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 webslinky: space
This week, the final frontier. With the news that the Americans intend to spend $104b firing man back at the Moon in the year 2018, this week we celebrate the still mind-boggling concept of space, online.“Earth is the cradle of mankind… but we cannot live in a cradle forever,” wrote Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, one of the pioneers of Russian astronautics way back when, in 1911. Although he never actually worked with rockets he’s regarded as one of the founding fathers of theoretical space travel, a man thinking beyond the clouds whilst the rest still just stared at them. A broader more practical potted history of space travel can be found at Space Exploration Merit Badge, which introduces the reader to the rivalry that later grew between superpowers in search of the ultimate technological colonial cachet – the Moon landings. But before humans get too carried away patting themselves on the back with all these staggering advances, remember the human cost at answers.com’s answers: disasters. The only team who ever actually died in space were the crew of Soyuz 11 who were part of a second planned visit to the world’s first space station, Salyut 1. It’s a sobering page that recalls the mix of fear and frontiersmanship found in Tom Wolfe’s marvellous book, The Right Stuff. It would be negligent not to head to nasa.gov at least once a week if you’re interested in space. The images on their Hubble Telescope site are astonishing. And their Near-Earth Object Program is an interesting side-venture too, plotting the course of objects in space that could possibly collide with Earth. There’s a 600m-wide asteroid called 25143 Itokawa nearby at this very moment, which the Japanese are currently studying with the help of their Hayabusa spacecraft. With all this high tech talk you might think that space travel is only the domain of rich First World countries? Think again, because there are legions of independent companies out there competing to create commercial passenger-carrying space vehicles for the near future. October 6-9 sees the XPrize take place at Las Cruces Airport in New Mexico. It’s a gathering of free-thinking individuals looking to compete with the big boys. And up there with the best of them is the UK’s very own Starchaser, based just east of Manchester. These are true visionaries who’ve been perfecting their future trade for years along the beaches of the North West. You imagine the possibilities - they try to realise them.
Richard Hector-Jones
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related info
 useful linksmy.execpc.com answers: space disasters www.nasa.gov www.hubblesite.org neo.jpl.nasa.gov www.xpcup.com www.starchaser.co.uk
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see also
 webslinky #053zombies  webslinky #052espionage  webslinky #051online communities  webslinky #050animals  webslinky #049online philanthropy  webslinkyarchive books  books and comics archive Author interviews and reviews from 2002 to 2008. art  art archive Watch artist interviews and see images from British exhibitions. |
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