Right Wing Nut House

For those of us who are fans — and always will be fans — of the marvelous Edgar Rice Burroughs series John Carter of Mars, the news that the film version will lose somewhere in the neighborhood of $200 million is depressing. The BBC critic Mark Kermode summed up the movie’s major problem:

The storytelling is incomprehensible, the characterization is ludicrous, the story is two and a quarter hours long and it’s a boring, boring, boring two and a quarter hours long.

The film cost a staggering $250 million to make and another $100 million to promote. A Disney spokesman confirmed to the Daily Mail the bad news, saying, “In light of the theatrical performance of John Carter, we expect the film to generate an operating loss of approximately $200 million.”

What went wrong? One of the most beloved sci-fi series of all time is set to become the biggest financial flop in Hollywood history.

Some critics point to the director and producers as being in over their heads. That’s one of those criticisms that is impossible to prove, but sounds like the critic knows something about making movies. In fact, the director, Andrew Stanton, was no stranger to blockbuster projects, and treated the source material with respect — even reverence.

But I agree with this notion from Rick Liebling, the Creative Culturalist at Y&R New York:

Indiana Jones on Mars? Sequels and theme park attractions? That’s why movies like this (or just about any other ‘blockbuster’) suck. They are viewed as franchise vehicles or cross-promotional, money-spinning opportunities. I’m not opposed to those things by the way, but when they are the raison d’etre, well all you’re going to get is a steaming turd.

Beyond the Hollywoodisms and other inside-industry explanations, there is the cultural chasm between the world in which John Carter was originally created by Burroughs and the less literate, less imaginative, more realistic world into which the film was released.

Chris Queen did an excellent job of fleshing out the history and background of the John Carter novels for PJ Media prior to the film’s release. In 1911 when the first story appeared in in the pulp magazine The All Story, the Civil War had been over less than 50 years. Almost everyone knew a veteran from that war, or saw them during parades and other patriotic events. The war was still alive for kids and young adults at that time, making the character John Carter live in ways that we can’t even imagine.

While Burroughs’ time was more literate, it was the imagination that forged a connection to the stories and characters and created such a powerful hold on our affections. In an age before film, before TV, before radio, there was only the reader, the written word, and however we imagined the world being created by the author. Burroughs prose could be turgid at times — to our ears anyway — but the compelling way in which he described his world of Barsoom far surpassed any attempts we might make today to translate the author’s imagined adventures to the screen. There are simply no cultural touchstones that connect the world of Burroughs with our world today. A young boy living in pre-World War I America imagined Barsoom far differently that I did in the 1960’s. And it is likely that most kids today hadn’t even read the books, waiting instead for the video game.

When the first trailer came out, my curiosity was intense. What was the filmaker’s vision of what the 4-armed, betusked Green Men looked like? Did they come close to the picture in my mind’s eye of a thoat? What would Dejah Thoris be wearing? Ultimately, it was a disappointment — had to be a disappointment. That’s the sticking point; even for fans of the series, everyone had their own private and intensely personal vision of what the characters should look like. For that, we can’t blame the film makers. They actually did an amazing job in bringing Tars Tarkas and the thoat to life:

Besides, everyone today knows that there is no life on Mars, could never be life on Mars, thus destroying the premise of the movie from the outset. And since most of the potential movie-going audience had no preconceived notions of the source material, and had no treasured memories of being swept up by the narrative, most of the audience ended up at sea — caught between wanting to suspend belief and their own realistic assumptions about Mars. In the end, how could you ignore what your own eyes have shown you about the Red Planet? We’ve had rovers exploring the surface of Mars for more than a decade. Those spectacular images of utter desolation were, in their own way, far more interesting than the world that Stanton tried to create on a Hollywood sound stage.

It’s a shame that John Carter was a flop. There will be no sequels. Nor will there be any lunch boxes, action figures, kids’ pajamas, battery operated thoats, and almost certainly no talking Tars Tarkas dolls.

But we’ll always have John Carter as Edgar Rice Burroughs imagined him in his wonderful series of books. For that, they can keep their $200 million and leave me dreaming about dating Dejah Thoris’ sister while saving Barsoom from the evil designs of evil men.

This article originally appeared at PJ Media Lifestyle.

Recent images of Pluto taken by the Hubble Space Telescope. Note the change in features - totally unexpected.

Last night, the PBS science program Nova reminded us what a real scientific debate looks like.

Remarkably, there was a kind of political element to the debate as well as pressure groups advocating for one side or another. But the important thing was that there was respect among scientists and lay people for opposing points of view. No charges of one side or the other being in the pay of corporations. Neither side referred to the other as “Nazis.” And yet, there was real passion and belief animating the debate - and a healthy skepticism from both sides that is the hallmark of true science.

The subject of the debate was the “former” planet Pluto and whether it should be restored to its place in the heavens as one of nine “wanderers” (which is what the Greek word for “planet” means), or whether the decision in 2006 by the Astronomical Union to demote Pluto should be confirmed.

“Pluto Files” was hosted by a national treasure. Neil deGrasse Tyson, the director of New York’s Hayden Planetarium, has assumed the title, “The People’s Scientist” that had been vacant since the lamented death of Carl Sagan in 1996. He is literally all over the tube these days with appearances on science shows produced for the History Channel, the Discovery Channel, the Science Channel (part of the Discovery Network), Natgeo, and other PBS productions.

I wish we had a dozen Tysons for other scientific disciplines. He, like Sagan, makes the subject matter under discussion lay-friendly. He makes learning fun. He comes across onscreen as approachable, and gives the impression that you can ask any question - no matter how stupid - and he would give you an answer.

His ability to take enormously complex subjects and distill their essence into tolerable, bite sized nuggets of information that everyone can understand is a gift. Or perhaps he works at it more than other scientists. In truth, there is some grumbling among other scientists about popularizers like Tyson. They have the attitude, many of them, that the lay population doesn’t need to know where their billions of dollars are going, what scientists are doing with our tax dollars. They believe that it’s too much trouble to explain to those who pay the bills what their experiments and studies are all about.

This may be true to a certain extent. But there are many scientists who at least try to help us understand the universe and our place in it. Tyson is quite simply, the best.

But it was Tyson who pretty much set off this debate over Pluto’s status by removing the “cosmic body” as he calls it, from the display of planets at the Hayden Planetarium in 2001 when the facility opened. When the New York Times got wind of the demotion and published a front page story, all hell broke loose. Tyson got thousands and thousands of emails and letter protesting his decision. One of them, from a little boy:

Dear Mr. Tyson, I think Pluto is a planet. Why do you think Pluto is no longer a planet? I do not like your anser!!! Pluto is my faveret planet!!! You are going to have to take all of the books away and change them. Pluto IS a planet!!!!! Your friend, Emerson York.

At about the same time, two astronomers who had been looking for other objects in the Kuiper Belt (the location in the solar system where Pluto lies), discovered several round, icy, planet-like bodies - one of which was even bigger than Pluto.

This precipitated a meeting of the IAU in 2006 where the infamous decision demoting Pluto to “minor planet” or dwarf planet was made. In many cases, a decision made by a governing body would satisfy all but the most curmudgeonly contrarians. But for whatever reason - and Tyson offers a few during the show, including the idea that Walt Disney naming the goofy dog after the planet probably contributed to Pluto’s popularity - both the public and surprisingly, hundreds of astronomers objected.

