Saturday night is Yuri's night, as Glenn Reynolds notes.

Hopefully someone will drink a toast for these fellows, who may have actually preceded Yuri Gagarin into space--if not safely back onto terra firma.

Well, that's one way to put it, I guess. Tom Wolfe's The Right Stuff and its movie version brilliantly depict America's first astronauts fighting against NASA bureaucrats to keep their balls--the piloting skills they earned the hard way, by surviving dangerous, experimental aircraft.

It took NASA almost 50 years, but these days, since space is no longer about actually going anywhere useful, their bureaucrats have finally won that battle.

Fireplaces? Well, hopefully yours will be grandfathered.

Internet servers? Hey, give 'em time.

Manned exploration of Mars? Forgetaboutit!

Hey, I thought it was the right that wanted to stand athwart history and yell stop...

An exasperated Betsy Newmark declares, "It's enough...almost...to make one a libertarian":

Thomas Sowell puts his finger on a central cause of so many of the problems we face today.

It is remarkable how many political “solutions” today are dealing with problems created by previous political “solutions.” Three examples that come to mind immediately are the housing -market crisis, the wildfires in southern California, and the water shortages in the west.

Add in our problems with people not being able to afford health insurance, the quality of our schools, AMT bracket creep, and fears for Social Security. And, I'm sure, a whole host of other issues that I don't have the time to think of. When you trace back to the origins of the problem, there is some well-meant government decision there in the beginning that started the whole mess.

And rather than reversing that original decision, the choice always seems to be to pile on more government solutions to fix the problem that some choice decades ago created.

The history of politics post New Deal and Great Society is pretty much an endless laundry list of trying to fix, tinker with, or add onto the programs of the New Deal and Great Society, isn't it?

Speaking of conspiracy theories, Jules Crittenden writes, "Truman Lied, Aliens Died", and Bill Richardson, if elected president, volunteers to blow the lid off the ultimate intergalactic cover-up.

Recently Glenn Reynolds noted that the launch of Sputnik 50 years ago this week was more a surprisingly improvised case of the Right Stuff, Soviet style, then a carefully planned first step by the Russians to sieze the ultimate high ground in the Cold War. But it had huge--if surprisingly temporary ramifications, as Rand Simberg notes:

In the mid-1950s, many science fiction writers, such as Arthur C. Clarke and Robert Heinlein, were predicting that men would walk on the moon. But none of them were so bold in their predictions as to claim that it would happen in the coming decade. It made no sense--there was a logical progression to such things. In 1958, we could barely toss a few pounds into orbit, and in the first year of launch attempts, three out of four had failed. The notion that we would be sending people into space, in a couple years, let alone all the way to the moon within a few more, seemed like too far out a prediction even for a visionary writer of fiction.

But what would have seemed even more fantastic was the notion that, having landed men on the moon in the late sixties, the last one would trod on the regolith a few years later, and there would be no return for half a century. That was beyond science fiction, into the realm of dystopian fantasy.

As Rand notes, "Yet, in part because of the Sputnik panic, that's exactly what happened." Read the whole thing.

And for own look at NASA's all-too-brief golden days, click here.

“The only moon landing in history is NASA’s Apollo expedition in 1968.”

Via Hot Air; more here.

Don't let Buzz hear about this!

(And in case AFP's editors are reading and they'd like to quickly bone up on NASA's golden age, here's a great place to start. Read the article, watch the DVDs, repeat the dosage as needed.)

I'm not sure if duct tape is The Force that holds the entire universe together, but it appears to be holding the Space Shuttle together, at least.

(And lord knows it needs it. For our look back at NASA's better days, click here.)

"Have you ever noticed that the sole mission of the Space Shuttle is to do more repairs on the Space Shuttle?"

This Salon article by Steve Paulson titled, "The Religious State Of Islamic Science" begins:

In October, Malaysia's first astronaut will join a Russian crew and blast off into space. The news of a Muslim astronaut was cause for celebration in the Islamic world, but then certain questions started popping up. How will he face Mecca during his five daily prayers while his space ship is whizzing around the Earth? How can he hold the prayer position in zero gravity? Such concerns may sound absurd to us, but the Malaysian space chief is taking them quite seriously. A team of Muslim scholars and scientists has spent more than a year drawing up an Islamic code of conduct for space travel.

Which, at least to me, strongly implies that Malaysia's first astronaut is also Islam's first astronaut. But Sultan bin Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud, who went up on a Space Shuttle mission in 1985, and at least according to Wikipedia (I think they're actually correct on this one, for a change) was the first Muslim in space. And the Iranian-American Anousheh Ansari is also Muslim, at least according to my intensive research efforts (i.e., a few minutes of Googling).

