Category Archives: Space

Slip

I’d been hearing rumors about this for a few days, and I’ve even had an email exchange or two with Elon in the last couple days on other subjects, but Clark apparently asked him what I didn’t. Falcon 1 first launch has been delayed until early next year.

The View From Orbit

For those of you with HDTV, the Discovery Channel will be doing a live broadcast from space in a few minutes, at 11:30 Eastern time. This will be the first time ever that there’s been such a broadcast in HD And if you miss it live, it will be repeated at 9 PM.

[Watching]

Some random thoughts. They spend a lot of time up front justifying and defending a space station. The problem is that this is a straw man. Many critics of the program agree that we should have a space station (I think that we should have multiple ones). The issue is not a space station, but this space station.

Also, there are no stars. They obviously filmed this in a movie studio, with hidden wires on the floating astronauts… (that’s a joke, for those unfamiliar with my posting style).

The beginning is just the astronaut floating and describing experiments. Not that interesting a use of the medium, I think. Now they’re showing views out the window, which is much more useful.

Now they’ve gone back to interior views, and are showing astrofood. I’m not fascinated by this, but I guess a lot of people are. Hope they won’t demonstrate use of the hygienic facilities…

[A few minutes later]

OK, broadcast over. They needed to do more views of the earth below, which is really the feature attraction. I think there’s a market for a camera that does nothing except orbit the earth at this resolution and show it in all its seasons, weather and diurnal cycles. It’s almost like a living kaleidoscope.

[Update about half an hour after broadcast end]

Glenn agrees. Great (or some kind of) minds think alike, I guess:

It was pretty good, but it was the images of Earth from space that were really captivating — they came across as IMAX-like — and they didn’t show enough of those. The stuff from the station interior was okay, be we’ve all seen people eat in zero gravity before and the demonstrations weren’t especially exciting just because they were HD. I would have rather had half an hour of pictures of Earth from low orbit, with only minimal talking-head involvement.

I wonder if you could make money with a cable channel that just showed pictures from a low-earth-orbit satellite in HD? It would certainly be cool — bringing the “Overview Effect” down to Earth — though I don’t think the technology’s really there for that yet.

[Update]

I’d like to see HD of the view of this from space:

KFC Corporation today became the world

Visionaries

Gerry Williams has a report from a space awards ceremony in San Diego, featuring Peter Diamandis and Burt Rutan.

Pet peeve–I wish that people would learn the difference between “risk averse” (correct) and “risk adverse” (incorrect).

Too Much Perseverance

Jon Goff has an interesting post on deciding when to quit, a critical ability for success.

Is it always right to keep going and see any difficult task through to completion, no matter the difficulty? Or is it best sometimes to reevaluate and change course when the going gets tough? How do you know which situation is which?

One of the things I got hammered into me growing up was the power of determination. If you set your mind to it, the saying goes, there is almost nothing you can’t accomplish. Unfortunately, I’ve ran into several situations in the past which have made me wonder when it really is best to keep slogging through a tough problem, and when it truly is wisest not to keep slogging away at it, but to completely change courses.

In a sense, this is a trap into which NASA has fallen many times (Shuttle and ISS both being excellent examples, and Ares may be as well), but they are often forced by politics to forge ahead with bad ideas. This is one of the many reasons that we will have to privatize space in order to make much progress.

There’s probably a lesson here for the administration vis a vis Iraq as well–clearly, we’ll have to do something different. The problem is that now the different thing that the people in charge want to do is give up and claim defeat, instead of coming up with a way to win.

Whither Space?

Brian Berger has a roundup of political impacts on NASA from the new Congress.

I think that there are some additional nuances here, but it’s a good start on understanding the implications. Bottom line–when it comes to space, there’s only one party–the Pork Party.

Getting The Stories Straight

Over at The Space Review today, Dwayne Day brings some clarity to the “debate” over the administration’s new space policy, and Jim Oberg demonstrates the cluelessness of many commentators on space weaponry.

Also, Jeff Foust reviews a recent attempt at space commentary by the Utne Reader. It shows that “progressives” are as out to lunch on this topic as most are.

Just as a side note, this is my eight thousandth post here, and I neglected to note my fifth bloggiversary last month.