This morning in the Leeward Space Foundation group on LinkedIn, Jun Okushi posted a link to this Examiner article which reported Buzz Aldrin is no fan of the current Asteroid plan.  And, of course the comments raged from the Mars, Moon and Asteroid supporters (wait, there were no Asteroid supporters, odd).

If you're on LinkedIn, search for it but be ready for a slug fest.

With my two cents I was going to quote Mozart's exclamation to his wigmaker...

but I posted this instead ...

"It shows that people of that generation had high expectations and a vision of a bright future ahead. I don't think there is anyone left on this planet that believes of a positive and Jetson's like future for the human race. It's like we have all just given up. "

Not all. Have You?

We have a copy of this piece in the office of the Space Studies Institute. It is about 12x24 (ish) framed and with a penciled in note at the bottom "To my good friend Gerrard O'Neill..." Every time my young son comes to my work at the Mojave Spaceport (where XCor, ViirginGalactic, Orbital, Masten and StratoLaunch make their amazing 'for-us-people' futures quietly today), he slides a chair over and steps up to just stare at this.

Have hope.

But more than that...

Lookie that, some fine soul at the Space Studies Institute put the High Frontier out on Kindle for a new age of Space enlightenment.  Oh, it was me ;-). 

Today I was introduced onstage at the Space Access Society conference in Phoenix by Gary Hudson, SSI President,  as the Space Studies Institute Evangelist, so I was honored to do the announcement of the release of the exclusive Kindle edition.

Go get it darnit.  It is truly an important and fascinating book.  Plus we worked pretty hard to get it turned into a nice Kindle version so, as a good good friend, you know that getting it and reading it will make me happy.

http://ssi.org/2013/04/the-high-frontier-is-now-on-kindle/

There is a project that I'm working on that was originally a publication with a cover by artist Pat Rawlings.  My client would like to get his permission to use the art he did for them but we're having the darndest time getting in touch with him. 

His own web page seems to have dead phone/email information.  Searching around got me a gallery in Texas and an answering machine number that I doubt is still monitored.

We could just dump it for something genericly "spacey" but for the reasons he talks of in this YouTube video, we really want to use his original.

Anyone have a line on the guy?  Can you tell him to update his web page?
Updated!

In the early 1970s America had proved its leadership in Human Spaceflight but among the nation’s youth an anti-technology mindset was growing.  Princeton Physicist Dr. Gerard K. O’Neill, inventor of the revolutionary Colliding-Beam Storage Ring technology that is now the basis of all high energy particle accelerators, asked his students if they could come up with a working Space Colony system to permanently and happily house and employ tens of thousands of regular people AND cleanly power the Earth.

Yeah, win win plus win. 

Could it actually be done?  Here's a pointer you might like.

Time flies. 

I got two emails from budds saying 'you're on LinkedIn a bunch and your site hasn't had anything new for a month... you available?'

I'm on LinkedIn a bunch because old friends started doing the Recommendation Game (a great feature of the LinkedIn system, by the way... really gets you involved, and it's fun.), and I wanted to return their favors.

Do I want a gig?  Hmmm... everyone has a price.  But, I actually have one and it's pretty darned cool.

"Yet another reason to ditch space colonization fantasies and focus on earthbound environmental problems."
- Alex Sevins post on MSNBC's "news" site

Ugh.  Several days ago the story broke that researchers may have found a possible link to brain inflammation from high mass, high energy particles.  And the implication jumped to the hot-button scare-title "Alzheimers". 

Amazon lists Dandridge Cole's Social And Political Implications of the Ultimate Human Society as unavailable. It is... but there is a way to get it.

After a good deal of investigation, I can assure anyone looking for this title that the search will be fun but fruitless... if you are looking for the exact title. There was a presentation at the 1961 AAS meeting and the book following the meeting (Advances in Astronautical Sciences Volume 8 - Proceedings of the Seventh Annual Meeting of the American Astronautical Society Dallas January 16-18 1961) lists the article BUT the book itself only has a half page abstract with a note that the reason they didn't print the complete text is that it was published as a two part series in the September and October 1961 Space World Magazine under the title "Macro-Life".

I truly do dislike using Dylan as a catch, but it's tradition.  Unfortunately, this shows that it is not the only tradition that refuses to go away.

"Dear Editor:
The following may indicate what
the rest of the world thinks of our
space program:
I was in a park in Hakata in southern
Japan this summer wearing an
L5 Society t-shirt. A middle-aged
Japanese came up and asked me what
the t-shirt meant.
I replied in halting Japanese that it
was an international organization
promoting space development, space
manufacturing and building human
colonies in space.
The gentleman nodded, looked up
at my blue eyes, and said, "Ah, you
are Russian!"
Jack D. Kirwan
Tucson, Ariz."

That's from the September 1986 edition of the NSS's Space World magazine. 

Shhhh... there is something big quietly happening...