All of this set up Tyson’s journey across the country to unravel the mystery of people’s love affair with Pluto. His trip took him to Harvard where he faced off with a scientist who disagreed with him. He went to Walt Disney World to hug a costumed Pluto.

And then, he traveled to my adopted hometown of Streator, Illinois. Clyde Tombaugh, the discoverer of Pluto back in 1930, was born in Streator and the townsfolk here revere him as a hometown boy made good. Tyson conducted interviews at the barber shop and next door coffee shop with people passionate about keeping Pluto’s designation as a planet. Indeed, the state of Illinois (and Tombaugh’s adopted home state of New Mexico) have passed laws proclaiming that while Pluto passes over those states, it is a planet. I kid you not.

Tombaugh is a quintessential American character. He was a farm boy with no college education who built remarkable homemade telescopes out bits and pieces of farm equipment - real Rube Goldberg stuff. To satisfy his passion for the stars, Tombaugh made his way west and got a job at the Lowell Observatory outside of Flagstaff, AZ cleaning the giant telescope. After a few years, he worked his way up to researcher and the observatory brass thought he would be an excellent choice to look for, what at the time was called, “Planet X.”

Since the discovery of Neptune in 1846, perturbations in that planet’s orbit inferred the existence of another planet. Dubbed Planet X by Percival Lowell, the rich astronomer who built the observatory, a fruitless search ensued for 9th planet for the next 80 years.

Tombaugh turned out to be the perfect choice for this thankless task. He was patient, dedicated, and eager to contribute. It was mind numbingly dreary work as night after night, he would expose photographic plates on the same section of sky and then, using a device called a blink comparator, he would patiently and with great diligence, click back and forth between two developed plates looking for a moving blur in the background.

Tombaugh struck paydirt on February 8, 1930. He confirmed the discovery and then measurements were taken to confirm that Pluto did indeed have an orbit outside of Neptune. His discovery made him world famous and garnered him a scholarship to college. He taught astronomy until his retirement in 1975.

Almost from the start, there were questions about Pluto’s status. It’s weird orbit took it inside Neptune’s for a time. It was very small, barely larger than earth’s moon. And then the questions really began once other Kuiper Belt objects were imaged and cataloged. This led to the controversial IAU decision and some serious blowback from astronomers who have not taken Pluto’s demotion lying down:

Within days of the announcement, a petition signed by hundreds of scientists rejected the IAU decision. On his way back to New York, Tyson stops at John Hopkins University’s Applied Physics Lab in Baltimore, Maryland, where he meets Alan Stern, a staunch Pluto supporter and one of the world’s leading experts on Pluto. Stern is the principal investigator of the New Horizons mission—a nine-and-a-half-year voyage to Pluto, which launched in 2006. Stern’s assessment of Pluto is that it is a new kind of planet, a dwarf planet. “It looked like the solar system consisted of four terrestrial planets, four giant planets, and misfit Pluto,” says Stern. “But today, instead, we see a solar system with four terrestrial planets, four freakishly giant planets, and a whole cohort of Pluto-like objects that turn out to be the dominant class of planet in our solar system.”

The spacecraft New Horizons is streaking toward Pluto, the fastest object ever built by man. It’s current speed is over 38,000 mph and will fly by the minor planet in July of 2015. At that point, we may be in for a huge disappointment. Pluto is so far away and gets so cold that it is very possible that its atmosphere actually freezes and descends to the planet’s surface due to its weight, obscuring any features we might make out. The spacecraft might be blocked from seeing the surface via visible light but the craft also has the capability of imaging in the infrared and ultraviolet as well. At the very least, we’ll get some idea of mountains and valleys that might exist on Pluto.

None of this will settle the debate over whether Pluto is a planet or not. And watching the back and forth between Tyson and those who disagree with him, you are struck by the contrast between those who passionately believe in climate change and the climate skeptics. It makes you wish that the debate over global warming could be carried out this professionally, and with due regard for the scientific process and the welcoming of diverse viewpoints.

It will never happen. The investment of the climate change scientists in maintaining their position is far greater than any astronomer engaged in the defense of the planet Pluto. Still, the debate over Pluto is indicative of real scientific inquiry and not the politically motivated and manipulated results we appear to be getting from climate change scientists.

These pics of the dwarf planet Pluto are not only really, really kewl, but how they were created is pretty kewl too.

After more than four years of processing on 20 hand-built computers, the best views ever captured of Pluto are now available.

Working from 384 images taken by the Hubble Space Telescope in which the image of Pluto itself was just a few pixels across, astronomer Marc Buie and his team at the Southwest Research Institute stitched together the maps of Pluto you see here.

“It also shows you what I consider to be my best guess for what the true color of Pluto would be if you were puttering around near it in a spacecraft,” Buie said in a NASA teleconference.

Pluto has mostly been in the news in recent years for its demotion from planet to dwarf planet and subsequent attempts to get it lumped back in with the bigger, round objects of the solar system.

But astronomer Mike Brown of the California Institute of Technology, aka @PlutoKiller on Twitter, said the question of the classification of the celestial body doesn’t merit the attention it’s gotten.

“That’s really not an interesting question to ask,” said Brown, who was not involved with the research. “It’s a great place to study.”

Specifically, what’s fascinating to Brown and Buie is the tremendous amount of change that has been observed on Pluto, particularly between images obtained in 1994 and 2003. Based on the new processing of the photos, there has been more change on Pluto than Earth or Mars.

“You’re looking at the surface in the solar system where there are the biggest changes we’ve ever seen,” Brown said.

First, the series of pictures:

They’ve already discovered one dwarf planet that is bigger than Pluto so it would seem the re-classification of the former 9th planet was a good idea.

But given the fact that even Hubble can only resolve the tiny body to what amounts to a faint smudge, these pictures are awesome. Also, given what scientist Mark Buie had to work with as far as funding to get this project done, I think some consideration for a Nobel might be in order:

The computing power necessary to turn the pixels of Pluto into the global map seen above is considerable. Buie hand-wrote all the code in a combination of IDL, a scientific programming language, and C. But when he finished and began to crunch the data, it appeared that it would take decades for the calculations to complete.

So, he took the funding he had and scraped together 20 computers to do the work in parallel.

“I bought these little shuttle boxes and a processor and memory. I got [the price] down to $450 per computer and I had enough to buy 20 computers and have them all grind,” he said. “That’s about the cheapest supercomputer you can manage.”

His team’s handiwork includes this little video of Pluto rotating:

It’s been a while since I wrote about the New Horizon’s spacecraft that recently passed the point where it is now closer to Pluto than it is to earth. It is the fastest moving object ever created by man, speeding toward a swing around Jupiter to get a gravity assist at more than 31,000 MPH. The previous record was held by Voyager I which is now approaching the outer reaches of the heliosphere.

I wrote of the mission back in 2005:

One of the most amazing things to me, a 51 year old amateur space nut, is that the missions NASA has launched to the planets over the last 40 years have been conducted largely under the radar of press coverage and interest by the American people. This state of affairs will probably be looked on 500 years from now by historians with some measure of astonishment. They will marvel at the fact that mankind’s initial attempts to explore their solar system neighborhood would have been met with a collective yawn by a media that routinely reports every pimple that breaks out on Brittany Spear’s face but can’t find the time or effort to describe the wondrous, almost magical efforts to answer questions that have been asked by humanity since our ancestors were loping effortlessly across the African savannah.

