Space updates - mostly great science... and a bit of UFOs

Is this worth pondering as another worry on our plate? A year or so ago astronomers were saying “Don’t worry (much) about Betelgeuse going supernova any time soon," despite the earlier nerves set off by the Great Dimming Episode. Now? A new paper says “Never mind that nevermind!”

This is from the conclusion: “We conclude that Betelgeuse should currently be in a late phase (or near the end) of the core carbon burning. After carbon is exhausted in the core, a core-collapse leading to a supernova explosion is expected in a few tens years.”  

Yipe, do bear in mind there are many sage astronomers who disagree. Anyway, we’re told that 150 pc seems a reasonably safe distance. It’d need to be within 50pc (160 light years) to have appreciable effects, except maybe to astronauts. Uh, one hopes. Still here’s an interesting question!  Ron Paludan on my FB feed asked “Do we know of any other stars with probable exoplanets that would be closer to Betelgeuse?”

Good one! I’d give it high priority! In fact I am making this an open call for anyone out there to check which known exoplanets might be closest to Betelgeuse! It should be easy to start by eliminating any that aren’t in the upper half of Orion!

If we do find a life world in the danger zone, then it suddenly becomes among our top reasons to forge ahead to interstellar flight! What better job for our g-g-grandkids than as protectors!

== Closer to home ==

A new 'quasi-moon' discovered near Earth has been traveling in tandem with our planet since 100 BCE.  

Congratulations ESA/Europe for launching the JUICE mission to study Jupiter's moons and maybe confirm oceans under the ice!

Do the moons of Uranus hold water? A re-analysis of 1980s Voyager data has led NASA scientists to conclude that four of Uranus’ largest moons—Ariel, Umbriel, Titania, and Oberon—probably contain water oceans below their icy crusts. These oceans are likely dozens of kilometers deep and probably fairly salty in being sandwiched between the upper ice and inner rock core, heated by radioactive decay.  This raises to double digits the number of likely ‘ice-roofed oceans’ in the Solar system. Implying that such worlds might be the principal sites of liquid water all across the universe...

...rendering talk of ‘goldilocks zones’ to specialized speculations of only Earth-style ‘open oceans’ exposed to the sky. That’s still an important distinction… it seems unlikely we’ll find tech-using peers under any of those ice roofs. But simpler life is another matter. It is likely everywhere.

Data from the Cassini spacecraft points to the presence of phosphates on Saturn's icy moon Enceladus. A key ingredient for life.

The NASA/JPL mission to the metal asteroid Psyche appears to be back on! Set for launch in October of 2023.

NASA’s Juno spacecraft has spotted short bursts that make up lightning bolts on Jupiter, showing that Jovian lightning works in much the same way as it does on Earth. 

A Webb telescope image of Uranus shows the planet’s rings in detail and its unique inclination. Unlike Earth, which spins on an axis of 23.4 degrees, Uranus rotates at an angle of almost 90 degrees, NASA says. This extreme tilt makes Uranus the only planet to rotate almost completely on its side. Images also of storm clouds and a polar ice cap!

This particular cave “…is located near the moon’s South Pole, an area rich in water ice and other valuable resources that could be used for life support, fuel, and construction materials.” Um, what ‘other’ resources? The only ‘lunar resources’ with any near term validity are those potential ice fields. But sure. we’ve funded robotic cave explorer designs at NASA’s Innovative & Advanced Concepts program - (NIAC). See other potentially useful pit caves. 

“During its relatively short time monitoring the interior of Mars, NASA’s  InSight seismographic lander detected hundreds of marsquakes, giving us detailed information about the Martian interior. From this, scientists were able to compile the first detailed map of the guts of Mars, and learn more about the state of Mars' interior activity. In 2021, InSight logged two tremendous events on the opposite side of the planet: a giant marsquake bigger than anything the lander had detected, and a meteorite impact that rattled Mars.” Result: Mars's center is a liquid iron alloy, with surprisingly large amounts of sulfur and oxygen mixed in.

Fascinating and gorgeous new images of details of the Sun’s surface, especially around sunspots.

