It's been 40 years . . . why haven't we gone back?

On July 20th, it will have been 40 years since many of us clustered around our tiny black-and-white televisions, watching the first moon landing (or for those of you of conspiracist leanings, a really convincing sound stage in Area 51). Why, after all this time, haven't we gone further? Why, for that matter, have we not been back to the moon for over a generation? Ronald Bailey explains the real reason:

The Apollo moon landings have often been compared to the explorations of Christopher Columbus and the Lewis and Clark expedition to Oregon. For example, on the 20th anniversary of the first moon landing, President George H.W. Bush declared, "From the voyages of Columbus to the Oregon Trail to the journey to the Moon itself: history proves that we have never lost by pressing the limits of our frontiers."

But what boosters of the moon expeditions overlook is that the motive for pressing the limits of our frontiers in those cases was chiefly profit. In his report from his first voyage, Columbus predicted that his explorations would result in "vast commerce and great profit." The extension of commerce was also the chief justification that President Thomas Jefferson gave in his secret message to Congress requesting $2,500 to fund what would become the Lewis and Clark expedition.

Forty years later, as we bask in the waning prestige that the Apollo missions earned our country, we must keep in mind that humanity will some day colonize the moon and other parts of the solar system, but only when it becomes profitable to do so.

Back in 1969, my friend Alan Fairfield and I sat in fascination (at least in the golden memory, they do . . . we were nine: I doubt that we paid as much attention to the broadcast as his mother thought we should). Mrs. Fairfield told us that we'd be able to go to the moon ourselves by the time we were grown up. It didn't turn out that way, and at the current rate of progress, it may not turn out that way for my grandkids.

But I still hope, one day . . .

Zaphod, call home!

Betelgeuse may have had a slight accident:

The red giant star Betelgeuse in the constellation Orion — famed as the home sun of Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy characters Zaphod Beeblebrox and Ford Prefect — is shrinking rapidly. Astronomers say that it has shrunk by 15 per cent since 1993, by which they mean that it actually did so in the mid 16th century. It may, in fact, already have exploded.

Betelgeuse, before it shrank, was thought by astro boffins to be so large that if it were placed in the middle of our solar system, Jupiter — out beyond the asteroid belt in reality — would lie inside it. Now it has shrunk by a distance equal to the orbital radius of Venus.

"To see this change is very striking," said Charles Townes, UC Berkeley emeritus physics prof and Nobel Prize winner. "We will be watching it carefully over the next few years to see if it will keep contracting or will go back up in size."

Fascinating, right? But wait — it gets even more interesting, in the Chinese sense:

The huge star, one of the brightest in the sky, is thought to lie about 430 light years from our solar system, so the changes being observed now actually occurred in 1579 AD. Many boffins believe that Betelgeuse is so vast that it's liable to go supernova — that is, blow up with stupendous, galaxy-shaking force — within a millennium or so. Indeed, it might already have exploded at some point in the last 430 years, in which case the flash wouldn't yet have reached us.

If Betelgeuse has gone supernova in the last 400-odd years, the impact could be rather impressive. The good news is, as far as we can tell, we're outside the kill zone of Betelgeuse. We think.

North Korea's next launch

DigitalGlobe, a satellite imaging firm, has released a photo of what appears to be the next North Korean rocket:

The Register says:

The image, released by commercial satellite Earth-imaging firm DigitalGlobe, shows the North Korean launch gantry at Musudan-ri, where the country's larger missiles and rockets are test fired. In commercial satellite images produced in recent months, the gantry has stood empty: but in the DigitalGlobe image — taken yesterday — a large multistage rocket is clearly visible.

[. . .]

Both the US and Japan have deployed warships equipped with SM-3 ballistic missile interceptors to the area. However, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has said there are no plans to interfere with a North Korean launch; this suggests that the warships will only shoot if the rocket's trajectory appears to offer a threat to Japan. North Korea has previously test-fired a shorter ranged missile across Japan into the Pacific.

Our cluttered near-Earth space

Wired created this image from ESA data:

Humans have ventured into space over the last 50 years, and all manner of junk has been left behind. From tiny bolts to whole space stations, people have discarded lots of stuff up there. Much of it eventually dies a fiery death as it falls through Earth's atmosphere, but some larger debris poses risks for astronauts and spacecraft that could collide with it. Here are some of the quirkier items left in space . . .

Accident? Or the first move in Space War I?

An American satellite is taken out by a collision with a Russian satellite. Coincidence? Russian hunter-killer test? IDG News Service reports:

A commercial Iridium communications satellite and decommissioned Russian satellite both appear to have been destroyed after an unprecedented collision in space, Iridium said Wednesday.

The collision took place on Tuesday and was verified by U.S. government organizations that track satellites and other orbits, said Iridium, which is based in Bethesda, Maryland.

The Iridium network, which offers satellite telephone and data service to governments, corporations, media and other groups worldwide, is made up of 66 satellites orbiting approximately 800 kilometers above the Earth's surface. This low-earth orbit means the satellites orbit the globe continuously and so, if enough are put into space, all parts of the planet can be covered with service at all times.

