News and Commentary on Space
It seems that you can grow marigolds in simulated lunar soil, with a bit of water and a dash of microbes, something which may hold promise for food production in lunar and martian settlements.
Of course, they’re not as tasty as mums or begonias, but hey, you gotta start somewhere.
Another week, another grandiose Russian space plan: Russia To Build an Orbital Construction Plant
Russia plans to build an orbital plant for the production of spacecraft (link to sketchy Google translation of the Russian original) that are too big to build planetside, or are just too bulky to fire into orbit once built…Plans seem to be rather sparse at the moment [no kidding?], with the tentative construction date set for 2020, after the ISS is scheduled for decommissioning.
Glenn Reynolds asks for science fiction recommendations, so, in honor of tomorrow’s Yuri’s Night, here are mine:
I purposely left out a lot of Heinlein and Niven, since they’re pretty much givens. The sad thing is, looking over this list I see very few recent works (Feed being the most recent at 2004). Either I’m getting old, or there just isn’t that much good science fiction being written now — certainly one sees very little SF on the shelves ostensibly devoted to it in the big retail bookstores, and what’s there is swamped out by forgettable and interchangable novels about vampires, wizards, and — of course — vampire wizards. I wasn’t all that impressed with the much-hyped Old Man’s War, which unlike Armor was a weak-coffee retelling of Starship Troopers…not bad, mind you, just not as intense or as thought provoking (respectively) as the other two. And of course there’s the Mars Trilogy, which was a great series of books aside from the asinine politics, unlikeable cardboard characters, Marineris-sized plot holes, and phenomenally naive economics (Robinson did do a good job of painting the Martian environment…at least, when he wasn’t waxing poetic about lichen).
If I had to guess, though, I would say that the fantasy genre’s long-running popularity is losing steam – it probably peaked with the Lord of the Rings movies, and if the box office performance of recent “fantasy epics” is any guide it must have jumped the shark about the same time. If so, we may see a resurgence in both popularity and quality in the SF genre in the near future.
Tangentially related to this, I have to wonder what the effects on SF of the “global warming” mass hysteria and associated fascist cult will be over the long term. Certainly the rationalist and libertarian strains of SF will critique the corruption of science and the bounding of the future which radical greenism represents (Niven/Pournelle/Barnes and Chrichton have already written books along these lines). I for one have a hard time imagining anyone writing good “environmentalist science fiction”, since anything written with the environmentalist perspective is bound to be preachy, teachy, and tedious in the extreme, given that the authors’ first priority will be to convince the reader of the dire consequences facing the planet and urge them to action…instead of, you know, telling an entertaining yarn.
Like Christian end-times fiction, environmentalist science fiction may appeal to a certain small demographic, but go largely unnoticed outside of the true-believer market (unless made mandatory reading in high school English communications arts classes and the like). It’s not impossible to write a popular novel from the green perspective, any more than a Rapture-themed novel can’t be written that becomes a success in the mainstream market (it’s been done, after all), it’s just that I doubt those who might be motivated to write from this perspective would be able to balance dogma with the demands of good fiction.
One might counter that the oddly popular post-apocalypse sub-genre has been around since the beginning of science fiction, and the environmental catastrophe or post-catastrophe story would be nothing more than a new direction for this sub-genre. I’m not so sure. I’ve read a lot of the more well-known post-apocalypse titles, and the plots typically involve one or more protagonists fighting to stay alive after the End Of The World As We Know It. We follow their struggles, root for them as the action reaches a climax, and cheer their success when they eventually overcome whatever nightmarish eschatological nastiness the author has thrown at them. In short, even books with as dire a theme as the end of civilization (or mankind itself) are pro-human, and will take the side of the human protagonists.
While environmentalist science fiction might also represent humans as the good guys and present their struggle for survival as a good thing, consider what the protagonists would have to do to remain heroic within the value system of radical environmentalism: acknowledge that the catastrophe is not only entirely of human making (which is the case in many post-apocalypse stories) but that it is cosmic justice for mankind’s environmental sins, wallow in existential guilt at being humans, fret about whether humans (including themselves) even deserve to survive The End, etc. It’s difficult to write a compelling survival story about people who hate themselves, since their self-loathing tends to undermine the believability of their struggling to overcome the apocalyptic circumstances — what plausible reason would they have to fight for their own survival when they doubt they have any right to exist in the first place?
Again, I’m not saying that it’s impossible to write a good story in this sub-genre from the environmentalist perspective, I’m just doubtful it can be done by anyone who might be motivated to do it, because of the very source of their motivation.
Now that the current inter-DAC is nearly done, the normally less-nonexistent level of blogging will resume.
Something that puzzles me about Orion, and about aerospace engineering programs in general, is why it seems every last organizational thing has to be reinvented with every new project.
LM has a pretty extensive process documentation organization, which promulgates company-standard procedures for even the most mundane of business activities. It also has a separate organization whose focus is specifically on engineering process improvement, through the creation of CAD tools and processes and the like.
So why, I have to wonder, has every project I have ever worked on with LM (X-33, VentureStar, ET, CEV/Orion, among others) started from scratch with everything from numbering schemes to release processes to configuration management to data vaulting to drawing formats and standards to basic skill mix and team structures? You’d think that after so many decades that a lot of this stuff would have become routine by now — revised periodically as new technology becomes available, of course, but not built anew every time.
A counter argument to this — and one I used frequently when confronted with the All-Encompassing Michoud Excuse for Not Improving Processes: “That’s the way ET does it” — is that one ought to take advantage of the start of a new program to incorporate the lessons learned from other programs, thereby continuously improving the way business is done. Unfortunately, there doesn’t seem to be a middle ground between status quo and Year Zero when it comes to these things.
If LM were smart, it would set up a “project in a box”, with all of the essential organizational elements defined and ready to go. Or rather, a handful of such packages, designed for projects of different sizes, from small R&D efforts up to major production programs.
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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.