A space probe operated by the United Arab Emirates has taken the most detailed photos yet of the Martian moon Deimos. Flying within 62 miles of the little moon, the probe, called Hope, got the closest to Deimos of any spacecraft since NASA’s Viking 2 mission in 1977.”  Alas, ultraviolet and infrared readings indicate Deimos is more similar in composition to Mars’ surface than to a carbon-rich space rock. Too bad. Had they been carbonaceous with volatiles beneath the surface, they might have become important ISRU filling stations for Mars missions.

== Oy… why is it always aliens? ==

Among the many cult misconceptions spread by Hollywood is that - of course - ‘aliens have already picked up our radio and TV.” 

In fact, Jim Benford and others showed that even when Earth was at its ‘noisiest’ in the 1980s, our tech emissions faded into background unless you aimed a dish at us the size of Connecticut. Now a research team has updated this result for today’s proliferation ofd cell phone radio. Folks at Mauritius U in Africa, and Manchester U, and SETI in California “…conclude that any nearby civilization located within 10 light years of Earth and equipped with a receiving system comparable to ours would not detect the Earth’s mobile tower leakage.”  The article cites me in several places. 

As for the damned UFO mania? Well, this time I'll limit my response. Though Again and again I repeat:

I've studied 'the alien' for 60 years from astrophysics to SETI to sci fi. I've got an 'open mind' to notions of other being!  Alas, I do NOT see any evidence for (nor want) contact with silvery teaser jerks violating every physical law while acting exactly (exactly!) like nasty forest elves feared by our ancestors. Today a MILLION times as many active cameras as the 50s catch ever-fuzzier 'images', mostly explicable easily - though for those 'tictacs' -- those that haven't already been easily explained by Mick West -- see my 'cat-laser' theory that does not require loony-sadistic superduper silverguys breaking every physical law. 

(And my theory - in my posting: What's Really up with UAPs/UFOs? - offers a very, very easy and straightforward experimental test.)

Worst of all about this cult mania that erupts like bad acne, about twice per decade, is the insult to the tens of thousands of TOP people who by now would have studied any crashed ships, across eighty years. 

The cult yammerers never tabulate that. Tens... of... thousands of our best people!  (I know a lot of our 'best people' who feel snubbed, 'cause THEY were never invited to study no UFOs!)

Learn to recognize when you are in a cult.

-------------

Oh... finally... someone tell Zach Weinersmith that there’s more to his story about Svetlana Savitskaya than he might have worked out with the beautiful brunette here. 

Upcoming missions to asteroids, moons and more

While hoping (and striving) for Enlightenment Civilization to rise up and repel the forces of lobotomization and darkness... I feel I should remind you to be confident! After all, what kind of bozo wallows in gloom when we can fly robo-helicopters on Mars, plumb the earliest moments of the Big Bang and shorten vaccine development times from 15 years to 6 months? And yes, make guilt-tripping wonders like Greta T?

Here's more, to stoke that spirit! A chant I urge upon everyone who stands with the sapient side of our civil war: 

"I'm as proud as hell and I'm not listening to gloomists, anymore! We can do anything!"

== Something tells me it's all happening... out there! ==

Among the missions I am most excited about is JAXA’s Martian Moons eXploration (MMX) mission — it’ll launch in 2024 to study both Martian moons, eventually returning a sample of Phobos to Earth in 2029. (And I know another group, in stealth mode, aiming at the other one.)

If either moon has traits of a carbonaceous chondrite asteroid (they might once have been) then it could have accessible water and other volatiles and be one of the most valuable sites in the whole Solar System.  The Russians tried to reach it several times. 

This is what the U.S. should be doing in space… partnering with the Japanese and ESA to do things only we can do - while keeping our hand in the Moon robotically and selling/renting landers and hotel rooms to all the Apollo wannabe tourists who are desperate for their “today I am a man” rite-of-passage footprints on Luna’s plain of poison dust. (We did that 50 years ago! Let others have their Bar Moonzvahs while we go for the riches out there.)

Meanwhile, DART - or a Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) - will be NASA's first use of the kinetic impactor technique, crashing into an asteroid to change its motion. NASA is set to conduct the mission, what it calls "the first test for planetary defense," on November 24, the day before Thanksgiving, to hit the binary near-Earth asteroid Didymos, specifically its moonlet, Dimorphos. Targeting a double asteroid allows vastly better post-impact effects analysis.