Who are we? Why are we here? Are we alone?

In a very real sense, NASA’s New Horizon’s mission to Pluto and the Kuiper Belt beyond will close the first chapter in our quest to solve some of the most fundamental mysteries of the universe. And the fact that this effort has been given such short shrift by our celebrity-obsessed, trivia reporting media reveals much about our manic efforts to remain ignorant about matters so sublime in their implications for adding to the encyclopedia of human understanding that one could actually question the collective sanity of the human race if not for the fact that there are plenty of examples already.

Pluto is such a bizarre object, some of its characteristics are science fiction-like. Scientists are guessing that it’s so cold on Pluto, that the atmosphere actually freezes on its outward leg away from the sun so that it descends to the planet’s surface. This may spell trouble for New Horizons because if that is the case, it will almost certainly obscure any surface features we might be able to photograph.

But it is the last leg of the mission that promises to expand our understanding of the origins of the solar system tremendously. After the Pluto flyby, New Horizons is scheduled to continue onward to the mysterious Kuiper Belt. Objects in the Belt are thought to be left over from the very early days of the solar system’s existence. Studying them may make us revise our theories on how the planets formed.

The Pluto flyby is scheduled for July, 2015.

NASA’s new budget is out and the howls from congressmen, space buffs, and conservative pundits will begin in earnest.

No moon mission - or at least one with a timetable. Scrap the Ares I rocket and Constellation program that were sucking up space dollars, leaching support away from other vital programs while running fantastically over budget and behind schedule.

I heard it from a few of you the last time this subject came up. Jeffrey Anderson sums up the pro-NASA moon mission boondoggle position:

As Rep. Suzanne Kosmas (D., Fla.) puts it, “The president’s proposal would leave NASA with essentially no program and no timeline for exploration beyond Earth’s orbit.”

Furthermore, at a time when the president claims his focus is on jobs, scrapping these programs — on which we’ve already spent nearly $10 billion — would cut public spending in one area that actually creates jobs.

You know those great pictures of Earth from outer space, showing our planet suspended against the blackness, a beautiful blue ball? No one has seen that view since the Apollo program ended 38 years ago. No astronaut has seen that view since then. We’ve all just seen the pictures.

Now, unless Congress rejects the president’s recommendations, the next people to see that view will likely be the Chinese.

Whether it’s tax cuts or defense spending; or whether it’s the courage, ambition, and sense of wonder that combine to lead great souls to great feats of exploration and discovery; one can surely say this much about Barack Obama: Mr. President, you’re no Jack Kennedy.

First, once the Chinese get there (and they have no heavy lift rockets, workable landers, or any experience with rendezvous in outer space), just what is it they will find that we didn’t discover 38 years ago? Anderson complains that we’ve only seen that wonderful picture of the earth from the moon since Apollo ended - no astronauts taking any more pictures since then. Well thank God for that. It seems a helluva waste of money to spend $100 billion to get some more pretty pictures from lunar orbit (if we’re really hard up, let’s send an unmanned orbiter) or even to simply maintain some kind of official USA government presence in our manned space program.

The Chinese have put a couple of men in space. They are about where we were in 1963. Only a crash effort on our part allowed us to make it to the moon by 1969. More likely, the Chinese and any other country, including Russia, is 10-15 years from any moon mission. I say let them spend themselves into penury to be able to plant their flag on the moon.

Meanwhile, perhaps Marriott or Holiday Inn will beat them to it. It is entirely possible that the next footprints on the moon will be sponsored by a company that wishes to commercially exploit it, and not gather up a few pounds of rocks while taking spectacular pictures. Space tourism is poised to take off this year and by decades’ end, there will be several companies ferrying people to low earth orbit hotels.

And you’ll have Barack Obama to thank for it:

Obama’s budget, according to a background briefing by an administration official on Sunday, will call for spending $6 billion over five years to develop a commercial spacecraft that could taxi astronauts into low Earth orbit. Going commercial with a human crew would represent a dramatic change in the way NASA does business. Instead of NASA owning the spacecraft and overseeing every nut and bolt of its design and construction, a private company would design and build the spacecraft with NASA looking over its shoulder.

The development of these launch systems will not be confined to taxiing astronauts to and from the space station. Reliable commercial rockets will open space travel to a lot more people. Tourism will be the initiator but commercial space stations that would exploit zero gravity conditions to make exotic metals, pharma products, and other commercially useful applications won’t be far behind.

The fact is, as Rand Simberg points out, the entire model for government-sponsored manned spaceflight has been wrong all along:

Part of the mindset that grew out of that era was that Space = NASA, and that “Progress in Space” = “Funding NASA” and that not funding NASA, or adequately funding NASA, or changing NASA’s goals, is a step backwards. But as I noted at Popular Mechanics yesterday on the 24th anniversary of the Challenger loss, that event had a good outcome, in that it allowed private industry to start to become more involved, a trend that continues (and that the Bush/Griffin administration did support, albeit with paltry funding, in the form of the Commercial Orbital Transportation Services (COTS) program to pick up slack in delivering cargo to the space station after Shuttle is retired this year or next). We have been in fact developing, though far too slowly, the sort of private-enterprise (and more intrinsically American than Soviet in nature) space program that might have evolved more naturally had we not been side tracked by Apollo in the sixties.

What the administration is doing is to finally end the model that the government will have a state socialist design bureau to build a monopoly transportation system for its own use, at tremendous cost, but politically supportable because of all the pork it provides to Alabama, Florida and Texas. It proposes to expand the COTS program to provision of crew changeout in addition to cargo delivery, encouraging competition, and providing a robust capability that won’t put us out of business when the government rocket fails (as has happened twice with the Shuttle in the past quarter century, for almost three years each time). Instead of a program projected to cost many tens of billions over the next decade for a NASA-owned-and-operated new rocket (Ares I) that will cost billions per flight of four astronauts, it is going to invest six billion dollars in developing private capability, with multiple competitors, and do it on a fixed-price, pay-for-performance basis, rather than the wasteful cost-plus model that inevitably results in overruns due to the perverse incentives.

The commercial space ventures today are maturing rapidly. No longer are they shoestring operations headed up by pie-in-the-sky dreamers and fantasists. Heavy duty capital is behind many of these public companies and their plans for space travel have moved off the drawing boards and are well along in the testing phase.

While there could have been more allowances made for the commercial space sector in the budget, the monies that are earmarked for commercial rocket development and, more importantly, a change in attitude by the government toward the commercial space sector, promises more rapid progress in realizing the goal of developing a robust, practical, commercial space industry that will be able to launch man into space at far less cost than NASA’s current $3000 per pound. New rockets will be developed faster and more cheaply than NASA. Manned space flight will become much more routine and rather than having all of our eggs in one basket with Shuttle, the government will have several companies to choose from to ferry our astronauts to and from the ISS.

The era of big government manned space spectaculars that were politically popular - both for the jobs they created and the nationalistic impulses they fed - is drawing to a close. Let the socialist space programs ossify into NASA-like timidity and bureaucratic red tape. Our commercial space sector will fly rings around them.

Simberg again, writing in PJ Media:

If the shuttle is extended at all, it will be only into 2011 to allow final completion of the ISS. As for ventures beyond low earth orbit, Constellation will be replaced with a technology development program for things such as propellant depots, landers, and other capabilities needed for such future missions. These are technologies that had been defunded by the previous administrator to provide funds for the troubled Constellation program, and will now be restored to their proper priority, with billions available for them once the shuttle is retired.

