The Russians Are Going to do What With Their ISS Modules?!

Ok, well not a whole lot new since earlier this week when I got on a tirade about the ISS and the proposed decommissioning - I just see Dvice taking the ball and running with it. Not much I can add or argue with but if you want to bring your blood back to a slow boil, check out these excerpts from the article.

• Since the U.S. is legally obligated to maintain responsibility for anything it puts into orbit, something has to happen to all of our ISS modules ... all we can really do is just deorbit everything into the ocean ...... The Russians, on the other hand, are already planning to refurbish many of their ISS modules and reuse them as part of a new Orbital Piloted Assembly and Experiment Complex to support deep space exploration.

That's right, NASA is saying by 2020 the ISS will be so riddled that we have to safely abandon it and burn it up. While the Russian (and excuse me, their modules are just as old if not older) as saying NYET and will refirb and reuse. Of course we can't cause we can't get there and if we could we can't refirb crap! I don't care how many times NASA says we got the lead....cause Tyson said it...The good ole us of a is fading. Game over man, game over. You guys remember to shut the lights off and lock up when you leave.

Military Spends More in a Month Than NASA Does in a Year!

Well, it shouldn't be a big surprise, but there is something about seeing it in print that seems to bring it home. In a recent Gizmodo article, astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson gets a bit hot under the collar. Here is some of the points he makes:

• The US military spends (during peacetime ed.) as much in 23 days as NASA spends in a year

That means:

• The entire half-century budget of NASA equals the current two year budget of the US military.

To put NASA's "foundation" into perspective, Tyson points out

• If Earth were size of a school-room globe, you'd find Shuttle and Space Station orbiting 3/8th of an inch above its surface - the Moon would be 30-ft away (and) Mars, more than a mile away."

And you have to consider this, NASA's management tells us that they are leaving the manned near Earth to commercial entities. That's good and fine but as Tyson puts it so eloquently:

• Commercial Space Flight will not advance the space frontier, but enable cheaper access to where we've already been.

So.....Just What IS Up for the Future of Manned Spaceflight?

So as NASA stands with it's collective pants around would be ankles...what IS the consensus on manned spaceflight....at least as far as the WEST is concerned? Well lets take a look at the an article in TECH Republic for a couple of laughs huh?

The article points first to an AP feed that quotes Apollo 11 commander Neal Armstrong and the first US astronaut, Mercury's John Glenn who both are leading a group of critics who say that the U.S. space program is ignoring a long-held belief that there should be a backup plan. Indeed, the end of the Shuttle program leaves a manned flight vacuum.

Ouch! I think NASA just got spanked!

The WSJ isn't taking it much easier. They point out that the International Space Station now depends solely on Russia. If the U.S. or ESA wants a lift to the facility it is Russia and its venerable Soyuz. Russia now has "a monopoly on manned space flight." The director of the European Space Agency, is quoted as saying that the situation is “uncomfortable” and a “collective mistake.”

Smack Smack

Charles Bolden the current NASA Administrator, is quoted saying "I’m here to tell you that American leadership in space will continue for at least the next half-century because we have laid the foundation for success "

Foundation huh? That is the way he see it?!!! So what happened to the HOUSE JFK built? Yep, that's right, Bolden and his class of backwards thinking have torn it down to the foundation that's what. Bolden is proud of being part of the elite astronaut corp. and I am flabergasted that he is proud of the present state of things.

Bolden says NASA should get out of the low Earth orbit delivery system and leave that to the private sector. NASA needs to set its sights higher. OK granted NASA needs to look to future exploration but at the same time he is placing manned spaceflight in the hands of Space X Lockheed Martin and Boeing.

There is much more. Check out the Tech Republic article here

Death by 1000 cuts: Rocket Launches May Need Regulation

I may be a little bit on the paranoid side here, however this article in Science Daily to me is a prime example of how to destroy progress and innovation. Slowly starve it of it's support and financial base. Over reaction? Perhaps, but the article reports on a paper just released that suggests that to preserve our ozone layer rocket launches will need to be curtailed in the future.

In the article, according to:

• Professor Darin Toohey of CU-Boulder's atmospheric and oceanic sciences department. "If left unregulated, rocket launches by the year 2050 could result in more ozone destruction than was ever realized by CFCs."

As right as this sounds....it's completely wrong headed. We have found it impossible to do with cars and trucks. In the end, it was and will be more efficient engines and less polluting fuel sources.

You want to confine Humans to one small rock, then cut down on ways to get off the planet and research on how to live somewhere else. We need more and bigger rockets, cheaper, more efficient...not fewer.

