Looking up and out

Last month, Cheryl and I and our daughter I had dinner with Rusty Schweickart, at the San Diego Air and Space Museum, at a gala celebrating the 50th Anniversary of the Apollo 9 mission that tested every technology needed for the first lunar landing, just four months later. (David Scott and Jim McDivitt had their own entourages at other tables. Only two Apollo missions still have all three members alive and these guys are as sharp as lasers.) Rusty was the "token liberal" on that mission, who became advisor to California governor Jerry Brown, along with Stewart Brand and other techno-hippies... who have always favored step-by-step advances in both sustainables and cautious nuclear power.

Many thanks to the folks at the B612 Foundation (which strives to develop ways to defend us all from killer asteroids) for hosting Rusty’s table at this way-fun event, and special thanks to our B612 hostess Hillary Aiken.

And the White House proposes cutting NASA's budget by half a billion dollars while diverting remaining resources to a copycat/useless stunt on the Moon (see below). Please pledge support for The Planetary Society's support for space exploration.

== Danger! Danger from above! ==

Detected by a US satellite, a space rock exploded with 10 times the energy released by the Hiroshima atomic bomb - 40% the energy release of Chelyabinsk - over the Bering Sea, off Russia's Kamchatka Peninsula. A  fireball this big is only expected about two or three times every century. To help us understand and deal with possible dangers from above, join the B612 Foundation! (Wait, wasn't Tunguska nearby? Who is pot-shotting Russia?)

An extreme form of solar storm, known as a solar proton event (SPE), struck our planet 2,679 years ago — 660 BCE — according to new research published today in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. If an event of such magnitude were to strike head-on today, it would likely wreak havoc on our technological infrastructure, including communications and navigation.

It’s now the third massive SPE known to scientists, with others occurring 1,245 and 1,025 years ago. This latest discovery means solar storms of this variety are likely hitting Earth's bullseye more frequently than we thought—perhaps once every 1,000 years—but more data is required to create more reliable estimates.

In fact we know the Sun spews such things much more often than that, because they nearly all miss Earth! But a couple that missed us have taken out space probes. It’s simply inexcusable that we haven’t been spending reasonable R&D on EMP protection for 70 years. Alas, the Putinist-Trumpists want to slash R&D of all kinds. The last thing Vlad wants is for us to be EMP resistant.

Oh, BTW, 660BCE does correlate pretty well with the dawn of the new classical era, especially in Greece, so maybe the mutation rate…

A magnetar comes back to life! If it happens to a much closer neutron star, aimed just right…

But the biggest likely threat is our own sun, as we stifle our planet in a cozy greenhouse blanket that prevents Earth losing heat as fast as it comes in.

== We choose to go to the moon... because... ==

“Vice President Pence Gives NASA Five Years to Put Americans Back on the Moon—or Else.” If any of you think you can defend this terrible thing, at any level and in any way, from its justifications to feasibility to blatant political motivation, all the way to the harm it intends, devastating any possibility of US breakaway leadership in space... please. Knock yourself out. Come defend this drivel below, in comments. 

It is unalloyedly indefensible and one more in a long list of depredations of our future.

Dig it again: HUMANITY is going back to the dusty, useless lunar surface, because it’s a close, easy sandbox for kindergarteners to learn to walk. To strut around and declare: “Today I am a man!” There are almost no resources down that gravity well and no wealth or near term benefits. But sure, I might be wrong! So let the Chinese, Russians, Indians, Euros, billionaire tourists and other Apollo wannabes romp around “exploring” down there. "Happy bar moonsvah!” Let us know if you find anything surprising or valuable and we grownups will drop in for a look.

Meanwhile, there are much harder things for the U.S. and Japanese to do out there. Vast wealth and huge accomplishments that only we can do. Because they are vastly more worthwhile. And because they are hard.

== A better idea, at last? ==

Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin rocket company has studied repurposing upper stages of its future New Glenn launch vehicle to serve as habitats or for other applications. Decades ago I led a similar study at the California Space Institute, exploring ways to utilize the Space Shuttle’s capacious External Tanks (ET) in orbit. We configured a strawman design that - with just three shuttle launches - could have produced a station with vastly more usable volume than the current ISS.  Yes, with just three launches, and more capable, too.

At the time, NASA officials had an allergic aversion to even discussing possible ET use, so we kept dive bombing them (at net-energy cost) into the Indian Ocean. The only practical outcome of our studies became my short story “Tank Fam Dynamo” about not only a vast station using ETs, but also electrodynamic tethers and brewing beer in space!

The story is available (ironically?) on Amazon Kindle. … and in my collection The River of Time.

== Short takes ==

Agh! XKCD on spaceships vs airplanes.

This recent webcomic from XKCD: Light Pollution and the Disappearing Night Sky appears to reference my (Hugo winning) short story The Crystal Spheres, published 35 years ago, from my anthology The River of Time.

Another reference in the choice of terminology for this end state of the sun in the far future, reminiscent (perhaps slyly?) of The Crystal Spheres?

Register for the Future In Review conference, returning to California, October 8-11, 2019, at The Lodge at Torrey Pines in La Jolla. 2019 speakers and moderators include: 

George Church, Professor of Genetics, Harvard Medical School; and Director, Personal Genomics

Kim Stanley Robinson, Hugo-winning Author of Science Fiction

George Dyson, Technology Historian & Nonfiction Author

Larry Smarr, Director, California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (Calit2) and Harry Gruber Professor of Engineering, UCSD

Don Norman, Author and Founder, The Design Lab, Calit2

Ed Butler, Senior Correspondent, BBC

David Brin, Founder, Futures Unlimited; and Sci-fi Author and Physicist