Great American Success Story

(Photo: NASA/Zuma Press/WSJ)

41-year-old Jonny Kim is the epitome of the Great American success story. Born in Los Angeles to South Korean immigrants, he has been embraced by Asian-Americans, who also dread comparisons with him by their parents. [bold added]

In half a lifetime, Jonny Kim has achieved the American dream three times over. He was a Navy SEAL. Then he graduated from Harvard Medical School. And on Tuesday, he blasted off as part of his latest act: astronaut.

When novelist Wesley Chu first learned about Kim, a 41-year-old father of three who is also a Navy pilot, his first reaction was awe.

His second: “Thank God my mom is not friends with his mom.”

After word of his feats spread, Kim became a global source of inspiration. And yet, to many of the same people who glance at his résumé and can’t help but compare it to theirs, he has also conjured up a bit of another feeling.

Dismay.

This has been especially true in the Asian-American community, where Kim, the son of South Korean immigrants, has been simultaneously lauded as a hero—and feared, only half-jokingly, as “every Asian kid’s worst nightmare.”

The worry: No matter what they achieve, their high-demanding immigrant parents will say Jonny Kim already did that—only better. “We accomplished all this stuff, but really, it’s what he did that matters,” Chu said.

Kim became an internet meme among Asian Americans, who frequently take to social media to express gratitude that he’s not a relative. NASA’s social-media posts about Kim are flooded with comments expressing similar sentiments. “As a fellow Asian, I hope my parents do not get to read this. But, safe journey my man,” one wrote.

His childhood was marked by tragedy:

It all started with trauma during his childhood in Los Angeles. Kim said he witnessed his father, who he described as alcoholic and abusive, pull a gun on their family. Police shot his father dead in their attic.

His desire to physically protect his mother and brother led him to become a Navy SEAL. But an Ultimate Frisbee ankle injury delayed his plan to join the Navy as an operations specialist. When he recovered, a recruiter steered him toward becoming a medic.

In 2005, Kim joined SEAL Team Three, serving as a medic and sniper, among other roles. He earned a Silver Star and a Bronze Star for treating wounded comrades during two tours in Iraq, an experience that motivated him to attend medical school.

No matter how successful, we eventually meet someone who is better than we are in our field of endeavor. (My revelation occurred in college.) Jonny Kim has yet to meet that person.

Elon Musk: the Wisdom in His Vision

(Citrin-Safadi/WSJ image)

Elon Musk has so many irons in the fire--Tesla, SpaceX, Starlink (part of SpaceX), and DOGE--that it's fair to wonder of he's one of those serial inventors (maybe the most brilliant and successful in history) who gets an idea and tries to make a business out of it.

What makes more sense is that everything that Elon Musk has done is directed toward establishing a human colony on Mars during his lifetime.

Musk founded SpaceX in 2002 with the mission of taking humanity to other planets. The company infused its culture with that long-term goal and completed a successful launch of its first rocket in 2008. It eventually developed the Falcon 9 rocket, which could be partially reused, lowering the cost of launches and taking market share from incumbent rocket operators.

Musk’s other businesses have contributed to the Mars goal. Musk has described Starlink, a SpaceX division that uses thousands of satellites to provide high-speed internet connections, as a cash machine for a future Mars mission. After Tesla, his electric-car company, gave Musk a stock award in 2018 valued at up to $55.8 billion, he later said it would be used for his space project. “It’s a way to get humanity to Mars,” he said in court in 2022.

Elon Musk has already stated that the goal of colonizing Mars is to preserve the human race when the earth inevitably experiences an extinction-level event. In that light Tesla and Starlink are "cash machines" to fund SpaceX, and DOGE will reduce concerns about the national debt and help the American government fund NASA.

For those who support DOGE and the space program, however, there is a legitimate disagreement with Elon Musk whether Mars should be a higher priority than colonizing the moon:

The White House plans to propose killing a powerful Boeing-built rocket designed for NASA to launch astronauts to the moon and beyond in a coming budget plan, according to people briefed on the plans. Canceling the vehicle, called the Space Launch System or SLS, would potentially free up billions for Mars efforts and set up a clash with members of Congress who support it...