The agency will also be redirected, to no one’s surprise, to more monitoring of the earth and its environment, something badly needed, given what a mess the current “science” of climate change has turned out to be, though whether it’s a job for NASA (as opposed to the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Agency) is a debate that the nation should have.

Those technology development programs are the kinds of things NASA should be doing - basic research that can be exploited by the private sector. It may delay a moon and Mars mission but after all, neither heavenly body is going anywhere. There is no compelling national interest in rushing to develop the new technologies and perfect the engineering required to take those kinds of trips.

By decade’s end, those who are wailing about the end of US dominance in space are probably going to forget they ever thought that way. A revolution is coming in manned space flight and thankfully, NASA is finally getting out of the way so that it can happen.

We are getting so close to discovering extra-solar civilizations, you can almost taste it.

Of course, in science, this is usually the point that the ground disappears beneath your feet. But there are a couple of things about this discovery of a near earth like planet that point to some kind of breakthrough in the near future.

First, the discovery itself is one of those “gee whiz” moments that occur when something extraordinary happens in science:

It’s not exactly Earth’s twin: It’s about six times bigger, a whole lot hotter and made mostly of water. But compared to the giant gas balls that account for nearly every other extrasolar planet ever found, it’s pretty darn close. And through a fortunate happenstance of cosmic geometry, astronomers will be able to study GJ 1214b in great detail.

“If you want to describe in one sentence what this planet is, it’s a big, hot ocean,” said Harvard University astronomer David Charbonneau. “We can even study its atmosphere. This planet will occupy us for years. That’s part of what’s so exciting about it.”

Described by Charbonneau and 17 other astronomers in a paper published Wednesday in Nature, GJ 1214b is the latest of roughly 400 planets detected by earthly telescopes. Of these, 28 are considered “super-Earths” — planets with a mass roughly comparable to our own.

The super-Earths themselves are too distant to be seen. Instead, astronomers infer their presence from subtle distortions in starlight, caused when photons travel through the super-Earths’ gravitational fields. Depending on the degree of distortion, astronomers can even calculate a planet’s mass.

Unfortunately, a couple of other “super earth” discoveries can’t be examined in quite the minute detail as GJ 1214b (let’s call it “Gilligan” for the moment). In order to glean the spectrum from these giant earths, it is optimum for the object to pass in front of their star. But these transverses are not common and therefore make viewing these objects difficult.

But Gilligan is differrent:

GJ 1214b does pass in front of its sun. Separated from Earth by a distance of just 42 light years, it’s close enough to be studied. Scientists will finally get to look at another Earth-like world.

Another exciting fact about Gilligan:

The telescopes that spotted GJ 1214b were custom designed to find Earth-like planets around nearby stars, and had only operated for a few months before striking water.

If true, it may be that we’ll have to start dusting off Frank Drake’s old equations and update them for the 21st century. When I read that, a chill went up the back of my neck. Either they are incredibly lucky and have found a needle in a haystack in record time, or we are in for a huge surprise as far as the number of earth like planets out there.

Meanwhile, NASA’s Kepler telescope, launched last year, has begun its own search for extra-solar earth like objects. This is a unique mission that will focus it’s photometer on a field containing about 100,000 stars for the entire 5 year mission. It’s goal; to find earth like planets in a “habitable zone” that transit in front of their own stars:

The Kepler instrument is a specially designed 0.95-meter diameter telescope called a photometer or light meter. It has a very large field of view for an astronomical telescope — 105 square degrees, which is comparable to the area of your hand held at arm’s length. It needs that large a field in order to observe the necessary large number of stars. It stares at the same star field for the entire mission and continuously and simultaneously monitors the brightnesses of more than 100,000 stars for the life of the mission—3.5 or more years.

The photometer must be spacebased to obtain the photometric precision needed to reliably see an Earth-like transit and to avoid interruptions caused by day-night cycles, seasonal cycles and atmospheric perturbations, such as, extinction associated with ground-based observing.

Results from the Kepler mission will allow us to place our solar system within the context of planetary systems in the Galaxy.

As mentioned above, these transits, while not rare, are not present for all planets. But the advantage of Kepler is that it will be looking at a huge number of stars simultaneously and will probably be able to give us a better idea of not only the number of earth like planets, but also whether Sol like solar systems are common or something of a rarity.

On deck for NASA - the NextGen space-based telescope. Due to launch in 2014 (heh - we will see that date slip), we are going to trust the Ariane rocket supplied courtesy of the European Space Agency to launch this cargo into a unique part of space; what scientists call an “L-1″ orbit that will place the earth, the moon, and the sun where those three bodies are directly behind the telescope at all times and thus, the instrument can be shielded at all times from infrared radiation emanating from those bodies.

This is crucial because the NGST or James Webb Telescope will be able to look back to the very beginnings of star and galaxy formation, as well as being able to discern life on distant planets. It’s sensitive infrared instruments must have a total black out of all extraneous radiation for that to happen.

Are we finally on the verge of finding E.T.?

“Only rarely does a long-sought scientific frontier loom so prominently just beyond the horizon, that the next generation of instruments seems sure to reach it,” wrote Geoffrey Marcey, a University of California, Berkeley astronomer, in a commentary accompanying the findings. “They provide the most-watertight evidence so far for a planet that is something like our own Earth, outside our solar system.”

Perhaps not locating an advanced civilization. But if all the other conditions for life are right - and that discovery seems just around the corner - from what we know of how life evolves, the odds are very great that the “Are we alone” question may be answered through physical observation and not simply inferred by using our common sense.

WhiteKnightTwo, a four-engine jet-powered aircraft unveiled last year that features twin fuselages mounted on either side of a huge wing. Spaceship Two is in the middle.

Virgin Galactic’s Richard Branson unveiled his baby earlier this week; the first vehicle designed to carry commercial passengers into space. Dubbed “Spaceship Two,” the craft was designed by Burt Ruttan, winner of the $10 million X-Prize, whose Spaceship I soared 62 miles above the earth back in 2004.

Test flights will begin early next year, and if the government signs off on its safety, flights carrying paying passengers could begin as early as 2011.

Wanna take a ride? It will cost you $200,000 and you’ve got to get in line. Branson has signed up 300 passengers already.

Spaceship Two

Most of those ticket holders, along with California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson, were on hand for the SpaceShipTwo unveiling Monday at Mojave airport, braving rain, high winds and frigid temperatures to witness the long-awaited rollout.

Branson told the enthusiastic crowd that safety was Virgin Galactic’s No. 1 priority and that “we will not be putting anybody into space until the test pilots have done many, many, many trips on this spaceship.”

“Only when we are absolutely certain we can safely to to space will we go into space,” he said. “I promise you, it will be well and truly tested before we go into space.”

Schwarzenegger said attending the unveiling was “one of the coolest things I’ve ever done.” Describing Branson as “an extraordinary visionary,” he called Rutan “one of the greatest space engineers of our time.”

Branson may be a great salesman but how safe is “safe?” Spaceship Two will be the first in a long line of commercial ventures that will eventually make going into space routine. Until then, I’ve got just two words for the colorful Mr. Branson:

Krista McAuliffe.

