The Time It Takes to Blog

Norman's Tropics

2011-08-23T10:23:00.007-05:00

He found himself going for a walk along the grass. Between the grandstand and the lagoon was a field about the size of a Little League baseball park and the photographers had all set themselves up at the edge of the water, their cameras with telephoto lenses set on tripods so that they looked from behind like a whole command of Army surveyors taking a lesson in their instrument. And the object on which they were focused, Apollo-Saturn, looked gray and indistinct across the air waves of heat shimmering off the lagoon.

To the right of the photographers was a small grove of pure jungle. Recollections of his platoon on a jungle trail, hacking with machetes entered his head. A hash of recollections. He had thought he would be concentrating on the activities at the Launch Pad, the Control Center, in the Command Module, he had expected to be picturing the vitals of the rocket, and the entrance of the fuels into it, but he was merely out of sorts with a headache, and waiting for the time to pass.
—Norman Mailer, at the launch of Apollo 11, from Of a Fire on the Moon

I have been struck by this description of the jungle just at the edge of the press viewing area, and now I have seen it for myself (and snapped a picture of it with my phone, as you can see).

One of the things I enjoyed most about getting press credentials for the last launch was getting to explore the press site itself. I realized today that I forgot to step out onto the patio of the CBS building, from which Walter Cronkite sat for many hours keeping Americans apprised of the progress of various missions, and that the CBS building will probably now be torn down, and then I was really sad. It seems there is no end to the fresh little tragedies at the end of American spaceflight.

You Remind Me of Me

2011-07-11T22:09:00.006-05:00

This is the title of a book that has nothing to do with spaceflight. But I kept thinking of this phrase the two days I was in Florida to witness the historic last launch of the space shuttle. As always, my visit was fascinating in terms of the space-related wonders I witnessed, and even more gratifying in terms of the people I met there and the deep connections between people and the space program.

As I made my way around the Space Coast Friday and Saturday, both at the actual launch and at events around it, I kept seeing people who looked weirdly familiar to me. Did I go to grad school with that guy? Was that woman in dorm at college? Is that the friend of a friend? I kept finding myself squinting into people's faces, trying to make a connection that was never there. (Okay, in one case it turned out I was squinting at Seth Green, who looked so familiar because I recently watched Buffy the Vampire Slayer in its entirety, and in another it turned out to be John Oliver of BOTH The Daily Show and Community. So... that was awesome).

But generally, my TV watching could not account for the strange sense that everyone was someone I already kind of knew. After I while I realized what it was. I had something important in common with just about every person there. We may be different ages, genders, and ethnic backgrounds, and we may come at this interest from entirely different directions, but we all care enough about the space shuttle to want to be there to say goodbye.

This time I got press credentials and so was able to see the launch from the press site for the first time, which was a significantly different experience from seeing it from other vantage points. Part of the press site experience included getting to know the #NASATweetup people-- a lucky bunch of 150 so-and-so's chosen by NASA "at random" to get unprecedented behind-the-scenes access to the Kennedy Space Center and the launch. One of those people chosen "at random" was my friend Stu, and by being sort of vaguely at his elbow I was able to sneak into the #NASATweetup tent (I refuse to call this structure the "Twent," as some of them insisted upon doing). The Tweety People (as I, in turn, annoyed everyone by insisting upon calling them) were simply a solid group of individuals-- smart, friendly and funny, space fans to the core, and honestly exactly the 150 people I would have chosen had NASA asked me to choose 150 people "at random." I'm lucky to have met as many of them as I did.

I will write in more detail about the launch itself, and the exciting saga of how I lost my press badge and got it back thanks to a standup character from the electricians' union-- but for now I will leave you with an image Stu took of me with my mouth hanging open like an idiot.

Godspeed Atlantis!

2011-06-22T13:33:00.001-05:00

I'm officially a Huffington Post Blogger!

Check it out.

The Space Coast

2011-06-03T12:17:00.006-05:00

One thing I will miss when the space shuttles are retired is traveling to the Space Coast for the launches. I've made a total of 6 trips to Brevard County in recent years (3 of them in 2011 alone) and I've gotten to know the area in a strange way-- by writing in the voice of a child who grew up there and knew the terrain like her own skin. Those of you who know the places where *I* grew up know how much I had to fake details like the palmetto trees in the back yard, unrelenting hot weather, lurking alligators, and the background rhythm of shuttle launches and returns.

Since writing the book, I've come across a lot of stuff I wish I'd been able to fit into the book, like the awesome memorabilia at so many restaurants. I've come up with a working theory: the worse the restaurant, the better the space memorabilia and vice versa. A shack that sells beer in cans and deep-fried marine life will be coated inside with signed crew photos, old blaze-orange NASA passes for long-ago launches, and random bits of NASA propaganda. A white tablecloth restaurant with a nice wine list will have nothing at all.

Also, there are beaches. (As gorgeous as this beach looks, it was covered in dead jellyfish, so... don't get too jealous).

2011-06-01T13:39:00.000-05:00

One could assume that the possible presence of high winds, slow turns, and upgrades would be the reason the crawler travels at less than its full speed, travels rather at turtle speed, half a mile an hour, but since the sight of the open skyscraper and the rocket in nine-armed embrace clanking along the Cape Kennedy moors at a rate somewhat less than one foot a second is a sight no man has ever seen before he has seen it, it is indeed a moment in the symbolic pageantry of legend perhaps not unequal to that hour when Birnam Wood came to Dunsinane: perhaps the exquisite sense of caution in Rocco Petrone which is reflected in the speed of half a mile an hour, instead of the possible rush through at twice that rate is due to some secret pleasure taken in the magnified luxury of treating all the workers at the Space Center to the pleasure of watching their mighty moonship edge along the horizon from morning to dusk, or even more spectacularly at night, with lanterns in the rigging, like a ghost galleon of the Carribean! The beginning of the trip to the moon was as slow as the fall of the fullest flake of snow.
Norman Mailer, Of A Fire on the Moon

On May 31, 2011 I got to witness Atlantis rolling out to the launch pad along with the workers at the Space Center. It was, in fact, a magnified luxury to watch the mighty [~~moon~~]ship edge along spectacularly at night. (Norman Mailer, no one can write about space more bombastically than you.)

Look closely: there are people on the crawler.

Mamas, don't let your babies grow up to be President

2011-05-30T09:37:00.009-05:00

The first man on the moon, the last man on the moon, and Jim Lovell, who missed his chance to step on the moon on Apollo 13 (think Tom Hanks), get together for some Obama-blaming on the anniversary of the "before this decade is out" speech.

Happy Before This Decade Is Out Day!

2011-05-25T15:19:00.003-05:00

As you know, 2011 is a big year for space anniversaries. We celebrated Yuri Gagarin's first flight on April 12 and then a few weeks later Alan Shepard's first flight on May 5. Imagine being Kennedy in the few weeks between May 5 and 25 (keeping in mind he had only been inaugurated in January). He spent those weeks conferring with scientists, the Pentagon, and let's face it probably the CIA. Then on the 25th JFK came out with his daring charge to the nation. Seriously, watch it, it's only a few minutes.

My favorite part of this speech, of course, is the part where he says we're going to the moon. But I am also totally amazed by his humility toward the end where he goes off the page. He admits that "I came to this conclusion with some reluctance," and then closes with this:

You must decide yourselves, as I have decided. And I am confident that whether you finally decide in the way I have decided or not, that your judgment, as my judgment, was reached in the best interest of our country.

