Well, it’s out, and depressingly familiar. There seems to have been very little imagination, and its authors seems stuck in the sixties. It’s basically Apollo to Mars.
Joel Achenbach has the story. I’m glad that at least they’re pointing out the safety issues with flying SLS so rarely, but a bolder report would have discussed what a disaster the program will be cost wise. I’ll have to read the report to see if they addressed the real issue, which is launch costs, but since they seemed to get all their input from NASA, I suspect that it will be completely ignored.
I don’t see any details, but apparently he died late last week. I hadn’t seen him in a couple decades, but I know that he’d been ill for quite some time. I imagine many younger people in the space movement haven’t heard of him, but he was one of the luminaries back in the seventies, creating the potential economic driver for O’Neill colonies. Anyway, John Mankins seems to have taken up the baton from him for space solar power.
All summer we’ll see the sequicentennials of that bloody summer of 1864, as Grant marched down toward Richmond, after (unlike his predecessors) not retreating after the bloody battle at The Wilderness, as Sherman was in turn moving down into the deep south. The two campaigns ended up saving Lincoln’s presidency in the fall election.
Cold Harbor was one of the bloodiest, complete with the beginnings of trench warfare that was ultimately a presage to the first world war. The European observers, used to Napoleonic tactics, were appalled at the butchery of rapid-fire weaponry, a technological advance (if one can call it back) to which took decades for tactics to adapt. The only major change in the half century afterward of carnage, really, was the tank.
This is not atypical. After a while, every page starts to refuse to load, or becomes unreadable, and you can paint weird things on it by just waving the cursor over various areas. It’s version 35.0.1916.114 stable, running in Fedora 20.
In frustration, I uninstalled and tried running the current beta. It had its own problems, with continual tab crashes and freezing the machine.
I switched a while ago from Firefox, for various reasons. Opera starts chewing up half my CPU after being up a for an hour or so. It just seems like every browser sucks.
I was there. I’ve had a cold for a few days, so it got a little grueling toward the end (not much in the way of seating for four hours) but it was pretty impressive, as you’ve probable seen from pictures and video. Alan Boyle was there, and has already posted the story.
[Friday-morning update]
Megan Geuss was there last night too. Here‘s her report.
Due to some unhappiness about having to deal with Facebook (and a politically problematic petition site), I’ve set up a new one at the web site for the book. So please sign over there, and pass the word.
