I recently met a mother of a young Space kid.  He's a great young man, has done SpaceCamp and visited SpaceX and has the bug.  I sent her this note about my impression of active periodicals and thought that in case there were others who knew of smart kids, or anyone looking for a good item to donate to school libraries, it might be of some help...

Small World.  Last year I was getting my hair cut in North Hollywood and to fill the down time I was reading the 2011 Space Report from the Space Foundation. There was a guy there who kept looking over at the book and as we were waiting for the credit card machine to come back from the dead he introduced himself as a "friend" of a small local satellite company and he was amazed that someone who didn't work for BigOldSpace would be owning - let alone reading - the Report. 

...

Well, if you're in a small group living on the faith of staying under the radar till you have your patent flying, and hoping just to make each payroll, here's your chance to save some of that precious money.

In previous incarnations of Smithvoice.com I coded in monitored and unmonitored discussion features.  Over time these just kept getting debates off topic and randomized so I cut the feature and now when I get a note I respond personally when I get the time.  I've gotten better relationships out of this than LinkedIn, and it keeps me from being bogged down by hundreds of blind linkbacks from people who aren't even interested in the stuff here.

I usually keep these private, but I got this one the other day and wanted to share it and my response.  Why?  As my neighbor Jerry Pournelle implies on his Chaos Manor project: 'Because it's my site, and I can do what I want' :).

Here's the note...

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/peter-navarro-and-greg-autry/was-newt-a-lunatic_b_1246090.html

It's the comments that get ya.

I gotsta say... the talking about GPS and mentions that every bit of data you hear, read and see (from corporate monsters or your auntie Ethyl) is bounced at least once off a sat, just can not break through the heads of people. It just doesn't. People truly believe that the 15 or so humans they see every day and the 10 or so they see on magazine covers are the whole of the planet. and the whole of universal civilization. We the people, mostly, are happily dumb in that way.

But maybe instead of saying "Tang" and "GPS"... hand even a standard idiot a subscription to NASA Tech Briefs. If they try really hard to follow it then they would see that *MONTHLY* the Space Industry delivers stuff that makes this world incrementally better year after year.

Back in 2008 Obama and McCain sent pretty high falootin reps to Boulder for a debate on Space Policy.  I did the YouTube edit for the Mars Society and knew from the mixing sessions that there was no banking on either side.

Through their reps and from their own mouths nether had any real intention of standing up for their Space related campaign schpeels, but probably McCain would have done more to at least keep Humans in the mix, whereas Obama made it clear as a bell all along that "Health Care Is This Generation's Apollo." 

But what about this time?  Pretty much I firmly believe that every single one of the options on both sides are liars.  Flat out and about everything every time they open their mouths.  Well, except for one...

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Last week's Space News Profile was on Elon Musk.  In case you don't read Space News, the Profile is the last page of the edition where a bunch of one-liner questions are fired at the target. 

SpaceX is the golden company and the olden companies (and thus the major money to Space News) are not very happy.  There was snide in the questions... but the angle was clear to readers in the very first intro sentence. 

It being a Profile segment, it had restrictions on the "guest".

I was wondering though, well before the end of the piece, when Musk would take the next correct step.  This evening it came to all SpaceX email subscribers...

[This is the 1st Amazon Review for the Nov 2010 book "Reopening the Space Frontier" by John Hickman]

If you personally have emotions over Space, specifically *Human* Spaceflight, then read this and take some time off to let it sink in before you do the next assault on Washington.

It will slap you directly in the face. The slaps will hurt.

The book takes every single positive that has ever been used as a bulletpoint for Human Spaceflight and rips each one apart.

Still looking for detailed information on the results of the MARIE experiment, called recently in BIS Spaceflight the "first experiment sent to Mars specifically to prepare for human missions".

The other night I finished reading the 2002 NRC "Assessment of Mars Science and Mission Priorities", 105 pages with 12 chapters detailing in our standard "turning gold into lead" style all of the things we have done and all of the things we will do in our "Mars Exploration Program".

In all of that, there was one (1, O-N-E) sentence on Odyssey's MARIE.  And if you think that was a low number... guess the count in the entire text of the word "Human".  I'll give you a hint:...

http://www.space-tourists-film.com/en/home.php

This has been listed on Netflix for a long while but remains unavailable to citizens of the United States. 

It is only available in PAL/Region2 so most likely your US/Japanese dvd player wont play it.  But an up to date computer drive and operating system should have no trouble (Win7 Media Player allows you to switch your default region for a certain number of plays before it "locks you in" but by just using VLC you can avoid that - and VLC seems to play everything smoother anyway so I just use VLC as my default now).

Why exactly does the Science Channel run Firefly when they know that there are top-notch documentaries like this out there?  I think Greg Klerkx would have an idea ;-)

Did you watch the final Discovery launch?  I had tivo tracking CNN, Fox and MSNBC to compare attitudes, which is alway fun, and something about the post-launch conversation on Fox struck me.

It was Astronaut Tom Jones who did what few in the corp do publically, he mentioned that he thinks "we have no goals right now, it's a failure of National Leadership."

And this image popped in my mind: