Finds Along the Frontier.

“In a teleconference, Kaltenegger said that the planet is at the warm edge of its star’s habitable zone, as if ‘standing next to a bonfire.’ That means the planet would require a lot of cloud cover — which reflects starlight — to keep the surface cool enough to prevent any water from boiling, she said.“

Gliese 581g, meet HD85512b. Among the 50 new planets astronomers announced on Monday is a “Super-Earth” that lies within the inhabitable zone and could hold water. “The new super-Earth is 3.5 times the mass of Earth.“

And, how are we going to get there, you ask? While DARPA works its mojo, NASA announces its most recent plans for a successor to the Shuttle: A new Space Launch System. “Administration officials said the new rocket system…would be the most formidable launch system deployed since the Saturn V…The new rocket coupled with a deep-space crew capsule already under development should enable an un-crewed test flight of the exploration system in 2017 and a crewed test flight by 2021, officials said.” If history is any guide, you’ll probably want to tack a few years on to those dates.

While we wait, here’s another interesting cosmic find to ponder: Astronomers have found an honest-to-goodness twin-sunned Tatooine in Kepler 16b, 200 light years away. “‘This is an example of another planetary system, a completely different type that no one’s ever seen before,’ Doyle said. ‘That’s why people are making a big deal out of this.’“

For the Long Haul.

“Look back 100 years. If you could have had James Clerk Maxwell and Guglielmo Marconi and Albert Einstein sit around a lunch table in the early 1900s, they would have had all the math necessary to create an iPhone. But there’s nothing that they could have done to characterize the integrated circuits, the satellites, the communication links or the Internet, to draw a plan that would have led them to an iPhone until Apple introduced it 100 years later. That’s how I see where we are with this.“

From the folks who brought you the Internet, DARPA announces the 100-Year Starship Study, offering $500,000 in seed money to whomever comes up with the best plan for developing the technology needed for interstellar travel. “To stimulate discussion on the research possibilities, DARPA officials will hold a symposium that brings together astrophysicists, engineers and even sci-fi writers so they can brainstorm what it would take to make this starship enterprise a success.“

Back to the Future?

“Douglas Cooke, associate administrator of NASA’s Exploration Systems Mission Directorate, told reporters the Orion concept, described by former NASA Administrator Mike Griffin as ‘Apollo on steroids,’ is the most capable spacecraft currently on the drawing board for meeting the Obama administration’s ‘flexible path’ approach to deep space exploration.“

With the Space Shuttle nearing its end, NASA unveils the prototype for their new deep space exploration vehicle, Lockheed’s Multi-Purpose Crew Vehicle (MPCV), and, well, it’s a throwback alright. “As currently envisioned, the MPCV would support four astronauts on short-duration flights of less than 21 days. For longer missions to asteroids or even Mars, the capsules would dock with a larger spacecraft of some sort that would provide more room for the crew while in transit.” “Of some sort”? So far at least, I am underwhelmed.

Surly Bonds, Slipped.

“‘My plane flew right past the shuttle!’ she posted on Twitter, along with the photos, under the name @Stefmara.” By way of a friend, and as also seen at Cryptonaut, a New Jersey woman captures the final flight of the Endeavor from her window seat.

Only one more launch left after this one: That final mission, STS-135, will return July 20th, thus ending — only for now, hopefully — manned space flight at NASA, exactly forty-two years after the moon landing. (Unless, of course, we somehow get our act together.)

Silence will Fall.

“‘There is a huge irony,’ said SETI Director Jill Tarter, ‘that a time when we discover so many planets to look at, we don’t have the operating funds to listen.’ SETI senior astronomer Seth Shostak compared the project’s suspension to ‘the Nina, Pinta and Santa Maria being put into dry dock.’…This is about exploration, and we want to keep the thing operational. It’s no good to have it sit idle.”

Another casualty of the lousy economy and the budget crises (in this case, California’s) SETI’s Allen Telescope Array goes dark. “‘We have the radio antennae up, but we can’t run them without operating funds,’ he added. ‘Honestly, if everybody contributed just 3 extra cents on their 1040 tax forms, we could find out if we have cosmic company.‘”

50 Years Ago, Our Journey Began.

“What beauty. I saw clouds and their light shadows on the distant dear earth…The water looked like darkish, slightly gleaming spots…When I watched the horizon, I saw the abrupt, contrasting transition from the earth’s light-colored surface to the absolutely black sky. I enjoyed the rich color spectrum of the earth. It is surrounded by a light blue aureole that gradually darkens, becoming turquiose, dark blue, violet, and finally coal black.“

Fifty years ago this week, Cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first, however briefly, to leave the cradle and get off-world. May there be many more.

Death of a Cosmonaut.

“Starman tells the story of a friendship between two cosmonauts, Vladimir Komarov and Soviet hero Yuri Gagarin, the first human to reach outer space…In 1957, both men were assigned to the same Earth-orbiting mission, and both knew the space capsule was not safe to fly. Komarov told friends he knew he would probably die. But he wouldn’t back out because he didn’t want Gagarin to die. Gagarin would have been his replacement.“

By way of LinkMachineGo, NPR’s Robert Krulwich tells the tale of the sad and unnecessary death of cosmonaut Vladimir Komarov. “As he heads to his doom, U.S. listening posts in Turkey hear him crying in rage, ‘cursing the people who had put him inside a botched spaceship.’“

Strapped to the Rocket.

“There is no shortage of proposals for radically innovative space launch schemes that, if they worked, would get us across the valley to other hilltops considerably higher than the one we are standing on now–high enough to bring the cost and risk of space launch down to the point where fundamentally new things could begin happening in outer space. But we are not making any serious effort as a society to cross those valleys. It is not clear why.“

In Slate, sci-fi author and technophile Neal Stephenson discourses on what rockets tell us about innovation and the course of technology over time. “The phenomena of path dependence and lock-in can be illustrated with many examples, but one of the most vivid is the gear we use to launch things into space.“

A Hand-Up for the Earthless.

“The time to put our most vulnerable and our most needy in space is now. We can’t keep running from this problem, hoping it will go away. They have as much of a right to live in dignity and urinate in a specially designed suit built to withstand incredible heat and cold while protecting the body from violent and sudden changes in air pressure as anyone else.“

Their timing isn’t great, but The Onion strikes comedy gold again: The Money We Waste On NASA’s Space Program Would Be Better Spent On Space Programs For The Poor. “I’m not talking about a handout, I’m talking about a hand up — up 20,000 miles into space, where our nation’s most desperate and destitute can gaze down on this big blue marble ball of clouds and dreams and be inspired to lift themselves out of poverty.” (FWIW, my response to the space-is-wasted-money argument, when made seriously, is here.)

The Challenge Remains.

“We’ve grown used to wonders in this century. It’s hard to dazzle us. But for twenty-five years the United States space program has been doing just that. We’ve grown used to the idea of space, and perhaps we forget that we’ve only just begun. We’re still pioneers. They, the members of the Challenger crew, were pioneers.“

25 years after a dark day in January, the Challenger is remembered. [Pictures.]
Update: As Dangerous Meta reminds me, yesterday was the 44th Anniversary of the Apollo 1 tragedy, and Tuesday will be the 8th anniversary of Columbia’s fall. This is just a terrible week for slipping the surly bonds and getting off-world.