NASA’s program known as Artemis, its long-range plan to explore the moon and eventually Mars, is being rethought to make Mars a priority. One idea: Musk and government officials have discussed a scenario in which SpaceX would give up its moon-focused Artemis contracts worth more than $4 billion to free up funds for Mars-related projects, a person briefed on the discussions said.

NASA’s long-range plan to explore the moon and eventually Mars is under the microscope. NASA has been working on the Artemis program and its predecessors for years. The cost from the government’s fiscal years 2012 through 2025 is estimated at $93 billion, according to the agency’s inspector general.

In January, Musk called the moon program a distraction in a post on X. Days earlier he had criticized Artemis, saying “Something entirely new is needed.”

SpaceX, Boeing and others have billions in contracts to build rockets, ships and lunar landing vehicles, among other technologies, for the program.

Musk has discussed with officials the idea that SpaceX’s moon-focused contracts, valued at more than $4 billion, could be dropped in favor of Mars plans.

Your humble blogger bows to the genius of Elon Musk but believes that the priority should be the moon, not Mars. It does the U.S. no good to be focused on Martian settlements if, say, the Chinese became the dominant lunar power. The latter could well jeopardize the former, just as Iwo Jima and Guadalcanal had to be taken before going after the real, distant objective of the Japanese homeland.

Elon Musk probably believes that Mars needs to be done while he's alive because the project could be abandoned without him, just as NASA lost its mojo after the Apollo program. He needs to have faith that the American people will see the wisdom in his long-term vision after we win the new moon race.

NASA’s role regarding the moon must be reimagined. As we are starting to see in LEO [Low Earth Orbit], Congress must shift funding and priorities so that the centerpiece of U.S. lunar policy becomes enabling private efforts. These pioneering initiatives cannot remain sideshows to the Artemis-Apollo rerun. It’s time to move American enterprise to center stage and let people lead...

Meanwhile, NASA can turn its central focus to putting the first people on Mars. Even if the first mission is a relative sprint, we’ll be learning skills on the moon we’ll need to go further.

Beautiful on Many Levels

(Photo from NASA/YouTube video)

Tuesday's splashdown was beautiful on several levels.

The esthetic beauty of the capsule being framed against a bright blue sky and deep blue ocean, surrounded by four symmetrically arranged orange-and-white parachutes;

The epistemic beauty of American technology that gave stranded astronauts Barry Wilmore and Sunita Williams a ride home; and

The empathic beauty of the safe return of two people from a parlous situation.

It'a a relief to celebrate a happy event while keeping politics mostly (but not completely, sadly) out of it.

Right Before Our Eyes

This happened on Sunday and was widely reported on all media channels. Your humble blogger had nothing to add, so initially refrained from comment.

Upon reconsideration, I thought that, of all the important events that have happened or likely will happen this October in a Presidential Election year, this is the one that will be remembered centuries from now.

WSJ: SpaceX Catches Huge Booster Back at Launchpad [bold added]

SpaceX caught a towering booster rocket back at its launchpad in south Texas, an engineering milestone for the Starship vehicle at the center of Elon Musk’s plans for deep-space exploration.

The Super Heavy booster, the first stage of Starship, lifted off from south Texas on Sunday morning and propelled the Starship craft into space. Shortly after the launch, SpaceX made the call to return the booster back to the pad from which it had launched.

A livestream from SpaceX showed the device zipping back toward the facility, and, as it approached a tower, its engines slowed the enormous device down, allowing for the catch around 8:30 a.m. ET. The vehicle latched down on mechanical arms sticking out of the tower.

It was SpaceX’s first attempt at the catch, a feat that the company and Musk, its chief executive, have said is key to reducing the cost of rocket launches...

Starship, which consists of the Super Heavy booster and Starship spacecraft, stands about 400 feet tall when it is launched.

Elon Musk is that rarest of technological pioneers who prioritizes the economic viability of his product. After the Apollo missions NASA lost its funding because its programs were always viewed as nice-to-have, not got-to-have. Reusability of boosters will drive down the cost sufficiently to make space travel more accessible and perhaps even profitable in its own right.

Elon Musk is Gloomy

Elon Musk worries about asteroid strikes. Unlike you or
me he can do something about them (Harvard/NASA).

