HD 28185: An Elite Odyssey

The first time I went to Los Angeles, what struck me was how this place I'd never been to in all my life could be so damn familiar. We see things on our screens and we read them on our pages, and while it's no substitute for experiencing a place with your own senses unmediated by anything, sometimes it's the only way we can make these journeys. As a science fiction writer, that's particularly the case for me--it's unlikely I'll ever leave Earth, and telling stories of far-off places is the best we can hope for. Even knowing these places are real can be staggering enough sometimes: last year I had the opportunity to view Saturn through a telescope, and my first thought on seeing those rings was "my god, it really does look like that."

One place I've visited twice now in print is the HD 28185 system, 138 light-years away in the constellation Eridanus; fourteen years ago we detected a gas giant orbiting in its habitable zone, and it's around that gas giant I've placed Esperanza, setting of the stories "The Paragon of Animals" in the March 2013 issue of Analog and "The Badges of Her Grief" in its March 2015 issue, which is available now--and you should totally go out and get it! It's a place that feels familiar now, though it's also a place I could never visit.

At least, I couldn't until Elite: Dangerous came out. This space flying-trading-pirating-exploring sim, the latest expression of a thirty-year franchise that goes back to vector graphics on the BBC Micro, is set in a one-to-one reproduction of the Milky Way and its four hundred billion stars. For now, it's also likely to be the closest I'll get to exploring the galaxy. With that in mind, given the occasion of "The Badges of Her Grief" seeing print, I went on a "short" pilgrimage to HD 28185--or as it's known in-game, HIP 20723, as E:D seems to have a serious love for the Hipparcos catalogue.

Well, as short as anything measured in light-years can be.

It wasn't THAT much of an odyssey, though. From my home base at Big Harry's Monkey Hangout* in the Jotunheim system, it was a trip of 158 light-years, with a brief stopover in the Ongkuma system to investigate the short-lived slave rebellion there. Seeing as how ships in E:D are capable of flying faster-than-light in normal space due to the magical frameshift drive--a technical necessity for a multiplayer game that, nonetheless, makes me feel dirty--and my Adder can cross 15 light-year gulfs in as many seconds, it was the work of an evening. I didn't even have to leave human space; to my regret, I discovered that HD 28185 is part of the Empire, the requisite society of neo-Roman assbutts that maintains slavery in the 34th century to remind us that they're a bunch of jerks.

It's not even a particularly interesting system. I was hoping to find things that would fire my imagination--perhaps even an Earthlike planet! What I found would be nothing to write home about if this was any other system--an asteroid belt close to the star and a rocky, ringed world with sulphur dioxide air, a 182 degree surface temperature, and a lonely orbital mining platform above, and at the edge of the system that I could detect, the gas giant HD 28185 b. Only in the stories I write is it called Corazon.

Not much, is it? Not even so much as a moon. I mean, I was hoping that it would at least have rings. Nevertheless--it had a feeling of reality to it. It's a world we know is out there. It's a place we can speculate about, and in this small way, I can see its face.

I'll be back there again, for future stories. For now, I like knowing that it's out there to be found.

* Which, incidentally, sounds like the sort of name the Culture would give to a space station. So far, it is only rivalled in-game by Norman-Mavis's Bingo Palace and Lucy Young's Orbital Happy Home.

For Neil

When my right index finger starts going numb, something that I've only experienced in the context of funerals, I know it's a serious thing. So it was when I heard the news that Neil Armstrong, first man on the moon, died yesterday. While it's the sort of news I knew that I'd hear one day, for it to be extracted from that comfortably distant future and dropped into the present was a shock. You don't ever wake up and expect that particular day to be the Day.

But it was, and the man who took one small step forty-three years ago is gone. There are other moonwalkers, of course; Buzz Aldrin is still alive, still healthy, and still punching out moon landing deniers. Neil Armstrong was different, though--he was the first. First in a way that it's difficult to conceive of without some thought, first in a way that's utterly foreign to Earth.

Barring an ancient extraterrestrial scout mission or some previous technological species that's been obliterated from the fossil record, he was the first thinking being to step out among those rocks in the history of time. Not just the first man, not just the first human, but the first sapient being in all the universe.

The first, and he returned to Earth to live a modest life. He didn't allow his experience to go to his head. He didn't take advantage of his fame for political ends. He did things no one had ever done before, and as long as there are those who look up in wonder at that silver world in the sky, he will never be forgotten.

see you space cowboy...

You See, But You Do Not Observe

Many of the big questions are simple, and few get simpler than "where are they?" That's the Fermi paradox if you've never heard of it, the question as to why we do not see any astronomical evidence of extraterrestrial civilizations anywhere in the universe. There are as many potential answers to the Fermi paradox as there are people, and that search for an answer has inspired a great many creative works through the years.

For some people, the answer is equally simple: we just haven't looked hard enough. Over at io9, George Dvorsky signalboosted the work of Fermilab scientist Richard Carrigan, who proposed that one way to observe extraterrestrial civilizations could come through observing "Dyson bubbles"--that is, areas in other galaxies where Dyson spheres have been constructed around their host stars. This would reduce in a significant drop of visible light emissions, but not so much for the infrared. Thus far, to the best of our knowledge, we haven't observed anything like this.. neither Dyson spheres nor any kind of large-scale engineering of the sort we'd expect a Type III civilization, one capable of harnessing the energy resources of an entire galaxy, to create.

"The observational evidence of astro-engineering a complete galaxy is lacking," says Ray Villard at Discovery, "and so it's fair to say that Type III civilizations either don't exist at all, or at least not yet."

I can't help but get the impression this line of reasoning falls into an anthropic trap.

Are you aliens?

First off, let's have a brief refresher: aliens are alien. It's weirdly tautological, I know, but so simple that most people are apt to completely ignore it--science fiction like Star Trek and Star Wars have helped shape public consciousness in that regard, too. Aliens are not going to be humans with bumpy foreheads--their psychology will not necessarily match up with humanity's in any respect. They will have been shaped by their environment and their history just as we have, and I think it's inappropriate to conclude that an alien species would of course do things that make perfect sense to humans--particularly an alien species with galaxy-spanning capabilities. We only have speculations on what a Type III civilization would be like; we have no idea what it would actually be like.

Beyond that, though, here's my own burning question on this matter: how can we be so sure we'd recognize megascale alien artifacts if we saw them? We're not Potter Stewart searching for pornography--we're trying to recognize artificial constructs made by beings that don't think anything like we do. Sure, one possibility is that no artifacts have yet been observed... another possibility, albeit one that's non-falsifiable and thus of not much value in science, is that no artifacts have been recognized. It's a simple distinction, but it's absolutely key.

