Space | Futurismic

Virgin Galactic declines to take Rule 34 to space - suborbital sex movies delayed

Paul Raven @ 03-10-2008

Say what you like about Richard Branson, but the man’s got standards and he sticks to ‘em. One of those standards would appear to be not corrupting his brands with what some punters might consider to be unsavoury business… at least that’s my guess after hearing that Virgin Galactic have declined an up-front offer of US$1 million cash to film the first* zero-G pr0n movie on SpaceShipTwo.

Who says ethics and entrepreneurship are incompatible, eh? Looks like Rule 34 as applied to zero-G will have to rely on camera tricks and cartoons for a while longer. [via SlashDot]

[ * - Well, the first one featuring humans, at least. ]

Falcon flying free - SpaceX finally make it to orbit

Paul Raven @ 29-09-2008

For my fellow dreamers in the audience, here’s a little something to momentarily take your mind off financial instruments, presidential debates and environmental doom:

From the press release:

SpaceX announces that Flight 4 of the Falcon 1 launch vehicle has successfully launched and achieved Earth orbit. With this key milestone, Falcon 1 becomes the first privately developed liquid fuel rocket to orbit the Earth.

“This is a great day for SpaceX and the culmination of an enormous amount of work by a great team,” said Elon Musk, CEO and CTO of SpaceX. “The data shows we achieved a super precise orbit insertion—middle of the bull’s-eye — and then went on to coast and restart the second stage, which was icing on the cake.”

Watching that makes me feel that - as a species - we’re pretty awesome. It’s just a shame we can’t stop arguing over which subgroups of the species are more awesome than the others… what might we achieve then?

[Story via pretty much everywhere; video first seen at Warren Ellis's gaff]

(Water) bears… in… spaaaaace!

Paul Raven @ 09-09-2008

water bear (tardigrade) Maybe you took that recent opportunity to determine how long you personally would survive in the hard cold vacuum of space, but it’s a very safe bet that you didn’t rack up a whole ten days. [image from Wikimedia Commons]

That particular accolade goes to the tiny invertebrate animals known as “water bears” (or more correctly tardigrades). Examples of two species of the little critters were launched from Kazakhstan in a satellite and subsequently exposed to the vacuum for ten days, after which 68% were successfully rehydrated and went on to live exactly as normal. It appears they can take the vacuum in their stride, though the UV radiation is a bit of a problem.

I wonder if sea monkeys can survive in space? I remember my mum telling me that mine had to go away while I’d been at school… perhaps they went to catch a rocket in Kazakhstan?

The Arches of Methone and Other Stories

Tom Marcinko @ 06-09-2008

arcs The novel I’m shopping around begins on the moon of a ringed gas giant. You’d better believe that in the next draft, that moon is going to have gorgeous arcs like the ones the Cassini spacecraft imaging team recently found gracing Saturn’s moons Anthe and Methone.

[Image: CICLOPS; tip: io9]

Postcards from Enceladus

Paul Raven @ 13-08-2008

We interrupt our normal broadcasting to bring you… some space pr0n.

If you’re getting a bit worn down by the trouble and strife here on Earth (and who could blame you?), maybe you’ll get some refreshing respite from five minutes gawping at the landscape of the Saturnine moon Enceladus as captured by the Cassini probe:

landscape of the moon Enceladus

The above image [courtesy NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute] was taken from less than a thousand miles above Enceladus’ surface. Just think - in the space of a month we’ve confirmed water on Mars and seen the surface of a distant moon that may also have the potential to harbour life.

OK, back to the grind. Think about it too long, and it gets hard to come back to Earth…

I still think it ain’t gonna rain any time soon, though

Paul Raven @ 31-07-2008

OK, so I guess I’d better publicly apologise for my previous bitching on the subject, but I only said those things because I care.

So… now that we actually have concrete evidence for water on Mars, how’s about we all get together and start exploring the place properly, eh?

Virgin Galactic unveils WhiteKnightTwo space-plane

Paul Raven @ 29-07-2008

I’m guessing that if you have any interest in commercial space travel, you’ve already had a bit of a swoon over the pictures of WhiteKnightTwo, the Virgin Galactic launch vehicle unveiled yesterday by Richard “Virgin” Branson and Burt “SpaceShipOne” Rutan.

Still, no one’s gonna object to me reposting one from the Wired coverage, I assume:

Richard Branson exiting the Virgin Galactic WhiteKnightTwo launch vehicle

Very pretty. I was disappointed to find that my press invite to the unveiling must have gotten lost in the mail*, but BoingBoing’s own Xeni Jardin was there with a camera crew, and she’s promising video footage imminently, so I won’t miss out entirely.

