Author: Joe

Space Symposium

I’ve been meaning to work on finishing my organization of the pictures from our family trip to the UK but that still hasn’t happened. I’m finally stopping letting that keep me from posting, but hopefully I’ll finish that at some point.

Every year the Space Symposium is held at the Broodmoor in Colorado Springs. I’ve never managed to talk my way into being involved with the booth my company does (I’m a programmer, not a presenter), but I did manage to visit this year to wander the floor where all the booths are set up.

XCOR is a space tourism company that’s still building their craft. Their booth had a mockup of the vehicle. I didn’t get a great picture of the vehicle overall but I love the logo on the side of it. The person running the booth said the current target is to start flight tests this year.
Lynx Mockup

I was at the symposium the day after the CRS-6 first stage exploded on attempted landing on a barge in the Atlantic (video here), but at the time video and details hadn’t been released. I spent a while chatting with the lady in the SpaceX booth about the publicly released information at the time, and I even got to sit in the Dragon 2 control seat mockup:
Dragon 2 Controls Mockup

The Lockheed Martin booth had this on display:
EFT-1 Orion Back Shell
That’s part of the back shell of the Orion capsule flown on EFT-1. Despite being on the back of the capsule the heat was intense enough to damage the paint on the flag.

New Theme

Google has started including mobile-friendliness as a criteria for page ranking, so I’ve updated to the WordPress 2015 theme.

London, Day 1

Normally I’d just put up some of what few pictures I took and call it a post, but we traded pictures after we got back. That means that alongside my 138 pictures I have 1300 pictures taken by my sister and 612 taken by my dad. For comparison, Allison took nearly as many pictures in the British Museum alone as I took the entire trip.

We arrived in London in the morning, met Dad at the airport, then made our way to the bed and breakfast we were staying at to dump our luggage. After that it was a reasonably short walk to Buckingham Palace, where many pictures were taken.
Buckingham Palace
Note that it was actually sunny, I hear that’s rare.

After we’d had enough standing around watching people wave selfie-sticks about taking pictures of themselves we wandered through Green Park.
Green Park Gates
We didn’t go through those gates, they’re apparently special and were locked, but there was a path around them to get into the park.

At the top of the hill we found a bus stop for a hop on-hop off line of tour buses and paid a lot of money for tickets to be able to ride the buses and their river boats for two days. Then we got on the bus for a lightning tour of London:

Trafalgar Rooster
Trafalgar Square has four plinths but only three are occupied by permanent statues. The fourth apparently didn’t get a statue built due to lack of funds, so every so often they install something new there (wiki article).

St Pauls Cathedral
St Paul’s Cathedral

Westminster Palace
Westminster Palace (parliment)

Tower Bridge
Tower Bridge from up the river

Tower of London
Tower of London (side opposite the river)