True, a suborbital flight on a well-tested aircraft will not carry the same risks taken by McAuliffe and the crew of the Challenger. But ask Ruttan what can go wrong and the list he gives will be considerably longer than that of a commercial terrestrial airliner.

Here’s how Spaceship two will operate:

SpaceShipTwo will be carried aloft by a futuristic-looking mothercraft called WhiteKnightTwo, a four-engine jet-powered aircraft unveiled last year that features twin fuselages mounted on either side of a huge wing.

For the unveiling Monday, WhiteKnightTwo, with the rocket plane attached to the center of the wing, was rolled into view amid soaring music and floodlights.

SpaceShipTwo will be released at an altitude of 50,000 feet. A hybrid rocket motor burning solid propellant with nitrous oxide then will boost SpaceShipTwo onto a steep trajectory to an altitude of more than 62 miles.

The roomy cabin of SpaceShipTwo, about the same size as a large executive jet, features multiple portholes to give its passengers a spectacular view of Earth and space.

After about five minutes of weightlessness as the spaceplane arcs through the top of its ballistic trajectory, the rocket plane will fall back into the atmosphere, pivoting its wings upward in a “feathering” technique invented by Rutan to increase drag and ease the stress or re-entry. From there, the spacecraft will glide to a normal runway landing.

Ruttan says the vehicle is being built to safety standards that exceed those in NASA operations. Of this I have little doubt; NASA operates under the assumption that the shuttle will have a serious accident about once every 48 flights (some experts are even more pessimistic). That’s about once every 9-10 years at the shuttle’s current launch rate.

Although the number of Spaceship Two flights a year will be determined later, it will be considerably more than the 5 or 6 shuttle launches a year. So while safety standards may be vastly improved, there is still going to be a significant risk due to the increased number of flights - especially the first few years of operation.

Going into outer space - for the moment - is still a very risky proposition. For all intents and purposes, and for the foreseeable future, getting there will continue to be an experimental challenge. I agree that we must begin this great leap forward with the commercial exploitation of space. My worry is that some aspects - including safety - are being oversold. I have no doubt that Branson and Ruttan will do everything in their power to make Spaceship Two as safe as it can possibly be made. But if space travel has shown us anything, it is that our best laid plans, and all of our efforts, mean little when dealing with the forces of the cosmos arrayed against us in space.

Think of the early crossing of the Atlantic in the 15th and 16th centuries. Many ships were lost. But the technology and ship building skills improved dramatically because it was commercially viable to get to the New World. Those tiny ships Columbus sailed in to cross the Atlantic were replaced in 50 years by much sturdier and more sea worthy vessels. They in turn, gave way to more improved ships until crossing the Atlantic became routine and relatively safe.

I imagine something similar will happen with commercial space travel. There will be tragic accidents, no matter how hard the companies will try to avoid them. Some businesses will not survive. Others will learn from those mistakes and press forward. And not only will space travel become safer as we go along, but the cost per pound of lifting cargo and humans into orbit will also fall dramatically. The latter benefit will lead to a true revolution as these private space-faring concerns will move beyond tourism and begin the great enterprise of serious exploitation of space-based resources. That’s where this is leading. And it is possible that in my limited lifetime, that I will see that process well underway before I depart earth for more interesting climes.

I have no idea how long it will take. My gut tells me that the less the government is involved, the faster the pace of progress, although as long as there are private citizens going up, I would hope that there is some regulation that will set standards for a minimum amount of protection for passengers. And I imagine that some new branch of OSHA will oversee any space-based workforce as well. This is inevitable, but how it shakes out will play a large part in determining the technological innovations and entrepreneurial spirit that will infuse the industry.

Congratulations to Branson and Ruttan. I wish them - and their passengers - luck and success.

There are still plenty of skpetics, but the idea of constructing a solar power collecting array in space and beaming the energy back to power stations on earth got a huge boost this week.

California regulators have approved a space-based solar power system for use by Pacific Gas and Electric:

California regulators on Thursday approved a long-term contract between PG&E Corp.’s (PCG) utility and the developer of a speculative technology that would beam 200 megawatts of solar power to Earth from outer space.

Under the 15-year agreement, Solaren Corp., of Manhattan Beach, Calif., will ship 1,700 gigawatt-hours of solar power a year starting in 2016. The power will be sent by radio frequency from an Earth-orbiting satellite to a receiving station in Fresno, Calif. The energy-conversion technology has been used by communications satellites for 45 years on a much smaller scale, Solaren said.

PG&E wouldn’t disclose the cost of the proposed 15-year contract, but said it would be above a benchmark price set by the California Public Utilities Commission that starts at 12.9 cents a kilowatt-hour.

PG&E and other California utilities are required to use renewable sources for a fifth of the power they sell by 2010, ramping up to one-third of their retail power by 2020. The requirements are part of the state’s 2006 plan to combat climate change.

Because Solaren’s technology is experimental and untested, PG&E can’t rely on the contract to comply with its renewable-energy requirements until construction begins on the project and the CPUC gives additional approval, the agency said in its decision.

Shares of PG&E recently traded 1% higher at about $43.80.

Pie in the sky? Some think so:

Hoffert is wary of Solaren’s latest step forward and the company’s promise of delivering 200 megawatts to PG&E utility customers in California by 2016.

Hoffert estimates that Solaren could manage to get about 50 percent transmission efficiency in a best-case scenario, meaning that half of the energy collected by space solar panels would be lost in the transfer down to Earth.

Solaren would then need to launch a solar panel array capable of generating 400 megawatts. The total launch weight of all the equipment would be the equivalent of about 400 metric tons, or 20 shuttle-sized launches, according to Hoffert.

But Solaren says that it would just require four or five heavy-lift rocket launches capable of carrying 25 metric tons, or about one fourth of Hoffert’s weight estimate. The company is relying on developing more efficient photovoltaic technology for the solar panels, as well as mirrors that help focus sunlight.

“Solaren’s patented SSP [space solar power] system dramatically reduces the SSP space segment mass compared to previous concepts,” Boerman told SPACE.com.

Solaren has not provided details on just how its technology works, citing intellectual property concerns. But it expects that its space solar power can convert to RF energy with greater than 80 percent efficiency, and expects similar conversion efficiency for converting the RF energy back to DC electricity on the ground in California. The company also anticipates minimal transmission losses from the space to the ground.

The technology to accomplish this has been around for more than 40 years, just never attempted anywhere near this scale before.

The way the system is supposed to work is the array - in this case more of a demonstration project than anything - would collect solar energy via its photovoltaic cells and beam the raw energy through the atmosphere using microwaves. An antenna on the ground - called a “rectanna” - collects the microwaves and turns them into DC power.

NASA has been looking at the concept for years, and even contemplated putting a one square mile solar collector in space during the 1970’s. But the engineering problems were too numerous to justify taking the project off the drawing boards.

Solaren’s concept would be considerably smaller but has the potential to generate much more energy per square foot due to a huge improvement in photovoltaic cell technology. Solaren appears to be banking on the fact that improvements in PV technology have been by leaps and bounds in recent years and that, if that trend holds, will see perhaps a 50% increase in the potential energy transfer by 2016.

Other problems:

Space solar power has to deal mainly with expensive launch costs of about $15,000 per kilogram, as well as the huge capital costs of building ground arrays if RF technology is involved. Hoffert has pushed for the laser beaming approach as newly effective cost-cutting measure, and even submitted a proposal with his son to ARPA-E, the U.S. Department of Energy’s new agency.

