News and Commentary on Space
A little self-fluffing from ESA on the 30th anniversary of its inception.
(Funny, I would have sworn there were more than just three exclamation points in that piece. Must be the breathless excitement shining through in the text itself.)
I’m having trouble deciding whether Bruce is making a clumsy attempt at a joke, or is really as disconnected as this makes him sound:
Even though Lucas says it is his last Star Wars film, the ending was a set up for another one for sure. The dark side wins but two babies are born and the Jedi’s will raise them to fight the dark side. They are the children of Darth Vader so here we go again.
It’s quite an indictment of someone’s views when you honestly can’t tell whether they’re playing dumb.
And speaking of being predictable, I knew before reading it that any Sith review from Bruce Gagnon would include something like the following:
Redeeming moments? One when Darth Vader says “You are either with me or against me” Reminds folks of George W. Bush.
Such wit!
I imagine that being eighteen and having an asteroid named after you would be a powerful incentive to succeed:
An asteroid flying several thousand miles away from Earth, currently located between Mars and Jupiter, has been named after 18-yearold Mumbaikar Bhushan Mahadik.The asteroid was christened after him by the prestigious Lincoln Laboratory of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Boston, which has played a key role in the development of space technology…
The laboratory named the asteroid after Bhushan in recognition of his achievement as a finalist in the 2003 Intel International Science Engineering Fare held in Ohio in 2003. The focus of his research was ‘synthesis of carbon nanotubes’.
Bhushan passed out of Father Agnel Junior College, Navi Mumbai, in 2004. Now, he is doing his undergraduate studies in chemical engineering at the University of California in Berkley.
Or continue succeeding, in this case. (“Synthesis of carbon nanotubes”??? That’s an impressive science fair project, but then science fairs just ain’t what they used to be.)
But what the heck is this all about?
He was selected by Isro and Nasa to participate in the ‘Red Rovers Goes to Mars’ programme in 2002. At Nasa’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Bhushan was trained to operate the Martian rovers in a simulated environment. Mars Society president Robert Zubrin has allotted Bhushan an acre of land on the Red Planet.
How generous!
Over at The Space Review, Dwayne Day reviews what I want for my birthday.
Yaaaaaaaawwwwwwwwnnnnnnnnnn.
ADDENDUM: To elaborate — in sharp contrast to others who have seen and blogged about it, Sith (I thought) had zero emotional depth. At no point during the movie did I feel any connection to any of the characters, or have any investment in their fate. I just didn’t care. It had about as much impact as a test pattern…or less, since I would have at least felt irritated if I’d paid $7 to spend two-hours-plus staring at a test pattern.
While Lucas has been getting a lot of the blame over the past six years for the lousy writing and ineffectual use of talent in the prequels, I still have to wonder as I have from the beginning if it isn’t really the Ewan McGregor Curse at work. Perhaps if McGregor had stuck to making the sort of high concept films in which his talent is most effectively showcased in all its thespianic glory — like Eye of the Beholder or A Life Less Ordinary — the Star Wars pre-trilogy might have actually turned out watchable.
MGS has been taking photos of its siblings in Mars orbit, Mars Express and Mars Odyssey.
There seems to be a rash of space-related panics underway…first “space weaponization”, now this:
Space turning into huge junk pile
Which bears a curious resemblance to this article on the same topic, which appears to be the source of this brief item.
I don’t see what this guy is getting so upset about…after all, if his hyperventilations are correct, the virus called Man will be forever trapped on this one planet, unable to infect the “pristine environment” of space.
If he only took a moment to look at the implications of his concerns through the lens of his pessimistic attitude towards humanity, he’d be encouraging such a thing.
Mark Whittington tackles the chamberlainism in an essay by Helen Caldicott in the Houston Chronicle. He makes a lot of good points, but doesn’t quite close the box on a couple of them.
In its document “Visions for 2020,” the U.S. Space Command announced the new doctrine of “Full Spectrum Dominance,” saying that “the nation which dominates outer space will dominate the Earth.” Space, according to the Space Command, is a legitimate and final frontier from which the United States should project its power.
