The state of Human Spaceflight in the United States of America is not good.  And the speakers at the Human Spaceflight Forum at the Columbia Memorial Space Center did not sugar coat or avoid that fact.

They meet it head on, that is their jobs.  They are as frustrated as everyone else, but better than everyone else they have real knowledge that I think you will be better off hearing than just living on NASA PR.

I hope that at some point you can start it from the beginning and listen all the way through, there will be a number of moments that are real eye-opening.  But if you can't do that right now then at least jump up to the beginning of Dr. Zubrin's part (about 11 minutes in),

Sorry iPad folks, this is Flash multimedia.  It is the king of the web so please use a real computer or Android or WinMo/Skyfire device.

Have you ever heard of Downey, California?

If you're a Fast Food Industry fan you may know it as the home of the last "original" McDonalds "drive in" with true golden arches pre-Ronald Speedie the Chef icon waving from the top ofthe huge main arch.

If you're a movie fan then you may know it as the city of Downey Studios, the home of the world's largest film water tank and the location where Iron Man 2's Monaco Raceway was recreated in a parking lot with giant green screens.

But if you're a fan of history, specifically Space Industry history, then you know Downey as one of the original Space development locations.  Monumental, in fact...

The Lego company just released a 16+ advanced kit of the Space Shuttle... and they can't keep them in stores.

Mary Roach of Bonk and Stiff fame has released her Packing for Mars book and its first week out has it at #5 of the NY Times Bestseller List.  Normal people appear to WANT space in their lives.

Normal people.  Not just us fringey scifi nerds and geeks.

"Hey Smith!  Got that country code table SQL?"

Yeah, right here.

Went to the NewSpace conference in Sunnyvale last weekend.

There are a number of things to ponder on this before posting anything in detail, as I have learned from going to conferences that you have to wait a bit before going public, to let the emotions ease and the facts settle.

However, I just had an email conversation with a dear friend who happens to be a devout world-traveller, and upon re-reading part of the e that I'd rolled off I said 'huh, that wasn't half bad', and figured it would be good to put it here for future reference on this point in time.

>>snip>>

Test clicked amighty all over the facebook options to see more of what it has... and more of the odd AJAX actions.  Then, having completely overstayed my welcome on the WHCN Alumni group, I deleted the account.  Good, all posts were gone.

Then, durnit, my old buddy Dave tells me that he has a facebook account - and He's a old time fully-Redmond-centric 'Softie!.  That is just plain wrong :)

On again.  But now off again... I just don't have things to share that good normal people find interesting enough to spend all of 5 seconds on before clicking a vote button.

Alas, least I know that my interests are boring, eh?

Sammie had Peter Jackson on the brain all last week and so when Universal sent me a freebie we grabbed the two annuals and took the Zaner to check out the new King Kong 3d part of the Studio Tour.

Worth it?  Yeah, definitely.  I would have paid the no-lines rate for it.

Oh.. as we were leaving I looked up and saw the Airship Ventures Zeppelin!

Just paid the tickets for NewSpace 2010 .

I was on the fence about it, what with the AIAA Space 2010 / ICSSC coming up in Anaheim the end of August.

But with SpaceX managing to continue beating the odds and Virgin Galactic still apparently on target and - very sadly - the Kistler group filing for bankruptcy, the newspace front has so much activity that doing the drive up to Silicon Valley seems the right thing to do.

Last fall my friend Kat told me that there was a WHCN alumni group on facebook that I just had to join.  I told her that  I'd coded against the fb api but never really saw the draw of being a user.

She called me an old fart and that was that.

Couple nights ago after mixing cold and hot sake I did a boogle for HCN and the group popped up.  I saw Kat's postings from last year, and Kim Alexander's and Dan Hayden's and Johnston Izzi's and got all nostalgic and joined and posted.

I'm always flipping between google and bing in the browser search dropdown... but now that is over.

Check out bingle.nu, once you're past the main form you can just put criteria in the upper left and get bings and googs side by side.  One prob is that it strips special characters ("C#" becomes "C", ugh), but it has the nice feature of being able to go full window with either engine.

Or you might like bing-vs-google.com  which doesn't strip characters and has custom providers for ie and fox so you don't have to do the two manual steps yourself.

Neat!

Just got an e about ELMAH.  Yes, I think its pretty fine.  Saves a lot of time, does fine with vs2010 asp.net4 for us so far... but let me tell you why we took the plunge.

Need to reduce those one-off cookies, session vars or visible query strings?  This is a library that I trust (and I trust very very few these days)

An aquaintance took issue with my calling Japan a '*proven* Asteroid retrieval leader'.  Well, while Mr. Obama says one day we will learn to fly again, Japan completed the major step one.

Congratulations to them.  Seriously, what I write here is in NO WAY against that country at all.  I have nothing but respect for them on this.

But...You do know Japan, right? The country that invaded China for iron ore because they have no local natural resources of their own... and then wiped out the US/British Fleet at Pearl Harbor to keep getting that Chinese iron without our hinderance.  They still have no local resources... but they do have the proven tech to get as much as they want before anyone else.

You may have noticed one of our rotating quotes which states that 'in 1974 the US had 100% of space transportation market share, but by 1995 it was down to 30%'  (and now it's reported a bit over 20%).

So what?  The 250 Billion dollar global market is what.

So... this report from South Korea shows that along with the Brits starting their new space trans agency last month, more and more countries are out to get what our country just doesn't care about any more... and THEY are the ones willing to try stuff while the US only cares about regulating for some impossible "perfect safety" pipe dream.