My friend Alethea Kontis has been running a series of interviews this month, and graciously included me in her coterie of interview subjects. Alethea it was who, upon hearing that I would be reading slush for Baen Books, suggested that rather than “slushmaster” my unofficial title should be “Slushmaster General.”
One click will take you to Genre Chick Interview: Gray Rinehart. Hope you enjoy it!
Many thanks, Princess Alethea!
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While the Space Shuttle Endeavour is in orbit on its final flight, it seems fitting that we remember that 15 years ago today — May 19, 1996 — Endeavour launched from the Kennedy Space Center on another mission.
(The Inflatable Antenna Experiment, after deployment. NASA image.)
Mission STS-77 carried U.S. astronauts John H. Casper, Curtis L. Brown, Daniel W. Bursch, Mario Runco, Jr., and Andrew S. W. Thomas, and Canadian astronaut Marc Garneau. The astronauts conducted a variety of experiments, including deploying the free-flying Inflatable Antenna Experiment, which at its full size was as big as a tennis court.
Here’s wishing the best to the current crew of Endeavour as they carry out their mission to the International Space Station.
Also in today’s space history, 40 years ago the Mars-2 spacecraft launched from the Baikonur Cosmodrome. On its approach to Mars in November 1971, it released a lander that “entered the Martian atmosphere at roughly 6.0 km/s at a steeper angle than planned” and crashed: the first human-built article to reach the surface of Mars.
by Twenty years ago today — May 18, 1991 — the first British astronaut flew into orbit aboard a Soyuz launch vehicle.
(Helen Sharman. NASA image from the UK Space Agency.)
Mission TM-12, crewed by cosmonauts Anatoli P. Artsebarsky and Sergei K. Krikalev and British astronaut Helen P. Sharman, launched from the Baikonur Cosmodrome en route to the Mir space station.
In addition to being the first Briton in space, Sharman was the first woman to visit Mir. She conducted biological experiments and contacted British schoolchildren via amateur radio during her week in space. She returned to earth with the crew of TM-11, the previous Mir occupants.
by Yesterday I wrote a long post on the NC State of Business blog about what I perceive as condescension toward companies and workers who make things for a living. Rather than reproduce the whole thing, here’s the conclusion:
Manufacturing is vital not just to a healthy economy but to everyone, because it provides many (if not most) of the things that make modern life possible and enjoyable. It’s unfortunate that manufacturers don’t get more respect for what they do, regardless of where they make their products.
If you want to read the whole thing, here’s the link: Disrespect and Condescension: Can North Carolina Manufacturers Expect Anything Else?
by Ten years ago today — May 8, 2001 — the Sea Launch team launched the XM-1 or “Roll” satellite from the Odyssey launch platform.
(XM-1 “Roll” launch from the Sea Launch platform. Image from www.sea-launch.com.)
In our “Satellite Radio in Space History” item, we noted the launch of XM-2, or “Rock” — so with this launch XM Radio officially had its Rock and Roll.
My time on the Pacific with Sea Launch came in the summer of 2002, and it’s still one of the coolest temporary duty assignments I ever had.
by Fifty years ago today — May 5, 1961 — Alan B. Shepard, Jr., became the first U.S. astronaut launched into space.
(Freedom-7 launch. NASA image.)
Shepard had named his capsule Freedom-7, though the flight was also known as Mercury Redstone-3.* The mission had several objectives:
(1) familiarize man with a brief but complete space flight experience, including the lift-off, powered flight, weightless flight (approximately 5 minutes), re-entry, and landing phases of the flight;
(2) evaluate man’s ability to perform as a functional unit during space flight by demonstrating manual control of spacecraft attitude before, during, and after retrofire and by use of voice communications during flight;
(3) study man’s physiological reactions during space flight; and,
(4) recover the astronaut and spacecraft.
Shepard’s launch from the Eastern Space & Missile Center was only 23 days after Yuri Gagarin had become the first human in orbit. Shepard’s flight was suborbital, however, so the honor of being the first U.S. astronaut in orbit would eventually go to John Glenn.
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*Speaking of Redstone rockets, why not pop over to Redstone Science Fiction and see what they have to offer? They recently posted their twelfth issue!
by Thirty-five years ago today — May 4, 1976 — the LAGEOS-1 satellite launched on a Delta rocket from Vandenberg AFB.
(LAGEOS. NASA image.)
The Laser Geodynamics Satellite (LAGEOS) (also known as the Laser Geodetic Satellite) “was the first spacecraft dedicated exclusively to high-precision laser ranging and provided the first opportunity to acquire laser-ranging data that were not degraded by errors originating in the target satellite.”