In the meantime: Rutan and Branson in white shirts with no ties against a pale blue sky - could the Wired snapper have made those images any more simultaneously secular and messianic than they already are? And who does sensawunda PR work better than Branson, other than science fiction authors? Discuss.

[ * - The same thing happened to my VIP ComicCon passes and complementary Burning Man tickets, apparently. Meh. ]

Martian chronicle: Working the interplanetary night shift

Tom Marcinko @ 14-07-2008

Mars Think your schedule is crazy? Spare a thought for the 150 Phoenix Mars lander scientists:

“Living on a Martian day is like traveling two time zones every three days over and over,” said [Laura] Barger, who is an instructor of medicine in Harvard’s Division of Sleep Medicine. “Everyone has a circadian clock. . . . When it isn’t able to synchronize with a Martian day, you get sleep disorders, decreased alertness and decremented performance.”

NASA is experimenting with soft-light boxes and an adjusted sleep schedule to help the Mars explorers stay alert. And it’s funding the two-year, $350,000 Harvard study in the hopes that results might help doctors, police, firefighers, and other earthlings who work skewed shifts.

[Mars image: jasonb42882]

Mars has component minerals for life

Paul Raven @ 27-06-2008

$NASA\'s Mars Phoenix Lander - artist\'s impression$ Latest word from the Phoenix Lander suggests that the soil of Mars contains the right sort of minerals to support certain forms of plant life - apparently asparagus would thrive there. I now have visions of an Edgar Rice Burroughs chase scene set in a forest of towering asparagus … [image courtesy NASA]

Of course, if you listen to a certain irritatingly vocal minority of asshats, we shouldn’t be wasting our time and taxes searching for the origin of life on other planets because “[l]ife originated on Earth when God spoke it into existence“. O RLY?

I think I’ve reached a tipping point with creationists; I used to find them infuriating, but recently I’ve found I just pity them. If the glory of God serves only to blind you to the glory of the universe, life must be depressingly short on moments of genuine marvel.

Help re-imagine Project Orion - nuclear space propulsion in the noughties

Paul Raven @ 24-06-2008

$NASA\'s Project Orion - concept art$ If you’re in need of something to bring a bit of excitement to your Tuesday (and let’s face it, who isn’t?), maybe you’d like to get involved with re-thinking the idea of launching space missions using the Project Orion model - in other words, the sixties concept space vehicle propelled by small nuclear explosions. [image courtesy NASA via Wikimedia Commons]

No, that’s a genuine NASA concept. And this is a genuine request; the following email turned up in the Futurismic contact inbox over the weekend from one Peter Queckenstedt:

“My name is Peter, I’m a Canadian designer, currently studying for my master’s in transportation design at the Umea Institute in Sweden.

I’m doing some advance work on my upcoming final degree project, and thought Futurismic might be able to aid me. My plan is to revive the idea of Project Orion, the atomic bomb-propelled ship designed in the 60s. My focus is not so much on the engineering side, but more on the ‘blue-sky’ ideas side. I want to explore what kind of changes 50 years of technology would make to this craft. My main intent is to get people excited about the idea of sending people into space in a serious manner.

If you know of anyone that might be interested in collaborating, sponsoring, or providing inspiration and input please let me know. Engineers, fiction writers, artists, mad scientists, bloggers … I’m open to anything as long as it’s interesting.”

There you have it, folks - if you fancy getting your crowdsource on and thinking about nuclear-powered rockets, now’s your chance! I think the best way to do this would be for you to leave a comment below if you’re interested in helping out, making sure to use a valid email address which I can then forward on to Peter.

But feel free to share ideas at the same time - for example, is Project Orion any more or less reasonable a suggestion now we’ve had five more decades of experience with nuclear power and weapons, not to mention the economic cost of space exploration?

Get hitched in sub-orbital space

Paul Raven @ 19-06-2008

Getting married is all about making your day as special as possible, right? Well, if you’ve got the cash and you don’t intend to tie the knot until 2011, you might want to think ahead and book your service with SpaceWedding, who promise to fly you to over 100km above the surface of the planet while you exchange your vows. [via Pink Tentacle] [image from SpaceWedding website]

But, like I say, you’ll need a fairly hefty amount of money. The service costs the equivalent of US$2.2million … though that does include:

“… the cost of transportation to and from the launch site, accommodations, a live broadcast of the ceremony to friends and family at a reception hall on the ground, and 4 days of rehearsal.”

