News and Commentary on Space
Bill Whittle and Rand Simberg have an interesting video out on the “new space age” — you know, the one that started on July 21, 2004…
I’d quibble with a few of Whittle’s comments that relate to Orion, but other than that, it’s worth watching. It’s almost enough to make me run out and join a startup right now…
“In the Shadow of Ares” (formerly known around here as “Labyrinth of Night”) is now available for download at Amazon.com:
In 2029, the third exploration mission to Mars vanishes without a trace. Two decades later, the success of human settlement of Mars and the life of a young girl hinge on the secret of what happened to the Ares III mission.
Twenty years later, Mars is a growing outpost of humanity, and 14-year-old settler Amber Jacobsen is a minor interplanetary celebrity – ‘the First Kid on Mars’. Pioneering Mars is hard, unglamorous work, though, and Amber secretly wishes she were just an ordinary girl living on Earth.When her family’s homestead is destroyed in an apparent accident, the Jacobsens relocate to an independent settlement located on the northern fringes of Noctis Labyrinthus, a vast and largely unexplored canyonland. Their new home promises new opportunities, and Amber looks forward to being just another member of the community. Instead, the other settlers dismiss her as a burdensome child and refuse to accept her as the responsible young adult she has become.
In order to prove the value of her unique knowledge and perspective, Amber vows to uncover the fate of the Ares III mission, whose loss had largely been forgotten in the rush of the Martian settlement boom. But this seemingly harmless challenge thrusts her into a deadly conflict: those who know the truth will kill to keep it hidden, while those who destroyed her family’s homestead would use the secret to secure their dominance over all of Mars.
In solving the mystery, Amber could destroy everything the Martian settlers have worked to create.
It’s priced at an affordable $6.99, and would make a wonderful Christmas present for the science fiction reader or young adult on your shopping list. Especially if you’re buying them a Kindle or they already own one (remember, you can also download the free Kindle app for various electronic platforms if you/they don’t have a Kindle reader).
While I’m going to be occupied for much of the weekend with writing a business plan and attending Christmas parties, I do expect to get the blog at AresProject.com up and running again in the next few days. We will use that forum to discuss the book, the backstory, etc.
…on their second successful Falcon 9 launch and first commercial capsule orbit and reentry. Hopefully, SpaceX having now shown it can be done will encourage the other potential players to push on (and, perhaps, improve their chances of getting financing). Competition is a good thing.
Rand Simberg wonders whether this will change minds in DC. A lot of us in the office were pondering that same question today, though for a very different reason – namely, wondering whether the success of a commercial operation in doing what Orion won’t be able to do until mid-2013 will encourage Congress to take a knife to critical look at the rump Orion program.
Apparently we have to be wary of pantybombers on ski slopes now, too.
It’s a windless morning at Steamboat Ski Resort, and Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believin’” pulses through a bright Gondola Square. Shuffling across the slushy snow, skiers line up to board the Steamboat Gondola, but first they must unzip, de-layer, and turn out their pockets. Like travelers at Denver International Airport, these would-be gondola riders must run through a gauntlet of security checkpoints before taking to the skies.
After ticket scanners confirm that skiers’ lift passes are legit, a panel of uniformed police officers pats everyone down and inspects backpacks for contraband such as alcohol. Refuse the search, and that $97 day-ticket becomes null and void. Still, on this bluebird day, one baby boomer flexes his ’60s-honed flower power and bucks the system. “You don’t have any right to search me!” he shouts. Throughout the loading zone, heads swivel toward the lone renegade. The cops try to respond to him in hushed tones. But he won’t be quieted. “You have no right!” he repeats.
This is one of those rare occasions where I agree with a hippie.
Of course, this isn’t TSA in action, so it’s not really about pantybombers or some illusion of security. Instead, the justification used is that it’s to maintain the family-friendly atmosphere of the ski resorts and to thwart theft. I wonder when malls will start implementing pat-downs and pocket searches under the same justifications — after all, there’s plenty of room for obnoxious behavior at malls, and an ever-present problem with theft.
