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Houston, we have a typo.
NASA scrambled someone out to pad 39A with a new sign that has the orbiter Endeavour’s name spelled correctly, and then posted a photo at the Kennedy Space Center’s website.
When the shuttle was rolled out to its seaside launch complex Wednesday, one item was missing: the “u” in Endeavour.
The included photo shows that the typo was on a banner at the perimeter fence, and not on the orbiter’s paint job as the text implies…imagine NASA’s embarrassment from having to roll back to the VAB to fix the paint (or of foregoing that expense and delay and flying with the wrong name on the orbiter).
At least (unlike “tommorrow” or “potatoe”) it’s an understandable mistake.
It seems science fiction author Fred Saberhagen died a couple weeks back.
I read the entirety of the Berserker series (at the time) in high school, after becoming acquainted with it via Larry Niven’s short story A Teardrop Falls in an issue of Omni Magazine. Fun reading, but as the wikipedia entry notes, the stories were so scattered in place and time that the series’ sense of continuity suffered as a result.
Wikipedia doesn’t say, but I’ve always wondered if the Borg were modeled after the Berserkers.
Thanks to a long vacation and the catch-up in its aftermath, today’s Heinlein Centenary caught me unprepared. So, here’s a roundup of what others have had to say on the topic this week:
John Derbyshire at National Review Online posts RAH’s famous “This I Believe” speech in its entirety:
I believe that this hairless embryo with the aching oversized braincase and the opposable thumb?this animal barely up from the apes?will endure, will endure longer than his home planet, will spread out to the other planets?to the stars and beyond?carrying with him his honesty, his insatiable curiosity, his unlimited courage, and his noble essential decency. This I believe with all my heart.
The LA Times (of all papers) posts a glowing retrospective of Heinlein through the lens of Southern California culture. And is promptly taken to task by a Heinlein fan who points out the California of today would make the man weep.
Heinlein’s short story “Jerry Was a Man” has been filmed as an episode of the Starz/ABC series Masters of Science Fiction. The episode will air on August 18, and features Malcolm McDowell and Anne Heche.
Dwayne Day takes a walk down memory lane, reexamining 62 years later the ideas and predictions in Heinlein’s resignation letter to the Naval Air Material Center at the end of WWII. It certainly gives one a different perspective on The Return of William Proxmire as alternate history.
John Miller has a piece on Heinlein in the dead-tree/subscription National Review (which I could swear I read in its entirety online this week, but I can’t find a link for it).
Phil Bowermaster says Citizen of the Galaxy is his favorite Heinlein book, and invites readers to share their own favorites. My personal favorite is The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, thanks to the exploration of political and economic themes (something like an Atlas Shrugged for SF geeks), but for pure entertainment value, I’ve always liked The Unpleasant Profession of Jonathan Hoag. It’s so deliciously weird and atmospheric that I’m surprised they didn’t pick it over the uninspiring Jerry Was a Man as Heinlein’s “Masters of Science Fiction” entry.
It seems one man has a solution for every problem that ails the VSE.
I thought this was a joke at first: License Agreement for the GPS TrackMaker(R) Program
LICENSE GRANT
The author grants a non-exclusive license to use the program, free of charge, if the user:
– Does not use the program for illegal purposes;
– does not practice activities that destroy or degrade the environment;
– does not practice polluting activities;
– does not throw trash on the ground or through the car?s windows;
– when going to the beach and creeks takes his trash back until finding a trash collector;
– does not practice any activities that hurt animals, like hunting, out-of-season fishing, pigeon shooting, dog fighting, etc.;
– does not buy wild animals that, by law, may not be taken out of their natural environment;
– has an ecological conscience and protects nature.
People that for any reason do not fit the conditions above, are expressly forbidden to use the program.
Let me get this straight: if I engage in any activity which has an adverse effect on the environment, I am “expressly forbidden” to use this guy’s software? By what standard? And what magnitude of offense triggers the prohibition on use?
I drive a car, which burns gasoline, emitting carbon dioxide and water vapor (which we are told are two of the big greenhouse gases), therefore I practice a polluting activity.
I breathe, which likewise emits carbon dioxide and water vapor, so I am again practicing a polluting activity.
For that matter, the software’s author himself used electricity to power the computer on which he wrote it, and electricity powers the servers and other network hardware through which he makes it available to the public. Every last electron of that electricity comes from a source which involves a “polluting activity” in some form, whether direct (in the case of combustion sources) or indirect (in the waste streams generated by the manufacture of hardware used to capture solar, wind, and other ostensibly “clean energy”).
And even giving “clean energy” sources a pass on their manufacturing-related pollution, they each have related tradeoffs which can be considered as “destroying or degrading the environment”. Just ask the Kennedy clan about the unsightliness of wind farms. Or the rare and endangered animals (or the 10,000 families) displaced by the construction of the Itaipu Dam about the “destructive environmental effects” of hydroelectric power.
The funny thing in dealing in ill-conceived absolutes like this guy does is that it is so easy to end up looking like a hypocrite.
In addition to the problems with definitions and degrees, the license displays some problems with basic sense. How, for instance, does fishing out of season hurt animals while fishing in season does not? I also fail to understand (whenever I run across people who are opposed to hunting) how an animal being pounced on by one of its fellow woodland creatures and then clawed, bitten, and bled to death in a lingering agony of pain and terror is somehow more humane than being quickly dispatched by a well-placed bullet.