NASA's VIPER - Volatiles Investigating Polar Exploration Rover (pictured) will head to the moon's south pole in 2023 to map concentrations of water ice in these permanently shadowed regions - where the sun never shines. At NASA's Innovative & Advanced Concepts program - (NIAC) - we've funded early phase enabling projects.

And the Psyche mission, set for launch in 2022, will journey to a unique nickel-iron metal asteroid between Mars and Jupiter - likely the core of a proto-planet that never finished forming. And yes, gold & platinum and all that. Rewrite the EXPANSE!

And yes, as you've heard. As NASA prepares to retire the International Space Station after more than two decades in orbit, Jeff Bezos's Blue Origin has partnered with Sierra Space and Boeing, proposing a new commercial space station to be built in low Earth orbit. Orbital Reef, billed as a "mixed use business park in space," will offer opportunities for micro-gravity research and manufacturing - for commercial, government, and scientific use - as well as space tourism. To be operational in the late 2020s.

== Woof and you think it’s hot? ==

Scientists have a new class of habitable exoplanets to look for life on: Hycean planets... hot planets covered in oceans that have an atmosphere rich in hydrogen -- and they MIGHT be much easier to find and observe than twins of our own planet. They have a larger habitable zone than Earth or Earth-like planets.

Hycean planets can reach up to 2.6 times the size of Earth and reach atmospheric temperatures of almost 392 degrees Fahrenheit (200 degrees Celsius). Underneath their hydrogen-rich atmosphere are oceans where microbial life could exist. 

Or cold?  An enormous comet — possibly the largest one ever detected — is barreling toward the inner solar system with an estimated arrival time of 10 years from now. The comet, known as the Bernardinelli-Bernstein comet (or C/2014 UN271, in astro-speak), is at least 62 miles (100 kilometers) across — about 1,000 times more massive than a typical comet. In our novel Heart of the Comet, Gregory Benford and I explored a comet (Halley) in both science (my PhD thesis!) and speculation in a dramatic space adventure.

Or rich? While the Psyche mission is preparing to robotically explore its namesake asteroid in the outer belt, a huge chunk of almost pure metal, likely from the core of a shattered protoplanet, a few much smaller metal rocks have been found tumbling within (relatively) much easier reach. Astronomers have ‘explored the mining potential of 1986 DA and found that the amount of iron, nickel and cobalt that could be present on the asteroid would exceed all of Earth's global reserves of these metals! While other Near Earth Asteroids contain gigatons of water. A far vaster realm of “resources” than our poor, depleted Moon.

== More astonishing asteroids ==

Lucy in the sky.... Just launched! NASA has launched Lucy - the first mission to the Trojan asteroids, orbiting near Jupiter. Its twelve year mission will take the probe on a circuitous journey to fly by eight different asteroids (one main belt and seven Trojan asteroids). These asteroids may represent time capsules from the formation of the early solar system. And yes, latest news: worrisome inability of one of Lucy's solar panels to latch. :-(

Scientists have identified two asteroids that are extremely red — more red than anything else seen in the asteroid belt, suggesting a lot of organic material on the surface, something we’ve observed in objects farther from the sun.

Earth crossing asteroid Phaeton, source of the Geminid meteor stream – has an elongated, 524-day orbit that takes the object well within the orbit of Mercury, during which time the Sun heats the asteroid’s surface up to about 1,390 degrees Fahrenheit (750 degrees Celsius). With such a warm orbit, any water, carbon dioxide, or carbon monoxide ice near the asteroid’s surface would have baked off long ago. But at that temperature, sodium may be fizzing from the asteroid’s rock and into space, creating both kinds of comet-like comas and possibly even tails… both ionized sodium and dust driven off the surface, explaining the rock’s increased brightness at perihelion.

The process described in this article happens also to be the one I first elucidated in my doctoral thesis, long ago. So, yeah, predictive track record preceded my career in science fiction!

Kleopatra, a “dog-bone” shaped asteroid which orbits the Sun in the Asteroid Belt between Mars and Jupitera is 270 kilometers (~168 miles) long and shaped like… well… more like a peanut. 

Unrelated to my story and screenplay set under the oceans of Venus, titled "The Tumbledowns of Cleapatra Abyss." And yes, it is hard SF. Good script, too!

