Tag: Space Race

The World According to Mij.

“‘This film integrates my life’s achievements,’ he told me. ‘It’s the most complicated stuff anyone’s ever done.” Another time, he said, “If you set your goals ridiculously high and it’s a failure, you will fail above everyone else’s success.’” On the eve of Avatar, the New Yorker‘s Dana Goodyear delivers a long and interesting profile of take-no-guff, autocratic auteur James Cameron. (“A small, loyal band of cast and crew works with him repeatedly; they call the dark side of his personality Mij–Jim backward.“)

The whole thing is definitely worth a read, but this caught me eye further down the piece: “‘We should ultimately have colonies on Mars, for purposes of expanding the footprint of the human race,’ Cameron says. He shares with the Mars Society the opinion that NASA — on whose advisory council he sat for three years — has become too risk-averse. ‘We’ve become cowards, basically,’ he says. ‘As a society, we’re just fat and happy and comfortable and we’ve lost the edge.’” Listen to the King of the World — he’s dead on.

Get your A** to Mars.

“‘The space program began the day humans chose to walk out of their caves,’ says Chang Diaz. ‘By exploring space we are doing nothing less than insuring our own survival.’ Chang Diaz believes that humans will either become extinct on Earth or expand into space. If we pull off the latter, he says, our notion of Earth will change forever.”

With that red meat for the space cadets among us, the Smithsonian’s Air & Space Magazine surveys current theoretical endeavors in propulsion mechanics, including nuclear-based rocketry and fusion. “I grew up watching Apollo, and the systematic and well-thought-out march to that. And they did it. When you look into pioneering topics, there are those people who don’t want to touch it because it’s too far out there. But if it’s mature enough for you to at least start asking the right questions, and you do an honest job, then you can be a pioneer.“

The Moon Receding?

“‘If you’re willing to wait until 2028, you’ve got a heavy lift vehicle, but you’ve got nothing to lift,’ she said. ‘You cannot do this program on this budget.‘” President Obama’s Human Space Flight Plans Committee is set to announce that getting back to the moon by 2020 is not feasible given current budgetary constraints, and Mars is definitely out of the question. “The final list of options…will include some variation of a lunar base down the road. But the committee is most animated by what it calls the ‘Deep Space’ option, a strategy that emphasizes getting astronauts far beyond Low Earth Orbit but not necessarily plunking them down on alien worlds.‘” Which basically sounds like unnecessarily strapping astronauts to normally-unmanned fly-by missions — Not sure I see much point in that.

Honestly, this is pathetic. As I said here, it’s time to raise our expectations of what we can achieve in space, and fund manned exploration of the solar system accordingly. Particularly given how much we’re blowing on the Pentagon’s space toys at the moment, we could stand to spend a bit more on one of the most important collective human endeavors still before us.

The “Orphans of Apollo.”

“So why do tech geeks love space? Though they may have the resources — a trip to space will now set you back some $45 million — this can’t be the full answer: You don’t see Donald Trump or P. Diddy signing up for an astro-mission. What makes it worth it for the tech geeks?” The Big Money‘s Julia Ioffe tries to ascertain why dot.com miliionaires pay out the nose for space travel. Uh, because it’s there?

“‘There’s a documentary called Orphans of Apollo that’s stated this well,’ he explained. ‘There’s a generation of us, who are the tech leaders of today, who were universally inspired to go into science and technology because of the NASA Lunar Space Program. And the reason the movie is called Orphans of Apollo is because, in many ways, we feel orphaned by the fact that the space industry has not done a good job of capitalizing on that momentum of what many of us believed were the first steps into space, carrying the mission of human space flight farther and farther into deep space.’“

The Final Frontier.

“The future is here and we are not too far off a new age of space. It is not just about private astronauts going up, it is about bringing the cost structure down and about new medicines, solar power in space and the entire range of scientific benefits that can come from it.” After many years of discussion and planning, ground is broken on Spaceport America in New Mexico, “the world’s first purpose-built commercial spaceport.” Any and all donations to GitM for one of the $200,000 spaceshots soon to commence from there will be greatly appreciated.

On the Cusp.

“In the summer of 1959, Allen Ginsberg, the generation’s visionary poet of exuberance and doom, wrote in the Village Voice: ‘No one in America can know what will happen. No one is in real control. America is having a nervous breakdown…Therefore there has been great exaltation, despair, prophecy, strain, suicide, secrecy, and public gaiety among the poets of the city.’ He might as well have written that today.“

In Slate and per his recent book, Fred Kaplan makes the case for 1959 as a Very Important Year, and uses the groundbreaking flight of Luna 1 as that moment’s muse. “[I]t, and the race to space that it triggered, helped create the climate in which all those other breakthroughs were possible or, at least, appealing to a broad population. The breakdown of barriers in space, speed, and time made other barriers ripe for transgressing.” And folks argue space exploration isn’t important…

Ground Control to Major Kong.

“In Huntsville, Ala., there is an unusual grave site where, instead of flowers, people sometimes leave bananas. The gravestone reads: ‘Miss Baker, squirrel monkey, first U.S. animal to fly in space and return alive. May 28, 1959.‘” On the fiftieth anniversary of their history-making flight, NPR remembers NASA’s pioneering space monkeys, Able and Baker. “More than 300 people attended Baker’s funeral service when she died of kidney failure in 1984, Buckbee says. And, he says, often at her grave at the entrance to the rocket center, ‘you’ll see a banana or two laying there.’”

Rocket’s Red Glare, Meet Bombs Bursting in Air.

“‘An automated rendezvous does all sorts of things for your missile accuracy and anti-satellite programs,’ said John Sheldon, a visiting professor of advanced air and space studies at Maxwell Air Force Base in Alabama. ‘The manned effort is about prestige, but it’s also a good way of testing technologies that have defense applications.‘” In order to keep pace with the increasingly proficient Chinese space program, President-elect Obama may be considering retying NASA to the Pentagon, “because military rockets may be cheaper and ready sooner than the space agency’s planned launch vehicle, which isn’t slated to fly until 2015…Obama has said the Pentagon’s space program — which spent about $22 billion in fiscal year 2008, almost a third more than NASA’s budget — could be tapped to speed the civilian agency toward its goals as the recession pressures federal spending.”

Hmm. On one hand, I would think making NASA yet another fiefdom of the Pentagon would greatly facilitate its ability to lock down the funding it needs for various exploratory endeavors, recession or no. And if the types of conveyance vehicles NASA needs are basically sitting around gathering dust in some Pentagon-owned warehouse next to the ark of the covenant, well then it only makes sense to combine the two programs. No need to reinvent the, uh, rocket.

On the other hand, putting the brass in charge is probably going to have deleterious effects on the types of projects NASA pursues in the future. And, in a perfect world, there’s something to be said for having a civilian space program completely outside the purview of the military. In fact, now that i think about it, won’t combining the Pentagon and NASA space programs cut back on the types of international cooperation that have guided our efforts in space in recent years? Given the current economic climate, I guess this is the best way for NASA to continue pursuing its goals in the short term. Still, there could well be trouble ahead.

Virgin’s White Knight.

“‘It was very emotional for me,’ he said. ‘I thought, “Oh my God, we’re getting closer.”‘” I’ll say…Richard Branson and Burt Rutan unveil their space tourism mothership, the White Knight Two. “Virgin Galactic envisions a future where space voyages will become as common as airplane travel. It wants to fly 500 people into space in the first year for $200,000 a head…So far, more than 250 wannabe astronauts have paid the full amount.” Hmm…maybe it’s time to start putting ads on this site.