QotD: Bad SF/Fantasy Writing

[Responding to the question "what turns you off in SF/Fantasy reading:] Egregiously bad science. Backgrounds that don't hang together (vampirism should not be ancient, secret and prone to spreading like a virgin field plague. If starship navigators are rare and die after a dozen trips, there should not be a large population of tramp starships. Ideally, one should not equal two and the standard method of landing a spaceship should not be the crash-landing).

The number one thing that turns me off is when it becomes clear that the author considers most humans a waste of valuable meat. See Bova's Titan where it's clear most of the humans in the Saturn system have no productive value, despite being a collection of scientists annoying enough to have been sent almost 10 AU from home, or David Marusek's Mind Over Ship, which includes this little rant:

"So who needs people? People are so much dead weight. They eat up our profits. They produce nothing but pollution and social unrest. They drive us crazy with their pissing and moaning. I think we can all agree that Corporation Earth is in need of a serious downsizing . . ."

James D. Nicoll, posting to the Lois McMaster Bujold mailing list, 2009-01-17

QotD: The dark science of dark matter

Roughly a decade ago, it was discovered the expansion of the universe is accelerating, not decreasing as expected. This led to the assumption there must be "dark energy" as well as the conjectured "dark matter," because some force must be providing the impetus of the cosmic acceleration. Dark matter, if it exists, is substance in some guise other than stars, planets, nebulae and black holes, and would explain why celestial objects move as if the galaxies contain substantially more mass than can be detected. Dark energy, if it exists, would be roughly the opposite of gravity. Gravity attracts, its effect declining with distance. The conjectured dark energy repels, and increases with distance — the farther the galaxies move apart as the cosmos expands, the more punch dark energy packs, steadily increasing cosmic acceleration. It's just that, um, er, science has only vague indications of what dark matter is and not the slightest clue what dark energy might be. Physics and astronomy departments at leading universities rather cavalierly have embraced an assumption that as much as 96 percent of all mass and energy in existence is dark matter and dark energy, neither of which can be located or explained. We can't locate 96 percent of the universe — but trust us, we're experts!

Gregg Easterbrook, "TMQ: Ministers of defense", ESPN Page Two, 2009-01-06

Got a spare fanbelt?

NASA — or rather, a firm doing data recovery for NASA — needs a 1972 Toyota Corolla fan belt:

It looks as if it belongs aboard Dr Who's Tardis and needs a fan belt from a 36-year-old Toyota Corolla to get going, but experts are betting that an old refrigerator-sized tape recorder can help to analyse "fresh" data from NASA's Apollo missions to the moon.

Improbable as it sounds, the 1960s-vintage IBM729 Mark 5 and the 173 untouched magnet tapes from Apollos 11, 12 and 14 are housed at a data recovery firm in Perth.

The information contained on the tapes, which deals with lunar dust, is unique and valuable.

NASA "misplaced" the original tapes, revealing the blunder only in 2006. It would benefit from the information contained on the copies in Perth for its planned return to the moon.

Guy Holmes, chief executive of SpectrumData, found the recorder in Sydney at the Australian Computer Museum, a little-known not-for-profit endeavour run by enthusiasts.

"The machine needs to be restored," Mr Holmes said. "It uses fan belts - we're looking for a 1972 Toyota Corolla - and other parts need to be replaced. We'll probably be ready to plug it into the wall in January."

Whole thing here. H/T to Roger Henry for the original link.

IP Addresses . . . in Spaaaaaaace!

An interesting summary at Slashdot points to this article on making TCP/IP spaceworthy:

For the last several years, Vint Cerf, co-creator of TCP/IP and now a VP at Google (Nasdaq: GOOG), has worked with colleagues from NASA and elsewhere to extend Internet connectivity to deep space.

If their work succeeds, astronauts on manned missions to Mars and other distant locations could keep in touch with researchers worldwide (while maintaining their Twitter links). (Notably, Cerf's work began prior to his start at Google and continues independently of that company.)

Deep space presents daunting challenges to Internet communications. These include distance; line-of-sight obstructions (like meteors); weight issues (high-powered antennas are often too heavy to send on a space mission); and the need for specialized "hardened" equipment that can automatically heal itself or be fixed via remote (very remote) network management.

Cerf and others are engaged in several efforts to address these challenges. One approach is to modify the satellite payload design now used to link IP routers with Ka-band satellites in government and business networks. Some researchers think an adjusted satellite-based IP would work fine, as long as links were made to planets or highly concentrated communities in space, mimicking the successful one-to-many transmission patterns of today's high-powered Ka-band gear.

Reasons for pessimism

Don't read this if you're easily depressed. It's the latest report from Ronald Bailey at the Global Catastrophic Risks conference:

But before becoming too complacent, keep an eye out for reports on the 210-330 meter asteroid Apophis-there's a 1 in 45,000 chance that it could hit the earth on April 13, 2036. Measurements in the next 3 to 4 years will determine just how big a chance of a collision there is.

