YA PAYS YA MONEY AND YA TAKES YA CHANCES: Space lotto? Yes, apparently so.
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YA PAYS YA MONEY AND YA TAKES YA CHANCES: Space lotto? Yes, apparently so. BEING THERE: Mike Malin and Ken Edgett are at home on the surface of Mars (4/15/02), according to this U.S. News article. Malin, you may be aware, is the guy behind Malin Space Systems, builder and operator of Mars Global Surveyor’s Mars Observation Camera (MOC). The article is less about the science and more about the martian zeal of the two men involved. If everyone in the Mars Society had this kind of motivation… A DIFFERENT KIND OF DT: The “John Carter of Mars” series by Edgar Rice Burroughs has been optioned by Paramount, which plans a “Lord of the Rings”-style epic series based on the novels. If they can get past that tiny little suspension-of-disbelief killer, the bit about falling asleep in a cave and (Presto!) waking up on Mars, well, they might have something. MAR GREENHOUSE FOR DEVON: SpaceRef has sponsored a Mars analog greenhouse for use by the SETI Institute on Devon Island. Pending acquisition of related equipment, the greenhouse will be constructed and its systems evaluated during the 2002 summer season, with the first test crops grown during the 2003 season. Compare to this project, which ties in with the Mars Desert Research Station. SPEAKING OF COMPETITIONS: SpaceDaily has an article on the RoboCup Games. The article doesn’t really make the connection it alludes to in the title, namely Mars and robotic soccer players, but the point is easy enough to see — this competition is developing software and other technologies for cooperative action among autonomous robots, which could be applied to swarms of small, mass-produced and therefore comparatively inexpensive “cooperative” robotic rovers for use on Mars. Rand Simberg talks about Yuri’s Night 2002, Friday, April 12, 2002. As for LAMS, we didn’t quite succeed in our quest to arrange a party in New Orleans this year, but Craig and I will be at the Living Science Center in New Orleans East on Saturday. Hopefully this will be a foot in the door for April 12, 2003. CORRECTION: The presentation on Saturday will be at the Living Science Center in Kenner, NOT in New Orleans East. The “Yuri Day Tour” will begin at noon on Saturday. Marshall Space Flight Center’s Great Moonbuggy Race is this weekend, April 12-13. I helped out a high-school team this year, part of the local (New Orleans) Explorer Scout post. And I learned something which is potentially applicable to Mars Society chapters looking for outreach opportunities. Until a few years ago, the activities of the local Explorer post consisted mainly of lectures on engineering and science (and possibly other things, but I’m talking about what sorts of things the people I know did with the scouts). The kids weren’t all that energetic about it, and it was difficult to get them involved in the lectures — not surprising when they had just spent seven hours being lectured to in school. One of my coworkers hit on the idea of demonstrating some of the principles being discussed, with hands-on experiments and such, and the scouts took notice. With more activity came more interest and more involvement in the post. The following year, he discovered the Great Moonbuggy Race. It was a challenging task, but the scouts were interested and motivated, and they managed to put together two moonbuggies and enter the competition. Since then, more scouts have become involved, and they are up to three moonbuggies this year. Every Saturday for the past few months found several dozen scouts and parents working in the shops at the University of New Orleans, piecing together three remarkably sophisticated vehicles, while learning the basics of engineering and gaining shop skills that I as an engineer wish I had had at that age. The point of this is: here is something that the Mars Society should be doing. Whether it is working with local schools to enter teams in this particular activity or one similar to it, or opening up chapter projects to involve high-school and college students, or even developing a new sort of competition along these lines within the Mars Society itself, giving people something to do will get them more involved and more enthusiastic than simply organizing a local chapter bureaucracy or delivering a canned lecture to a captive audience. IT AIN’T THE MOON THAT’S CHEESE: While I didn’t get to see the STS-110 launch last week, I did visit the KSC visitor’s center, and was moved to ranting by…the gift shop, of all things. When I think of a gift shop at the world’s premiere space launch facility, I imagine a shop which sells a wide array of models and books and memorabilia relating to the space program. A place where one can buy things not available elsewhere, unique items produced exclusively for that shop. Of a huge assortment of extra-nifty space toys. Of a dazzling array of prints and posters reproduced from the immense imagery collections of the space agency. I do not think of booths where one can get one’s coat-of-arms printed. Or buckets of colored rocks. To be fair, the gift shop at KSC does indeed have books and models and such, but a fairly paltry selection — a number of books I would have expected to see there (such as Dennis Jenkins’ fantastic Space Shuttle) were not, and the models were almost exclusively K’Nex or similar snap-together types. Most baffling was the near-absence of Apollo-related materials. I mean, you’d think there’d be some Apollo models or books available, right? On prominent display, perhaps? There were some items, but very little. Equally disappointing was the none-too-mysterious absence of non-U.S. space program materials among the toys and such. While it would have been nice (he says, grossly understating it) to find a Soviet N-1 model available, I was under no illusions as to the likelihood of that — the shop is under the umbrella of NASA after all. Sure, there is some merchandise which is NASA-unique, and the store isn’t a complete write-off for those who are serious about space, but there is far more junk and cheesy merchandise there than there really ought to be. (For schedule reasons, we didn’t get out to the Saturn V Center, which experience would have surely overshadowed the gift shop cheesiness.) YESTERDAY’S VISIONS OF TOMORROW: I thought I’d already linked to this, but apparently not — it’s Romance to Reality: Moon & Mars Mission Plans, an annotated bibliography covering the various plans that have been floated over the past five-plus decades for missions to the Moon and Mars. And not only the plans themselves, but also the various articles published in general circulation periodicals, related declassified studies, etc. I have by no means read through the entire site, but what skimming I have done shows it to be a great time-lapse view of how our current plans for Mars exploration and settlement have developed alongside our improving understanding of Martian geology and our advancing technology. Beyond the nostalgia, however, the bibliography also gives an indication of how much thought has gone into the matter over the years. |
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