This week is a semi-kinda-sorta-annual-bi-monthly-whenever-I-feel-like-it column about whatever is interesting/pissing me off this week.

Let’s get started.

First the fun stuff:

Cupcakes

Apparently, there’s a cupcake zeitgeist out there.  Who knew. There was all that hubbub about cupcakes on Sex and the City. And The Dude informs me that there was a cupcake-centric storyline on some show called What About Brian.  Again, I say: Who knew.

I was on AOL today and they had an entire list of cupcake bakeries and their “specialties.”  Honestly, I almost got up to bake, but I took a few deep breaths until it passed.

There was also a link to what happens when cupcakes meet knitting.   Some people really need to get out more.

On to more serious matters:

Scott McClellan Finds Reality 

It was attached to his ass all along.

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All right, I’m three days late.  Mea culpa and like that.  But I’m here, after having faced off with the horror that is post-Thanksgiving shopping.  While Avocado was looking for presents at Borders I was browsing around and came upon a copy of Little Women, that staple-of-girlhood-literature.  Now, the copy of Little I grew up with was the Little Brown hardcover (part of the collected books, all with tipped in color illustrations, and utterly ubiquitous: if you are a female person of a certain age, even if you loathed Louisa May Alcott, you would recognize the edition I mean).  The first illustration, opposite the title page, looked something like this:

 There they are: Meg in the center, Amy, petite and blonde, on the left, Jo on the right, and Meg, doubtless too sickly to stand up, sitting in the middle.  I not only like Little Women, I’m fond of most of Alcott’s work…

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For several months I have been collecting data for a series of graphics-focused posts on space exploration, and I am finally ready to start sharing my results with you, my dear, zombie-infested Brainiacs.

First of all, allow me to introduce you to my assistant, who will be helping me to illustrate certain concepts. You’ll see more of hir as we go along.

Human Space Density, in Hours

Here is a graph showing how many hours humans (only US astronauts, so far; see note below) have spent above the level of the atmosphere.

I’m counting the upper edge of the atmosphere as about 76 miles up, though you will find many different estimates–and in fact, it changes over time, with fluctuations in the solar wind and other factors, including global warming impacts. But 76 miles is a good average number for our purposes.

So how much time are we talking about, really? For comparison, the average American work-year is about 2,000 hours. A year has about 8,900 hours, all told.

As you can see in the chart above, after a promising start with Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo, the US manned space program languished, when SkyLab drew to a close. It wasn’t until 1981 that the space shuttle program re-energized space exploration. The hours really started racking up once the International Space Station was completed. You can also see the effect of the Challenger (1986) disaster. The Columbia re-entry breakup (2003) is not as easy to see, but it is the cause of the dip in 2003-2004. In fact, it has slowed the pace of NASA shuttle missions to this day.

If you were to add up all the hours every NASA astronaut has spent in space since our first manned mission, that’s almost 31 years. Humans have spent nearly half a life’s worth of time outside Earth’s atmosphere (A good deal more than that, in fact, if you include other nations’ efforts. More on that rsn).

Granted, that’s a pittance, compared to how many people live beneath the atmosphere. (In fact, it surprised me. I thought it would be more.) But hey, it’s a start.

As you can see from the chart above, the US has had seven major piloted space programs since we launched our first astronaut, Alan Shepard, Jr., into space in mid-1961. Since this is my first post on the subject, it seems like a good idea to talk about that launch.

Mercury Redstone 3

On May 5, 1961, 37-year-old Alan Shepard climbed into a tiny capsule atop a liquid-fueled rocket. He rode it up from Cape Canaveral, Florida to an altitude of 116 miles: about forty miles above the upper reaches of the atmosphere. He experienced six gees (six times Earth’s gravitational pull) during liftoff, stayed aloft about 15 and a half minutes, and then splashed down in the waters of the Gulf Stream.

I was very young then, a preschooler, but even so I remember my excitement, and also fear, as I watched the news footage. I recall the wind from the helicopter stirring up the waves that splashed against the capsule as it righted itself.

I can only imagine what it must have felt like, soaring up so high. Not to mention how it felt, coming down.

I remember seeking a glimpse of his face through the little portal, and the thrill I felt when the divers helped him emerge and climb into the sling.

President Kennedy was there, for that first launch.

Since that time, the US has launched 167 piloted missions, and many, many robotic missions. Our astronauts have spent months at a time in the International Space Station, working in cooperation with people from a variety of other nations to do scientific and engineering research.

We have forty-six years of human-piloted space exploration under our belt*. Alan Shepard and Mercury-Redstone 3 set the stage for everything else.

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*Van Allen belt, that is.

Notes: Now that I’ve gotten started, let me haul out the usual caveats. I pulled the graphical data together primarily from NASA’s mission data pages, with Wikipedia as a secondary source (in particular for the International Space Station). About five percent of the data (in particular, maximum altitude and distance traveled, which will follow in impending posts) was not readily available online, in which case I SWAG’d^ it, based on data from other missions. In other words, there is slop in the data. Don’t use it for your doctoral thesis, or to calculate whether you have enough oxygen to survive till the rescue team arrives.

Also, I currently only have information on US astronauts. I hope to add other countries soon. Watch this, er, space.

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^Scientific Wild Assed Guess. It’s tethered to real numbers to some degree, but it definitely floats around in the ether to some degree, too.