Consider it. Couldn't it be possible that some part of what we believe to be the natural universe is actually artificial, but we haven't yet realized that, both because we haven't observed it closely enough and because we don't know any different? Hell, even one hundred years ago there wasn't a scientific consensus on whether galaxies existed outside the Milky Way. What if, at present, we're no more capable in recognizing the artificiality of supposedly "natural" phenomena than an ant would be capable of recognizing the artificiality of the keyboard it's walking across?

We've got to consider the search, of course. As far as I see it, though, it's far too early yet to make any kind of authoritative conclusions about extraterrestrial civilizations. We're still just starting out, after all.

Short SF Review #24: The Man in the Moon

"The Man in the Moon," by Mack Reynolds
Appeared in Amazing Stories, July 1950 and March 1969

There was no night and no day; there was no sound and there was nothing to do; there was practically no food to eat and little water to drink. And this lasted for four days.

There was nothing to do but sit and think.

Forty-three years ago tomorrow Neil Armstrong took one small step off the ladder of the lunar lander, but when it comes to journeys in spirit he wasn't even close to being first. In decades when spaceflight was a distant dream of engineers, enthusiasts and scattered scientifictionists, the moon was the shining objective, the great goal. Moon journey stories are littered through the corpus of science fiction, from Asimov's "Trends" to Heinlein's "The Man Who Sold the Moon," and go back past Jules Verne and the supergun Columbiad all the way to Cyrano de Bergerac's seventeenth-century moonflights by firecrackers and more.

The years between the end of the Second World War and the first spaceflights weren't just the Golden Age of science fiction--they were also a shining time for moonflight stories, a time where the technical state of the art was advanced enough that it was a "day after tomorrow" idea, but when there was still wide room for speculation as to how it would all come about. Many of them didn't resemble the form that the actual lunar missions took--but they're still valuable, both for entertainment value and as windows into a vanished time.

Mack Reynolds' "The Man in the Moon" is one of these. Republished by Amazing Stories in early 1969, a copy of which I found in a Portland vintage store, its first appearance was in the July 1950 issue of Amazing and looks at the moon from a time when some people still thought rockets wouldn't work in space because there was no air for them to push against. It's the story of the first successful manned flight to the moon, and resembles Apollo 11 in two respects: the flight was by rocket, and it was American.

Other than that, well...

The year is left unspecified, but from the nature of the story it seems to be set twenty minutes into the future--that is, probably around 1955--and it's a world where the United States and Soviet Union (or "our potential enemy," as the story calls it) have thrown themselves into space with even more reckless abandon than they did in real history. The United States has been attempting, in secret, to make a successful lunar landing because the Potential Enemy has successfully placed a space station in Earth orbit, and it's taken as a matter of course that a space station "completely dominates earth in the military sense"--this is, of course, why Don Pettit is now the Science Lord of Humanity. Therefore, the United States is desperately racing to land men on the moon to counterbalance the enemy space station.

I'm sure it must have made a lot more sense back in 1950.

This was the state-of-the-art in rocketry back in 1950, incidentally.

The story follows Captain Jeff Stevens of the United States Space Service, an astronaut in the scattershot effort to claim the moon for America through a secret space program that resembles nothing if not a shotgun blast. Rather than using a single powerful rocket to send up sizeable capsules, Mack Reynolds' moonshots involve as many as one hundred rockets being fired at the moon--most being unmanned, and more than half of them somehow managing not to make it to the moon at all. Stevens is one of three astronauts who are to be fired at the moon in individual rockets in hopes of claiming it--of the previous three sent only one managed to land, only to suffocate from lack of air.

This story is thick on desperation--the problem is that it assumes the need for things to go in such a desperate way is so obvious that it's unnecessary to establish them in the story itself. As a result, from my 21st-century vantage point it all looks rather crazy, like "Kerbal Space Program: The Story," but with dudes instead of kerbals. Pre-flight checks? Not in this world; the astronauts aren't informed that they're flying until twenty minutes before launch, and once Stevens finishes strapping himself into his own rocket, he's only got four minutes to wait before launch.

Another oddity of the story is the terminology that's used, an artifact of its predating the actual Space Age. The story opens with a quote from Willy Ley's Conquest of Space, and Reynolds uses Ley's preferred terminology: the German term brenschluss is used continuously throughout the early parts of the story without explanation, and it wasn't until I got to a computer that it made sense; it refers to engine cutoff, it's a term Ley unsuccessfully tried to get the American aerospace industry to adopt. Similarly, the story refers to the moon rockets as multi-step vehicles, when in reality we would call them multi-stage.

While "The Man in the Moon" is an interesting adventure story, it does have its flaws. Not only does the story's triggering event feel particularly artificial, the ending struck me as hollow. Sure, Stevens manages to land and assemble a crude base bare-handed from the cargo rockets that preceded him. He's also got a broken arm because the descent stage collapsed while he was on the ladder. He is the commander and sole occupant of Fort Luna... to what end? So the United States has a base on the moon. In what world does that translate into "dominance of Earth," and how does it prevent simple Cold War one-upmanship?

This story's real value is, I think, getting across what science fiction readers in 1950 were prepared to accept as realistic and believable.

ANDREW'S RATING: 2/5

Previous Short SF Reviews:

• #23: "Ministry of Space" (Warren Ellis, Chris Weston, et al.)
  
• #22: "When Planets Collide" (Gold Key Comics)
  
• #21: "You Source of Tears" (Andrew Barton)
  
• #20: "The Helix" (Gerard Rejskind)
  
• #19: "The Thirst Quenchers" (Rick Raphael)
  
• #18: "Hackers" (Rick Cook)
  
• #17: "Attached to the Land" (Donald J. Bingle)
  
• #16: "The Great Gizmo Machine!" (Pierce Rand and John Forte)
  
• #15: "Alien Psychologist" (Erik Fennel)
  
• #14: "The Frontliners" (Verge Foray)
  
• #13: "Second Chance" (Walter Kubilius and Fletcher Pratt)
  
• #12: "Hades" (Charles F. Ksanda)
  
• #11: "Revolt of the Ants" (Milton Kaletsky)
  
• #10: "Blessed Are the Meekbots" (Daniel F. Galouye)
  
• #9: "To Make a New Neanderthal" (W. Macfarlane)
  
• #8: "Funnel Hawk" (Tom Ligon)
  
• #7: Testing... One, Two, Three, Four" (Steve Chapman)
  
• #6: "Bite" (Lawrence A. Perkins)
  
• #5: "No Shoulder to Cry On" (Hank Davis)
  
• #4: "Crazy Oil" (Brenda Pearce)
  
• #3: "The Saturn Game" (Poul Anderson)
  
• #2: "Job Inaction" (Timothy Zahn)
  
• #1: "Roachstompers" (S.M. Stirling)

It's a Bird, It's a Plane, It's Supermoon

The moon: something that's been there for as long as we can remember, our planetary friend, our first clue that the universe beyond Earth wasn't just heavenly perfection - now available with footprints and spent Apollo Program descent stages. Last night, its full phase matched up with an uncharacteristically clear Lower Mainland sky, so I took another look at it from my window. I found that, as usual, it is a spherical world that can appear grey or golden depending on the time of day, appearing approximately the same size as a dime held six feet away from your eye.