That guy was a class act.

Now just for fun, put on your best Hyannis Port accent and sing along: "we choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things not because they are easy but because they are hard!"

(Still not quite sure what "the other things" are.)

STS-134

2011-05-19T22:35:00.007-05:00

Dawn at Kennedy Space Center

The next-to-last space shuttle launch was Monday (if I was a real English professor I'd use the word "penultimate") and scholars, I was there.

When I went to my first space shuttle launch, STS-102 in March 2001, I was all like, Well, that's it, I've seen a shuttle launch! I was writing a book in which the characters go to many shuttle launches, and I needed to see one to know what it was like. Having crossed that off my list, I never thought I'd make a point of seeing another one again.

But then the program was canceled, and I wanted to write about the end of American human spaceflight. I felt like I should see the last few launches in order to write about it. My second launch was ten years after my first, three months ago, STS-133 in February 2011, and I was surprised by how different it was from 102. 102 was a night launch and 133 was day; I was at a different vantage point, the weather was different, 102 was pre-Columbia and 133 was post-, and the overall spectacle, sound, and experience were totally different.

As of Monday, I've seen three launches, and I'm starting to understand why some people who live in central Florida make it a point to go to every single one. Each one is a little different from the others, they each have a different story behind them and put on a different performance. Realizing this of course makes me incredibly sad that there is only one more to go for all time. And of course I plan to be there no matter what it takes.

This time I had a WAY better vantage point than I ever have, and better than almost anyone else. I mean not to be braggy, but I was closer than the press site, even closer (by a smidgen) than the astronaut's families, where President Obama was for the first attempt. This is all thanks to my friend Omar and his father Frank, both of whom work at the Cape, and they were generous enough to invite me along on their Extra Special Access badges. Here is a great video that Omar shot:

Godspeed Endeavour!

Happy Space History Day!

2011-04-12T08:00:00.001-05:00

On April 12, 1961, Yuri Gagarin became the first human being in space. Yuri was awesome and there's pretty much no way around that.

On April 12, 1981, the first space shuttle launched.

Today is April 12, 2011. It's been exactly thirty years since the start of the shuttle era and exactly 50 years since the start of the era of human spaceflight. Is it a bit of a bummer that we celebrate Space History Day (yes I made that up) preparing to say goodbye to the remaining space shuttles? Yeah it is.

Discovery's last flight

2011-02-25T10:19:00.008-06:00

Scholars, I'm still knee deep in work on my hugely long essay about the end of the space shuttle era, and as some publications are twitchy about publishing work that has appeared on the internet, I'm not going to take any chances and risk writing some transcendent sentences here that I will then be unable to use in the essay.

For now, suffice it to say: I was at the launch of STS-133, I met some kooky people there, and I'm really glad I went. From the west end of the 528 causeway, it looked something like this. (It gets a little cut off because Blogger and YouTube are not playing nicely together, but you can kind of get the idea).

From a much better vantage point across from the Vehicle Assembly Building, from my friend Omar who works at the Kennedy Space Center, it looked more like this.

Stay tuned!

2011-01-28T22:45:00.002-06:00

I'm afraid I don't have anything new for the Challenger anniversary this year, as I'm frantically writing a new piece on the end of the space shuttle era and preparing to go to Florida for the last launch of Discovery. (People keep asking me, when I mention I'm going to a shuttle launch, "Oh, cool! Where?" I try not to sound sarcastic when I answer, "Um, Florida. Have you ever heard of Cape Canaveral?" (The Kennedy Space Center is not actually at Cape Canaveral, but that's what they call it in the movies, and it has a pleasing alliteration.) My point is, space shuttles have only ever been launched from one place).

Anyway. In lieu of a Challenger anniversary post of my own, I want to direct you to a wonderful review of The Time It Takes to Fall by Catherine Howard over at Catherine, Caffeinated. She is the author of a memoir about living in Orlando for a while a a child as a visitor from Ireland-- must have been an odd experience, and I can't wait to read the book. She also has rather addictive blog about writing. She knows a lot about self-publishing in the era of e-books, which is a topic that a lot of people talk about without knowing nearly as much as Catherine seems to. You should check it out.

The Last Rockets

2010-06-23T12:48:00.004-05:00

This is the first of what is sure to be a series of articles noting a series of "lasts" for the shuttle program. This one hits especially close to home for me, because the Solid Rocket Boosters were at the center of the plot of The Time It Takes to Fall (both literally and figuratively), and the journey they take by railway to get to Florida is one of those randomly beautiful facts that novelists could never make up and can only be grateful for. In Dolores's words, from the epilogue:

I still think about that O-ring. I’ve learned that it was manufactured in 1985 in Brigham City, Utah, cleaned off like a newborn, inspected and measured and inspected again before being packed and shipped to Florida. That O-ring made an American journey by railway, across deserts and mountains, across the width of the American South to arrive at the coast of central Florida on October 11, 1985, at the marshy wildlife refuge, the improbable spaceport. There it waited to be unloaded into the Vehicle Assembly Building, unpacked and reinspected and remeasured and reinspected again, by my father.

Never again will a Solid Rocket Booster make that journey. Unless, of course, the retirement of the space shuttle is extended for a few more years...

The Long Hard Slog

2010-05-11T13:25:00.002-05:00

For those of you who don't read the Fiction Writer's Review:

1.You really ought to be reading the Fiction Writers Review. It's full of good stuff.

2. Like my recent piece.

The Time It Takes to Blog recycle-o-matic

2010-03-10T12:03:00.002-06:00

I recently discovered that the literary blog Metaxu Cafe has gone out of business. This makes me sad because I liked it. For instance, a regular feature was a recently-published writer discussing a "classic" that had influenced his or her writing. Great idea, right? Will someone else please pick that up?

Anyway, I was asked to write one of these around the time my book came out, and now that the site is gone, I will have to put it on my blog or it will not exist on the internet at all. It will be like it never even happened.

Margaret Lazarus Dean on Lolita

I first read Lolita when I was a teenager, much closer to Lolita’s age than Humbert’s. When I picked it up, all I knew was that Lolita was a dirty book, that it was a salacious account of a nasty old man’s lust for a young girl, a defense of his indefensible behavior. (Like many people of my generation, I got the false impression that Humbert was old from the song “Don’t Stand So Close to Me” by the Police: “Just like the old man in that famous book by Nab-uh-koff.”) So what I found was a revelation. Humbert is not old, and his behavior is never excused. The subject matter is treated with a complexity and a decency I had not been led to expect. The portrait of Lolita that seeps through Humbert’s narrative is nuanced and sympathetic, even as he objectifies her—we are left with an indelible image of her monkey toes, her sunny curls, her slangy speech, her harsh high voice. And, of course, the language: Humbert is pompous and showoffy, but within and around that excess Nabokov gives him a caustic precision I adored. Most surprising: Nabokov’s treatment of pedophilia was funny, not in a slapstick way but in a tragically revealing way. So my experience of this novel was an experience of being surprised continuously and variously— maybe the ideal literary experience.