With every day that passes, I’m more amazed at my virtually hall-monitor-free experience in Iceland. We laughed at the fact that the Land of the Vikings outlawed the sale and private ownership of souvenir swords, of all things, but at least they didn’t have security people on every corner looking for any reason to rifle through your belongings and clothes and feel you up with an invasive touch-search.
The gals at WhoSaidYouSaid.com have turned the creepy Pennsylvania tax ad into an equally disturbing parody.
If James Cameron is so passionate about restoring the 3D camera to MSL/Curiosity, then…instead of lobbying, and urging, and taking his concerns to the NASA administrator, why didn’t he just pay for it out of pocket?
I don’t know that he didn’t, or didn’t offer to do so (the article doesn’t say), but it seems like the obvious thing to do for a guy with a passion and a couple billion dollars in the bank. Indeed, a sponsorship arrangement with NASA would have been a coup for both. Trade Cameron the rights to market the resulting imagery in exchange for underwriting the camera, let him produce a theatrical 3D documentary using it, and both win: Cameron cleans up at the box office, and NASA gets a great PR and education/information outreach opportunity.
Master Thespian John Morse, Colorado Senate Majority Leader, goes off on a rant over Amazon.com’s small act of defiance against his tax increase and privacy invasion. This is so laughable it has to be seen to be believed/appreciated:
For those who don’t know, the Democrat-controlled Colorado legislature two weeks ago passed what have come to be called the “Dirty Dozen” tax increases – blatantly ignoring the Taxpayer Bill of Rights amendment to the state constitution by raising taxes without a vote of the citizens. Among the items subjected to new or increased taxes, including soda and (some, weirdly-defined) candy, doggie bags, software downloads, and bull semen (!), are all online sales.
In the case of the latter, the tax increase mandated onerous and privacy-invading reporting requirements onto online retailers. Amazon announced early on that they would suspend all affiliate accounts for Colorado residents if the measure passed, and over the weekend made good on that promise, sending cancellation letters to all of its Amazon Affiliates in the state.
In other words, a company had the guts to stand up in a small, symbolic way to the anti-constitutional taxation policy and invasive reporting requirements of the state of Colorado – and Senator Morse won’t stand for it. How dare Amazon not meekly accept the dictates of Senator Morse and his pals in the Colorado legislature? Who does Amazon think it is?
Me? I say “Hooray for Amazon!”
What amuses me is that he is now going to ditch his Kindle, boycott Amazon, and take his custom to more statism-friendly Apple. While I applaud Amazon’s actions, I firmly believe that they will lose far more business from people like me, who will no longer purchase anything online, from any retailer, so long as this taxation and reporting law is in effect. Indeed, even though I am a shareholder and the move would cost the company money, I would have preferred to see Amazon go all the way, and refuse to accept any orders for delivery to or with a billing address in Colorado (or at the very least the addresses of the governor and every legislator who voted for the bill).
What’s not funny about Senator Morse’s dramatic soliloquy, though, is the unquestioned assumptions that lie behind it. The notion that Amazon being a $900 million “corporate customer [sic]” is something shameful, a sin that requires the redistribution of their profits to assuage. Or the assumption that the targets of an objectionable piece of legislation ought to know their place, and accept the imposition humbly without uttering a word of protest. Or the apallingly ignorant assumption that he and his equally-economically-ignorant colleagues can blithely pass tax increases without altering economic behavior in the private sector whatsoever.
What’s even worse is Morse’s astonishing and hypocritical attack on Amazon as being a “bully” and engaging in “egregiousness” and ”tyranny”. Senator John Morse, Democrat of Colorado Springs, may want to look in the mirror – after all, it isn’t Amazon who is pitching an over-the-top emotional fit, it isn’t Amazon who is throwing its weight around to take something it shouldn’t have or forcing people to do business with it, and it isn’t Amazon who is acting in blatant violation of the state constitution and against the loudly expressed wishes of the citizens of Colorado.
