Stilgherrian » Space

Enceladus from Cassini

Stilgherrian — Wed, 19 Mar 2008 06:33:00 +0000

Have I been too harsh on NASA? Last week the Cassini spacecraft zoomed past Saturn’s moon Enceladus and took these magnificent pictures. Hat-tip to the Bad Astronomy Blog.

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Lego spacecraft from 2001

Stilgherrian — Wed, 19 Mar 2008 04:30:21 +0000

Speaking of Arthur C Clarke, how about a Lego model of Discovery, the spacecraft from 2001: A Space Odyssey? Ta for the pointer, Richard.

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Remembering the Space Age: Arthur C Clarke dead at 90

Stilgherrian — Wed, 19 Mar 2008 02:40:48 +0000

Bugger. The Space Age ended today. Sir Arthur C Clarke, the grand master of science fiction, is dead at age 90. According to the BBC he died in Sri Lanka, his adopted home since 1956, from a cardio-respiratory attack.

Clarke is best-known, of course, for his collaboration with Stanley Kubrick on the ~~1966~~ 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey. Even today it’s visually stunning, a grand expression of 1960s technological confidence. Even today, the ending still makes no sense whatsoever, with or without LSD.

Everyone remembers that the computer HAL 9000 went mad and killed the crew. The real lesson is that HAL went mad because his masters had told him to lie, to cover up the mission’s true purpose. This Cold War-era fable about how paranoia corrupts the mind remains completely relevant in this age of The Continual War on Terror.

What Clarke should really be remembered for, however — and what could have made him a multi-billionaire — is suggesting the use of geostationary satellites for international telecommunications.

Clarke’s 1945 paper “Extra-Terrestrial Relays — Can Rocket Stations Give Worldwide Radio Coverage?” sketched out the idea so thoroughly that it counts as “prior art” and no-one’s been able to gain patents ever since.

Apart from 33 novels, 13 short-story collections, TV programs and countless non-fiction works, Clarke was a regular letter-writer to New Scientist magazine. Sometimes he wrote about the ethics and politics of science and technology, but more often than not it was to point out that some newly-patented idea had already been described in one of his novels decades before. Not to boast, just to chuckle.

Sir Arthur is dead. The Space Age is dead.

At least the First Space Age is dead. The 1960s imperative “to boldly go” as imagined by visionaries like Clarke has congealed into a bloated, bureaucratic NASA which has, in the US at least, drained all the excitement from spaceflight.

Long live Space Age 2.0, funded not by governments asserting their fitness to rule the world, but by entrepreneurs like Sir Richard Branson and Virgin Galactic. Space will never be the same.

[A slightly different version of this story was published in Crikey today.]

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3 movies for a lazy Sunday

Stilgherrian — Sun, 24 Feb 2008 00:11:41 +0000

Three quick movies for you to watch on a lazy Sunday… things which I’ve been sent over the last week.

The 15-minute promotional film A Ballad for the Fair (pictured) tours the 1964 New York World’s Fair, with an emphasis on communications technology since it was produced by Bell System. Marvel at the video-phone! Warning: there is folk music. Hat-tip to Paleo-Future.
A creepy community service announcement about violence against women starring Australia’s celebrity criminal Mark Brandon “Chopper” Read. Chopper even has his own website. Hat-tip to Rhys McDonald via Five Thumbs Down. Check the latter for an amusing AFL players’ social guide.
The US shoots down a spy satellite. Thanks, Richard. I won’t bother discussing the military-strategy and international-politics angles of that one, there’s plenty elsewhere.

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Australia 2020 Summit website (finally) online

Stilgherrian — Mon, 11 Feb 2008 06:53:34 +0000

The guv’mint has finally gotten up a website for the Australia 2020 Summit. The main new pieces of information are a little more about each topic area and the nomination process.

Key points:

Nominations close 25 February. There’s a nomination form, and you’ll have to include an explanation of “why you want to participate as a delegate in the Australia 2020 Summit in 100 words or less.” A bit like a TV Week competition.
You can nominate for up to three subject areas.
If you don’t get selected, you can still make a submission. Submissions close 9 April.

And that’s about it, apart from a photo of Chairman Rudd. Not even an RSS feed.