== Navigating NASA - and beyond ==

I’ve been (proudly) a member of the external advisory council for NASA's Innovative & Advanced Concepts program - (NIAC). We just finished our annual symposium of truly amazing projects – just this side of science fiction - that NIAC seed-funded. You can watch the recorded livestream here or view the projects individually. 

A three times NIAC fellow and former NASA Jet Propulsion Lab employee, Jeff Nosanov, has a new book out: How Things Work At NASA: Everyday Secrets of Space Exploration is a behind-the-scenes look into the inner workings of the most famous space science organization in the world. Specialized interest but potentially valuable to some of you. 

I might add that I am very impressed with NASA, of late, for the practical reason that former Administrator Bridenstine and others managed to shield the important technology endeavors from raids to fund Donald Trump’s Artemis moondoggle. Perhaps Trump’s (unintentionally) best appointee. 

== And Space Miscellany! ==

A fascinating and gorgeous 3-D rendering of the Veil Nebula.

Dead galaxies? NASA's Hubble Space Telescope found six ancient galaxies, which appeared to have run out of the cold hydrogen gas needed to make stars while most other galaxies were producing new stars at a rapid pace. The gas “could have been expelled and now it's being prevented from accreting back onto the galaxy. Or did the galaxy just use it all up, and the supply is cut off?" Since the galaxies were so old and so far away, scientists spotted them via gravitational lensing. 

Considered an ultra-hot Jupiter – a place where iron gets vaporized, condenses on the night side and then falls from the sky like rain – the fiery, inferno-like WASP-76b exoplanet may be even more sizzling than scientists had realized.

A cool… rather hot… new approach to the magnetic acceleration of atoms to provide thrust in space uses the ‘pop’ of energy when separated magnetic field lines reconnect (as on the sun). One of several ways to offload the power part of the rocket from the propellant part, so both can be optimized separately.

And... a WTH moment. This textbook illustration meant well…

Our bold future in space!

Looking past quarantine... and the War On All Fact People... let's pause amid the gloom and assume that we'll prevail! Where are we headed for our next bold adventure?

Well, for one thing, sample-return missions from Mars are in the works: this is how the ESA and NASA will work together to bring rocks back from Mars. And NASA has developed plans for a lunar base camp on the surface of the moon, looking toward a sustainable human presence. 

== NIAC on the Attack! ==

NASA's Innovative and Advanced Concepts program (NIAC) has announced their new Phase I, II and III fellowships for 2020, including some of the most intriguing possible endeavors or new technologies that might lead to new missions and adventures out there.

Among the cool new projects: 
-An ultra-low frequency 5 km radio telescope that would fit snugly into a crater on the far side of the moon. (This had a lot of press; it's a lunar use-case that actually makes sense.) 
-And using "extreme metamaterials" for solar sails. 
-Ways to biologically convert the abundant CO2 in the Martian atmosphere into liquid hydrocarbons suitable for rocket propulsion and other energy needs on Mars. 
-Pulsed plasma rockets for combined high Isp and thrust. 
-Antimatter deceleration of interstellar probes! 
-A way to rendezvous with and study InterStellar Objects (ISOs) like 'Oumuamua'. 
-Plus ways to synthesize pharmaceuticals needed by human explorers to other worlds.  
-Another NIAC grant got press play as a possible way to actually image distant, interstellar Earthlike worlds.
... And a dozen more new and vivid concepts!   

(Full disclosure, I serve on the NIAC external advisory council.)

== Space miscellany ==

In an important milestone, one commercial spacecraft was used to save and reactivate a more valuable one, by latching onto it and providing the maneuvering ability it had lost. This is just the beginning as we'll gain the ability to service and refuel - and dispose of - satellites and make better use of orbit.

Spacefarers: How Humans will settle the Moon, Mars and Beyond, by Christopher Wanjek, explores humanity's cooperative, bold future in space, with colonies established beyond our home planet - to reap benefits, both scientific and economic. 

This may illuminate the origins of life: ribose has been discovered in meteorites, wow. Even more amazing… some bits of stardust found on an Australian meteorite are presolar grains that apparently formed before our sun. A new analysis of the meteorite revealed particles that formed between five to seven billion years ago. That makes the meteorite and its stardust the oldest solid material ever discovered on Earth. Inferred from elements that were likely formed by incoming interstellar cosmic rays.  