“The cost to first power doesn’t have to be in the hundreds of billions,” Hoffert said. His proposal includes laser transmission tests on the ground in an NYU lab, and then a space experiment launched to the International Space Station.

Such beaming tests could even provide temporary power to isolated places on Earth along the space station’s ground track, although a true solar space power station would sit in geostationary orbit.

Hoffert approved of Japan’s own space solar power effort, led by JAXA, which would test both RF technology and lasers as means of energy transmission. He envisions the possibility of space solar power becoming commercially viable within a decade — but only if all the science bears out the technology behind private efforts.

“Some of it is physics and engineering, and some of it is business and promotion,” Hoffert said. “But in the long run, you can’t fool Mother Nature.”

Solar panels in space can generate 7 times more energy than ground based systems. This is significant because of one of the dirty little secrets about solar power generated on earth; it takes an enormous amount of energy to make them. Although the exchange rate has improved dramatically (at one time, it was probable that more energy was expended in making a solar cell than the unit would put out in its lifetime), it is now calculated that a single photovoltaic cell “pays” for itself with regard to the energy exchange after about 4 years of use.

Another drawback is the expense of making solar cells in an environmentally friendly way. The toxic sludge generated in making them is among the most difficult to manage for manufacturers but this problem also is getting easier as new eco-friendly processes are developed.

The truth about ground based solar cells is that they will never become an efficient way to generate electricity on a massive scale. They will continue to augment other electricity-generating technologies but even with big improvements in energy efficiency, there is still the problem of clouds to deal with.

This is where the space based systems can find their niche. It is probable that the kind of huge arrays envisioned by science fiction writers are decades away. Until we can get the cost per pound of launching stuff into space down to a few dollars, a satellite measuring in the square miles, generating thousands of megawatts is out of the question. Solarens envisions launch costs of $15,000 per kilogram with a total payload of 400 metric tons.

And this is just baby-sized.

We shall see if Solarens can make this ambitious plan come together. Regardless, it appears that for the first time, we are taking the concept of space based solar power generation seriously. And that can only be good news for our economy and environment.

Spirit photographs silica deposits at the bottom of Gusev Crater (2007)

“The Little Rover that Could,” they call it. Designed to last 3 months, both NASA Mars rovers Spirit and Opportunity have passed the 5 year mark of operations on the surface, much to the delight of Mars buffs and scientists alike.

Since landing in January of 2004, the two rovers have revolutionized our knowledge of the red planet. And their ability to survive and thrive through several crisis have earned them the reputation of being plucky machines as well as intrepid explorers.

They have climbed hills, descended into craters, peered inside dozens of rocks by using their unique drilling instruments, and wandered far and wide searching for signs that would confirm the theory that Mars was once much warmer, and wetter, and thus more friendly to the idea that some kind of life may have evolved there.

They have confirmed that water once flowed in liquid form on Mars - perhaps their most significant achievement. They have also been able to determine that the Mars magnetic field was once strong enough to deflect deadly solar rays. This discovery makes the possibility that life may have arisen at one time on Mars more than a theoretical possibility. (Other clues discovered by the Mars Orbiter and the lander Phoenix have confirmed and augmented these discoveries.)

They have found no sign of any life, past or present, but that was not really part of their mission profile. Instead, they have allowed us to vicariously walk the surface of Mars as if we were part tourist, and part geologist. They have sent back a quarter of a million pictures and more than 36 gigs of data from the surface of Mars - enough to keep scientists around the world busy for a decade. And they have enriched our understanding of the forces that shaped the red planet.

Now, however, the rover Spirit may be at the end of the road. Already operating on much reduced power due to dust on its solar panels, the little rover now appears to be stuck fast in some very soft Martian soil and is unable to get any traction:

Spirit has certainly outlived expectations. It became embedded in soft soil at a site called Troy in early May, more than five years into a mission on Mars that was originally scheduled to last for three months. The rover team suspended further driving attempts with Spirit while evaluating how to free it.

The engineers are trying to figure out how to move Spirit while avoiding putting the rover’s center of gravity directly over a rock that is touching or nearly touching the machine’s underbelly. Other added tests are using a lighter-weight test rover than the one used for most of the testing this summer. A complete “dress rehearsal” test of the extrication strategy judged to hold the best chance of success is planned in the test setup at JPL before the team commands Spirit to begin driving. That test and subsequent review of its results are expected to take several weeks.

Moves by Spirit will not begin before October, according to current plans.

A dust storm that had reduced the electrical output from Spirit’s solar panels by nearly half during late August still has some lingering effects on the skies above Spirit, NASA said.

Scientists figured out that the rover was sitting directly over an exposed rock by pulling a unique maneuver and peering underneath the rover itself with its camera. With its power supply dying, scientists feel they must extricate the machine in the next few months or it will be curtains for Spirit:

“We are proceeding very cautiously and exploring all reasonable options,” said John Callas, NASA project manager for Spirit and its twin, Opportunity. “There is a very real possibility that Spirit may not be able to get out, and we want to give Spirit the very best chance.”

Callas and colleagues at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory have been testing ideas on a twin of Spirit at the California facility, in a pit designed to simulate the surface of Mars. It’s tricky though, because of the difference in gravity of the two planets. The rover team is also refining a detailed computer model of rover mobility, calibrated with results from testing and measurements from Mars.

“The computer modeling will allow us to connect the results from tests performed in Earth gravity with what to expect from the rover in Mars gravity,” Callas said in a statement Monday.

For a mission that originally cost $820 million - a bargain as far as planetary exploration is concerned - it is reasonable to say that we sure have gotten our money’s worth out of both rovers.

Meanwhile, the rover Opportunity keeps plugging away. Spirit’s twin recently cracked open a Mars meteor, looking for clues about how thick the Martian atmosphere might have been when the cosmic piece of junk struck the surface.

Here’s hoping they can save Spirit and help it dig itself out of trouble. If not, what a ride that little rover that could has given us.

Via Glenn Reynolds, this piece in Technology Review on a new twist to the Fermi Paradox makes the case that there may be an incredibly small number of intelligent, space faring civilizations in the entire universe - perhaps as few as 10:

The absence of alien probes visiting the solar system places severe limits on the number of advanced civilizations that could be exploring the galaxy.

The Fermi paradox focuses on the existence of advanced civilizations elsewhere in the galaxy. If these civilizations are out there–and many analyses suggest the galaxy should be teeming with life–why haven’t we seen evidence of them?

Today Carlos Cotta and Álvaro Morales from the University of Malaga in Spain add another angle to the discussion. One consideration is the speed at which a sufficiently advanced civilization could colonize the galaxy. Various analyses suggest that using spacecraft that travel at a tenth of the speed of light, a colonization wave could take some 50 million years to sweep the galaxy. Others have calculated that it may be closer to 13 billion years, which may explain why we have yet to spot extraterrestrials.

Cotta and Morales take a different tack by studying how automated probes sent ahead of the colonization could explore the galaxy. Obviously, this could advance much faster than the colonization wave front. The scenario involves a civilization sending out eight probes, each equipped with smaller subprobes for studying the regions that the host probe visits.