Elon Musk's big ideas to save it have made him the richest man in the world: [bold added]

Musk has framed his business endeavors as striving to prevent calamity, a motivating ideal that helps inspire employees, investors and fans while inducing eye rolls among critics and rivals.

For him, Tesla is about trying to save humanity from global warming while SpaceX is about making humanity a multiplanetary species in case things don’t work out on Earth.

A year ago, with the purchase of Twitter-turned-X, Musk couched the decision as keeping the social-media platform as a bastion for free speech in what he sees as a larger battle against cultural forces trying to squash diverse thought—or, as he calls it, the “woke mind virus.”

Despite his current wealth of $221.9 billion (Forbes) Elon Musk is far from content:

Musk sounds worried—about everything from cyclical business jitters to existential global concerns. He choked with emotion during a recent public conference call with Tesla analysts about the economy. This past week he warned during a forum on X about “civilizational risk” stemming from the Israel-Hamas war cascading into a wider conflict that would pit the U.S. against a united China, Russia and Iran.

“I think we are sleepwalking our way into World War III,” Musk said Monday.

Elon Musk worries that the human race won't survive. He has the wealth and knowledge to affect the future and feels the responsibility. Centi-billionaires are different from you and me.

Don't Hold Them Back Became Let's Give Them an Advantage

Katherine Johnson (1918-2020) received
the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

The 2016 film Hidden Figures was based on the true story of African-American women mathematicians who were crucial to the success of NASA's early missions. They had to overcome extreme race and sex discrimination, accompanied by condescending attitudes, to be taken seriously.

By the end of the movie their skill and reputation became so widely known at NASA that John Glenn insisted that the numbers be checked manually by Katherine Johnson, one of the "hidden figures," before his historic flight. She also performs emergency calculations to bring John Glenn home when one of his capsule's heat shields broke loose.

It's a popular theme in fiction and real life: the talents of a person who is discriminated against are so outstanding that the powers-that-be must call on the person to solve an important problem. Anti-discrimination narratives appeal to both the heart and the head: the former because the victims are treated unfairly and the latter because society's potential is unrealized by holding back skilled people.

60 years later the pendulum has shifted too far in the other direction. Anti-discrimination has given way to Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) quotas. DEI is especially damaging in the technological contest with China: [bold added]

The Australian Strategic Policy Institute reported this year that China leads the U.S. in research on 37 of 44 critical technologies, including advanced aircraft engines, electric batteries, machine learning and synthetic biology. In a recent essay in Foreign Affairs, Dan Wang, an expert on China’s technology landscape, wrote that “China now rivals Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan in its mastery of the electronics supply chain.” In 2007, the Chinese added less than 4% of the value-added costs of iPhones made in that country. Now it’s more than 25%...

Given this challenge, you might imagine that America would re-emphasize the principles of objectivity and merit that made it the world’s leading scientific innovator. You would be mistaken.

Where it once was taken for granted that expanding knowledge was more important than a scientist’s sex or skin color, anyone adhering to that approach in the U.S. now must fend off charges that it is racist, patriarchal, colonial, or a tool of oppression. As a group of 29 scientists and academics contended in a recent paper for the Journal of Controversial Ideas, scientific progress in the West “is being hindered by a new, alarming clash between liberal epistemology and identity-based ideologies.”...

The U.S. will only find it harder to compete with China if activists and administrators are allowed to bully scientists into caring more about artificial diversity goals than about their work. To quote the 29 authors who stood up for merit, “for science to succeed, it must strive for the non-ideological pursuit of objective truth.”

In the liberal arts and social sciences, the DEI crowd can advocate for individual revealed truths and personal lived experiences. By contrast, those who work in STEM fields believe that there are objective truths, and the goal of science is to discover these truths. I am 100% sure that the mathematicians who worked for NASA would agree.

"Be the House"

(NY Post image)

One common characteristic of getting older is that people become more conservative--politically, culturally, and financially. As life's expiration date approaches, this perspective makes sense.

Older people, including your humble blogger, are less willing to take chances because they have more to protect. If a risky bet turns out wrong, recovery--physical and financial--is difficult and sometimes impossible.

