I F#€&'n Forgot to Title my Space Post!

Yesterday, the great Andrew Leon wrote a blog post about why we have to move out into the solar system. It’s a post about dreaming big, and about cats - but lately most of his posts involve cats in some way. Of course that reminds me of the story of John Scalzi and his experiment of combining the two largest internet memes for a post by strapping a bunch of bacon to his cat and taking pictures.

The result of his experiment was one of the most popular posts in the history of the internet.

So, I think Andrew is trying to get the cat people engaged in space exploration – well played, Andrew, well played.

Now, as I’ve lamented in the past, I don’t really have the time to blog properly, well, I do have time I suppose, but that is time that I tend to spend doing other things, reading, writing, artsy stuff, whatever. I think I’m proving with each and every post that I could never be a journalist, or columnist, or reviewer.

But I can be a rambler. No links, not citations, just me saying stuff. Yes, that is my call in this world.

So, where what I? Oh yes, our call to action. To dream of the stars.

I’ve spent a lot of my time in the past decade or three thinking on this topic. Of reading on this topic, and here are my thoughts:

We will never get off our planet in a meaningful way. Ever.*

Why? The bottom line is that it’s all about money. Even with a fortune in minerals out there  locked up in Near Earth Asteroids (should be enough iron, gold, nickel, etc., to wreck virtually every market we have here on earth) there is the startup costs of getting out there. Right now it’s in the neighborhood of  $2,000 or $3,000 per pound for SpaceX (about $10k per pound in the space shuttle days) just to get something into low earth orbit. Doing some quick math means that getting mining equipment (and workers) to something that might be millions of miles away (instead of 220) is going to cost well into the billions, and possibly into the trillions, of dollars. Since the first moon landing the U.S. has stopped throwing unlimited resources at space exploration. That well has all but dried up.

Cost to get here? Many Millions of Dollars

And what company is going to put up tens of billions or more in startup costs for something like this? Not any publicly held companies, that’s for sure. No private companies have the capital even if they wanted to. We may get orbiting hotels made meteor resistance balloons, and other one-off events from corporate endeavors, but real cutting edge exploration… I doubt that we’ll ever see it done without governments subsidizing the thing.

That leaves governments. The U.S. spends almost nothing on space exploration,** when compared to social services or defense, you can’t even see the NASA budget on a graph. Yet they are on the chopping block every year as ‘pork’ that needs to be cut out of the budget.

Cost of Getting Here? GAJILLIONS of Dollars!

That means they spend year after year making ludicrous promises as to what they can deliver and giving projections for spending that is a fraction of what they actually need. The space shuttle was a total disaster from the beginning if you look at what they promised, a launch per month at a cost per pound that was unheard of, you’d see why folks in congress don’t like NASA accountants very much. Something similar happened with the ISS (International Space Station), the U.S. committed to it internationally, then got stuck funding it later when other nations *coughrussiacough* decided not to. Add to that the cost overruns that were billions and billions of dollars, and we have this huge floating money pit in space.

And NASA has done this with almost every project it’s been a part of since Apollo. They seem to be hoping that congress will engage in that gambler’s mentality of being so financially committed that they don’t stop the funding for fear of losing everything.

And the budget gets cut almost every year, it’s not like they’re fooling anyone.

So I don’t think the governments of the world will enable us to be living in L5 habitats, or domed cities on Mars, or floating cities over Venus. If there is a hope, it’s that within the next 50 years that we can build a space elevator. We don’t have the materials science down to actually build the darned thing, but we’re close. If the world could have a joint location that they agreed upon and all the powers that be contribute to defray costs, then we might have a way to reach orbit cheaply. From there, the rest is easy.

Then, the dreamers that Andrew talked about can have their chance. Then we get the old west type of land grants and such that makes exploration and migration really possible. Much has been made of how China once had a naval fleet that was the envy of the world, then within a generation they dismantled it and spent the next few centuries looking inward and dealing with problems at home. When the europeans rolled in much later they found folks that were a mere shadow of their ancestors. I think I’ve made the comparison here on this blog myself and won't belabor the point. Instead, I'd like to put a positive spin on it - I’d like to think that we went to the moon before just to see if we could, but the next time we go, we’re not pulling a stunt, but will be going to live.

*I didn’t mean that.

** Alastair Reynolds, my favorite sci-fi author, states that we spend more on chocolate than we do space exploration. We get an astounding bang for our buck with NASA, the ESA, etc., I don’t mean to give these guys too hard a time, I’m generally shocked at the awesome missions that are completed by them – mostly robotic – but that is beside the point here, which is HUMAN exploration.

