The source is Robert Zubrin, so I'm just slightly suspicious just on the grounds of his usual Mars evangelism (not that there's anything wrong with it, I just suspect he overreacts some times and the news may not be what he thinks it is).

That said, Obama administration to end all NASA planetary exploration in next budget. Curiosity would be launched, but Kepler would be shut down, the James Webb telescope would be mothballed, and all future missions would be cancelled.

"The rock was collected during the 1972 Apollo 11 mission"

Either you mean 1969 or Apollo 16/17, guys.

(From here)

Have you heard of Philip Taylor Kramer? He was, curiously enough, the bass player for Iron Butterfly -- part of their "reunion" lineup in the mid-70s, not the famous lineup that recorded In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida -- then afterwards a programmer of some repute specializing in aerospace work, fractals, and communications software.

On February 12th, 1995 he made a number of strange phone calls, and then disappeared. His rusted out van and skeletal remains were found in Decker Canyon in the Santa Monica Mountains east of LA on May 29th, 1999. That's 1,567 days.

Besides his regular programming and engineering, he was also apparently interested in faster-than-light communication. To travel from Earth to Proxima Centauri at light speed would take 4.24 years or 1,548 days.

That would be one hell of a story wouldn't it? Burned-out rocker turned inventor converts his van into a bundle of light-speed particles and sets out for the nearest star. It will seem instantaneous to him, but of course Einstein can't be cheated so it really takes the requisite number of years. No matter, this is SCIENCE! But something goes wrong at his moment of emergence: he snaps back to Earth and the missing time piles on his craft -- and Kramer -- in an eyeblink, killing him. Nineteen days later his remains are found at the bottom of the overgrown canyon, an apparent suicide. But a close examination of the hulk suggests it was cleverly converted to be airtight, and if you take the time to submit Kramer's bones to just the right tests you would get some very crazy readings....

Scalzi's Fuzzy Nation, I mean.

( Extremely mild spoilers )

I have an opportunity to read John Scalzi's reboot of Little Fuzzy over the next day or two. By coincidence I re-read the original just a few weeks back, it being in the public domain and me owning a new iPad. On reading a quick review of the new one, it's mentioned that Jack Holloway is no longer a crotchety old miner, but rather a hunky ex-lawyer. I am feeling trepidatious, though still willing.

I'm not entirely happy with it, but it's getting close. Or I may chuck it and try something different.

( But this is the cover to the Passing Strangeness e-book )

Passing Strangeness is just about ready; at the moment I'm pondering whether to submit it to a publisher or commit to an experiment and join the 99 cent self-publish crowd for Amazon Kindle/ITunes Books. I'm hearing good things about the latter option.

Anyway, I'm strongly considering making the next blog/book about "failed mainstream" space vehicles -- in other words, not the Apollo program and Soyuz, but also not (the original nuclear-powered) Orion either. Rather, it'd focus on stuff like the Saturn S-N V-25(S)U or Almaz OPS-2 that could have been built in only a slightly different world, or even was built but aborted at the last minute.

I'm not sure what to call it, though. I'm thinking "Dreams [or Dreaming] of...." and then I get stuck. Dreams of the Moon...to specific. Dreams of Space? Dreaming in Black? Orbit Dreams? Nothing really makes me go "Woo!"

Maybe "Dreams" is not the way to go.

(Oh, and Happy Yuri Gagarin Day)

I bought an iPad the other day to use (primarily) as an e-book reader(*). I've been merrily downloading various free books, the one I anticipated the most being some sort of collection of H.P. Lovecraft's work -- it being out of copyright here.

And so I came across a nice compilation of everything he's written (barring the collaborations, which are still in copyright) in four volumes. Alas, the covers for each were, to use the technical term, poo-poo. I would not have this amateurishness sullying my new toyuseful business-related tool.

So I fired up Corel Draw and produced some nice Penguin Classic-like covers for them myself. And I wanted to show them off. Please note that the pictures used for each *are* a copyright infringement so don't, I dunno, take these and try to sell them or whatever.

(They're from a Rhode Island School of Design student contest that can be found here. Unfortunately my 1337 Photoshopping skills hover somewhere down in the 900s instead, so I couldn't figure out how to snip loose the Penguin of Leng cleanly and had to use others.)

( LJ-Cut lest they blast your sanity! )

(*) The other reason is not to play Angry Birds, honest.

I've been playing around with the list of 1200 planets discovered by the Kepler satellite (or, more to the point, discovered by the algorithms designed to churn through the mass of light curve data produced by it). I thought most of the people reading this would get a kick out of this one.

By far the closest of the planets found is KOI 977.1, whose parent star 2MASS 19305271+4851071 is a mere 38.1 light years from Earth in the general direction of the star Delta Cygni -- the next closest Kepler planet is 116 light years distant (and the furthest is over 5500). Despite its closeness, it's a red dwarf of such unsurpassed dimness and general boringness that so far as I can tell it's not been cataloged in any of the usual suspects like Gliese or the "BD+" catalog (properly known as the Bonner Durchmusterung and now you know why everybody calls it the "BD+ catalog). But here's a picture of it so you can be properly introduced:



Its one known planet (it may, of course, have more) is a close-in rock ball roughly 0.6 of Earth's radius -- in other words, slightly larger than Mars but not by much. Bear in mind that this is an extremely rough estimate based on a couple of parameters that are darned hard to measure. But it's what we've got.

As with the large majority of extra-solar planets discovered so far it is *way* too close to its primary at a mere 2.1 million kilometers. So despite having a red dwarf for a sun it gives Mercury a run for its money in the temperature category at 355 Celsius (this is another calculated figure but it's probably quite close to the truth, as it's a simple black body calculation with one assumption, that the planet has an albedo of 0.3). KOI 977.1 is, with a probability vanishingly close to 100%, going to be tide-locked to its star.

There are a couple of known exoplanets closer than this; the closest is a gas giant around Epsilon Eridani. The recently famous Gliese 581 system is closer too. But this is by far the closest known small planet of the kind people crunch around on in SF novels.

It's quite exciting for someone whose longtime specialty was inventing planets for JTAS.

There is no such person as Islamabad K. Brunel.