Thirty-five years ago today, the last manned flight of the Skylab program — Skylab-4 — launched from the Kennedy Space Center. The three crewmembers were Gerald Carr, Edward Gibson, and William Pogue, who would spend 84 days in space.
This NASA page has links to more information about the Skylab program; this Wikipedia page has details about Skylab-4.
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Today’s space anniversary marks the first and only flight of the Soviet Union’s space shuttle “Buran” — November 15th, 1988. It lifted off from the Baikonur Cosmodrome on a modified Energia booster, and returned to the launch site a few hours later.
When I was at Baikonur in 2002, the Buran facility was pointed out to me as we drove by it. Part of it had collapsed earlier in the year, damaging the remaining orbiter. What was left of it looked to be in sad shape — Baikonur is an unforgiving environment.
More about the Buran program is here and here.
by Let me start by saying: It was really cool to be allowed to call in to the NASA press conference to hear the announcement live. I am space today.*
So here’s what NASA had to say:
The Hubble Space Telescope collected the first visible light images of a planet circling another star. The star, Fomalhaut, is one of the twenty brightest stars in the sky; even though it’s about 27 light years away, it’s visible with the naked eye if you know where to look (an image of the constellation is on the page linked below).
The planet, known as Fomalhaut-B, was observed in 2004 and 2006, but not “discovered” until scientists reanalyzed their data this past Memorial Day weekend. The NASA team concluded that the object was a planet based on three factors: first, its relatively low mass of around three Jupiters; second, the presence of a perturbed dust ring in the Fomalhaut equivalent of our Kuiper Belt; and third, comparative images from 2004 and 2006 that show the planet’s motion in its orbit. The team expressed high confidence that Fomalhaut-B was a planet rather than a brown dwarf star because the object did not show up at infrared wavelengths as a brown dwarf should, but was only detected using visible wavelengths.
After the next Hubble servicing mission, the team hopes to make further observations of the Fomalhaut system. With a third observation of the planet in its orbit, they can make more accurate calculations of its orbital elements.
See this page for the story and this page for the briefing materials.
As a space geek and would-be “steely-eyed missile man,” this was pretty awesome for me. 😀
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*To add to all the other days when I was space, which seem oh so long ago now. I miss my space days.
by This afternoon’s NASA “Science Update” is supposed to include an announcement about a “major extrasolar planet discovery” made by the Hubble Space Telescope. See this link for more information.
In today’s space history, a seeming disrepancy: one NASA site says today is the 30th anniversary of the launch of the “Einstein Observatory,” the second High Energy Astrophysical Observatory (HEAO-2), but this page gives the mission start date as yesterday. Since I found the 13th noted in more places than the 12th — not that I did any kind of exhaustive search — I’m comfortable posting this as today’s space anniversary. (It’s not as if I can go back and post it yesterday.)
Now, I wonder if blogging counts as reporting in terms of getting a spot in that NASA press teleconference this afternoon. 😉 It’s all research, isn’t it? It may not show up in the novel I’m writing now — unless they’ve discovered a planet with a moon like ours — but who knows what novel I might write next?
by I originally planned to post this yesterday, but I got carried away typing about the National Veterans Freedom Park.
One of the troops from the old 55th Mobile Command & Control Squadron — where I was the Operations Officer in the late 1990s — clued me in to this video called “Remember Me.” It’s extremely well done, and a heart-rending tribute to our uniformed forces. Click on the link, spend five minutes watching, remember and be thankful.
by Even though I’m an Air Force veteran, I think of Veterans’ Day as something for those other folks — for the real veterans, in other words, for those who faced more danger and hardship than I did. The most danger I faced was cleaning up burning red phosphorus at the AF Rocket Propulsion Lab, and I didn’t have any real hardship — my remote tour in Greenland was more fun than not, and my requests to go to the Iraqi AOR were denied.
So Veterans’ Day sort of embarrasses me. Honor the guys who really sacrificed, please. Honor those with whom I served, but not me.
That’s why I’m glad to promote the National Veterans Freedom Park, which is going to be built right here in Cary, North Carolina. Its theme is “The Story of Freedom as told by the Veteran,” and it will feature some striking artwork and an education center. It’s also working with the Library of Congress in the Veterans History Project, to “collect and archive the personal recollections of U.S. wartime veterans to honor their service and share their stories with current and future generations.”
In other words, the National Veterans Freedom Park will honor not just veterans, but real heroes. I’m all for that.
And for those served honorably — no matter where or when — and who are still serving today, on the front lines and behind the scenes, I salute you all.
by For our continuing “this day in space history” series, today marks the 40th anniversary of the Russian’s Zond-6 mission to the moon. It successfully flew by the moon as planned, but a reentry problem apparently caused most of its photographic film to be lost. You can read about it on this NASA page or this Wikipedia page. I’m not sure what to make of the notation that France sponsored the mission, but I was very interested to see that Zond-6 launched on a Proton rocket out of Tyuratam: the Baikonur Cosmodrome.