I'm Not Dead

I'M BACK

It’s funny how a few days off quickly ballooned into a few months of sabbatical. Such is the nature of things I suppose. But a few months ago when I was feeling a bit overwhelmed with things I decided to skip a week of blogging. Not just skip writing in my blog, but of visiting others as well.

And then another week passed, and another, and another. Before I knew it people were sending me emails wanting to know if I was okay. I guess I really have been away for a while now.

WHAT HAPPENED while I was out? Disney bought Lucasfilm (will I now see the 1977 theatrical version of Star Wars get released on Blu Ray? Without all the updates).

There was a presidential election – I think somebody won.

NASA KEEPS ANNOUNCING they’ve found evidence of that water once flowed on Mars in the ancient past – At some point, someone needs to talk to them about these sorts of things. This last one was this huge tease about something ‘game changing’ and it turned out to be just repeating what they’ve told us at least 3 other times in the recent past. I’m thinking about starting a conspiracy that they found real aliens there but the govt stepped in and shut them up before they could announce it… thusly changing their story at the last minute and bringing up the water thing yet again.

I FOUND OUT DUOTROPE is going to a subscription model in January. Something that saddened me greatly – it’s a website that many authors use as a resource to track their submissions to various markets. As the real value that the site offers is that so many people use it that you can find out what standard wait times are for markets you’ve submitted to, what their acceptance rate is, and a pretty slick search feature that helps identify the best markets for a story that you may have written, the rest of what they offer is more secondary, at least to me.

I imagine that the number of people that will leave the site after it goes subscription will really devalue the data they collect – and therefore devalue their service. That’s my fear anyway. I’m torn about whether or not I want to invest in moving it forward.

Other than that, I had a lot of free time. What did I do with it all? Well, I watched 5 seasons of 30 rock, I finally got caught up on The Walking Dead. I read a few books, I started and QUIT reading a few more books.

All while doing some soul-searching.

I’m not so sure I’m through with that last part. At least in regards to my writing. But that’s been my time in a nutshell. More later… it’s good to be back. Just baby steps for now.

It Started So Innocently But Then...

Genius!

What a rant! I don't know where this came from. Sorry team, we'll try to do better tomorrow.

I think I’ve talked about Neal Stephenson before, actually, I know I have, I just can’t remember when (or which posts), and I don’t really want to talk about him again today except for what it means for my larger topic. He did, however, write of the most brilliantly odd books I’ve ever read in Cryptonomicon, which is a genre defying novel about a code breaker in WWII and his grandson in the present day, both kinda sorta on the hunt for the same thing. Flat out awesome. Drop what you’re doing and go read it quick, before others find out and mock you.

Of course, at a solid 1000 pages long, I’m not sure you can read it real quick, but do what you can.

Anyway, I have plans to read all his books at some point, and have one still sitting on my shelf that I picked up in the great Borders’s fire sale of 2011, but I’ve also got around 50 other books on my shelf I got then as well, it might be a while before I get to it.

Now, what was my point? Oh yes, I heard an interview with him the other day and he mentioned offhandedly about how America has shied away from mega-engineering projects for quite some time.

Also, it's a Star Destroyer!

And boy, did lights start going off in my head.  It’s true, oh so true. My first thought was the James-Webb space telescope. To put it bluntly, it’s the most awesome thing in the history of mankind, and it’s up for debate right now on whether or not it will ever fly. This was designed to be the replacement to Hubble and would be another giant leap forward in our understanding of the cosmos. It’s entering its home stretch in the assembly process, it’s over budget, it’s behind schedule, and it’s almost done. I blame those who budgeted the thing, but only partially. The thing is cutting edge, and we’re pushing the limits of technology, and in some cases, were counting on technologies that didn’t exist when the plans were being drawn up for the thing. It’s an impressive piece of engineering. The reason it might not fly however, is not an engineering one, it's a political one. The funding might get pulled now, in the 11th hour.

The shuttle program… gone. There is a replacement program in the works, but some insiders are doubtful that it will come to fruition. I personally feel like the shuttle program was a mistake anyway, but that’s a different topic. I don’t think ending a program with nothing concrete in the works is a good idea.

It would have been that big!

Anyone remember the superconducting supercollider? The U.S. spent tons of money on this project back in the 80’s and was far enough along in construction in the early 90's that shutting the program down was nearly as expensive as just finishing the damn thing (not really, but it was very expensive). It would have dwarfed the large hadron collider that had so many folks believing the world would end when it opened for business last year.

