I can’t help but see red.
Red is the color of an apple and a strawberry
Red is the color of blood and fire.
Red is when you unfortunately lose money or go broke.
Red is a can of Coke and the planet Mars.
Red means you got something wrong on the paper or exam.
Red sneakers, that’s okay too. 😉
(Credit Photo: Andy Blumenthal)
First day in 15 weeks! that we went to a real store yesterday.
Dick’s Sporting Goods was open, but still not much else.
It was refreshing to look around again.
Nearly all the bicycles were cleaned out with people forced to do their own exercise routines these days.
People walking around mostly like they were on Mars.
Had some restaurants with just their patios open and people are sitting outside in the good weather.
Also, some eateries open for takeout.
Best part is still nature, and all the closures have brought us back to it.
This turtle was tanning in the warm sun on the rocks and swatting the snake away with its rear foot.
Sort of funny that even a turtle can never get any rest in life. 😉
(Credit Photo: Andy Blumenthal)
Awesome presentation on Interplanetary Travel by Charlie Kuehmann, VP Materials Engineering at SpaceX and Tesla.
Interplanetary travel and colonization is one of the most exciting possibilities for mankind.
It’s all just beginning (we’ve only been in orbit for about 50 years).
One of the keys Charlie mentioned at SpaceX and Telsa is how quickly we learn.
It’s okay to fail, as long as we learn quickly and progress from it.
The progress with reusable rockets at SpaceX is impressive.
Can’t wait for more to come soon. 😉
(Credit Video: Andy Blumenthal)
Remembering the Apollo mission that landed a man on the moon on July 20, 1969 (50 years and 1 month ago yesterday…sorry, I’m late on this post).
Thought this model (scale 1:48) of the command ship and lunar lander in the NASA store was perfect.
It truly is miraculous that Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldin made this journey.
In just 8 days, they made the round trip between the earth and the moon, traveling about 240,000 miles each way.
And they walked on the moon for about 3 hours–I want to try that!
Even until today, the U.S. remains the only country to have actually put men on the moon (total of 12).
“One small step for a man; one giant leap for mankind.”
Now it’s high time that we get ourselves to Mars already and colonize it! 😉
(Credit Photo: Andy Blumenthal)
Space Force as another full branch of the military is the right thing to do!
The things that get focused on, get accomplished.
Space is the “final frontier.”
And as Gene Roddenberry realized with the creation of Star Trek in 1964, it is the future of Mankind’s very survival.
It’s time to stop thinking small as in planet Earth, and start thinking big as there is a whole universe out there!
Russia and China get it–hence their development and testing of anti-satellite rockets and other “kill vehicles” in space as well as lasers and jamming equipment against our satellites, and of course, their plans to colonize the Moon and land men on Mars and beyond.
Why have we in America only gotten it in Hollywood?
Yes, there have been a few notable exceptions such as President Reagan with his vision for the Star Wars’ Strategic Defense Initiative and President Trump with the bonafide stand up of a Space Force.
Some of the Pentagon brass, particularly the Air Force, may hem and haw about the politics of this thing…losing money and prestige for their branch of the military, but their power is not the concern, our power as a nation is!
I envision a day in the not too distant future when the Air Force doesn’t run Space Command, but rather Space Force runs the Air Force.
We need to put politics aside and stop laughing at our own ignorance about the potential of space for our future survival and for conflict. 😉
(Source Photo: Andy Blumenthal)
So excited about the new show called MARS (and yeah, it’s on National Geographic).
I watched the season premier and it was awesome!
They did this cool combination flipping between the non-fiction of the here and now on Earth in 2016 with all the plans and advances being made to go to settle Mars someday, and the fictionalized future 2033 actual voyage and colonization there.
The spaceship, rovers, colony are all pretty amazing and it seems so real like we’re practically there!
Elon Musk (SpaceX) does a nice job explaining the vision and the reusable rockets they are focused on to get us cost-effectively to the Red Planet and beyond.
The imperative is clear for us becoming a true multi-planetary species, so that we drastically reduce (hopefully to zero) the risk of an extinction level event to humanity.
There was a good quote that I remember, something like:
“We go into the dark, so others can follow the light.”
