Looking SE, you can’t see the fire directly because it’s hidden by intervening ridges (a good thing), but you can see the plume of smoke trailing off towards Denver. Google Maps says the fire is 11+ miles away by road, so it’s somewhat less than that (say 7-8) as the crow flies.

In comparison, it’s only a couple miles west of the main Lockheed Martin facility. The office smelled like the inside of a fireplace today.

Looking S you can see Pike’s Peak – or maybe not, thanks to the lingering smoke. It should be dead center in this shot, and it is if you look closely.

Looking SW, a little reminder of how destructive wildfires can be — this is a portion of the vast scar left by the 2002 Hayman Fire, which came within about five miles of my house.

UPDATE: of course, these pics are nothing compared to the video one of my coworkers took…

UPDATE: Fire’s out as of 4/2/12, and today (4/3) we received about 6″ of snow in the foothills. Snow, where were you a week ago???

The fire is about 7 miles southeast of my house, which is reasonably safe depending on winds. On the other hand, it’s only a couple miles west of the main Lockheed Martin plant here – where my office now is. And the new outbreak mentioned in the article was visible from the gate as I was driving in at lunchtime. Stinks like a bad wood stove in the whole office building.

This doesn’t bode well for this summer, unless we get a whole lot of late-season precipitation this spring.

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’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.