For anyone, to read Lolita is to be forced to look at a pubescent girl through a series of distorting lenses: she is reduced and amplified by Humbert’s lust for her, but also humanized by his developing tenderness, all of which is muddied by the haze of his recollection and by his knowledge that he will lose her. All this is refracted through the additional lens of the manuscript’s fictional editor, John Ray, Jr., Ph.D, who seems to feel a disturbing empathy for Humbert’s predilection for young girls. A reader might legitimately ask: is the book’s main character Humbert Humbert, or is it this series of frames and ciphers? We might assume that Lolita is a book about a man tormented by a girl-object; having so recently been such a girl-object, I felt certain the book was about the girl.

Lolita has very little power in this story, ruled completely as she is by people who do not love her—first her mother, then Humbert, then Quilty. Lolita reaches a certain age—nearly thirteen—and discovers a new power over men. Should it be any surprise that she starts having sex, or even that she initiates sexual contact with Humbert? Many readers feel that because it is Lolita who crawls toward Humbert in The Enchanted Hunters hotel bed that early morning, everything that follows is her doing, that Humbert is in fact a victim of sorts, as Lolita’s act robs him of his last shred of self-control. In the dictionary, a “Lolita” is not a victim of sexual abuse, but a sexually aggressive young girl. Anything that happens to her, it would follow, is her own fault.

But Lolita is not a sexual predator; she is a child, with a child’s need for attention and a child’s propensity toward selfishness and sweetness and goofiness, and one of the hallmarks of Nabokov’s genius is that we can see her as a child, even through this series of distorting lenses. No one has ever read my novel and said it was reminiscent of Lolita (nor would I expect anyone to), but my book is infected by that book, as if by a blood disease. My protagonist is a thirteen-year-old girl named Dolores, and her precocious sexuality is an expression of a gene planted by Dolores Haze, her ghostly great-aunt. My Dolores chooses to initiate sex with an older partner—hers is eighteen, less shocking that Humbert’s thirty-eight, but still quite illegal. Of course, the scene feels significantly different told from the point of view of the girl rather than the man: we can understand her motives and can only wonder at his, rather than the other way around. The novel does not spend a great deal of time on this sexual relationship—readers can expect to learn much more about the space shuttle program of the 1980s than about Dolores’s sexuality—yet I have heard from more readers about this scene than any other. I think the scene disturbs readers because, while Dolores does pay certain costs for having sex with an adult, she is not irrevocably changed by it as Lolita is. Seeing the scene from the girl’s point of view, we can see that she is not a predator, but a child with few other choices available to her. Yet it’s hard for some readers to see Dolores make this choice and get away with it. This is the form our prudishness takes now: a book containing such a scene will no longer be banned as pornography, but we want to see the girl punished for her choice. Like Lolita, Dolores is a child who has discovered this one power, this one loophole, but Dolores is spared the stigma of being a “Lolita,” a girl reduced to the barest outlines of her body. Fifty years after the publication of Lolita, with younger and younger girls sexualized more and more, you would think this scene would have lost the power to shock. I’m still not sure whether this reaction is shock at the audacity of a girl using her sexuality to claim power over a man, or shock that her circumstances offer this as the only source of power she has.

Reading Lolita for the fiftieth time, I’m still moved by the fact that Lolita wants only the things we are all supposed to want, like love and autonomy. One could argue that the choice she makes in that hotel she makes out of a desperate hope of achieving these. One could argue that she eventually succeeds.

No Moon

2010-02-15T15:58:00.004-06:00

For as long as I've been reading about the history of NASA, it's fascinated me that there seems to be little correlation between a person's political ideology along the conservative-liberal spectrum and their feelings about publicly-funded manned spaceflight. This "publicly-funded" piece is key, by the way, as some people think that spaceflight is great as long as their taxes don't go to support it. One blog commenter I came across recently called Constellation "the socialized moon project" to differentiate it, I suppose, from a capitalist moon project. (Note to venture capitalists: moon travel is probably not a great investment).

So it's been interesting to watch, in the past couple of weeks, the space enthusiasts of the internet try to express their feelings over Obama's decision to ax the moon project in political terms. A lot of the people most upset about this decision, understandably, are NASA employees, who tend to skew (for multivalent reasons) conservative. Well, you can imagine: Obama plus cutting Constellation equals full-on Glenn Beck style rage. But as much emotional sense as it might make to rage against the guy who just axed your job and everything you've ever worked on, raging against Obama as a liberal doesn't hold much water. Not only because conservatives are supposed to like privatizing things, but also because this entire thing-- the whole send a man to the moon and bring him back safely before the decade is out thing-- was introduced by Kennedy, generally not embraced as a role model by conservatives.

A couple of people have asked whether I was sad about this decision, and I have to admit that I'm not. First of all, we have to acknowledge that part of this decision involve increasing NASA's budget quite a bit, a detail that often gets set aside in the Obama Bashing. Also because I never believed we would really be going to the moon any time soon in the first place. What Bush created when he called for Constellation was what politicians call an "unfunded mandate." He took credit for the idea and the excitement and left the money for future presidents to beg. Obama calculated that he can't spend the political capital to make Constellation happen, and he's right.

It cheered me slightly to see that Buzz Aldrin feels the same way I do (thanks @Irving Flashman for bringing this to my attention), and it cheers me all the more because I happen to know that Buzz watches a lot of Fox News and doesn't think much of Obama. That he would call this Obama's "JFK moment" means a lot, especially from someone who cares so deeply about getting to Mars.

Challenger Day

2010-01-28T11:30:00.001-06:00

Twenty-four years later...

Challenger day has snuck up on us once again, and this one seems especially significant because this is, presumably, the last Challenger anniversary on which we can still look forward to more shuttle missions. The space shuttles are slated to be retired from service, one by one, as they complete the last five missions over the coming year, with the last mission to launch no later than September.

When I try to imagine what the Challenger crew would say to this, a few things jump to mind:
1) "You're still flying those birds? They're 18-26 years old, y'all!" (Columbia would be the oldest, at 29, if it hadn't broken up on re-entry in 2003.)

2) "What do you have lined up to fly next? A super cool new space ship, right? I mean after all, it's 2010..."

By the way, is it weird that I am imagining dialogue with people I never met who have been dead since I was 13? Not really, because I think sometimes the dead can help keep us honest about what we do next. These seven people believed in the promise and coolness of spaceflight so much that they were willing to risk their lives for it— I wouldn't want to have to explain to them that we haven't decided to get out of the spaceflight game so much as we've just sort of let it peter out without any clear decision-making or fanfare. That's lame, right? If we decide it's not worth the money any more, fine (well, not fine, but...you know what I mean)—but we should take responsibility for making that decision. If we want to do something else now, something cheaper (and let's remember that the entire driving force behind the space shuttle system in the first place was its cheapness) that's fine too, but we should be honest about that too.

Also, NASA seems to be selling off some space stuff and I'm trying to figure out how to raise some quick cash.

15 Things I learned when I spent a day with Buzz Aldrin.

2009-11-20T16:48:00.011-06:00

1. Everybody wants a piece of Buzz Aldrin. People want to touch him, shake his hand, have their picture taken shaking his hand, get their picture taken clapping him on the shoulder, and generally make physical contact with him as much as they can—and get photographic evidence that they have done so, if at all possible.

2. Everybody wants to tell Buzz Aldrin where they were and what they were doing while he was walking on the moon. These stories are almost uniformly uninteresting, as stories about watching TV tend to be.

3. Buzz Aldrin nods and smiles politely at these stories. Telling one of these stories, a person will start to realize how idiotic he sounds, telling Buzz about where he was watching TV one day in July of 1969. Buzz Aldrin is so patient with these stories it’s easy to forget that he has been listening to them FOR FORTY YEARS.

