Turkey day

In watching TV at my brother's place in NJ I'm struck by a couple things.

The daily show is GOOD. I laughed my tush off at the recent show on the competition between "South Jersey Magazine", "South Jersey Magazine", and "SJ" - three publications all trying to capitalize on the "events" in this staid, quiet area of vacation homes, casinos, and wet weather.

Tivo makes modern television almost bearable. Where I used to treat the 3 minute break every 15 minutes as time for smoking or going to bathroom, my bro's hands just twitch towards Tivo's fast forward button, and boom, those 3 minutes are wiped out by a 3 second blur of commercials, and then back to the show.

Still, the reality shows of people trying to lose weight, the forensic shows trying to figure out who horribly murdered a character introduced in the teaser with a serving fork, and comedy shows about the 70s, all leave me cold, and uninvolved, and wanting to make a trip to the nearest library for something that doesn't make me twitch towards the fast forward button.


One of the things that draws me away from being a journalist, and more of a columnist, is the essential sameness of the journalist templates for so many things.

This morning I woke up to TV news doing the classic live interview of "soldier at war talks to wife at home with kid"

"I love you so very much", she says, while the baby suckles, and the soldier says something like "I love and miss you too", and she says "I can't wait til you come home again", and she and the baby start bawling...

... cut to commercials

I wondered what the soldier's reaction was? "You just keep on taking care of that baby, I've got insurgents to shoot and people to protect here, I'll be home in time to teach the kid baseball."

I'm grateful for one thing this turkey day. Can you imagine the Islamic reaction to this holiday if the pilgrims had celebrated thanksgiving by eating ham? Or commercials, like "Pork: The other white meat" got run on the Voice of America?

Everything should have a fast forward button.

the other journalistic template that got under my skin these past month was:

"New asteriod NOT GOING TO HIT EARTH." Even when done well, as in the Economist's recent story on Toutatis, it gets under my skin. However...

a group of scientists and former astronauts formed the B612 Foundation (named after the home asteroid of Antoine de Saint Exupéry's little prince) in 2002. Their goal is to develop a way of altering the course of an asteroid using an ion rocket, which pushes electrically charged atoms out of the back. This is more efficient than the hot gas which provides the thrust in a conventional rocket.

The B612 group believes such a system could be ready for use by 2015, and suggests it should be tested shortly thereafter on a non-threatening asteroid.

Someday, some reporter is going to notice that all the things we are developing under the auspices of "fear of asteroids", could one day be used to benefit from them, by, for example, building space elevators.

Labels: asteroids, msm, space04, toutatis

  ¶ 7:15 AM 0 comments

  Man's children

Crazy Horse stood high on a mountain
Said: “51's a long way to climb
And – youth doesn't come from a fountain
And - Freedom you can't redesign”

In the early 70s, NASA Ames built the Pioneer 10 and 11 spacecraft on the cheap to take the first pass through the asteroid belt and onto Jupiter. They endured 450,000 rads on close approach to Jupiter – 1000 times the lethal radiation limit of a human being, and after providing data critical to the success of the follow-on Voyager grand tour, they died -- seared, malfunctioning – with the teams that controlled them trying desperately hour by hour, day by day to keep them running.

I'm no stranger to animism, I emphasise deeply with the machines of man, and even more deeply with the men that make machines.

I felt for those machines as they died, and for the people that created them, knowing that they would surely die, but knowing that their deaths would serve a purpose also.

At the Contact conference earlier this year I had the chance to meet Mike Sims, one of the technical leaders behind the Mars Lander Opportunity - he was tired, from endless nights keeping his machine alive, black bags beneath his eyes.

And I had to ask him - after that achievement - after the long deserved vacation he took after that machine, too, inevitably died, what then?

I asked him. He didn't know. He couldn't think much past keeping his baby alive until the end.

But I remember vividly his expression as the 8 year old Brianna Machado asked him, in a child’s innocent seriousness:

"Did you actually go to Mars yourself?"

"No", he said slowly, his eyes misting up - "but I wish I had".

That I'll never forget. I'd seen that look before...

I'd seen the same look on the face of a widow drawing her hand across her husband's name on the Vietnam memorial.

I'd seen it on my own face, in the mirror, after nearly crashing my car into a telephone pole just below Mark Bingham's parent's house
just after 9/11. There was a pile of flowers there as tall as the mailbox...

