Some Recent Space and Lunar History

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Five years ago today, the European Space Agency’s SMART-1 mission was launched to the moon. SMART was an acronym for “Small Missions for Advanced Research in Technology,” and the spacecraft tested solar electric propulsion technology on its way to the Moon. According to the ESA fact sheet on SMART-1, the spacecraft entered lunar orbit on November 15, 2004 — for those who didn’t know, electric ion thrusters don’t make for a particularly speedy trip — and after a one-year extension the mission ended on 3 September 2006 with a planned lunar impact.

As well as testing new technology, SMART-1 did the first comprehensive inventory of key chemical elements in the lunar surface. It also investigated the theory that the Moon was formed following the violent collision of a smaller planet with Earth, four and a half thousand million years ago.

And hopefully, relying on some of the latest lunar science observations will help make my novel MARE NUBIUM a little more realistic. Time will tell.

Now, back to work on the thing 😉 .

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Thanks to Bloggers for Veteran-Related Posts

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If you’re interested in blogs about leadership and management, I recommend Wally Bock’s “Three Star Leadership” blog. One of his recent posts linked to Julie Ferguson’s entry on the “HR Web Cafe” blog about hiring veterans. As an Air Force retiree, I appreciate them calling attention to the subject and just wanted to say, Thanks, y’all!

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Science Fiction Blog Aggregator

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I look at blog aggregators every once in awhile when I need source material and don’t want to paw through a bunch of regular search results. Guy Kawasaki’s Alltop is one of my favorites; I see that “writing” is a new topic on it, though I might recommend it be subdivided into genres.

One of the newer aggregators I consult is http://42blips.com/, an aggregator devoted to science fiction and fantasy. I can’t remember where I first saw this — probably on Futurismic or BoingBoing or somewhere like that — and I don’t know how useful it will be in the long run, but for now it’s pretty interesting to look at.

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Space Past, Space Recent, Space Present

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Space Past: 35 years ago today, the Skylab-3 mission splashed down in the Pacific after astronauts Alan Bean, Jack Lousma, and Owen Garriott spent almost two months aboard the station. You can read more about the mission on this Wikipedia page.

Space Recent: I missed this when it was on the Discovery Channel, but a recent experiment demonstrated the technology for beaming power from space-based solar collectors. This interests me because one of my Ornery American essays was on using space-based power to help recovery efforts after natural disasters.

Space Present: The folks at Sea Launch successfully lofted the Galaxy-19 satellite yesterday. (I worked as a technology security monitor on the Galaxy IIIc launch, which was a great adventure.) Congrats!

Space Present II. Also yesterday, the House passed a waiver that would allow NASA to continue purchasing Soyuz flights to the International Space Station beyond the 2011 expiration of the current waiver.

Because it takes three years to build a new Soyuz, an INKSNA waiver extension is required for NASA to avoid unmanning the station starting in 2012. If the Senate goes along and the extension becomes law, NASA would be able to maintain an uninterrupted presence on the lab complex and bridge the gap between the end of shuttle operations in 2010 and the debut of its replacement in 2014 or 2015.

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A Fast Breeder Reactor in Every Garage

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Happy Autumnal Equinox, one and all.

Today’s subject comes courtesy of the Anti-Candidate Position on Energy, just posted on the forum.

Long-term energy needs require long-term energy solutions, and petroleum is not a long-term solution. Fossil fuels in general aren’t long-term solutions, because we’re not making enough fossils these days to replace the fuels.

Interested parties can find it here.

The post just prior to that one, incidentally, is the Anti-Candidate Position on Free Speech. Basically, it’s a good thing — but free speech doesn’t automatically mean easy speech.

[BREAK, BREAK]

Today in space history, 1993, the Space Shuttle Discovery landed at Kennedy Space Center at the conclusion of mission STS-51.

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I Finished Writing a Story Today

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Between slush reading assignments and making progress on my novel, for the last couple of weeks I’ve been writing a short story for the Codex Writers Group Halloween Contest. Today I finished my first draft, which gives me a few days to let it sit quietly before I read through it and attempt any revisions. (The deadline is October 1st.)

The way the contest works, we’re randomly assigned to provide another person the “seed” for their story. I provided a story seed to fellow Boot Camp alumnus Oliver Dale; it wasn’t a very good seed, but Oliver’s the kind of writer who can make good things from bad.

I got the seed for my story from Meg Stout, with whom I wrote a story for the Codex Collaboration Contest and whose mom was in Dave Wolverton’s Writing Workshop with me — small, small world. Meg’s seed was elaborate but extremely good, in that it allowed for an incredible degree of flexibility. I did what I could with it, but I’m not sure I did it justice.

The story ended up being pretty short (the limit is 7500 words, so we aren’t too overwhelmed by reading and judging all the entries, but I didn’t come close to that), and I think I like it. But I always seem to like what I’ve written until people start pointing out the flaws; hopefully, letting it sit for a few days will help me see the flaws for myself.

