wired science from elon to space junk

Wired Science: From Elon to Space Junk

Wired Magazine is a favorite of mine, and although I don't watch much

TV, I have managed to catch a couple of episodes of their spin-off

show Wired Science on PBS, and it's quite good. But usually I hear

something about a segment I want to watch and then forget to watch it.

The good news is that they put a lot of their video segments on line

after each broadcast.

Case in point: the video segment from last week on "space junk"

(above). The "space junk" in this case is not hazardous debris in

Earth orbit, it's actually space hardware that has been abandoned or

sold to private dealers. The hosts in this segment visit a company in

North Hollywood, California that has a huge inventory of spacecraft

parts dating back to the Apollo era. Their customers have often been

movie studios and private collectors, but now they also have NASA and

other engineers visiting to salvage parts to be studied and perhaps

reverse engineered for the new Constellation moon program! They have

also removed internal parts from the old Saturn V boosters that are on

display in Huntsville, AL and at KSC in Florida. Interesting and

ironic - it seems that in the rush to meet JFK's promise to land on

the moon by 1970 that many of the devices and systems that were

designed and built were not especially well documented (or perhaps

documents were thrown away like the remaining Saturn V's). By

measuring and testing various valves, pumps, and other specialized

parts from Apollo-era hardware, they may save time and cost on

designing and building a similar part for the Constellation program.

There's also a great interview with Elon Musk from the first episode