I've seen that same look on the face of the parents and friends of the casualties of all our wars for freedom:

"I wish I'd been there."

"I wish I knew I'd do the same thing they did"

But, being born and raised long after our last major war, I grieve today, not just for our honored dead in physical battle, not just for those MIA or in prison camps, and not just for those returned home crippled and changed - but for those that fought for the idea of freedom on whatever ground they could find to stand on, who fought and won, or fought, and lost -

"for to fight for the right, without question or pause"

and to die trying

is the greatest expression of why freedom is worth fighting for.

"I wish I knew I'd do the same thing they did". I wish I knew.

Labels: rhysling, space, space04, terrorism

  ¶ 1:50 AM 0 comments

  NEOX vs the Comanche

Want to see me get mad about money misspent? Read on. I want to talk about the incredible cost-effectiveness of NEOX based space missions after I get done being pissed off about this:

Feb. 23 (Bloomberg) -- The U.S. Army plans to cancel the Boeing Co.-United Technologies Corp. Comanche helicopter program, according to people familiar with the plan.

The program has been overhauled six times in its 18-year history as the cost per helicopter grew. The U.S. Army was ordered in 2002 to reduce the number of Comanche helicopters it planned to buy to 650 from 1,207. Initially, it planned to buy 2,000.

``The Comanche program was overtaken by new threats and new technologies,'' said Loren Thompson, a defense analyst for the Washington-based Lexington Institute. ``After 20 years of development, it had yet to produce an operational helicopter.''

The value of the contract was raised to $6.6 billion from $3.2 billion under a revised development contract awarded in November 2002. That contract calls for the venture to deliver nine Comanche helicopters in 2005 and 2006 for test and evaluation improvements through 2011, according to United Technologies' annual filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.

The program's total budget for the Comanche is $38.3 billion [bold by yours truly]. The Army has spent $6.8 billion through Sept. 30. The fiscal 2005 budget asks $1.2 billion for research and development and just $12 million for procurement. The procurement request is $2 billion in 2009.

38 billion dollars spent over 20 years to not produce a single operational aircraft. That kind of money would pay for roughly 5000 NEOX missions, each visiting 4 asteroids, or more, in a quest for raw material, and information, laying the groundwork for a network of telescopes, radar and observing stations well beyond earth's orbit - and potentially opening the solar system to human colonization. Each impact probe would give us so much more detail on what conditions were like...

The thing I am maddest about today - is that the only thing the press seems to pick up on is the one in half a million chance that one rock will hit earth - it's not just that -

It is in the 0 chance that I will ever get to live on one of these rocks - hitch a lift past earth, through the Belt, up to Jupiter, and back to Venus. It would be a wonderful 4 year trip - it would be a wonderful trip to make multiple times...

I see each of the thousands of near earth asteroids as opportunity - as real estate on the hoof - as a place where greenpeace isn't running around in little rubber boats - I see the former swamplands of florida in only 70 years of development covered with retirement homes... and I see Toutatis: Toutatis - where I want to retire. While it isn't much to look at now, neither was the swampland in florida 70 years ago. See that cute little dimple in the center? That is over 600m in diameter - right on the edge of that, I think, would be a good place for a near-zero-g-hottub with an everchanging view.... The pictures may be small, but we are talking about kilometers of land, and billions of tons of raw material here.

The only way to get there is to make it pay, to make it possible to bring resources from space - and the only way I can think of to do that is to bootstrap it with an enormous number of tiny spacecraft launches each on a mission to survey a different set of asteroids, to find sources of water, metals, and the essentials of life - and to establish an effective relay network for communication between all these craft - and... and... I start to sputter about stupid and wasteful it is to spend money on a helicopter designed to counter a non-existent threat - I rant about how if we only just took a step back and looked at the solar system, as a whole, from space, rather than from earth - we'd understand that the answers were already in our grasp -

It is not science fiction anymore, and, compared with most government programs - is cost effective with a potentially astronomical rate of return -

From the article that started all this matrix-y thinking:

``The most directly competing programs in the Army are Apache and Comanche,'' Aboulafia said. ``Which would you rather have - 100 percent of a proven machine with good profit, or 50 percent of a risky venture?''

you can have A, or B -

but if you start jumping up and down crying out for another option, a risky venture with an incredibly high rate of return...

just look up, on Asteroid Appreciation Day, February 29th - and visualize looking back on this green marble from the front porch of your very own digs on your own chunk of land.

