On Hiatus
Mood:  rushed
I regret to inform you that I'm putting this blog on hiatus for the next two weeks. I have a manuscript to finish by deadline, and simply don't have extra energy to devote to being funny and topical here.

The worst thing about writing isn't the writing... it's taking the novel you've lovingly crafted and writing no more than two pages per chapter, cutting away the loving craft and leaving a skeleton that is still somehow supposed to sell the idea to the publisher you send it to. Nuts.

Got typing to do.
See you in two weeks!

Scott the harried

ScottLand Saturday
Mood:  spacey
We haven't blown away yet. Not completely anyway. Spent the night by the firelight and lanterns and such but it was nice rather than being a drag. It's odd to draw by lanternlight. You get a real insight into why Renaissance master drawings look like they do in terms of strong light from a single source, rich vermillions and copper hues on the skin and so forth.

"Hard-Headed Woman" lyrics by Claude Demetrius
"Margaritaville" lyrics by Jimmy Buffett
Both appear under "Fair Use" provisions of US copyright Law (Title 17 US Code, Section 107) as one-time usage for purposes of satire.

The storm before the lull...
Mood:  loud
Stupid weather!
I gotta get this posted while we still have power. Sometime last night we lost it (power that is) and it didn't come back until about the time I had to leave for work. Lucky thing my clock has a battery backup.

Our back porch is taking the brunt of it (appropriate, I suppose, since the front porch is no longer there...)

There's a roof of corrugated tinted vinyl which is supposed to make it a 'sun porch' but doesn't take well to huge limbs and 40mph windgusts rattling it.

I'm trying to decide what to replace it with or if I should just shrug and replace it with the same stuff. It really seems to work fairly well as a solar ceiling, especially considering that's the shady side of the house. A very pleasant place to eat breakfast under other circumstances.

Of course the cats are a little freaked by it all, but even when there's a bad wind blowing, this is Washington and into every kitty's day a little sun must fall. So Figaro - at least - found a lull amid the storm.

Gotta go. The lights are flickering and I don't wanna have to type all this again.

Scottie

ScottLand
Mood:  don't ask
Now Playing: "Troy" (The movie. I don't think I know anyone named Troy...)

"Can't Buy Me Love..."
Mood:  flirty
Now Playing: The Beatles (of course)
Happy Valentine's Day, everyone!

Sunday Funnies
Mood:  rushed
A flashback today. I drew this one in 2003 and only lately found it as I was digging through my old sketchbooks. Sorta tells you how long I've been thinking about doing this, I guess.

-Scottie

ScottLand
Mood:  silly

The Lost World
Scientists have discovered a Lost World, which would make Conan Doyle proud on a mountainous Indonesian Island which has apparently never shuddered under the footsteps of mankind. There aren't any dinosaurs (yet) but there are new species of plant, insect and animal being discovered daily. Biodiversity of a kind unimagined even in the Amazon. Large mammals naive of the danger posed by the two-legged interlopers. An arboreal kangaroo thought almost extinct, a strange egg-laying mammal, all have been seen for the first time since the 19th century.

Wow.

Follow the link and be entranced as I was.
And they say the Earth's surface has no secrets left to uncover.

This... this is amazing!

Scott

The Final Frontier...
Mood:  caffeinated
Now Playing: Still watchin' MacGyver on DVD...
For further reading if you're curious about more on the Spaceramp post...

Is the Shuttle Grounded Forever?
A discussion about the workability of modern Space Travel
Mars Direct at Scientific American

There's an interesting point brought up in some of these articles regarding a trip to Mars. Simply put, Martian surface Gravity is roughly 38% of "Earth Normal", whereas the gravity on the moon is roughly 17% Earth Normal. Excluding atmospheric influences, the Apollo moonlander(s) only had to generate a relatively tiny bit of thrust to take off relative to what it would require to take off on Earth and return its astronaut payload home...

So how are we going to get back from a planet with a denser atmosphere than the moon, which is our only extraterrestrial return-trip experience? A mars lander can't be blocky like the lunar lander. It'll need to be at least somewhat aerodynamic. The lander will pretty much need to be a proper reusable spacecraft in its own right, just to overcome the forces pulling on it as it tries to relaunch for the homeward trip!

