25 years ago today....

The future doesn't belong to the fainthearted; it belongs to the brave... We will never forget them, nor the last time we saw them, this morning, as they prepared for their journey and waved goodbye and 'slipped the surly bonds of Earth' to 'touch the face of God.'

"The best fantasy is written in the language of dreams. It is alive as dreams are alive, more real than real ... for a moment at least ... that long magic moment before we wake. 

Fantasy is silver and scarlet, indigo and azure, obsidian veined with gold and lapis lazuli. Reality is plywood and plastic, done up in mud brown and olive drab.

Fantasy tastes of habaneros and honey, cinnamon and cloves, rare red meat and wines as sweet as summer. Reality is beans and tofu, and ashes at the end. 

Reality is the strip malls of Burbank, the smokestacks of Cleveland, a parking garage in Newark. Fantasy is the towers of Minas Tirith, the ancient stones of Gormenghast, the halls of Camelot.

Fantasy flies on the wings of Icarus, reality on Southwest Airlines.

Why do our dreams become so much smaller when they finally come true? 

We read fantasy to find the colors again, I think. To taste strong spices and hear the songs the sirens sang. There is something old and true in fantasy that speaks to something deep within us, to the child who dreamt that one day he would hunt the forests of the night, and feast beneath the hollow hills, and find a love to last forever somewhere south of Oz and north of Shangri-La. 

They can keep their heaven. When I die, I'd sooner go to middle Earth." 

- George R. R. Martin

First, Bill Gates and Warren Buffett convince 38 billionaires to give up half their money to charity.

Link to WSJ article.

Second, a Federal judge just struck down the California same-sex marriage ban!

Link to CNN article.

News like this makes me happy. :D

SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket launches into space!

OMFG, I've never been so excited in my life!

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June 4 (Bloomberg) -- Space Exploration Technologies Inc., one of the companies at the center of President Barack Obama’s plans for NASA, launched a new rocket designed to take cargo and astronauts to the International Space Station.

SpaceX’s Falcon 9 took off on its first test flight at about 2:45 p.m. local time from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida. It reached the Earth’s orbit about nine minutes later. The company’s first rocket, the Falcon 1, took four attempts before it reached orbit in September 2008.

Falcon 9 is designed to compete with launch vehicles such as the Atlas and Delta from United Launch Alliance, a joint venture of Boeing Co. and Lockheed Martin Corp. SpaceX, led by PayPal Inc. co-founder Elon Musk, plans to use the rocket to carry into orbit its Dragon spacecraft, which is intended to take cargo to the orbiting outpost after the space shuttles are retired and may later ferry U.S. astronauts.

SpaceX’s vessels are part of Obama’s new strategy for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, which calls for the agency to develop systems capable of taking humans to Mars while helping entrepreneurs build vessels to carry astronauts to the space station.

NASA in 2008 awarded the Hawthorne, California-based company and Orbital Sciences Corp. $3.5 billion in contracts to deliver cargo to the station through 2016.

An earlier attempt to launch today was scrubbed seconds before ignition when the rocket put itself into safe mode after experiencing a “shutdown condition,” SpaceX said on its website.

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The spacecraft was a long way from home.

I thought it would be a good idea, just after Saturn, to have them take one last glance homeward. From Saturn, the Earth would appear too small for Voyager to make out any detail. Our planet would be just a point of light, a lonely pixel hardly distinguishable from the other points of light Voyager would see: nearby planets, far off suns. But precisely because of the obscurity of our world thus revealed, such a picture might be worth having.

It had been well understood by the scientists and philosophers of classical antiquity that the Earth was a mere point in a vast, encompassing cosmos—but no one had ever seen it as such. Here was our first chance, and perhaps also our last for decades to come.

So, here they are: a mosaic of squares laid down on top of the planets in a background smattering of more distant stars. Because of the reflection of sunlight off the spacecraft, the Earth seems to be sitting in a beam of light, as if there were some special significance to this small world; but it's just an accident of geometry and optics. There is no sign of humans in this picture: not our reworking of the Earth's surface; not our machines; not ourselves. From this vantage point, our obsession with nationalisms is nowhere in evidence. We are too small. On the scale of worlds, humans are inconsequential: a thin film of life on an obscure and solitary lump of rock and metal.

Consider again that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it, everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you've ever heard of, every human being who ever was 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 mother and father; hopeful child; inventor and explorer; every teacher of morals; every corrupt politician; every supreme leader; every superstar; 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 endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner. How frequent their misunderstandings; how eager they are to kill one another; how fervent their hatreds. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that in glory and triumph they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. 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. Like it or not, for the moment, the Earth is where we make our stand.

It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. It underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the only home we've ever known.

The pale blue dot.

-- Carl Sagan

LIFTOFF!

The last night launch ever of the Space Shuttle. Words cannot express how much I wanted to be there.

But I will do my darndest to be at the very LAST Shuttle launch! Scheduled for September 16, 2010. It will be STS-133, the Space Shuttle Discovery.

Say hello to the Ares I-X rocket, the vehicle which will carry the Orion spacecraft, the planned replacement for the venerable Space Shuttle when it is retired in 2010.

It made its maiden flight yesterday, October 28,2009, at 11:30 AM EST.

The growth of light pollution in Southern California

That's not a video of the sun rising, that's a video of ambient light from the city near Palomar Observatory growing over the years.

Now that's just depressing. Not only because anyone living under such skies basically will never see a true night sky, but also because that much light pollution represents billions of dollars in wasted electricity.

Think about it: why in God's name do we have to be shining lights upward?

As much as half of the electricity we pump into our outdoor lights is wasted illuminating basically empty space that almost no one uses. That amounts to over $10 billion of wasted electricity annually, and an average of $150-$250 annually per home. And beyond the financial impact and the obvious environmental impact of generating and then wasting that much electricity, there's also health considerations, for us as well as for animals, as light pollution can also disrupt sleep patterns. In the center of a city (Level 9 on the light pollution scale), even if you're not in direct line-of-sight of a light source, the ambient sky-glow is often bright enough to read in.

The good news is that there are initiatives out there to reduce light pollution, like LA's recent announcement that the city will replace 140,000 streetlights with lower-power, full cutoff lights that drastically reduce the amount of light reflected into the sky and save approximately $10 million a year, but there still needs to be more awareness spread about this problem. Even though it can't be completely eliminated, it's one of the easiest, cheapest, and most effective ways to improve local environments.

A National Geographic article on the issue of light pollution.

Wingsuit Skydiving during the *bleeping* SPACE SHUTTLE launch!

Holy *bleeping* *bleep*..... I have found a new dream....

...would you dare to step off and fly?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1PmYItnlY5M&feature=related

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