Paulson's introductory paragraph appears tacked on, possibly at the editor's request, to make his interview (which is pretty fascinating stuff) with Taner Edis, the author of An Illusion of Harmony: Science and Religion in Islam a bit more timely. I'm not sure why it doesn't mention the previous two Islamic astronauts, though.

Update: While I mainly focused on the article's lead, Ace gives it one hit to the body:

Hey, Christian conservatives? You want to win your creationism cases? Start bringing in Muslim creationists. And watch your liberal opponents suddenly finding it much more plausible that God -- or, rather, Allah -- created the earth, the animals, and humans directly.

To paraphrase a prominent resident of Springfield, It's depressing because it's true.

Hint: Martin Landau and Keir Dullea won't be getting too excited by the meager designs currently on the drawing boards.

Charles Krauthammer boldly goes where no man has gone before: defending druken astronauts:

Have you ever been to the shuttle launch pad? Have you ever seen that beautiful and preposterous thing the astronauts ride? Imagine it’s you sitting on top of a 12-story winged tube bolted to a gigantic canister filled with 2 million liters of liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen. Then picture your own buddies — the “closeout crew” — who met you at the pad, fastened your emergency chute, strapped you into your launch seat, sealed the hatch and waved smiling to you through the window. Having left you lashed to what is the largest bomb on planet Earth, they then proceed 200 feet down the elevator and drive not one, not two, but three miles away to watch as the button is pressed that lights the candle that ignites the fuel that blows you into space.

Three miles! That’s how far they calculate they must be to be beyond the radius of incineration should anything go awry on the launch pad on which, I remind you, these insanely brave people are sitting. Would you not want to be a bit soused? Would you be all aflutter if you discovered that a couple of astronauts — out of dozens — were mildly so? I dare say that if the standards of today’s fussy flight surgeons had been applied to pilots showing up for morning duty in the Battle of Britain, the signs in Piccadilly would today be in German.

Cut these cowboys some slack. These are not wobbly Northwest Airlines pilots trying to get off the runway and steer through clouds and densely occupied airspace. An ascending space shuttle, I assure you, encounters very little traffic. And for much of liftoff, the astronaut is little more than spam in a can — not pilot but guinea pig. With opposable thumbs, to be sure, yet with only one specific task: to come out alive.

And by the time the astronauts get to the part of the journey that requires delicate and skillful maneuvering — docking with the international space station, outdoor plumbing repairs in Zero G — they will long ago have peed the demon rum into their recycling units.

Would anyone have complained if the astronauts were narcotized via preflight tranquilizers instead of moonshine?

Actually, low Earth orbit-shine, but still.

Roger L. Simon explains to PBS that everything is biased in one form or another:

It's well known by now that PBS has excluded the documentary Islam vs. Islamists: Voices From the Muslim Center from its American Crossroads series from reasons of "bias."

As an American citizen and as a filmmaker, I find this despicable censorship. It is also based on an absurdly obvious lie:

All movies are biased. The form itself is biased. The camera is a pen, as the French auteur theorists correctly told us decades ago. Movie-making, documentary or not, is done through selection via script, camera and editing and those selections are made by wholly biased human beings. There has never been an unbiased film ever, not even Andy Warhol's experiments, because the Warhol himself picked who he put in front of the camera and where he put them before setting his actors free.

And the biased nature of film has been known practically since the medium's inception when early Soviet filmmakers like Dovzhenko demonstrated editing by visual association. In fact, it is arguable that films that appear to be less biased are more biased through the pretense of even-handedness - although perhaps this is over the heads of the bourgeois middlebrows at Public Broadcasting.

Nevertheless, one thing is clear: what the nabobs of PBS are objecting to is not bias at all, it is a bias they don't like. They are censoring an opinion - that's it. This makes them reactionaries - and cowards. Shame.

It's not entirely surprising that PBS is being reactionary, as the network was one of the last creations of the era of mass media. And obviously, their executives still cling to beliefs that existed when it was birthed by the Johnson administration 40 years ago. A lot's changed in the now demassified information world since then--including this: a review of the documentary that the Great Society's network doesn't want you to see.

The only man to fly into space in a Mercury, Gemini and Apollo spacecraft passed away at age 84.

For our TCS Daily look back at NASA's golden era, click here.