Why did that fact interest me? Because I watched the Nimiq-2 satellite and its Proton booster get prepped for launch at the Baikonur Cosmodrome back in November-December 2002. (I came home shortly before the launch.) While I was there I was inspired to write the first draft of my short story, “The Rocket Seamstress.”
In other writing and lunar-related news, yesterday I passed the 80,000-word mark on my novel, MARE NUBIUM. I’m beginning to doubt that I’ll hit 100K by December, but I’m trying to forge ahead.
by My writing friend Allen Moore posted an entry in our “2004 Literary Boot Camp” forum in which he mentioned that most slush pile screeners look for the “first sign” of average writing. Understandably, that caught my attention and got me thinking.
I decided that I like the metaphor of “signs” of mediocre writing. (I like “mediocre” instead of “average” — the root of mediocre is the same as for medium … a middle value which accords with the arithmetic meaning of average — but in any case the idea is writing that is less than excellent.) As a slush reader, I see these signs over and over again.
So I told Allen and the Boot Camp gang that I actually look for the second sign of mediocre writing, and sometimes the third, rather than just the first. But I’m still young and naive as slush readers go, and old pros would probably chide me for reading any more than I have to.
So what are the signs of mediocre writing? This theory is still new, but so far this is what I’ve got:
The first sign is actually more a sign of terrible writing than of mediocre writing. It usually shows up within a page or two of a novel, and it’s a big flashy powered billboard that says, “I can’t complete a coherent sentence in the English language.” Manuscripts that display this sign are easy to evaluate. Note that this isn’t a question of the occasional misplaced comma or misspelled word; it’s an issue of basic coherence, the inability to transmit a comprehensible thought.
The second sign is more like a yard sale sign or a political sign stuck in the front yard; it comes a little later in the manuscript, but sometimes within the first chapter. This sign says, “I’m not sure what story I want to tell, and I don’t want to think deeply or do any research to make my writing believable, so I’m going to toss in a whole bunch of extraneous stuff and hope you like some of it.” These manuscripts are pretty easy to evaluate, too — especially if the extraneous stuff is more interesting than the central story. (Another, similar sign that I sometimes see says, “I didn’t bother to check to see if you publish this kind of story.” Those manuscripts are also easy to evaluate.)
The third sign of mediocre writing is smaller still, and harder to read without getting close to it. It might show up by the end of the first chapter, but often it stays hidden through a couple of chapters — and sometimes a writer will keep it hidden until a third or halfway through the book. This sign says, “I like what I’m writing and I hope you do, too. I have no idea that my characters seem a little flat; or, I’m not aware that my story arc is too derivative; or, I don’t know if you already looked at three other novels based on this same idea; or, I don’t realize that this scene is simply unbelievable; or, I’m ignorant of the fact that I just contradicted something I wrote fifty pages ago.” (Now you see why this stupid sign is so bloody hard to read: the writing is terrifically small.) These manuscripts are the hardest to evaluate, because sometimes they could be fixed with a little extra work; unfortunately, publishers generally don’t have time to help new writers fix all the problems to produce a marketable book.
So those are the signs I’ve found so far. I’m interested in other signs or variations on these, if anyone else has any to contribute.
As for me, that third sign is the one I’m trying hardest to eliminate in my own writing … although I know I still have the second sign up in some places. I’m trying to knock that one down, too, because any sign that my writing is less than excellent means my manuscript won’t get noticed.
by My mission, should I choose to accept it, is to put civility back into civil discourse. And even if I can’t put it back into the general discourse, which became increasingly shrill and at times simply vile during the campaign, I will try to keep my own discourse civil.
I don’t know if I succeeded during the election or not, but I hope I did. I won’t apologize for disagreeing with anyone or for stating my own opinions in sometimes strident terms, but I apologize if anyone feels I attacked them personally.
I think I succeeded in my civil discourse goal the day after the election, in a long conversation with a co-worker. (We were in a car together, so she couldn’t get away from me.) She didn’t like all of the questions I asked her as I tried to pin down the sources of her dissatisfaction with our country, but neither did she accept my invitation to slap me if I went too far. I count that as a success.
(At the risk of putting words in her mouth, I think she believes in the perfectability of our country and perhaps the entire human race. I do not. She admitted to being a glass half full person, whereas in the realm of geopolitics I’m more likely to point out that someone’s going to break the glass sooner or later so we’d better get a towel and a trashcan ready.)
Anyway, I offer as an example an online discussion about how this election may affect the military that I’ve had with my writing friend Dave Klecha on his blog, Bum Scoop. We don’t agree, but we’re not gouging each other’s virtual eyes out, either.
That, I think, is a good start.
by I thought it would be interesting to list the election results in terms of all the states I’ve lived in:
So that works out to 28 electoral votes for Senator McCain, and 107 for Senator Obama. (Imagine if all those states had gone for the Anti-Candidate; that’s a good chunk of the electorate.)
So, congratulations to Mr. Obama.
And now we get to see how much more interesting the times will get.
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