Ever wonder what the earth would look like from Mars? Wonder no more.

NASA’s taken a picture.

The rest of the day. I’m driving up to San Bruno, and I’ll be attending the International Space Development Conference this weekend. Hope I’ll see some of you there.

Maybe some posting tonight or tomorrow.

The war on model rocketry by the ATF continues.

[via Michael Mealing]

The recent war in the sands of Mesopotamia was won, in a sense, hundreds, even thousands of miles overhead.

Surveillance satellites provided valuable intelligence, in spectra both visible to human eyes, and those only viewable by computers, in real time.

Communications satellites relayed that data to those who needed it, from generals and admirals in Doha, to special forces in the north, down to the lowest ranking soldiers who needed to know if the enemy was across the river, or around the corner, and how many there were, and where their comrades and reinforcements could be found.

Navigation satellites told our troops where they themselves were at all times.

This did more than shorten the war and thereby save the lives of both our and the enemy’s troops. It also saved many civilian lives, by the precision with which targets could be taken out, injuring few bystanders. It saved (and continues to save) lives in other ways.

In wars past, power plants and lines, water treatment plants, dams and hospitals, might all have been destroyed, not because it was necessarily a war goal, but because our crude warfare techniques would have devastated the incidental with the targets. The precision allowed by our satellites spared critical non-targeted infrastructure, necessary to restore life-saving services and utilities quickly, relative to a more old-fashioned, conventional war.

It was the first total communications, digital war, and it couldn’t have been won, or even fought remotely like it was, without billions of dollars worth of hardware in orbit, assembled painstakingly over the past several decades.

It’s becoming clear that the new high ground of space is critical to America’s ability to, for better or worse, project both force and humanity on terra firma. As Britannia once ruled the waves, if America is to maintain its own sense of security, and ability to prevail in future such conflicts, it must rule the void above, as some members of Congress recognize.

This is not as radical or unilateral a notion as it may sound.

After all, our nation currently rules the air and the sea, in the sense that if we apply our will to it, we can dominate any other nation on the planet in a battle in those environments. It doesn’t mean that no one else is allowed to fly, or to ply the oceans–it simply means that if we, for whatever reason, decide that we must prevent them from doing so in a particular place and time, we have the ability to do that.

Whether or not that’s a good or bad thing, for either America or the rest of the world, is an interesting discussion, but one for a different column. Regardless, it’s currently reality. Now some are simply saying that we must extend the fact of that primacy above the atmosphere, where we are currently relatively impotent.

No one, with the possible exception of the Russians, has the actual ability to interfere with the missions of any of our satellites, particularly the high-altitude ones, short of launching a nuke into orbit and detonating it, which would result in massive and comprehensive damage from the electromagnetic impulse of the explosion, at least in low earth orbit, which is where many of our surveillance satellites reside. But if someone were to develop such an ability, we have absolutely no current capability to negate it.

Our space assets are almost totally defenseless, and we are relying on our potential adversaries’ (temporary) weakness, rather than our own strength and technological prowess, to ensure their continued availability. Certainly, it’s much easier (and within easy technical reach of many advanced nations) to come up with an offensive weapon against our satellites, than it is to defend them.

No doubt there are many who believe that we should rely on a “multi-lateral United Nations transnational” defense force to ensure that no one should place weapons, or systems that can enhance or even, heaven forfend, enable weapons, in space, to protect it for the pristine purposes of science.

The reality is that space is a place, and this doesn’t just apply to uses for entertainment and commerce, but military endeavors as well. Given the UN’s track record in keeping weapons out of terrestrial areas, the notion that it should be in charge of maintaining a peaceful cosmos is laughable.

In some perfect, ideal existence, there would be a universal peace force that would patrol “greater metropolitan earth” to ensure that no rogue nation could get a march on innocent countries, disable their defenses, and bombard them from above of some terrestrial location. Sadly, that is not the existence in which we live. The US isn’t perfect, but it’s probably the best we’re going to do on the planet, absent a massive global educational initiative.

This may sound arrogant, and perhaps it is, but if there is going to be a superpower, even a hyperpower on earth, what would you choose it to be? A nation founded on at least the principles of accountability and balance of power between the rulers and the ruled, or an entity on the bank of the East River of New York, consisting mainly of the votes of a number of satrapies and kleptocracies that perversely demand the rights of democracy, which they deny their own people?

Again, our nation is not perfect, but it has at least the mechanisms in place to achieve such a state, or at least approach it. “Britannia rules the waves” was not perfection, but in many ways it advanced civilization for a century or two. We will continue to improve on the American experiment, but while we’re doing so, we could do a lot worse than to bask in the benefits of a “Pax Americana Cosmos” as we continue to work out the bugs. The world has to ask itself: would we prefer the domination of space by people whose credo is death and destruction of anyone who believes not in Wahabbism, or those who are pluralistic and tolerant of other religions that are tolerant themselves?

Perhaps the choice isn’t that stark, but given the current state of the world, it’s incumbent on those who think otherwise at this point to make their case.

In a column titled “Mainstream media still treating Bush with kid gloves,” a Democrat hack named Ed Garvey (who apparently lost an election to Tommy Thompson) demonstrates that he is totally looneytunes.

Wouldn’t it be refreshing if Fox News, CNBC, CBS and others were to make the same apology for the what can only be described as “journalistic fraud” as they slant the news to favor President Bush and his factually unsupportable justification of the invasion of another country?