That's why Elon Musk is unique. At 51, his enterprises and his wealth are an order of magnitude bigger than they were ten years ago, yet he's still willing to bet the farm to fulfill his vision(s):

In the span of 24 hours this past week, Elon Musk made three very big bets with three very different companies, together showing his penchant to plow ahead despite sizable risks.

Between Wednesday and Thursday evenings, he stripped celebrities, journalists and other high-profile users of their free, legacy verification on Twitter, risking a VIP revolt on the social-media platform. He promised that the electric-car maker Tesla Inc. increase; green up pointing triangle would chase sales volume at the expense of profitability. And he launched SpaceX’s first of its kind giant space rocket, which exploded on the way to the heavens.

Making big bets doesn't mean that Elon Musk isn't aware of the risks:

“If the odds are probably in your favor, you should make as many decisions as possible within the bounds of what is executable,” Mr. Musk said a few years ago. “This is like being the house in Vegas. Probability is the most powerful force in the universe, which is why the house always wins. Be the house.”

Although he's one of the richest people in the world, amassing wealth was not the goal, just a means to get to his destination. Elon Musk's aspirations are grand indeed: interplanetary space travel, efficient autonomous transportation, and a platform for the free-wheeling exchange of ideas.

Along the way Elon Musk doesn't care how foolish he looks to others. Blowing up a rocketship to find out whether it functions (without hurting anybody) is a necessary step on the way to Mars, and crashing cars is the price for making millions of authomobiles self-driving.

Wealth often induces billionaires to become philanthropists and lift individuals out of poverty. Elon Musk's way of using his wealth, IMHO, will enrich humanity's future.

Asteroids

Asteroid 2023 BU’s trajectory is in red (WSJ illustration)

An asteroid flew by earth today, missing it by a mere 2,200 miles:

An asteroid the size of a big truck will fly by Earth on Thursday just 2,200 miles above the planet’s surface in one of the closest approaches ever recorded, scientists said.

The asteroid, named 2023 BU, will travel over the Pacific Ocean west of southern Chile, Thursday afternoon Pacific time, according to Davide Farnocchia, a navigation engineer at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

The near-Earth object poses no danger, and there is no expected impact...

Had it entered Earth’s orbit, the asteroid would have burned upon entry and, at its small size, turned into a fireball. “It’s not going to get close enough for that,” said Dr. Farnocchia.

What's alarming to this non-astronomer is that the object was detected on January 21st, less than a week ago.

I hope that larger asteroids that could possibly cross earth's path are being tracked, but experience tells us that we don't know about all of them.

The late Stephen Hawking's principal worry was that an asteroid strike would end life on earth:

“There are thousands of really large asteroids, some are over ten miles long – the size of Manhattan.

“An asteroid this size hits the Earth [every] 100,000,000 years.

“The last one struck the Earth 65,000,000 years ago, and probably was responsible for wiping out the dinosaurs.

“We don’t know when the next asteroid will strike, but if it’s big enough, it could sterilise our planet.

“That would be the end of the five billion year story of life on Earth.”

Sweet dreams!

Changing Our View

Eclipsing our differences (WSJ image)

For time immemorial our species has stood in awe of nature. And that emotion, psychologists aver, affects behavior toward others:

A new paper in the journal Psychological Science, by Sean Goldy, Nickolas Jones and Paul Piff at the University of California, Irvine, suggests there is at least one psychological way that celestial events can indeed influence us. When people gaze up at an awesome sight like an eclipse, the researchers conclude, they become more humble and caring when they look down at their Twitter feed.

The researchers took off from earlier studies that Dr. Piff did with Dacher Keltner and colleagues at the University of California, Berkeley. In one study, people were shown videos of earthbound awe-inspiring sights like a towering tree, a sublime landscape or an erupting volcano. Afterwards they felt less significant themselves and more caring toward others.

In another study, researchers placed students in front of either the majestic Berkeley Eucalyptus Grove or a tall but boring campus building. A confederate then came by and dropped a bunch of pens on the ground, apparently by accident. The awe-struck students in the grove put more effort into helpfully collecting the dropped pens than did the students by the mundane building.