4. It's not as common as you might think that someone actually challenges Buzz Aldrin in person about whether the moon landings were faked. I saw Buzz Aldrin meet about 350 people and witnessed zero confrontations. (I know— I was disappointed too.)

5. Every time a suspected lunar hoax conspiricist approaches Buzz (and by "suspected lunar hoax conspiricist" I mean a white man, 25-45 years old, with poor hygiene and/or fashion sense), everyone becomes quiet and listens carefully until the man starts to tell Buzz where he was and what he was doing while Buzz walked on the moon.

6. The things people ask Buzz Aldrin to sign are many and varied. Old yellowing newspapers from 1969 with Buzz’s picture, various Apollo-era souvenir books, a moon-shaped nightlight, a couple of garments, zero body parts. (It’s just not that kind of party, I guess.)

7. When a suspected lunar hoax conspiricist approaches Buzz Aldrin holding nothing in his hands but a hunting jacket, draped entirely over his arm and covering his hand and any possible firearms he may be carrying, everyone will freeze watchfully but no one will throw herself in front of Buzz Aldrin or attempt tackle the man.

8. I was thinking I really should throw myself in front of Buzz Aldrin if the suspected lunar hoax conspiricist got any closer. I mean, how cool would it be to save Buzz Aldrin’s life? But I didn’t, and neither did anyone else, and the guy would have had a clear shot at him. As it turned out, the guy wanted Buzz to sign his hunting jacket because he didn’t have a copy of the book. Buzz declined to do so.

9. Some children are genuinely excited to meet Buzz Aldrin, and this is quite dear to observe. But some children don't really understand why they should be excited to meet Buzz Aldrin, and become shy and confused, and when that happens, there is a tendency to for people to try to get the child excited by saying to him or her, "You know Buzz Lightyear? Well, this is the REAL Buzz!"

10. I wouldn’t have guessed it, but it turns out that I am one of these people. I heard myself say “This is the real Buzz!” to children several times.

11. Buzz Aldrin's Twitter name is "The Real Buzz."

12. Buzz Aldrin will be happy to sign a Buzz Lightyear action figure for you. He even carries a permanent marker that writes nicely on the plastic.

13. After I introduced Buzz Aldrin at his reading, as I walked off the stage, he said to the crowd, “Now that’s a special lady.” This is a moment that I expect to see flash before my eyes in any future near-death experience.

14. Buzz Aldrin's business card identifies him as “astronaut” and “rocket scientist.” I am thinking of having those titles put on my business card too, even though in my case they would be lies.

15. When Buzz Aldrin recommends a book (as he did mine at the beginning of his talk) a number of people will dutifully buy it. God bless you, Buzz Aldrin.

Watch this space! (get it?)

2009-10-22T13:58:00.000-05:00

I met Buzz Aldrin. More to come.

Pushy Literary Theorist

2009-08-07T21:53:00.003-05:00

I was honored and quite starstruck to do this interview with Mimi Smartypants recently. If you don't know who Mimi Smartypants is, leave this site and go to hers: www.mimismartypants.com. I'll see you back here in a week or so.

Back? Good. So you see why I like her so much. I was really curious to interview her because I have a lot of Questions and Ideas about what it means to be a writer in the Age of the Internet... As a writer of a Book, I'm constantly being told that books are not long for this world and that I am basically a throwback to a bygone era and may as well be churning butter by hand or setting cold type. So I was curious to talk about all this with a woman who is, to my mind, one of the very best writers working primarily on the internets.

But I failed to consider, in the course of preparing for and conducting this interview, that no artist (and I don't think it's a stretch to call Mimi Smartypants an artist) is really capable of analyzing her own work and her own place in the history of her genre. Of course, right? I mean, any artist who even likes trying to talk about such things is probably so wanky that you would never want to read their work. As Mimi puts it: "I do not have a lot of patience for people who have a grand manifesto about their creative activity." That.

Anyway, I hope I didn't permanently alienate myself from her good graces by pushing her on, for example, what sort of paper an undergraduate might be forced to write about her work in 2509.

I did, however, confirm that no-delete Thursday is real. It's real! Which blows my gourd. You don't want to see my no-delete anything, believe me.

I read a book.

2009-07-22T14:44:00.008-05:00

On an earlier attempt at a blog, I started out recording the books that I read and my thoughts about them. Not formal reviews, just my off-the-cuff impressions. It was fun to record what I read this way, and to hear others' comments on books. But it wasn't long before this happened: I gave a book a meh review. I was disappointed because I really idolize the author and the whole book just didn't hold up to the genius I expected. Cut to me, several weeks later, shaking this author's hand at a bookstore reading, calculating how quickly I could get to a computer to erase (or edit) that review before The Author could see it. That was not a good feeling. So I haven't been doing the same on this blog.

But it occurs to me that I don't have to write reviews—I can just record what I read. All the better, since I seem to be unable to keep my Goodreads or Librarything updated... according to those sites, I haven't read a thing since my son was born but Goodnight Moon. Not that that book isn't a classic.

So in the spirit of this, I recently read:

Jeanette Walls, The Glass Castle
Junot Diaz, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
Jonathan Franzen, The Corrections
Margaret Atwood, The Edible Woman
Jim Keogh, Solving the Year 2000 Problem [guess which of these are research for my next book]
Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina [yes, again. What?]
Dave Cullen, Columbine

(I wanted to tell you how much I liked some for these because I forgot for a second that I'm not reviewing them. That will take some getting used to.)

I knitted something.

2009-07-03T09:38:00.004-05:00

It's one of the great ironies of academic life: when we get lots of free time (I've been on leave since January) we actually feel that we have LESS time for non-work activities like updating blogs, reading for pleasure, home maintenance, and personal hygiene. This is because when you have unstructured time in which you are supposed to be doing something huge and insurmountable (in my case, writing my second novel) it feels like it's never acceptable to take the time to do anything else. After all, you're on leave! You should be producing! How many pages have you written today! Etc.

Anyway, that's sort of an excuse for how little I've been updating this blog lately, even with all the NASA news that's been going on. I hope to update you with my fascinating thoughts about recent goings-on when I get the chance (probably, when I get back to a normal teaching schedule).

For the time being, please enjoy one non-work-related thing I've managed to get done: I knitted matching sweaters for a colleague's newborn twins. Knitting might seem as though it should fall into the above non-work category, but knitting is what I do when I watch Netflix movies with my Associate in the evening, and so knitting projects have been continuing apace. Coming next: a hand-knitted reusable Swiffer cover. Oh, no, I'm not kidding.

2009-04-25T12:43:00.000-05:00

MOSTLY FICTION Review

2009-04-23T18:35:00.003-05:00

http://www.mostlyfiction.com/contemp/dean.html

This is a great site. Their "you might also enjoy" algorithm kicked up books about space I had not previously been aware of and am now totally going to read.

The Death of the Book!!! (dun dun dun)

2009-02-27T23:13:00.005-06:00

You know what I'm talking about, right? Every other item I see in a magazine or on the Internets, especially among my Facebook buddies, is about how publishing and bookstores as we know them are ending, in a flaming mushroom cloud, right now. The publishers are completely freaking about how bad business is and they are preparing for things to get even worse. The main way they are preparing, it seems, is by publishing fewer and fewer of the kinds of books my friends and I care about. The remaining entrenched independent bookstores to survive the nineties are now starting to go belly-up one by one. Borders is trying to sell out, but no one wants to buy them, including Barnes & Noble. Often that Reading at Risk study by the NEA is cited at some point.

