By Burl Burlingame, Star-Bulletin
Mike Livad explains to Punahou student Missy Lovell,
14, how the Zarya and Unity components of the
space station fit together.
Isle students
get glimpse of
Russian launch
A video link from Bishop
By Burl Burlingame
Museum is part of a national
educational network
Star-BulletinThere's a classic piece of trivia that rocket scientists like to repeat. It explains the fundamental differences between the Russian and U. S. approaches to technology. When the Space Age dawned, scientists realized that astronauts may have trouble writing notes in space -- it's gravity, after all, that makes ink flow out.
The United States embarked on a crash program to develop a zero-G pen. Parker engineers labored months, spending tens of thousands of taxpayer dollars to design a pen with pressurized ink. It worked beautifully, but cost more than a car.
The Russians instructed their cosmonauts to use pencils.
These two worlds, once bitter enemies, started to merge this week with the launch of the first piece of the International Space Station. Named Zarya, Russian for "dawn," and attached to a Proton rocket, it leaped off the earth Thursday night from Baikonur Cosmodrome, to be followed Dec. 3 by a U.S. component called Unity inside space shuttle Endeavor.
Some things don't change. Unity is tailor-made, while Zarya is a rechanneled former Mir module.
A roomful of space-minded students watched the lift-off live at Bishop Museum. Whether it will be a defining moment for the rest of their lives remains to be seen, as the Moon landing was for their parents, but the adults there were certainly excited.
Bishop Museum educator Mike Livad, a regular visitor to Houston Space Center, had never seen a Russian rocket launch. Most Americans haven't, and certainly not live on television."It's so different," he said. "We have gantries that swing back; they truck the missile out and haul it upright. Their service towers fold down like flower petals; ours swing out of the way. The Space Shuttle leaps right off the pad -- it's going 100 miles per hour when it clear the tower -- theirs goes roooomph roooomph on the blast pad. It lifts up slowly. But we both get there in the end."
Bishop Museum is the Hawaii anchor for a national web of "Star Station One" sites, a Boeing Company-funded system of educational centers to link students to the space station. Hawaii's SS-1 site was the first in the nation to open, with the launch event in the museum's Explorers center.
Livad held a short course in celestial mechanic and rocketry physics -- demonstrating the concept of "trajectory," for example, by throwing baseballs. Then the students asked some pretty good questions, such as "If astronauts lose 10 percent of their bone mass each month while in space, how can they possibly voyage to Mars?" (Answer: We dunno.) The space station will research this problem.
The museum will hold public-education events connected to the space station, which will be assembled in bits and pieces over the next half decade. Eventually, it will be larger than a football field, and as it sweeps across the night sky, it "will be the brightest thing in the sky, next to the moon," said Livad, awe in his voice.
It all depends on how you look at things, the event suggested to the kids. This bright object in the sky will certainly only be sunlight reflected off a hurtling mass of expensive hardware. But it is also a beacon, a candle in the darkness, a sign that humanity can work together and step into the big beyond. Space, the final frontier.