It was only very recently that I learned people were, for one reason or another, really talking about last night's moon - that it was in fact some kind of supermoon; the real unusual thing, to me, was that the media was actually acknowledging it. Ordinary people who don't live in the future tend not to pay all that much attention to happenings on the other side of the sky. The last time I can remember an astronomical event actually getting newspaper space involved the close approach of Mars about ten years ago, which resulted in... an imperceptibly larger point of light in the sky. Much like last night, when the moon's "supermoon" phase coinciding with its periapsis resulted in an imperceptibly larger moon.

Most of the news articles in the immediate runup to the night were fairly straightforward "go and see the supermoon" pieces. (Step 1: look at the moon.) Amidst those, however, a couple caught my eye. The Toronto Star asked whether it would "make us crazy," and the Tampa Bay Times recognized that some people were exaggerating the effects, and that earthquakes were "unlikely."

Really. The media had to step up and specifically tell people that Earth's internal geological processes weren't going to be affected by a full moon at periapsis. What that tells me is simple - we may be living in the twenty-first century, but there are plenty of people still hewing to magical thinking that would have been common in the eleventh.

Moon. Moon! Mooooooooon. In case you didn't already know what it looks like.

I can understand why some people can believe that the moon can have such wide-ranging effects on Earth. For one, it does; the influence of the moon's gravity, a piddling 0.16 g as it is, affects the tides. For an ordinary person, it's not necessarily a huge leap of logic to conclude that if the moon can affect one part of Earth, it can affect another. It's completely wrong logic, mind you, but it is not crazy moon-man logic. The only problem is that earthquakes are the result of internal geological processes; for the moon to have an influence on them it would have to be a far more coarse manner, such as the moon actually impacting Earth. As for the Star's commentary, while the supermoon didn't make people crazy, some people probably believed crazy things would happen as a result of the supermoon... so maybe it kind of did.

The way I figure it, it's this - the moon is big, the moon is visible, and the moon is recognizable. It's easy for humans to read danger into something familiar, something that can be seen by anyone. For the reptile brain, there's no "subtle threat" about the moon. It's something huge that stays up in the sky as if by magic, but who's to say that, if the people upset the gods, it won't descend to Earth and crush them like a hammer of divine fury? It's big. Even though we have a steadily increasing knowledge of it, have even visited it, for a lot of people it's still just a great big unknown - and the unknown can be dangerous.

Personally, I marked the supermoon by crashing landers into the Mun in Kerbal Space Program. The sacrifices of those brave kerbals will not have been in vain...

Short SF Review #23: Ministry of Space

"Ministry of Space," by Warren Ellis (writer), Chris Weston (artist), Laura Martin (colorist), and Michael Heisler (letterer)
Originally published as Ministry of Space #1-#3, April 2001 to April 2004

"I must have had one too many brandies at lunch. Because, you know, I could have sworn you said missiles and space rockets to my bloody face as if I were stupid."

It was the Second World War that brought the world to the edge of space, and it was London where the first seeds of a human future in space fell - granted, though, they were not seeds so much as V-2s. Those checkered rockets from Peenemunde killed thousands in London and Antwerp, but they were also the first things made by human hands to go beyond the sky and touch what waited beyond. The V-2 designs and the rocket research team, headed up by Wernher von Braun, were spirited away to the United States and played a key role in getting the American space program off the ground.

But did it have to happen that way? One alternative that could result in a rather different Cold War might have the Soviet Union take the lion's share of men and materiel from the German rocket program, leaving the United States to catch up with whatever it could scrape together. One could find interesting stories in there stemming from the desperation of the nascent American space program, searching for an edge to let them beat the Reds at their own game... but in the end, it'd likely end up being like real history, only more so.

In Ministry of Space, Warren Ellis rejected that possibility. Instead, he weaved together a world where the spoils of German rocket science went not to the United States, not to the Soviet Union, but to the United Kingdom - a world where a Britain battered by six years of war looked upward to reinvigorate itself and its empire - not just a world where the UK participated independently in the Space Race, but a world where the UK independently conquered space. Since we're now living in a world where there is at least one company actively planning to mine asteroids, I figure it's appropriate and instructive to look at a world of might have beens.


Ministry of Space follows the rise of the titular British space agency, from its formation at the end of the war thanks to an unorthodox black budget, through its first satellite launch in 1948 to the first man in space in 1950, flying a spaceplane that seems to take no small inspiration from the Gloster Meteor, from the assembly of a space station and a direct ascent lunar landing in 1960 to a fleet of dozens of ships claiming Mars for Queen and country in 1969. The primary conflict is found in the "present day," 2001, when protagonist and Ministry founder Sir John Dashwood is finally confronted with the truth of what he did in order to give space to the British.

In his afterword, Warren Ellis is clear about where Ministry of Space came from - it was an attempt to figure out how a world like the one inhabited by Dan Dare, Pilot of the Future could come about, a world where the big dreams of 1950s science fiction and rocket scientists like von Braun weren't dashed by the pursuit of more and bigger ICBMs, but were planted in rich soil and allowed to bloom, a world of riveted space stations and helibackpacks and a shiny jetpack England at the turn of the twenty-first century.

Ministry of Space seems to inhabit a kind of wishful-thinking neverneverland in that respect, a world where nothing blocks Britain's path to the stars, where the Cold War is just something that happened to other people. It's a strange world to get one's head around, but it does dovetail well with the sense of postwar wistfulness that Ministry of Space was meant to channel - that after the destruction of the First World War, the deprivation of the Great Depression, and the destruction of the Second World War, the world in general and the United Kingdom in particular had earned the right to look up, to go beyond. Outside of the prelude, I don't think the Soviet Union is even mentioned anywhere in the story.

For all of that, Ministry of Space is also a work of social commentary - and while there are hints scattered throughout, it doesn't become evident until the very last panel. It's an important question that many people would have considered; if the United Kingdom had managed to replace its fading colonial empire with an empire of the solar system, what would it not have had to address? If you make yourself busy and stay busy, it's easy to avoid looking in the mirror. Sure, thanks to the Ministry of Space 2001 England has "her free electricity and cheap food and her glorious, unchanging aspect," with ships at Saturn and biodomes on Mars, but the big question remains - "was it all worth it?"