Before Boris Yeltsin passed away, he would have been amused at how long the Soviet Union's existence seemed to linger on in the minds of nostalgic liberal journalists. Two weeks before MSNBC's very public meltdown in judgment last week, Frank Martin noticed this mental holiday from whoever writes its Website's headlines. But hey, fair is fair--the Internet headline writer over at Dan Rather's CBS believed that the Soviet Union was in existence less than three years ago!

Glenn Reynolds writes that space is "the next frontier for advertising", linking to this Wall Street Journal report:

California Rep. Ken Calvert, ranking Republican on a House Science subcommittee overseeing NASA programs, surprised an industry conference in Colorado Springs, Colo., by announcing plans to introduce a bill that would make “NASA space assets available for commercial advertising and marketing opportunities.” If that ever becomes law, companies and universities might be able to market themselves by plastering logos on equipment or sponsoring equipment such as cameras on the International Space Station.

The revenues, ultimately reaching perhaps $100 million, would be used to build up a self-sustaining prize fund to honor space innovations by entrepreneurs. Calvert said his aim is to increase public awareness of manned space exploration programs without spending taxpayer money. The congressman suggested it could evolve into “an advertising system” similar to those used by public radio and the Smithsonian Institution “which have long-term, dedicated and tasteful sponsorship” arrangements.

Why worry about tasteful? Like the side of a stock car, there's plenty of room for advertising on the Space Shuttle's booster tank, and it's disposable.

Right from the start, Star Trek always has had plenty of commercials, hasn't it? And there were numerous brand names visible in 2001: A Space Odyssey.

In the 1984 update to his epochal 1962 book, Profiles of the Future, Arthur C. Clarke had a chapter titled "Cosmic Engineering", with a couple of paragraphs in which he explored the idea of orbiting mirrors (they're on page 232-233 of my battered paperback, if you have the same edition):

The idea of ‘orbiting mirrors’ was suggested by Hermann Oberth as long ago as 1925. He pointed out that reflectors miles wide could be made from very small amounts of material such as films of metallic sodium. (Today, aluminized Mylar would be a good candidate.) Something like this might even have happened back in the 1960s. There was a time when the Pentagon seriously considered abolishing night in Vietnam. Only a few Saturn Vs, it was calculated, would be necessary to do the job…

(Elipses for dramatic effect in original.) Beyond providing illumination a war zone, there are other obvious benefits to erecting an orbiting mirror, Clarke wrote:

More constructively, orbiting mirrors might greatly increase agricultural yields (24-hour-day crop growing), alleviate climatic extremes by pumping heat into cold areas, perhaps even direct movement of rain clouds and establish a form of weather control. These would be great benefits; but as usual, there would be a price to pay.

Imagine the combined howls of the anti-war and then-nascent environmental left if there actually was a giant mirror orbited over Vietnam, and the hue and cry of the latter group still to come, if and when an orbiting mirror is ever deployed purely for agricultural or climatic purposes.

But the Associated Press is cheerfully reporting on a negative image version of an orbiting mirror, as it explores combating some of the more apocalyptic envirodoom scenarios--or with a name the "Solar Umbrella", maybe it's more akin to a plot dreamed up by Batman's arch-villain, The Penguin:

For far-out concepts, it's hard to beat Roger Angel's.

Last fall, the University of Arizona astronomer proposed what he called a "sun shade." It would be a cloud of small Frisbee-like spaceships that go between Earth and the sun and act as an umbrella, reducing heat from the sun.

"It really is just like turning down the knob by 2 percent of what's coming from the sun," he said.

The science for the ships, the rocketry to launch them, and the materials to make the shade are all doable, Angel said.

These nearly flat discs would each weigh less than an ounce and measure about a yard wide with three tab-like "ears" that are controllers sticking out just a few inches.

About 800,000 of these would be stacked into each rocket launch. It would take 16 trillion of them — that's a million million — so there would be 20 million launches of rockets. All told, Angel figures 20 million tons of material to make the discs that together form the solar umbrella.

And then there's the cost: at least $4 trillion over 30 years, probably more.

"I compare it with sending men to Mars.I think they're both projects on the same scale," Angel said. "Given the danger to Earth, I think this project might warrant some fraction of the consideration of sending people to Mars."

Close the global umbrellas--prevent global darkening!

(Via Newsbusters.)

NASA Clips Lisa Nowak's astronaut wings.

Update: Could this be her potential perfect mate?

"Duct-Tape, Tranquilizers Part Of NASA's Plan For Mentally Unstable Astronauts In Space".

Buzz Aldrin writes:

On my last trip to the moon I didn’t get to stay the whole day and had to share my accommodations with another man. If I could go back, I would expect not only a larger room, but a longer moment to gaze at the stars and the cloudy blue ball that should only be mankind’s starter home.

