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Space Adventures Charters Entire Russian Spacecraft
Now Space Adventures has upped the ante by buying not just one seat aboard one of the expendable Soyuz spacecraft that have been the mainstay of the Russian space program since the 1960s, but an entire flight. A professional Russian cosmonaut will command the flight for two ticket-paying passengers some time in late 2011.
From then on, Space Adventures plans to fly one charter flight to the International Space Station a year through the station’s operational life. RKA will add new spaceships to its manifest rather than bumping existing flights, such as those that might have to be used by NASA after the Space Shuttle retires in 2010.
Selling individual seats on an ISS-bound Soyuz is one thing, but a fully tourist flight is quite another. If the Russians are willing to take this step, it’s only a small step from there to Soyuz flights to Bigelow space hotels…
Interesting…
Unbelievably, this is not science fiction. Mr Pal holds up a small beaker of bug excretion that could, theoretically, be poured into the tank of the giant Lexus SUV next to us. Not that Mr Pal is willing to risk it just yet. He gives it a month before the first vehicle is filled up on what he calls “renewable petroleum”. After that, he grins, “it’s a brave new world”.
Mr Pal is a senior director of LS9, one of several companies in or near Silicon Valley that have spurned traditional high-tech activities such as software and networking and embarked instead on an extraordinary race to make $140-a-barrel oil (?70) from Saudi Arabia obsolete. “All of us here ? everyone in this company and in this industry, are aware of the urgency,” Mr Pal says.
What is most remarkable about what they are doing is that instead of trying to reengineer the global economy ? as is required, for example, for the use of hydrogen fuel ? they are trying to make a product that is interchangeable with oil. The company claims that this “Oil 2.0” will not only be renewable but also carbon negative ? meaning that the carbon it emits will be less than that sucked from the atmosphere by the raw materials from which it is made.
This is of course not the only effort going on to use microbes to synthesize petroleum and/or its derivatives (I remember an oil company commercial from the late 1970s or early 1980s touting their R&D work along these lines). What’s interesting, though, is that this is yet another petroleum alternative that high oil prices are making more attractive, and one that doesn’t (as the quote above states) require the complete rebuilding of the transportation fuel infrastructure. So, it’s a more realistic and economically practical oil alternative than, say, a hydrogen-fueled car.
Of course, the amusing part is that it is theoretically a carbon-negative fuel source — the microbes take more carbon out of the atmosphere than what they excrete as a useable oil (if that doesn’t seem to make sense, recall that the microbes themselves require carbon for their own structure).
On the other hand, since this approach requires genetic engineering, the watermelons and luddites will no doubt put the kibosh on it regardless of its benefits — the only thing more intolerable than the idea of environmental-guilt-free petroleum sustaining the Western lifestyle of individuality, independence, and material happiness is the knowledge that that guilt-free petroleum comes from “frankenbacteria”.
Behold: The Ron Paul Rocket. No…really…
The Ron Paul Revolution is producing a spaceship for the purpose of lifting a payload into space so the entire Universe may receive Ron Paul’s message for as long as we can maintain electricity. This is a groundbreaking effort, as no grassroots support group for a politician has ever paid tribute in Outer Space!
The idea sprang about on the ronpaulforums.com as an effort to probe and expand the frontiers of our peaceful revolution. To reach this goal, we will utilize existing hobbyist technology, and push the edge. We will reach space!
One other purpose is to develop alternative propulsion systems using Carbonic Reaction Thrust Engines, powered by Diet Coke and Mentos. In this end, we ask both the Coca Cola Corp. and Mentos brand Breath Mints to sponsor both our early traditional propulsion efforts, and our experimental CRTE efforts.
It might be a joke, but then again, who knows? As rocket science, this approach is about as workable as the Paul supporters’ approach to politics.
After a weekend in Moab, I can see why the Mars Society picked the Utah desert for one of its research stations.
Pretty martian.
A distracting side-effect I’ve experienced from reading Goldberg’s Liberal Fascism is a newfound mental habit of playing Spot the Fascist Tendencies with everything I read.
Case in point:
“The Overview Effect,” a phrase coined in the book of the same name by space philosopher and writer Frank White. It refers to the experience of seeing firsthand the reality of the Earth in space, which is immediately understood to be a tiny, fragile ball of life, hanging in the void, shielded and nourished by a paper-thin atmosphere. From space, the astronauts tell us, national boundaries vanish, the conflicts that divide us become less important and the need to create a planetary society with the united will to protect this “pale blue dot” becomes both obvious and imperative.
Oh, I know they mean well, and are probably not likely to start strutting around in jackbooted spacesuits, pressing us all into the worship of a unified pan-human World-State or whatever. But it’s hard now to read such things without noticing the odor of mystical collectivism they emit. It’s also difficult to read things like this and not speculate on where such mysticism could easily lead — namely, regarding space as some sort of sacred wilderness to be preserved in perpetuity from intrusive human activities.
Personally I prefer rationalism and individualism as the basis for the permanent settlement of space.
On the other hand, I can’t fault them for wanting more people to go into space (even if we may disagree as to the why of it). At least they get that part right.
[via Clark Lindsay]
After a long, strange trip, Phoenix has landed near the Martian north pole.
The image from orbit of the lander descending under parachutes is pretty darned cool.
It’s Algore Winter here in Colorado…you know, that late bit of winter weather that comes after spring has already started. This is the view off the back deck about ten minutes ago:
Three inches of snow and 22F outside, a day after it was dry and sunny and 60F (in the foothills, at that).
I think someone broke the global warming.