And now, apart from the slush reading, I can turn my attention back to my novel.

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Progress Report and Space History

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MARE NUBIUM, my novel of lunar colonization and survival, is now 70,000 words long. I have six weeks left if I’m going to finish the thing by Halloween. I need to pick up the pace.

On the space history front, 45 years ago today — September 18, 1963 — the lifting body demonstrator “ASSET-1” (a precursor to the Space Shuttle) flew to an altitude of 35 miles at the Eastern Space & Missile Center. You can read about the ASSET program on this Air Force fact sheet or this Wikipedia page.

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50 Years Ago In Space … and Writer Congrats

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Astute readers might say to themselves, “Not much was happening a half century ago in space,” but something happened on the ground on September 17, 1958, that was important to U.S. space exploration: the NASA-ARPA (Advanced Research Projects Agency) Manned Satellite Panel was formed.

According to THIS NEW OCEAN: A HISTORY OF PROJECT MERCURY, the panel recommended:

I. OBJECTIVES
The objectives of the project are to achieve at the earliest practicable date orbital flight and successful recovery of a manned satellite, and to investigate the capabilities of man in this environment.

II. MISSION
To accomplish these objectives, the most reliable available boost system will be used. A nearly circular orbit will be established at an altitude sufficiently high to permit a 24-hour satellite lifetime; however, the number of orbital cycles is arbitrary. Descent from orbit will be initiated by the application of retro-thrust. Parachutes will be deployed after the vehicle has been slowed down by aerodynamic drag, and recovery on land or water will be possible.

III. CONFIGURATION
A. Vehicle
The vehicle will be a ballistic capsule with high aerodynamic drag. It should be statically stable over the mach number range corresponding to flight within the atmosphere. Structurally, the capsule will be designed to withstand any combination of acceleration, heat loads, and aerodynamic forces that might occur during boost and reentry of successful or aborted missions.
The document outlined generally the life support, attitude control, retrograde, recovery, and emergency systems and described the guidance and tracking, instrumentation, communications, ground support, and test program requirements.

I love the concise nature of the statements, and the fact that the whole plan consumed “only two and one-half pages of typescript.” These days stating the objective by itself would probably take almost that much space. (Maybe typewriters and carbon paper helped them get to the point.)

[BREAK, BREAK]

Congratulations to my writing friend and fellow member of the Codex Writers Group, Alex Wilson, for reaching the finals of the Writers of the Future Contest! I hope he snags one of the prizes, and that I reach the same point … or sell so much that I render myself ineligible. 😉

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Is SPORE an advertisement for Intelligent Design?

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Disclaimer: I’m not an on-line game player (not since playing on-line chess occasionally while I was stationed overseas), so I haven’t played “Spore.” Maybe I will, but I doubt it.

The first things I heard about the game Spore focused on the evolution aspect of the game, and made it sound as if the game was a computer simulation of evolution and natural selection. I didn’t see how that kind of long-term, random mutation simulation could be any fun to play, but it turns out that’s not the focus of the game at all. It’s a game that lets the player act as God, guiding the actions and development of little creatures in the computer.

So I wondered if the game might be a subtle advertisement for Intelligent Design as an alternative theory to evolution. I couldn’t imagine that was the case — not since the game has a tie-in to a National Geographic video. But the ID possibility remained: after all, the player is presumably intelligent. And the player’s intelligence apparently guides the actions of a virtual creature that normally would be acting without volition (i.e., by stimulus-response and “instinct,” however that developed.)

I went to the Spore web site to see if my suspicions were correct. On the “What is Spore?” page, the opening text is, “How will you create the universe?” Then the page enjoins the player to “create and guide your creature through five stages of evolution.”

But life on the virtual planet doesn’t spring out of the local primordial ooze, nor does it give the player the option to “create” life — instead, life arrives inside a meteorite in a computer version of panspermia. So maybe Spore isn’t the best advertisement for ID, since it doesn’t address the central idea of where that life really came from.

I’ll leave the answer to that question up to God.

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15 Years Ago in Space

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On September 12, 1993, the Space Shuttle Discovery launched on mission STS-51. Astronauts Frank L. Culbertson, Jr., William F. Readdy, James H. Newman, Daniel W. Bursch, and Carl E. Walz made up the crew.

Details of the mission, including the scrubbed launch attempts starting in July, are on this page.

The crew deployed two payloads: the Advanced Communications Technology Satellite (ACTS) and the Orbiting and Retrievable Far and Extreme Ultraviolet Spectrograph-Shuttle Pallet Satellite (OERFEUS-SPAS). The mission lasted nine days — a day longer than scheduled because of adverse weather at the Kennedy Space Center landing site.

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