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Looks like I chose wisely in waiting until next year to visit Iceland:
Iceland is on the brink of collapse. Inflation and interest rates are raging upwards. The krona, Iceland’s currency, is in freefall and is rated just above those of Zimbabwe and Turkmenistan. One of the country’s three independent banks has been nationalised, another is asking customers for money, and the discredited government and officials from the central bank have been huddled behind closed doors for three days with still no sign of a plan. International banks won’t send any more money and supplies of foreign currency are running out.
The dollar-krona exchange rate has shifted by about 35% since I decided back in February to hold off on going to Iceland, and the drop in the krona’s value recently defines “precipitous”. Yikes.
Of course, the way things are going with the global economy, Iceland might be a great bargain next summer…or it might be a few summers before I get another chance to go.
Relevant to space exploration, though, there is a brief quote from Björk at the bottom of the article, recounting Iceland’s settlement by Norwegians who “couldn’t deal with authority in Norway”. I’ve been reading a selection of the sagas lately, and it’s amusing how true this statement is. Here is a country whose first settlers decided that they were not going to put up with some petty nobleman conquering other petty noblemen, declaring himself king, and then demanding fealty from the free men who wanted nothing to do with his imperial project. Often under the shadow of death sentences for refusing to swear allegiance to the king, they sold off their lands, packed up their belongings in boats only just suitable for the purpose, and took dangerous treks across the sea to a distant, almost mythical, and marginally inhabitable island in order to continue living as free men.
The parallels to libertarian imaginings of space settlement are clear enough, but the sagas go beyond the mere why and how of the settlers’ travels to their “new frontier”. Land claims, legal disputes, the creation of a new (and new form of) government, exploring an alien and often hostile environment, and commerce between settlements and with distant lands form the backdrop – and in many cases significant plot elements – of the stories, describing the growing pains of the new society as the settlers struggled to build everything up from scratch in a previously uninhabited land.
They aren’t quite a user’s manual for space colonies, but they do offer some interesting insights into what to expect and how to — and how not to — handle some of the problems settlers will encounter.
Damn… I wish I’d had one of these during the DNC in August:
In principle, the Fulgurator can be used anywhere where there is another camera nearby that is being used with a flash. It operates via a kind of reactive flash projection that enables an image to be projected on an object exactly at the moment when someone else is photographing it. The intervention is unobtrusive because it takes only a few milliseconds. Every photo another photographer takes of an object at which the Fulgurator is also aimed is affected by the manipulation. Hence visual information can be smuggled unnoticed into the images of others.
The cross projected on to Barack Obama’s podium at the Siegessauele speech is amusing, but the baffled and slightly fearful reaction of the couple in the video taken at Checkpoint Charlie is classic. “There’s something in my picture…but…{whispers} it’s not there!”
Depending on your perspective, this move might be seen as an admirable example of not resting on your laurels, or a demonstration of epic cockiness:
Space Exploration Technologies has proposed to NASA a robotic cargo lunar lander service that would be priced at $80 million per mission.
SpaceX proposed the lander at a meeting with the US space agency because it is a member of Odyssey Space Research’s team for NASA’s Altair project office lander evaluation study that began in March. The SpaceX lander would deliver 1,000kg (2,200lb) to the Moon’s surface in support of NASA’s Altair missions. The unmanned Altair cargo version could deliver 14,000kg to the Moon.
The SpaceX lander is [sic] launched by the company’s heavy version of its Falcon 9 rocket. The standard version will make its maiden flight in 2009 with a first stage powered by nine Merlin 1C engines. The heavy version would use 27 engines with two Falcon 9 first stages as strap-on boosters.
Grooming contrived business opportunities for itself, SpaceX also proposed that NASA sponsor a $500M lunar lander competition.
Looks like we’ll have to bring parkas and mittens – Phoenix has spotted falling snow on Mars:
NASA’s Phoenix spacecraft has discovered evidence of past water at its Martian landing site and spotted falling snow for the first time, scientists reported Monday. Soil experiments revealed the presence of two minerals known to be formed in liquid water. Scientists identified the minerals as calcium carbonate, found in limestone and chalk, and sheet silicate…
A laser aboard the Phoenix recently detected snow falling from clouds more than two miles above its home in the northern arctic plains. The snow disappeared before reaching the ground.
Phoenix landed in the Martian arctic plains in May on a three-month mission to study whether the environment could be friendly to microbial life. One of its biggest discoveries so far is confirming the presence of ice on the planet.
Scientists long suspected frozen water was buried in the northern plains based on measurements from an orbiting spacecraft. The lander also found that the soil was slightly alkaline and contained important nutrients and minerals.