It seems that you can grow marigolds in simulated lunar soil, with a bit of water and a dash of microbes, something which may hold promise for food production in lunar and martian settlements.
Of course, they’re not as tasty as mums or begonias, but hey, you gotta start somewhere.
Another week, another grandiose Russian space plan: Russia To Build an Orbital Construction Plant
Russia plans to build an orbital plant for the production of spacecraft (link to sketchy Google translation of the Russian original) that are too big to build planetside, or are just too bulky to fire into orbit once built…Plans seem to be rather sparse at the moment [no kidding?], with the tentative construction date set for 2020, after the ISS is scheduled for decommissioning.
Glenn Reynolds asks for science fiction recommendations, so, in honor of tomorrow’s Yuri’s Night, here are mine:
- The Wall at the Edge of the World — telepathic society lives in peace and harmony in a walled-in future Northern California…and brutally murders anyone who isn’t a teep. Including the rest of the human population.
- Atlas Shrugged — whaddya mean “it’s not science fiction”? Of course it is. It’s an alternate history, for one thing, splitting off from real history around 1925 as near as I can tell. For another, it features several elements of advanced technology: Rearden metal, Galt’s motor (and related generators), the ray screen, the Xylophone, etc. (It’s also a pretty darned funny book.)
- Methuselah’s Children/Time Enough for Love — they really have to be read together. A good collection of character vignettes, with far-future technology and culture and the allure (and drawbacks) of radical life extension as unifying elements.
- The Children’s War — another alternate history, set in the present-day Third Reich.
- Dune — need I say more?
- Ender’s Game — ditto.
- The Mote in God’s Eye — not your ordinary “first contact” novel. Interesting alien characterizations, and a deep backstory.
- Red Moon — the Soviets got a man to the moon first…and left him there.
- Feed — young-adult science fiction, but one of the few SF novels to make me laugh out loud in numerous places.
- Armor — a vastly more gritty take on Starship Troopers.
I purposely left out a lot of Heinlein and Niven, since they’re pretty much givens. The sad thing is, looking over this list I see very few recent works (Feed being the most recent at 2004). Either I’m getting old, or there just isn’t that much good science fiction being written now — certainly one sees very little SF on the shelves ostensibly devoted to it in the big retail bookstores, and what’s there is swamped out by forgettable and interchangable novels about vampires, wizards, and — of course — vampire wizards. I wasn’t all that impressed with the much-hyped Old Man’s War, which unlike Armor was a weak-coffee retelling of Starship Troopers…not bad, mind you, just not as intense or as thought provoking (respectively) as the other two. And of course there’s the Mars Trilogy, which was a great series of books aside from the asinine politics, unlikeable cardboard characters, Marineris-sized plot holes, and phenomenally naive economics (Robinson did do a good job of painting the Martian environment…at least, when he wasn’t waxing poetic about lichen).
If I had to guess, though, I would say that the fantasy genre’s long-running popularity is losing steam – it probably peaked with the Lord of the Rings movies, and if the box office performance of recent “fantasy epics” is any guide it must have jumped the shark about the same time. If so, we may see a resurgence in both popularity and quality in the SF genre in the near future.
Tangentially related to this, I have to wonder what the effects on SF of the “global warming” mass hysteria and associated fascist cult will be over the long term. Certainly the rationalist and libertarian strains of SF will critique the corruption of science and the bounding of the future which radical greenism represents (Niven/Pournelle/Barnes and Chrichton have already written books along these lines). I for one have a hard time imagining anyone writing good “environmentalist science fiction”, since anything written with the environmentalist perspective is bound to be preachy, teachy, and tedious in the extreme, given that the authors’ first priority will be to convince the reader of the dire consequences facing the planet and urge them to action…instead of, you know, telling an entertaining yarn.
Like Christian end-times fiction, environmentalist science fiction may appeal to a certain small demographic, but go largely unnoticed outside of the true-believer market (unless made mandatory reading in high school English communications arts classes and the like). It’s not impossible to write a popular novel from the green perspective, any more than a Rapture-themed novel can’t be written that becomes a success in the mainstream market (it’s been done, after all), it’s just that I doubt those who might be motivated to write from this perspective would be able to balance dogma with the demands of good fiction.
One might counter that the oddly popular post-apocalypse sub-genre has been around since the beginning of science fiction, and the environmental catastrophe or post-catastrophe story would be nothing more than a new direction for this sub-genre. I’m not so sure. I’ve read a lot of the more well-known post-apocalypse titles, and the plots typically involve one or more protagonists fighting to stay alive after the End Of The World As We Know It. We follow their struggles, root for them as the action reaches a climax, and cheer their success when they eventually overcome whatever nightmarish eschatological nastiness the author has thrown at them. In short, even books with as dire a theme as the end of civilization (or mankind itself) are pro-human, and will take the side of the human protagonists.
While environmentalist science fiction might also represent humans as the good guys and present their struggle for survival as a good thing, consider what the protagonists would have to do to remain heroic within the value system of radical environmentalism: acknowledge that the catastrophe is not only entirely of human making (which is the case in many post-apocalypse stories) but that it is cosmic justice for mankind’s environmental sins, wallow in existential guilt at being humans, fret about whether humans (including themselves) even deserve to survive The End, etc. It’s difficult to write a compelling survival story about people who hate themselves, since their self-loathing tends to undermine the believability of their struggling to overcome the apocalyptic circumstances — what plausible reason would they have to fight for their own survival when they doubt they have any right to exist in the first place?
Again, I’m not saying that it’s impossible to write a good story in this sub-genre from the environmentalist perspective, I’m just doubtful it can be done by anyone who might be motivated to do it, because of the very source of their motivation.
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