Again, shocking, that a great nation would want to project its power, especially to stop some other nation from dominating space.
What concerns people like Ms. Caldicott is not that someone, someday may come to dominate space, but that that country is most likely going to be the U.S. Like Ward Churchill, they operate from an a priori assumption that not a sparrow falls that wasn’t brutally snuffed by the U.S., and that our actions are the sole motivator and instigator of belligerence by others. This perspective leads to the argument that, by placing weapons in space, the U.S. will trigger an arms race in which its rivals will do the same to keep parity. Mark rightly points out (later in his post) that this is unlikely to happen given economic and political realities, but what I find interesting about the argument is its implicit flip-side: we are expected to conclude that if the U.S. simply does not place weapons in space, these rivals will likewise forego placing — or using — weapons in space.
Ms. Caldicott could benefit enormously from reading (and understanding) The Gathering Storm. Churchill (Winston, not Ward) documents (among many other things) how quickly those wishing for peace and stability can lose the military and technological advantages by which they are able to secure them, when they choose not to act for fear of offending or provoking the belligerent tyrants they ought to be securing such things against, or through idealistic but naive efforts to unilaterally throw away those advantages in the interests of “international comity” and “avoiding arms races” and the like. There were plenty of treaties and agreements and pacts signed by the European powers in the interwar period, aimed at reducing tensions and preventing conflict by reducing or eliminating weapons in various categories and operational spheres. By the time Britain came to its senses and threw out the restrictive multilateral naval agreements and self-imposed “non-threatening” limitations on its air power by which it was hoped another great war could be contained, it was almost too late to defend itself against a suddenly rearmed Germany which had circumvented many of those agreements on the sly. Taking the “moral high ground” may have an emotional appeal to idealists, but in the real world it’s likely to be interpreted as a weakness to be exploited by the very people who are apparently supposed to be impressed by such impotent magnanimity.
People sharing Ms. Caldicott’s worldview seem to make no distinction between the motivations of the U.S. military in working for dominance of near space and those of other candidates for that role, and fail to recognize that if the U.S. military does exert dominance, it will be as a cop on the beat, broadly maintaining order by its mere presence and protection of its own assets, but otherwise not interfering with legitimate activities. The same can be said of the U.S. Navy — and the Royal Navy in the 19th Century — on the high seas. (It’s worth noting here that we have the world’s largest navy, yet we do not have much in the way of a commercial shipping industry.) The same can not be said of most other nations who might take on such a role should we choose to abdicate it. An implicit premise in my own argument here is that someone will move to take on the role in question — politics abhors a power vacuum just as nature leaves no niche unfilled, and given the alternatives it might as well be the U.S. that does it. The U.S. military acting as the keeper of the peace may not appeal to the transnational progressivist utopianism of people like Ms. Caldicott, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t a good thing. To paraphrase Franklin, U.S. domination of space is better than the alternatives.
Other countries are eager for an agreement, just as they are for a nuclear test ban that includes underground testing, an international criminal court, an agreement on global warming as well as treaties on land mines, small arms and chemical and biological weapons.
Of course they are. These would restrain the United States.
More to the point, Mark, they are aimed solely at restraining the United States. And one must commend the backers of such arrangements for their cleverness in formulating and making use of these initiatives: if the U.S. complies, its power is restrained and its freedom of action is restricted (and in the case of the ICC, its sovereignty is undermined), while if the U.S. refuses to participate, it sets itself up for sanctimonious lecturing from people like Ms. Caldicott — it’s a win-win situation for the transnational progressives.
I just noticed that Biff and Sandy haven’t posted a diary entry since last March. Is there something the Astrobot Corps isn’t telling us?
(And is it just me, or is there a whole bunch of innuendo in that last entry?)
UPDATE: Oh, this doesn’t look good at all.
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A young girl sets out to prove herself by resolving a long-forgotten mystery. But when she gets close to the truth, what she thought was a harmless adventure becomes a threat to the future of the independent commercial settlements on Mars.