December, 1972: Apollo 17's "Blue Marble"

Additional support for the Awe => Humility => Caring connection came from a comparison of millions of tweets from those who were in the path of an eclipse and those who were not.

they also used more words expressing social connection, like “care” “love” and “thanks,” and they expressed more humility and tentativeness, saying “maybe” or “perhaps.”

The second age of space travel does not seem to be as marred with criticism as space travel was during the Sixties. As mankind slips the surly bonds of earth and explores the wondrous, dangerous, and awe-ful universe, perhaps human beings will be prompted to set aside their differences and be more aware of how much they have in common with each other.

Elon Musk: The Excitement is Here Again

I never expected to see another businessman as important or as lionized as Steve Jobs, but ten years after Steve's death Elon Musk has filled that role.

The richest man in the world does not own a house and has recently been selling off his fortune. He tosses satellites into orbit and harnesses the sun; he drives a car he created that uses no gas and barely needs a driver. With a flick of his finger, the stock market soars or swoons. An army of devotees hangs on his every utterance. He dreams of Mars as he bestrides Earth, square-jawed and indomitable. Lately, Elon Musk also likes to live-tweet his poops.

Like Steve Jobs, Elon Musk nearly bankrupted his companies in pursuit of a vision that very few could see, much less believe in. Like Steve Jobs, he achieved extraordinary success, disrupting major industries, making himself a multi-billionaire and enriching many thousands of employees, investors, and suppliers. Both men also pushed people out of the way, thereby earning criticism for their acerbic ways and personal eccentricities.

Bill Gates, who knew both men, sees major differences:

“Elon’s more of a hands-on engineer. Steve was a genius at design and picking people and marketing,” Gates said. “You wouldn’t walk into a room and confuse them with each other.”

Indeed, Musk often talks about his demanding schedule and his hands on approach. For example, on a Tesla earnings call in November 2017, Musk said he was spending all hours in the Tesla battery production factory, even sleeping on the floor and skipping showers to catch up on Tesla 3 production in 2018.

“I am personally on that line, in that machine, trying to solve problems personally where I can,” Musk said on the call. “We are working seven days a week to do it. And I have personally been here on zone 2 module line at 2:00 a.m. on a Sunday morning, helping diagnose robot calibration issues. So I’m doing everything I can.”

As for Jobs, he “was such a wizard at over-motivating people ... I could see him casting the spells, and then I would look at people and see them mesmerized,” Gates told podcast host Dax Shepard Aug. 20.

As of this writing Steve Jobs has touched many more lives than Elon Musk. Over one billion people have an Apple device, while less than 1% that number have owned or will own a Tesla.

But with his single-handed revival of the space program, Elon Musk may very well have changed the course of human history. Ten years ago many asked, somewhat plaintively, "Without Steve Jobs, Where's the Excitement Going to Come From?" Time's Person of the Year has the answer to that question.

Maybe POTUS Is Just Going Home

An opinion piece in the respectable Wall Street Journal has the attributes of a put-on, but it's not written by a humorist.

The U.S. Should Send a President to Space

(graphic from spaceref.com)

To rekindle the spirit of American adventure, a U.S. president should travel to space by the end of the decade. This will show that space is a priority for American leadership, and it will signal that the best has yet to come...

To launch a U.S. president into space, NASA should form partnerships with the private sector, underscoring the unmatched entrepreneurial spirit of the U.S. The president should also take along the leader of a strong ally or partner like the U.K., France, Germany, Japan or India to show a unified front against China’s space aspirations.

Even if they are serious, a Presidential candidate who announced this ambition would disqualify him- or herself and quite possibly be institutionalized.

Oh, well, the two writers have given us a clue that they're pulling our leg. One goes by the name of Chris Mulder.

52 Years After Apollo 11

Blue Origin crew: Oliver Daemen, Wally Funk,
Jeff Bezos and Mark Bezos. (CBS)

52 years to the day after the first moon landing Jeff Bezos' company launched four men into space:

Tuesday’s space flight was Blue Origin’s first with passengers on board, a group that included the world’s wealthiest person—Mr. Bezos’ net worth amounts to more than $200 billion, according to Bloomberg—as well the oldest-ever space traveler and the youngest, 82-year-old aviator Wally Funk and 18-year-old student Oliver Daemen, respectively. Mark Bezos, 50, the co-founder of private-equity firm HighPost Capital and Jeff Bezos’ brother, also was on the trip.