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Oh, America’s 50 Years in Space… um, yeah, missed it

Stilgherrian — Fri, 01 Feb 2008 16:26:06 +0000

Nobody gets a place in history for coming second. In October 2007 we celebrated 50 Years of The Space Age, commemorating the launch of Sputnik 1. I wrote about it, here and for Crikey (different pieces). I masturbated.

Yesterday was the 50th anniversary of America’s first successful satellite launch — and I only just realised it now.

The Bad Astronomy Blog has some of the story, and of course Wikipedia reveals all.

Apparently the US could’ve gotten something into orbit before the Commies, but they wanted to use an American rocket. The Juno 1 launch vehicle, based on German technology, was originally unsuited politically. Alas, the all-American Vanguard wasn’t up for it.

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How & Why Wonder Books were… wonderful!

Stilgherrian — Sun, 27 Jan 2008 12:49:38 +0000

I’m currently writing an essay to explain what I mean by “middle class values”, but I’ve been sidetracked into childhood memories about cows (don’t ask!) and rediscovering one truly wond’rous part of my childhood: the How & Why Wonder Book series.

If you can point to one thing that made me the geek I am today, it’s this series of books.

Each one was just 48 pages long, and the illustrations were usually paintings — pretty corny by today’s standards. But they really did create a sense of wonder for the Science and Technology which was unfolding in The Space Age. The first one was issued in 1960 and they ran well into the 1970s.

Looking through the lists put together by collectors intabits and Joe Roberts, I reckon I had at least 23 of the titles.

My favourites were The How & Why Wonder Book of Planets and Interplanetary Travel (insanely optimistic, in hindsight), Rockets and Missiles, Atomic Energy (no nuclear waste here, just atomic trains!) and The How & Why Wonder Book of Robots and Electronic Brains — man, there’s a whole essay in that last title alone, eh?

I bet my mother still has them stashed away in a cupboard somewhere.

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Virgin unveils first commercial spaceliner

Stilgherrian — Wed, 23 Jan 2008 20:03:39 +0000

OK, it’s not really a spaceliner, ‘cos it won’t be making any leisurely cruises to Mars or even the Moon. It just goes up and then comes down again. But it looks so goddam sexy.

Virgin Galactic has presented the world with this sexy design for SpaceShipTwo, which will start taking paying passengers on a sub-orbital trip in 2010, eight people at a time.

Sir Richard Branson reckons it’s important that the project is a genuine commercial success.

If we do [this], I believe we’ll unlock a wall of private sector money into both space launch systems and space technology.

This could rival the scale of investment in the mobile phone and internet technologies after they were unlocked from their military origins and thrown open to the private sector.

Virgin Galactic reckons the carrier vehicle — White Knight Two — is very nearly finished and will start flight tests later this year. SpaceShipTwo is about 60% complete.

They’ll look rather spiffy parked outside the Foster+Partners spaceport they showed us in October.

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Spaceport America, designed by Foster+Partners

Stilgherrian — Sun, 07 Oct 2007 07:03:52 +0000

Spaceport America, the world’s first commercial spaceport, is being built in New Mexico for Virgin Galactic. Who else would you choose to design it other than Foster+Partners — follow the link for more piccies. Thanks to Wired for the pointer.

Given all the announcements of a spaceport in Australia, a shame it’s not somewhere like Cairns. Or Uluru.

Bonus space link: Arthur C Clarke on the 50th anniversary of Sputnik.

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The Space Age is Dead

Stilgherrian — Wed, 03 Oct 2007 21:46:31 +0000

What has happened to our sense of adventure? 50 years ago today that Russian metal thing (left) went “Beep, beep, beep” and we were thrust into the Space Age. But now the Space Age is dead.

On 4 October 1957, it was a beach ball with a beeper inside. A month later, 3 November, it was a differently-shaped Russian metal thing with a dog inside.

“Jay-zus,” thought America, collectively. “Those goddam Commies have gotten into space! And they’ve got The Bomb.” They called it “the Sputnik Crisis” and the US created ARPA (which eventually developed the Internet) and New Math (which created a huge market in hula hoops for primary schools).

The first human in space was in 1961. And only eight years later people were walking on the moon.

But now, in 2007, it’s been 35 years since anyone’s been to the moon. Indeed, it’s been 35 years since anyone’s been more than 480km from Earth.