Labels: asteroids, comanche, nasa, neox, retirement, space, space04

  ¶ 11:19 PM 0 comments

  Presidential Priorities in space...

I am told that that "vision thing" is happening again... that today, President Bush is supposed to announce plans to return to the moon and put a man on Mars.

I have sort of been aware of this for a long time, and have been doing my best to ignore it. I have enough problems in my life right now... what happens in space is very far away when getting the mortgage paid is my principal concern.

I look forward to reading his speech, though, and reading more about what the actual proposals look like. Maybe there will be a surprise in there... Maybe there will be a slice of the pork left over for asteroid exploration, who knows?

Bonus Link: No Oil on the moon. While I don't agree with the author on (most) points, I AM interested to see how closely his analysis of the justifications for space exploration will be in the speech. It is also not amusing, to me, to see the author drag out the same reasons, yet again, for not exploring space.

It is such an old argument. I am tired of it. So tired...

Update 2:48 PM - I read Bush's speech... I'm so tired... an extra billion for NASA, woopdedoo. Here, NASA, let me write you a check for five bucks, personally. It's the best I can do. (I owe a couple hundred bucks to the government for the war in Iraq, but I am a little behind on my taxes)

Hey, Prez! Did you know that for less than 100mil you could get a spacecraft like the Falcon - unveiled in front of the smithsonian last week - Oh... I take it you were in meetings that day?

To add to today's tale of discouragement read about what happened the last time private industry tried to get into space instead of NASA.

And all this time I thought republicans were the bastions of private industry....

Labels: nasa, space, space04, vse

  ¶ 2:48 PM 0 comments

  Howling at the moon

I howl at the moon every birthday.
My last three blog entries came from my disappointment at never making it into the space program. I dropped out of college in the early 80s and went into programming computers for a living. I thought that maybe I'd work my way into space that way, but after the Challenger disaster, I focused on becoming a Delos D. Harriman. That hasn't worked out so well either... neither has my attempt at becoming Rhysling... I just managed to secure a press pass for the upcoming Planetary Sciences conference. Engineer, songwriter, businessman, journalist... If I could just break orbit then I'd be a wanted fan!

Occasionally you do have to take a step back, get some perspective, and restore your sense of wonder. Progress in my own field, favorite design method (open source), and OS (Linux) has been amazing. I take comfort in that.

A little over a year ago the web browser mozilla hit 1.0. Since then, the product has hit a release date, every quarter, and is now at a stable 1.4 release. It "just works", in every way an advance upon Internet Explorer, but I found myself bothered this morning that it seemed to be a touch slow. Well...

I'd been running this invocation of mozilla for 14 days straight. I had 41 browser windows open. As a guess, I'd say I had 15 tabs open, on average. That's 615 web pages all open at the same time! (and several thousand read - I've done nothing but research and write these past weeks) The browser was using 809MB of RAM to do this. Simultaneously I was running open office, and the graphics editing program gimp.

I had about four blog entries planned referencing many of these tabs, and I just bookmarked them all with a few mouse clicks... Rock on Mozilla! My Linux machine may be chugging but it keeps on working...

With better software, fewer space missions will fail due to bugs like missing semi-colons, priority inversion problems, mistaken metric/english unit conversions, or bits flipped the wrong way. These are all real examples of how bad software caused failures in the space program. A missing semi-colon caused one venus mission to miss, a priority inversion problem ate at the battery of one of the Mars landers, the Mars Polar Orbiter burned because of metric confusion, and the Climate Orbiter had a single bit sensor jiggled during re-entry that stopped the motor firing early, so it crashed. I wrote about these last two software bugs in Uncle Bill's Helicopter.

I hope that Linus's Law - "With enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow" - etches it's way into more minds.

I sat at my desk these past two weeks, flying from one web page to another, absorbing quantities of knowledge in a way that I would have never dreamed back when I first started working on the internet 18 years ago. To find the information - to find the information - to find the information - would have taken me decades had I started in the 80s. Sure, it took 809MB of RAM, but only a year ago mozilla would have crashed within a day, only three years ago my machine would have....

My sense of wonder is back.

Labels: bugs, games, moon, software, space, space04

  ¶ 10:27 AM 0 comments