Virgin Galactic Unity 22 July 11 crew: Pilot Dave Mackay,
Op. Engineer Colin Bennett, Astronaut Instructor Beth
Moses, Richard Branson, VP Gov Affairs & Research
Sirisha Bandla, Pilot Michael Masucci. (space.com)

The race by three billionaires to bring space travel to the masses may seem like a "boys and their toys" moment in history, but such dismissiveness belies the seriousness with which each has approached this mission:

Tourism is merely the first rung of the space ladder. Blue Origin has two more manned flights on the schedule for this year, and Mr. Bezos said the company is approaching $100 million in private sales. Virgin Galactic has presold hundreds of tickets for its space plane, which flew its founder, Richard Branson, to weightlessness last week. Elon Musk’s SpaceX has ferried NASA astronauts to orbit, but it has private flights on the calendar, too...

The money paid by wealthy passengers will also help these companies go higher. Blue Origin has other projects in the works, including a New Glenn rocket that will be big enough to put satellites into orbit. Mr. Musk, as everyone knows, is aiming for Mars. The benefits of all this are hard to say precisely, but that’s the nature of exploration and entrepreneurial risk-taking.

Several companies are working on constellations of small satellites that could beam fast internet to remote areas that lack it. Novel uses of technology are harder to predict, but surprises happen when smart people are trying to be the first to achieve some milestone. Nobody working on America’s first satellite missions in the 1950s and ’60s could have ever imagined that the Global Positioning System, or GPS, would one day keep millions of people and Uber drivers from getting lost.

Elon Musk wants to set up colonies on Mars but
will go into space himself on Virgin Galactic.

The resources that the billionaires can bring to space travel are tiny compared to what state actors like the U.S., China, Russia, and India have at their disposal. On the other hand, governments are limited to spending money on traditional functions like military and basic scientific research, functions that will be cut when the political winds shift.

My betting is on the entrepreneurs, not the governments, to figure out how to make space travel economically sustainable, to use a fashionable term.

July 20, 2021 will never be as famous as July 20, 1969, but it will be a milestone date nevertheless.

Find My iPhone Will Need to be Updated

(ArtistShot Image)

In case you missed it, Your iPhone will soon work on the moon: (H/T Tyler Cowen) [bold added]

Nokia will build a 4G cellular network on the moon. It’ll allow future astronauts to make voice and video calls, but also transmit data and remotely control equipment.

The goal is to have the wireless network in place on Earth’s largest satellite by 2022. It’s part of NASA’s Artemis program, which has the goal of establishing a sustainable presence on the moon by the end of the decade...

NASA could have skipped 4G and gone straight to the latest standard, but telecoms are only just now rolling out 5G on Earth.

It's wise that they're installing 4G instead of the much-faster-but-unproven 5G.

If you bring a vintage 2014 iPhone 6 (valued at $100) to the multibillion dollar lunar base, you want to be sure it's going to work.

"We are Go for Launch"

The story that supplanted the Minnesota riots and COVID-19, at least for a day (the launch begins at 6 hours, 10 minutes in):

LIke a Rocket Ship

SpaceX launch in 2018

TSLA has "gone parabolic". Will it crash or reach escape velocity?

Elon Musk's SpaceX isn't his only business that's defying gravity. Tesla stock (TSLA) has taken off like a rocket ship in the past five days.

The ascent has been so rapid that Tesla shares, which jumped 20% to a closing record Monday, are now up 86% for the year—outperforming every single stock in the S&P 500, as well as bitcoin and gold. In fact, Tesla’s rise over the past five trading days marked its best five-day stretch since a rally in May 2013, when the company posted its first-ever quarterly profit.

What has driven the company to this point? The rally got a boost last week when Tesla reported making record deliveries in the fourth quarter and said it planned to deliver more cars globally in 2020.

There's a part of me that wishes I were along for the ride (the stock, that is). There's also a part that's worried about the landing.

Heavy Prediction

(WSJ art by Ryan Inzana)

Space archaeologist Alice Gorman says that gravity will be "the most precious commodity of the next space age." [bold added]

To maintain their bone density and muscle mass, crew members must exercise for over two hours each day. Without this discipline, the astronauts could end up with osteoporosis. Living in gravity so different from Earth’s has consequences, including vision impairment and diminished organ function...

