“If it turns out that the Moon has a number of caves that can provide some protection from radiation and meteor showers, it could be an even more interesting destination than previously thought,” said veteran cosmonaut Sergei Krikalev, quoted in an article by Reuters.”
Damn! I wish I’d known this when I was writing “Moon Dreams!”
As Russel Mead at Via Meadia writes to great effect the Great Loon, the Duck of Death is dead.
And here is Russel Mead’s interesting take on protests etc. A very insightful piece that hit home once more regarding something that puzzled me… ” There was a time long ago when political protest really mattered. The Vietnam protests didn’t end the war (and didn’t keep Nixon from carrying 49 states against George McGovern in 1972), but they helped end the draft. The civil rights movement led to some of the most profound social changes this country has ever seen. Before that, there were labor and suffragette marches…” ” But these days the old style protests remind me of political conventions: empty and pointless (though noisy and publicized) rituals. “ And he draws a comparison to the conventions. Once the conventions were important, before mass media and instant communications, but now they are just rituals the politic druidic class still hold. In the old days a mass rally meant something, life for the working class was twice todays and wages closer to subsistence, and brutality was expected of the police, going to a rally meant something. Today it’s not much more than a smelly holiday. Not to say that there aren’t some grievances and suffering…but OWS is more theater than struggle. And then Amity Shales had this to say about what these folks want, vs what they need.
I am never going to be the blog-media-news miner that Instapundit is. Here is the latest on the SLS fiasco from Rand Simberg, the Space Launch System is a works program, yes well paid and aerospace is effective economic multiplier but the money could be spent to so much better effect!
(edits, still not getting all of this right the first time)
A concept to boost parts of the ISS either into Lunar orbit or to one of the Lagrange points. One negative comment pointed out the ISS requires a lot of support. Well there is no reason you can’t resupply and crew as needed instead of full time. The point here would be reuse of a facility that is already in orbit ( $aving in the tens of millions to billions in the process) and by that point would have fulfilled it’s original purpose (however vague that was.)
Boeing is getting crap for suggesting the X-37 could be used as is, scaled up, or scaled and crewed. How can it be a bad idea to take a successful aerospace-craft as the basis of future growth. The original X-37 was intended for just this sort of scaling. O.K. it being Boeing does worry me, a little, but they have the scale, resources, focus (maybe) and balls (probably) to do this. My main concern is the crowding out of smaller eSpace players. But the eSpace crowd appear to have gotten their climbing claws dug in and seem to be on a flight path of their own. As long as BigB is climbing as well as, not instead of, I think we’re good.
International Space Station's Expedition 29 crew on September 17, 2011, while cruising over the Indian Ocean near Australia and south of Madagascar
Is it only after certain brute needs are met that we can look up and see the wonder, the beauty of the world around us? And if you are trapped in the mental, social, and light smeared deserts where too many of us live in, does it takes a special imagination to see beyond the here and now?
SNC Dream Chaser Docked with ISS
Sierra Nevada Corporation dreams big with the Dream Chaser, a crewed spaceplane based on the NASA/AF experimental lifting body designs from the ’70s (It was the crash of one of these that was a lead in to the Six Million Dollar Man TV show by the way, not to put you off.)
They have a composite fuselage built and have experimented / developed (like Virgin Galactic) a hybrid rocket motor. A hybrid rocket motor has a solid fuel but liquid / gaseous oxidizer. You don’t have to deal with the complex plumbing of a pure liquid motor or the uncontrolability of a solid. They are talking to Scaled Composites/Virgin Galactic about catching a ride into the stratosphere on a White Knight II. I’d even guess a sub orbital launch from a WKII is likely. I then hope they talk to SpaceX about a ride to orbit on a Falcon. There is no reason these various guys shouldn’t be looking at cooperation as their technologies mature, or not. Its possible the SpaceX dragon will be a wonderful cargo hauler but not a real solution for crew return or maybe won’t really be reusable….
There seem to be a lot of people dreaming about a lot of options, far and away above what NASA has been able to do for most of my life. I can only hope this continues.
And by the way, the guys who are supporting this stuff, they’re all in the 1% the OWS crowd are against. When OWS talk about bankers, they almost have my sympathy, but when I look to eSpace and Steve Jobs, even Gates, then that faint flicker, flickers out.
