The history of the space race between the USA and Russia is well documented, but what happened before NASA was founded in 1958 is much less common knowledge. In her new book Breaking the Chains of Gravity, spaceflight historian Amy Shira Teitel takes up the task of telling the story of the early days of what would ultimately launch humanity into space. On her Vintage Space Blog and her Youtube Channel, she has already often talked about this rarely mentioned era, but Breaking the Chains of Gravity is much more than just a simple collection of blog posts.

The books sticks close to the facts, but as the author mentions in her introductory video, this is not a technical reference manual. Instead, it centers around the people behind the technology, the inventors, engineers and even visionaries that have made spaceflight possible. One of the key figures is, of course, Wernher von Braun, but for Amy Shira Teitel telling just his story was not enough and so she went even further back to the hobby rocketeers in the late 1920s Germany around Max Valier, Herman Oberth and their Society for Space Travel. By necessity, the book is also partly a history of World War II, but the author has wisely kept close to the topic and does not dwell too much on the question of war crimes, although the devastation the V2 rockets were capable of does not go unmentioned.

After the end of WWII, the book shifts gears and tells the parallel stories of the German scientists and engineers around Wernher von Braun arriving in the USA and the efforts of the Americans themselves to successfully build rockets both as weapons and for space exploration. This is also the more well-known story of Chuck Yeager, Scott Crossfield and Neil Armstrong flying rocket planes to break the sound barrier and almost reaching space, but the equally harrowing tales of flight surgeons John Paul Stapp self-experimenting with deceleration and David Simmons’ high-altitude balloon flights are mentioned more than just in passing. American politics under President Eisenhower also take up a larger part of the book’s second half, which describes in detail the decisions of the US administration that ultimately led to the creation of NASA.

Amy Shira Teitel’s writing style closely resembles her many blog posts, but here it seems even more refined and improved. While she has chosen to omit technical details, her writing is far from dumbed down and actually full of minute details and facts rarely mentioned anywhere else. The narrative successfully avoids being a dry history lesson and instead conveys the author’s enthusiasm for the subject by being engaging and suspenseful, but at the same time not too emotional. The book has only two negative aspects: it ends in 1957 with the creation of NASA and the Russian spaceflight efforts are hardly mentioned at all – but both are entirely understandable and would have warranted a whole second book… which perhaps may be forthcoming in the future.

Breaking the Chains of Gravity has been released in Europe and Asia on October 22 and will be available in the US on January 22 next year. An audiobook version (sadly not read by the author herself) is already out in the US.

This review also appears in the WSH Crew Community and on the WSH Crew Website.

Recently, I noticed that the different font rendering under Windows 7 broke the layout of the top menu on this blog a little bit – this never bothered me because I had no other operating systems than Windows XP on my computers before I got my new laptop! But because the layout was also a bit wonky under Android, I have fixed this now and also slightly overhauled the top menu. To make room for a long needed Science button, I made the plunge and changed the site logo to BIBRA.EU. This domain has been active for a while and already redirects to the blog, but next year I will move the whole site to the new address. Otherwise, everything is going to remain the same here for the time being, meaning that it’s still going to be my all-purpose blog for everything that does not fit into my other sites.

There’s also something else going on… I completely forgot to mention it here because I was so busy, but I have been building a new website for the WSH Crew Google+ Community this Summer! This means that the old Hangout Schedule Index which I had been maintaining here on the blog is now a part of the new website, but apart from some major layout improvements it is still the same page administrated by yours truly in cooperation with the other WSH Crew admins Nancy Graziano, Hugo Burnham, Silvan Wespi and Jim Meeker. The WSH Crew Community is also the reason I don’t write as much about science and astronomy here on this site at the moment, since we are posting all the interesting news over there, but I will probably still write the occasional article now and then. For everything else, go and join the WSH Crew Community – it’s a nice and cozy place and in addition to lots of space news we always keep everyone updated about which hangouts are happening.

So the changes here are actually not very earth-shattering, but at least I got around to work on the site a little bit. Maybe there will be more improvements along the way sometime!