Even stuff as small scale (relatively speaking) as skyscrapers, the replacement towers for the world trade center got me thinking of when the last truly grandiose skyscraper was built in the U.S. When I was a kid most of the tallest, most awe inspiring structures in the world were the twin towers of the World Trade Center, the Sears Tower in Chicago. I know a lot of the reasons that we don’t continue to build bigger buildings are political – like a beautiful San Francisco building proposal was nixed because it violated height restrictions within the city – and there are federal regulations that would prevent anything similar to the giant tower in Dubai from being duplicated anywhere in the U.S.

Well, now that I look at it, it does look a bit... gaudy

I think the whole thing is depressing. I want to see a base on the moon, a trip to mars, a Manhattan type project to build a space elevator, or a maglev from Florida to Australia. I want to see miles wide solar cells high in orbit beaming down energy to the earth, or a plan to wipe out smallpox... wait, they may have done that one.

I wonder if those big dreams were part of the WWII mindset that carried over into the cold war. It was a time when using atomic weapons as a propellant for space craft wasn’t just a crazy idea, it was tested and ready to implement. Then it all came to a halt.

I want it back. I want us to do something big, so challenging that it might not work. The funny thing is, the main reason given is that it costs too much, that these projects are too much a financial burden, it would be foolish to waste our money on them.

To those who say that, I say you’re wrong. We spend more money on air conditioning in Iraq then we spend on NASA in a year*. I’m not making a political statement (as any discussion about congressional money quickly becomes), I’m just saying we spend money, lots of it, on things that don’t matter that much in the big picture.

The reason for me is two fold, 1) corporations are only interested in their quarterly earnings. Long term projects are those that take 2 or 3 years. We won't see any decades long research coming out of a publicly traded company, there is no money in it.

2) Governments. That's the only way to get really large scale projects done. They actually hire publicly traded corporations to do the big projects, it's inefficient, costs are hugely inflated, and corruption abounds, but it gets done (years late and way over budget). Except politicians are under more and more scrutiny, and they think of long term as their next election cycle, which means a 20 year project to get my ass to mars won't happen there either. They're more likely to make a big deal out of spending money that could be used to feed orphaned tuna is being wasted sending squirrels into space. Space science gets cut, the orphan tuna still starves, but people think that they're being frugal.

The end result. I think we're screwed.  

*What is more profound to me, the total amount of dollars spent on NASA since it's inception in the late 50's totals around $500 billion. A lot, but we've spent about two and a half that amount on the U.S. war on terror.

They Should Have Sent a Poet

Because I don't have words for this:

Earth | Time Lapse View from Space | Fly Over | Nasa, ISS from Michael König on Vimeo.

Howdy Mr. Alien... Have You Ever Tried Grilled Cheese?

As an aspiring science fiction author, I read a lot of science and science related materials. Although I am firmly a layperson in all matters science I have a fascination and appreciation for it that is pretty powerful. Science, my hat is off to you good sir. Thanks for cell phones, the internet and the eradication of polio (although I'm not entirely thrilled with nuclear weapons and killer bees).

So the folks over at New Scientist magazine have put together a short look at what was actually on the voyager probes that NASA sent off into the depths of space back in the seventies.

In case anyone doesn't know, the Voyager missions (after the Pioneer missions a few years earlier) were intended to photograph the outer planets - and afterward they were just supposed to keep going.

And like the energizer bunny, they are. 32 years later they are still traveling at 40,000 mph deeper into the blackness of space.

After thinking that some aliens may stumble upon one of our spacecraft at some point in the far future as our beloved voyagers enter into a new solar system, the great Carl Sagan helped in designing a small multimedia device that would serve as a simple "hello" from the people of earth.

The amount of storage date available at the time was pretty limited. A handful of pictures and data that has to teach any would be life-forms the basics of earth, language, humanity and whatever else they need to know to get a good idea of who and what we are. No small task.

So Carl and the gang produced a gold record of what they thought was important for the denizens of the galaxy to know about us. So what was on this mysterious golden record?



That's right, a bald guy eating grilled cheese, a young girl treating an ice cream cone, er, inappropriately, and of course, Stevie Wonder.

Wow. No wonder aliens are always hell bent on destroying us when they show up in the movies, look at the crap we are inundating them with. At least the stuff we transmit from earth is on accident, we did this on purpose.

I weep for us all.