You have to have big assets to make big dreams real, and as long as they are spending it on this sort of thing, I’m all for them keeping every last cent of what they make in the money world.
What happens when your memory is so faulty you don’t even know your memory is faulty?
I was reading an article in an actual paper magazine Brain Power that was discussing the problems of a patient with a particular type of brain damage. The patient had a form of amnesia that let him remember old information, from before the brain damage, but not since, the person can do all the normal things, dress and take care of themselves, but they are living in an eternal now. And because all they have is a fixed past and an utterly confusing now their mind basically fills in the gaps, without ongoing memories the persons brain/mind cannot do the sort of ‘running average’ comparison of the now with the near, recent, etc past that keeps us (most of us, relatively) grounded in the hear an now. So this person asked a simple question about where they are and why, would come up with various stories, from the nearly right to the utterly fantastical and apparently believe them and operate as if they were true.
So maybe writing Sci Fi requires a certain amount of amnesia?
There is a very interesting article at Baen the premier outlet for Sci Fi these days particularly Mil Sci Fi. Mr. Dunn has done an excellent job of outlining the current trajectory of the mil world from the threat to the budget and the current reaction of the Tech Services, the Navy and Air Force, I eagerly await the second part which will deal with the ground forces.
The situation in grunt land has always been more complex than that in the technical services, not to say that the sea or the air are simple, just simpler, on land you have the interaction of so many things that it is hard to readily predict what will work and what won’t.
I can hear a lot of cat calls regarding the fact that Navies and Air Forces have made huge missteps. And I agree but in general those mistakes while suboptimal where still better than what came before. In the mud its not clear that this is always the case. Now I’m not talking about weapons like nukes or even heavy artillery, these are technical services, but as we have found out in Iraq and Af’stan its boots on the ground that matter and a thousand little actions that eventually spell success or failure.
In the J.S.Zaloga book Panther vs. Sherman focusing on the battle of the bulge the author re-examines the face off between these two tanks. And while in most pure technical terms of armor, gun, ground pressure, engine power, the Sherman comes off the worse, in fact tactically it often won. For many reasons, reliability, more vehicles, fighting from ambush, generally more agile, better visibility.
While better equipment is often an amplifier, training, logistics and morale are generally more important once you have reached reasonable parity. You are not going to beat even a PzKfWgn II with straight up lancer charge. But there is no reason that an armored force couldn’t be fought to a standstill by folks on horses given horse portable anti tank weapons, equivalent logistics and lack of air superiority (Russia in Af’stan anyone?)
Precision weapons and ubiquitous day/night recon and observation are having profound effects on open field warfare. And the emergence of extended urban/sub-urban campaigns are making things even more difficult. Then there is the emergence of powerfully armed subnational or non-national forces whose operations are distributed temporally and geographically, to such an extent that they look like policing problems, but are really outside of the scope of traditional police force, since they are often heavily armed and operate largely within the law except for occasional egregious exceptions…..
So I’ll be interested to see what Mr. Dunn has to say in his second article.
Anybody got any ideas regarding NaNoWriMo, still not firm on my basic approach or genre or anything….probably should keep it simple and the ideas I have even a flicker are all SciFi or Fantasy:
Any takers?
In Sci Fi aliens serve a myriad purposes, but most often as humans in bad makeup. One reason for this is so that the author can tell an allegory without having to worry about being considered racist, or misogynistic, anti immigrant, anti american, etc. Also, if they act/react like humans but are described as ‘Other’ the reader has a much easier time relating, we can understand their motivations and like, or dislike, them. This makes telling a complex story much easier and makes it more enjoyable to read.
They also make better class of zombie, vampire, elf (don’t tell me Spock’s not an elf), gods (small g), etc. In other words they let us retell stories again and again just changing the protagonists and antagonists, the setting and the point of view, creating an endless array of potential stories to tell ourselves.
As a dilettante in the sciences my current expectation is that life at least at the level of microbes is fairly to extremely common, but life at the level of complexity/sophisticated seen on Earth is rare, possibly to the point of singularity. My expectation is that if life will probably come in many forms but from a terrestrial world you will get terrestrial looking creatures that, to the citified might just be one other weird ass racoon, or chicken, etc, they are unlikely to look like Predators etc. Would an intelligent dinosaur or wolf be horrific? Leaving aside the potential they’d consider us good eating or a lower class of pest that is.