This blog post comes a little late, although I had shared the news on the social media channels before: CosmoQuest has been saved! After the citizen science project had lost its primary NASA funding in October 2014 after having been hit with the sequestration before, it was held alive by donations, among them the very successful Hangoutathon from this spring, but even the most generous donations only go so far. Because of this, CosmoQuest director Pamela Gay has been tirelessly writing proposals to replace the lost NASA grant and on September 25, she got the news everbody involved in CosmoQuest had been waiting for: WE GOT FUNDING.

This is the good news – CosmoQuest will receive NASA funding for at least five years, but it is not exactly clear how much yet. On September 25, NASA had announced that 27 organisations, among them CosmoQuest, have been selected as Science Education Partners for STEM Agreements – altogether, a sum of $42 Million will be given out, but how this is going to be distributed is still in the future. If it would be divided equally, each grant applicant would get about $1.5 Million, which does not seem much over five years, but it would certainly be a windfall for CosmoQuest, which has been surviving on a few ten thousands for more than a year. The bottom line is that this is not about simply spending money but about giving scientists a chance to do research and support education – and scientists are humans like everyone else who need to be paid for their work. Other bills have to be paid too, of course – but this is all about the people doing the science.

While everyone waits for more details to come out, there is always more citizen science to do on CosmoQuest – there are still other worlds to map, especially Mars! And Pamela Gay has also hinted that there may be another CosmoQuest Hangoutathon sometime – but with less begging and more science. Let’s see what the future brings… it already looks pretty good now and I think CosmoQuest can really celebrate its fourth Birthday on January 1, 2016!

For a long time – actually since 2008 – I had been using an old Compaq Evo N610c business notebook as my primary work computer, but in addition to being seriously underpowered nowadays and rapidly losing screen brightness, it has been giving me some other trouble recently as well. Earlier this year, my last large harddrive failed and because 2.5″ IDE drives are nearly impossible to get now that SATA has taken over, I have been reduced to using the laptop with one of the two last 40GB drives I had in reserve. The last straw was only a couple of days ago when it suddely didn’t want to turn on anymore – after removing the optical drive and the battery, the problem suddenly vanished again, but now I fear that this might happen again and the laptop could finally stop working completely.

Because of the difficult harddrive situation, I was already looking for alternatives and found out that the IBM/Lenovo Thinkpad series has already been supporting SATA drives at least since the T60 series, which has become quite inexpensive on eBay recently. Although I had not intended to buy a new laptop this early, the slowly failing Compaq worried me so much that I finally made the decision to do it right now – and last week, I snagged a very nice Thinkpad T61 with a big 15.4″, 1280×800 display, 2GB RAM and a 1.8 GHz Core2Duo processor. It’s not a brand-new machine by any means, but still a huge upgrade over my old laptop. The amazing thing is that I bought it from the same seller I got my Compaq notebook from back in 2008 – a dealer who refurbishes leased computers and gives a one-year warranty on used articles, so I’m on the safe side.

It arrived yesterday and as expected it is in amazing shape – the only signs of use are some small scratches on the lid and otherwise it looks like completely new. The only part I will probably replace soon is the 80GB harddrive it came with, mainly because I want to put something bigger into the laptop, but also because it has a somewhat high power-on hour count. It also came with an unexpected and very welcome surprise: a built-in sd card reader in front of the palm rest, something which I had not expected at all. There was absolutely no driver trouble when I installed Windows 7 and everything works perfectly. I expect that in a couple of days I will have everything up and running again and then I can finally do some work without being interrupted by ageing hardware!

This will only be my fifth notebook, but my first Thinkpad. I guess I should write a retrospective blog post on all those machines that came before it – except one of them, all are still around in working condition! This will be an interesting project for the fall, so stay tuned :-).

This is another edition of my now regular articles about the crew changes on the International Space Station – so much has happened since I posted the last one back in July and not all  of it was good. With the loss of a Dragon freighter at the end of June the third supply flight in a row had not reached the ISS, causing some major concern – but since then both a Progress transporter and a Japanese HTV have arrived without problems and both SpaceX and Orbital/ATK are working hard on returning to flight soon. On a more positive note, the first space-grown vegetable was served on the ISS and there was also a successful spacewalk by Russian cosmonauts. The crisis seems to be mostly over, but in September it is going to get very crowded on the station.   