I could write an essay on the death of the Space Age — but amateur astronomer Stuart Atkinson has already done it. His impassioned plea for space makes the point that it’ll be the commercial mavericks who create our future in space, not the slow-moving international “cooperation” which created the lame ISS — and certainly not boring old farts like NASA.

What the hell were we thinking? No, seriously, what the hell were we thinking? We had a beach-head in space; we’d stepped off the Earth and started to become a multi-planet species, a species capable of surviving an asteroid impact, or a nuclear war, or population crises. We’d just started to Think Big, to dare to dream, to look beyond our own close horizon to the world beyond, and we turned away from it all. We ran back from the Moon with our tail between our legs, whimpering, cowering from the darkness, frightened by its immensity.

Watching shuddery footage of Neil Armstrong descending Eagle’s ladder, and of Dave Scott standing wide-eyed with wonder on the edge of Hadley Rille, the historians of the future, sitting around their holographic displays in the grand museums and universities of the worlds circling 51 Pegasi and other exotic star systems will shake their heads in disbelief and pity and contempt at what we did after Apollo. They’ll think us timid at best, cowards at worst, for how we fled from the future. They’ll debate endlessly the reasons why, instead of keeping going, instead of settling the Moon, reaching out for Mars and spreading across the solar system as is our destiny we came home, shut the door, turned off all the lights and went to bed, pulling the covers over our heads so we wouldn’t have to see the Moon and planets and stars shining seductively through the window.

God, if we’d just kept going… don’t you ever wonder what it would be like now? What kind of world we would be living in?

…

It makes me want to scream at the sky “I’m sorry! We were stupid! Forgive us!” and hope my words reach the citizens of the future.

It’s worth reading the whole thing.

I agree with Stuart’s point. Indeed, I’ve written before about the glory of Mars and why the US space program is shite. But where is that sense of adventure?

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Now about this spaceport…

Stilgherrian — Tue, 02 Oct 2007 22:50:04 +0000

I’ve been researching Australia’s contribution to the Space Age for an article to be published in Crikey today. Part of that narrative seems to be the continual announcements of plans for a Spaceport which never come to anything.

June 1989: The Cape York Space Agency announces that launches from its Temple Bay facility will commence in 1992.
Sept 1997: International Resources Corp announces it’ll break ground on its spaceport near Weipa in October.
June 2001: Science Minister Nick Minchin announces a $52M government contribution to a spaceport on Christmas Island to target the Asian satellite launch market. The first launch is expected in 2003.

And those three are just a taste! When will this spaceport actually happen?

50 years old tomorrow, the Space Age began with the launch of Sputnik 1. Australia’s current role in space is a set of commemorative postage stamps. Wow.

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Moonbase Krakow

Stilgherrian — Thu, 30 Aug 2007 02:26:00 +0000

No, this isn’t something from Thunderbirds, but a new radio studio complex in Krakow, Poland. Thanks Richard.

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Day and Night

Stilgherrian — Mon, 27 Aug 2007 11:07:50 +0000

I’ve been looking at this photograph for hours, scattered over the last few days.

~~It was apparently taken from the space shuttle Columbia~~. No it wasn’t, scroll down for the comments. I shouldn’t need to point out that the big lumpy thing in the foreground is called Africa, and further back there’s the thing they call Europe.

It fascinates me because it — literally! — puts things in perspective. Some of the world’s greatest cities are invisible, at least in daylight. The Low Countries are just starting to blaze in artificial light. But the brightest lights are the flares of oil wells in the deserts of Algeria and Libya, and off the coast of Nigeria.

Hey, aren’t the people there starving? That can’t be right, if they’ve got all that oil, surely?

Thanks to Memex 1.1 for the pointer.

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NASA prepares for new fake Moon landing

Stilgherrian — Tue, 24 Jul 2007 23:44:59 +0000

NASA preps robots for future fake moon landings, reports The Register. Thanks to BAB for the pointer.

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Shuttle a pile of crap

Stilgherrian — Sat, 09 Jun 2007 22:18:27 +0000

The Space Shuttle really is a pile of crap, isn’t it. A book I had back in the 1970s enthused that there’d be a flight every week. The Shuttle would be regular trucking service to orbit. Reality: The first Shuttle flight for 2007 was only the other day, and I hardly need to mention the disasters. Still, offer me a ticket and I’ll fly tomorrow. Though part of me suspects the sturdy Soyuz would be safer.