This is not a new scenario. One previous calculation suggests that in about 300 millions years, those eight probes could explore just 4 percent of the galaxy. The question that Cotta and Morales ask is this: what if several advanced civilizations were exploring the galaxy at the same time? Surely, if enough advanced civilizations were exploring simultaneously, one of their probes would end up visiting the solar system. So that fact we haven’t seen one places a limit on how many civilizations can be out there.

This is not only fascinating stuff, but a lot of fun as well. Next to politics, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence has been a favorite subject of mine since childhood. It parallels my fascination with space but, due to the speculative nature of the subject matter, forces me to stretch my thinking beyond facts and embrace a world of the mind unlike no other of which I am familiar. When contemplating the unimaginable distances and time periods that are necessary to give ETI serious thought, you exercise a part of the brain that is usually dormant - at least in rational laymen with an abiding interest in science but not the aptitude to get it down by the numbers.

Fermi’s Paradox, first uttered by Enrico Fermi at a lunch with several Los Alamos scientists in 1949, takes the statistical probability that there must be other intelligent species in the universe due to sheer numbers of possible planets, and asks an obvious question: So, where are they? Why haven’t they visited us? Why is there no physical evidence of them ever having been here?

Sorry, but as reliable as eyewitness accounts have been, there is no physical evidence that we’ve ever been visited - and that includes idiotic and insulting questions regarding who built the pyramids or carved the Easter Island statues. We humans are a very clever species and hardly need aliens to help us overcome small technical problems like how to haul a 10 ton block of stone the 4 miles from the Nile River to the Valley of Kings. It is insulting to humans to ascribe our ability to overcome these obstacles to anything except our own, native intelligence.

As for other “evidence,” no reputable scientist has ever come forth with physical evidence that could withstand the scrutiny of their peers. And even eyewitness accounts cannot confirm that what they report came from another planet. In short, as a scientist, Fermi was asking a perfectly legitimate question. We have no evidence of ET’s probes, or spaceships, or any other alien artifact despite the statistics that point to a universe that should be teeming with intelligent life.

And beyond that, there is the idea that a truly advanced civilization would probably require unlimited amounts of energy and would tap every atom and erg they could possibly get out of their own sun. Freeman Dyson speculated that such a race of beings would enclose their entire sun - perhaps their entire solar system - in a sphere in order to capture every atom of power possible (”Dyson Sphere”). The sphere would so alter the radiation signature of the star that it would be detected by even our crude by contrast instruments.

(A great treatment of a Dyson Sphere in pop culture was a Star Trek Next Gen episode that featured Scotty being trapped in a transporter loop for 70 years after becoming stranded on the surface of the sphere.)

A civilization that is advanced enough might attempt to re-engineer their entire galaxy. In Carl Sagan’s book Contact, Ellie Arroway sees a black hole at the center of the Milky Way galaxy “eating” stars in copious amounts. It turns out that the aliens who brought her to this particular planet were trying to alter the mass of the galaxy to keep if from flying apart - a nice trick if you can do it. Again, statistics say there should be civilizations capable of such a feat but so far, we have been unable to detect such an obvious beacon of intelligence elsewhere.

So, where are they? This one should send chills down your spine:

Another possibility is that intelligent species beyond a certain point of technological capability will destroy other intelligence as it appears. The idea that someone, or something, is destroying intelligent life in the universe has been well explored in science fiction[35] and scientific literature.[3] A species might undertake such extermination out of expansionist motives, paranoia, or simple aggression. In 1981, cosmologist Edward Harrison argued that such behavior would be an act of prudence: an intelligent species that has overcome its own self-destructive tendencies might view any other species bent on galactic expansion as a kind of virus.[36]

This hypothesis requires at least one civilization to have arisen in the past, and the first civilization would not have faced this problem.[37] However, it could still be that Earth is alone now. Like exploration, the extermination of other civilizations might be carried out with self-replicating spacecraft. Under such a scenario,[35] even if a civilization that created such machines were to disappear, the probes could outlive their creators, destroying civilizations far into the future.

If true, this argument reduces the number of visible civilizations in two ways - by destroying some civilizations, and forcing all others to remain quiet, under fear of discovery. (see They choose not to interact with us) as we have seen no signs of them.

So are we being incredibly stupid in sending out signals into the void announcing our presence as an intelligent species? Some scientists have actually advanced that argument and indeed, common sense caution might be the better part of valor in this case. I can just imagine these thousands, perhaps millions of civilizations out there who are cowering in fear of some Borg-like race of bloodthirsty aliens. Very kewl. But not likely.

What is much more likely is that Einstein is right, that light speed cannot be exceeded, and that intelligent species are reduced to building multi-generational ships if they wish to explore. The biggest problem with that idea is one of technological development on the home planet outrunning the technology that built the ship originally.

Suppose we built a ship that could travel at one tenth the speed of light. We send them off to Barnards Star 10 light years away, a trip that theoretically would take 100 years (relativistic effects on time don’t become obvious unless you are traveling above 90% the speed of light).

But let’s say 10 years after the ship leaves earth, we build a vehicle that can travel at 1/5 the speed of light (2/10ths). That ship would pass the first ship in about 40 years, in which case you have expended an enormous amount of effort to build the first ship basically for nothing.

Much more likely is the probe idea outlined in the article linked above. It would take much less effort to deploy probes to search the galaxy for that “needle in a haystack.” Even given the time frame allowed - 50 million years or more - a truly advanced civilization would no doubt have overcome many mundane problems that we deal with like ecological disasters, or perhaps even death itself.

Time is an artificial construct anyway. To beings so advanced, it may even be meaningless.

The probability is, we can’t detect the aliens because we don’t even know what we’re supposed to be looking for. And the thing that always bothers me about pop culture treatment of ET is that just because the probability of life on other planets is fairly good (we may even find life in our own solar system before too long), it doesn’t necessarily follow that intelligent life - self aware, cognizant abilities, etc.) would arise.

There is even a question as to whether complex life forms beyond viruses and bacteria could ever develop elsewhere except in extremely rare cases. But intelligence itself is not where evolution on any planet would be required to end up. That’s because intelligence is simply one of a million adaptations made by living creatures, no more surprising or necessary than a giraffe’s long neck or a cheetah’s speed. It eventually made us into a super-predator, but that was only after millions of years.

So despite what the statistics tell us about life elsewhere, the Fermi Paradox might indeed apply. At any given time in the existence of the universe, perhaps no more than a handful of intelligent beings exist who have the industrial know how, engineering skills, and scientific knowledge to leave their home planet and go exploring. It certainly would answer the question “Where are they,” although it will never put the issue to rest as long as we continue to reach for the stars ourselves.

It doesn’t seem like 40 years have passed since I sat in the cold living room of our family’s vacation house in northern Michigan watching Neil Armstrong take his step into eternal glory. Memory has a way of telescoping time, making distant events seem immediate and that’s how it is with me and Armstrong’s famous stroll on the surface of the moon.

We had been making the trip to Glen Lake for 6 summers in 1969. The huge, ramshackle old house we rented had a roof that leaked, a kitchen with 1920’s appliances, and no heat. With temps that could plunge into the 40’s at night in the middle of July, we made excellent use of a huge fireplace in the living room and an ancient oil burning heater. But everything about this house was big and the heater and fireplace combination only managed to make about half the living room a comfortable place to sit without a heavy sweater.