Scholars, there's nothing I can say to argue with any of this, as these are facts. And as a professional consumer AND producer of literature, I'm not in a place to take any of it lightly. If publishing and bookselling and, lordhelpus, libraries were to stop being what they are, that would be really bad for me and the people and things that I value. I'm working on another book right now, and I hope that at such time as I might finish it, some publisher will be willing to spend money to make paper copies of it, and that some bookstore might spend money to stock some of those copies on shelves-- both of which seem like sketchier propositions by the day.

But here's what bothers me about the way we tend to talk about this: I generally hear a tone that I'd describe as decrying— you know, decrying the plight of literature. But my question is: whom are we decrying?

We can't possibly blame the bookstores themselves for going under—if any of their decisions have led to their desctruction, it's their tenacity in continuing to devote floorspace to poetry instead of High School Musical DVDs. We might like to blame publishers, but the same argument sort of holds, right? Even if they have been reacting to declining sales by throwing more money at less literary books, it's in an effort to continue publishing books, which after all, is what we want.

The only people left to blame are the people who don't buy books, and this is what makes me squeamish. It makes me feel like we (you know, we consumers and producers of literature) are huddled in a little latte-sipping mob, sniping at the Philistines who should be spending their money on $24.95 literary hardcovers instead of Xboxes. And that's just troubling to me on a number of levels. One being that every new technology has pissed off the devotees of the technology that came before it, the purists (or Luddites, take your pick) who champion (cling to) the noble (outdated) medium they feel gives their art meaning. The first example to spring to mind is the people who freaked over Gutenberg's moveable type because it made irrelevant the skills of calligraphers and illiminators(?) who had theretofore cornered the market on bookmaking. And I get that, the clinging to the beautiful manuscripts, but I get even more the unstoppable force and undeniable democratic appeal of moveable type, which made knowledge available to more people, more cheaply, thereby changing the world forever. For the good, I think we can all agree.

I guess what I'm saying is that if people aren't buying books, it's not because they're stupid, it's because books, as a technology, are over. (One could make an argument that if you agree to live in a capitalist society, you must accept all of the results of capitalism, but I won't argue that.) I do believe that The People, in making these changes, are never stupid, scholars, even if beautiful things might get trampled in the process. I know, I know, if I think books are over why have I chosen to work in that medium and devoted my day job life to helping the young to read and write in that medium? I guess I hope that the art form itself is not really over, but there's a major transition, an upheaval, going on in the way people want to experience narratives. It's this transition that seems so badly glossed over and misunderstood by the sort of facile "oh god soon books will be completely replaced by [fill in ridiculous philistine invention here]." I tend not to be on the side of arguments that take that tone, a tone that, frankly, has not a small whiff of classism mixed in.

Because we, even we who do the decrying, watch TV and watch movies that come to us on DVDs in little red envelopes and play Wii and read the Times online and talk on the phone and type our musings into blogs rather than manuscripts intended to become paper books. WE do. We spend more time doing these things than we do reading words on paper (or we would if you don't count our day jobs). So I feel like we should take our noses out of the air and think about how to find a place for literature as we know it in and among a wash of newer media, all of which turn out some art and some crap, without blaming people for failing to uphold our preferred dying medium. WE should take the responsibility for helping the narratives we value (the ones based on words) survive somewhere in this ecosystem, rather than just copping Sorrowful (and Superior).

You know what I mean? No, you think I'm way off. I can tell.

IT'S CHALLENGER ANNIVERSARY DAY

2009-01-28T12:30:00.004-06:00

Can you believe that another January 28 is upon us?

This year I am thinking about a new era for the US government— especially with respect to one of my favorite government agencies, NASA. Our friends in the spaceflight industry have been spooked by the new President's lack of a clear position on funding for NASA, and Obama has freaked everyone out a couple of times by, for example, suggesting that the moon-to-Mars project could be pushed back five years in order to free up money for troubled public schools and asking how much would be saved by canceling the Ares 1 project altogether. The verbs are important here: he is not "announcing" or "demanding," but "suggesting" and "asking." I think Obama is testing the waters, trying to figure out whether we the people who elected him would like to see expensive space projects canceled in a show of frugality, or whether we want to see money spent that will create jobs and build pride in the nation. And this "pride in the nation" thing is not an abstract concept I'm throwing about— the United States has achieved more in spaceflight than any other country, and with VERY few resources—we are taking about half of one percent of the federal budget. And don't let the false either-or about spaceflight vs. school funding scare you, either. For instance, we could SPEND MONEY ON BOTH. We have the money to spend.

Last week, everyone I knew was fired up by an inauguration in a way that I have never seen before in my life. Even those who are completely cynical about politics and the federal government are peeking out of their irony caves to sniff the air, and scholars, they are picking up the scent of hope. Be the Change? Yes We Can? These should sound cheesy, but they don't, because they are delivered with sincerity and because those messages are badly needed right now. President Obama: now is a great time to show the world that our government respects SCIENCE once again. Now is a great time to spend money that will create and maintain jobs in many fields in many states, and now is definitely a great time to give us all something uniquely American to be proud of.

Most of the Challenger astronauts stated at one time or another that, should they die in an accident on a flight, they would want spaceflight to go on. So today, with this in mind, I'm going to use the swanky new contact tools on www.whitehouse.gov to share my views on this.

The Columbia Accident Report

2009-01-03T13:14:00.002-06:00

This is more interesting than I thought it would be.

The language has a strange combination of bluntness and evasiveness that readers of the Kerwin Report on Challenger will find eerily familiar. Readers of The Time It Takes to Fall will remember that Dr. Kerwin examined the wreckage of Challenger's crew cabin and the crews' remains in order to speculate on the possible causes of the crew's deaths. Before this report was released, everyone assumed that the astronauts had died instantly at the moment of the explosion, but the Kerwin report exposed the fact that they (probably) survived the explosion and (probably) were still alive when the crew cabin impacted the surface of the ocean. The suggestion that the crew all blacked out instantly from depressurization is, while comforting, far from certain—the report includes this disturbing passage (actually a bullet point, because NASA loves the bullet points):

The crew seats and restraint harnesses showed patterns of failure which demonstrates that all the seats were in place and occupied at water impact with all harnesses locked. This would likely be the case had rapid loss of consciousness occurred, but it does not constitute proof.

The new Columbia report reflects the same fascination with consciousness or lack thereof; once again we are told that the crew blacked out when the cabin depressurized, possibly sparing them the suffering of being thrown about in the crew cabin, exposed to heat or cold, and knowing what was to occur. Students of Challenger can be forgiven for being skeptical about this comforting possibility. What went wrong with Columbia probably developed gradually (re-entry is a very slow process) and it's hard to imagine that the crew somehow escaped understanding what was going wrong.

In DailyTech, which you might have missed if you aren't an enormous geek, a debate emerged in the Comments area over the funds and effort expended on this study. Many readers felt that there's no point in pinpointing exactly what went wrong and why. These readers especially questioned the Report's deep interest in the crew's pressure suits and restraint harnesses, both of which seemed to have failed badly. Nothing to be gained by this further information, these readers say, and some go a step further to speculate that this report is timed to make NASA look bad just as Obama takes office in order to justify his slashing of their budget. (Question to DailyTech conspiracy theorists: wait, why is NASA releasing this report to justify their own budget slashing? Please advise.)

