April 17, 2025 Quick space linksCourtesy of BtB’s stringer Jay. This post is also an open thread. I welcome my readers to post any comments or additional links relating to any space issues, even if unrelated to the links below.
- View a NASA documentary describing its effort to identify potentially dangerous asteroids
It’s an hour and fifteen minutes long, so I admit I haven’t watched it. It is also touted by NASA as “gripping”, with the researchers involved “dedicated,” “tireless,” and “unsung heroes,” the kind of propaganda words that always turn me off. Nothing against these scientists, but it is absurd to describe them in this manner.
- Texas Space Commission awards another $26 million in grants to five companies
All five are small companies doing a variety of background work that makes the industry function.
- On this day in 1970 the Apollo 13 capsule returned to Earth, safely bringing its three astronauts home after a near disaster
The blackout period during descent lasted about 90 seconds longer than expected, which added one last teeth-gritting moment to this nerve-racking rescue flight.
On Christmas Eve 1968 three Americans became the first humans to visit another world. What they did to celebrate was unexpected and profound, and will be remembered throughout all human history. Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8, Robert Zimmerman's classic history of humanity's first journey to another world, tells that story, and it is now available as both an ebook and an audiobook, both with a foreword by Valerie Anders and a new introduction by Robert Zimmerman.
The print edition can be purchased at Amazon. from any other book seller, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit.
The ebook is available everywhere for $5.99 (before discount) at amazon, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. If you buy it from ebookit you don't support the big tech companies and the author gets a bigger cut much sooner.
The audiobook is also available at all these vendors, and is also free with a 30-day trial membership to Audible.
"Not simply about one mission, [Genesis] is also the history of America's quest for the moon... Zimmerman has done a masterful job of tying disparate events together into a solid account of one of America's greatest human triumphs."--San Antonio Express-News
Courtesy of BtB’s stringer Jay. This post is also an open thread. I welcome my readers to post any comments or additional links relating to any space issues, even if unrelated to the links below.
- View a NASA documentary describing its effort to identify potentially dangerous asteroids
It’s an hour and fifteen minutes long, so I admit I haven’t watched it. It is also touted by NASA as “gripping”, with the researchers involved “dedicated,” “tireless,” and “unsung heroes,” the kind of propaganda words that always turn me off. Nothing against these scientists, but it is absurd to describe them in this manner.
- Texas Space Commission awards another $26 million in grants to five companies
All five are small companies doing a variety of background work that makes the industry function.
- On this day in 1970 the Apollo 13 capsule returned to Earth, safely bringing its three astronauts home after a near disaster
The blackout period during descent lasted about 90 seconds longer than expected, which added one last teeth-gritting moment to this nerve-racking rescue flight.
On Christmas Eve 1968 three Americans became the first humans to visit another world. What they did to celebrate was unexpected and profound, and will be remembered throughout all human history. Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8, Robert Zimmerman's classic history of humanity's first journey to another world, tells that story, and it is now available as both an ebook and an audiobook, both with a foreword by Valerie Anders and a new introduction by Robert Zimmerman.
The print edition can be purchased at Amazon. from any other book seller, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. The ebook is available everywhere for $5.99 (before discount) at amazon, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. If you buy it from ebookit you don't support the big tech companies and the author gets a bigger cut much sooner.
The audiobook is also available at all these vendors, and is also free with a 30-day trial membership to Audible.
"Not simply about one mission, [Genesis] is also the history of America's quest for the moon... Zimmerman has done a masterful job of tying disparate events together into a solid account of one of America's greatest human triumphs."--San Antonio Express-News
”It is also touted by NASA as ‘gripping’, with the researchers involved ‘dedicated,’ ‘tireless,’ and ‘unsung heroes,’ the kind of propaganda words that always turn me off.”
Even worse than that, it goes on…
”Witness the drama, the challenges and the triumphs of those on the front lines of planetary defense.”
I haven’t seen it either, and I don’t intend to. I’m an engineer, and the absolute last thing I want at work is drama. No good can come from that.
The documentary really showed a people having a lot of fun solving the problem of discoverying objects in our solar system and explaining how to do it. Some scenes of senate hearings too. But I did fall asleep and need to try the last 29 minutes again.
mkent noted: “. . . the absolute last thing I want at work is drama. No good can come from that.”
Indeed. You do not want an engineer to say “Well, that’s interesting.” Or worse ” That was unexpected.”
I think I made it halfway, I kept drifting off into daydreams. The guy observing from Arizona talked about how he got hooked on near earth objects while watching comets from southern Utah… Then I started looking him up to see if I know him or his family, from my childhood.
Here’s a sleeper, trumps science/technology secretary? They repeat his speech twice to make it an hour.
https://www.youtube.com/live/ud5TgxeDPEc?si=1OK4DPfLHqZ8-KQa
A friend sent it to me saying that the government is admitting teleportation, time travel, gravity manipulation… typical Internet hype.
He talked about our past technology leaps from the first airplane to landing on the moon to the development of supersonic aircraft… Trump is bringing back the technology leaps like the glory days. (I must’ve daydreamed past the part where transportation becomes teleportation). As for the future manipulation of space and time at the end of his speech, a sentence from every science fiction ever written.
More of a can-do kind of broadcast.
One of the dangers of trying to get funding is that yokels are convinced we already have flying saucers—a myth that plays to cost-cutters and program killers’ tightwad natures.