What a Day for a Rumfart

No matter how much I dislike the phrase "the sky's the limit," since it betrays its origins in a time when humanity was chained to the ground, the fact of the matter is that except for the space agencies of the United States of America, Russian Federation, and People's Republic of China, it's still pretty accurate. In aiming for space, we on Earth face what's quite possibly the highest barrier to entry we've ever encountered, orders of magnitude beyond even the Polynesian colonization of the Pacific islands by dead reckoning alone. From Sputnik on, space has been a game for governments and corporations - while we can only gawk, us prisoners of gravity.

The twenty-first century doesn't necessarily have to unfold the same way.

Copenhagen Suborbitals, a non-profit Danish rocket group, has recently come to the attention of the news - my only regret is that I didn't write about it sooner, when they were still obscure. Their goal is a modest one - just to build and launch the first crewed Danish space mission, and a private space mission at that. Copenhagen Suborbitals is supported by donations and grants, and with those the people behind it - many of them volunteers - have built HEAT1X-TYCHO BRAHE.

The rocket's first test was terminated only a few hours ago, when the attempt to launch from a homemade platform in the Baltic Sea - towed there in part by Nautilus, Copenhagen Suborbitals' homemade submarine - was scrubbed by a frozen liquid oxygen valve. Apparently the heating system, a $10 hair dryer, was not up to the task. Also, a bad battery had to be replaced. Still, the rocket itself remains intact, and the launch window remains open for another twelve days.

Twelve days to shatter the paradigm of space travel from 1957 to today.

HEAT1X-TYCHO BRAHE installed on its launch platform. Photo by Ellinor Stenby, released to the public domain.

Governments have traditionally been the pathfinders for new, experminental, untested, and originally limited-use technologies. The military applications of air forces in the First World War and mail delivery contracts in the 1920s gave the fledgling aeronautics industry the push it needed to keep on rolling to the present day. Likewise, governments invested the vast sums of money necessary for research, development, and proving of increasingly more sophisticated rocket technologies; today, with those lessons and solutions in the books, the doors are open for agencies with more limited resources to give it a go.

Limited resources on one hand, but on the other, limited bureaucracy - NASA is, regrettably, choked by its bureaucracy and utterly dependent on a generally uninterested government. Sure, the engineers and boffins at Cape Canaveral and JPL have come up with tons of great ideas - but the nature of government work is such that good ideas can get buried for lack of resources or lack of will to see them through. Not so for something like Copenhagen Suborbitals, which is fundamentally a hobbyist organization - though some of these hobbyists have worked with NASA and know a thing or two about rocket science. This is a case of people making something for the sake of making it - for the sheer joy of testing these frontiers, in the finest traditions of the human spirit. To me, the story of Copenhagen Suborbitals is even more compelling than that of SpaceX. Kristian von Bengtson and Peter Madsen don't have the resources of Elon Musk, don't have the millions of dollars that are backing up his dream - but they're following the same road anyway.

Today Copenhagen Suborbitals is rattling the cage that we're all trapped in. Sooner or later, the lock is going to give way - and it's going to be an interesting time when that happens. It's been fifty years since the first flight of Yuri Gagarin, and here we are in a place and a time where non-profit hobbyists are zeroing in on a crewed flight into space. What might we see fifty years from now?

Also, if you were wondering, "rumfart" just means "spaceflight" in Danish.

PDP #253: Prepare To Have Your Minds Obliterated

There were easily over a thousand people in line for the midnight release of Scott Pilgrim Volume 6 at the Beguiling last night - or, more appropriately, nine and a half hours ago. I know this because my voucher was numbered #1037, and the line was very nearly occupying three separate streets.

The atmosphere on Markham Street was very much that of a block party, but with the sort of Pilgrim vibe you'd be hard-pressed to track down anywhere else. Like, really - how often is it that you'd run into The Boys and Crash, who have the ability to manipulate pure sound waves through hard work and willpower alone? I should totally see if they're doing a show soon, like that one back in Volume 3.

I, the copyright holder of this work, hereby release it into the public domain. This applies worldwide. In case this is not legally possible, I grant anyone the right to use this work for any purpose, without any conditions, unless such conditions are required by law.

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To Your Scattered Panels Go: Ad Astra 2009

This past weekend, the Crowne Plaza Hotel up by the Don Valley Parkway hosted Ad Astra 2009, Toronto's annual sf convention. I had wanted to put in an appearance at this one last year, but was unable to do so because of my night shift schedule - I had no such limitation this year, and so on a bright Saturday I boarded a 100 Flemingdon Park bus up to North York to see just what I might encounter.

It's been a while since I've attended a convention - my last was, I think, 1992 - but what I did learn on Saturday was that they're far better when you're actually with someone, and not just navigating through the crowd like a fish swimming upstream. Be that as it may, I attended a couple of events which I did find rather interesting, and picked up a fair shake of swag as well - including issues of Analog dating back to 1965. Wheee!



I had intended to attend a reading of Robert J. Sawyer's latest novel Wake, which I read when it was serialized in Analog last year. It was standing room only by the time I arrived, though that was primarily because I'd set my clock an hour ahead, and arrived just in time for it to end. Grumble, grumble says I.

My primary interest came right after that - a panel discussion on "Those Pesky Laws of Physics" which included Robert J. Sawyer, James Alan Gardner, and Marcel Gagné. As a bottom-of-the-ladder sf author, getting those details right is important to me, because on some level I really do want to believe in this stuff and suspend my own disbelief - because, really, if the author can't manage that, why should a reader?

More importantly, adhering to the laws of physics produces good, hard limits which help to frame stories and characters. When anything is possible nothing is forbidden, and when nothing is forbidden nothing is interesting. Sure, there's plenty of sf based on the "one free impossibility" to examine - H.G. Wells' time machine, for example, or Larry Niven's Ringworld - but that is the sort of thing that should be minimized.

One of the things that fascinated me during the panel, and which I looked up myself later, was Robert J. Sawyer's reference to a RAND Corporation study from 1964, "Habitable Planets for Man." This trove of planetary and astronomical data may be older than some countries, but the equations in it are no less relevant and can provide a great jumping-off point for aspiring authors. They've made it available as a free PDF for download on their website.

Nevertheless, I'd have to say that the highlight of the convention was the Steampunk Fashion Show. This was apparently the first year it was run, and I'd very much like to see it continued in the future - I love that style. Most of the costumes were dead on, but I'd have to give the trophy (had I one to give) to Phineas Flensing, Esq., traveller, inventor, and dinosaur hunter.



I daresay.

To conclude, some choice quotes:

"Skydiving in a skirt - that's daring." - Female presenter, Steampunk Fashion Show

"As soon as you've waved your hand about gravity, you've acknowledged you're writing fantasy." - Robert J. Sawyer

"Because I wanna go to Mars on a spaceship built by teenagers." - James Alan Gardner