Some of this I can agree with (e.g. not littering). But the rest is just mushy-headed, feelings based moral posturing, the sort of environmental activism often engaged in by people whose view of the natural world derives from Disney cartoons and whose approach to understanding it has more in common with Oprah than with intellection.
But hey, if it makes the guy feel good about himself that he’s doing his part to protect the “circle of life” from human interference, I guess that’s what’s really important. (Personally, I think it makes him look like a pretentious nitwit.)
ADDENDUM: This particular verbiage from the website doesn’t appear in the license agreement embedded in the software itself. I knew it was odd that I didn’t notice it when I installed the software.
What’s interesting about this Pop-Sci article on “space diving” isn’t so much that it’s a new market for alt.space or that it could (as Tumlinson suggests) generate public interest in space, but that someone other than NASA is developing operational space suits.
Current suit technology is a hindrance to intensive development of space…yet NASA, even in pursuing the VSE, doesn’t seem especially interested in implementing alternatives. However…a business activity in which space suits (or space-suit-like protective garments) play a vital role will create an incentive for the development of alternatives. If space diving is successfully launched as an adventure sport, maintaining its allure will mean (as the article suggests) augmenting the thrill involved through higher and faster jumps — which in turn means more capable suits.
Admittedly, there may not be much incentive in this particular market to bring into being more dexterous suits, but there will be an incentive to making them less expensive to produce and more readily reusable than current (NASA) designs. The real beauty here, though, is that this sport could bring into being an industrial capability for producing suits which could in turn supply (and improve) them for other space activities, such as those planned by Bigelow.
(Surprisingly, the article completely omits mention of spacecraft-less reentry concepts explored over the past few decades, like MOOSE, AIRMAT, Paracone, etc.)
You don’t see this kind of thing every day (which, er, is probably a good thing considering what sort of weather phenomena would be required to produce it naturally): contrail from STS-117 over VAB.
I’m outta here. Back on the 25th.
The aforementioned sounding rocket project I worked at while in New Orleans a couple of years ago has its own website (hosted at the And?ya Rocket Range site), with some slick pictures of the hardware: Hybrid Technology Rocket Campaign.
Here’s some pictures of the parts I was responsible for designing: the liquid oxygen tank, intertank structure (crammed with valves and tubing — and note what appear to be friction-stir welds at each end by the radax joints), payload adapter structure (with the forward attachment to the launch rail and holes for ground electronics), and the top-level assembly, minus science payload (and yes, it really is as skinny as it looks). And here’s Joe and Mike with the completed, painted, ready-to-fly rocket on the launch rail.
It’s amazing how much like the Catia V5 “render with material” views the real hardware actually looks. The intertank structure in particular is exactly how I pictured it, with all those rivets and bolt holes around the access panels.
Unfortunately, there’s no pictures yet of the launch itself. And I’m still eagerly awaiting a copy of the DVD of the launch video.
Being an astronaut is probably not the best choice of occupation if you’re a germophobe:
Imagine their surprise when they opened a rarely-accessed service panel in Mir’s Kvant-2 Module and discovered a large free-floating mass of water. “According to the astronauts’ eyewitness reports, the globule was nearly the size of a basketball,” Ott said.
Moreover, the mass of water was only one of several hiding behind different panels. Scientists later concluded that the water had condensed from humidity that accumulated over time as water droplets coalesced in microgravity. The pattern of air currents in Mir carried air moisture preferentially behind the panel, where it could not readily escape or evaporate.
Nor was the water clean: two samples were brownish and a third was cloudy white. Behind the panels the temperature was toasty warm-82?F (28?C)-just right for growing all kinds of microbeasties. Indeed, samples extracted from the globules by syringes and returned to Earth for analysis contained several dozen species of bacteria and fungi, plus some protozoa, dust mites, and possibly spirochetes.
But wait, there’s more. Aboard Mir, colonies of organisms were also found growing on “the rubber gaskets around windows, on the components of space suits, cable insulations and tubing, on the insulation of copper wires, and on communications devices,” said Andrew Steele, senior staff scientist at the Carnegie Institution of Washington working with other investigators at Marshall Space Flight Center.
Setting aside the juvenile “ick” factor, what’s interesting about this is that NASA is working on a handheld device to locate and identify the bacteria and fungi that attack spacecraft surfaces (which Star Trek fans will surely gush over as a proto-tricorder).
While I’m not a big fan of the “spinoff” justification for NASA’s existence (it’s a cliche, and the claims that a given technology is a “NASA spinoff” are often inaccurate), this is certainly an example of innovation being driven by new needs encountered in space exploration.
As one of the interviewees suggests, a descendent of the LOCAD-PTS device being tested today might prove useful in the detection of life on Mars…even if it’s not sophisticated enough to recognize nonterrestrial life as such, locating and identifying common terrestrial microorganisms will at least whittle down the number of false positives.
But the true “spinoffs” (groan) will be in terrestrial medicine. One example is the spread of “nosocomial” infections in hospitals — if it becomes easier to locate pathogens, and to identify which pathogen it is, it may be possible to further reduce the rates of secondary infection, while also reducing the development of resistance by tailoring sanitation procedures and verifying their effectiveness. Simply being able to “see” where pathogens are will make a huge difference in dealing with them.
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