Talking Elon Musk on ABC Melbourne

ABC logoThe demonstration launch of SpaceX’s Dragon Heavy launch vehicle was for me the highlight of the week. It got some attention elsewhere too, and not just from space geeks.

By complete coincidence, I’d been booked for ABC Melbourne’s regular Wednesday night “Please Explain” spot, with the task of explaining Elon Musk, the founder of SpaceX. Here’s the full conversation with Lindy Burns and Declan Fay.

This audio is ©2018 Australian Broadcasting Corporation.

Talking Chris Hadfield and space on ABC Radio’s “AM”

ABC logoOf all the things I thought I’d be talking about last week, Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield wasn’t one of them. And yet I did end up talking about him — ever so briefly — on ABC Radio’s national current affairs program AM.

Why? Because there was massive media interest in Hadfield’s rendition of David Bowie’s Space Oddity. That’s the video embedded above — and if that’s not working you can watch it on YouTube.

Journalist Martin Cuddihy recorded maybe five minutes with me via phone to San Jose, but just one sentence ended up in the final report:

Commander Hadfield has really brought space alive and made it more engaging to a new audience, far more than anyone has done in recent years.

I wrote back in 2006 why I thought that the US space program is shite. In 2007, I lamented the end of the Space Age, and again in 2008 with the death of Arthur C Clarke. And it’s two years since I wrote about my own memories of the Space Age, both real and imagined.

Perhaps I should write more about Space…

Anyway, here’s the full audio of the story from AM, and over at their website you can read the transcript.

The audio is of course ©2013 Australian Broadcasting Corporation.

50 to 50 #9A: The Real Space Age

While the superpowers were busy spending billions on a Space Race that would ultimately lead to a series of blurry television pictures, there was another, far more real, Space Age unfolding. In my head.

As B Smith said, in the 1960s there were snap-together rockets in Kellogg’s breakfast cereal boxes, including reasonably detailed models of the actual Apollo spacecraft, some of the more speculative NASA designs — even, as this close-up photo shows, vehicles from Thunderbirds and Captain Scarlet and the Mysterons.

The real imagined future of US and Soviet space exploration blurred with the imaginary imagined future of Gerry Anderson to create, in my mind at least, a gloriously unfolding set of possibilities.

My favourite breakfast cereal toy of all was the Kellogg’s Molab, pictured above — although I’m pretty sure mine was blue. Apparently it’s loosely based on NASA concepts for a manned MObile LABoratory for cruising the Lunar surface, much like this book cover illustration. General Motors even built a mock-up. However once the Moon Landings had happened, the follow-up programmes to Apollo were killed off.

I kept losing my Molab’s wheels. Probably because I didn’t glue in the axle pins. But that didn’t matter. I re-imagined it as a spacecraft. The wheel mounts became fold-down exit ramps for rapid troop deployment.

But my favourite space-related TV series from that era was Fireball XL5. May I recommend the opening and closing titles? Or perhaps this version by Bob Downe.

[Photo: Kellogg’s Molab cereal packet premium image thanks to Wotan of the Moonbase Central blog. If you grew up during the Space Age, you’ll lose yourself there for hours.]

50 to 50 #9: The Space Age

[This post is part of the series 50 to 50, started last year to mark my 50th birthday. One post per year, y’see. The series ground to a halt due to a combination of work and personal pressures, as well as finding that such intense reminiscences of my own past were emotionally draining. The series has now been resumed.]

The 1960s were the Space Age. And since I was a bright male child of that decade, my thoughts were dominated by the events, images and themes of space exploration.

It doesn’t look much now, but this photo was the very pinnacle of all that. Or perhaps the apogee. Neil Armstrong stepping onto the surface of the Moon. One small step etc, taken from the original TV footage.

I was mesmerised — even though half the time my nine-year-old self couldn’t figure out what was going on. I’d been following the story as it unfolded in the newspapers, reading every word and memorising every diagram. It was front page news every day. But the TV images were just crap.

Of course the reason they were crap was the circuitous journey they took from the Apollo mission’s slow-scan TV cameras. The signal was compressed from arsehole to breakfast time and bounced from the Moon to the Parkes Radiothermal Telescope in rural New South Wales, then somehow to NASA Mission Control in Houston where the audio was mixed in, then back to Australia to the TV stations, and finally out through the normal broadcast chain.

It’s a miracle they arrived at all, as the film The Dish portrayed — along with its historical inaccuracies.

But historians and popular culture tell us that the world stopped to watch these blurry images, and we all remember where we were. And it’s true.

Continue reading “50 to 50 #9: The Space Age”

Space: we’ve still such a long way to go

Hubble Space Telescope imagery of newly-discovered planet around Fomalhaut b

This morning I watched the Space Shuttle Endeavor [sic] rocket into orbit on NASA TV. Exciting. But now I see this new photograph (above) of a planet found orbiting Fomalhaut, and realise we’re still only taking the tiniest of baby-steps into the universe.

I’m a child of the Space Age. When I was born, no-one had been outside the earth’s atmosphere. I was too young to be aware of the flights of Yuri Gararin or Alan Shepherd. But when Apollo 11 commander Neil Armstrong walked upon the Moon we got the day off school to watch the grainy video imagery — our rural school didn’t have enough TVs for everyone to see.

Today I watched quietly as Endeavor became a tiny blue dot in the empty black sky — oh so quickly! And yet… And yet in the full-sized Hubble Space Telescope imagery the newly-photographed planet Fomalhaut b is also just a faint dot.

25 light-years away.

Endeavour would take more than 900,000 years to get there at its low Earth orbit speed of 8 kilometres a second.

Tiny. Baby. Steps.