To me, the reason the expense and effort are justified seems obvious. But I'll let N. Wayne Hale, Jr., a former head of the shuttle program, answer for me. He said in the Times:

“I call on spacecraft designers from all the other nations of the world, as well as the commercial and personal spacecraft designers here at home, to read this report and apply these lessons which have been paid for so dearly.”

THAT'S why.

Breaking News

2008-11-23T09:30:00.017-06:00

Scholars! You will never believe who I met last week: astronaut Jack Schmitt, Lunar Module Pilot on Apollo 17. I am still breathless from this encounter (literally: I was fighting a bad cold to begin with, and scraping myself out of bed to meet Dr. Schmitt seems to have turned me toward the bronchitis/plague end of the sickness spectrum. But enough complaining).

Dr. Schmitt is friends with University of Tennessee professor of geology Larry Taylor, who invites him here to speak periodically. The two met when they were both geology consultants on early Apollo missions, teaching the astronauts how to gather samples of lunar rocks and dust. NASA then tapped Schmitt to become the first scientist astronaut, and (depending on how you define it*) the last man on the moon. Professor Taylor was kind enough to invite me to meet with Dr. Schmitt one-on-one before his lecture in the Earth and Planetary Sciences department. Well, scholars, you can imagine my anticipation. What would you ask a man who had walked on the moon, given the chance?

*Both Schmitt and Apollo 17 Commander Gene Cernan can be defined as "the last man on the moon" because Schmitt was the last to set foot on the moon (he was the first off the Lunar Module) and Cernan was the last to leave the lunar surface.

As you can see here, Dr. Schmitt is a delightful man. He seems quite young for his age (born in 1935, but looks like he's in his mid-50s) and was very friendly and open to meeting people (not just me, but everyone who showed up for his talk). He seems to truly enjoy talking about lunar origin theories, possible future landing sites on the moon, the political and technological feasibility of returning to the moon, and his own experience going to the moon— which is a good thing, because he's been talking about these subjects whether he likes it or not probably every day since his mission ended in December 1972.

I tried not to act like a starstruck fangirl, scholars, but it was hard to restrain myself, because—I'm not sure if I've been totally clear on this—Jack Schmitt actually TRAVELED TO THE MOON IN A SPACESHIP and then donned a spacesuit to WALK ON THE SURFACE OF THE MOON. When we shook hands, I fear I may have held on a bit too long, because I was reflecting to myself that his hand, the hand I was at that moment shaking, HAS BEEN ON THE MOON.

I gave Dr. Schmitt a copy of my book, because as you'll recall, scholars, he was mentioned in it by name. Apollo 17, as the last mission of NASA's great golden age, was something of a touchstone in the book—after that flight, there were no more manned missions until 1981 with the first test flight of the space shuttle. In fact, I set Dolores's birthdate as December 11, 1972, specifically to coincide with Apollo 17 for symbolic effect. Anyway, Dr. Schmitt seemed to appreciate the longing that people of my generation feel for the missions of the past, and the promise that seemed to be inherent in Apollo (that promise, of course, has gone unfulfilled (like so many promises made by one generation to the next)).

But what was odd about our conversation was the extent to which our interests in spaceflight almost don't overlap at all. As you know, I started learning about NASA history by way of the Challenger disaster, and my now voluminous (though random and dubiously researched) scope of knowledge centers mostly around the subtopics SPACE SHUTTLE HISTORY, SPACE DISASTERS, CULTURAL IMPLICATIONS OF ABOVE, and GENERAL AESTHETIC AWESOMENESS OF SPACEFLIGHT. This last category encompasses much more material from the Apollo era than from the space shuttle era — going to the moon was simply grander, cooler, more unlikely, and more beautiful, than anything else ever accomplished by humans. Je m'interesse de ça. One of the finer examples being this photograph:

You've seen this before. In fact, NASA speculates that this is the most reproduced image in human history. Next time you come across an image of the earth used in an ad, textbook, movie, matchbook etc., look closely for Africa and Antartica in these positions—chances are good that you are seeing the Blue Marble. Dr. Schmitt took this photograph (probably).

What is fascinating is that Dr. Schmitt does not seem to take the same interest in the GENERAL AESTHETIC AWESOMENESS OF SPACEFLIGHT that I do. He seems to think the point of the Apollo flights was to learn more about the moon. He's not wrong, of course, and it's sensible that he would think this, since he's a geologist and his way in to the Apollo project was as an expert on the moon as a physical object. I thought it was generally accepted that Americans in the sixties supported the Apollo program to the extent that they did not because they wanted to know what the moon was made out of, but because 1) they wanted to beat the Russians and 2) going to the moon was fun and beautiful to watch (keep in mind that 1 and 2 were reversed for many Americans). Neither Dr. Schmitt nor I care a fig about 1, but he seems not to care much about 2 either, and 2 is pretty much where I hang my hat as a space enthusiast.

Of course, we did find some common ground. Dr. Schmitt and I chatted about the possibility of returning to the moon (he has actually written a book on this subject) and what it would take to gather the money and political will necessary. Dr. Schmitt feels (as I do) that government has to play a central role in spaceflight, but there also has to be an incentive for private enterprise to get involved, and Dr. Schmitt believes that helium-3 mining on the moon could offer a new energy source and provide enough incentive for energy companies to invest in travel to the moon to get it. I couldn't help but think back to the outlandish claims of how the space shuttle would "pay for itself" through private enterprise (and the space shuttle was a lot cheaper to operate than a mission to the moon will be), but whatever—if this kind of talk gives politicians the confidence/political cover they need to vote "yes" on a multibillion dollar appropriation for NASA, then that's fine. (In recent weeks, I can't help thinking that if Obama has the guts to bring back a WPA-style big-pending project, a moon shot could be a great mood-lifting jobs-creating component, couldn't it? Who's with me?)

What else? I asked Dr. Schmitt what he thinks about the alarmingly high (and growing) number of young Americans who believe the moon landings were faked (or harbor a significant amount of skepticism). My least intelligent moment in our conversation came right about here: I asked him what he tells people who are skeptical, and he said, in a slightly I'll-say-this-slowly-because-you're obviously-not-too-bright voice, "Well, I just tell them about my personal experience of going to the moon. And if they choose to think I'm a liar, I can't do anything about that." Well, yeah, I guess, that's a good answer. I wish I could use the phrase "my personal experience of going to the moon" in a sentence, don't you? Maybe I'll start trying to work it in.

Dr. Schmitt did agree with me that young people can be forgiven for their credulousness to some extent because, as unlikely at is seems that such a hoax could be perpetrated, it seems even less likely, to people who didn't witness it, that we managed to send human beings to walk on the moon and brought them back safely nearly 40 years ago, especially considering that we are not capable of doing so now. If you are an Occam's razor type person, and ask which one requires more assumptions, you can be forgiven for having trouble choosing. I was surprised that Dr. Schmitt did not seem as frustrated by the hoax credulousness as I am, signaling as it does a dwindling personal connection to these accomplishments on the part of America as a nation (I can become quite patriotic on this topic, scholars). Being a pragmatist, he has his sights set on going back to the moon ASAP and doesn't sit around worrying (as I do, obviously) about the cultural implications of the number of years it's been since we went last time.

