What a pity. I was pretty fond of his earlier stuff - the Giants series was one of my favorites as a kid (I don’t believe in it, but I’m still a sucker for a good Velikovskian yarn), and Voyage From Yesteryear was one of my first real introductions to libertarian ideas, since I didn’t read any Heinlein until I was eighteen. And just this morning I was randomly thinking about the premise of The Genesis Machine.

I’ve always thought Griffin’s direction to change to an Apollo-redux capsule for Orion was a short-sighted mistake. The original lifting-body design would have done much of what the hypothetical X-37c would be expected to do re:crew.

I’m hardly naïve when it comes to the capacity for dishonesty and self-delusion among politicians, but the brazenness of these shenanigans is still breathtaking. Nobody wants this vehicle. Nobody needs this vehicle. The nation can’t afford this vehicle — neither in the sense of having the dollars to pay for it nor at the expense, as Rand notes, of all the useful space technology that could be funded with this money if we did have it.

Funny, Armor was one of my favorite science fiction books growing up, and one of the first I read after really getting into the genre (and after consuming everything by Larry Niven I could get my hands on), and I just re-read it about two weeks ago for the first time in probably fifteen years.

The answer is obviously “yes”, it’s just a matter of how. The article primarily discusses soil composition (along with the philosophical question of what, exactly, “soil” is), leaving out hydroponics and aeroponics.

In Labyrinth, we have taken the position that farming on Mars requires some not-insignificant preparation of the raw soil, using modified bacteria to remove undesirable trace elements and other bacteria (along with sewage and such from the settlement) to add biological content to the otherwise sterile dirt. This is partly for plot reasons, but partly based on familiarity with Keweenaw stamp sands.

There were probably more reasons for the cancellation than were publicly admitted to than just the engine difficulties. But if that’s all there was, it’s interesting to note (as others have) that SpaceX’s original Merlin-1 engine is in the same thrust class as Fastrac. And Merlin-1 has actually flown.

Plus, it doesn’t hurt that the Obama administration’s space policy tends to the commercial. Or that Obama and Musk seem to be pals.

I actually don’t expect X-34 to fly (if they haven’t been stored properly for the past ten years, the refurbishment costs will probably be uneconomical). But I sure would like to be pleasantly surprised.

Minerals on Mars studied by the NASA rovers suggest water once flowed on the planet’s surface, but was very salty and acidic, raising doubts about whether it could have supported life.

But in 2007, Melanie Mormile of Missouri University of Science and Technology in Rolla and colleagues cultured a bacterium from water sampled from one of several salty, acidic lakes in Western Australia.

The lakes are very shallow and periodically fill with rainwater before partially evaporating, which concentrates the salts within them. They may be the closest equivalents on Earth of the shallow pools thought to have once dotted Mars.

Which leaves me to wonder if there aren’t pockets of salty, acidic water remaining underground on Mars, warmed by residual internal heat from the planet, where such microbes might have migrated from the surface as conditions there grew (even) less hospitable.

So far, so good. After being grievously disappointed with the “reimagined” V  and the unconscionable audience betrayal that was BSG’s deus-ex-machina series finale,  let’s just say my hopes weren’t all that high for the show, but I was still pretty impressed.

The feel of the show was entirely different from BSG, but yet reminiscent of the feel of the flashbacks to pre-apocalypse Caprica in the last year of the show. At the same time, Caprica isn’t exactly what one might have imagined from the early scenes and flashbacks in the prior series – it’s bigger and a bit more fleshed-out now than in those glimpses. The mechanical cylon (there’s only one so far) is quite retro, yet with all the familiar elements in place – given what I already knew of the plot, I was concerned that the cylon would be a human-form one, which would have made for a very contrived explanation given the known backstory of the humanoid versions. We once again see the inexplicably octagonal sheets of paper, but this time with a twist: some of them are paper-thin computers which appear to fill a similar niche to netbooks. The settings are also familiar – though the skyline is different, the Greystone home appears to intentionally recall the similarly-sited home of Gaius Baltar in the BSG pilot miniseries. Likewise, there were a few familiar musical cues, particularly near the end when Adama’s character theme appears as the background music to the reconciliation between the young William Adama and his father, and a familiar martial theme accompanies the successful demonstration of the cylon prototype.

And like good science fiction does, it tackles some intriguing questions regarding the consequences of speculative technology. The virtual reality element is cleverly done, showing how the simple knowledge that one can do anything in the virtual world (including virgin sacrifices for entertainment) and get away with it has a corrosive effect on the outside world in unexpected ways. The metaphysical status of one of the characters is also the subject of some debate among the other characters, applying the Turing Test concept to the identity and “soul” of an artificial intelligence.

The most interesting detail, though, was suddenly grasping during one scene the delicious weirdness of two characters having an earnest religious discussion in which classical monotheism polytheism was the common cultural point of reference and monotheism was something strange and even dangerous.

So, even though it is entirely bereft of killer supermodel fembots with an anthrocidal agenda (thus far, anyway), it has promise.

* – I refuse to use their corny new spelling. It’s embarrassing.