A bargain! If anyone needs a ring-bearer, drop me a line via the contact page, OK?

Mars Water Fit for Pickling . . . Life

James Boone Dryden @ 10-06-2008

toxic water The scientific community eagerly watches the progress as Pheonix lander scours Mars. They are hoping that there will be signs that there was once a supply of water on the planet that would give evidence that there may have once been life on the planet. Most scientists seem to conclude, though, that data from the Opportunity indicates that the water was a toxic mix of salty water and minerals that would have been unsuitable for Earth-like lifeforms. [photo courtesy Kevin].

If this is true, then it changes a lot of our views of the Red Planet, making it a lot less viable as a possible location for colonies or population in the future. What was once seen as the new bastion of human existence when we ruin the planet we have now, may be nothing more than a dusty satellite orbiting the Sun. Who’s to say, though? We on Earth have such an egocentric view of our existence that it’s hard for us to imagine that there may be other possibilities of variant lifeforms in the universe that don’t operate as we do (i.e. - do all lifeforms really have to be carbon-based?).

Shooting the moon

Tomas Martin @ 10-06-2008

An artist's impression of Moonlite Space scientists have come up with a novel way of studying the moon (and possibly later other satellites like Europa). Scientist Sir Martin Sweeting’s Moonlite experiment plans to launch a satellite to orbit the moon. Once in orbit, the satellite would fire four dart-like missiles at the moon’s surface, penetrating three or four metres to study the composition beneath the ground.

Planned for a launch in 2013, the project has had recent tests of the high powered darts in South Wales prove very successful. The subterranean probes are hoped to provide details on the heat flow, seismic activity and water components of our closest astronomical friend.

Meanwhile, the most recent astronomical mission is having problems with its own studies of extraterrestrial soil. The Phoenix lander is struggling to sift the clumpy Martian soil to small enough pieces to study in its compact detectors. The robotic lander is resorting to shaking and sprinkling soil samples with its robotic arm to get material small enough to study.

[picture by SSTL and story via BBC]

Visible Magnetic Fields

Tom James @ 05-06-2008

Magnetic fields are weird, something that’s invisible in and of itself, but nevertheless acts on the other objects. By way of visualising magnetic fields, some boffins from Semiconductor working at NASA Space Laboratory as “artists in residence” - Ruth Jarman and Joe Gerhardt - have created this incredible movie depicting magnetic fields:

There isn’t much explanation as to what this is - how abstract is the representation? From Semiconductor Films:

In Magnetic Movie, Semiconductor have taken the magnificent scientific visualisations of the sun and solar winds conducted at the Space Sciences Laboratory and Semiconducted them. Ruth Jarman and Joe Gerhardt of Semiconductor were artists-in-residence at SSL. Combining their in-house lab culture experience with formidable artistic instincts in sound, animation and programming, they have created a magnetic magnum opus in nuce, a tour de force of a massive invisible force brought down to human scale, and a “very most beautiful thing.”

Well it sure is pretty, but it would be nice if there were some details as to how the effect was created. It reminds me of the “fields” of the drones from Iain M Bank’s billiant Culture series, which use coloured “fields” to convey emotion and also as manipulators.

[story via technovelgy][video from caleaflo]

That Smoke Ring Thing

Tom James @ 30-05-2008

Fans of Larry Niven’s superlative Integral Trees series will recognise the gas torus surrounding the red supergiant star WOH 64, located in everyone’s favourite neighbouring dwarf galaxy, the Large Magellanic Cloud. From The Scientific Frontline Observers Gallery:

Comparisons with models led them to conclude that the star is surrounded by a gigantic, thick torus, expanding from about 15 stellar radii (or 120 times the distance between the Earth and the Sun - 120 AU!) to more than 250 stellar radii (or 30 000 AU!).

Everything is huge about this system. The star itself is so big that it would fill almost all the space between the Sun and the orbit of Saturn,” says Ohnaka. “And the torus that surrounds it is perhaps a light-year across! Still, because it is so far away, only the power of interferometry with the VLT could give us a glimpse on this object.

In The Smoke Ring, as in much of Niven’s work - the environment is as big a part of the story as the characters. Niven describes a group of humans living within a vast “smoke ring” surrounding a neutron star.

A gas giant orbiting the star has had it’s atmosphere stripped off by the tidal forces of the neutron star, leaving a long, ring-shaped trail within which organisms have evolved to live in a weightless, three-dimensional world, where the only meaningful direction is “out”.

There are some beautiful artists impressions of WOH 64 - unfortunately there is no suggestion that the gas cloud would be anything less than monstrously uninhabitable, like almost everywhere else in the universe.

