"Clarke's Law"
Arthur C. Clarke, inventor of the concept of using geosynchronous orbit for communication satellites, once wrote that new ideas like this pass through three stages:
Stage 1: "It can't be done."
Stage 2: "It probably can be done, but it's not worth doing."
Stage 3: "I knew it was a good idea all along!"
When Clarke first published his idea of utilizing geosynchronous orbit in 1945, that idea was in Stage 1 because it was technically impossible to do so at the time. Today, of course, that idea is in Stage 3, and our television programming and phone calls routinely go through geosynchronous satellites.
The idea of building space settlements moved past Stage 1 in the 1970s, as this website will amply demonstrate. For the past couple of decades we have been stuck in Stage 2. Stage 3 is reachable within the lifetimes of those now living. Read on!
References and Recommended Reading
1. Johnson, R. D. and Holbrow, C. editors (1977). Space Settlements: A Design Study. NASA SP-413. [Complete online copy] [Buy from Amazon]
2. Heppenheimer, T. A. (1977). Colonies in Space. Stackpole Books. [Review] [Complete online copy] [Buy from Amazon]
3. O'Neill, G. K. (1977). The High Frontier: Human Colonies in Space. William Morrow and Company. [Review] [Buy from Amazon]
4. O'Neill, G. K. (1979). Space Resources and Space Settlements. NASA SP-428. [Complete online copy] [Buy from Amazon]
5. Zubrin, R. and Wagner, R. (1996). The Case for Mars: the Plan to Settle the Red Planet and Why We Must. The Free Press. [Buy from Amazon]
6. Lewis, John S. (1996). Mining the Sky: Untold Riches from the Asteroids, Comets, and Planets. Helix Books, Addison-Wesley Publishing Company, Inc. [Review] [Buy from Amazon]
****************************************************************************** A National Space Society Press Release --- July 27, 2007
America was built on the courage of those who dared to explore new frontiers. From Lewis and Clark to the Apollo astronauts, great men and women have tested themselves against the frontiers of their age.
In the course of their efforts, these heroes may pay the ultimate cost, as they did yesterday in Mojave. When that happens, it is the highest duty of all of us to care for the injured, to mourn the departed, and to care for the families. An honest investigation must be conducted to learn what went wrong, and to fix the cause so that it does not happen again.
But when the investigation finished, our duty is to carry on the work of those heroes, to redouble our efforts to scale the peaks that they were climbing. That is what we learned from Apollo 1. That is what they would want.
The frontier of space is far from tamed. The men and women of Scaled Composites are engaged in one of the great efforts of our time: opening space for all humanity. That is a noble pursuit, perhaps the most noble of all, and we must all be thankful for their work, and for their sacrifice.
Let us not shirk from what happened yesterday. Professionals will find the cause. The program will continue. The effort to open space cannot be stopped. Now is the time to honor those men by honoring the cause that they were engaged in. Those of us who are part of this great endeavor, whether as participants or as supporters, let us carry forward this message of perseverance to our own communities, to our elected leaders and to the media. Now more than ever, the nation needs to hear your voices.
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10th International Mars Society Convention
The next convention of the MArs will be held 30 Aug - 2 Sep 2007 at the University of California, Los Angeles. The International Mars Society convention presents a unique opportunity for those interested in Mars to come together and discuss the technology, science
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