Interesting Los Angeles Developers Meetup at Blank Spaces on Wilshire. John Shiple of FreelanceCTO.com talking about Tech Trends and getting your business to be a business.

It might irk you that he mentioned every tech market under the sun but just could not remember that Seattle's East Side (or even just Seattle) is a wee bit of a player.  Try to forgive him, he's an MIT and silicon depression oriented person ;-). 

Here it is in Flash audio. (iPeople please use a 'puter or android. Jobs is dead but his non-tech hatred of your freedom lives on)

Pics of Goldstone DSN dishes

JPL had some visitors last night

We headed down to San Diego last weekend for our first trip to the Wild Animal Safari Park and also spent some time at the Air & Space Museum in Balboa Park. It was our second visit to the museum and, again, it was great.

They currently have the NASA Journey to Our Future exhibit and if you haven't seen it in your town yet, you should go for it. It's a lot of fun and unlike a lot of travelling shows the parts and pieces are still in great shape.

I wish it weren't such a haul from LA, because this year they have a kids summer program that looks awesome.

For the fam, here're a few phonepics...

Was skimming through the magazine rack and saw that Air & Space Magazine has a feature story this month on how cool and scientific it is to ride the American Zeppelin, The Eureka From Airship Ventures.

It struck me that some readers might like to see what it is really like... so here ya go!  From November 2009, a scoped video of what it is like to take a five year old up 1000 feet over Long Beach. 

See it all, including a talk with pilot Kate Board and closeups of the SeaLaunch ship (now Russian owned). 

What is your story of today?

My son had the day off from school so we killed the day at Disney.  Just as the SpaceX Dragon was successfully splashing down we were starting down the internal "space station" stairs in Space Mountain.  I was streaming the news and got about 20 messages all at once.

I squatted down and looked the six year old in the eye and said "When I was your age I was sure that when I grew up places like this - in Space - would be real.  You remember this moment, Zaner, because right now a few hundred miles from here that Elon Musk guy did what the big fat slow companies couldn't do in 40 years with billions and billions of dollars.  When you are my age, your world will be different.  Real Space for regular people is finally happening."

Nice launch yesterday off the coast down near Catalina.  News orgs are running around now trying to figure out who did it.. as currently all military groups are saying that it wasn't them/us.  So, who was it putting a medium "missile" up?

Well, who's in the area?

SeaLaunch, the former US floating launch facility out of Long Beach was given approval to become a Russian Energia company.The odd ruling was partly based on the "fact" that because their launches don't happen on 'foreign soil' they could be a Russian government company based here in the US.

Except for the fact that their first launches are officially to be done from their Moscow based "LandLaunch" facility. (yeah, this does fly in the face of the Congressional approval being based on their not doing land launches).  SLV says it wasn't them though.

Still no word, not even a mention of swamp gas.  I really don't know sometimes how America stays viable.

SpaceX sent out the word in July and normal folks took it seriously - HR5781 was postponed.  Tonight I received a mail from The Space Frontier Foundation that the House bil is on deck for tomorrow.  I sent this email to my congressman... will you please contact your representative?  Trust me, it is painless and you don't have to go into the details you see here... just tell them NO on HR 5781.

...

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...