That said, it is splendid that the VLT Interferometer is working out so well. [via PhysOrg] [image by R'Yes']

Every month the Earth beats up the Moon with its magnetotail

Tomas Martin @ 22-04-2008

The Earth's magnetotail is a pretty thing to imagine The Moon seems like a pretty static place. After all, there’s little atmosphere and apart from occasional meteorite impacts, nothing much happens. Or so we thought. NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter mission found that every month when the moon is full, the moon crosses through the Earth’s magnetotail, bathing our satellite in high energy charged particles that may create dust storms and electrical static.

Astronauts have never been on the Moon during this period. Landings have never taken place when the moon is full. But as Roland Piquepaille on ZDNet’s Emerging Tech blog discusses, if astronauts return to the moon to establish a base, they will have to face the challenges of the magnetotail, which could clog up vents and even give astronauts electric shocks!

[via Science Daily, image by NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center Conceptual Image Lab]

Black Holes in the sky, Black Holes in the internet

Tomas Martin @ 10-04-2008

Three black holes interact in complex ways A mix of two stories about completely different types of Black Holes today. First, researchers at the Rochester Institute of Technology found that interactions between three black holes should produce gravitational waves that detectors like LISA or LIGO could detect within the next ten years. Gravitational Waves are ‘ripples’ in Space-Time caused by massive objects and events and could tell us a great deal about the big bang.

Another kind of black hole in the news is the ‘internet black hole’. Researchers for the Hubble internet project found distinct pathways on the internet where data was lost for unexplainable reasons. The project, which you can see the results of at their website, was intentionally named after the famous astronomer and telescope. The researchers say they are performing ‘internet astronomy’, looking for events in the cosmos of data that is the internet.

[image by M Campanelli/L Carlos/Y Zlochower/H-P Bischof, that plus space story via New Scientist, internet story via TG Daily]

Moving the Earth

Jeremy Eades @ 26-03-2008

The typical ending of our lovely planet will come in several billion years when the Sun swells up and engulfs all of the inner planets. But it’s never too early to start thinking of how to rescue our beloved cradle.

According to an article in the NYTimes, the Earth faces an unknown future because it will move further out in orbit as the Sun expends its mass and the gravitational forces become weaker.

One solution is to lasso comets and asteroids, swinging them near the Earth and using their slight gravity to boost the Earth to a higher orbit, where it could escape the Sun’s expansion. Because, y’know, what could go wrong with that?

(image from NASA website)

Sins of A Solar Empire game developer talks piracy

Tomas Martin @ 12-03-2008

Sins of A Solar Empire by small independent game company Stardock (and their developers Ironclad) is the biggest selling pc game of 2008 so far, despite a tiny budget and much less coverage by the gaming press. Stardock owner Brad Wardell posted an excellent analysis of why their games are having success. (last year’s Galactic Civilisations II was another underground hit.)

He talks a lot about the bad policies taken by much of the PC game industry. For example, why bother targeting the Chinese market when piracy is so rife many people won’t purchase your game? His main point, and it’s a very good one, is that very few people upgrade their computer often so targeting the graphics of your game to only work for the ‘hardcore’ pc gamers is limiting your market. Rather than trying to break the latest processor if you just make a game that’s fun and works on most computers people will play it.

Sins is a fun game that combines the 4X ideas of ‘eXplore, eXpand, eXploit and eXterminate’ of games like Civilisation with Real Time Strategy elements of space games like Homeworld. I’ve enjoyed myself whenever I’ve played it but what’s even more impressive is the attitude of the people behind it - updates are frequent, there’s no DRM, the developers comment frequently on the game’s forum and they listen to requests from players about bugs and new features. In an industry full of high budget Hollywood games, it’s comforting to see that small companies can be a big success if they just concentrate on pleasing their audience.

First images from the Large Binocular Telescope

Tomas Martin @ 07-03-2008

The Large Binocular Telescope in Arizona has ‘opened its eyes’ for the first time, marking one of the first in a new wave of high-tech astronomical devices to come online. The LBT combines two 8m mirrors working in tandem to take pictures of

Futurismic

Virgin Galactic declines to take Rule 34 to space - suborbital sex movies delayed

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Falcon flying free - SpaceX finally make it to orbit

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(Water) bears… in… spaaaaace!

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The Arches of Methone and Other Stories

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Postcards from Enceladus

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Martian chronicle: Working the interplanetary night shift

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Get hitched in sub-orbital space

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Mars Water Fit for Pickling . . . Life

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Black Holes in the sky, Black Holes in the internet

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