Gamma Ray Bursts

Technion physicist Arnon Dar warned of another space hazard — gamma ray bursts (GRBs). GRBs were originally detected by U.S. military satellites that were checking to see if the Soviets were testing nuclear weapons. GRBs are beams of highly energetic photons produced when a gigantic star goes supernova. Dar described a GRB beam hitting the earth would be like a kiloton bomb per square kilometer going off at the top atmosphere. He speculated that some of the earlier mass extinctions, such as the Permian extinction in which perhaps 90 percent of all life died out might have been caused by GRBs.

So are there any stars likely to go supernova nearby? Dar pointed out that the gigantic star Eta Carinae at a distance of 7,500 light years has been extremely unstable of late. Eta Carinae is 100 times more massive than the sun and 5 million times brighter. When it goes it will be a hypernova. Dar then gave us the good news: Eta Carinae's axis is pointed away from the earth, so the GRB beam it will generate when it dies will be aimed far from us. However, don't get too complacent about GRBs. Future of Humanity Institute research fellow Anders Sandberg mentioned that some astronomers are worried that we may be looking down the barrel of gamma ray gun when the WR 104 binary located 8,000 light years away goes supernova.

Just to add to your worries . . . we'd get very little real warning that a neighbouring star had gone supernova: the GRB beam would arrive almost simultaneously with the visual or radio wave evidence of the event.

Messages to the stars

Lore Sjöberg takes it upon himself to grade the various attempts to communicate with extra-terrestrial intelligences:

The Pioneer Plaques

These are identical, gold-plated plaques attached to the Pioneer 10 and 11 spacecraft. They feature a picture of the solar system, a picture of the probes and a pictorial representation of the hyperfine transition of neutral hydrogen. Ring any bells? No? Well, it also has a picture of a naked man and woman on it. Ah, yes. Now you remember.

Many people considered this nothing more than interstellar porn. Others objected to the fact that the man is the one waving his hand, presumably to give the woman time to bake the aliens a nice batch of muffins. My objection is that the people depicted have no body hair at all. Aliens are gonna come down and think we're living in symbiosis with our pubes.
Grade: C

The Voyager Record

I love that we sent an LP. It's so delightfully retro! I expect alien life forms to discover it and say, "Clearly, this is the work of a truly groovy civilization. We do not know what to expect when we visit their planet, but we should prepare ourselves for an extremely mellow experience." In actuality, the funkiest track on the album is "Johnny B. Goode," which I think is a poor choice. I mean, I'm not sure how one carries a guitar in a gunnysack, and I was born on this planet.
Grade: B

"I can see your house from here!"

A very cool image indeed: Earth at night:

Click the image to see the whole thing.

QotD: The missing universe

Fritz Zwicky of Caltech noted in 1933 that large clusters of galaxies don't contain enough visible matter to keep themselves from flying apart. By the 1980s, it had become apparent that individual galaxies don't contain enough visible matter to hold their stars. This triggered the searches for "dark energy" and "dark matter," postulated cosmic forces. Many projects are seeking evidence of dark energy and dark matter, including the Korean Invisible Mass Search, a set of detectors buried inside Jeombong Mountain. The latest estimate from NASA's Microwave Anisotropy Probe suggests that space is 4 percent ordinary matter, 22 percent dark matter and 74 percent dark energy. What might dark energy and dark matter be? No one has the slightest idea. We can't locate 96 percent of the universe. But trust us, we're experts!

Gregg Easterbrook, "TMQ: State of the Nation", ESPN Page 2, 2007-11-12

An unromantic view of shooting stars

Col. Chris Hadfield of the Canadian Space Agency discusses the differences between bears in the woods and astronauts in space.

Pluto comes clean

John Scalzi lets the cat out of the bag on how Pluto is feeling:

The funny thing about the demotion is that I never actually wanted to be a planet, you know? I was out here minding my own business and then suddenly Clyde Tombaugh is staring at me. And the next thing I know, people start calling me and telling me I'm the newest planet. And I remember saying, I don't know if I want that responsibility. And they said, well, you can't not be a planet now, Walt Disney's already named a character after you. That's really what made me a planet. Not the astronomers, but that cartoon dog. People loved that dog.

Ironically, I'm a cat person.

I'm not going to sue. Who am I going to sue? You think the International Astronomical Union has any money to speak of? There's a reason the most popular event at an astronomer's conference is the free buffet. [. . .]

One thing about something like this is you find out who your friends are. Jupiter couldn't have been nicer during the whole thing. Saturn's been a real sweetheart, too. And Neptune — well, we go way back. We're simpatico, always have been. But some others, eh. Not so nice.

No, I don't want to name names. They know who they are.

Oh, fine. Mercury. I got into the club, and Mercury was suddenly my best buddy. And I thought, well, okay — we're close to the same size, both of us have eccentric orbits, we've both got a 3:2 resonance thing going on. Similarities, you know? So we hang out, get to know each other, fine, whatever. Then the IAU vote comes down and I haven't heard from him since. Like the demotion might be catching or something. He may be right; he's not exactly a brilliant lane-sweeper himself.