The spacecraft itself was simple: a sphere covered with 426 “cube corner reflectors” or retroreflectors which return light directly to its source no matter the incident angle. According to this page, LAGEOS-1 also carried a small plaque designed by Carl Sagan:
The plaque is 4 inches by 7 inches (10 cm by 18 cm) stainless steel plate. The spacecraft carries two identical copies included in its interior. In its upper center it displays the simplest counting scheme, binary arithmetic. The numbers one to ten in binary notation are shown. At upper right is a schematic drawing of the Earth in orbit around the Sun, and an arrow indicating direction of motion. The arrowhead points to the right, the convention adopted for indicating the future. All arrows accompanying numbers are “arrows of time”. Under the Earth’s orbit is the binary number one, denoting the period of time used on the plaque — one revolution of the Earth, or one year. The remainder of the LAGEOS plaque consists of three maps of the Earth’s surface. The first map denotes the Earth 268 million years in the past. All the continents are shown together in one mass. The close fit of South America into West Africa was one of the first hints that continental drift actually occurs. The middle map represents the zero point in time for the other two maps. It displays the present configuration of the planets. The final map shows the Earth’s surface 8.4 million years from now — very roughly the estimated lifetime of the LAGEOS. Many important changes in the Earth’s surface are shown, including the drift of California out into the Pacific Ocean. Whoever comes upon the LAGEOS plaque needs only compare a current map of the Earth’s geography with that in the lower two maps to calculate roughly the difference between his time and ours.
Put it on your calendar: let’s meet up with LAGEOS-1 8 million years from now and see how accurate Sagan’s continental drift picture is.
by As a follow-up to the “blog tour” posts I’ve been doing, featuring fellow members of the Codex Writers online community, some updates and reminders ….
Bradley Beaulieu’s The Winds of Khalakovo was recently released and has received a lot of positive attention. Bradley did a two-part interview for the blog tour: Part One, and Part Two
Last month, Colin Harvey signed copies of Damage Time at Eastercon. We discussed his book in this interview.
And last week, Leah Cypess’s Mistwood was released in paperback. My interview with Leah is at this link.
I don’t have any news about my own writing, except to say that I’ve recently set aside the short story I was working on and have been revising one of my nonfiction books, tentatively titled The Elements of War. Speaking of war, I am still processing the recent news about the death of the would-be Caliph … I may collect some thoughts here in the next few days.
by First things first, the military mission: 20 years ago today — April 28, 1991 — the Space Shuttle Discovery launched on a dedicated DoD mission.
(Auroral image taken during the STS-39 mission. NASA image.)
The STS-39 crew — Michael L. Coats, L. Blaine Hammond, Guion S. Bluford, Gregory S. Harbaugh, Richard J. Hieb, Donald R. McMonagle, and Charles Lacy Veach — completed a combination of classified and unclassified mission objectives during their week in space.
On this same date a decade later — April 28, 2001 — the first “space tourist,” U.S. businessman Dennis Tito, rode aboard the Soyuz-TM-32 mission with cosmonauts Talgat A. Musabayev and Yuri M. Baturin. Their mission launched from the Baikonur Cosmodrome and docked with the International Space Station. I love the description of Tito in the linked write-up as “not a professional astronaut.”
And just 5 years ago today, the CloudSat and CALIPSO* meteorological satellites launched from Vandenberg AFB on a Delta-II rocket. They launched into the same orbit as the Aqua, PARASOL, and Aura satellites to join the A-Train of observational craft that pass overhead one right after the other.
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*CALIPSO = Cloud-Aerosol Lidar and Infrared Pathfinder Satellite Observation, a U.S. and French collaborative spacecraft
by One of my favorite parts of the liturgy — which I don’t recite very often, since we go to a Baptist Church — is the Mystery of Faith:
Christ has died.
Christ is risen.
Christ will come again.
On Easter Sunday especially, the Mystery of Faith resonates with me. I think it’s aptly named, i.e., that the basis of our faith is ultimately mysterious and beyond human comprehension. To the worldly wise it is a foolish thing that confounds them; to those of us who are not so wise it can be a confusing thing, difficult to understand and harder to put into practice.
I don’t understand it — neither the mechanisms of the miracles nor the depths of such sacrificial love — and because I don’t understand it, of all the disciples I relate most to Peter the denier and Thomas the doubter.
To me it is, and probably always will be, a mystery.
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