Space & Campaign 2004

Still Interested

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President Bush is planning a speech in the next month or two addressing the new space policy (probably after the Aldridge Commission reports in early June).

Sources said Bush has been briefed on the hearings held by the commission and is awaiting its report to help frame his forthcoming remarks. Despite the approaching presidential election, the speech, which will reiterate Bush’s call for advanced human exploration of space, will not necessarily be made “in a political context.”

But you can bet it will be interpreted that way by people who don’t know any better.

Sources said although there has not been widespread support for the space plan since its debut, the president has felt no need to rush to make additional public comments. Bush has remained “highly enthusiastic” about his space proposal and his lack of additional mentions of the idea should not be taken as a cooling of interest, they said.

Space

Low Pressure Hothouse

Dan DeLong has a suggestion for the NASA Centennial Prize:

1. first edible tomato over .1 kg grown at 5 kPa total atmospheric pressure
2. first edible potato over .1 kg ” ” ” “
3. first kg of edible corn kernels ” ” ” “
4. first kg of edible peas ” ” ” ” “
5. first kg of edible beans
etc.

Where 5 kPa is Martian atmospheric pressure and also a reasonable-to-build lunar greenhouse. If you make the winner of each ineligible for the others there will be a large number of contestants.

Each contestant gets to choose atmospheric constituents from oxygen, nitrogen, and CO2 in any combination.

Then, another series of prizes would be for food crops grown with 2 weeks daylight and not more than X% duty cycle and Y illumination intensity for 2 weeks, repeat cycle as necessary. Then, X and Y decrease to lower and lower values for higher dollar prizes.

I hesitate to extend the idea to animals because I wouldn’t want the issue to get confused by animal rights activists.

Unfortunately, things that are literally edible (they won’t kill you, and might even prove nutritious) don’t necessarily taste all that great. As I pointed out to Dan in email, there are a lot of items in the produce department of my local grocery (including tomatoes) that I consider inedible, at least relative to the home-grown variety. Maybe you could come up with a panel of judges to make a determination as to whether it was sufficiently edible to be useful to space colonists.

Space

Vegas In July

If you’re interested in returning to the moon, you might want to think about attending the Return to the Moon Conference, sponsored by the Space Frontier Foundation, in Las Vegas this July (around the time of the thirty-fifth anniversary of the first manned moon landing on July 20th). Film director James Cameron (Terminator, Titanic) is scheduled as one of the speakers. Considering that the president has made this part of the new space policy, it should be a very interesting meeting.

Political Commentary

The Other Pete Knight

Andrew, Pete Knight certainly deserves to be recognized as a pilot and a space pioneer, but he was also a very controversial political figure in California. He was the driving force behind the legislation to keep gay marriage illegal (the law that the San Francisco mayor was flouting earlier this year), and he was regularly denounced by the left as a rabid right-wing homophobe (I don’t know to what degree that’s true, but considering the sources of much of the criticism, I’m inclined to think that he wasn’t as much of a neanderthal as his political enemies made him out to be).

Technology and Society

CD Rot

It’s not really new, but it’s good to see the fragility of CDs getting some press. One of the ironies of the information age is that information is being lost at a rate unprecedented in human history. A lot of that is pointless BS like my undergrad history papers, but a depressing amount of it is potentially useful technical material and historical primary sources. It’d be nice to have a really good high density long term data archive format. Currently the best we can do with any certainty that it will still be accessible in a hundred years or more is high quality acid-free paper.

Biting Commentary about Infinity…and Beyond!