By smith on
8/15/2008 6:00 PM
Day two of the convention is over and tonight I have a better feeling about this organization... not a great feeling but a better one. The reason for the slight shift is likely due to getting actual questions answered.
First off, in the morning I asked Patt Czarnik, the Society's Membership Director, what exactly the MS membership numbers were. Knowing that the NSS is considered the big guy and also knowing that their American membership is only allegedly 12,000 gave me some concerns about the Mars Society.
And the number is
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By smith on
8/14/2008 10:02 PM
Day one of the 11th Annual Mars Society convention in Boulder is now over.
So... I came here to find out a couple of things but mostly I wanted to see if the Mars Society was a "for real" group with a plan or if instead the excellent Robert Zubrin book The Case For Mars had simply grown a fan club of anything-spacey folks.
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By smith on
8/14/2008 11:30 AM
If you're planning a trip to Seattle the Museum is great - for kids and adults - and, take my advice, make part of your day at least one of the short rides in the Old Tyme Aviation biplanes.
Why? If you have flash installed, just look below. Getting ready for the convention I noticed that I still had the videos on my cameras and because I couldn't sleep I edited them down and made a quick Flash client for my Wowza back end; Nothin' fancy, in time I'll make the player prettier (maybe), but t's a real streamer and I hope you like the vid
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By smith on
8/8/2008 9:10 AM
This is for my head, so don't read it, ok?
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By smith on
8/6/2008 2:50 PM
So I was just thinking, letting my mind wander on the costs of various technologies for getting payloads to space, and my mind drifted to Paul Allen and Elon Musk and I thought 'If I had a billion dollars would I really give some, most or all of it away for Space exploration?" I thought of Paul Allen and a story I'd heard from someone who used to work for Vulcan.. he told me that once he had to fly out to one of Allen's yachts to do a hardware and software upgrade before the big guy flew in to throw a party.
"One of Allen's yachts" That was what triggered it...
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By smith on
8/6/2008 12:34 PM
couple interesting places showing where the space bucks go:
FedSpending.org set for NASA contract drilling.
Wikipedia space agencies and budgets
and... I meant Branson, not Branniff ;-)
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By smith on
8/4/2008 9:57 PM
"Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down ? That's not my department."
- Werner Von Braun
Alright, I'm still not quite ready to just show this hand, because the answer to the question that keeps me up at night just seems too darned obvious to be possible. But I have to dump this on you or I'll be pacing all night...
This afternoon I signed for the delivery of NASA report SP-509. Interesting to find yet another page in Dr. Chris McKay's life .. but even more interesting that still with all of the documents and plans and learned elite meetings and conferences STILL the mention of the elephant in the room of Space industries *STILL* is never mentioned...
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By smith on
8/4/2008 10:59 AM
Have you seen Wall-E?
We brought our 4 year old to see it the first weekend and it was ok, not great... probably because of the live-action stuff getting in the way of the suspension of disbelief; But anyway...
There's that part where Wall-E is leaving Earth and he has to break through the space junk (shouldn't be a spoiler since it's flashed in the trailers), at that point I noticed a fair number of laughs and snickers and - this is why I really remember it - there was a guy a couple rows down who said to his kids "ha ha, look we even filled up space with garbage!"
Now, I had just finished reading a bunch of NASA white papers and zealot books about the Space Elevator and ...
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By smith on
8/1/2008 1:56 PM
...Honestly though, and just between us, I've got one major, I mean MAJOR, Space related issue that I can't get out of my brain, one that looks like it should be so primary and fundamental that Everyone should have it covered... but my research is so far showing that only One company out there is even mentioning it. Because of that incredible lack of information on this subject I'm kinda thinking that I'm an idiot to think it important...
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By smith on
5/25/2008 8:00 AM
My four year old son started the day by yelling "Mars Day!!!"
4pm today... flip a coin on Ares allowing us in.
And remember, Peter Ward's UW Astrobiology Team was a NASA group when he published "Life As We Do Not Know It" and said:
"NASA has had huge triumphs in this new century on its Mars missions and knows more than it is telling about the possibility of life on Mars. For NASA, information about life on Mars is the crown jewel of its intelligence, and getting that information is a bit like getting the CIA to divulge what it really knew about Saddam Hussein's WMD, even for us insiders" (page 175)
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