My family and I visited the Kennedy Space Center last week near the end of our Florida holiday vacation. While the visit and tours were interesting and comprehensive, the lasting impression it all made on me was one of nostalgia and honor of past accomplishment, with only a dimmest look to the future.

The Kennedy Space Center Visitor Center is located on Cape Canaveral, Florida, a short drive from the beaches and hotels of Cocoa Beach. Driving into the parking lot, a full-size mock space shuttle and the Rocket Garden — a standing collection of early NASA rockets — beckons visitors young and old. After standing in line (the first of many) to buy a $38 ticket, you’re in and facing the decision of what to do first.

Aside from the mock space shuttle and the rocket garden, the main part of the visitor center is built out something like the theme parks central Florida is so famous for. There are theatre attractions and “rides”, a restaurant and a huge gift shop, and here and there a few informative exhibits about NASA’s plans for the future.

The centerpiece of a tour of Kennedy Space Center is a three-stop bus ride onto the real estate of the complex. But the line is long — for us, more than an hour after lunch on a day when the center wasn’t very busy.

The first stop of the bus tour is an observation tower located some distance from the distinctive vertical assembly building and the two launch pads used to launch space shuttles. From this three-story tower, using the pay-per-view binoculars, one can sort of see the launch pads and some of the launch complex. Best for us here was the wildlife: wild pigs, alligators, raccoons and an armadillo. A line awaits to get back on a bus to move on.

The second stop of the bus tour, and the gem of the Kennedy Space Center, is a newly created museum of the Apollo moon-landing era. Inside the building, in addition to several other exhibit rooms and a theater (and another gift shop — it’s hard to get a five-year-old boy through a gift shop), are an Apollo capsule, a lunar lander and rover, and a mighty Saturn V rocket laid out on its side.

What an impressive vehicle. More than twice as tall as the space shuttle, the Saturn V is one of the most powerful machines ever made. The rocket was designed and built in the early 1960s under the direction of the famed German rocket scientist Wernher von Braun. Thirteen Saturn Vs were launched from Nov. 9, 1967 to May 14, 1973, taking men to the moon and establishing the United States first space station Skylab. That was more than thirty-five years ago now.

Nearing the end of our day, it just seemed like thirty-five years in line to get on a bus to push on to the third and final stop of the tour, a mini museum devoted to the International Space Station. Here, one can walk through several mock ups of ISS modules and have a look inside the large clean room where materials destined for the ISS are prepared for launch, and learn how badly NASA wants to “complete the space station.”

Then, another line to catch a final, sunset bus ride back to the visitor center.

If you visit the Kennedy Space Center, however, be sure to hit the Astronaut Hall of Fame. The Hall of Fame was established by astronauts and is located about six miles off the main complex. It is a wonderful museum with a great collection of space memorabilia and a variety hands-on exhibits for kids young and old.

This column originally appeared in the Grand Haven Tribune on 2 January 2009.

Look to the west after sunset tonight to see Venus, Jupiter and the moon converge on a tiny patch of sky. The three objects, now easily the brightest things in the sky (other than the sun, of course), will be closest together on the evening of Monday, Dec. 1.

November and December, West Michigan’s two cloudiest months, are not the best times for stargazing. You might have to steal a glance through gaps in the clouds. But you only need a partly clear sky to see part of the sky, so don’t give up hope.

Presently, the sun is setting in Grand Haven at 5:11 pm, according to data provided by the US Naval Observatory. On Monday, Venus, Jupiter and the thin, crescent moon will set at about 8:30 pm, giving a three-hour window to catch a glimpse of their alignment.

It is worthwhile to note at this time of year that while meteorologically, winter is just beginning, astronomically, we’ve just about reached winter’s greatest depth. The shortest day of the year is in just a few more weeks, on Dec. 21, the winter solstice. So if you’re a sun-loving person, you can look forward to longer days and more sun.