Optimistic report from SpaceX

Dale Amon has an upbeat report on the recent test flight data from SpaceX:

It turns out that as many of us suspected, there was a feedback between fuel slosh and the control equations:

In a nutshell, the data shows that the increasing oscillation of the second stage was likely due to the slosh frequency in the liquid oxygen (LOX) tank coupling with the thrust vector control (engine steering) system. This started out as a pitch-yaw movement and then transitioned into a corkscrewing motion. For those that aren't engineers, imagine holding a bowl of soup and moving it from side to side with small movements, until the entire soup mass is shifting dramatically. Our simulations prior to flight had led us to believe that the control system would be able to damp out slosh, however we had not accounted for the perturbations of a contact on the stage during separation, followed by a hard slew to get back on track.

There was indeed a contact of the first stage with the bell of the stage two motor at stage separation and it was indeed not a big thing [. . .] The vehicle will be launching a satellite on its next flight

TV Webcast worth watching

SpaceX may have a launch later today:

The flight readiness review conducted tonight shows all systems are go for a launch attempt at 4pm California time (11pm GMT) tomorrow (Monday). The webcast can be seen at www.spacex.com/webcast.php and will start at T-60 minutes. Please check back for updates, as the launch will be postponed if we have even the tiniest concern.

Too ugly to fly

Blue Origin had a successful test launch and landing of their VTOL sub-orbital prototype on November 13 (reported on their website by Jeff Bezos). It's an odd looking craft:

Photo from the Blue Origin website

The video shows the craft taking off and landing again (after reaching a height of 285 feet), but it just looks wrong. Of course, after all the footage of traditional rockets and the shuttle, anything a bit unusual is going to look weird.

Riiiiiights iiiiiiiin Spaaaaaaace!

If you've ever considered homesteading off old home Terra, you'll want to read Ed Minchau's round-up of what the current legal situation is for owning property outside the atmosphere.

"Space is ours, bitches"

A fascinating summary of the newly revised US National Space Policy, at Hit and Run:

"The danger against which we all must be vigilant," [Robert Luaces, U.S. representative to the U.N. General Assembly (UNGA) First Committee on Disarmament and International Security] said, "is not some theoretical arms race in space, but threats that would deny peaceful access to and use of space — especially ground-based space denial capabilities intended to impede the free access to and use of space systems and services."

In other words, space is ours, bitches.

Which isn't to say that there won't be lots of space-based fun for all. Said Luaces: "We also believe other nations have the right to be in space as well, and that those nations who have space systems, services and capabilities in space have the right of free passage; that is, their satellites should be able to go wherever they go unimpeded." The document should also give hope to commerical/private space nerds, with significant verbiage mandating coordinated government action to "enable a dynamic, globally competitive domestic commercial space sector in order to promote innovation, strengthen U.S. leadership, and protect national, homeland, and economic security."

Past views of the future Mars

Tim Cavanaugh has a linkulacious post at Hit and Run covering a lot of Martian (turned out to be imaginary) territory.

Where have you gone, Chesley Bonestell?

Now this is what these here internets were invented for: Walt Disney's wonderful 1957 science reel Mars and Beyond, preserved for the ages, or until youtube gets bought up by Google or somebody. Say what you will about Walt — he was a friend of science, and this documentary features the state of the art in Martian technology, from the golden age of Wernher von Braun's Marsprojekt. When these kinds of movies work well, they remain fascinating equally for what was right, what was wrong, and what was wrong but still seems kinda right. All of it narrated by the great Paul Frees, whom you will recognize immediately as That Guy Who Narrated All That Stuff.

Xena becomes Eris! All Hail Discordia!

The Register reports:

The distant rock which prompted astronomers to strip Pluto of its planethood has been offically named Eris, the International Astronomical Union (IAU) announced Wednesday.

Eris is the Greek goddess of discord, hinting at the troubled ordination of the newly-discovered body.

One of Eris' discoverers, Michael Brown of the California Institute of Technology, told AP the new name was "too perfect to resist." Eris' moon gets the monicker Dysnomia, after Eris' daughter — the spirit of lawlessness — in Greek mythology.

So, just to confuse the situation further for layfolk like us . . . we now have a solar system composed of a star, eight "real" planets (Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune), and an as-yet-undetermined number of dwarf planets, starting with Ceres, Pluto, and Eris.

Look out for "George"

A co-worker sent this link to a NASA page on viewing the planet they once called "George":

English astronomer William Herschel discovered the planet in 1781 during a telescopic survey of the zodiac. He promptly named it the Georgium Sidus (the Georgian Planet) in honor of his patron, King George III. Later, to the everlasting delight of schoolchildren, George was re-named Uranus, the Greek god of the sky.