As someone once said, "Man Must Explore".

"As another famous pilot once said, 'a trench coat and wig and, a knife, BB pistol, rubber tubing and plastic bags....Gosh, a feller could have a pretty good time in Vegas with all that stuff.'"

Here's a story that sounds like a subplot that was left on the cutting room floor of Moonraker, or maybe the old UFO TV series:

Lisa Marie Nowak, 43, is (or perhaps was) an active Space Shuttle astronaut, who was a mission specialist on a Discovery launch last summer. She was arrested at Orlando International Airport today on attempted kidnapping and battery charges, "after police say she attacked her rival for another astronaut's attention", according to the Orlando Sentinel.

Ooooooohkaaay. Here's a plot that Law & Order or CSI: Miami certainly wouldn't have dreamed up on their own:

Nowak drove more than 12 hours from Texas to meet the 1 a.m. flight of a younger woman who had also been seeing the astronaut Nowak pined for, according to Orlando police.

Nowak -- who was a mission specialist on a Discovery launch last summer -- was wearing a trench coat and wig and had a knife, BB pistol, and latex gloves in her car, reports show. They also found diapers, which Nowak said she used so she wouldn't have to stop on the 1,000-mile drive. Reports show that after U.S. Air Force Capt. Colleen Shipman's flight arrived, Nowak followed her to the airport's Blue Lot for long-term parking, tried to get into Shipman's car and then doused her with pepper spray.

Nowak, 43, is charged with attempted kidnapping, battery, attempted vehicle burglary with battery and destruction of evidence. Police considered her such a danger that they requested she be held without bail in the Orange County Jail, reports show.

A married mother of three, Nowak told police that she was "involved in a relationship with," Bill Oefelein, another NASA astronaut, which she categorized as "more than a working relationship but less than a romantic relationship," according to the charging affidavit.

Oefelein, who piloted the most recent shuttle Discovery flight in December, could not be reached Monday night at home in Houston.

Given all of the recent attention that the first efforts towards privatizing manned spaceflight had been getting, this sounds like just what the doctor (McCoy, or Crusher, I guess) ordered to get NASA's PR machine back on track!

Or not.

Update: I guess there's a bright side to this story, in a way. We're one step closer to living in Star Trek, in that, when everyone's an astronaut, or at least space travel is commonplace, such stories are bound to start proliferating.

We've come a long way though, from the early days of NASA, when Henry Luce of Time and Life went to such enormous lengths to make the original Mercury 7 astronauts appear as clean cut and wholesome as boy scouts to preserve their mythic, heroic status. This story is an effective bookend to that innocence of NASA's heady early days.

Another Update: Ed Morrissey adds:

NASA will have some work to do to deconstruct all of the ways in which this trio managed to embarrass the program in such a tawdry way. They'd better be quick about it, though, because this is the most eligible story for TV moviedom since a cheerleader's mom tried to find a hitman for the mother of a rival.

But only if they get the special effects right. Industrial Light & Magic--time to fire up that blue screen again!

One More: More here.

AP reports:

The Bush administration warned Wednesday against threats by terrorist groups and other nations against U.S. commercial and military satellites, and discounted the need for a treaty aimed at preventing an arms race in space.

Considering how much of the world's communication is carried via satellite, it's far from an idle concern. Heck, when I interviewed Alvin Toffler immediately after 9/11, he was discussing the threat back then.

Ed Driscoll.com: Five years into the future! Err, sometimes, at least.

Update: More here.

Allah explores Iranian science fiction and finds it blandly going where Mel Brooks has gone before. Me? I think this Iranian-born astronaut is far more interesting. As I wrote a couple of months ago:

I wonder if the mullahs back home, and her fellow Iranian women are aware of these images, and the power of their symbolism.

No wonder they'd rather crank out grade-Z sci-fi propaganda instead.

Not sure how things are in Darth Vader's neck of the woods, but down here, Pajamas writes that a dueling battle over orbital defense is coming to planet Congress next year: "Democrats to Gut Missile Defense / Bush to Announce 'Orbital Battle Station'".

Fresh off her successful mission as the world's first female space tourist, first female Muslim, and first Iranian in space, pioneer Iranian-American astronaut Anousheh Ansari (a.k.a., the "Hot Interstellar Millionaire Iranian Babe In Space", as one clearly crazed blogger once described her), has updated the photo section of her Website. It now includes a slideshow featuring several photos of her firing an impressive looking rifle of some sort.

I wonder if the mullahs back home, and her fellow Iranian women are aware of these images, and the power of their symbolism.