But we don’t even have to wait until the winter solstice to see more of the sun. In early December, about two weeks before the first day of winter, we reach the date of the earliest sunset. The earliest sunset in Grand Haven is shortly after 5:10 pm on or about Dec. 8. The sunset time will steadily march later and later, after that, reaching 5:20 pm by the end of December, almost 6 pm by the end of January, and about 6:30 pm by the end of February.

In case you’re wondering why the date of earliest sunset doesn’t coincide with the winter solstice, the shortest day of the year, I can only point you to the best explanation I’ve found (from the US Naval Observatory FAQ): http://tinyurl.com/5q5odz. It’s pretty complicated, but interesting.

There is another thing you might want to keep an eye out for next week. Did you hear about the small tool kit that was dropped accidentally from the International Space Station? Observers from around the world are reporting seeing this tool kit from the ground with nothing more than a pair of binoculars.

The flyaway toolkit near ISS (image courtesy NASA).

You can read more about the flyaway tool kit, and get predictions concerning when and where to look to see it, and the ISS, at http://spaceweather.com.

The tool kit is spiraling downward into thicker and thicker atmosphere, and is expected to crash and burn in a year or so. The lower something orbits earth, the faster it moves, so for now, the tool kit is visible as a pinpoint of light flying a few minutes ahead of the ISS. The ISS and tool kit make several favorable passes over West Michigan beginning on Dec. 5. For ISS and the toolkit sighting opportunities from Grand Haven visit http://spaceweather.com/flybys/) and enter our zip code.

This column originally appeared in the Grand Haven Tribune on 28 November 2008.

Watching the latest space shuttle launch and reading the news about the astronauts space walking to repair the International Space Station (ISS), I was reminded of some of the oddities of low-earth orbit.

The ISS and space shuttle orbit earth little more than two hundred miles up. At this altitude, in what is called low-earth orbit, objects coast with little resistance just above the upper reaches of earth’s atmosphere.

Two hundred miles is not very high. Consider that the earth itself is about four thousand miles in radius. Two hundred miles on top of four thousand miles amounts to just five percent. The fuzz on a Michigan peach stands out in about the same relief as does the ISS orbit above earth.

It is a common misconception that there is no gravity in space. While this is true, to some extent, in the deepest reaches of outer space, it is decidedly not true just two hundred miles above earth’s surface. The force of gravity exerted by earth on an astronaut in low-earth orbit is about ninety percent as strong as it is when the astronaut is back home.

What explains all the floating around?

Spacewalking astronauts, and everything else in orbit around the earth, are “weightless” because they are freely falling toward the center of the earth. You can be weightless right now, for a brief period of time, in exactly the same way if you jump. The higher you jump, the longer you can be weightless.

Us earthbound folks, who experiment with weightlessness when we jump, have to face the abrupt end of our orbits when we hit the ground. As the saying goes: “it’s not the fall that kills you, it’s the sudden stop at the end.”

Weightless astronauts don’t eminently face the sudden stop because they are zipping along in orbit around the round earth in just such a way that they can fall forever and never get any closer to earth’s center or surface. In orbit, astronauts move horizontally at a speed the matches the distance they fall in any interval of time to the distance earth’s surface curves away below.

At what horizontal speed does something need to move in order to stay in orbit two hundred miles above earth’s surface? Really fast. Relative to earth’s center, things in low-earth orbit have to move about eighteen thousand miles per hour! At that speed, they scoot around earth in just ninety minutes.

All the fire and fury of a space shuttle liftoff is aimed at one thing: to get the shuttle and everything inside moving at eighteen thousand miles per hour. The energy required to reach an altitude of two hundred miles is tiny compared to the energy required to accelerate to the proper orbital speed.

You may have heard that one of the astronauts let a tool kit slip from her hands on a recent ISS spacewalk. Ultimately, like everything else in low-earth orbit, the tool kit will come back down.

For something to return to earth gracefully, however, it must shed the tremendous amount of energy it gained during launch and slow back down to a stop. That little tool kit, for example, has now as much energy as the average US home uses in two days. Before too long, after maybe a couple of years, the air molecules in the upper atmosphere will begin to tear at the toolkit, sapping its energy ever faster. When the kit falls into the thicker parts of the atmosphere, in a brief flash, it will be vaporized.