Uranus had been seen many times before but mistaken for a star. The earliest recorded sighting was in 1690 when astronomer John Flamsteed cataloged it as 34 Tauri, the 34th star of Taurus the Bull. We can understand the error. Uranus is so far from the sun it looks like a star to the unaided eye. And it moves so slowly; you have to watch for decades to realize that it is a wanderer — or, in ancient Greek, a planētēs.

In modern times, Uranus has become all but impossible to see. The planet is naturally faint, and urban lights wipe it out completely. No one notices when Uranus soars overhead.

Nevertheless, you can see Uranus this month. Another planet will guide you to it.

"Do you remember when . . .?"

Twenty years ago, the Challenger was destroyed shortly after take-off. For many people, it was the 1980s equivalent of the Kennedy assassination . . . people remember exactly when they heard the news. I'm no different.

I was working as a co-op student at IBM Canada, when Don McCaig, one of the "lifers", came up to me in the hall and said, in a shocked voice, "the shuttle just blew up". I didn't immediately grasp what he was talking about — we had a company van we called "the shuttle" to move staff from the main lab building to the office building in which we worked. At first, I thought he meant that shuttle. I started to make some lame joke about auto maintenance, and then it hit me what he was really talking about.

QotD: Competition

Competition provides not only useful criticism but a continuous source of experiments. It gives people . . . the ideas with which to create still more progress and encourages them, too, to come up with incremental improvements. By picking winners, stasist protectionism eliminates this learning process, which includes learning what does not work.

"Premature choice," warns the physicist Freeman Dyson, "means betting all your money on one horse before you have found out whether she is lame." Protecting established interests from new challengers is one form of premature choice. But technocratic planners also sometimes kill existing alternatives to force their new ideas to "succeed." To protect the space shuttle, NASA not only blocked competition from private space launch companies, it also eliminated its own expendable launchers. Such pre-emptive verdicts often mark public works projects. Planners pick an all-purpose winner, squeeze out alternatives, and eliminate any real chance of experiment and learning.

Virginia Postrel, The Future and its Enemies

Saturn . . . planet of confusion for scientists

According to a brief report on MSN, one of the rings of Saturn is actually a spiral:

"These strands, initially interpreted as concentric ring segments, are in fact connected and form a single one-arm trailing spiral winding at least three times around Saturn," Charnoz and colleagues write in the Nov. 25 issue of the journal Science.

Charnoz's team made computer simulations to explore the spiral's origin. The new explanation raises more questions than it answers.

"The newly reported spiral is in a class by itself," says Mark Showalter, a SETI Institute researcher who wrote an analysis of the discovery for Science.

And it is changing rapidly. The spiral wound itself tighter between November 2004 and May 2005, the Cassini observations show. It will continue to tighten until the strands blend into a more uniform feature, Showalter said.

Saturn sounds like the most unusual planet in the system, and it seems to get less and less easy to understand the more data is gathered.

Hat tip to Bill Wenrich, from the Bujold mailing list.

SETI going home

The SETI@home project announced that they are closing down their original system and merging with Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing (BOINC). Slashdotters discuss.

I've had SETI@home installed on my various machines for quite some time, but I'm not sure if I'll follow to the new BOINC software: there have been some reports that it's more than a bit finicky to set up and get running.

Hat tip to Jon for the original email.

What to do with moondust

Tom sent this interesting NASA link to a mailing list on which I lurk:

Scientists and engineers figuring out how to return astronauts to the moon, set up habitats, and mine lunar soil to produce anything from building materials to rocket fuels have been scratching their heads over what to do about moondust. It's everywhere! The powdery grit gets into everything, jamming seals and abrading spacesuit fabric. It also readily picks up electrostatic charge, so it floats or levitates off the lunar surface and sticks to faceplates and camera lenses. It might even be toxic.

So what do you do with all this troublesome dust? Larry Taylor, Distinguished Professor of Planetary Sciences at the University of Tennessee has an idea:

Don't try to get rid of it — melt it into something useful!

Space toys

Dale Amon got the opportunity to visit Las Cruces over the weekend:

If there is a heaven, then I died and went to Las Cruces this weekend. Or perhaps I stumbled into a jackrabbit hole after one of the long sessions in the hotel bar and found myself inside a space art painting I saw some years back. Whatever the case . . . I was there.

The next NASA funding boondoggle

The American government has announced a $104 billion plan for NASA to return to moon exploration by 2018:

Canada could play a prominent role in NASA's plan to return astronauts to the moon by 2018, scientists with the U.S. space agency said Monday as it unveiled a lunar exploration plan expected to cost upwards of $104 billion US.

The country's internationally recognized expertise in underground drilling in extreme environments such as the far north is a specialized skill that the agency will need for its venture, said NASA chief scientist Jim Garvin.

The remote manipulator known as the Canadarm, a fixture on past space shuttle missions that made its deep-space debut in 1981 and is often lauded as Canada's greatest engineering success, is a shining example of Canada's contributions to the U.S. space program.

Garvin, speaking at the 7th annual International Lunar Conference in Toronto, said NASA will once again need Canada's help in setting up a permanent, "Antarctic-like presence" on the moon — a "beachhead in deep space" that could eventually serve as a staging ground for missions to Mars.

