Super Bad Moon Rising

While the title sounds like the name of a pretentious rock band, the lunar eclipse that happened last night was truly a “super moon” as well as a “blood moon.” Heralded by some nitwits as a sign that the world was ending, it only brought about a final battle between photographers and the ever dimming lunar face.

Okay, make that just one photographer, me.

After a week of feeling fairly terrible, the rare combination of fair skies and a rare celestial event prompted me to get the telescope out last night. Once outside, the amazing amount of light pouring out of the sky into an only slightly hazy atmosphere led to the brilliant idea of trying to take some photographs. Brilliant idea or merely a touch of lunacy? That ended up becoming the question of the night.

Failure Is an Option…

…At least it is where engineering is involved. NASA has successfully tested the privately built Orion capsule with parachutes rigged to fail. While we live in a risk and failure averse society (no lose soccer matches anyone?), science requires failures to advance knowledge and nowhere is that more true than in mechanical engineering. Failures expose weaknesses so that they can be addressed so that tragedies can be avoided as much as possible.

There is a life lesson in that, I think. My failures have taught me more than my successes, so I appreciate the necessity of screwing up from time to time. Maybe not immediately, but once cooled off things can be assessed objectively.

Oddly enough, the anime Space Brothers is going through an arc involving parachute failures right now, so this article leapt out at me even more than the usual aerospace report. Lives will depend on getting this right, so it is good to see the test went very well.

Odds and Ends 4-10-2012

Since I have not done this in awhile, I will throw some links up to what has caught my attention lately.

Locally, the apple orchards that are such a part of the region are under threat thanks to the cold snap this week. The combination of unusually warm temperatures followed by unusually cold ones is lethal to apple buds. Not much can be done but hope there will be Honeycrisp’s this year.

Ah, those wacky Japanese using high tech to better humanity. Oh wait…

At least they are diverting resources from making robot women. Don’t get me started there.

Having watched the dot com bubble of the late nineties, I have been getting the feeling of déjà vu again. It turns out I am not alone in worrying over how the latest Internet startups are over priced. I suspect we are headed for a dot com bubble 2.0.

The media in all its forms is increasingly dishonest as things crank up for the elections this year. Race baiting is one of the more evil ways to stir things up and it is being employed fully as a rallying tactic for the left. Outright fabrications are being spread around to inflame tensions. The ends justifying the means rarely leads to anything good, but people never seem to learn that.

The mainstream media cannot be trusted to be guardians of the truth or public good and I wonder if they ever were worthy of it. Given how partisan they have become, they resemble the state controlled media of totalitarian states more and more. Maybe the idea that yellow journalism died out was an illusion in the first place.

One thing that has bothered me for a very long time is how humanity lost its willingness to take risks by the end of the 20th Century. We need to go to space, take chances, colonize, and build. Yes, people will die in the endeavor, but there are far worse things than death. One of them is stagnation. So it is sad to see plans from the 1950s aimed at going to Mars and realizing there is little chance that will happen this century.

I am probably not alone in that. An anime adaptation of Space Brothers has started airing in Japan and streaming worldwide at Crunchyroll. It is a rare thing these days to see an anime featuring characters that are all adults and dealing with adult problems. Set in the near future, it is about a pair of brothers hoping to make it to the Moon and beyond as astronauts. Warm and sentimental, it also catches some of the current cultural malaise in Japan. Man, it makes me wish we had real space programs and not the token jokes we have today.

Major Tom

Forty two years ago the Apollo 11 Moon landing took place. It was the first of six manned landings with the last one in 1972.  That makes it nearly thirty nine years since a human last set foot on the Moon. There are no concrete plans to ever return.

This induces a feeling of melancholy in me, since I’ve been reading classic science fiction the last few years. Those wonderful books of adventure, especially those aimed at teens, predicted a vast new frontier to be conquered.  Most authors expected us to have large functional space stations and a lunar colony before the year 2000 rolled around.

But somewhere along the line we lost the spirit of adventure and exploration. Most likely it is the extreme wealth that has been generated in the West and developing parts of the globe that has ironically hampered this impulse. If we had really wanted to, those predicted things would have been made into reality.

I’ll concede that relying on governments to implement space programs is a huge culprit. Wasteful and always subject to the political whims of the moment, these bloated bureaucracies are rife with incompetence and  corruption. Perhaps if private corporations had been allowed to pioneer in the starry skies things would have been different.

Instead, man has to be content looking at the Moon through a telescope with no hope of touching its dusty surface. Our dreams have fled, drowned out in a cacophony of cellphones, Twitter, video games, and all the myriads of distractions of our day. We are too content and lazy to dare anymore.

This actually bothers me more than the financial doom that looms overhead.

Fly Like an Eagle

In the night sky of 1957’s Autumn, people could see the glowing dot of man’s first artificial satellite, Sputnik 1. It was a colossal embarrassment for the U.S. government and a great achievement for the Soviet Union. But America rallied and made it all the way to the Moon the year I was born.

So earlier today, the last space shuttle launch happened and the last mission for the program got underway.  I have mixed feelings about the whole thing. On one hand, the United States has abandoned manned space missions and likely will never return to government ones in my lifetime. On the other hand, one of the biggest wastes of time, energy, and money by our government is finally coming to an end. This is not a knock on the astronauts, but on the NASA bureaucrats who designed the program and ran it.

The space shuttle never lived up to a fraction of what it promised to do. Regular spaceflight is still an elusive goal as is doing it cheaply. Two spectacular and preventable accidents killed fourteen astronauts along the way. Did we get the big space stations and labs in the sky we should have had by now? I’m sorry to say the International Space Station is nothing to be excited about. About the only real gain out of all this was the Hubble being refurbished and its achievements in astronomy.

For those of us who grew up in the 1970’s or before, there was promise of great things just around the corner in space exploration. Large space stations, moon colonization, manned missions to Mars, and further exploration into the unknown. None of those things have happened and it is decades later with every attempt to do so shot down before it goes anywhere.  As an American, I find it tragic that we will now have to hitch rides with the Russians to even get to the I.S.S.!

Maybe the mistake was relying on the federal government to do something so important. Maybe the comfortable laziness spawned by too much material wealth stripped us of any daring. That promised future which gleamed so brightly in the night sky looks lost right now.

Our only hope is now with private firms going into space.