Living in variable gravity environments makes gravity a commodity that it simply isn’t on Earth; it becomes foreground rather than background. Power may be determined by whomever controls access to specially designed, high-gravity environments where people can maintain their strength. Gravity may indeed be rationed, and depriving people of access could have serious health (and even legal) consequences.

Dr. Gorman quickly dispenses with the spinning-spaceship solution to artificial gravity:

The earliest space stations, such as the rotating wheel conceived by the Viennese engineer Hermann Noordung in 1929, were designed to produce “artificial” gravity by spinning, like the centrifuge astronauts train in.....In the 1960s, NASA considered spinning space stations, but decided that astronauts might not enjoy being spun like a sock in a washing machine. Having been in a gravity rotor in an amusement park, I can categorically say that I did not enjoy it.

I applaud Alice Gorman for thinking outside the capsule, but it seems that there are many features of earthly life--oxygen, natural food, copious running water, convenient sanitation, privacy, pets--that will be in short supply in space. I doubt gravity will be "the most precious", but then again she's the expert.

A Good Movie Despite the Math

The camera sends a message. (Image from Medium)

One of my favorite movies of recent years is The Martian, the story of an astronaut who must survive on Mars for a year and a half with only a fraction of the food needed for survival.

A key plot point is how he and NASA can communicate armed only with a still camera that can rotate 360 degrees.

The astronaut can write brief messages to Earth on poster board, but how can Earth send messages to him? The answer: a circle with 16 positions corresponding to hexadecimals:

This is where hexadecimal or base 16 comes in. If we allow ourselves 16 number symbols, then our place values can multiply by 16 at each step. For example, the number 321 represents one unit, two 16s and three 256s, so it is the same as the decimal number 801.

The trouble is that hexadecimal requires 16 symbols, and our usual numerals only go from 0 to 9. The solution is usually to use the letters A, B, C, D, E and F for the extra symbols representing the decimal numbers 10 to 15.

This means that hexadecimal numbers can look like C9F, which represents F (i.e., 15) units, nine 16s and C (i.e., 12) 256s—that is, 3,231. In coding, for instance, colors can be represented as six-character strings in hexadecimal, which yields a total of more than 16 million possible colors, starting at 000000 for pure black and running through FFFFFF for pure white.

In hexadecimals, i.e., base-16, only two characters, FF, are necessary to count up to 255 (in our decimal system). 255 places are more than we need to translate hexadecimals into the standard letters, numbers, symbols, and control characters of the ASCII table.

More than 50 years after converting base-10 numbers into base-2, base-8, and base-12 (by hand, without calculator or computer, kids), I finally see why the teachers made us do it.

(From LookupTables.com)

Even in Space You Can't Escape this Visitor

I couldn't name a post-Apollo astronaut other
than Sally Ride (1951-2012) without Googling

Popular Science headline: A Brief History of Menstruating in Space.

Women astronauts have been around so long that space menstruation has had a "brief history." Time indeed is flying. (It's easy to treat the subject lightly, but if interplanetary travel is ever to become reality, this is one body function that we had better understand.)

Moonshot

The founders of Israel's SpaceIL (Israel Today)

Time: "Google and Israel May Be Heading to the Moon". There's a $20 million first prize to land an unmanned spacecraft, have it move 500 meters, and send back hi-def pictures by the end of 2017; it's a one-way trip.

Am I the only one who thought "Good idea! Moving Israel to the moon will at last bring peace to the Middle East!"

Nope, I'm far from the first.

Unexpected Finding

Hot

Not (ebay image)

NASA's 9-year Pluto mission has produced an unexpected finding:

Amazingly, there are no craters at all in this image. None. That means the surface must be young, having been resurfaced quite recently. The scientists on New Horizons figure the terrain must be less than 100 million years old, but that’s a guess.

there is no tidal stress [from Pluto's moon Charon]. What could be heating Pluto so that its surface is young? Radioactivity from rocks beneath the surface? It’s hard to say just yet. We have a Plutonian mystery on our hands.