"Canada certainly has a lot to bring to the table," said Garvin, noting that NASA hopes one day to make the moon a livable environment and extract any natural resources it might possess.

While I'm eager to see space exploration get underway again, I don't think entrusting the megabureaucracy of NASA is the right way to go. Private entrepreneurs have been making good progress toward non-governmental space travel (admittedly, they've still got a long way to go), and thus far NASA's major contribution has been to hinder and obstruct as much as they could manage.

NASA is now too mired in bureaucracy to be effective at engineering . . . which has shown up tragically in the shuttle program. Getting back to space is going to cost a lot of money, but better that money be raised by private enterprise, who then bear the costs but also reap the rewards of success.

More Serenity . . . now

The Space Channel (Canadian cable equivalent to the Sci-Fi channel in the US) has a set of Serenity clips available here. There's the trailer you've probably already seen, plus three "behind the scenes" type of clips.

I'm warned by someone who got to see one of the previews that there are some minor spoilers in the clips, but I didn't notice anything that screamed "spoiler" to me . . . your mileage may vary, as they say.

Roll on, September 30!

Some have suspected this for years . . .

. . . that is, that former Minister of National Defence Paul Hellyer is a space alien. Or, more accurately, believes in them.

Hellyer, 82, says he believes not only that UFOs are extraterrestrial visitors, but that some governments — the United States at least — know all about it and are covering up.

He says he believes American scientists have re-engineered alien wreckage from a UFO crash at Roswell, N.M. in 1947 to produce technical marvels.

"I believe that UFOs are real," he said in a recent interview. "I'll talk about that a little bit and a bit about the fantastic cover-up of the United States government and also a little bit of the fallout from the wreckage, by that I mean the material discoveries we have made and how they've been applied to our technology."

Hat tip to Damian Penny.

Ten tech items inspired by science fiction

An old post on Eclecticism details a bunch of 20th century techno-toys and -tools that were predicted by SF authors:

• THE GEOSTATIONARY SATELLITE: Arthur C. Clarke
• THE COMPUTER WORM: John Brunner
• ORGANLEGGING: Larry Niven
• THE WALDO: Robert A. Heinlein
• GYRO-STABILIZED PERSONAL CONVEYANCE: Robert A. Heinlein
• THE WATERBED: Robert A. Heinlein
• HOME THEATER & WALL-MOUNTED TV: Ray Bradbury
• THE FLIP-PHONE: Gene Roddenberry et al.
• THE TASER: "Victor Appleton"
• MULTI-USER DOMAINS IN CYBERSPACE: Vernor Vinge

Hat tip to "Heather" from the Bujold mailing list.

Slashdot chatter on SpaceShipThree

There's a brief news update and plenty of informed (and uninformed) discussion about SpaceShipThree at Slashdot:

The president of spaceflight company Virgin Galactic has recently stated that if the upcoming suborbital service with SpaceShipTwo is successful, the follow-up SpaceShipThree will be an orbital craft. Although orbital spaceflights would be much longer and could potentially dock with orbital space stations, they are also considerably more difficult than suborbital spaceflights. Other private firms working on orbital spaceflight (and potentially in the running for Robert Bigelow's $50 million America's Space Prize for orbital flight) include t/Space and SpaceX.

Strange e-Bay auction of the day

Obi-Wan figurine that actually flew on SpaceShipOne. Proceeds to charities (listed in the auction).

Hat tip to Jason A. Ciastko for posting the link.

Bureaucracy trumps engineering . . . and humanity

Colby Cosh has strong opinions on the rather disturbing information coming out of NASA:

It's a shocking disaster. And what made it more shocking were the continual protestations from Michael Griffin and Bill Parsons that Discovery's current mission was a "test flight" in which major anomalies were anticipated. Was this phrase used freely when the crew of STS-114 — who, for the moment, seem to have dodged a large cream-coloured bullet made out of synthetic insulation — was being recruited? The original test flights of the space shuttle were conducted with crews as small as two members. Question for NASA: why are there five men and two women aboard a spacecraft whose engineering properties were apparently being "tested" for fundamental survivability?

I'm more than upset by the news that the original problem which caused the loss of Columbia has still not been resolved. I'm utterly appalled that the bureaucracy at NASA seems to have decided to deliberately risk the lives of the crew of Discovery in spite of the lack of resolution of that critical problem.

I sure hope that Burt Rutan and company can ready a rescue flight to the space station ASAP: I think we need 'em urgently.

QotD: Shuttle Launch

For the first time in nearly two and a half years, there is a Space Shuttle in orbit.

The launch appears to have gone textbook-perfect, including a Bujold Moment just after main engine cutoff and external tank jettison:

"Well, that was boring."

"I like 'em that way."