In 1986, the Commodore 64 got its own graphical user interface system, capable of running only on 64 Kilobytes RAM and a 170kb floppy drive. GEOS, the Graphical Environment Operating System, was like having Windows on an 8-bit computer. At that time, the venerable machine had already been on the market for about four years and was starting to get overshadowed by its 16-bit successors like the Amiga – but the computer was still popular, because it was now very inexpensive and lots of games and software were still being released for it. There were many good serious programs, but most of them limited themselves to the C64’s text mode and only few graphical interfaces like Commodore’s own MagicDesk had emerged. But this was all about to change in 1986 and it was all the fault of the airline industry.

It’s that time of year again – the Perseid Meteor Shower Lottery is upon us! Will we see some meteors, or a LOT of meteors? Or will the curse strike us again? This year, we don’t have the almost-full Moon making things worse and the weather might even play along in our location here in Midwest Germany. The Perseids will peak on August 12 in the early Evening CEST, so the night from the 12th to the 13th will probably be the best chance to look for meteors, but generally the few days around the peak date are usually good too.

It looks like we might at least be able to watch, because it isn’t so unseasonably cold at night like last year, but there is some light cloud cover that might get in the way. Although I have a new camera this year, I’m not sure I will be able to catch meteors with it – but if the sky is clear, I might try it. The only time I ever caught a Perseid meteor was in 2008 – I’ve been using that particular photo for all my Perseid posts.

[Update 8/16: The weather has now completely turned and there is no chance anymore of seeing the sky in the next days. We actually saw a tiny handful of shooting stars on the night of the 12th, which was a considerable improvement from the last year, but nowhere near the spectacle promised by the media!]

If your weather looks good and you want to try watching, here are the usual links: If you want to know more about the Perseids, Universe Today has a really good Observer’s Guide written by David Dickinson and Fraser Cain’s  short explainer video about meteors in general is also very recommended. In short, if you have a reasonably clear view of the sky to the east and northeast, you are all set to go! You don’t even need any fancy equipment, just your eyes are enough :-).

After buying my first smartphone – the Huawei Ascend G610 – this spring, I noticed how much faster it was than my old tablet, whose battery was slowly dying after more than two years of heavy use. So I was in the market for a new tablet in the sub-€100 category and after some research I decided to abandon Odys in favour of Lenovo. The A7 series of 7″ tablets ideally suited my requirements and my budget – the A7-40 (A3500-FL) and A7-50 (A3500F) to be exact, with a difference of 8 and 16GB storage space and an additional back camera on the A7-50. I chose the latter because the price difference was only €10 – and this is the device I’m reviewing in this article, although the A7-40 is in every respect identical save for the storage space and the back camera. At the time of my purchase the tablets cost €79 and €89 on Amazon.de, but this varies a little bit. With a list price of originally €110 and €150, those devices are bargains in any case.

On July 23rd, 1985 the Commodore Amiga was first introduced to the world in a huge launch show demonstrating the then unheard of capabilites of this new 16-bit generation of personal computers. It could do things that are totally common today, but were almost utopic in 1985 – not even the first Apple Macintosh, released a year before, was able to deliver what the Amiga did back then. Although this marked the commercial release of the Amiga 1000 and the later, much more popular Amiga 500 and 2000 only appeared two years later, it was the start of a revolution – the first true multimedia computer was born.

The video embedded below is a recording of the famous show at the Lincoln Center in New York exactly thirty years ago – it was a somewhat pompous event, but it delivered the goods. Andy Warhol painting a digitized image of Debbie Harry is maybe the most memorable part of the show, but everything else is actually a very fair and unexaggerated demonstration of the computers abilities. Remember, this was 1985, only three years after the Commodore 64 was introduced!

I think it may be time to write a big Amiga article soon. My own Amiga 2000 is still in good working condition, although the second floppy drive and the harddrive are broken – but the computer itself still works!

The last couple of days have been nothing short of amazing. Until only a week ago, Pluto had been literally just a small blob of pixels to humanity since its discovery eighty-five years ago by Clyde Tombaugh, but then New Horizons made its approach to the former planet. Even before the actual flyby, Pluto and its Moon Charon were transformed from pixels to detailed photos, which brought many surprises and some poignant visual allusions, like the now famous heart – which also looks like a certain dog! It’s been incredible and maybe the most exciting thing in uncrewed space exploration since the Voyager missions in the 70s and 80s!