2008-11-07T19:55:00.005-06:00

Oh, scholars. It fills me with shame to ponder how long it's been since I've caught up with you.

And so much has happened! The Time It Takes to Blog HQ has officially moved to Tennessee, where, you'll be pleased to know, the Time It Takes family is enjoying more square footage in the family compound, a Krispy Kreme right around the corner, and shorts weather right up through yesterday.

What else? Well, this happened. Scholars, I know this article is supposed to be a bit tongue-in-cheek, but am I wrong for thinking it's just as important to have achieved the election a president who is an Intellectual American as it is to have broken the Nonwhite American barrier? And don't get me started about the non-issue of the non-election of the first Feminine American president.

I've also found it interesting to follow the coverage of Obama's likely NASA policies vs. McCain's... among the spacegeek blogs, a typical assumption seems to be that Obama would "spread NASA's wealth" from manned spaceflight to... I don't know... health care for underprivileged children, or something. Because that's what Obama's fixin to do with everybody's wealth, is spread it. This may be because space geeks tend to be conservatives (or conservatives masquerading as libertarians—you know who you are) so the assumption is that liberals=bad. But ahem, which party was it that produced the President who started it all in 1961, the before-this-decade-is-out President?

As you know, scholars, The Time It Takes to Blog is a nonpartisan blog, but the fact is that not one of the candidates of either party could have achieved the confusing combination of apathy and spendiness produced by the the Bush administration, with their wishy-washy lack of interest in what will replace the space shuttle (a mere 14 months from now!) combined with their kooky manned Moon/Mars plan. So in other words, there's nowhere to go but up. (Get it?) Also: as with so many other things, it's not really up to the President how much money NASA gets or what they do. And historically, having more Democrats in Congress is not always bad for NASA. (Confusingly, lots of Republicans aren't necessarily bad for NASA either).

What else? I've knitted several things and forgotten to take pictures of them. I have a great batch of new writing students. Some space shuttles have launched.

More soon, I hope...

I knitted something

2008-06-13T13:43:00.002-05:00

What is it, you ask? Why, it's an iPhone cozy, of course.

I think I invented it.

2008-06-05T10:28:00.004-05:00

Hello, Scholars! Sorry for the long absence-- there has been a lot of drama here at Time It Takes to Blog HQ, with our impending move to Tennessee. Turns out, there are still mortgages to be had, but man they do make you sign a lot of papers.

What did I miss? A successful launch, a new lab for the International Space Station, a six-hour spacewalk, and toilet problems on the ISS. Scholars, I cannot convey to you the thoroughness of the breathless play-by-play coverage of the toilet's breakdown, possible causes thereof, possible fixes for, and finally the long-awaited treatment: new parts sent aboard Discovery on Saturday. Judging from the coverage, scholars, you'd think the toilet was the most important news, eclipsing all other events. What is it about bathrooms in space that so fascinate the space media? They tell us that bathroom-related questions are the most frequently asked, but I can't help but think this sort of coverage is partially to blame. Combine the bathroom fixation with that old media standby, NASA screwing up, and you've got a hit on your hands with this story. We're lucky the successful launch of Discovery made it into the papers at all.

Seriously?

2008-03-12T09:16:00.003-05:00

Is there really no way to launch a space shuttle without crap hitting the orbiter? The astronauts are now spending their first day on Endeavour checking for damage to the nose rather than the more traditional activities, choreographing zero-g dance routines and throwing up.

In other news: The Time It Takes to Fall has been named one of New York Public Library's Books for the Teen Age. Most of the books chosen for this are marketed as Young Adult. So it's especially an honor that they had to seek mine out for this. Librarians are so cool.

Largehearted Boy

2008-03-02T16:30:00.003-06:00

I am a guest blogger this week at Largehearted Boy, a very cool music blog. He invites authors of recent books to write about music that is relevant to the book in some way. I really enjoyed putting together a playlist of Dolores's favorite songs from 1985-1986 and writing about why she loves them.

Also see the playlist (missing some of the songs due to copyright) at iTunes.

Guest blogging

2008-02-28T18:24:00.002-06:00

I'm a guest blogger today on Tom's Astronomy Blog, a very cool blog about spaceflight and (mostly planetary) astronomy. He's got great graphics up there every day. I so admire bloggers who update every day.

Check it out!

HAPPY PAPERBACK RELEASE DAY!

2008-02-19T19:44:00.004-06:00

That's right, today's the day the paperback is officially released. Go down to your local bookstore and demand to know its whereabouts.

The paperback includes a Reading Group Guide, which I will include here for your perusal just as soon as I get the chance.

Paperback buzz

2008-02-17T12:28:00.002-06:00

The paperback release of The Time It Takes to Fall is this week, scholars! Can you believe it's been a year since the hardcover was released upon an unsuspecting populace? Now you can buy it again in a smaller, lighter format, with a shiny foil effect on the cover and a Reading Group Guide!

This week the book is featured on Authorbuzz. Enter to win a free copy of the paperback or just share the Buzz.

I had lunch with George Saunders today.

2008-01-29T14:50:00.000-06:00

That's all-- just one more thing I can check off the lifetime to-do list.

Challenger anniversary

2008-01-28T11:35:00.000-06:00

Can you believe it's been twenty-two years?

Lately I'm surprised by how little memorializing there is when this day comes around... even for the nice round numbers like the twentieth anniversary. Maybe this is because most Americans alive now are too young to remember Challenger, or Reagan, or a real recession (but that's another post).

Today I'm thinking about the grown children of the Challenger crew, who are now in their late twenties to mid thirties. It must be odd to look back on this day and think about a parent they may not remember clearly any more. I hope they know that many of us who saw the disaster as children still look up to their parents and still remember what happened that January 28.

Everyone agrees

2008-01-13T09:47:00.000-06:00

Scholars, I was very intrigued to see this on the Freakonomics blog. (Actually, I saw a link to it on Slashdot.) The headline "Is Space Exploration Worth the Cost?" caught my geeky eye, and I looked forward to reading a Freakonomics (read: challenging and iconoclastic) analysis of the question. Also, this is a question that people ask me ALL THE TIME so I'm always looking to crib new answers.

Be warned, it's long—but it can all be easily summarized with one word: YES. And the reasons are not very groundbreaking, scholars. I caught a hint that this would be the case in the introduction.

For the impatient among you, here are a few highlights:
Logsdon on a not-so-obvious incentive for manned space travel: “Space exploration can also serve as a stimulus for children to enter the fields of science and engineering.”

This is a not-so-obvious incentive? Um, the argument that space exploration inspires children is one that I hear ALL THE TIME. And it's also frankly not one of the best arguments where cost is concerned. If we wanted to spend $7 billion dollars a year encouraging kids to take more of an interest in science and engineering, I bet we could spend it more efficiently (a good place to start would be, hello, improving science and math education in public schools). All of those arguments about space exploration paying off in the form of things on earth, including inspired schoolchildren, Velcro, and pens that write upside down (hey, don't knock them, I have one and it's awesome) are inherently troublesome. If we want things to happen on earth, we should spend the money on earth. If we want to explore space, we should spend the money to explore space.

I guess I would have liked to see some compelling "NO" answers in order to start a real dialogue about this. I shouldn't have to provide a NO answer myself-- it depresses me.

More on this later.