New maps of water distribution on Mars… including vast regions where ice appears plentiful near the surface… will be of major use in planningfor future habitation.

Here's a great looking video that could be on Mars, but isn't. Vegetation? Who needs vegetation? Seriously cool.

You might enjoy this... A game called Terraforming Mars - played on an accurate map of the Tharsis region of the Martian surface, where corporations vie to tame the Red Planet. 

A visual treat: this gorgeous image from the space station of the trail of the Proton-Soyuz rocket bringing up a friend.

A Scottish start-up just successfully tested a 3D-printed engine for the orbital stage of its 72ft launch vehicle. It burns 'Ecosene' (made from plastic waste). They plan to launch from a Scottish spaceport. Pure dead brilliant.

Here’s a fascinating interview with Dennis Bushnell, Chief Scientist at NASA Langley Research Center, regarding a range of potential breakthrough technologies to improve our access to space. (Some of them we’ve funded at NIAC.) 

== Strange gullies in Mars from sliding Dry Ice Blocks? ==

Wow. Mysterious features observed... and clever researchers not only come up with a great explanation, but then test it out on nearby sand dunes... Followed finally by speculation on a great new sport folks may play someday... on Mars.

What a time to live in. Astronomers took a closer look at how the Vela neutron star spins at about 43,000 rpm. (Yes, you read that right.) Only about 8 km across, it sometimes “glitches” for a brief slowdown, then speeds back up again. A model now explains this as subtle interplay between a “mantle” of superfluid neutrons and an outer crust of a different superfluid state.

And how would Earth look as an exoplanet? … though I’d seen preliminary versions. It will be some time before we can image planets in other systems. (A couple of tricky methods are being funded by NIAC - it’s fun getting first looks!) Till then, an intermediate will come when we can get single pixel images with some spectral resolution. Yeah, “images” consisting of one blurry dot. But analyzing over many bands and over time, you’ll get data like rotation period, possibly mass, atmospheric constituents and – yes – a very good stab at both cloud data and the rough shape of oceans and continents!

A fascinating JPL experimental rover looks and acts like a pool cleaning robot, patrolling the underside of sea ice with two big wheels, observing the abundant life there and testing possible technologies for a Europa mission.

TESS mission has found its first Earth-sized, potentially habitable planet, orbiting at the Goldilocks range from a smaller-reddish star just 100 light years from us.  Size and orbit confirmed by the soon to be retired, venerable Spitzer Telescope. It’s tidal locked in a 37 day orbit and reddish dwarves dent to flare a lot, but this one appears to be relatively calm. All told, when we get scopes that can study atmospheric traits, this might be the one for answering many questions about a tidal-locked world. Still you can be sure all the METI kooks will be aiming yoohoo cries and adverts at this one.

Earth orbit is filled with trash – abandoned satellites, upper stages etc. – endangering humanity’s shared resource. In Existence, I posited using tethers, ropelike systems to snag and dispose of some objects. Even better would be to equip all new satellites with tether-based de-orbit systems, like the one just tested (by Tethers Unlimited). ‘Prox-1, a 71-kilogram cubesat that launched into a low Earth orbit in June on a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket, successfully deployed a 70-meter length of conductive tape in September that is creating enough drag to deorbit the satellite much sooner than simply abandoning the satellite.’

The Very Large Array in New Mexico – featured in the movie CONTACT – is doing an all sky radio survey that will allow the Breakthrough SETI program to tap into the data stream with a supercomputer, looking for potentially sapient patterns. “The VLA is being used for an all-sky survey and we kind of go along for the ride,” said Andrew Siemion, director of the Berkeley Seti centre. “It allows us to in parallel conduct a Seti survey.

== Stay Safe ==

Here's hoping all's well for you and yours and that you are healthy and doing great.

Do thrive and persevere... you and all you love.

But also fight for a civilization that rises above the blandishing allure of that old curse - feudalism - and instead decides that we can do better by cooperating and competing fairly, in the light. And then riding light to the stars.

Space news! NASA. NIAC. Lunar landers and tourism.

I was in DC for a week, first to give a colloquium at NASA’s Goddard Spaceflight Center, then for three days of meetings with the staff and Phase One fellows of NASA’s Innovative and Advance Concepts NASA's Innovative and Advanced Concepts (NIAC) program, as a member of NIAC’s External Council.