Just to reach Low Earth Orbit (125-700 miles altitude give or take), the space shuttle has to exceed 15,000 mph (partially due to the density of the Earth's atmosphere). On the moon it was less than a sixth that, so simple boosters were all they really needed to get off the ground... how are we going to do that coming back from Mars? We'd have to carry sufficient fuel for an atmosphere launch, build a gantry or ramp or runway or whatever and take off again, facing many of the same problems (actually, about 38% of them, I suppose) a space launch faces taking off from Earth.

A sticky wicket and that's no lie.

Some serious people are considering the possibility of what I'm going to call 'disposable astronauts'. People we can send up and not come back! Yes, astronauts sent to explore another planet with no expectation of return, living out the rest of their natural (?!) lives on another planet, researching their new home and presumably sending back regular reports.

That sounds horrible but at some point, we're going to make the attempt to colonize an extraterrestrial environment beyond the International Space Station. This means people living, dying, and being borne off-planet. Mayhaps it's high time we got used to the idea?

I wouldn't want to do it, but then... I have to admit, I've always been intrigued by that last great feat in mountaineering... being the first to summit Mons Olympus on Mars, the highest peak in the solar system!

Eat yer heart out Sir Edmund Hillary!

-Scott

Just add Astronauts and a Waylon Jennings soundtrack
Mood:  caffeinated
Now Playing: MacGyver Season 4
It has been said more times than I care to count that the space program owes as much to HG Wells as it does to Einstein. And the internet was created first in the minds of such visionaries as William Gibson and Phillip K Dick decades before it was made true by thier fans who said "What a cool idea, let's do it!"

Now the trouble begins, not with the ubergeeks who grew up reading cyberpunk and watching Bladerunner (and Star Wars, and Star Trek and... and...) but with the kids who... well, didn't. What abou the kids that idolized Evel Kneival? What happens when the kids who lived for their Hotwheels and Matchbox cars and harkened to the horn of General Lee grow up? What marvels will they introduce to the world? What ideas will the Dukes of Hazzard inspire?

Nascar? Monster Truck Rallies? The next obvious step in the evolution of the Space Program?

Say that last one again.

I give you: The Skyramp! Some brilliantly oddball engineers who'd watched Bo & Luke Duke jumping over Miller's Creek in the General Lee one too many times said "What if we built a way that you could jump into orbit!?" Then they set out to do it. And if that doesn't scare you... this will. They succeeded. Well in theory anyway. if nothing else a whole bunch of them banded together and formed Skyramp.org. It's impressively argued, though I'd be curious to hear the more engineeringly inclined (Kristin?) chime in on this.

It is possible that using existing technology, the future of space travel won't have to involve tiny spaceplanes duct taped to gigantic solid fuel rockets, or Apollo-like rockets bursting away from the gantry in a plume of fire and brimstone. Rather they could be launched Jetsonlike from a ramp, reaching speeds in excess of Mach 1.3 before they ever leave the rail. The ramp would be at a 75 degree angle up a mountainside or - more likely - up through an underground tunnel to keep the excessive G-forces off the astronauts. A downward launch could mitigate some fuel expenditure using gravity and you'd never need the $500,000,000 in rocket fuel per launch! You could fly to the International Space station for less than it costs to fly to Japan!

All of these things exist already, they just need to be put together and tested. Existing rocket sleds used by Lockheed and Northrup Grumman to test aerospace parts (not to mention pilots) for G-force strain can already reach the speed of sound and beyond and they haven't really pushed the technology as far as it will go. With a magnetic levitation system reducing friction on the rails to near zero (in use in Swiss metrorail, whose tunnel-trains exceed 300 mph!) and no worries about having the brake at the end (since you're wanting to fly off the end of the ramp) all the tedious mucking about with rocket boosters and tons of liquid oxygen and hydrogen would be eliminated! Sounds to me as though - once again - the simplest solution might just prove to be the best one.

This is a direction NASA should not ignore. I would hate to look back someday and see that this was an obvious idea we missed. All of the systems you hear spoken about to replace the retiring Space Shuttle program sound like steps backward or sideways. This would be a cheap alternative using largely extant technology. So why not at least try it?

I - for one - would love to see it. Besides, how cool would that be? Daisy Duke in space!
(insert wolf-whistle here)

"Just some good ol' boys,
never meanin' no harm
beats all you never saw
been in trouble with the law (of gravity)
since they day they was borne..."
-Waylon Jennings

----------------

Credit (or blame) where it's due: I first read about the Skyramp over on the SchlockMercenary blog and that inspired me to check it out. If you like smart space and science humor (and some fart jokes thrown in for good measure) I recommend Howard Tayler's web comic Schlock Mercenary.