DIY Pressure Suit Testing Feature Parts II and III

Parts II and III (the conclusion) are now up at explorersweb.com, the premiere website for global exploration; air, space, polar, mountain and ocean. Thanks to Tina Sjogren for covering the story!

Feature at Explorersweb.com

Online now, part 1, and parts 2 and 3 in the next few days: click here for the story.

Smashing the ‘Right Stuff' Fallacy: Building a Pressure Suit for DIY Space Flight

An upcoming talk and pressure suit demo for the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry. These are always fun!

Science Pub Hillsboro

Smashing the ‘Right Stuff' Fallacy: Building a Pressure Suit for DIY Space Flight with Dr. Cameron M. Smith

Space suits are simple in principle and are mostly used for launch to orbit and return to Earth. Still, building such a garment has taken Dr. Cameron M. Smith five years, but it’s kept him alive during several tests (underwater, altitude chamber, hours-sitting pressurized) and is now ready for a rebuild so that he can fly it to above the 63,000-foot ‘Armstrong Line’ in Summer 2015 in the first manned flight of Copenhagen Suborbitals' DIY manned space program. In this talk, Dr. Smith will cover the history of the Copenhagen project, why an anthropologist became involved with space exploration, and introduce a new partnership with Copenhagen Suborbitals.

Dr. Cameron M. Smith of Portland State University's Department of Anthropology began his career excavating million-year-old stone tools in Africa and today combines his archaeological interests with a consideration of human evolution and space colonization. He is applying his interests in his collaboration with the scientists at Icarus Interstellar's Project Hyperion, a reference study for an interstellar craft capable of voyaging to a distant star by the end of this century.

Recently Dr. Smith presented a paper at the NASA/DARPA '100 Year Starship Study.' His recent publications include "Starship Humanity" (Scientific American, Jan. 2013) and the book "Emigrating Beyond Earth: Human Adaptation and Space Colonization (Springer-Praxis, 2013).

A recent interview with Dr. Smith, about interstellar human evolution, can be found at Scientific American podcasts.

Goodbye, Gondola!

Goodbye Gondola! The entire gondola mockup has been entirely dismantled after occupying my place since New Year's day 2012. You can bet we cannibalized every useful valve and millimeter of wire from the old girl! This is because we will now build a metal replica of the entire 1.6m-diameter Tycho capsule, built in Denmark, here in my apartment. And that's because to integrate the suit with the capsule we have to get very specific now, as the pilot, for example, will ride on the back, not seated upright as Ben Wilson is here, in one of many thrilling tests in the past couple of years. And in 15 I'll fly in a capsule under a balloon to test the life support system above the Armstrong Limit (63k feet). Time to start training -- simulated flights complete with comms, expendables (coolant ice, battery power, breathing gas) and so on. It was great living with the gondola, but that's all over!

New Publications

Two new publications out, one on models of cultural evolution in Physics of Life Reviews, the other a popular science feature on evolution in Skeptical Inquirer. PDF's can be found under links ('Papers', and 'Popular Science', respectively) at my Academia.edu page.

And Now For Something Completely Different

While I am working on organizational issues regarding the pressure suit, I am also working on my Fall 2014 book, "Atlas of Human Prehistory". This diagram sketches out the origins of anatomically- and behaviorally-modern humans in Africa. Each such diagram will be on one large page, the facing page will be a dense essay covering all sites mentioned and summarizing the issue. Lotta work to do, 100 diagrams, 100 dense pages, each heavily referenced! Yahoo!

Link to PDF diagram.

Move Forward!

Occasionally I like to post here a piece of music that seems to move me forward in my thoughts and actions. I imagine this will do something, for someone, somewhere :)