20 years ago, Arthur C. Clarke looked ahead to the 50th anniversary of man's landing on the Moon and wrote a "Letter From Clavius" dated July 20th, 2019:

It doesn’t seem like fifty years—but I cannot be sure which memories are false, and which are real.

Present and past are inextricably entangled. The monitor screen has just shown the ceremony at Tranquillity Base, culminating with the third hoisting of the American flag. It was blown down, of course, by the blast of Eagle’s ascent stage, and lay there on the trampled Moon soil for thirty-six years until the Apollo Historical Committee reerected it. Then the big quake of 2009 knocked it down again; this time, we’re assured, it would take a direct hit by a fair-sized meteor to lower it.

Now, immediately after the live transmission from Tranquillity, they’ve put on a grainy old tape—yes, tape, not vidule!—from exactly half a century ago. And there I am back in the CBS Studio on West 57th Street with dear old Walter Cronkite and. wise-cracking Wally Schirra, watching Neil Armstrong take that first step off the ladder.

For the hundredth time, I strain my ears. Neil Armstrong once told me (and by then he must have been heartily fed up with the whole subject), “What I intended to say was: ‘That’s one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind.’ And that’s what I thought I said."

Sorry, Neil—you fluffed! The “a” got short-circuited between brain and tongue. But it doesn’t matter; this time, at least, history has been correctly reedited.

--From Clarke's July 20, 2019: Life in the 21st Century, published in 1986.

Fast-forward to the present, and an article titled, "One small word is one giant sigh of relief for Armstrong" in England's Times Online, dated October 2nd:

Mr Armstrong has long insisted that he meant to say “one small step for a man . . .” — which would have been a more meaningful and grammatically correct version, free of tautology. But even the astronaut himself could not be sure.

“Damn, I really did it. I blew the first words on the Moon, didn’t I?” he is reported to have asked officials later, amid uncertainty as to whether he had blown the moment or simply been drowned out by static interference as his words were relayed 250,000 miles back to Earth.

Now, after almost four decades, the spaceman has been vindicated. Using high-tech sound analysis techniques, an Australian computer expert has rediscovered the missing “a” in Mr Armstrong’s famous quote. Peter Shann Ford ran the Nasa recording through sound-editing software and clearly picked up an acoustic wave from the word “a”, finding that Mr Armstrong spoke it at a rate of 35 milliseconds — ten times too fast for it to be audible.

Mr Ford’s findings have been presented to Nasa officials in Washington and to a relieved Mr Armstrong, who issued a statement saying: “I find the technology interesting and useful. I also find his conclusion persuasive.”

Now if we could just get that moonbase built on Clavius...

No, that isn't spam for Internet pr0n or some '50s sci-fi B-movie. Glenn Reynolds links to photos of Anousheh Ansari, set to become "the first female Muslim in space, first Iranian-born person in space, and the first female space tourist on September 18, 2006", according to her Wikipedia profile.

As the Professor writes, "Bin Laden wouldn't like this". But I bet P.J. O'Rourke does.

As Curmudgeons Corner notes, Gene Cernan, the last man on the moon, is happy to write about the program "that will finally deprive him of that dubious honor":

With a single announcement from NASA last week, the nation took a giant leap forward in realizing its plans to return humans to the Moon by 2020 and then press on to Mars and destinations beyond — known in space policy circles as the Vision for Space Exploration.

The announcement proclaimed that Lockheed Martin will build the replacement for the space shuttle, a cone-shaped crew exploration vehicle designed to take astronauts into and out of Earth orbit, as a prelude to voyaging once again to the moon.

NASA has dubbed the new spacecraft project Orion, following in the tradition of projects Mercury, Gemini and Apollo of the 1960s and 1970s. Orion will borrow the best from our country's nearly 50 years of space experience and combine it with 21st century technology for this new and challenging venture.

The result is expected to be a new vehicle that is more robust than Apollo, less expensive to operate than the space shuttle and safer to fly than any other capsule or winged space plane flown so far. First flight of Orion with a crew on board is targeted for 2014, but NASA hopes to find a way to move that up to as early as 2012.

Yes, the thought of modern-day NASA actually meeting deadlines, let alone pushing them up puts a wry grin on my face as well. And for better or worse, it's a stageringly safe bet that this Project Orion won't be using the same propulsion system as the original Project Orion.

