So they could afford to do things more like this.
It’s always a little unnerving to me to see them fly through the ring plane. It makes you realize that as striking they are in appearance, the mass density is very slight, and there’s plenty of open space in there. Not that they couldn’t have had a collision, but they haven’t.
OK, I know, even if they weren’t being forced to waste money, they’d still have trouble getting more funding for more planetary missions.
Building a new community, something out of nothing. It is 1979 and the PC is about to appear in the next year.
When suborbital took off after X-Prize win, was all about tourism. Last year we saw at the first conference that research and education had come to the fore. A lot of surprise last year when over 250 people showed up at first conference, but now providers talking about this as primary market. Life science, earth science, space physics, astronomy and solar physics, lots of new ideas that we couldn’t have imagined a year ago, just heard an idea last night about how to detect extra-solar planets using suborbital flight. Will be able to get more useful microgravity time for many areas than on ISS. Last year over 80 presentations, with double that this year, three hundred pre-registered with a lot of walk-ins this morning. Last year SS2 had just rolled out, but this past year we’ve seen vehicles actually flying. Spaceport America dedicated in October (many here were there), SS2 is doing approach/landing tests, XCOR, Masten and Armadillo manifesting payloads, Blue Origin has announced their cabin payload system, NASTAR offereing regular REM training courses, CRuSR funded, Commercial Spaceflight Federation has new members, and new space policy that encourages commercialization. Flights will be beginning soon with SwRI and others, and next year we may start to see results at this conference.
George Nield of FAA up next.
The latest Carnival of Space is up.
For anyone interested, I’ve never participated in this, primarily because in my experience, they’re not really carnivals of space — they’re carnivals of space science, a subject in which I have little more interest in than other kinds, except to the degree that it provides knowledge of how to develop and settle it. This is a specific instance of a more general irk — when many people learn that I’m an expert on space policy and technology, or I do a radio interview, they assume that I’m both an expert on and interested in space science and astronomy and (even more annoyingly) UFOs. It’s the same kind of general public level of (lack of) knowledge that leads to phrases such as “rocket scientist.”
It’s pretty damn good, even though we can’t really measure it, and better than any digital camera. But maybe not for much longer.
No, but it helps.
From the strange mind of James Lileks:
As we were all taught in grade school, the Eskimos came across the land bridge from Russia, which broke once they were across, and then they settled down and built igloos, invented 37 words for snow, made parkas with fur around the face, and fished. the teacher would note that some continued to go south, and eventually populated the rest of the Americas, where they spent their time raising Maize and not inventing the wheel, hanging around wearing loincloths, and playing a game that involved putting a rubber ball through a stone circle. They also invented chocolate. Then the Spanish came, and –
Hold on, Teacher, why didn’t the Eskimos keep moving south?
We don’t know.
But why would anyone stay there? Especially when the rest of the guys are moving on?
We don’t know.
So the Eskimos are sitting in snow up to their eyebrows, and some guys say “hey, we’re going to keep moving, because this sucks,” and the Eskimos stay because they think it can’t possibly get any better?
We don’t know.
Also, some technological prognostication: videopaint.
Articles like this just show how much we still don’t know about human evolution.
From Lileks:
Says io9: “Two enormous, gamma-ray-emitting structures are bubbling out of the center of our galaxy. And astronomers have no idea what caused them.” That’s comforting. They do have an explanation for the enormous white brackets and letters and numbers, each of which is several hundred light-years across, but about the bubbles they got bupkis. That’s not what gets me, though: it’s the Milky Way. Suddenly it seems as if we really should have a better name for the galaxy. You meet some aliens, work out the language issues, and find out they call the Galaxy “The Hand of God Prime” or “The Torch of the Void” or “The Cradle of Light,” and then they ask us, and then they look at us with their eyes on stalks moving quizzically up and down and say, in their grating metallic voices, “The Fluid of Mammary Glands Road? Seriously?” And one of them spies a Milky Way candy bar – actually, he heard its distinct chemical signature as it underwent a chemical change when the wrapper opened, and this produced a rather dissonant change in the infra-red spectrum, which they usually reserve for tragedy and dark comedy – and he asks why that is named after the galaxy. Or if it’s named for breast milk. “It’s all about tits with you people, isn’t it?” And then we sort of nod and say, well, you got us there, what can we say. But what did you say you called Andromeda, the Comely Buttock? To each his own, then.
Also thoughts on colliding galaxies, and failure to us a turn signal.
One more for my lost childhood — Triceratops never existed.
I got through my dinosaur phase at a pretty young age, but these are pretty cool.