It shouldn’t be a surprise that there is water ice and snow near the Martian poles — we can see and measure the evidence from orbit, mixed in with the dry ice. Unlike Spirit and Opportunity generating new and unexpected data about the Martian surface, or the assorted orbiters showing us the surface at a level of detail or in ways we haven’t seen before, Phoenix seems to be more focused on confirming some of the fundamental things that we knew should be happening but had yet to observe directly. Which may not be quite as engaging as the ongoing saga of the rovers or as fascinating as the eye candy from the orbiters, but it’s no less valuable a task.
Reading excerpts from the time-warped Chinese press release about the launch of Shenzhou 7, I was reminded of the strange similarity between their official propaganda and – of all things – bodice-ripper romance novels:
After this order, signal lights all were switched on, various data show up on rows of screens, hundreds of technicians staring at the screens, without missing any slightest changes …
‘One minute to go!’
‘Changjiang No.1 found the target!’…
The firm voice of the controller broke the silence of the whole ship. Now, the target is captured 12 seconds ahead of the predicted time …
‘The air pressure in the cabin is normal!’
Ten minutes later, the ship disappears below the horizon. Warm clapping and excited cheering breaks the night sky, echoing across the silent Pacific Ocean.
Hmmmm…
He raised his trembling hand over the warm, smooth console. His heart fluttered but his body was still, poised for action. The gaze from his bottomless black eyes traced the gentle curve of the status display panels like a lover’s caress, watching, waiting for the subtle signs of readiness he knew so well.
There – right there. The wink of a light. The subtle shift of an indicator. The unmistakeable signal: she was ready at last.
With a violent thrust, he pressed his finger to the glowing red button.
From what seemed like miles away came a deep, throaty groan, the dangerous but rapturous echo of barely-restrained energies being released at long last. The sweat of overwhelming anticipation dripped from his brow as the long, firm shaft rose into the sky.
“Liftoff!” the flight controller cried out in ecstasy. “Oh, God! Yes! Liftoff! Liftoff!”…
Elon Musk:
With a successful Falcon 1 mission, Musk plans to start lobbying for a follow-on contract to develop the Falcon 9-Dragon to transport space station crews.
“We haven’t pushed hard yet, even though I think it’s like blindingly obvious as the thing to do because we’re hoping to get to orbit and then on the back of getting to orbit and push hard … because otherwise our detractors have too much ammunition,” Musk said. “They’d say, ‘How can you trust the future of the American space program to a company that hasn’t gotten to orbit?’ That’s the obvious attack. So we hope to get to get to orbit and then they can’t use that attack.”
Musk said he’s expects fierce opposition from companies who stand to gain financially from the shuttles’ continued operations, mainly United Space Alliance, NASA’s prime shuttle contractor.
Okay, so that’s what he expects if the next launch succeeds.
Soooo…..what if it fails? Is that “line of attack” from his “detractors” then a fair criticism?
The Japan Space Elevator Association is planning to build (obviously enough) a space elevator:
Now the finest scientific minds of Japan are devoting themselves to cracking the greatest sci-fi vision of all: the space elevator. Man has so far conquered space by painfully and inefficiently blasting himself out of the atmosphere but the 21st century should bring a more leisurely ride to the final frontier.
For chemists, physicists, material scientists, astronauts and dreamers across the globe, the space elevator represents the most tantalising of concepts: cables stronger and lighter than any fibre yet woven, tethered to the ground and disappearing beyond the atmosphere to a satellite docking station in geosynchronous orbit above Earth.
Up and down the 22,000 mile-long (36,000km) cables — or flat ribbons — will run the elevator carriages, themselves requiring huge breakthroughs in engineering to which the biggest Japanese companies and universities have turned their collective attention.
Sure. And they’ll use Klipers to build out the space infrastructure, while the workers lounge at orbiting space polyps hotels on their days off.
Let’s hope NASA can actually make something of this project – NASA Eyes Nuclear Reactor for Moon Base:
Supported at a cost of about $10 million a year, the Fission Surface Power Project this week awarded two contracts for power conversion units, used to turn the heat of nuclear reactions into electricity…
The converter design by Sunpower Inc., of Athens, Ohio, uses two opposed piston engines coupled to alternators to produce a total of 12 kilowatts of power. Barber Nichols Inc. of Arvada, Colo., is developing a closed Brayton cycle engine that uses a high-speed turbine and compressor coupled to a rotary alternator. It also generates 12 kilowatts.
The ground system would not use any nuclear materials, said project manager Lee Mason.
“Our goal is to build a technology demonstration unit with all the major components of a fission surface power system and conduct non-nuclear, integrated system testing in a ground-based space simulation facility,” he said.
These contracts appear to be related to the initiative discussed in this earlier Mars Blog post on NASA nuclear power initiatives.
Not sure if the economics would support a full-scale version of this on Earth any time in the near future, but it’s got a lot of possibilities for lunar and Mars colonization – Farming in the Sky. The PopSci article notes that while a fully-integrated implementation is still being worked, the various technological bits and pieces have been or are being developed right now.
As you might expect, there is an organization promoting the development of this integrated approach – The Vertical Farm Project.
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