[via WhoSaidYouSaid]
ADDED: Senator Morse is getting called out on his BS in the comments at YouTube, and is (not at all surprisingly) responding with snippy and condescending remarks. How dare we proles question him! He’s a senator!
Well, you would have thought so from some of the nailbiting hall talk and email at work today concerning the announcement that the Obama administration will push for the cancellation of Constellation, replacing it with initiatives aimed at bringing the nascent commercial spaceflight industry into bloom. The doom and gloom around Orion was in (understandable) contrast to the delight (or simple satisfaction) seen around the space blogosphere.
I think Michael Mealing comes closest to my own attitude towards this development:
President Obama’s new policy for NASA is the most fiscally conservative and downright capitalist policy to come along since the agency was founded.
And yes, it really boggles my mind that that should be the case. Obama? Capitalist? Who’da thunk? As one co-worker quipped today, Obama seems confused: he wants to nationalize a private industry in healthcare, but privatize the national program in manned space. One thing that has really surprised me today is how many of my friends have called or emailed me, expressing shock and disappointment that we are now “abandoning” space – unwittingly accepting the premise that a government program is our only possible means of getting people there. The perception that government is the sole entity capable of conducting manned spaceflight is so ingrained and unquestioned that it doesn’t seem to occur to even those who claim to be capitalists to question it.
But of course, I have to temper my surprise and excitement at this prospect, much as I did regarding the newfound enthusiasm for nuclear power Mr. Obama expressed in his SOTU last week. There’s going to be a lot of haggling to get the Congressional NASA caucus on board with this (although one Senator who could have been expected to be among the biggest roadblocks seems to be climbing on board – however reluctantly). It’s going to take some time, and who knows, just as ESAS made a dog’s breakfast of the VSE, so too could Congressional compromises and NASA resistance turn the promise of this new policy direction into yet another dead end.
Heh – Libertarian Except for the Cool Stuff:
Even the most Heinlein-quoting, Ayn Rand-lovin’, taxation-is-theft Wookie suiters get all weepy when NASA takes a shot in the payroll, when the simple fact of the matter is that the only spaceships the federal government has any constitutional business building should be run by the USAF and have frickin’ laser beams on them.
It’s a good thing NASA didn’t exist from the nation’s founding, or Lewis & Clark’s canoe would have taken thirty years to build and contained strips of birch bark from 72 different Congressional districts. If we want to see progress in space, we need to tell NASA to go research airfoil shapes and just declare everything that happens above X miles to be extraterritorial and tax-free.
[hat tip: Wesley]
Update: Fixed broken link.
Despite my relief at the Scott Brown victory, I’m going to be a voice of sobriety here: important though it may prove to be, this is one victory.
One.
Brown’s win may or may not derail the nationalization of healthcare, depending on whether Obama, Pelosi, and Reid “double down” in an all-out push to ram through their abominable bill with procedural tricks, but it could very well do so. But keep in mind that first, it should never *ever* have gotten this close in Congress, and second, the future is still balanced on a knife’s edge, even with a 59-41 Senate.
I’ve heard today’s victory called “the Scott heard ’round the world” – but like the events of Lexington and Concord this needs to be the first step towards reining in the statists and restoring our liberty, and not mistaken by those in the grassroots who helped to make it happen as the arrival at that still-distant destination. Much work remains, what with caucuses, primaries, and midterm elections coming up, and aside from boosting the confidence of the grassroots in its efficacy in influencing major elections, this victory in Massachusetts does nothing to change that fact in other states.
Republicans, too, should avoid drawing the wrong lessons from this win – it was not an embrace of Republican policies or Republican leadership, it was for many a rejection of creeping socialism, fiscal irresponsibility, and government power-grabs in favor of liberty, and a repudiation of arrogant but clueless elitists endowed with an sense of entitlement to political office…all of which the Republicans have themselves been guilty lately. The GOP still needs to acknowledge these failings and its responsbility if it expects to rebuild the public trust, and would be wise to articulate a positive, pro-liberty platform for rolling back the nanny state rather than simply restraining the pace of its growth.
Buy Kindle version
Buy Nook version
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.