At its core, despite the label on the spine Ministry of Space is a science fantasy. The UK was clobbered by the war, and even after it ended rationing remained in place to such an extent that there were restrictions on how much furniture one could buy. I have difficulty seeing the British people cheering on a Ministry of Space when every spaceplane launch meant bombed-out houses that weren't being rebuilt or empty store shelves that weren't being restocked - perhaps that's just my cynical 21st-century character showing through.

Ellis openly admits its fantastic flavor, but it's a peculiar kind of science fantasy at that - one that reaches into the barely vanished past for its resonance, and which builds upon those haunting whispers of what if and if only. It's not supposed to be plausible, but not in the sense that space magic and superpowers are supposed to be plausible. I feel that its nature as a comic series works in its favor and lets us ignore this - after all, we're already used to suspending disbelief with the comic form to the extent of accepting flying bulletproof people in tights. Compared to most of the stories you'd find on the racks today, a 1969 British expedition fleet to Mars straight out of von Braun is the very picture of rigor and plausibility.

My only real complaint is that it could have done with being longer - Ministry of Space offers a rich world full of possibilities, of which we see shards and shadows. It seems to me that there are a lot of stories to be told there... but considering that Ministry of Space is a creator-owned work, something that is regrettably rare in the comics world today, there may yet be more tales of the Ministry down the road.

To tie it up, Ministry of Space is something I heartily recommend. The original three-issue miniseries has since been collected in a single volume with foreword, afterword and extras, and set me back only $12.99 plus tax. If you're interested in "nuts and bolts" visions, this one will work for you.

ANDREW'S RATING: 4.5/5

Previous Short SF Reviews:

• #22: "When Planets Collide" (Gold Key Comics)
  
• #21: "You Source of Tears" (Andrew Barton)
  
• #20: "The Helix" (Gerard Rejskind)
  
• #19: "The Thirst Quenchers" (Rick Raphael)
  
• #18: "Hackers" (Rick Cook)
  
• #17: "Attached to the Land" (Donald J. Bingle)
  
• #16: "The Great Gizmo Machine!" (Pierce Rand and John Forte)
  
• #15: "Alien Psychologist" (Erik Fennel)
  
• #14: "The Frontliners" (Verge Foray)
  
• #13: "Second Chance" (Walter Kubilius and Fletcher Pratt)
  
• #12: "Hades" (Charles F. Ksanda)
  
• #11: "Revolt of the Ants" (Milton Kaletsky)
  
• #10: "Blessed Are the Meekbots" (Daniel F. Galouye)
  
• #9: "To Make a New Neanderthal" (W. Macfarlane)
  
• #8: "Funnel Hawk" (Tom Ligon)
  
• #7: Testing... One, Two, Three, Four" (Steve Chapman)
  
• #6: "Bite" (Lawrence A. Perkins)
  
• #5: "No Shoulder to Cry On" (Hank Davis)
  
• #4: "Crazy Oil" (Brenda Pearce)
  
• #3: "The Saturn Game" (Poul Anderson)
  
• #2: "Job Inaction" (Timothy Zahn)
  
• #1: "Roachstompers" (S.M. Stirling)

To Mine the Heavens

It's been a long time coming, I'll say that much.

You may have seen the headlines popping up in the past week, headlines that look like they're from some science fiction universe, headlines having to do with asteroid mining. There are millions of asteroids in the solar system, ranging from dwarf planets like 1 Ceres to the irregular chunks of rock left over from the condensation of the planetary nebula four and a half billion years ago. Owing to their nature, asteroids have the potential to be mining bonanzas - miniature worlds made of iron and copper, with comparative pebbles containing more gold and platinum than have ever been mined in the history of humanity.

There's just one problem: the economics of space. Right now, the biggest stumbling block to any presence in space is the cost of getting there - presently, you're going to pay somewhere around $10,000 per pound of material launched into orbit. Efforts to bring this cost down have historically been complicated by the fact that for the last forty years, space missions haven't ventured past Low Earth Orbit and have been limited to satellite deployment and repair and space station resupply - not exactly a fertile market to breed competition, though now that SpaceX is in the game things may be changing.

With the arrival of Planetary Resources, things may be changing even more. The company - backed by billionaires such as James Cameron, Ross Perot, and Larry Page and Eric Schmidt of Google - is going to be officially unveiled today at a press conference in Seattle's Museum of Flight, with a goal to "revolutionize current space exploration and help ensure humanity's prosperity for generations to come." It's an idea whose time has long since come - one of the only ideas that can break the cycle that we're locked into, an alternative to the economists' folly of unlimited growth in a limited world.

As people have been saying for decades, there just are not enough resources on Earth for everyone to live a prosperous lifestyle - it's not a question of will, it's a question of mathematics. The obvious solution, then, has always been to expand the equation - to bring in resources from off Earth.

The asteroid 4 Vesta, one of the largest Main Belt asteroids, as photographed by the Dawn spacecraft. The asteroids Planetary Resources eventually intends to work are much, much smaller than this.

The idea of asteroid mining isn't new. Peter Diamandis, the man behind the X-Prize and co-chairman of Planetary Resources, wanted to be an asteroid miner when he was a teenager - a notion pulled from the fertile fields of science fiction, where roughneck belters in their spaceships leapfrogging from rock to rock has been a staple for decades. The cover story of the September 1963 Analog is all about asteroid mining and asteroid industry. It's not something that's come out of nowhere.

That is, at least, for people like me who follow this sort of thing. In scrolling through newspaper comment cesspools for the Planetary Resources stories, it's been interesting to see the reactions of people to whom this is all a bolt from the blue, people who never considered the notion of mining the sky. There are people who see it as hubris, that mining and moving asteroids will inevitably destroy us. There are people who pick up that nails-on-a-chalkboard environmental sanctimony, about how it's not enough that we're wrecking our own planet but now we're going to wreck other ones (note: asteroids are not planets; they are lifeless chunks of rock). I've seen people worried that using asteroid-mined metals on Earth would change its orbit because of the extra mass. I've even seen one person - thankfully, universally downvoted - who suggested that we get more experience by landing on the moon first.

Of all of that, the pseudo-environmentalism infuriates me the most. Sure, asteroid mining is expensive - it's going to be a long road before Planetary Resources gets to there from here - but what's the environmental cost to mining on Earth? Can you put a dollar value on a toxic tailing pond that may or may not be straining at its banks? What about the mining operations where mountains are flattened to get at the resources within? If it was up to me, I'd establish an infrastructure of asteroid mining with the goal of ending large-scale extractive mining on Earth. Asteroid mining is something that environmentalists should be behind, if only to provide an alternative to Earth mining.