Read the article. In my mind, there is damn little science here to base such a conclusion on...

Close Call on the ISS

The Associated Press via Boing Boing puts what happened recently on the international Space Station in perspective. As you probably heard already the ISS had a very close call with space borne debris that forced all the occupants into the safty capsule until the danger had passed. How close did the junk get? Hard to say - more than likely a couple of miles, but it is possible that it may have been tens of feet.

I have mentioned this repeatedly that there is a astounding amount of material in low Earth orbit. thousands and thousands of trackable and untrackable parts and pieces just waiting to do damage. Just last month we had one satellite destroyed by a defunct Russian satellite (yes, read defunct as junk) making hundreds more pieces to track. Now the ISS has a close call. It should become brutally obvious that this problem is not going to go away but only get worse. Our habit of just throwing things away when they are useless has come back to bite us in a big way.

As it was, the crew of the ISS only had a few hours notice that they were in danger and were fully prepared to abandon the station should the need arise.

Here is how it breaks down - From the article:

• The U.S. Space Command tracks 13,943 orbiting objects 4 inches or larger. Only about 900 of those are working satellites. The rest is litter. There are thousands more smaller pieces of junk that can't be tracked as easily.

Size is really not the issue here. Even a grain of sand going 5+ miles a second (yes that's 20,000 miles an hour) is going to do deadly damage. Last month's satellite collision may just have been the final deal breaker for the Hubble which sadly is close to the same orbital position as the debris cloud.

Safety lately has usually had tragedy attached...one would hope that we don't have to loose another space craft full of astronauts to motivate people to space as an environment every bit as important as those on Earth.

Serpentarius Magazine Dies

You can read the full particulars over at SFScope blog, but the jist is that some pinhead calling himself Ghost51 has hammered Serpentarius' site so bad that they have given in and shut down.

Their ending words were: If you know some teen named Ghost51, tell him thanks for ruining things.

If you liked the magazine or not, if you read it or not - frankly that isn't the issue. What is though is some pin head with a hair across his ass and a hard drive full of tools he bought off ebay, most likely, has limited your choices. Swell..........

Adult Swim Anime rant

Is anyone else just a bit cranked at what has happened to the Cartoon Network's Adult Swim on Saturdays? As a general rule Saturday evening would have Toonami which lead in with a few light anime shows. From 11 to 2, adult swim used to come in with some really hard edged anime. It was the only night they really did a schedule like that and quite honestly I had come to enjoy some varied anime classics. Now they have eviscerated the schedule and run only one...Bleach, which is not bad, but one wonders if it's days are numbered. So instead of a couple of hours on Saturday nights.....they have me for 30 minutes and start looking forward to Mondays on Sci-fi which, guess what? yep, has 2 hours of pretty damn good anime. LATER AS!

*UPDATE 10/1/08*
From IO9: Cartoon Network may have killed off their Toonami programming strand, but that doesn't mean that the network has abandoned anime entirely, according to an unnamed Bandai employee at last weekend's New York Anime Fest. Talking to Newsarama, the Bandai source is quoted as saying “There is no way Cartoon Network is giving up Naruto or Pokemon any time soon... We also want people to make sure Code Geass is not cancelled and will be back on a more convenient time slot in the near future." Maybe CN is ready to just admit that anime is as much a cartoon as American animation? [Newsarama]

I am not holding my breath or watching any Adult Swim anymore. We shall see, but I AM getting my fix off Sci-Fi believe it or not. Monday nights at 11 rock with anime. That and the internet network Hulu can really cover the anime booster you need. I rave at Sci-fi's programming but they HAVE stayed with the Monday night schedule so Cartoon Network can bite me.

"What if?" the Sci-Fi Channel became mundane?

Nelson sends in an article from nytimes.com that waffles a bit on the present leadership and the programming of the Sci-Fi network. TIM ARANGO might not go so far as to call the present person at Sci-fi's helm schizophrenic, but does go a long way towards admitting that Sci-fi's Dave Howe may have something less than a clear idea of what science fiction really is. Scii-Fi is now in the hands of Dave Howe, who was promoted to president of Sci Fi from general manager in January. To give you an idea of where he wants to take the network, he has been quoted saying, “It’s not just aliens, spaceships and the future,” “It’s about asking that simple question, ‘What if?’ ”

OMG What if? no....its more of WTF! Where does wrasslin come in according to that scenario?
It's clear that they are trying very hard to expand their market by taloring the product to women. In marketing materials for “Battlestar Galactica,” for example, there are no spaceships, and the story lines try to create more of a balance between action and emotion. Which if you look at that trend, you see that very well may be what happend to BSG in the second season. They may have gained a market share in gender but managed to confuse and alienate fans from the first season.