Tom Elia has some thoughts on Anousheh Ansari, the Iranian-born U.S. citizen who is about to become the world's first female space tourist three days after the fifth anniversary of 9/11:

As the grandson myself of an immigrant from what is now present-day Iran, I can't help but notice the irony in the fact that the first female space tourist is a US citizen from Iran, a country today under an extremist Islamist leadership that would rather keep its women veiled, uneducated, and under the thumb of 11th Century fanatics than to train them to create new medicines, advance new technologies, or generally improve the lot of its people, let alone try to send one of its own people (man or woman) into space.

It's an irony that speaks volumes....

Absolutely.

(Via Betsy Newmark.)

The Discovery successfully blasted off from Cape Canaveral a half hour ago. As Reuters notes, one of its mission objectives is to test "the shuttle's troubled fuel tank". Which highlights one of the many enormous problems with this antiquated and dangerous vehicle: there have been over 100 previous launches. Shouldn't they have gotten it right long before now?

It's time for NASA to simplify things and go back to the future. And eventually get the government out of the manned space business as much as possible.

Update: Unfortunately, the Space Shuttle wasn't the only vehicle launched towards space today...

In his syndicated column, James Lileks raises some entirely tongue-in-space helmet concerns about NASA's proposal to implement Frank J's Realistic Plan For World Peace:

In another baseless act of unjustified aggression, the United States has announced plans to launch an attack on the moon.

NASA says it will crash a rocket into innocent Luna in 2009, looking for water. It will hit the poor rock so hard that we will see the explosion here on Earth. Good Lord, why not put Pennzoil stickers on the rocket for that NASCAR touch, and launch the strike when the moon's in a crescent phase so we can infuriate the Muslim world?

This is so typical. So American. We're not content destroying this planet -- we have to go out of our way to ruin the moon with phallic-shaped devices. Why don't we drill for oil in the pristine Venusian swamps while we're at it? Sure, it's a barren, poisonous deathscape -- but a decent nation would spend billions to put caribou on another planet, just to make sure it's never exploited for its natural resources.

If you're not spending sleepless nights worrying whether the batteries on our Martian rovers may leak and contaminate the water we think we found, you're just not paying attention.

To return to the immediate crisis: Why the moon? Lunarians were not involved in 9/11. Don't tell me: That's where Saddam hid the WMD, or got some yellowcake. In any case, it's a distraction from the failing economy, what with jobless rates hitting a new low ... no, that's not it. It's a distraction from the American casualties in Iraq, which have been falling for five straight months ... hold on, we'll get it.

Ah! It's a cover for the United States' devious plans, revealed by super-patriot Seymour Hersh, to nuke Iran. The anti-moon missile goes up, falls on Iran, we say "my bad," and that's the end of that chapter.

Listen up: If George W. Bush wants to go to the moon, then going to the moon is wrong. The MOON is wrong.

Hey, he wouldn't be the first person to come to that conclusion.

Frank J.'s brilliant 2003 "Realistic Plan For World Peace" comes another step closer to implementation.

Update: Elsewhere, Glenn Reynolds turns Cruz Bustamante's MEChA-madness on its head: "Annex Mexico?"

"Microsoft Unveils Ultracompact Computer".

And speaking of the Final Frontier, Drudge writes that NASA's Cassini spacecraft:

may have found evidence of liquid water reservoirs that erupt in Yellowstone-like geysers on Saturn's moon Enceladus. The rare occurrence of liquid water so near the surface raises many new questions about the mysterious moon.

My God, it's full of stars!

(Sorry, wrong sci-fi franchise.)

I've done a few pieces on Spacecraft Films (including two for Blogcritics and one for TCS Daily), which for the past four years have been archiving in DVD form the voluminous footage that NASA shot during their glory days in the 1960s and early 1970s. But I've never spoken to Mark Gray, the company's founder before today. It was (at least from my point of view) a terrific interview; look for this piece on dead tree in the coming months--I'll keep you posted.

(In the meantime, be sure to check out the links above if this is a subject that's at all of interest to you.)

With the Soviet Union thankfully dead and buried, Russian cosmonauts and their families are now free to express their religious faith--and do so in a big way, including a handsome new Russian Orthodox church near the Baikonur Cosmodrome, long the home of the Russian space program.

Found via NRO's Corner, which notes that if you scroll down a bit through the MSNBC story, you'll also see "an unforgettable clip of a smiling U.S. astronaut in one of the Russian service modules, showing an icon on the module wall".

I'm writing an article in which I might quote a famous aphorism by Russian space pioneer Konstantin Tsiolkovsky. But if I do a Google search on "Tsiolkovsky" and "Cradle", it's amazing how many variations I get on it:

"Earth is the cradle of humanity, but one cannot live in a cradle forever."

"Earth is the cradle of humanity, but one cannot remain in the cradle forever."