Admittedly, this isn't a sure thing. It is expensive, and the value of all that gold and platinum locked away up there would plummet dramatically once it was brought to market on Earth; not that it would be a bad thing, because now you can use gold and platinum in manufacturing and industrial processes that were completely uneconomical before - imagine electric wiring made out of gold or silver, or cheap fuel cells to bring a revolution in electrical generation. But the possibilities of a successful asteroid mining program are such that as long as we have the capacity, it would be foolish to not even try. Nothing ventured, nothing gained and so on.

Still, the fact that newspapers are talking about asteroid mining with straight faces feels otherworldly - and not in the literal sense. I suppose I've just become accustomed, so inured to the drudgeries of the everyday that I never thought something like this would actually make the jump from science fiction to reality. Sure, I live in a world where people carry computers in their pocket that link to a vast global communications network, but it's still fundamentally a world, as if existing apart from the rest of the cosmos.

Some part of me keeps thinking that Planetary Resources shouldn't be real. That it can't be real, That it's just some big joke at the expense of people like me, people who are still willing to look up and believe in what might come if we got our collective acts together. "No, you don't get it!" says that annoying little voice. "You're not supposed to do this! You're supposed to jaw about coming together to work for a better future while never actually doing anything to bring that better future about!"

Fact is, this is the future. It's about time we started making it look the part.

Photo: Two Specks and a Wire

The close conjunction of Venus and Jupiter is over now, and while they've begun pulling away to go off to their respective corners of the sky, they're still relatively close together and shine brightly enough with reflected sunlight to burn through even the light pollution you'll find being thrown up over downtown Vancouver on a Friday night. Venus is the brighter one at the top, thanks to its proximity to Earth, and while it isn't responsible for casting that light on the wire, once I realized the effect it was too good to pass up.


I, the copyright holder of this work, hereby release it under the Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

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Photo: Crawlers and the VAB

You've seen them before, in some movie or news hour or NASA broadcast - the massive crawler-transporters at Kennedy Space Center, originally built to move Apollo Program rockets from one spot to another at a staggering ONE mile per hour, and the Vehicle Assembly Building where the rockets were assembled and, later, where the shuttles had their tanks and boosters attached. This shot was taken in February 2005, during the long gap in launches that followed the destruction of Columbia.


I, the copyright holder of this work, hereby release it under the Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

This means that you are free to Share (to copy, distribute and transmit the work) and to Remix (to adapt the work) under the following conditions: Attribution (you must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author or licensor, but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work), Noncommercial (you may not use this work for commercial purposes), and Share Alike (if you alter, transform, or build upon this work, you may distribute the resulting work only under the same or similar license to this one).

A Key to Entertaining Education

Most people of my generation has at least some experience with edutainment games. Primarily at school, but sometime at home as well depending on what our folks wanted to learn, we'd be set in front of the keyboard and given leave to play a "game" that was teaching us something at the same time... the problem is that a lot of the time edutainment games just weren't very good, sacrificing the entertainment aspect for the education aspect. In fairness, though, it's rather difficult to build a non-transparent edutainment game, something that's fun in spite of being educational.

One way to get around this is to build a game that is not itself educational, but which requires learning specific skills in order to succeed. Kerbal Space Program, an awesome spaceflight simulator game I've written about before, is one of these. As your rockets become more and more sophisticated and your flights become more and more ambitious, you can't help but learn about things like orbital mechanics, the way thrust works in a vacuum, and how difficult some things really are to pull off successfully. Like, say, moon landings. So far we've had six successful moon landings, and when you have even a bit of experience with a game like Kerbal Space Program, you know that it's a testament to the skill of everyone from Neil Armstrong to Gene Cernan that not a single moon landing ended with twisted debris strewn across the surface. The most successful of my first six moon landings were qualified by "included the fewest number of explosions." A powered descent on an airless world takes nerves of steel; Neil Armstrong's heart was doing 156 beats per minute during the final descent of Apollo 11. This is not simple stuff.

That, in itself, is an important lesson - building up one's understanding that even if someone knows how to do something, that does not make it easy.

Making a successful Mun landing: hard. Making sure you have enough propellant left to get home: also hard. Going by the crew portraits, I think Jeb is the only one who truly grasps this. Kerbal Space Program is © Squad.

It's easy for us to make grand leaps of logic out of ignorance. To think that anything we don't understand is hard only because we don't understand it, and for someone who knows what they're doing it's child's play. The hard fact is, just because you know how to do a difficult thing doesn't make it stop being difficult, it just makes it stop being practically impossible.

That's a worthwhile education on its own, an idea of what it's really like up there - an appreciation for how difficult some things really are. I'm guilty of that, even just in the context of Kerbal Space Program; I really believed there was a chance that with the smallest fuel tank in the game only one-quarter full, I could not only establish a stable lunar parking orbit but execute the burn to get the crew home. What actually happened was that the fuel was exhausted barely after ascent had begun, and shortly thereafter the Mun gained a new crater. Brutal, unforgiving physics demonstrated how deep in error I was.

So I tried again, with a bigger fuel tank for the descent module. Wouldn't you know it, not only did I manage to land it safely, but took off again and brought the crew all the way home with just a sliver of fuel, despite the Mun swinging around to screw up my trajectory. That single mission taught me more about how spaceflight really works than an entire childhood spent reading starcharts and science books. There is a certain viscerality when you're actually doing these things, or as close to actuality as you can get through a computer screen.

This is what edutainment should be. Not just games where you shoot enemies by solving mathematical equations at them - things that are fun on their own, but demand comprehension of the underlying subject in order to succeed. That's how new things are learned and lessons are retained. A greater understanding of things like this means a people that's equipped to comprehend the way the world works, and that's just what we need in this sort of century.

Mars, Curiouser and Curiouser

Almost four hours ago the Mars Science Laboratory, including the car-sized Curiosity rover, successfully launched from Cape Canaveral and is now on its way to Mars. With the Russians still struggling to salvage the Phobos-Grunt mission, which has been trapped in Earth orbit for weeks now after its engines refused to fire, one can only hope that the hunger of the Great Galactic Ghoul has been sated for now and that MSL and Curiosity will make it to the Red Planet. If all goes according to plan, this time next year the largest Mars rover in history will be driving around Gale Crater and vaporizing rocks with its laser, because it's about damn time we sent out a rover with a laser. So it can blast annoying Martians and, through the wonders of spectroscopic examination, gain new awareness of their material composition. ("We are v-r-r-iends! Ouch!")

