MarsBlog.net

So much for my plans for more frequent postings – new laptop or no, my folks have no internet service with which to use it.

On the other hand, they do now have satellite teevee, through which I was able to catch a few minutes of a program on Mars settlement this afternoon. I think it was a UK-produced show (the flamboyantly hip host was to all evidence British) named “Escape Earth”, which looked at (of all things) the options open to us if humanity had to leave the mother world in event of some natural or artificial global catastrophe.

Which is something of an exotic premise for a TV series, given the limited number of workable alternatives – for instance, the next episode will be about colonizing Venus, whose obvious drawbacks certainly wouldn’t make it one’s first (or even hundredth) choice of a refuge from planetary cataclysm.

But the portion of the Mars show I saw was nonetheless interesting, for instance, demonstrating some of the construction methods Bob Zubrin catalogued in “The Case For Mars” many moons ago. Unfortunately, everyone but the uber-hip host was from the list of Martian Usual Subjects, so it didn’t introduce any new faces.

Posted on December 31st, 2009 under Settlement. Comments Off

 I vaguely remember watching this show a couple of times when it was originally aired. I remember it being cheesy, but ye gods, I had no idea…

Like watching a Kevin Costner movie or reading a Cormac McCarthy novel, it’s so awful it makes one’s brain hurt.

Posted on December 22nd, 2009 under Entertainment. Tags: 1970s, Quark, Science Fiction, sitcom, television. Comments: 1

Although Keith warns that the story is premature and may not be correct in its particulars, this Science Insider preview of the Obama administration’s revised space policy (particularly regarding Constellation) indicates that it might include some longed-for Christmas presents…including (and especially) the cancellation of Ares I.

I can’t say that I’m thrilled at the possibility of handing off Altair and the hypothetical lunar base to international partners, given the distortions that imposed on the ISS (e.g.: the higher-inclination orbit that allowed Soyuz to reach ISS from Kazakhstan). Nor am I especially enthusiastic about the possibility of accelerating the development of the unneeded Ares V, but I do recognize that it would be a political necessity to appease Sen. Shelby (R-Huntsville Makework Jobs) should Ares I actually get the long-overdue and well-deserved axe. Nor am I thrilled that NASA may be given $1-4B more, given the waste that has already plagued Constellation (Ares-1X, MLAS, and Ares I design mitigations, for example).

The potential stocking stuffers in this story, though, are the appearance that commercial cargo to ISS is finally being taken seriously as a part of NASA’s operations, and (personally, since I work on Orion) the possibility that Orion could switch to riding an EELV as it should have from the beginning. If true, the former will be a big boost to a true commercial space transportation industry, and the latter will make our design job on Orion a heck of a lot easier through more benign launch and abort environments and mass margins (not to mention the stack won’t look like a corndog any more — that’s just embarrassing).  While the rumored policy update does nothing to address what I consider to be the root problem — NASA shouldn’t be doing this stuff in the first place, but rather (if anything at all) encouraging through tech transfer and incentives the growth of robust private sector space industries — it would at least be a step towards a somewhat more sensible way of doing what the agency has been tasked with doing.

Posted on December 20th, 2009 under Constellation, European Space, Moon-Mars Plan, Orion, Space Commerce, Space Technology. Tags: altair, ares, atlas, Constellation, delta, eelv, Orion, Space Policy. Comments: 1

Part of the reason that posting on MarsBlog has been so lackluster over the past year is that my other project, People’s Press Collective, has been claiming nearly all of my time outside of work. Since I live about forty minutes from downtown Denver, and end up down there for events 2-3 nights a week, it’s been awfully hard to find the time (or motivation when time is available) to blog from my trusty deskbound desktop PC at home.

For that and other reasons, I finally invested in a new HP dm3 laptop yesterday. Or maybe it’s a netbook. I’m not really clear on the distinction, and this one seems to be in a gray zone in between, having a dual-core 64-bit processor and faster bus than an obvious netbook and a slightly larger size, but similarly missing the optical drive of a laptop and a typical laptop’s voracious appetite for battery power. Oh, and it has a slick magnesium case, which makes it look much more hardy than the toy-like netbooks (or medical-equipment-like white Apples, for that matter).  

So, with any luck, this should make posting a lot easier, and thus somewhat more frequent.

While I’ve had limited time thus far to play with it (that will come in the airport this week), I have tried out some video from the HD camcorder I picked up last month, and it is truly amazing. The desktop didn’t have enough memory to view native .MT2 files without a lot of choppiness  (and since it was RDRAM, was not cost-effective to expand), but the little laptop was all set up and ready to go, with all the right codecs already installed for Media Player. If you haven’t played around with HD video, it’s incredible how much sharper and more “real” it is than what you may be used to from YouTube or online television watching. I still may need to get a new desktop at some point to process video, but for viewing it, I don’t think I could ask for much better.

Posted on December 20th, 2009 under Meta, Miscellaneous, Useful Technology. Tags: Add new tag, blogging, camcorder, HD video, laptop, marsblog, netbook, technology. Comments Off

I finally finished scanning all 500-odd of my uncle’s old slides yesterday, and found a couple more aerospace shots in the mix, including this:

I’m not a plane expert, but I believe this is a C-124 Globemaster II. One thing that struck me about looking at the plane from this angle is the vague resemblance to the forward fuselage of a 747 — which is interesting given that the C-124 was a Douglas product.

If anyone is interested, the scanner used is a Nikon Coolscan 5000ED with the slide autofeeder attachment. I honestly can’t say enough good about the thing.

Oh, and among the slides not related to aerospace — puppies!

(Also known as “shameless link bait”.)

Posted on December 20th, 2009 under Entertainment, Miscellaneous. Tags: 1950s, airplane, beagle, C-124, Douglas, Globemaster II, military, nikon coolscan 5000, photography, puppies, transport. Comments Off

While visiting family in Michigan over Thanksgiving, I happened to mention to my uncle that I had bought a slide scanner a couple of years ago, and that I had scanned in my grandfather’s (his father-in-law’s) old slides from the early 1960s. This led to him dropping off a box the next day, with around 300 slides he took in the mid-1950s, for me to take home and scan for him.

A number of them are of aerospace interest, as they show various then-current planes, including  a tarmac filled with C-97 Stratofreighters and a Flying Boxcar:

What I didn’t expect was this slide:

It appears to be a shot of WWII hero and actor Audie Murphy during the filming of The Guns of Fort Petticoat, a movie taglined at IMDB thus: “GOOD WOMEN…BAD WOMEN…BRAWLING WOMEN…BRAVE WOMEN! They were all soldiers in skirts! “  I cropped the slide down to about half size, but there is a boom microphone to the right and a camera in a blimp to the left (above the shoulder of the guy in the white hat).

You just never know what you’re going to find.

Posted on December 14th, 2009 under Entertainment, Meta, Miscellaneous. Comments Off

Some of my co-conspirators at People’s Press Collective have been having a little fun with the “global warming insurance” video…

“It’s not like you’re gonna give up your whole paycheck, it’s just a few bucks a month [that you're gonna give up]“.

Dude…it’s not your money to take.

[hat tip: WhoSaidYouSaid]

Posted on December 8th, 2009 under Economics, Luddism, PPC. Tags: Bill Dube, Boulder, environmentalism, moonbats, People's Press Collective, Progressive Democrats of Colorado, satire, WhoSaidYouSaid. Comments Off