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Just the Disney-Pixar Toy Story cartoon character Buzz Lightyear was so named after the Apollo 11 moonwalker Buzz Aldrin, so the 55-year-old British comedian and space afficionado, Frank Skinner, has also named his new baby boy Buzz. 

Apparently the drily-amusing comedian is a fan of cowboys as well. The baby's second name Cody has been given after the cowboy showman Buffalo Bill Cody.  

Astronaut Buzz Aldrin (real name Edwin Aldrin) was so named in childhood after his sister kept mispronouncing "brother" as "buzzer".   When it came to family names, of course, it was almost as if it was ordained that astronaut Buzz would set foot on Earth's natural satellite.   Buzz Aldrin's mother's maiden name was Moon.

After Internatioal Space Station Dutch astronaut Andre Kuipers played Sir Elton John's famous song Rocket Man to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the release of the song, so now the 65 year old singer has sent up a video of a live version which he performed in Las Vegas, also to celebrate the 40th anniversary.  

Hyperbola would like to pay a belated short tribute to Sir Raymond Lygo who briefly figured in the UK attempt to build a reusable spaceplane.  Sir Raymond Lygo passed away in March at the age of 87.

Having briefly worked in the newspaper industry, Lygo worked his way up from the ranks to become a World War II fighter pilot and officer in the Royal Navy.  Lygo went on to have a post war naval career in which he became Captain of the aircraft carrier Ark Royal.  Having been knighted the year previously, Lygo finally left the Navy in 1978 with the rank of Admiral.  

Sir Raymond Lygo then joined British Aerospace (now known as BAE Systems) to lead its Dynamics missile division before being promoted to head the whole company.  In that role he managed to gain government support for the launch of the now successful A320 passenger aircraft.  More controversially, the plain speaking Lygo become involved in the argument about the future of the Westland helicoper company and whether it became part of a US or European firm.

During his time at Briish Aerospace, Lygo also did nuch to promote the HOTOL concept of a single-stage-to-orbit reusable spaceplane.  In the end, for technical reasons and because of a lack of government support, that design never came to fruition, though it subsequently led to a technically more promising, if very slowly developed, spaceplane design called Skylon. 

When proposals for endoatmospheric long-range hypersonic passenger transport aircraft briefly came into vogue, knowing that aerothermodynamically-generated total heat loads might make such flights impossible, Lygo suggested that leaving the atmosphere altogether for most of a flight would be a better option.   

Sir Raymond Lygo officially retired in 1989 though for a time he became Chairman of the delivery company TNT Express.   Sir Raymond Lygo married twice, the second time as a widower, and had three children by his first marriage.  A memorial service for Sir Raymond Lygo is being held at Chichester Cathedral in June.

The Space Shuttle Enterprise has been moved out of Washtington D.C. now that the city has the real thing:  the Smithsonian's Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center received the Space Shuttle Discovery ealier in April,  The  Enterprise, which was only ever used for gliding tests rather than flying into orbit, was flown from the Udvar-Hazy Center into New York while mounted atop a NASA 747 Shuttle Carrier Aircraft (SCA) on 27 April, 2012.  It is to be shown at the Intrepid Sea, Air & Space Museum.

Beginning on the 12 April, - and carrying on over the next two months,  the British Interplanetary Society in Vauxhall, London,  is showing  "First Orbit", the hit Internet film which re-creates the story of the Major Yuri Gagarin's revolutionary spaceflight of 12 April1961.   The quirk is that the film is being shown in 30 different languages after the film's fans around the world translated the Russian into subtitles for free.

This "installation art" documentary, which was directed and produced by Christopher Riley, tells the story of the very first orbit by mimicking the orbit in near real time by using footage shot mainly by Italian astronaut Paulo Nespoli while he was on the International Space Station (iSS) with the cooperation of NASA, ESA and Roscosmos. 

Interspersed in the subtitled footage is English commentary from contemporary Radio Moscow and BBC broadcasts complete with their strangely old fashioned accents.  The film was originally released on the internet to coincide with the 50^th anniversary of the flight last year.  It became a viral internet sensation taking the record, at over 3.5 million, for the largest number of hits on YouTube for a long film.

