SpaceX just got the nod from NASA’s safety board to move forward on building it’s Dragon vessel that will hopefully deliver cargo to the space station for NASA. And if it is successful, maybe even astronauts some day in between the gap between the shuttle’s retiring and NASA’s replacement.
Friday Free Fiction for 7th September
First off, stories from within stories – a compendium of Kilgore Trout stories detached from the Vonnegut novels in which they originally appeared.
Now, the old-school:
If you were put off by the vast size of the H. G. Wells collection last week, you might prefer to go one story at a time. Courtesy of manybooks.net, “The Crystal Egg” and “Tales of Space and Time”.
From the same source, “Sense from Thought Divide” by Mark Irvin Clifton and “The Stutterer” by R.R. Merliss.
Meanwhile, Project Gutenberg has Murray Leinster’s Sand Doom, and Irving W. Lande’s Slingshot.
Then the new-school:
Clarkesworld Magazine has a new story this month, as always: “Lost Soul” by M. P. Ericson.
Enjoy!
Writers, editors and anyone else – if you want something you’ve written or published on the web for free mentioned here, drop me (Paul Raven) an email to the address listed for me on the Staff page, and I’ll include it in next week’s round-up.
NASA as DARPA
This a very interesting defense of NASA by TCS Daily that asks readers to consider NASA as like a DARPA like institution that one invests in in order to receive interesting spin off technologies that drive other industries, not as, in and off itself, a way to get people into orbit.
Frickin’ Laser Beams to Power Japan
Japan continues to horde its portion of the unevenly distributed future: Gizmodo is reporting on their plan for generating solar power from orbiting collectors, then beaming that energy back to Earthbound collection sites via laser. Expectations are that it could match a 1-gigawatt nuclear plant. No word yet as to the arrival of “1.21 gigawatt” systems.
New X-Prize to be announced on the 13th
The X-Prize Foundation will be announcing the largest cash prize to date, in the ‘tens of millions’ of dollars, for a secret goal that will be announced on the 13th.
Bigelow Aerospace had a $10 million dollar prize for the first person to orbit, I’d be curious to see if this is something similar, or if Bigelow and X-Prize have teamed up.