Postcards from the Bleeding Edge
Friday, September 10, 2004

  SpaceShipOne's launch crowd

I just volunteered for SpaceShipOne's launch crowd on Sept 29th, 2004. It is also (and, I hope, not coincidentally in the minds of many) the day my favorite asteroid, Toutatis, make the closest approach to earth of nearly any major asteroid, roughly 1.6m km - or only 4 times the distance from here to the moon -

that's a short hop to some of the most desirable real estate in the solar system - packing billions of tons of useful materials and radiation shielding, on an elliptical orbit that leads to Venus, Mars, the Belt, and the moons of Jupiter....

Traditionally, I hold a party for that - an asteroid appreciation day - instead, I'll be in the Mojave desert, with 30,000+ people, urging on the first contestant for the Ansari X-Prize, SpaceShipOne, helping willing a private spacecraft 100km above the Earth, and doing whatever is needed to help the team get there. It's really the first time since I was a member of the L5 society in the 80s, that I've done anything concrete, real, physical, connected to space.

As an oft-lonely space advocate, I'm really jazzed about sharing space - touching it - in the desert with so many others who share the same dream.

I won't mind missing Toutatis, this time.

Heinlein said - "Once you reach earth orbit - you're halfway to anywhere." Only months after the US and USSR put their first men in suborbit - we had men IN orbit -

and I hope, feverently, that this start to private spaceflight makes all my childhood dreams of colonizing the solar system a reality before I retire from this earth, too. We're a long way to orbit, but one day, maybe even in the next 10 years, we will be sending men and women into space, to stay - and maybe, one day, 20 or 30 years later, my sweetie and I could go ourselves, like I feverently dreamed we could so many years ago.

However: I'm glad I can put all those fevered dreams aside, for a day, and just concentrate on crowd control and the 80 seconds of pure joy in the launch itself. For now. But I can't help looking at Simone, and Dawn, and daydreaming of SpaceShipNinetyThree....
 

  Computers that are faster, cheaper, louder, less filling, with extra whitening, and leave you with better breath

Intel announces it's dual-core plan, and an ambitious plan to halve power consumption for its laptop chips, with a completely un-ambitious plan to do it by 2010.



Ericson drops bluetooth, signifying mostly that bluetooth's life will be long, but stuck in the IR and wireless handset replacement market....

while the big handset and wifi providers get behind wifi - signifying the slow squeezeout of independent wifi operators similar to what happened in the ISP market post-AOLhell (1995)

DirectTV plans an ambitious launch schedule to expand HDTV broadcast capability. No sign of what kind of launch vehicle they intend to use. But speaking of that...

 
David Täht writes about politics, space, copyright, the internet, audio software, operating systems and surfing.


Resume,Songs,
My new blog, NeX-6, My facebook page
Orgs I like
The EFF - keeping free speech in the world
Musical stuff I like
Jeff, Rick, Ardour, Jack
Prior Rants - New song: Log Off Now Sharing your home network better in a time of covi... Designing for the disconnect Email lists going down the memory hole Instituting saner, professional source code manage... Wireless and Wifi in 2015 - not what I dreamed of Saving wifi! Fixing Bufferbloat! Fighting the vend... Virgin Media - Fixing the epidemic of bufferbloat ... 49... and trying to find my navel Wheels down on mars!
Best of the blog:
Uncle Bill's Helicopter - A speech I gave to ITT Tech - Chicken soup for engineers
Beating the Brand - A pathological exploration of how branding makes it hard to think straight
Inside the Internet Mind - trying to map the weather within the global supercomputer that consists of humans and google
Sex In Politics - If politicians spent more time pounding the flesh rather than pressing it, it would be a better world
Getting resources from space - An alternative to blowing money on mars using NEAs.
On the Columbia - Why I care about space
Authors I like:
Doc Searls
Where's Cherie?
UrbanAgora
Jerry Pournelle
The Cubic Dog
Evan Hunt
The Bay Area is talking
Brizzled
Zimnoiac Emanations
Eric Raymond
Unlocking The Air
Bob Mage
BroadBand & Me
SpaceCraft
Selenian Boondocks
My Pencil
Transterrestial Musings
Bear Waller Hollar
Callahans
Pajamas Media BlogRoll Member

If you really want to, you can poke through the below links as well.

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