We have a space station in orbit. You can see it as it passes overhead. People have lived there for over a decade. From what I’ve read, living there is a pretty magical experience.

There are two commercial companies launching regular cargo shipments to the space station, plus cargo launches by the Russian, European, and Japanese space agencies.

People still have to ride a Russian rocket to get to the space station. A few commercial companies are working on better ways to get there.

The space station has a cannon that launches small satellites into orbit, including bunches sent up on commercial cargo flights. One company is launching 30 earth-observing satellites at once, because they can.

There’s a nuclear-powered robot on Mars. She’s been there for over a year. She occasionally tweets selfies. She joined a solar-powered robot that’s been roving for over a decade. Another robot just landed on the Moon, the first one in a long while.

At least one commercial company is flight testing their passenger rocketships. Another is hot on their heels. We’re all impatiently waiting for flights to space, including hundreds of ticket holders.

One of those cargo-launch companies launched and landed the ten-story-tall first stage of its rocket. On its tail. Eight times.

An asteroid-mining company is using crowd-funded money to build their first asteroid-finding space telescope. It will also take selfies.

We now know of over a thousand planets around other stars. (You can help find more, or just get updates on your phone.) We have a photograph of at least one of them. There’s a new telescope to take photos of a lot more.

When you look up at the sky tonight, count 25 stars. (It’s easy, because there are millions in view.) One of those 25 is a Sun-like star with an Earth-sized planet  in the habitable zone, according to our best estimates.

There’s more going on than I can even list in an overview. A decade ago, most of this was science fiction. Welcome to 2014, when space is awesome.

In this case, I’ve been thinking about how it might feel to walk around a city on Mars. It’s likely to be mostly underground to help shield against radiation, but there should be as much daylight as possible to save energy. On Earth, that kind of daylighting comes from skylights, windows, and (my personal favorite) light tubes.

But what about on Mars? Mars is farther from the Sun than Earth is, so it gets less light on the surface, but how much less? Is walking down a Martian street destined to feel like a gloomy overcast day?

First I had to get a grip on how to measure daylight. An obvious comparison is solar radiation, measured in Watts per square meter. Depending on time of year, Mars gets between 1/3 and 1/2 as much solar radiation as Earth, because it’s about 50% farther from the Sun. That’s handy for figuring solar power output, but the human eye isn’t so linear.

Another way is illuminance, measured in lux. Though the exact conversion factor between solar radiation and lux is a bit tricky due to the eye’s reaction to different wavelengths, I gather that the relationship is linear. Thus, using some standard Earth values and scaling them:

(I’m assuming that indirect daylight is scattered as well in Mars’s pink sky as it is in Earth’s blue. Something to check later.)

Filling in a few other Earthly values for comparison:

So it looks like daylight on Mars wouldn’t look too different from daylight on Earth. It’s orders of magnitude more light than during “golden hour” on Earth, which is plenty to get around by. It would probably feel like a partly-cloudy day, since there would be more light than even the brightest overcast day, with sharply-defined shadows.

For daylighting, this probably means that Martian interiors would need twice as many Solatubes to get the same level of illumination, but we’re still talking about a fraction of the available daylight. In other words, using Earth-style lighting techniques should keep a Martian city street from feeling gloomy.

*Note the use of Wikipedia sources. Kids, don’t use Wikipedia as a source if you want anyone to take you seriously.

The panel was fun, and I put together a slide show to serve as spacy background for it. Those slides are big and unwieldy because they have huge images and video, but you’re welcome to have them if you’d like:

• slides in their original Keynote format (320 MB)
• slides exported to PowerPoint (PPT) format (316 MB)

I might try to put the audio and slides together somewhere so you get the full effect, but that’s going to be a pain. If someone with better skills than me would like to do that, you have my blessing. Please send me the result if/when you post it so I can link it in here.

If it’s clear enough, and if I’ve read the magnitudes and times and directions correctly on Heavens Above, here’s what I’ll be doing that night:

1. At 5:00pm I’ll go outside and stand in a nice dark spot. (I live in the middle of San Diego, so that takes a few minutes to find.)
2. At 5:05 I’ll look to the northwest for a bright object moving toward the northeast. If it’s moving slowly and not blinking, it’s the International Space Station. Population: 6. I’ll wave to Daniel, Anton, Anatoli, Oleg, Donald, and André.
3. At 5:07, when the ISS is as far up as it’ll get in the northeastern sky, I’ll look to the southwest for a dimmer object moving toward the northeast. If it’s moving slowly and not blinking, it’s Tiangong 1, the first part of China’s space station. Population: 0 so far.
4. Until about 5:10, when Tiangong 1 is right overhead and ISS drops below the eastern horizon, I’ll watch the two of them share the sky.

Thanks to Allan Manangan for passing along the news from David Dickinson on Twitter.

The rule is simple: When you tell a child anything, they will ignore most of it and leave only the words that benefit them.

Toddler version:

No, don’t run into the street.

Blah blah run into the street.

Young child version:

We’ll go to the zoo if there’s time after the store and lunch.

