The Meat Planet

Rarely is astrophysics so mouth-watering.

"How was aerobraking? I wish I could have seen that." "I wish I could have slept through it."

After all the recent garment-rending over NASA’s "broken culture", it was encouraging to read this piece by Michael Benson in The New Yorker on the many innovations and improvisations provided by dedicated NASA personnel during the mission of the Galileo interplanetary probe, which comes to a firey end this month.  In the years both before and after Galileo’s launch, there were several opportunities for lesser men to give up and write off the investment of time, money, and ingenuity, and thereby claim credit for what passes for wise management in some corners of the federal bureaucracy (and space advocacy).  That they did not gives me hope that space exploration in the near future will not be the exclusive monopoly of the Chinese.

Plundering The Chinese Main

Nick Denton claims to eschew romance in his prescription for reinvigorating space exploration, but how can you beat pirates for romance?

Plundering The Chinese Main

Nick Denton claims to eschew romance in his prescription for reinvigorating space exploration, but how can you beat pirates for romance?

Plus La Même Chose

Along with reruns of Hill Street Blues on Bravo, this is giving me severe vertigo.

Per Aspera

This morning, as the TV repeated the video of the daylight meteor shower over Texas, I watched my one-year-old son playing on the floor and wondered if he would ever ask me about today.  A staple of grade school historians, "national tragedies" are ready-made segues for inter-generational bonding.  Ubiquitous media never hurts; while I’ve asked my grandfather where he was when he learned of Pearl Harbor, it never occurred to me to ask where he was when the Hindenburg went up.  Perhaps it’s the element of human villainy that transforms catastrophe into infamy.

Nevertheless, I will always remember January 28, 1986, if only because my high school class was interrupted and we were all permitted to watch CNN for the remainder of the period.  More enduring than the shock of that morning was the frustration and loathing for the craven bureaucrats who used the occasion to make political hay and to defer the dream of exploration.

While I feel an undertow of that same dread today, I find my thoughts turning not to Challenger or Apollo I but to Pathfinder, which I vividly remember tracking on the Web and watching on TV.  Tellingly, I was no less excited for the fact that it was a robot and not a human taking the risks; it was sheer technological geekiness on display, the same geekiness that saved the day on Apollo XIII.  I was eleven months old for Apollo XI, and I like to think my parents convinced me to watch Armstrong step off into history.  I won’t forget Columbia, but in a few years I hope my son asks me about how cool it was to watch a Lego Mindstorms kit roll about the Martian landscape, and perhaps one day he’ll go bring it back.

Keep It Wholly

You won’t see the U.S. Postal Service in action today, and you won’t be able to talk to a bank teller, but I doubt you would otherwise be able to tell that our society is observing Columbus Day.  On the face of it, I would say that this is a good thing; American society is pluralistic and accepting of many cultures, and I like it that all sorts of ethnicities and microcultures are free to celebrate their particular holy days and I am equally free either to vicariously share them or to ignore them altogether.

When it comes to Federal holidays, however, the United States comes as close as it dares to prescribing official Days of Rest.  Even this handful of dates is too many for all employers to agree on, and Mammon whips most of us past Washington’s Birthday and (when it falls on a weekday) Veterans Day without a backward glance.  These partial, half-hearted holidays were hard to explain to my French wife; in France (and, I imagine, most other countries lacking a Protestant work ethic) everyone has all holidays off, and they don’t shift them to the nearest Monday to minimize economic disruption.

Altering the calendar of Federal holidays is a delicate matter, not only because every shaman with a congregation of one can make a numbing case for public observance of the Feast of St. Billy-Bob, but also because Federal holidays are written into almost every labor contract in this country and holiday pay is more sacred than Thanksgiving turkey.  Nevertheless, I would make the case for the "demotion" of two Federal holidays and the concommitant "promotion" of two others.

Columbus Day ought to mean something to Italians (although it should really be restricted to Genoese), I suppose, and I can see Spanish (actually Castilians) taking pride in it.  Americans as a whole, however, have very little to do with Spanish imperialism.  We do have something in common with bold exploration, and I would therefore suggest dropping Columbus Day in favor of what I call Tranquility Day.

The U.S. Code calls it Washington’s Birthday and everyone else calls it Presidents Day, but while I find both George Washington and Abraham Lincoln to be admirable historical figures, this holiday still represents hero worship, and both Washington and Lincoln would hastily remind us that the country they fought to create and preserve should revere the law, not men.  No age is safe, but these days in particular we should stop and remember the singular grace of our Constitution.