I clearly don't read enough books about space
I hadn't quite finished everything from Baen, apparently. I didn't think I'd like Boundary, since dinosaurs and space travel really aren't my bag, but I liked "Diamonds Are Forever" and Digital Knight a lot, so I thought I'd give it a shot. And ended up very happy that I did. It's very geeky and I like all the clever references - the independent Earth-to-Mars project is named Ares - but I really like that most of them are explained for those of us who haven't read all the Burroughs or Cthulu books.
Ironically, I randomly ended up going to the Museum of Natural History (twice!) over the weekend, and seeing Roving Mars on the IMAX. As expected, it's a commercial for the space program, but the graphics are cool and who wouldn't love a movie where the engineers are the heroes? There were some very cool bits: I liked the part where they pointed out that once it's launched, no human will ever see it again, so it has to really really work, and then in the dramatization, they showed how, really, every single piece, down to the lowliest opening mechanism has to work or they've wasted A LOT of money and time. Reminds of why I was scared of being an engineer. I also kind of wondered how it works: can we actually plot a course so precisely that it can get to Mars with mostly gravity and inertia? It seems to me that chaos theory and enough random bits of asteroid could knock it well off course.
I really started wondering about that while watching the planetarium show at the Hayden. (It was a very space-y weekend.) They talked about the K-T boundary, solar fusion, how we might survive a rampaging asteroid, and a theory about lunar formation. According to the movie, one way to deal with an asteroid that's set to hit us, instead of bashing it to bits, we could divert it but sending a spaceship to lure it off course. Except, I gotta wonder, wouldn't it take an awful lot of mass to do that? The movie also offered that the moon was created when something smashed the Earth to bits and some of the bits reformed as our planet and some reformed as the moon. Is that for realz?
Ironically, I randomly ended up going to the Museum of Natural History (twice!) over the weekend, and seeing Roving Mars on the IMAX. As expected, it's a commercial for the space program, but the graphics are cool and who wouldn't love a movie where the engineers are the heroes? There were some very cool bits: I liked the part where they pointed out that once it's launched, no human will ever see it again, so it has to really really work, and then in the dramatization, they showed how, really, every single piece, down to the lowliest opening mechanism has to work or they've wasted A LOT of money and time. Reminds of why I was scared of being an engineer. I also kind of wondered how it works: can we actually plot a course so precisely that it can get to Mars with mostly gravity and inertia? It seems to me that chaos theory and enough random bits of asteroid could knock it well off course.
I really started wondering about that while watching the planetarium show at the Hayden. (It was a very space-y weekend.) They talked about the K-T boundary, solar fusion, how we might survive a rampaging asteroid, and a theory about lunar formation. According to the movie, one way to deal with an asteroid that's set to hit us, instead of bashing it to bits, we could divert it but sending a spaceship to lure it off course. Except, I gotta wonder, wouldn't it take an awful lot of mass to do that? The movie also offered that the moon was created when something smashed the Earth to bits and some of the bits reformed as our planet and some reformed as the moon. Is that for realz?