Substitute Bill Clinton for Bush over the past six months and you will see my point. What would TV talking heads be saying today? William Kristol, Sean Hannity and the others would be demanding Clinton’s impeachment. They would be screaming that there were no weapons of mass destruction and Clinton knew it. He lied to the U.N., to the American people, and he deliberately and unnecessarily placed American troops in harm’s way.

Well, with Bill Clinton, it would all sound pretty plausible, seeing how much else he lied about, and given the fecklessness of his military policy. But of course, this is a true fantasy, because Mr. Clinton would not have invaded Iraq. The thought of him standing up (as opposed to sucking up) to the UN, and France, simply beggars my imagination.

And if that was insufficient to start an impeachment proceeding, they would be screaming that he did all of this without a congressional declaration of war.

Ummm…he had congressional approval. Did you miss the vote last fall? The one that you folks demanded last summer?

This would be “Wag the Dog” all over again. A war to divert attention from a flagging economy. And, to top it off, Clinton did not secure the Iraqi nuclear sites to prevent looting, did not protect the national museum, did not capture Saddam or his sons. He led people to believe that the invasion of Iraq was about Sept. 11, not oil.

Sure, there would probably be some partisan Republicans who’d do that. But Fox and the other “right-wing” news outlets you’re complaining about are letting hordes of Democrats do it now, as is the Capital Times, with your insane rant.

What’s your point?

They would save the best until last. Do you remember the famous haircut on Air Force One? Clinton supposedly had his hair cut while planes were diverted around Los Angeles International Airport. It didn’t happen, but Clinton was condemned on right-wing talk shows throughout America for this alleged waste of funds.

Imagine if Bill Clinton had slowed down an aircraft carrier and had landed on the deck in a jet for photo ops for his campaign. Oh, my goodness! The folks at Fox would be in cardiac arrest. Rush would froth at the mouth.

“Slowed down an aircraft carrier”? My understanding is that carriers generally go at full steam in order to allow aircraft to land on them–it reduces the relative velocity and makes for a safer landing…

Mr. Bush may get some nice campaign footage out of it, but the purpose was to make a nationwide speech and boost morale of the troops, the latter being something that Mr. Clinton tended to achieve in reverse.

And actually, Mr. Clinton did delay air traffic at LAX for a haircut, to the best of my knowledge. I’ve never seen a persuasive debunking of the story. And no one was complaining about a “waste of funds.” The complaint was that he was so inconsiderate as to delay hundreds of passengers’ departures for his personal vanity.

My recollection was that unlike the troops who were cheering for the President on the carrier, the passengers waiting on the tarmac were fuming. Other than that, the two incidents are exactly the same, of course.

When the right-wing forces control the media, what chance is there for the truth to raise its head? And the concentration is only getting worse. Those who control the electronic media can keep the Dixie Chicks off the air, praise Bush for bush league antics, and yet find time to take swipes at the Democrats.

Amazing. I don’t have time to do the whole thing, but there’s plenty more for folks to chew on.

Alan Boyle has a good rundown on upcoming attractions at Epcot and Universal. Disney is shooting for a space experience that may do a fair job of simulating almost a minute of weightlessness.

I don’t think that this will detract from the market for true weightlessness, such as Zero G Corp will offer, because you’ll be able to actually move around and do weightless stuff in the airplane. It’s really a different market. (By the way, despite the hype on their web page, they won’t be the first private provider of weightlessness in the US–as far as I know, the late Lee Weaver and I were, but they may be the first financially successful one.)

Alan asks a question at the end:

In the wake of Columbia?s loss, ?Mission: Space? may well be as close as paying customers will get to space flight for the foreseeable future. What do you think?

I think that Columbia is utterly irrelevant to how soon we get paying customers into space. The folks working X-Prize, and those developing suborbitable passenger vehicles, such as Jeff Bezos, don’t seem to be deterred, and in fact, NASA is in such disarray right now that it will probably actually encourage a lot of the entrepreneurs, because it’s too busy with its own problems to get in the way. Getting rid of Art Stephenson was a good step toward making NASA less of a problem.

P. J. O’Rourke has the current goods on Bill Clinton.

Bill Clinton gives hope to every one of us potato-nosed oafs from nowhere with our shiftless relatives and our marriages that are like being sewn up in a sack full of cats. If this knight of the manure shovel, this gas pudding, can become the leader of the free world, there’s hope for us all. We observe his ragamuffin character stitched together from scraps of prevarication and ribbons of fantasy. We watch his hinge-heeled ethical contraption flap in the breeze of fundraising and personal finance. We cluck at the spectacle of a sad rip and his homely girlfriends. No annoying crick in the neck from looking up to this hero.

As someone once said, read the whole thing.

Christie Whitman is resigning.

Michael Isikoff writes in Slate that Sid (the squid) Blumenthal has a “malleable relationship with the truth.” He’s too kind, in my humble opinion.

I’m still waiting to find a review of his paen to the Clintonian saintliness that commends it, rather than exposing it for the pack of sycophantic lies that it is. If I see one, my prediction is that it will be by either Gene Lyons, or Joe Conason, both notoriously enthusiastic Clinton keester smoochers.

Michael Isikoff writes in Slate that Sid (the squid) Blumenthal has a “malleable relationship with the truth.” He’s too kind, in my humble opinion.

I’m still waiting to find a review of his paen to the Clintonian saintliness that commends it, rather than exposing it for the pack of sycophantic lies that it is. If I see one, my prediction is that it will be by either Gene Lyons, or Joe Conason, both notoriously enthusiastic Clinton keester smoochers.