It's a welcome step forward for Mars research, particularly since there's now no longer any threat of the probe being cancelled because of economic factors. What I'm not looking forward to is the possibility that Curiosity will be more grist for the mill of the unmanned-boosters' peanut gallery. That is, the people who almost seem to be offended by the idea of human space exploration, or who think that calling spaceships "canned monkeys" is an endearing habit that totally makes people want to come over to their point of view.

The history of robotic Mars exploration has been incredible, all right. It's incredible that we've got as much out of robots as we have, and the ultimate cost of all their scientific insights would probably be incredible as well. There's one thing I'm curious about that, unfortunately, Curiosity won't be able to help me with; it's the question of whether all the science done by all the probes that have ever been landed on Mars over the last forty years could have been replicated by an astronaut actually on Mars in one week, or if it would be more like two weeks.

That rock had it coming. Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

I'm not saying this to denigrate the people behind the actual Mars probes. Mars is a forbidding environment full of challenges alien to Earth, and it's hard enough to build a machine that works properly - let alone a machine that's rugged enough to keep on trucking in an environment that no human has any direct experience with. Yet, the limitations imposed upon past probes as a consequence of building them to endure the Martian environment had a definite effect on what they could actually do there. Remember Sojourner, the first successful Mars lander after the original Viking probes? It was a technical triumph - but that triumph wasn't free. Sojourner was not that much bigger than an Xbox 360, had a maximum speed of 0.036 kilometers per hour, and could operate as much as five hundred meters away from its lander. Over the eighty-three sols - that is, Martian solar days - it was in operation, Sojourner took five hundred and fifty photographs and analyzed sixteen locations.

It was a technical triumph, yes. But it also sounds like the sort of work that a lone astronaut, operating from a fixed base on Mars, could literally do in about an hour and get back to base in time for lunch. I expect that Curiosity will do good science, and will help pave the way for future human exploration, but it's inherently limited by the fact that it's a robotic rover at least partially dependent on a mission control which could be anywhere from three to twenty-two light-minutes away.

I'm not sure what the unmanneders - though there's got to be a better word for those people who support robotic missions and denigrate human ones - want me to take away from their arguments. What I usually end up taking from them is that they are willing to accept the return of a limited scientific payload in exchange for the expense of sending humans to do all this science themselves. Personally, though, I can't see myself coming around to that point of view - I can't yet accept the notion that, for a given amount of scientific returns, it would be cheaper to use robots than astronauts. Robots leave humans out of potentially dangerous situations, yes, but we pay through the nose for the privilege.

Nor do any of them, from my perspective at least, have the sort of psychological weight as the idea of boots on Mars.

In the Shadow of the Moon Treaty

This is one piece of prospective international law that you may never have heard of, but it was a rather prominent thing among certain circles in the late 1970s. The Agreement Governing the Activities of States on the Moon and Other Celestial Bodies, which is generally known as the Moon Treaty just for conservation of letters, was introduced in the wake of the Apollo missions in an attempt to establish an international regime for how people would deal with other worlds in the future - or, as it may well have turned out had the treaty honestly come into force, wouldn't.

That's not to say that the Moon Treaty is a horrible crock. There are important things with in it, such as Article 3, which forbids the installation of military bases or weapons of mass destruction on or orbiting the moon, and Article 6, which protects freedom of scientific research by anyone on the moon - and by extension anywhere in the solar system other than Earth, as that's what this treaty was meant to apply to. They were not thinking small back in the 1970s.

Actually... they were, just in a different way.

On the bright side, it would mean that you wouldn't have to worry about some joker writing "EAT AT JOE'S" on the near side.

So what's the problem? Apparently that the Moon Treaty, despite not having been signed and ratified by any state relevant in the modern space program, could be argued to have wormed its way into the status of "customary law," and binding upon non-States Parties because... well, presumably because they haven't been carrying out activities in violation of its terms, notwithstanding the fact that no state on Earth has had the capacity to do so since the 1970s, with the last Saturn V launch that put Skylab into orbit. Still, I'm not a lawyer, so I don't know whether legal scholars would take "inability to take action" into account for this. Michael Listner at The Space Review wrote an overview of the situation the other day, which I encourage you to read.

There are several massive sticking points, which I went over in a post last June. Reading it now, the Moon Treaty strikes me as something that could only have been drafted by a one-planet civilization, and its terms are understandable in the context of a one-planet civilization; I may be a space booster, but even I recognize it will be a long, hard, expensive road before human presence off Earth becomes something more permanent. The problem with the treaty as I see it, though, is that it seems able to very effectively strangle any attempt to build any kind of off-Earth human presence.

It strikes me as rather Earth-chauvinistic... and in a bad way. Article 7 lays out that "States Parties shall take measures to prevent the disruption of the existing balance of its environment, whether by introducing adverse changes in that environment, by its harmful contamination through the introduction of extra-environmental matter or otherwise" - language that could easily be used to throw cold water on any kind of organized resource extraction on, say, an asteroid. It seems a bit out of joint - do nothing about adverse changes in the environment of Earth, but make damn sure that nothing bad will happen to airless rocks where nothing will ever, ever live unless we make it so.

I'm not saying that something like the Moon Treaty could never work. It's not like it forbids activities in space... but I can see its terms actually leading to conflict; since "States Parties have the right to exploration and use of the moon without discrimination of any kind," I could easily envision a situation similar to that which comes up in Issui Ogawa's The Next Continent, with construction-phase rivalry between the NASA and private Japanese lunar bases - it would be easy for some State Party to be an asshole by actively and "innocently" getting in the way of any exploration or development attempts that it doesn't like. It's just that in a form such as this, especially when it's hewing so heavily to nebulous "international regimes," I'm rather skeptical of how much progress would have been made under it - aside from progress on how to violate the spirit of the treaty while abiding to its letter.

The ideals of the Moon Treaty are good. What's really necessary is to figure out a way to bring them into the twenty-first century without strangling the spirit that would make it necessary.

good thing chairface chippendale didn't have to worry about this

The Wonderful, Wonderful Q Machine

People are always looking for the next big way to get something from nothing. We've seen it again and again in the financial world, with banks filling their coffers from trading toxic assets that weren't actually worth anything to begin with, and it's there in the history of space exploration too. Space is big, space is vast, space takes a long time to get through; just think of how much easier everything could be if you could get through it fast. It's too bad space doesn't work the same way as Earth does - if you want to move through a vacuum, the only way we've got is to throw crap out the back of your ship in a stunning proof of the Newtonian principles of action and reaction.