While the space station's orbital elements (i.e. its inclination, apogee, perigee and eccentricity) differ a bit from cosmonaut Gagarin's Vostok 1 spacecraft's passage, by cobbling together various sections of the high definition video along with actual footage (yes - most of that is in monochrome) as taken from the original and other space missions, director Christopher Riley has managed to create pretty close depiction on what it was like to look out of the Vostok's porthole window.

While there are a few quibbles about some of the views - at one stage a parachute appears to open before the re-entry (the shots were taken out of order from NASA's Apollo 10 mission re-entry) - Riley, who has a space related planetary geology background himself, and his editing team, took especial care to get the ground track and solar angles correct. Night views for the orbit, including some sparky thunderstorms, were provided by some NASA night vision cameras.  

Most impressively the voice communications during the first part of the flight between Gagarin and the ground stations (including the voice of legendary Soviet space designer S.P. Korolev) has been included after cooperation with the Russian government. 

During the latter part of the flight Gagarin is mainly silent.  He was alleged to have lost consciousness after his craft went into a spin minutes before it successfully re-entered Earth atmosphere.   Gagarin recovered consciousness in time to eject and parachute as planned from the re-entry capsule to a safe landing - though his ejection was kept under wraps for several years in case anyone challenged the new record given he had left the craft before it touched down.

While some of the images are beautiful, especially, the sunrise and sunsets emphasizing Earth's thin atmospheric border, the most impressive part of the film is actually its haunting musical score as composed by Philip Sheppard.  This is at times, reminiscent of music from the seminal eco-science fiction film "Silent Running".   In a presentation made before and after the showing, Riley apologized for the variable quality in some images variously caused by human focusing error, dirty windows and also by bright spot pixels caused by space radiation damage to the cameras' CCD (Charged Couple Device) sensors: a problem that Gagarin could barely have imagined in those pioneering and inspiring days.

Flightglobal/Ascend Overall Rating:  This film is, at times, awe inspiring and enlightening. It can also be a bit tedious as well, with long stretches in which nothing seems to be happening.   It is perhaps one to have running in the background (especially for the music) so you can dip in and dip out of a beautiful space trip - 7/10. 

The Attic Room productions film is now available now on DVD and Blue-ray. 

 http://www.firstorbit.org/

 

In addition to his own Blue Origin rocket pursuits, Amazon guru Jeff Bezos is also interested in space history and artefacts. He is leading a team attempting to find parts of the first stage of the Saturn V rocket which was used to launch the Apollo 11 first moon landing expedition in July 1969. Bezos has reported that his team and has now found the Apollo 11 engines lying 14,000 feet below the surface in the Atlantic using state-of-the-art deep sea sonar.

The team hopes to recover these engines and display them (with NASA's permission) in various museums including the Smithsonian Air and Space museum.  The condition of the engines is not yet known.

SCI FI MOVIE 'CURSE' MAY HAVE KILLED OFF AMERICAN AIRLINES' FUTURE

 By David Todd

 As American Airlines files for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, it may well be suffering from the "sci-fi movie curse of the airlines".  As science fiction film makers have found, predicting the future is fraught with hazard as those companies that are strong now may not be so in the future.  This curse usually results in such airlines which do appear usually not having any future at all.     For example, American Airlines appeared in the well regarded eco-science fiction drama Silent Running (1972) which starred Bruce Dern, some very sweet robots, and a lot of trees.   Of the airline, robots and trees....now it looks as if only the trees will survive.

 American Airlines is not the only victim of this curse.  In Stanley Kubrick's 2001 - A Space Odyssey (1968) the Orion shuttle which carried space passengers to the rotating Earth station was seen in the livery colours of the then great, but now defunct, Pan American World Airways (PanAm).  Perhaps PanAm was asking for it when it even actually took bookings for flights to the Moon.   

