Following on from Crew Tether Spin - With Final Stage - On Routine Mission To ISS - First Human Test Of Artificial Gravity?, I've got some great videos to share now, showing the Soyuz and final stage spinning to create artificial gravity, over the turning Earth, against the stars. So, let's take a look at the highlights of the mission in video, ready for the Space Show webinar on artificial gravity.

First, launch sequence, if you haven't seen it yet

We are surrounded with an abundance of clean energy, if we only had a way to harness it it. Most people probably know about solar energy, that we would only need to harness a tiny fraction of it to power the entire world (e.g. the Sahara desert has eighteen times the surface area needed to power the entire world).

However, solar power is intermittent, even in deserts, with day night cycles. Wind also is unpredictable. Tidal power is intermittent also. Hydro power on the land is limited - and also often has environmental impact because of the need, usually, to dam a river to get it.

You may remember, a while back I talked about Joe Carroll's ingenious idea to do our first ever true experiment in a gravity tether during a routine Soyuz crew transfer to the ISS, His idea is to use the third stage -which goes into orbit anyway, as the counterweight. Remarkably, the whole thing, even including the spin up to create artificial gravity, uses almost no extra fuel over a normal mission to the ISS. This could help with numerous health issues of zero g. 

The metronome seems such a simple thing, just a machine that goes tick tick, and you then play in time with it. So, why is it that beginner musicians often have so much difficulty keeping in time with it? And why is it that humans find it hard to play like a metronome, why doesn't that come natural to us?

Many musicians and entire musical cultures with a wonderful sense of rhythm don't use a metronome at all. Yet many western musicians spend hours every day with the tool. Do we need it, does it help - and if so what's the best way to work with a metronome? And what about ways of working on rhythm without using a metronome at all?

Elon Musk's ideas are in the news right now, rockets with first stages that fly back to a soft landing under auto pilot. But you might be surprised to learn how many other ideas there are under active development, for low cost ways to get into orbit.

The British Skylon would fly directly into space from a reinforced airport, taking off like a plane, without need to discard anything (single stage to orbit). Then JP Aerospace plan airships to float up to 200,000 feet followed by transfer to a lighter than gossamer skinned, "orbital airship" that never lands, but can accelerate gradually through the near vacuum of the troposphere and above, to orbital velocities.

I'd like to share some of the amazing range of rhythms you can find, linking music and maths, some discovered only in the last few years. These include: fibonacci gamelan patterns - highly structured yet the pattern of beats never repeats; the rhythm you get if two musicians each with perfectly steady rhythm play as out of time as possible; the rhythm of the famous "Cantor's set"; and the fairly recent discovery that many rhythms of music throughout the world are "Euclidean rhythms" - uneven beat patterns pleasing to the ear made with a surprisingly simple construction.