This quote pretty much sums up my feelings on the present course for the Sci-fi channel: “Generally speaking, the feeling within the science fiction community is that a lot of the shows on the Sci Fi Channel are watered-down versions of the real thing,” said Michael Capobianco, the president of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America.

Thank you Michael...wonder if they will listen...

click title for complete NYT article.



photo by Chester Higgins Jr./The New York Times

Speed Racer - Just Too Gay?

Wow, everyone is bustin on Speed Racer! Not to be left out, IO9 lands some heavy body blows on the CGI blingtastica event. Speed Racer is an English adaptation of the Japanese anime Mach GoGoGo which centered on automobile racing. The big screen version has played it straight according to the original series, but many now speculate if that was the only in the whole process that was! Why is Speed bombing so bad? Analysts have speculated that Speed Racer's problem might have been caused by a boring and confusing plot, or early negative reviews. But IO9 might know the real reason. Speed Racer is freaking people out because it's just too gay.

Here are a couple of high points from the article:

Most of the colors in Speed Racer are sparkly pastels, What is this, Queer Eye for the action hero?

Monkeys are gay.

Several bad guys are giant hairy men dressed in furs and Viking helmets Some of them might even have been centerfolds in Bear magazine.

Speed loves his mother and is super-nice to his girlfriend. Obviously a homo! A true straight dude would be like Iron Man, obsessing over his dead dad and abusing every woman in his life.

And the rant goes on...Click for the complete rant on IO9

Johnny Mnemonic is dated OMG!

I know most or at least a good portion of you thought Johnny Mnemonic was so much trash. However, I like the cyber-punk sub-genre and on top of that, I like William Gibson's style. I first read the short story in OMNI magazine in '81 and was floored. At that time I was just starting to play around with computers. Most of what I could store was on audio tape which I might remind you was a major upgrade from paper tape. A machine running a 1mhz with 4kb of RAM was a serious piece of machinery. The thought that you could have 128kb and store data on 360kb disks was still a bit off. So here is this story where Johnny could store GIGABYTES mind you in his HEAD! Well that was just plain fantastic! then the movie came out in the late 90s when you could get a gigabyte drive without taking out a house loan, the though still of all that storage, SMALL enough to fit in your head was still major geekiness. So what is my problem? No, it's not realizing that Reeves can not act, it was a simple throwaway line in the movie that I again watched last night. Johnny is trying to escape from someone bent on taking his head off. He finds himself in the sewers having weird flashes as the data in his head starts leaking. When asked what is happening to him, he replies "I got this implant that can store 80gig in my head, 160 if I use a doubler" and the movie instantly became quaint. Why? I just took an 80 gig drive out of my "play" computer and threw in a 160gig why? because the 160 was dead cheap and was "old" pata tech. So, Johnny went from being uber cool to being a cheap hack geek using discoed ots trash. Sigh......

Kyle XY or why I would rather watch SpongeBob

Have any of you seen this show called Kyle XY? The show centers around a boy named Kyle (Matt Dallas), who wakes up in the forest outside of Seattle, Washington with no memory of his life up until that point. The series follows Kyle as he tries to understand the mysteries of who he is or why he has no memory of being a child. Oh and it seems he has no belly button. Have you seen it? Then join me as we commiserate together....Excuse me but how did this show get into it's second season? It's TERRIBLE! Is it worse than the SF Channel's Flash? You know, it just might be. Why? Because these people are taking themselves seriously! I am convinced that everyone involved with Flash Gordon knows they are hold a turd and are just passing it from one person to the next to see who drops it first. But they are inhaling deeply at Kyle XY and trying to convince us that we are smelling roses. Can we say two dimensional characters? No one has to walk offstage, just turn sideways and disappear. Kyle? Better Pinocchio, for all the wooden acting I witnessed. I tried, I really did, but I could not get through a whole episode. Nope, giving this one a pass. But omg, ABC has renewed it for a third season! What am I missing? They will cancel a show about a guy jumping through time because no one is watching, supposedly, and make a multi-million dollar stinker about the SAME THING and call it great! COME ON!!!!! We lost some very innovative shows over since the start of the new season and they are keeping trash fiction on the air. Sorry, I am not bellying up to the mundane bar, I will watch Sponge Bob instead, at least they are honest about what they are doing and what they are offering. OK, done ranting.

Kyle XY airs on ABC Family network, Mondays 8:00 PM
SpongeBob Sqarepants on Nickelodeon