Astronauts returning from the ISS looks like this: Well done! (Sorry for the lack of a whole lot of content this week…there’s a lot going on at Casa Jaquandor this week, so my focus is on keeping the pedal to the metal on Princesses II: A Clash of Princesses.) Share This PostDown the rabbit hole….
…here are some photos, from a NASA FLickr stream, of an actual real spaceship launch. Specifically, the Antares rocket, developed by a private company. I think that the human future in space will depend in great part on private enterprise, and also that the future of the human economy will depend on our future in space. Plus, there’s still something awfully thrilling about a rocket launching for space. Space still beckons! Share This PostDown the rabbit hole….
Visualizations that help convey the non-human scale of distances in space are always nice, but even so, they never really make it totally clear. I just don’t think the human brain is wired to conceive of these kinds of distances. Nevertheless, how far away would Mars be if Earth was only 100 pixels of your computer monitor in diameter? Find out! Share This PostDown the rabbit hole….
When I was a kid, my dream was to be an astronaut. Not terribly unique, as kids dreams went, in my generation. The space program had lost a bit of its momentum in the mid-1970s, but the moon landings were still fresh in memory, and in any event, a movie came along in 1977 that made space a going concern for an awful lot of young’uns, myself included. So in my first few years of grade school, I read a ton of space books. I remember very few of them, but I learned a lot from each. One of themDown the rabbit hole….
Meteors in Russia. This is how it starts, folks. Someone’s just drivin’ along, and then, from the sky…. Or, after that thing has zoomed overhead, some other Russian dudes are standing around gawking at the contrail the object left…when, about twenty-seven seconds in, the shock-wave arrives…. The world is ending, people. ENDING!!! (Hmmm…I should really have coffee before blogging…anyway, for what is likely the best coverage in terms of making sense of the science and sifting out the bullshit, check out Phil Plait’s Bad Astronomy.) Share This PostDown the rabbit hole….
Today is Carl Sagan’s birthday. He will forever be one of my greatest heroes. Share This PostDown the rabbit hole….
Farewell, Endeavour. Surely another ship will one day bear your name; may she sail as faithfully and true! Share This PostDown the rabbit hole….
Images of Mars-fall: If we were to cut our defense budget by, say, a third, and instead of using that money for tax cuts we were to put every penny of it into our budget for space exploration, I think it would be better for us, maybe later rather than sooner…but not so much later as we might believe. Share This PostDown the rabbit hole….
A few weeks ago, Kevin Drum had a post (yes, I am too lazy to track down the link) in which he indicated that he just doesn’t think the evolution-versus-creationism “debate” is that big a deal, and his reasons basically boiled down to the notion that the only place this ‘debate’ takes place is in elementary schools; nobody is challenging the teaching of evolution in colleges or in the use of evolutionary theory in medical research and so on. This strikes me as tragically wrong-headed, because in a society that is only going to become more and more scientifically dependent,Down the rabbit hole….
The recent transit of Venus over the Sun yielded some amazing images. Here are some of them, from the Nasa Goddard Space Flight Center’s Flickr stream (which is, incidentally, one of my favorite Flickr streams). That last one is amazing…it’s among the greatest space images I’ve ever seen. After the transit, I tweeted to Neil DeGrasse Tyson that now I want to see images of an Earth transit, taken from Mars. By the way, it’s always helpful to keep in mind the sheer distances involved here. After putting in some values to this site, I find that to make thingsDown the rabbit hole….