Off to Mars again!
It’s worth remembering that if we moved one small nickel-iron asteroid into orbit around the earth and started mining it, we’d have enough pure nickel, iron, rare earths, and other metals to last Earth for a century. If we moved a small carbonaceous asteroid into orbit, there’s enough oxygen and carbon to last space stations for a millenium.
I love videos of the night skies. I love to listen to Carl Sagan speculating aloud. I love pithy thoughts and statements.
You can probably guess how much I enjoy this video. Watch it full-screen.
Thanks, Sherry, for finding the Ustream HD recording, which is the feed we watched this morning.
We are rapidly approaching the end of the most historic era in human history–manned space travel to expand the human horizon.
UPDATE!! Reader Kirk sent me a link to the most amazing-damn photograph. It’s Endeavour emerging from the cloud cover during its launch:
I am SO glad we have Washington paper-pushers and slackweights keeping an eye out on the federal budget. They’ve trimmed back programs that threaten to increase the national debt. Like…
SETI, which was spending $2.5 million a year to gather signals generated by extra-terrestrial life–a search that will someday be deemed the greatest scientific search in the history of mankind.
Let’s see. $2.5 million a year against a national debt approaching $15 trillion. That means that defunding SETI will close the debt in…6 million years.
Yeah, that’ll work.
Fucking morons.
“You develop an instant global consciousness, a people orientation, an intense dissatisfaction with the state of the world, and a compulsion to do something about it. From out there on the moon, international politics look so petty. You want to grab a politician by the scruff of the neck and drag him a quarter of a million miles out and say, ‘Look at that, you son of a bitch.‘” — Apollo 14 astronaut Edgar Mitchell
Who needs mythos when we have this:
Say hello to UGC 1810 and UGC 1813
This is not someone’s painting, folks. This is one of the latest images from the Hubble Space Telescope. These are two galaxies from the Arp’s Peculiar Galaxies catalog, entry 273. (Greetings, Mr. Webb!)
Who the hell needs God, or Yahweh, or Allah (or Thor, for that matter) when we have this in the sky?
The Messenger payload nudged itself into orbit around Mercury yesterday!
Note the heavy sunshield that protects the probe from the sun.
Here was its flawless launch:
Now, almost 7 years after launch, and flyby slingshots off of Earth once, Venus twice, and Mercury itself three times, we’ll get far and away our best data from Mercury yet.
And for those folk who enjoy a bit of whimsical music:
Humanity has all of its eggs in one basket–Earth.
If we hope to have our race survive into the distant future, we’ve got find more baskets. So where do we find them? The Solar System is not a very viable source of new home planets (with the scant possibility of Mars).
The asteroids and stars provide that answer.
DARPA is working on development of the processes needed to find more homes for humanity. A conference of scientists, thinkers, and (yeah!) a few science fiction writers was held last month to chart out some answers to three questions:
There’s an interesting read on Tao Zero Foundation’s blog from Marc Myers on what was discussed. The conference focused more on how to run an organization that would get the job done, rather than how the trip would be made, but it was interesting nonetheless.
No answers yet, but at least someone is starting to form the serious questions.
Voyager 1, launched 33 years ago to explore Jupiter, Saturn, and Uranus, has reached the heliopause.
When I was 33 years younger, the twin Voyager vessels were as exciting to me as the Apollo project had been a decade earlier. Voyager was another example of humanity pushing the frontier a little further. Exploration of the the outer solar system (in the day when the best pictures of Pluto were fuzzy blobs on film) was one shocking revelation after another–
close-ups of the Great Red Eye of Jupiter
the vast majesty of Saturn’s rings
the cracked-ice surface of Europa and the sulfur-rich hell of Io
These all seemed harbingers of a bright future of space exploration for humanity.
*sigh*
So now we’ve made it to true interstellar space.
Barely.
There are no plans for any manned exploration for the foreseeable future. No lunar base, no landings on Mars, no nothing. We should be reaching out, not looking in.
We are starstuff that has reached sentience, and we’re trying to get back to where we came from.
The Japanese space probe Hayabusa returned to Earth near Woomera, Australia around 14:00 UT today.
Why is this a big deal? Because we now (hopefully) have a pristine sample of an asteroid to examine.
Hayabusa landed on asteroid 25143 Itokawa in November of 2005. It is thought to have successfully scooped up a tiny portion of dust from the asteroid’s surface. Portions of the Hayabusa craft were designed to survive a fiery reentry, and we now have our first real sample of stardust.
A big damned day, folks.
A story quietly came across the wire today, the subject of which has increased chances of establishing permanent residence on the moon a hundredfold.
Using NASA’s Mini-SAR radar instrument on India’s Chandrayaan-1 lunar orbiter, it has been discovered that the moon’s north pole contains at least 600 million metric tons of water ice in permanently-shadowed craters. Sub-surface water was also discovered last year near the moon’s south pole.
This not only allows future lunar base establishment without having to ship water from Earth, but also would allow oxygen for breathing and hydrogen fuel for energy and for propulsion. We don’t have to bring it to the moon ourselves; it’s already there.
America may not establish the first lunar base, but the odds of creating one within my lifetime just bumped way up.
The next leap into space
The Ares I-X orbital vehicle is sitting on the launchpad at Cape Canaveral this morning, waiting for its first flight test. America’s next leap into space is about to take first steps.
Here is a great page for showing your children where their future is going.