Let’s wish the astronauts a safe return.

This column originally appeared in the Grand Haven Tribune on 21 November 2008.

Spring arrives with a full moon late next week. The sun passes the vernal equinox — a point in the sky in the constellation Pisces — at precisely 1:48 am EDT on Thursday, Mar. 20, marking the official beginning of spring.

Look for the sun to rise due east on Thursday morning (and for the next few days), making your morning drive to work on Lake Michigan Ave. and other West MI East-running roads a challenge if it’s not cloudy. Then look for a bright full moon to rise in the west at sunset. March’s full moon, which is technically on Friday, is called the Worm Moon, hinting that the ground will soon thaw for the worms to begin their spring work preparing the soil for planting.

Over the next three months, until summer begins on June 20, sunrise in West MI will drift from 7:47 am to 6:05 am, sunset will slide from 7:58 pm to 9:28 pm, and the duration of daylight will lengthen from just about 12 hours to nearly 15-and-a-half hours. Thanks to the new daylight saving time rules, we are under daylight time the entire season.

The date of Easter is tied in a complicated way to the spring full moon. This year, because the moon is full so soon after spring begins, Easter is celebrated much sooner than average. Easter Sunday is Mar. 23.

In the sky shortly after sunset, Winter’s ruling constellation Orion will slowly settle to the western horizon as spring segways to summer. As Orion falls away at dusk over the season, look for Saturn high in the southeast sky in the constellation Leo. And look for Mars in the constellation Gemini nearby to the west of Saturn. Watch Mars steadily drift closer to Saturn as the refreshing spring days go by, passing through the constellation Cancer in May and reaching Leo with Saturn in late June and early July.

Watch also for Mercury to become visible above the western horizon just after sunset beginning in late April. For a period of a few days around May 14, when it reaches greatest elongation, Mercury will be best positioned for viewing after sunset in the west in the constellation Taurus.

In May, the moon can guide you on a tour past the early evening’s visible planets. On May 6, the moon, then a very thin crescent, will slip past Mercury. By May 9-10, the moon will have grown to nearly first-quarter — what looks like a half moon — and will glide past Mars, and a day or so later will sail past Saturn.

If your a morning person, look for Jupiter before sunrise low in southeast in the constellation Sagittarius. Watch over the season as Jupiter climbs higher and higher above the southern horizon.

But don’t look for Venus this spring; she will be lost near the sun until sometime this summer.

Other targets of opportunity this spring include two meteor showers: the Lyrids on Apr. 22 and the Eta Aquarids, which are debris from Halley’s Comet, on May 5.

Closer to here and now you might enjoy watching for the ISS and Space Shuttle to fly overhead. The spacecraft should make several high and bright visible passes over West MI on the mornings of Mar. 17-20. Details about these West-MI viewing opportunities:

• On May 17, look for the spacecraft to rise above the horizon in the northwest at 6:57 am, fly to about 45 degrees above the hoizon in the north northeast by 6:59 am, and settle back to the horizon in the east southeast at 7:02 am.
• On May 18, they should rise in the west northwest at 7:19 am, reach an altitude of about 60 degrees above the southwest horizon by 7:22 am, and sink into the southeast horizon by 7:25 am.
• On May 19, they should brighten into view as they move into sunlight high above, about 40 degrees above the horizon in the north at 6:09 am, and climb to about 45 degrees above horizon in the north northeast by 6:10 before sinking below the horizon in the east southeast at 6:12 am.
• And finally, on May 20, which might be the best viewing opportunity, the shuttle and ISS should pop into view at 6:31 am about 40 degrees above the west-northwest horizon, sail high overhead in the southwest by 6:32 am, then settle into the south-eastern horizon at 6:35 am.

These predictions are spcific to Grand Haven, and may change as the shuttle and ISS orbits change slightly. I will try to update these predictions if they do change; visit heavens-above.com for detailed viewing forecasts for any location.

Look for a new post on or about 22 March 2008.