(See the range of bold research endeavors, and pencil in September 24-27 to tune in to the NIAC Symposium, in Huntsville. I'll announce when/where.)  I also spoke at The International Space Development Conference and at a couple of future-concerned agencies.

In related news, NASA announced that it was hiring Astrobotic, Intuitive Machines and Orbit Beyond to carry its first modern set of science experiments and technology demonstrations to the moon. Astrobotic was stimulated in part by past NIAC grants and all three are pondering using NIAC-fostered technologies. Read about some of the target sites for the first wave of landers.

Grabbing some well-timed spotlight just before this announcement: Jeff Bezos revealed his own planned, much larger -- and likely human-rated lunar lander -- 'Blue Moon'... (Let's set aside the unfortunate vibe of the eponymous song -- no matter.) 

Most of you know that I'm not a big fan of near-term manned lunar expeditions down to that dusty-poison plain by the U.S. (see below). Oh, for sure HUMANITY will go back to that gritty-useless desert soon (and that’s fine!), because whole bunches of Apollo wannabes are anxious to have their rites of big-boy adulthood there... a "bar moonzvah" so to speak. And yes, some exploring will get done. I even hope they'll prove me wrong about Luna being a barren wasteland. 

(So far, it seems that except for a little ice at sunless depths (hence no solar power) down at the poles, there's simply no real (beyond arm-waving) evidence that anything of any immediate value is accessible down there, near term. Except tourism!  And as Andy Weir shows in ARTEMIS, that could have real value. The Chinese, Indians, Russians, and billionaires will spend for that.

Hence, I raise a glass and cheer for Jeff's new lander, a terrific money-maker that will get those Apollo Wannabes to pay development costs. Design, build and sell it, Jeff. Better yet, lease it to em!  Yankee industry. Sell it and free up NASA to do other things.

What other things? While continuing to keep our lunar hand in, with robots, NASA should join the Japanese and the smarter zillionaires heading off to do stuff that no one else can do.  And yes, Jeff has now completely undermined his favorite person, Donald Trump. Love it. 

== More space! More space! ==

An amazing find! Two galaxies that appear not to have any appreciable amounts of Dark Matter.  No, we’re not “seeing” the DM. But we can see that in nearly all galaxies, stars orbit the galactic center quickly, revealing the galactic mass is much bigger than the sum total of stars, planets and dust/gas. There are also measurable gravitational lensing effects. These galaxies show markedly different orbital speeds.  The implications are huge.

Offering a glimpse of Earth’s distant future, astronomers found a massive chunk of debris orbiting a white dwarf that could be a 125-mile round fragment of an Earth-like planetary core, leftover from the death of its original star. Periodic changes in the star’s spectra—repeating every 123 minutes—seemed to bear out a fairly substantially sized object, rather than dust.

In 1946 British engineers proposed a highly plausible sub-orbital, manned rocket that would have advanced spaceflight by a decade. Megaroc. SO? Have a glimpse of what might have been in my colleague Mary Robinette Kowal's recent Nebula Award winning novella The Calculating Stars, in which we urgently push ahead to achieve... by 1958... something incredible, led by a clade of women who are even more-incredible still.

As if from the pages of EXISTENCE...  A meteor from another solar system may have hit Earth, and the implications are fascinating. 

Um, and speaking of alien objects. In 2017, the Pentagon first confirmed the existence of the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP), a government operation launched in 2007 to collect and analyze info on “anomalous aerospace threats” from “advanced aircraft fielded by traditional U.S. adversaries to commercial drones to possible alien encounters.” … In some cases, pilots — many of whom are engineers and academy graduates — claimed to observe small spherical objects flying in formation. Others say they’ve seen white, Tic Tac-shaped vehicles. Aside from drones, all engines rely on burning fuel to generate power, but these 'vehicles' had no air intake, no wind and no exhaust.

To consider in context: It's been 25+ years since any new techs were announced from the various Defense Department Skunk Works. Used to be, we’d get some kind of revelation, e.g. stealth bombers, at least once per decade, showing something for our tax dollars. I do know things are at least marginally farther along than we are told, when it comes to hypersonics, lasers, and ABM abilities, though by how much? 