"The Earth is the cradle of the mind, but we cannot live forever in a cradle".

"Earth is the cradle of humanity but one cannot live in the cradle forever"

"The earth is the cradle of mankind - one cannot remain in the cradle forever"

"The Earth is the cradle of humanity, but mankind cannot stay in the cradle forever"

And that's just a sampling from the first page of the Google search. I wonder what's the closet English translation to what Tsiolkovsky actually wrote?

I guess all of the variations are a combination of translating a quote from Russian to English, along with people typing quotes from memory (which is how Bogie's "Play it, Sam" became "Play it again, Sam!" and other movie quotes become misheard and paraphrased), plus filtering old quotes through whatever the current PC-filtering requires (replacing "mankind" with "humanity", for example).

I wonder how many other famous quotes from history have become similarly mangled over time, much like the famous E Plebnista...

The Space Shuttle lands safely in California.

And hopefully for the last time.

That's a question that Investor's Business Daily asks in its "Issues & Insights" column:

Read More »

Shades of the Muppets' old "Pigs In Space" routine! Here's a headline and story you don't see everyday:

China to send pig semen into space
By Daniel Brillman
Jul. 17, 2005 at 7:39PM

Jul. 17 (UPI) — China is hoping to learn what, if any, effect cosmic rays have on sperm by sending pig semen into space, the BBC reports.

Around 40 grams of semen from high-pedigree pigs will accompany two astronauts on an October orbital mission, and will be kept both inside and outside the Shenzhou VI spacecraft.

Sperm that survives the voyage will be tested for effects of microgravity and used to fertilize eggs. The semen is from the Rongchang breed of pig, prized for its high quality of meat and physical characteristics.

China became the third nation to send a human into space, after the United States and Russia, two years ago.

My wife reminds me that this is important stuff: "If we go into space I want to know I'm going to get good BLTs", she said in response to this story.

Makes sense to me! Link Hogthrob could not be reached for comment, though.

But we did get through to Homer Simpson. He responded with a long, low, "Mmmmmm....bacon...", before getting back to his efforts to modify donuts for time travel.

Had D-Day not gone according to plan, General Eisenhower had prepared a speech in which he assumed full responsibility for its failure. Fortunately, he never had to give it.

Similarly, Bill Safire was tasked by the Nixon White House to write a speech that no one hoped President Nixon would actually have to read:

"To: H.R. Haldeman," reads the memo dated July 18, 1969. "From: Bill Safire." The subject: "IN EVENT OF MOON DISASTER."

The Apollo 11 astronauts had lifted off at 9:32 a.m. July 16 from pad 39A at the Kennedy Space Center, embarking on a mission that spanned nine days. Commander Neil Armstrong and pilot Edwin E. "Buzz" Aldrin were preparing to separate the lunar module Eagle from the command ship Columbia, and descend to the moon's surface. What if they were stranded there? Inside Richard Nixon's White House, chief of staff Haldeman considered that possibility. And so Safire penned a speech of 233 words no one wanted to hear:

"Fate has ordained that the men who went to the moon to explore in peace will stay on the moon to rest in peace," Safire would have had Nixon say. "Others will follow, and surely find their way home. Man's search will not be denied. But these men were the first, and they will remain the foremost in our hearts.

"For every human being who looks up at the moon in the nights to come will know that there is some corner of another world that is forever mankind."

A protocol was established: Nixon would call the "widows-to-be" before speaking to the nation. NASA would cut communications with the astronauts. And then, the memo went on to say, "a clergyman should adopt the same procedure as a burial at sea, commending their souls to `the deepest of the deep,' concluding with the Lord's Prayer."

But tragedy was not to be Apollo 11's fate.

I wonder how many other speeches have been prepared over the years, planned carefully enough so that they'd be up to the task if needed, but whose writers prayed they were never needed?

Glenn Reynolds (who was kind enough to link this post earlier today.) has been tracking over the past couple of days the first attempt at building a spacecraft that's long been the dream of science fiction enthusiasts: a solar sailer:

In an effort to promote space exploration, a private group plans today to launch the first spacecraft to sail in Earth orbit on the solar wind.

If successful, the mission will provide scientific proof for a concept that has captivated science fiction for decades - that ships can travel great distances across the heavens under the power of giant solar sails nudged by the faint energy of light itself.

Glenn notes today that its had a successful launch. As he says, "So far, so good."

For our look at earlier, slightly more brute force-style spacecraft, click here.

Update: The solar sailing mission may have entered its quagmire phase...

