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My adventure for October was a visceral visual event.  I saw my first rocket launch the other day.  Those of us living in southern California have our own launch pad at Vandenburg AFB.  Vandenburg is involved in most of the testing of the ballistic missile shield, launching in conjunction and generally in the direction of Kwajalein Atoll.  They launch Atlas, Titans and other rocket bodies and do it just about every month.

You can see the launches from most anywhere in Socal and there’s a great mailing list dedicated to information on launch times, dates and payloads at spacearchive.  The launch I got to watch was a Delta II, you can see a picture of the launch here.  I was standing near the top of 7,300 foot Alamo mountain to see it and it was beautiful.  The launchpad was over 50 miles away, but my perch was so high I had a clear view of the rocket quietly streaking into the night.

This lead me to think about change and how hard it is.  A rocket, weighing tens of thousands of pound and holding thousands of gallons of fuel is built for change.  It’s entire existence is built around one simple task, to go from stationary to 17,500 mph in under nine minutes.  They are built to beat gravity, to slip the surly bonds of Earth if you will.

A rocket will burn most of it’s fuel within the first three minutes of flight.  Each minute it gets a bit easier though, the gravitational pull of the Earth lessens second by second and it’s speed increases bit by bit.  Easier and easier it gets the farther it is from the point where it changed trajectory from a stationary hunk of metal to a speeding hunk of metal.

I think that’s true of any and all change, it takes a lot of effort to change the course or path of a life, but it gets easier with every step.  Once that initial decision is made and you are off to whatever change that is, it gets easier.

Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of Earth
And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings;
Sunward I’ve climbed, and joined the tumbling mirth
Of sun-split clouds, — and done a hundred things
You have not dreamed of — wheeled and soared and swung
High in the sunlit silence. Hov’ring there,
I’ve chased the shouting wind along, and flung
My eager craft through footless halls of air. . . .

Up, up the long, delirious burning blue
I’ve topped the wind-swept heights with easy grace
Where never lark, or ever eagle flew —
And, while with silent, lifting mind I’ve trod
The high untrespassed sanctity of space,
Put out my hand, and touched the face of God.

— John Gillespie Magee, Jr

You are insignificant. No, really you are. All the following pictures are to scale and are intended to demonstrate how insignificant we all are in the big scheme of things.

Here is a representation of our planets, including Pluto.

Here is a representation of our planets in comparison to our own little sun.

Here’s our sun in comparison to some other stars.

And here’s our sun in comparison to some bigger stars.

Antares is by no means the biggest star out there. Something to think about next time you are outside looking at the stars, unless you’re one of those unfortunate souls that live in a city and have no night sky to inspire you. Or if you’re one of those people who’s only time outside is the time it takes to walk from their car to their destination and then return to their car.

That little white spot between the white lines is Earth. Here’s what the late, great Carl Sagan had to say about that pale blue dot.

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“We succeeded in taking that picture [from deep space], and, if you look at it, you see a dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever lived, lived out their lives. The aggregate of all our joys and sufferings, thousands of confident religions, ideologies and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilizations, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every hopeful child, every mother and father, every inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every superstar, every supreme leader, every saint and sinner in the history of our species, lived there on a mote of dust, suspended in a sunbeam.

The earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that in glory and in triumph they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of the dot on scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner of the dot. How frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe, are challenged by this point of pale light.

Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity — in all this vastness — there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. It is up to us. It’s been said that astronomy is a humbling, and I might add, a character-building experience. To my mind, there is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly and compassionately with one another and to preserve and cherish that pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.”

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After getting some crushingly bad news earlier this week and being pretty bummed today turned up pretty well. First of all, El Presidente will be re-invigorating the space program by endorsing a manned lunar base as a stepping stone to manned missions to Mars. I personally could care less what social programs get cut, gutted or axed, I don’t care if you don’t have a job and need food, I don’t care if your twelve kids are hungry. Governmental funds should be spent on the common good, and I don’t see how feeding you or your damn kids is the common good.

I do however see how cordless drills, cell phones, microcircuitry and CCD’s benefit the entire world. I do see the human spirit needing frontiers to push back, unexplored horizons to find and adventures to embark upon. I do see America as the one and only nation on the Earth with the technology, knowledge, financial capacity and now political will to do something so bold and audacious. I hope my offspring will see man on Mars, I hope to God I’ll get to see it.

This has been and will be a huge year for exploration, I’m sure everyone knows Spirit has touched down on Mars already, Opportunity will be doing so in a couple weeks and Stardust has collected some of the primordial soup from the tail of a comet. In the middle of the year Cassini will arrive at Jupiter and hopefully this is the year that the X-prize is awarded to the first privately funded and developed space launch platform.

Bring on the stars.

Ohh the other thing I am excited about, going backpacking (even though it’s a gimped solo mission) will be great. Snow, cold and loneliness are on the menu for this weekend.

Bring on the snowshoes.

Today President George W. Bush’s administration leaked out the information that we (spacebuffs) have been waiting for for years and years. America’s space program has been foundering in low earth orbit for over 30 years now and it’s time we got out of this rut.

The potential plans call for the United States to return man to the moon and establish a research faciilty (whether it will be permanently manned or not is in question at the moment). No matter what, this is finally a day that I can start being proud of paying taxes again. Not to sound like an asshole, but I can’t stand my money going into building public housing (the time I spent there in Chicago have soured me on that entire venture permanently). Military spending is necessary, that’s for sure, but after seeing how much ammo the ‘bush monsters’ would eat, and the number of weapons systems, vehicles, buildings and all sorts of other equipment were destroyed in the name of training… I have a feeling that the military budget is grossly overinflated and wasteful.

I’m sure there will be wasted money getting us back to the moon, but there will be research and development trickle downs to us civilians. I thank god for my cordless drill, CCD’s, Tang, Telecommunications and all the other spin-offs.

Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of Earth
And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings;
Sunward I’ve climbed and joined the tumbling mirth of sun-split clouds,–and done a hundred things
You have not dreamed of wheeled and soared and swung
High in the sunlit silence. Hov’ring there,
I’ve chased the shouting wind along, and flung
My eager craft through footless falls of air…
Up, up the long, delirious, burning blue
I’ve topped the wind-swept heights with easy grace
Where never lark, nor eer eagle flew–
And, while with silent lifting mind I’ve trod
The high, untrespassed sanctity of space,
Put out my hand and touched the face of God.

-John Gillespie Magee

10.14.03

China launched a man into space today, just a couple of hours ago.  Now we have three countries in the world capable of putting a man into space nearly at will.  The U.S., is obviously the premiere space faring nation at the moment, though our space shuttle fleet is grounded for the time being.

I was in Mammoth for an extended weekend of snowboarding when Columbia disintegrated, I was in Mr. Lopez’ class learning something that I have long since un-learned when the Challenger exploded. 

This is probably the first national level event that I remember, I kept a copy of the local newspaper with the well known picture of the explosion on the cover.  I think it was the incident that inspired my dreams of space, my love of the space program and my respect for those who participate in it in any fashion.  This is a tiny, tiny silver lining for that terrible cloud the Challenger disappeared into on that January day.

I hope that China never has to misfortune of losing its bravest.