People tend to chafe at this. As a result, there's never any shortage of inventors who claim to have built something that would shatter the foundations of modern physics - a reactionless drive, a mode of thrust that doesn't throw any crap out the back of the ship. Considering that ships would need to carry a hell of a lot of crap with them to get anywhere in a reasonable time, a reactionless drive would really make things a hell of a lot easier for those spaceship engineers.

Back in the 1950s and 1960s, the standard bearer of the field was the Dean drive, a purported reactionless thruster that was championed by John W. Campbell and G. Harry Stine over at Analog, presumably because they really wanted to believe. The drive has since been demonstrated to not be a drive at all, its thrust illusory based on friction with what it's sitting on... not exactly workable for a space drive.

But fear not! We may yet be able to transform submarines into spaceships! Because, ladeez and germs, here comes... the QDrive! It is, according to the website, some sort of radiation pressure thruster designed in such a way that a "differential in radiation pressure generates an unbalanced force that creates thrust... without use of propellant." It's being developed by Cannae LLC, a company apparently focused solely around the development of the drive, presumably deriving its name from the Battle of Cannae out of the hope that the modern scientific orthodoxy will play the part of the Romans, and that the metaphor will not go any further than that... after all, Rome eventually annihilated Carthage.

That's incredible, folks! Just imagine what you could do with something like this! Those QDrive people must be just bursting with ideas...

...well, okay then! (Screen capture from QDrive website.)

The most important sentence in the entire sphere of science, I believe, is this: extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. If you claim that there's an invisible pink dragon living in your garage, you'd better have some good information backing it up if people don't want to think you're crazy. If you claim that pumping billions of tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere every year is having no effect on the planetary climate whatsoever, it behooves you to offer an explanation for what it's doing instead. And if you've put together a machine that appears to give you something for nothing, it's your responsibility to look very, very closely at it.

I'll admit, not all thrust modes use propellant in the "throw crap out the back of the ship" sense. Solar sails are the usual suspect here; they generate thrust by the pressure of radiation in the solar wind. I note that this is rather similar to the explanation as to how the QDrive works - all I'll say is that not only am I not a physicist, I don't even play one on TV.

Nevertheless, for something like this it's only proper to be skeptical. If an actual reactionless drive ever comes along, it would thrust past skepticism.

A Calendar for the Moon of 55 Cancri f

A while ago I was making plans to write stories in the world of Esperanza, a fictional habitable moon of 55 Cancri f, a gas giant that's known to orbit within the habitable zone of its star. I made a fair amount of early progress before I discovered more detailed plots of f's orbit that demonstrated its orbit was a bit more eccentric than I'd thought; that the planet spends roughly a quarter of its orbit inside the habitable zone.

If it had been otherwise, if the orbit had wandered out of the HZ for a spell, that'd be different; it's easy to retain heat, but it's a bit more difficult to get rid of it, and while the limited calculations I did indicated that it wasn't out of the question for liquid water to exist on one of f's moons no matter what the nature of the planet's orbit, that moon would be way too torrid for humans - the numbers I found were in the neighborhood of 70 or 80 degrees Celsius, though I freely admit there's every possibility that I screwed up the math and the real situation is entirely different. I am, after all, a dude that very nearly failed Grade 10 General Math.

Before I found these things out, though, I'd put together a calendar, after the Coyote series demonstrated the need for one. Since planets don't tend to share orbits, it's unlikely I'll be able to use it as I've put it together, except for some built-to-specs fictional planet. So here it is.

The Calendar of 55 Cancri f-I (Esperanza)

While the telescopes we have are sensitive as hell, and have to be in order to detect all these exoplanets, there's still room for uncertainty. To my knowledge, 55 Cancri f's orbital period still isn't exactly known; but Wikipedia cites a 2007 article that makes it 260 days, plus or minus 1.1, so I just split it down the middle and gave it a 260-day long year. That's one of the things I liked about it; a lot of other planets seem to have years that are longer than Earth, so it felt fresh and new for the years to go by quickly.

The moon, Esparanza, has its own day; it's not tidally locked to the gas giant for valid reasons that are irrelevant here. That day is thirty-eight hours long, which makes the local year 164.2 E-days in length, with the decimal resulting in there being an extra 7 hours and 36 minutes left over at the end of the year. Originally I'd planned to have them constitute a "short day" after the last regular day of the year, but I didn't think that would work; it seemed to me it would make the sunrise and sunset times gradually drift.

Esparanza orbited 55 Cancri f with a semimajor axis of roughly 1.6 million kilometers (I'm working off of memory with this point, but hopefully the number is accurate), making one orbit in 15.7 days. This worked out well for making the standard month sixteen days long. There are nine months on Esparanza, which I named after the Muses of Greek mythology plus one: Mnemosyne, Polyhymnia, Erato, Clio, Thalia, Terpsichore, Euterpe, Melpomene, and Urania. Mnemosyne is a twenty-day month; all the others have sixteen days. New Year's Day, Mnemosyne 1st, is Esparanza's northern hemisphere Winter Solstice.

Yet there's still the issue of those leftover hours and minutes at the end of the year. After a bit the solution was obvious - just use a leap year. After five years, enough spare time has piled up at the end of the year to be worth a day in itself; this day occurs on Terpsichore 17th, and in accordance with the Law of Fives, it is called St. Tib's Day.

There are four days of the week, with names derived from the classical Japanese elements: Tsuchiday, Hiday, Kazeday, and Mizuday.

So here's what a page of a calendar would look like:

T	H	K	M
1	2	3	4
5	6	7	8
9	10	11	12
13	14	15	16

In-setting, the Esparanza calendar began with its original discovery from Earth in 2042, which allowed me to calculate backwards to determine the importation of holidays. Figuring out the date that, say, Christmas or Easter would fall on is an issue for people more focused on calendrical affairs, though now that I think about it that could make an interesting background for a short - I went with something simpler, and figured out the date on which Esparanzans would celebrate X-Day.

Fairly simple - X-Day, the prophesied end of the world at the hands of the alien X-ists and Sex Goddesses, happened on July 5, 1998. (What, don't you remember?) Converting the Earth and Esparanza years into hours, I worked backward and found that July 5, 1998 and March 17, 2042 - this latter date being Mnemosyne 1st, O AS (Anno Spes, as "spes" and "esparanza" both mean "hope") - were separated by exactly 383,064 hours, going from midnight to midnight. Thus, July 5, 1998 worked out to Clio 12th, -61 AS, and I had a yearly Esparanzan date for X-Day. Truly an important holiday to pin down.

Then science came and wrecked it all up, and I packed up for some new star system. Still - I like the way this one was starting to come together.