No matter. The fire was a treat for us greenhorns from suburbia. And since there was no phone and no TV the first 5 summers we made the 8 hour trip from the northwest suburbs of Chicago to Leelanau County, it really made us feel like we were “roughing it” in the north woods.

I can’t write about the moon landing without writing about Glen Lake. It was a magical place for us because so much of what we did and experienced was beyond the ken of our every day suburban lives. It was a place to test how grown up you could be - a huge attraction for pre teen boys. We learned how to sail, how to play bridge with the adults, drink coffee, smoke cigarettes (unbeknownst to my parents), make out with girls, and explore the pine forests of northern Michigan, pretending that our woodcraft was adequate to the challenge. It wasn’t but we got lucky and never had to pay for our stupidity.

We were already budding bibliophiles thanks to my father’s own love of books that drove him to build a library in our finished basement. But with no TV at Glen Lake, we devoured every book in sight. Over the years, books read by our older siblings were read by us the following year or two and in turn, read by our younger siblings down the line. We had one dog-eared copy of The Three Musketeers that was falling out of its spine, it was passed down to so many of us. (Did I mention there were 10 of us children?)

But the staple of every year’s vacation was reading the pulp fiction that we bought from the rack at Bauman’s Trading Post about two miles from our house. Bauman’s was a place for the ages. They featured a real soda fountain with malts, shakes, floats, cones - everything a growing boy needed to spoil his appetite for dinner. And in the back of the store, was beach reading material of the day; Jacqueline Suzanne, Arthur Hailey, and other potboilers for the grown ups.

And for the kids (and the young at heart) a marvelous collection of classic science fiction, horror, and adventure, including just about everything ever written by Edgar Rice Burroughs. It was here I fell in love with Tarzan, John Carter of Mars, the Pellucidar and Venus series, as well as Asimov, Clarke, Bradbury (The Martian Chronicles still thrills me to this day), Pohl, Sturgeon, and later, Frank Herbert’s Dune.

But that summer of 1969 was a little different. Joining us on our traditional 4 week trek beginning the Saturday after Independence Day was an extremely small TV set. It might have been 9″ or 12″ - I don’t recall. What I do remember is that you couldn’t get any station during the day.

Glen Lake is aptly named. It is surrounded by huge bluffs, and the TV’s small antennae wasn’t up to the task of bringing us a picture while the sun was up. This meant that we missed the actual landing on TV since that event occurred during the day. Fortunately, we were able to pick up a radio station that carried a live feed from Cape Kennedy from one of the networks and listened as Aldrin guided the LEM down to the surface of the moon.

My 81 year old grandfather, aunt, and uncle had made the trip from Chicago to visit us that year and that night, all of us gathered around the ridiculously small screen to watch man take his first steps on the moon. It struck all of us, I think, to see my grandfather witnessing an event that must have seemed almost like magic to him. He grew up in the era of horse and buggy, was a teenager when the Wright brothers flew, was a young man when Henry Ford began to mass produce cars, was in his 40’s when Lindbergh crossed the Atlantic, and a grandfather when the first jet airplane entered commercial service. We never did ask him what he was thinking as he watched what in his youth was thought impossible.

The TV picture was barely passable which made the crude, blurry images coming from the moon indecipherable for me. I saw a barely moving image that I now know was Armstrong but didn’t really see the pictures of Armstrong making that first step until I saw a replay of the event some time later. What was truly amazing was that about 15 minutes after Armstrong began his stroll on the lunar surface, I fell asleep. I guess I couldn’t see much anyway so why bother?

Except I had been looking forward to that broadcast since I was 7 years old. Almost since the time I could read, I was fascinated with space. One of the first books I can remember reading was an illustrated compilation of the planets and the sun. In a time before any probes had been sent to the planets, I knew that Venus was hot, Mars was cold, Saturn was beautiful, and that you couldn’t stand on the surface of Jupiter because the gravity would make you feel like you weighed 800 pounds (that part is a little hazy).

It was natural, then, that I would fall in love with NASA and the space program. I watched every Mercury liftoff, usually with my mother, who was much more afraid for the astronauts than I was. The Gemini and Apollo missions prior to the moon shot also held my close interest. By then, I could read anything printed in newspapers and magazines on the space program and gobbled up anything that came to my attention.

By the time 1969 rolled around, I was primed and ready. I probably could have written on the mission for almost any newspaper in that I knew as much about as it as most reporters covering it. I knew that the Saturn V booster weighed 6.5 million pounds and could lift 260,000 pounds into orbit. I knew it stood 363 feet in height and could generate nearly 7 million pounds of thrust at takeoff. I knew that it took 8 seconds for the rocket to build up enough thrust to lift the Apollo capsule off the launch pad.

The Saturn V remains one of the largest machines ever built by man and certainly the most powerful. With the capsule and crew module, it had more than a million parts - many of them redundant components in case of failure.

As I reflect back on it, my love of space exploration eventually led to amateur enthusiasms in other scientific fields from anthropology to zoology and everything in between. But as much as I am fascinated by the physical world on this planet and beyond, I never rose above the kind of general interest in scientific matters that has limited my knowledge to this day. Part of it is my atrocious math skills. Another problem is that I have a fairly undisciplined mind - a problem that does not lend itself to real scientific inquiry.

But that hasn’t stopped me from learning all I can about the universe and ultimately, given some thought to our place in it.

We are truly on an island in the cosmos - a safe haven that is, as far as we know, the only place where life has been nurtured and thrived (statistical probability of life elsewhere tell another story and most scientists believe before too long we will discover life fairly close by). It is extraordinarily humbling to contemplate just how big our universe truly is. The fact that the Hubble Space Telescope can image galaxies 14 billion light years from earth is incomprehensible. It’s not just the distance, of course, but the time that we glimpse with these images.

Looking at this picture is like looking through the portal of a time machine where we see galaxies that were already old nearly 10 billion years before our sun formed.

A hundred billion galaxies each with a couple of hundred billion stars should make you feel very small and very alone. But it doesn’t, does it? Perhaps we are incapable of grasping such immense emptiness - our minds possessing a fail safe device that stops us from going mad at the prospect of realizing just how little our lives matter when held up to the enormity of it all.

For people of faith, the emptiness is filled by the presence of an all knowing, all seeing deity. I am actually glad for those who enjoy that kind of certainty but for many of us - even believers who take a slightly different view of God and the cosmos - it is inadequate to the task of answering the fundamental questions of human existence; who are we and why are we here.

Is it enough to say that we are who we are because of evolution and the interaction of chemicals and electricity? Is it enough to say that the reason we are here is because this is where the random fluctuation of atoms from an exploding star that pushed a cloud of hydrogen gas into a ball to form the sun and the planets just happened to drop us?

Is there more to it than that?

When contemplating the relative eternity of the universe, such answers are inadequate indeed - even for an atheist. Is this all there is of existence? Are we, creatures formed of star stuff, condemned to wander the pathways of our mind seeking answers to the unanswerable? Is there nothing of the universe in us that we may, one day, be able to tap and glimpse ultimate truth?

The moon landing was an expression of that hunger to know, to understand, to seek out knowledge for the sheer joy of knowing. Eventually - if we can find a way to survive - we will step off this rocky mount and hurl ourselves into the void looking for some of the answers to those questions. We still may not find them. But we will surely discover something just as valuable; that trying to satisfy our insatiable need to learn new things will expand our consciousness and open new frontiers, the shape and scope of which we cannot even imagine today.