And while a Non – Terrestrial world’s environment could easily produce creatures we have a hard time relating to (maybe they’d even be horrific in appearance.) They’re unlikely to want to interact with us except on a purely business matters since its unlikely we’d be of much interest to them. Though again empire builders might not care about having to live in domed cities while the locals mine the tar pits.
So having wandered all over the topic, what is my point you ask?
I don’t really have one I guess, I was thinking about the Post a Day challenge and then decided to post about what I would write if I take up the NaNoWriMo challenge and wandered off from there. Am I going to write Sci Fi again, I think so. Will it have aliens, again I think so, though perhaps not obviously. Am I going to try to do NaNoWriMo…who knows…if a big job hits at work then certainly not, 1,700 words a day and 80 hour work weeks do not mix. But the aether appears clear at this time. So Maybe.
Vesta South Polar Region Dawn Framing Camera
The Dawn Mission is ultra cool, what’s not to love about orbiting an unexplored world. Motoring there on ion drive and planning to motor over to a new planet (minor) on your ion jet after you’ve finished with this one. This is what space exploration was supposed to be like….and it is, we just got too jaded in the mean time to understand what we are seeing. This image is from the Image of the Day.
SpaceX Falcon Heavy
Another Instapundit hit, National Space Society Blog on Why the SpaceX Falcon Heavy is important. Read back over some of what I’ve said and linked articles and read this article. We have the potential core of a commercial space program but will congress or others (?) manage to screw it up.
Image from NASA of SLS on launch pad
For only $18Billion….and I’m not kidding about the ‘only.’ This is a big budget program on a pitiful credit line. All the technology development is to happen in the first couple of years of development, before inflation robs the fixed and thus effectively decreasing NASA budget, of its buying power. The choice of technologies was based on reusing the shuttle solid booster technology, shuttle main engine derivatives and the canceled Constellation’s upper stage engine because they are hydrogen fueled and thus use shuttle Infrastructure. It will launch either cargo or cargo and the Orion exploration capsule/system into low orbit.
It’s an impressive beast, it will start with the ability to loft 70 tons into orbit and end with something like 130 tons, significantly more than the Saturn V of Apollo fame. But the plan is to launch maybe 1 a year, and that will make it terrifically uneconomical. The intent is to have a booster capable of lifting exploratory craft for Luna and Lagrange Point exploration, with multiple launches it could do a Mars mission.
In the meantime we are supposedly going to fund the Entrepreneurial Space companies to compete for ISS supply including crew launch and recovery…..
But if we have the ESpace why do we need SLS. If SLS is going to need to do multi craft build to go further than Luna or the Lpoints why not focus on building up our space infrastructure and refueling capability to support a common set of commercially viable launchers lofting the parts for assembly of the earlier and simpler systems in orbit. It may seem more expensive at first but in the long run it will become cheaper because the launchers are cheap on a per use basis.
OK I’m sure they’re promising that SLS will be real cheap per lb to launch because it uses proven technology and it has the advantage of being bigger (bigger is generally more efficient in this game.) But its a Gov’t program w/infrequent launches, using technology that has been chosen to save money up front. Not a promising Start.
And it’s quite possible that one of the driving factors in choosing solid booster over pure liquids was to keep the manufacturer in business (I believe there is only one US supplier at this point) Solid fuel rockets are brute simple, on the surface, but brutally complex in detail, and the only other significant market for the stuff is weapons. With the wind down of the cold war and the use of solids for various boosters the solid rocket industry has hovered on the brink of bankruptcy. That means the supplier will have the ability to hold NASA over the barrel for providing the boosters.
So the SLS remains the Senatorial Launch System and a yoke around the neck of our future in space…..Its a pity we didn’t build this system twenty years ago, when it would have had a positive impact….
Moon Dreams is now available as a Nook Book through Barnes and Noble ! Also at the Apple Store and at Smashwords. At Smashwords you can get it in most common eBook formats including mobi for the Kindle.
Cover Art
This World and Others 