The leap forward of us actually making it to and colonizing Mars is so mid-boggling great that just about everything else literally pales in comparison.
Mars is just the first real step…after that the possibilities are truly endless. 😉
(Source Photo: here with attribution to NASA Jet Propulsion Lab)
So invariably you hear these days from those that dislike one or the other candidate running for President, that if he/she wins, they are moving out of this country.
That is apparently how strong people feel in terms of dislike for the candidates–in fact, the most disliked candidates in American history!
Well, I ran into this couple in the Metro.
They were from New Jersey and visiting Washington, D.C. with their daughter.
They were wearing matching t-shirts that said:
“Election 2016: Time To Move To Mars”
Now moving from the USA is not far enough away for people to get from the horrible politics and/or politicians that they can’t seem to stand…so next stop is Mars!
As a big time proponents for colonization of other planets, I think this may actually be one of the best things to come out of this election cycle. 😉
(Source Photo: Andy Blumenthal)
So cool!!!
OPM Job announcement today for Astronauts.
Work for NASA at the Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center.
Train for missions to the International Space Station, on two new commercial spacecraft, and for the Orion deep-space exploration vehicle.
To go where no man or woman has gone before…
Dreams do come true!;-)
(Source Photo: here with attribution to Paul Hudson)
So my daughter is graduating high school, but is already taking a class in 3-D printing.
(This little guy pictured here was made experimenting in the class and was a precious gift from her.)
Already prophetically envisioned in Star Trek as “the replicator,” this technology has been around in primitive trial form since the 1980’s.
In 3-D printing, alloyed material is successively layered under computer control to make complex shapes and products.
It makes traditional 2-D printing (on paper) look like rubbing two sticks together to build a fire (circa the paleolithic period of mankind thousands of years ago).
The promise of 3-D printing for advanced manufacturing is absolutely incredible.
The Wall Street Journal describes how NASA researchers and engineers are working toward using 3-D printers in space to “make bricks suitable for airtight buildings and radiation proof shelters” simply using the sand already on Mars.
Moreover, the astronauts on their journey may be eating pizza from these printers as well (except for the sand, but still probably better than MREs–Haha).
Already objects have been printed “19 feet long…stone-like building blocks weighing one-and-a-half ton each”!
In the future, 3-D printers could be sent in advance to planets we look to colonize and “lay down landing pads, roads, and shelters” in preparation of our arrival.
These printers could even build working replicas of themsleves or “swarms of self-assembling construction robots” boosting our capacity for even more building.
Moreover, technology is in the works to recycle from 3-D printing by melting down the printed products back into material that could be reused for new printing projects.
On Earth, where we have long been drawing down our natural resources as well as polluting our environment, the prospect of going to other worlds where their are new resources and we actually have the ability to use them constructively is humanity’s chance for a whole new chapter of life beyond. 😉
(Source Photo: Rebecca Blumenthal)
According to the Wall Street Journal that compares with $671M that it cost NASA (which arrived just 3 days earlier than India’s) and the European Space Agency’s mission that cost $386M in 2003,
But aside from the Indian’s being able to achieve a Mars mission at a tenth the cost of what we did, BBC reported that they also did it $26M cheaper than even the cost of the science fiction movie Gravity with Sandra Bullock about the International Space Station.
While we clearly go the extra mile and are able to do great things–why does it always cost us so much to get there?
Perhaps, you can say that we are somehow more diligent or careful in our work (i.e. putting a premium on safety) or that it’s just the higher cost of labor in this country or that we are early innovators and incur the costs of research and development that others than leverage.
However, even though we are considered a very wealthy nation, it is fair to ask whether we are managing our wealth with discretion and an eye to the future or do we just take it for granted and are wasteful with it?
With a $3.9 trillion federal government budget (note, this is a full 21% of the entire U.S. economy/GDP), we are talking about some serious money, and we should be getting the most for it.
Unfortunately, the gravy train extends from certain “Beltway Bandit” contractors–e.g. remember the $640 toilet seats, $7,600 coffee makers, and $436 hammers uncovered by the Project on Government Oversight–and apparently all the way to mission Mars. 😉
(Source Photo: Andy Blumenthal)
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