Scott Padgett, posting to the Lois McMaster Bujold mailing list

Interplanetary fireworks show on July 4

The Deep Impact spacecraft will attempt to nail a passing comet, Tempel 1, with an 820-pound "bullet". If it's successful, the firework display should be visible with the naked eye and scientists hope to reap some detailed information about the composition of comets:

Scientists hope the July 4 collision will gouge a crater in the comet's surface large enough to reveal its pristine core and perhaps yield cosmic clues to the origin of the solar system.

NASA's fleet of space-based observatories — including the Hubble, Spitzer and Chandra telescopes — along with an army of ground-based telescopes around the world are expected to record the impact and resulting crater.

The big question is: What kind of fireworks can sky-gazers expect to see from Earth?

Scientists do not know yet. But if the probe hits the bull's-eye, the impact could temporarily light up the comet as much as 40 times brighter than normal, possibly making it visible to the naked eye in parts of the Western Hemisphere.

"We're getting closer by the minute," Andrew Dantzler, the director of NASA's solar system division, said earlier this month. "I'm looking forward to a great encounter on the Fourth of July."

Hubble spies out Sauron

The Hubble telescope has captured an image that proves that Sauron escaped from Barad-Dur and is plotting his revenge:

A spectacular, luminous ring offers the best evidence yet that a nearby star is circled by a newly formed solar system.

The ring is composed of dust particles in orbit around Fomalhaut, a bright star located just 25 light years away in the constellation Pisces Austalis — or the Southern Fish. A recent image captured with the Hubble Space Telescope — which makes the system look uncannily like the Great Eye of Sauron from the blockbusting Lord of the Rings trilogy — confirms that Fomalhaut’s ring is curiously offset with respect to the star.

I'd be plotting paths to the nearest volcano if I were you . . .

Hat tip to Pat Matthews.

Enough circuitry to launch Apollo 11

The innards of a not-too-modern industrial coffee machine. It's in the coffee room down the hall from my office, and it looks like someone was so desperate for caffeine this morning that they tore the door open. We're all a little coffee-deprived this afternoon as a result. It did occur to me, as I passed the machine for the third or fourth time today, that there's probably more computing power in that board than the Apollo command module had available back in the 1969 moon mission.

Space Tourism Prospects

Jim Davidson writes that the burgeoning space tourism industry is still having to fight the US government to stay alive:

This time, the problem comes from the USA government export control laws which pretend to license the export of technology that could have military applications. Even though Scaled Composites developed its SpaceShipOne technology for American Paul Allen and did so entirely without government assistance (and, as Rutan explains above, in the face of direct government attempts to prevent it), the would-be masters in the USA government wish to prevent the licensing of SpaceShip technology to Virgin Galactic.

As far as government interference goes, there's a long and sordid history:

Naturally, the whores in government are doing everything they can to prevent this industry from coming into existence. It was easier when all they had to do was throw false charges of felony gambling promotion of a lottery at two entrepreneurs from Houston. It was a bit more complex when Walt Anderson arranged to fly space tourists to Mir, and Mir had to plummet to an untimely death through the machinations of diplomacy. Then NASA tried to drag their heels on letting Dennis Tito aboard the Internationalist Socialist Space Station, but as Russia had control over who it flew there, NASA ended up unable to stop the first space tourist flight.

Expect more obstruction and premeditated government inaction to prevent anyone other than NASA from getting into space.

Dale Amon thinks about spaceports

Dale Amon does a bit of interpretation of Richard Branson's foray into space tourism:

Now notice he is considering more than one spaceport location. He is not talking of abandoing the US launch site in the Mojave. He wants to add another site for suborbital fares. He would have two sites at which he could operate suborbital space ship take offs and landings.

Branson is in the airline business and knows better than I what the size of the market is for people who want to take a short suborbital tourist hop . . . versus the number of high value business people who would pay extraordinary fares to reach the antipodes in 45 minutes. British Air refused to sell him the Concordes, but Richard might just laugh last and best.

Inference two: I expect we will at some point see a proof of concept flight of a Rutan vehicle which leaves the Mojave on a suborbital intercontinental ballistic trajectory and lands in Australia. If he has a vehicle capable of carrying 6 paying passengers for tourism, that same vehicle with a lone pilot can probably boost onto a trans-Pacific trajectory.

"Serenity" trailer release on Tuesday

Nick Packwood also scouted out Joss Whedon's announcement of the (non-spoiler-free) trailer for the Firefly movie Serenity, due in theatres in September.

I can't wait: I've watched the DVD set over and over again (commentary tracks included). Roll on September!

RAH Extremely Limited Edition

Robert A. Heinlein's collected works are to be republished in an extremely limited cloth-bound edition, priced at $2500 for the entire set (and only 5,000 sets are planned). I'm a huge fan of RAH, but I certainly don't expect to be one of the lucky 5,000.

Hat tip to Reason Hit and Run.

Solar Sailing: a new sport for 2100?

Nature is reporting on an interesting non-military missile launch from a Russian submarine in April:

In April, if all goes to plan, a 600-square-metre Mylar sail called Cosmos 1, which looks more like a windmill than a starship, will prove that a spacecraft can be propelled by sunlight alone.

