Ideas!

Tonight after supper, 10-year-old Sarah and I designed an exploration mission to Jupiter that would involve hundreds or thousands of tiny weather balloons fitted out with cameras and instruments to report data back to a few orbiting satellites, which would send the data back to Earth.

Then we fleshed out a story idea involving Girl Scouts on Mars - third-generation Martian girls whose grandparents had been among the first settlers of Mars later this century. The story might involve a trip to Earth, like current-day American scout trips to Europe.

I love being a Daddy :-)

Imagine that

A complex bloated half-century old government bureaucracy can't get things done on time and under budget. Who'da thunk?

Hey, I know - let's put a complex bloated government bureaucracy in charge of health care!

Eremitical astronauts

There's some talk about setting up a one-way mission to Mars - a lone astronaut heads there to stay. That simplifies the whole man-to-Mars problem, and it also complicates it: no ordinary person is sane enough to withstand the spiritual and psychological rigors of solitary life on another planet.

That's a job for a person whose life is designed to be lived in isolation and in union with God - Camaldolese or Benedictine hermits, for example. Heck, you could probably get a largish crew of educated and trained Benedictine monks (or Carthusian or Camaldolese, etc.) to do the job and establish the first monastery on another planet. It would at least make a cool premise for a sci-fi novel.

The story of Corona mission #1005

Or, Venezuelan farmers find a high-tech American spy satellite in 1964.

Did Mike Collins talk them into this?

Calling all Command Module pilots: in the Apollo lunar program, one unlucky guy got to stay in orbit around the moon while the other two landed, got out and had fun. You had to keep a guy in orbit in case the lunar lander didn't make it all the way back to the command module - the guy left behind in the CM would then have to find the lander and dock with it in lunar orbit.

For next time, NASA's looking into an automated search-and-dock ability in the command module so all the guys can go have fun on the moon. Then if the lander doesn't make it all the way back to orbit the CM can hunt them down itself. Pretty cool stuff.

On the difficulties of lunar orbit insertion

Here's a good little essay on a difficult task that NASA made look easy: entering lunar orbit for an Apollo landing.

Last call for Hubble

NASA is planning the last repair mission to the Hubble Space Telescope.

On saving space junk

A neat interview with Alice Gorman (aka Dr Space Junk) of Flinders University in Adelaide, Australia, about the junk orbiting the earth.