 It was not just this film that got it wrong about PanAm.  The dystopian vision of what future cities will be like in Ridley Scott's Blade Runner (1982) had massive illuminated advertising hoardings with PanAm featuring prominently.  It was not just Pan Am that was apparently cursed, some of the other companies that featured in the film such as Atari and Cuisinart also suffered financial difficulties.

So which airline/spaceline will actually be around to fly you to the moon?   Obviously, given its plans for suborbital spaceflight Virgin Galactic has to be a contender.  But whichever airline does make it into this brave new future, we do hope it is not one of the low cost airlines.  Let's face it, none of us want to have to pay for our oxygen as a surcharge.

 

 PanAm will now never be an orbital spaceline despite this colour scheme on the Orion III Space Clipper. 

Sometimes, it's best to let things speak for themselves. Read on, friends (our highlights):

The First Vibrator in Space   
     
Los Angeles, CA - September 27, 2011 -- On October 8, 2011, online sex toy sales leader SexToy.com, will lead a team to launch the first adult sex toy vibrator into space. The space craft will be equipped with a still and video camera that will send images of its best selling vibrator back to Earth.
 
Through rigorous experimentation, the group has developed a way to send the vibrator into space. The toy will have to withstand temperatures of -75 degrees Fahrenheit and conditions 10 times over normal cosmic radiation. The vibrator will be fully exposed to the elements, reach an altitude of 100,000 feet (~20miles) above the Earth's atmosphere, which is three times the cruising altitude of a typical jet plane. The team hopes to retrieve the vibrator in fully functioning order.
 
SexToy Dave, CEO of CNV.com Inc., says of his inspiration behind the project, "I have always been into firsts and that is how I made my money. I was one of the first on the web selling sex toys, first to have an adult affiliate program, the first to make three appearances on Bravo's hit show Millionaire Matchmaker and now the first online adult business with a space program."
 
The sex toy will be carried into space by a partially solar-powered, partially helium-filled balloon 8 feet wide, armed with a 1080p HD video camera, a 10MP still camera, two consumer cell phones running tracking software, and an experimental GPS unit. The balloon and vibrating bullet will travel through Jet stream winds of up to 100 miles per hour for 1-3 hours and achieve a total distance of up to 100 miles. Sextoy.com will publish the photos on its new blog, "Chew On This" at www.sextoy.com/blog http://www.sextoy.com/blog

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One of many media channels to report it, watch NBC's bulletin above about the open letter sent to the White House Tuesday by Apollo mission commanders Neil Armstrong, Gene Cernan and Jim Lovell and a second such letter from other Apollo veterans all criticising president Barack Obama's NASA plan

Go here for spacepolitics.com report on the White House's reaction to the Apollo astronauts' criticism. How much worse can the PR get for Obama's day at Kennedy Space Center?

According to the above video in 1976 Goddard Space Flight Center was a "kaleidoscope of extremes". Is that still so Goddard workers of today? Hyperbola wants to know. But more importantly this video was about the center's celebration of the 50th anniversary of the first liquid rocket engine flight, care of its name sake Robert H. Goddard. I think 1976 was the 200th anniversary of some historically significant event as well but for the life of me my British mind can't recall what it was...

Next year will be the 50th anniversary of human spaceflight and space.com's report about Bolden's speech at the 26th National Space Symposium doesn't really provide any sort of idea of what NASA 2011 will be like. It's not space.com's fault but Bolden said so little, making one wonder why he even bothered to add to his carbon footprint and hot foot it all the way to Colorado for a morning chit-chat

While in the Sunshine state we have learnt today, care of the Orlando Sentinel, that Obama will now not check out the X-37 during his visit. As if making a speech about a plan that cancels a vehicle whose building your standing in at the time isn't ironic enough, standing by the Space Shuttle look-a-likey X-37 might just be a bit too much for anyone

If you're a young American looking for a vibrant space programme perhaps India is the place to go? According to Aviation Week the Indians are just getting on with it, it being a manned space programme. And Bangalore owes the USA a few jobs...