First, though, it will have to be launched into orbit on a converted missile from a Russian nuclear submarine in the Barents Sea. Cosmos 1 is privately funded by the Planetary Society, a US space-advocacy group based in Pasadena, California, which Friedman heads, but it was built in Moscow by the ex-Soviet aerospace company NPO Lavochkin.

After the sail reaches its initial 800-kilometre orbit and unfolds its eight triangular vanes, ground controllers will tilt the vanes like sailors feeling for the wind. A slight boost to the spacecraft's orbit is all they need to demonstrate propulsion by light pressure. It may take a few days, but the Cosmos team won't mind waiting.

It may not be the fast way to go, but it's another one of those old SF ideas that we might soon be accepting as commonplace. . .

The Disaster From Outer Space

Reason's Ronald Bailey talks about some of the legitimate reasons to get back into the space exploration business:

Assuming that Spaceguard did identify an asteroid that was going to strike the Earth several years in advance, what could be done to deflect it? Not much, right now. In November 2004, the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics called for stronger measures to protect our planet from impacts, including the creation of an agency directly responsible for planetary defense, the development of techniques to deflect menacing NEOs, and eventually, test missions on non-threatening NEOs to make sure those techniques work.

One proposal for diverting NEOs, devised by SpaceWorks Inc., is called "The League of Extraordinary Machines." This plan involves an armada of small spacecraft attaching themselves to the NEOs surface. Once attached, the landers would heat up and eject material from the asteroid's surface as a way to change its path away from the Earth.

Space, the final frontier

A post at Samizdata pointed to this interview with Burt Rutan:

One gets the feeling that in restricted niches of the Mojave Spaceport here, work is already underway on bigger and better spaceships. Asked directly about that prospect, Rutan is quick with a "no comment" that comes wrapped in a guarded smile.

"You think this is cool?" Rutan asked, pointing to the freshly flown SpaceShipOne. "Wait 'til you see SpaceShipTwo . . . it is erotic," he added, alluding to the smooth lines of a craft that would seem tangible and touchable — not a minds-eye image of vaporware.

My favourite part of the interview is this:

"Look at the progress in 25 years of trying to replace the mistake of the shuttle. It's more expensive . . . not less . . . a horrible mistake," Rutan said. "They knew it right away. And they've spent billions . . . arguably nearly $100 billion over all these years trying to sort out how to correct that mistake . . . trying to solve the problem of access to space. The problem is . . .it's the government trying to do it."

Depending on government to solve any kind of problem is a long, long step on the road to serfdom. Allowing government (any government) a monopoly on access to space is one of the worst mistakes we could ever make; this is a wonderful, but overdue, correction of that mistake.

Ad astra!

SpaceShipOne Wins the X Prize

Reports from CNN indicate that SpaceShipOne has successfully met the terms of the X Prize Competition by completing a second launch earlier today.

More information, I'm sure, will follow.

The X-Prize Is On The Line Now

SpaceShipOne took off this morning at 7:12 local time from Mojave Airport, in the first of the two required launches to win the X-Prize. Here's an AP report from the New York Post.

I'm keeping my fingers crossed for a successful pair of flights.

Update: Here is an MSNBC report on the flight.

The Pessimist's View of the da Vinci Project

This article by Darren Bernhardt has some scary notes about the da Vinci Project's impending launch:

Saskatoon and Kindersley, (the launch site in Saskatchewan, near the Alberta border), of course, are going to be within bombing range.

And

If (the pilot) loses control and goes on a ballistic trajectory, Saskatoon is in sight. Let me say, this is not a launch for amateurs.

And even more to the point:

If there are any problems, the chances of surviving are zero.

And, then, talking about the gigantic helium balloon to be used to raise the spacecraft into the upper atmosphere:

This thing's going to be so big on the ground that any wind greater than one kilometre per hour is going to kill him.

After all that doom and gloom, do I really need to tell you that the person being quoted, E.J. (Ted) Llewellyn, "has been involved with the Canadian Space Program since 1964"? I thought not. No, there is no sign of sour grapes, no envy, no bitterness implied in any of his careful, reasoned, rational, and dispassionate comments is there?

I'm hoping that he just feels so much more bitter after a successful, safe, triumphant flight and landing by the da Vinci people!

Heinlein's "Moon" to be filmed?

This report from Sci-Fi Wire says that Tim Minnear, who worked on Joss Whedon's Firefly and Angel series, has been hired to create a screenplay for Robert Heinlein's The Moon is a Harsh Mistress.

Although I've really enjoyed Firefly and I'm eagerly anticipating the feature movie next year, I'm still cautious about anyone adapting Heinlein's work for other media. I'll file this one under "tentative approval".

The Canadian Entry in the Space Race

This is very cool. This is actually the first real news I've heard about the Canadian entry in the X-Prize Competition. I wish them the very best of success!

Here's the Reuters report.

The Canadian Entry in the Space Race

This is very cool. This is actually the first real news I've heard about the Canadian entry in the X-Prize Competition. I wish them the very best of success!

Here's the Reuters report.