25 Pages Tagged “Space Exploration”
Reviews
- A City on Mars
★★★★★
Kelly and Zach Weinersmith
Accessible and intricately researched, with scattered humor to keep the reader’s interest. Getting to space is the easy part. Staying there is going to be a lot more complicated. - Soonish
★★★★★
Kelly and Zach Weinersmith
Fascinating, accessible, funny, and still relevant overview of cutting-edge tech, even though it took me 7 years to get around to reading it. - Under Alien Skies
★★★★★
Philip Plait
A fun look at what it would be like to visit other planets or star systems, weaving together sci-fi scenarios, the science behind them, and the history of how those discoveries were made.
Blog Posts
- Cis is Just A Description
Imagine a small village near a valley, so isolated that they just call themselves “the people.” One day they find out about another village on the other side of the valley, and they start calling them “the people across the valley.” They can keep talking about “the people,” but sometimes they need to make a […]
- Lost Cities and Alien Skies
You wouldn’t think that books about astronomy and archaeology would have a lot in common, but Four Lost Cities and Under Alien Skies pack some odd similarities.
- Blue Sunsets on Mars
One of many cool facts brought up in Phil Plait’s new book, Under Alien Skies is that Martian sunsets are blue! On Earth, nitrogen scatters light randomly, with bluer colors scattering more than redder colors, so the ambient sky is blue, but when you’re looking toward the sun at a shallow angle (like sunrise or […]
- Pixar, the Space Shuttle, and Kids’ Museum Memories
Went with the family to see Space Shuttle Endeavour and a Pixar-themed exhibit on computer animation at the California Science Center. The 6YO loved the Pixar exhibit, which broke down all the steps to creating a computer-animated movie into separate hands-on centers where you could do things like… Apply different textures and bump maps to […]
- Visiting Endeavour on its Final Journey
Spotting the space shuttle from a mile away, then walking out to see it up close while it sat in a Los Angeles parking lot.
- Watching Endeavour’s Final Flight Through LA
Half of the people at my office turned out to watch the space shuttle’s final flight around Los Angeles.
- Celebrating Curiosity at Planetfest 2012
Timed for the Mars Curiosity landing, Planetfest featured mock-ups of capsules and landers, space art, meteorites, robots, speakers and of course a party.
- Watching the Space Shuttle Land in 1988
When I was 12, I went to see the Space Shuttle land at Edwards Air Force Base. I took an SLR and telephoto lens. With the shuttle program ending, I’ve scanned the photos.
- Recent Links: Moon and More
Linkblogging: SMBC, XKCD, space pics, Flash Forward, mobile web usability and more.
- Southern Lights…from SPAAACE!
Check this out: It’s the aurora australis, or southern lights, seen from above! It was taken May 29, 2010 from the International Space Station. Bad Astronomy talks about what causes aurorae in the blog post where I found the picture. Seriously: The aurora. From space. How cool is that?
- Outer Planets: Viewing Neptune
When I was younger, astronomy books only had paintings of Neptune. Now, they have photos – but they show weather from one visit way back in 1989.
- Links, from the Astronomical to the Surreal
The Value of Space Exploration, via Phil Plait. Neil Gaiman on The Fairy Feller’s Master Stroke, a painting by a madman that’s inspired its share of stories. And from Comics Worth Reading, our WTF entry for the day: Paradise by the GoPhone Light. It’s a commercial done in the style of a music video, featuring […]
- Cities at Night, seen from Space
This is cool: a fascinating tour of the world’s cities as seen in visible light from the International Space Station. Cities at Night, an Orbital Tour Around the World It’s interesting to see how just lighting illustrates different patterns in city development. European cities have this star topology, US cities tend to stick to the […]
- Atlantis home
Space Shuttle Atlantis has landed safely. *whew!* I’m getting more nervous about shuttle missions lately. In part, it’s the greater focus on all the things that could go wrong. In part, it’s the realization that you know, the shuttle fleet really is aging. But mostly, I think it’s the fear that, given reactions to the […]
- Hollywood and Space
Some interesting comments by Warren Ellis in today’s Bad Signal on film budgets, and Superman Returns in particular. $250 million puts you in spacelaunch-budget territory. For $250 million WB could’ve given Bryan Singer his own communications satellite and spent the change on a George Clooney movie. This is the absurdity of modern Hollywood; that taking […]
- Back in Space!
Discovery reaches orbit – we’re finally back in space! Here’s hoping the shuttle will be able to tide us over until a next-generation ship is ready.
- On Google Moon
Google Maps has been extended to the moon, with all the Apollo landing sites marked. Be sure to experiment with zoom for full effect.
- Reusable space travel is here!
SpaceShipOne has won the X-Prize! This morning it completed its second trip to the edge of the atmosphere within one week (the prize stipulates it must be within two weeks!) The Scaled Composites team made history in June with the world’s first privately-funded manned space flight, and last week they made a deal with Virgin […]
- Far-Flung Finances
In CNN’s report on the discovery that Mars once had liquid water – and thus may have once been hospitable to life – it mentions that the Spirit and Opportunity missions cost about $820 million. The IMDB estimates the budget for Spider-Man 2 at $200 million. In other words, each mission cost two big-budget summer […]
- To the stars…
Well, the critics have started coming out, claiming that manned space flight isn’t worth the risk and space exploration (at least with human crews) should be written off as a bad idea. How can you look up at the night sky and not think it’s worth it? Or is it because so many of us […]
- Earth to the self-righteous….come in, people….
<RANT> Okay. For all you holier-than-thou smarty-pantses out there, here’s a question. If an average-sized couch cushion were to hit a brick wall at 15 mph, would you think at first glance that the brick wall might be damaged? I thought not. So leave me the FUCK alone with your judgmental snippetiness about how YOU […]
- Columbia
It’s taken me two days to collect my thoughts enough to write about this. The loss of the orbiter and its crew hit me as a complete shock on Saturday, and I immediately started checking CNN and press releases. On the web. Not on TV. I remembered watching the Challenger footage over and over, and […]