We’ll go to the zoo blah blah blah.

Older child version:

If you clean your room, you can borrow the car on Saturday afternoon.

Blah blah you can borrow the car blah blah.

Journalist version:

NASA will hold a news conference to discuss an astrobiology finding that will impact the search for evidence of extraterrestrial life.

NASA will blah blah discuss blah finding blah evidence of extraterrestrial life.

…and there you go. Good luck on Thursday, guys.

This year, Suw Charman-Anderson made a pledge: “I will publish a blog post on Tuesday 24th March about a woman in technology whom I admire but only if 1,000 other people will do the same.” Over 1,800 people agreed, and so here you are.

I decided to write about Esther Dyson, a writer and technology investor who has become quite a force in the NewSpace industry. Of course, I should have known that she would be a popular choice, so much of her biography can be found in other Ada Day posts:

From ideonexus:

Dyson attended Harvard at the age of 16, was reporting for Forbes at 25, and was analyzing technology stocks for Wall Street by the age of 30. She co-established the publication Release 1.0, which continues today as Release 2.0 and sells for $130 a single issue. She has backed some of the best start-ups online, including Flickr, del.icio.us, and many others.

She was chairwoman of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and boardmember of the Long Now Foundation, blogger for the Huffington Post, and columnist for the New York Times. At the time of my writing this, Esther Dyson is living just outside of Moscow, training to be a cosmonaut.

From Vector and Pixila:

The first time I saw Esther Dyson speak at SIME it really struck me that she was an extrordinairy entrepreneur, a businesswoman investing early in eastern european countries, investing and engaging in start-ups, a philantopist, and an visonairy and brave adventurer, that dares to walk her own way.

And some good background from a previous BBC article:

Ms Dyson started her working life at the bottom of the heap as a fact checker at business magazine Forbes, only because Variety would not hire her. It was not long though before she became a reporter writing about technology.

After a few career moves, she bought the company she worked for and took over a highly influential newsletter called Release 1.0 that covered emerging markets.

“What I did for a long time was make things obvious that people weren’t noticing by explaining what was going on and pointing out stuff like the internet or the impact the internet would have,” said Ms Dyson.

I first heard of Esther when I was evaluating whether to work for Eventful; she and Steve Jurvetson were both early-stage investors in the company. I learned more about them through their Flickr photos, and it became obvious that they were both space and science enthusiasts as well as savvy tech investors. That implied good things about the company, so I joined up.

Seeing the faces of heroes like Peter Diamandis in her photos gave me the impression that the space industry is actually a pretty small group, and her roll-up-the-sleeves style of participatory journalism made their amazing activities seem within reach. Her enthusiasm for getting involved and her willingness to work hard have inspired my own gung-ho approach to space advocacy.

Today she’s posting photos from a Soyuz rocket rollout, attending as a member of the backup crew. She has shared every step in the process, writing not as some rich or famous tourist but as an excited traveller sharing with the folks back home. And that’s what it really comes down to: Esther Dyson isn’t just an amazing “woman in technology.” She’s an amazing human being.

I was pleasantly surprised to discover that the National Space Society has donated telescopes to students in over 20 countries as part of the Permission to Dream project. The project page posted photos of a recent star party in Nepal, featuring one of the donated telescopes:

Click through to the Permission to Dream project page for more photos from the star party. Well done, NSS! If you’d like to donate to the Permission to Dream project, become an NSS member today (and be sure to tell them the San Diego chapter sent you).

[via the NSS on Twitter] ]]> https://globalspin.com/2008/10/permission-to-dream/feed/ 0 https://globalspin.com/2008/09/welcome-haumea/ https://globalspin.com/2008/09/welcome-haumea/#comments Tue, 23 Sep 2008 14:11:00 +0000 http://globalspin.com/?p=1195 The Solar System’s planetary roll call just got longer. From today’s Astronomy Picture of the Day:

One of the strangest objects in the outer Solar System was classified as a dwarf planet last week and given the name Haumea. This designation makes Haumea the fifth designated dwarf planet after Pluto, Ceres, Eris, and Makemake. Haumea’s smooth but oblong shape make it extremely unusual. Along one direction, Haumea is significantly longer than Pluto, while in another direction Haumea has an extent very similar to Pluto, while in the third direction is much smaller. Haumea’s orbit sometimes brings it closer to the Sun than Pluto, but usually Haumea is further away.

It may be just a dwarf planet, but I think it’s interesting enough to visit on the Grand Tour. Who knows what we might find on that (probably) icy planet and its two little moons?

Robert Woodhead, self-described Mad Overlord and all-around geek, has posted an amazing amount of detail from his recent experiment in seeing how the Diet Coke & Mentos reaction works in microgravity. It’s a modification of the now-standard geyser-producing demonstration, but with a twist: performing the trick on a Zero G flight and recording it on a high-speed camera. The Youtube video is great, but the expanded description is even better.

Continue reading “Mentos + Diet Coke + Zero G = Best. Experiment. Ever.”

And showing off the friendship star quilt that Karen made for Luke, too!