Reach for the Skies

I had dinner last night with X-Prize impresario Peter Diamandis, at the annual Strategic Investment Conference run by Altegris and my friend John Mauldin. Vernor Vinge and I were invited to ask the first questions of Peter, who earlier in the day had stopped at UCSD's new Arthur C. Clarke Center for Human Imagination, to help unpack the five finalist entries in the Tricorder X Prize.  Read up on all that, because the future is shifting under our feet.  See especially Peter' Diamandis's orgy of optimism, his book, Abundance: The Future is Better Than You Think. The trends are amazing.  If that future is stymied, it will be because of treason to humanity.

I'll be chatting with Elon Musk in a few weeks. The ongoing series of accomplishments of this fellow - who is rapidly becoming our generation's cult-Edison figure - only begin with electric cars and fantastic space rockets (soon to land on their tails, the way we kids of the 1950s always knew they would.) Elon's new venture, in selling home battery packs to level the load and let some citizens get off-grid, is terrific. We spoke of it three years ago and I want to be a customer.  But this is just the beginning.  He has his eye on drought problems caused by climate change.  More on that in our next science-dump.

And, of course, there is not just one "good billionaire" out there. Amazon's Jeff Bezos also wants to stimulate the future, using well-earned gains from the real capitalism of delivering goods and services.  (Unlike the parasites who use their lucre to warp democracy and siphon wealth via "financial services" and low-royalty resource-extraction.) See (at last) a good look at the Blue Origin New Shepard rocket.  And much more in the background.

== More amazements! ==

There's a new entry in the space-tourism sweepstakes, without the rush (or danger) of a rocket launch. Recently,  World View completed an unmanned flight that took its balloon 100,000 feet in the air, and safely landed the capsule using a parafoil.Team leader Jane Poynter predicts by the time it’s ready for launch, as early as 2016, World View will have spent less than $100 million on development. That means tickets aboard a World View balloon—$75,000 each—will also cost less than half as much as those to board one of Virgin Galactic’s flights.

Mining the skies...NASA is developing its first-ever mission to identify, capture and redirect a near-Earth asteroid, moving it to a stable orbit around the moon, where astronauts will explore it in the 2020s, returning with asteroid samples.  Watch this informative video. The Planetary Resources company -- founded by Peter Diamandis and Erik Schmidt (Google) and other Pacific Coast style moguls -- intends to make us all richer by accessing the cornucopia that awaits us, out there.  

I'm pleased that NASA is also on this course (instead of the insane Bushite notion of re-landing on the sterile-useless Moon.)  We're helping, at NIAC!

Not all space news is great.  There are setbacks. Simmering in the background news is the apparent destruction of an older U.S. Defense Department weather satellite, spewing yet more debris into low earth. The news stories blame a decaying battery that might have overheated and exploded. But take a closer look. This satellite was in approximately a sun-synchronous orbit, at about 846x837 km altitude…near the center of the band congested with both large debris (mostly Russian) and small debris, mostly untracked, from China's 2007 Fengyun/A-sat (anti-satellite weapon) test — the two biggest sources of destructive space debris. According to one prominent space engineer I know: “I strongly suspect that the satellite was hit by untracked Fengyun debris smaller than 10 cm.”

In other words, the peril that we were shown in the movie GRAVITY is very real, indeed.

 == And More....==

Vigorous climate change denialist Sen. Ted Cruz is chairman of the Senate’s Space and Science Committee.  His recent, hostile interaction with NASA Director Charles Bolden should be the stuff of legend, in which Bolden defended the fact that NASA builds satellites and other missions aimed at studying one particular planet – our Earth.  It seems that those who proclaim “we don’t have enough science yet, to confirm global climate change!” also do not want the science that might answer those questions.

And you are surprised? Under G.W. Bush, NASA was ordered to drop “Earth” from its vocabulary.  Rick Scott's Florida - the US state most vulnerable to rising seas - has banned all state agencies for planning against days that nearly all scientists -- the folks who actually know stuff -- see coming at us like a freight train.

And.... reaching for the skies...A lovely animation of a concept for a lunar space elevator.  

A fascinating article on how constellations of small satellites may deliver broadband to the whole world.  

How cool!  Watching the behavior of stars and gases in collisions of clusters of galaxies… and using gravitational lensing to measure the dark matter… enables astronomers to learn something fundamental about the nature of dark matter.  

A lovely interview at JPL with INTERSTELLAR  screenwriter Jonathan Nolan and my friend Kip Thorne, the physics advisor on the film.

== Two miracles of space! ==

In his book Of A Fire on the Moon, Norman Mailer credited the Apollo era NASA with accomplishing two "miracles" of a biblical scale. First - it gob-smacked him one day that "these geeks are actually going to the moon!" The second bona fide miracle? They were actually succeeding at making it boring!

Seriously, of all the mazillion channels of TV, which one covers the most exciting and inherently interesting real life stuff that's going on, right now, in real time? And which one is the most tediously sleep-inducing?  The NASA Channel, of course.  Making all of this worse is the stunning and willful wave of cynicism that has swept all generations, especially of Americans, who used to have such a gosh-wow reputation for their eager, can-do spirit.

What is the anthem of the Baby Boomers? It was provided by Peter Finch, in the movie Network. Remember?  "I'm as mad as hell, and I'm not gonna take it anymore!" 

An utterly futile paean to sanctimony and the drug high of useless rage, it's poisoned us. As I lay down colorfully here: Indignation, Addiction and Hope: Does it help to be mad as hell?

But -- inspired by Peter Diamandis -- I declare that you don't have to put up with that, anymore. Just pay attention to what we've done, as a people, in the last few months:

Human beings -- well, Europeans -- landed a laboratory on a comet!

One of our robots started climbing a mountain on Mars.

We confirmed Ganymede has more liquid water than planet Earth.

New data doubled the estimated size of our own galaxy.

The New Horizons probe is fast approaching its July encounter with freaking Pluto....

And humanity - via NASA - has arrived in orbit around Ceres! Finding hints that the dwarf planet/asteroid might also have buries seas.

What a year it's been, with all of that... plus discovering scads of extrasolar planets -- numbering up to five thousand at latest count...

...and finally getting satellites out there to study the Earth (after a previous administration deliberately sabotaged science).  Indeed, these are amazing times. And in a couple of months, our New Horizons emissary will sweep past freaking Pluto! Wowzer.  And that's just space.  You know that I could type till my fingers were bloody, and not run out of reasons that you... and yes, I mean directly you... ought to be proud as heck.

Hence, the most amazing thing is that we... aren't!  The cult of fear-mongering cynicism has grown so intense that it's time for you to get mad! Mad at the merchants of fear and doubt and small-mindedness. Mad at the propagandists who seek to keep you "mad as hell" all the time.  Mad at the whole "I'm as mad as hell" ethos that poisoned a generation, a nation, and threatens all our kids.

Next time something cool happens, on Earth or in space, get up and shout out the window "I AM A MEMBER OF A CIVILIZATION THAT DOES STUFF LIKE THIS!"

Watch my rant about how we need to (aggressively!) fight cynicism with pride and joy.

Or else...

... be proud to be a member of the same species as cretins like this one:

 “NASA should stop wasting time exploring other planets because God's only experiment with life is on Earth," according to televangelist Pat Robertson.

We are at war, all right. A war for the future that, ironically, we can only win by fostering the confident song of ambitious joy in our hearts.