Another piece to the puzzle. Some years ago the National Reconnaissance Office gave NASA two Hubbles. Yes, two Hubble Space Telescopes. Well, not quite. They were the optics-guts of obsolete Earth observing spy satellites, and we thus discovered that the Hubble had been a “beard” for the spysat program, all along.  The gift put NASA in a bind – getting two billion-dollar spacecraft for free is nice, unless you don’t have the quarter of a billion it would take to repurpose them for real science.  One of them has been repurposed now and will launch soon as a great new mission -- WFIRST -- but it took a while. (I visited the WFIRST lab-correlate while at NASA Goddard, last week.)

But the lesson is clear. Stuff goes on, behind the scenes. Some “wasted” funding may have only been diverted (see my old novella “Senses, Three and Six” from my collection The River of Time). Some civilian events or endeavors may be (partly) “beards.” And yes, I have a theory about these "sightings" that you've likely not seen anywhere ;-)

Above all, we need to pray and hope that members of our defender caste really are (as I believe) nearly all devoted public servants and not how Fox-and-ilk portray them – as Deep State enemies of the people.

== Inspirational perspectives ==

I'm a fan of Isaac Arthur’s series of podcasts about the vast range of ambitious endeavors we might pursue… if we manage to get past the mewling panic of ankle-grabbing troglodytes in our own species. He’s covered a vast range of topics, including “uplifting animals to sapience.” And there are times when I find he makes unwarranted assumptions – e.g. the silly concept that the Moon has copious “resources” readily accessible with current technology. (Baloney.) Still, it’s amazing stuff, vividly delivered, sometimes inspiring and even eye-popping.  Here’s one of the most-amazing, from a science fictional perspective, on Orbital Rings.

Plywood delivery drones that cost just a few hundreds of dollars may soon be deployed for re-supply missions for the Marines.

Wanna personal flying machine? “GoFly, the $2M+, two-year global competition to create a safe, quiet, and ultra-compact personal flyer, just awarded prizes to five teams across the globe for their winning prototypes. (via Peter Diamandis.)

I’ve long touted the Age of Amateurs — the skyrocketing of hobbies and avocations that prove the very opposite of the “decadent-lazy” accusation often hurled at modern citizens. See now these citizen science expeditions.

A British system pre-cools air that’s been compressed during hypersonic flight so it can safely be used in a hybrid jet-rocket engine, potentially paving the way for a single flight to orbit space plane.

== Not just another anti-loony rant, but a forecast! ==

Okay, I can’t help myself. Here is a reprint of my earlier prediction that a jingoist, flag-waving, U.S.-only-yay! Mission to repeat Apollo would very soon become international’d.

Look ahead for what's intended, downstream, by those pushing the U.S. to "race back to the moon." Some dismiss the Pence-Trump lunar-declaration as pompous jingoism without scientific or national merit, misdirecting U.S. space resources and efforts toward copycatting past glories. But I'm astonished anyone believes that potemkin farce, that isn't even proposing a tenth of the needed funding. It won't and cannot remain a "race." Here is what’ll happen, if Republicans remain in power, prioritizing a moon-race over heading out to prospect and rake-in asteroidal wealth. 

As costs mount, suddenly, at a politically opportune time, the White House will announce:

"Huzzah, rejoice! We negotiated making the moon landing mission a joint-international project!! 

It will be more efficient, spreading costs!!! It will set an example of international cooperation and a spirit of pan-human accomplishment!!!! 

One giant step for humanity and peace!!!!!!"  (One accomplishment will be a ratchtting of exclamation points.)

Unspoken will be: No one in the U.S. wanted to pay a hundred billion to "win" a "race" against the Chinese and other Apollo wannabes, desperate to prove themselves on that dusty-useless plain.

Unspoken also: We will pay all right, by transferring all of U.S. technology to our new "partners."

Make no mistake, that’s the end game for the jingo-competitive "race"... as it was for "U.S. Space Station Freedom." Our money and space tech to help them get their glory moment in dust, while our chance to gain actual wealth-value out there gets tossed away.

 But I was wrong about how long it would take. Administration officials are already hinting at this, while echoes from the "moon race" announcement haven't even faded. Ah.

And a coda: Space is poised for explosive growth - let's get it right!