What would it be like to walk around on one?
Category Archives: General Science
How People In Scientific Academia
How Would Other Planets Look?
…if they were the same distance from earth as the moon?
Jupiter is pretty scary. Of course, in the case of the gas giants, to first order, we’d be orbiting them, not them orbiting us.
The World’s Ugliest Animals
This is more of a Friday post, but what the hell.
[Via Debbie Witt, collector of odd links]
Rewriting The Textbooks
…in science. As I’ve been writing for years, science is a process, not a compendium.
Thoughts On The Solar System
…and involuntary ant flights.
I Wish Congress Wouldn’t Make NASA Waste So Much Money
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.
Alan Stern Speaks
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 Misnamed Blog Carnival
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.”
The ISO Of The Human Eye
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.