Flinging a Rocket Into the Future

I was high in the sky when I first heard about NASA's new rocket, flipping through the channels on WestJet's seatback satellite television to see if anything good was on or if I should just go back to Coyote Rising. Still, after the floundering that came after President Obama's cancellation of the Constellation program in 2010, which was supposed to have returned people to the moon in 2018, it's refreshing to see that in the Space Launch System, NASA once again has a direction, something to strive for.

Nevertheless, I've heard rumbles. Rumbles that it's too expensive, that it's a waste of money that would be better spent on Earth - it is a little-known secret that the liquid fuel of rockets is actually a superchilled slurry of $100 bills, and the electronics packages of satellites are just wads of old fives - that with millions of Americans unemployed and the world staring down the barrel of a renewed depression, space is something that we just can't afford. That it's time to hunker down, close the shutters, and nail down what we can while we wait for the storm to pass - and then once the skies clear, we can see what's still standing, and only then figure out whether the winds are good for throwing ourselves back into space... until the next storm comes, that is.

I disagree.

While I think that NASA would be better off getting out of the space truck business sooner rather than later, using launchers built to spec by private industry now that there is such a thing as a private space industry rather than doing that grunt work itself, for the moment new NASA projects are valuable. Whether it's a new rocket, a cutting-edge space telescope, or just another perspective on our place in the universe, the things that NASA provides have a vitality that no other government program can hope to match. NASA gives us things that are uplifting, that take us away from the dirt beneath our feet and allow us to feel the solar wind in our hair.

I don't buy the argument that the United States can't afford to maintain its space program. For me, arguments like that lost all potency when the government shoveled hundreds of billions of dollars into the drooling maws of bankers who shattered the world economy through their high-stakes gambling and came snivelling for cash when their bets went bust. Compared to that, compared to pretty much everything else the government does, NASA is pocket change. At no point in my lifetime has NASA's budget ever represented more than 1.05% of the United States federal budget. For 2011, it's getting $18.7 billion, which sounds like a lot... but not in the context of the largest economy on Earth.

Investment in systems such as this are investments in the future.


"Projects that are future-oriented, that, despite their political difficulties, can be completed only in some distant decade are continuing reminders that there will be a future. Winning a foothold on other worlds whispers in our ears that we're more than Picts or Serbs or Tongans: We're humans."
- Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot

The future is in danger these days. I can understand why, but it's still disturbing. People don't give much thought to the future when the present is uncertain, but that lack of thought undermines the foundation of the future. We owe it to ourselves to look ahead, to lift our eyes from the ground and force ourselves to look ahead, to step out of the shadows of discontent and fear we've been living in for years - to remind ourselves that one day things will be better. Things will be better, and if we take action along those lines today, that better time may not be too long after tomorrow.

Carl Sagan is right in that NASA's projects have not produced a lot of things that have "bread on the table" practical value compared to other major government projects like, say, the construction programs of the New Deal. But what's easy to overlook is that people can't live on bread alone. We need something more, a reason to move forward, something that tells us to look up and envision a better time - something that reminds us that there will be a better time. In these days, when pessimism is rampant and society is pulling the blinds tight, that sort of hope is valuable in a way that can't be demoninated in dollar signs. An optimistic society is a dynamic society, capable of great deeds. A pessimistic society, a society that believes the highest virtues are austerity and quiet desperation, is on a course to despair and irrelevancy.

Days like this, we need the future. The Space Launch System may yet help bring it here.

An Elevating Sense of Perspective

Some of the most valuable things are those that can teach without you realizing it. On the surface you're just playing a game or having a fun time, but in the hours and days afterward the content of that game percolates in your mind, bubbles and eventually boils over into a realization that you wouldn't necessarily have had without that original impetus.

Kerbal Space Program, the launch-to-orbit sandbox alpha game I reviewed here last week, works like that for me. Sure, the education it provides about rocket engineering and basic orbital mechanics is obvious, even though the lessons - like how the most fuel-efficient way to deorbit is to thrust retrograde at apoapsis, thus lowering your periapsis into the atmosphere, and not simply just thrusting directly toward the planet - aren't necessarily so, given the vast disconnect between our day-to-day experiences on a planetary body and the way things work out there in space.

No, what Kerbal Space Program really helped reinforce for me was a humbling sense of perspective. Now, this ain't no Total Perspective Vortex - it's ordinary, and in that respect, for me it's that much more powerful. One moment your capsule can be in a stable orbit, nearly even circular, far above the world; the next your engine is roaring with the deorbit burn, and only a few moments after that, the command pod parachutes to a safe landing - sometimes in the middle of the ocean, without even a scrap of land on the horizon. Yet only five minutes ago you were up so high that you kept missing the ground and could see an entire continent in a single gaze. I can't help but think that it doesn't seem possible that in less time than it takes to peel the potatoes for dinner, the capsule was up there in orbit; with the familiar world reasserting itself around you after landing, this whole business of "orbit" and "space" almost feels like a dream.

It all looks so small from up here...

My opinion: this is something that more people need to experience, to have that feeling of descending from the heavens to Earth, to watch the world go from something you can see all at once to something that surrounds you and enfolds you and becomes your entire universe. I think we dearly need that humility if we're to prosper in the years and decades ahead, if we're ever to go beyond societies dominated by avaricious corporations and greedy, skittish stock traders and all the other sorts of people who don't care one whit about the consequences of their actions... because, in the grand scheme, their actions are unimportant. You cannot, unfortunately, say the same thing about the consequences of those actions.

The world could be a better place if people could be elevated, if people could see it in a different way. If they could get a broader sense of perspective - to help understand the things that, in the end, are truly important. But it's a world we couldn't easily realize. Some people - be they iron-fisted dictators, money-chasing plutocrats, or whatever else they may be - are supremely wedded to the idea of the world as it seems.

(Incidentally, for the KSP players looking for suggestions on rocket-building - since I know from the search terms that there is no shortage of you all - here's the details of Adventurer III, my current reliably-to-orbit rocket: Stage 6, 4x KSP-30 Solid Fuel Boosters, each equipped with SAS modules and decorative nosecones, attached to the Stage 4 fuel tank by radial decouplers; Stage 4, one 4X-800 Liquid Fuel Engine Cluster fueled by two FL-R1000 Fuel Tanks, topped by a 1X3 Module Adapter Shroud; Stage 2, a NERVA Mk. I Nuclear Thermal Rocket Engine fueled by one FL-T500 Fuel Tank and topped with one SAS module and a stack decoupler. The command pod is also equipped with a parachute. Aside from the NERVA's fuel tank and the SAS modules, this rocket is entirely built with equipment from Sunday Punch's parts pack. To install, just unzip the .zip file into your /Kerbal Space Program/Parts directory.)