Ralphie is the beloved, bespectacled bobble-headed mascot of Minnesota's Northern Alliance Radio Network, based on his looking much like Hugh Hewitt (if Hugh himself was a 13-inch tall polystyrene bobblehead doll). And he's just gone where no bobblehead doll has gone before: almost a mile in the air.

Chalk up another success for America's other rocket program!

Glenn Reynolds links to this Popular Mechanics illustration of a potential Space Shuttle replacement designed by Lockheed-Martin.

The design makes a lot of sense, at least to this layman: it simplifies the shuttle by seperating the crew module from a mission module that can be modified and changed out for various missions, and rather than gliding down to a rolling stop on a runway, uses parachutes to slow its decent.

I can't help but think that this fellow had the right idea for another successor to the shuttle: dust off the technology from the Apollo program.

It's proven, it's simple (compared to the shuttle) and after Apollo 1, it worked pretty darn reliably--it even survived being struck by lightning on Apollo 12, and the explosion on Apollo 13.

NASA could always use the shuttle derivative for more complex missions, and the Apollo derivative for simply ferrying crews to and from the ISS or its successor.

Will Collier of VodkaPundit notes that today is the 35th anniversary of the splashdown of Apollo 13, and links to a nifty article on the engineers who manned Apollo 13's Mission Control.

Charles Murray and Catherine Bly Cox wrote a terrific book about 15 years ago called Apollo, which focused on Mission Control and the rest of the "behind the scenes" crew at NASA who designed and safely flew not just Apollo's manned missions (and recovered and learned from the horrific fire that killed the crew of Apollo 1), but all of the test flights that led up to the moon landings. Naturally, there's particular attention paid to Mission Control's role in Apollo 13. The authors quote several men who worked Mission Control who all said that as important as Apollo 11 was, the successful conclusion to Apollo 13 was the program's finest hour.

I purchased Murray and Cox's book when it was first published as a lark one day in a South Jersey shopping mall while killing time on a lunch break, only to eventually discover a few years ago that because it was out of print, it was selling for over a hundred dollars via used booksellers. Fortunately, it's back in publication--and I highly recommend it.

I have a piece on Spacecraft Films' encyclopedic DVDs of the Apollo program over at Tech Central Station.

It will probably eventually be changed, but check out the headline that's currently on this CBS story:

U.S.-Soviet Crew For Space Station

Italics mine; lack of knowledge that the Soviet Union is no more definitely CBS's.

Nice historical accuracy there, guys!

(Via Little Green Footballs.)

By the late 1960s, many felt that Rand's writing was entering a period of decline. But she wrote a great essay praising Apollo 11, and justifying the space program from a libertarian perspective.

If it isn't a feminist issue, apparently the Library of Congress thinks it doesn't count, according to Joanne Jacobs. Jacobs notes that the moon landing didn't make the Library of Congress's Today in History page--nor did the plot to kill Hitler in 1944, which also occurred on this date.

In other lunar news, Adam Keiper looks at President Bush's revolution at NASA.

Today's the 35th anniversary of landing man on the moon. But another famous story happened in late July of 1969 as well.

Well actually tomorrow--that man landed on the moon for the first time, as Ronald Bailey notes, bemoaning the cost to taxpayers of the New Frontier's final hurrah.

One of the best ways to relive the event is via Spacecraft Films' recent comprehensive DVDs. Be sure to check out our reviews of them.

Update: On the other hand, was it all a fake? Carefully documented evidence such as this lends new credence to the theory!

Bart Howard only wrote one hit song in his lifetime. As Mark Steyn writes, it was the only one that he needed:

In 1969, Buzz Aldrin took a portable tape player up there with him, and “Fly Me To The Moon” became the first moon song to get to the moon itself. “The first music played on the moon,” said Quincy Jones [who arranged Sinatra's definitive version]. “I freaked.”

Steyn adds:

Had any other nation beaten NASA to it, they’d have marked the occasion with the “Ode To Joy” or Also Sprach Zarathustra, something grand and formal. But there’s something very American about Buzz Aldrin standing on the surface of the moon with his cassette machine.

Exactly.

I had requested review copies of Apollo 11: Men On The Moon and their upcoming disc on the Saturn V from Spaceflight Films, and while I'll have a more detailed review eventually online, my first impression is that if you're at all a fan of the space program, run, don't walk to your local store (I saw them at Target this past weekend), or buy them online from Amazon.

This is absolute space geek nirvana.

The Apollo 11 package arrived today, apparently, they'll be shipping the review copy of the Saturn V disc as it gets closer to its release.

I was just young enough to not remember firsthand much of the Apollo missions, with the exception of the last one, Apoll