Best wishes to her and congratulations to him. Ragged Point is a beautiful place to get married.
Wonder how they’ll work out the geography, though, with her in Hawthorne and him in Midland, unless he’s staying in Mojave.
Category Archives: Technology and Society
More Thoughts On Mars
…from George RR Martin:
Mariner’s findings thrilled scientists around the world and gave us a detailed and accurate picture of the nature of the inner planets, but for the readers and writers of science fiction, the excitement was mingled with disillusionment and dismay. This was not the Mars we wanted. This was not the Venus of our dreams.
I never wrote that Mars story. Nor any stories on Venus, or Mercury, or any of the worlds of the “lost” solar system of my youth, the worlds that had provided the setting for so many wonderful tales during the 30s, 40s and 50s. In that I was not alone. After Mariner, our genre moved to the stars in a big way, searching for the colourful exotic settings and alien races that could no longer be found here “at home”.
I think that there’s still too much romanticism about the planet.
Shuttle/Centaur
A history, over at Ars Technica. In addition to the balloon tanks, there were concerns with the common bulkhead between the LOX and LH2 tanks (though AFAIK this has never caused a Centaur failure).
As I’ve written before, there was an alternative approach, that NASA never considered.
Nutrition Guidelines
Tom Vilsack: “I wish there were scientific facts.”
Pro tip to Vilsack. An “informed opinion” not based on scientific facts is an uninformed opinion.
And here’s a nice bit of illogic:
Lawmakers also noted that federal nutrition guidelines could be considered a failure because of the country’s high obesity rates. But Burwell fought back, arguing that obesity would be much worse had the guidelines not been in place.
“We are on the wrong trajectory, but would the trajectory have been worse?” Burwell said, acknowledging there was an obesity problem.
Since it was the original crap low-fat guidelines from the government that caused the problem, no, there’s no reason to consider them a success, or to not end the insanity.
Jay Gibson’s Talk On XCOR
I didn’t live tweet it, but here are some tweets from Jeff Foust on Gibson’s #ISPCS comments yesterday:
Jay Gibson, XCOR: we don’t have the benefit of a wealthy backer; that makes us very feisty and innovative. #ispcs
— Jeff Foust (@jeff_foust) October 7, 2015
Gibson: we’re building a platform that is frequent, affordable and capable; we’ll let the free market determine how to use it. #ispcs
— Jeff Foust (@jeff_foust) October 7, 2015
Gibson: our focus right now is getting ready to fly, “and we will soon.” #ispcs
— Jeff Foust (@jeff_foust) October 7, 2015
Commercializing The Cosmos
This looks like an interesting event tomorrow.
Increase NASA’s Budget
aA
ISPCS
I got up early this morning, flew to El Paso, and then drove up to Alamagordo to the space history museum. In Las Cruces now. I’ll check in from the event tomorrow.
Hollywood And Mars
[Monday-afternoon update]
Even the film-makers had doubts:
“If you had told me two years ago when we were walking into Fox to pitch the approach and what this movie would be, if you told me I’d be on the phone talking about how this is a big spectacle movie, I would have been delighted,” he tells Esquire. “At the time, we knew it was going to be expensive, but we thought it would be more niche than Ridley made it.” Nope.
What made The Martian unique also made it a difficult sell. It was not an action movie. The film’s star would spend his time farming potatoes harvested from his co-astronaut’s feces. The Rock would not show up to blow away aliens halfway through the second act. Mind would prevail over muscle. And that’s not easy to write for the masses.
I hope it will break some of the stereotypes, and make it easier to make these kinds of films.
[Bumped]
Space Pirates
Michael Listner explains in excruciating space-law detail why Mark Watney isn’t one.