Danish Rocket Launch

Today was a good day for the Danish rocket builders Copenhagen Suborbitals.

They launched the small rocket Nexoe (Nexø) 2 this morning Danish time from a self built sea launch platform about 35km West of the island Bornholm in the Baltic Sea. The rocket fired perfectly and burned for 33 seconds, and reached an altitude of 6.500 meters, the parachute unfolded beautifully and the rocket was recovered nicely.The launch was streamed with a somewhat interrupted stream via Youtube. The interruptions in the streaming are due to the distance, and some rising water vapour in the warm (for the time of the year) Baltic Sea, and also due to the large distance and wide bandwidth of the signals.

I followed the stream from about half an hour before launch, until the rocket was recovered and brought to the launch control ship.

The planned maximum altitude of 13000m was not reached, because the burn time for the engine was only 33 out of the planned 45 seconds, but never the less I consider today’s flight a strong success, many new systems were tested, and functioned well.

Congratulations to Copenhagen Suborbitals with the successful launch.

Ebooks – Self Made

I have written some articles for a Danish science fiction magazine.

Since I have an e-reader I would like to have those available to bring with me.
For an article the process is very simple :
I take the text version of the file and add some headline tags (Simple HTML), make some paragraph markups .
Things come up very readable, and I used a neat text editor for the Mac called “TextWrangler” The editor “understands” Regular Expressions, a hairy Unix way of doing text editing, but I just had to learn a bit of it to do this.

Neat to get my own stuff on the e-reader. I may put more of my stuff on it.

“When the Power goes …. Chaos Reigns” (J.C. Hutchins)

– or at least the Internet connection disappears.

This evening I have been powerless for a few hours. I was just taking a break and should be starting my daily post when the lights first faded for a few seconds – then went out. DSL-Modem, computers radio and TV etc – the whole house was dead.

Now what ? since this is quite unusual for this area I first looked out of my windows, and the flats in the next street had lights on – looked to the other corner – more lights. Went to the other side of the flat : a dark area for some miles/km – where there would normally be a sea of lights.

I found myself in one corner of a dark area, with light on two sides. Hmmm. I do not know exactly what happened, but my guess is that a transformer station went up in smoke – likely due to an overload – it can happen if someone digs into a cable (seen that before).

Find a flashlight – I have one or two LED flashlights around , talk to neighbours, one had a non working flashlight – fortunately it just needed new batteries, and she had spares.

No lights, no reading, no tv , no computers, and certainly no internet.

Actually, I don’t mind the dark, then the stars become visible. Unfortunately the stars are blocked by “The Great Northern European Nebula” , aka clouds, so no luck there. Well – I was a little tired, so had an excuse to take a rest.

It took a few hours for the power to return here, so no real harm done.

Funny how much we depend on electricity for our daily activities nowadays. Make me think that I should have some backup power system. Not easy in the flat, but at my house “back home” – that is another matter. I should plan to make some kind of renewable energy generation there, so it is ready when I return to my home country.

The Chinese Launch of Shenzhou 7 with a Crew of 3.

The Chinese space agency has launced their 3rd manned spacecraft with 3 astronauts (“Taikonauts”) on board. see the article from SPACE.com

The plan is to have a Space Walk of about 40 minutes in order to test a newly made Chinese space suit, collect some scientific experiments from the outside of the craft and launch a small satellite sending images back to Earth. The Space Walk should happen on Friday or Saturday.

Exciting to see the Chinese emerge as a manned space faring nation. along with the US and Russia.

There are still not many nations/organisations capable of launching space craft into orbit. I count

– US
– Russia
– Europe (ESA)
– Japan
– India

did I forget anyone ?

I am curious to see when and if the Chinese will join the ISS. I think they belong there along with the others.