I must now take back everything I've ever said about the federal government.

2007-12-05T14:27:00.000-06:00

Because of this.

Actually, I'm being facetious—I've said almost all nice things about NASA, which is also a government agency. Not that there's any connection between the two, of course. Or there would be lots more novels singing the praises of the SEC, the EPA, the FCC. Hmm, that gives me an idea...

I knitted something.

2007-11-29T21:03:00.000-06:00

That is all.

Just As I Suspected

2007-11-21T19:11:00.000-06:00

Scholars, I've blogged before about the troubling misconceptions my fellow Americans hold about our national space agency. But this demonstrates that the trouble goes even deeper than many of us had feared.

When asked to estimate NASA's allocation of the national budget, people respond with amounts averaging 24%. TWENTY-FOUR PERCENT. Scholars, if NASA got 24% of the national budget, I would be writing this from my moon condo. And I wouldn't be typing on a keyboard, I would be using nanotechnology to blog using only the power of my thoughts.

It's telling that NASA was the part of the budget on which people overestimated most wildly. I hate to blame the media, because it's such a cliche, but to hear the mainstream media talk about it, you'd think NASA was burning up all our money on their pointless toys. In fact, they do quite a bit with very little.

For the record, NASA's allocation is 0.58%.

MLD in Five Chapters!

2007-11-10T14:05:00.000-06:00

I have a story this week in Five Chapters entitled "Lives of the Great Baristas." Five Chapters is a cool online journal. Check it out!

Female Pioneers in Space

2007-11-04T15:32:00.000-06:00

Scholars, I'm happy about this sort of thing, of course. As noted last time, Commander Melroy (still in space as we speak) is the second Feminine American to command the space shuttle, and it's a nice coincidence that she's meeting another of her gender commanding the International Space Station. But I'm a bit troubled by this kind of coverage.

"Melroy and Whitson are showing it doesn't matter whether someone is male or female," according to Eileen Collins, the first woman to command the Space Shuttle. And that's true. Yet we have a contradiction here because this kind of coverage--the inspiring of the Girl Scouts and so on--insists that it does matter. Otherwise why cover it as such?

I've written about this contradiction before with respect to the first woman to play professional baseball, and I still don't really have my story straight: It bothers me that these women's accomplishments get filed under Women's Accomplishments rather than under Accomplishments, yet I get choked up when little Girl Scouts are inspired to become daredevil pilots by seeing big girl pilots.

Discuss.

Godspeed, Commander Melroy

2007-10-19T19:35:00.000-05:00

Tuesday will be the first launch attempt for STS-120, helmed by only the second female commander in shuttle history. She will also be the last, as there are no other Feminine Americans qualified to command the shuttle, and none coming down the pike before the shuttle is retired in 2010.

Commander Melroy's career is especially interesting to me because we share an alma mater. I think it's incredibly cool that we had the same astronomy professor, Dr. Priscilla Benson, though presumably Commander Melroy got more out of the course than I did, seeing as how she has had the chance to experience some of its concepts in their real-life applications.

I know it's kind of cheesy to identify too closely with public figures based on simple demographic facts like gender, but I do think it's cool for little girls to get to see a shuttle commander with a ponytail. None of the first batch of female astronauts were qualified to be pilots because the military still didn't allow women to fly. But Commander Melroy was a navy test pilot, no less, the old-school Right-Stuff route to getting to fly NASA's spacecraft.

She says that her goal is to be the next astronaut to set foot on the moon. I hope she does; it will be an even bigger feather in our alma mater's cap than getting the 44th presidency of the United States.

Sputnik anniversary: Ahmadinejad's Mars Ambitions

2007-10-04T01:51:00.000-05:00

Fifty years ago today, the first artificial satellite was launched. You could look at this and remark upon how much we've accomplished since then and breathe a patriotic sigh of satisfaction, as some space writers have done. Or you could look at this and wonder how we can possibly equal the accomplishments of the sixtes, as others have done.

I find it frustrating to read all the coverage of this anniversary, because so much of it misses the point. And the point is clear right there on the cover of Life magazine: "Why Reds Got It First." A lot of Americans (more to the point, the Americans who controlled the money) didn't much care what an artificial satellite did or how it worked nearly so much as they wanted to know how the Russians could have beaten us to it. So, after it became clear that they couldn't get a human being into orbit first either, they made up a new goal (man on the moon) and the rest is history. (History that a shocking percentage of Americans don't believe happened-- but that's another post.)

So in all this hand-wringing over why we haven't followed through on the promises implied by our early successes in space, the answer seems obvious--there's no more enemy to race. It's not only that our enemies don't express themselves through technological achievement (if only they did) it's also that we have no enemies capable of engaging in this sort of sparring with us at all. If Mahmoud Ahmadinejad had Mars ambitions instead of nuclear ambitions, and if he had the resources to get there, we'd be going too. And until we get an enemy worth racing, we're not going to do much.

Well, that's depressing. Happy Sputnik day...

NASA announces search for new astronauts

2007-09-24T15:55:00.000-05:00

Thanks everyone for thinking of me, but you can stop forwarding me this now. I've decided not to go back to college to get a degree in math, engineering or science in order spiff up my application.

I think this is actually a weird gesture on NASA's part. (Not as weird, for the record, as sending the lightsaber into space). These astronaut candidates will begin duty in 2009. But doing what? Not going into space, I can assure you, unless they manage to beg a seat on a Soyuz capsule. The space shuttle will be no longer available, its last few remaining missions having long before been promised to astronauts with more seniority. The lunar transport will still be little more than a glint in an engineer's eye. As it is now, there are close to 100 astronauts cooling their heels in Texas hoping for a mission, many of whom have never flown and won't get to before the shuttle is retired.

But by making this announcement, NASA makes it seem as if there are lots of missions scheduled, so many that they need to hire more people to fly them. Perhaps they think this will create a sense of inevitability--because the astronauts are there, Congress will pay to build spacecraft to keep them busy. But this is not how it works, I don't think. I fear that instead this hiring binge will send out the message that NASA has all the money they need and a secure future, so we need not lobby our Congressional representatives on their behalf. I think they will come to regret this. Meanwhile, lots of young Americans are unknowingly applying to become NASA PR officers in blue flight suits, maybe never to see a real mission.

one half-empty bottle of tequila

2007-09-05T20:57:00.000-05:00

I earlier reported on the alleged drunken-astronaut scandal, so felt I should be responsible and follow up. Apparently, further investigation has found
no evidence that astronauts have ever flown drunk.

Though there is some tantalizing talk of "booze runs" and a half-empty bottle of tequila in one of the astronauts' cupboards. Tequila? Isn't that a bit... undergraduate? I thought these were supposed to be the best and the brightest.

Lightsaber to Fly on Space Shuttle

2007-08-30T10:17:00.000-05:00

Scholars, am I the only one who finds this really depressing?

I'm not even going to bring up the tacky commercialism of flying the original lightsaber prop on the shuttle. Space enthusiasts had to start getting over that type of outrage when astronauts were obliged to try both Coke and Pepsi in orbit in 1985. I bet the astronauts are really peeved about having to make room for this thing when they are allotted so little space for their own souvenirs. Case in point: Christa McAuliffe wanted to bring her son's favorite stuffed frog on board ("Fleegle") but to make him fit they had to take his stuffing out and vacuum-seal him in a plastic bag.

No, it's details like this one that depress me:
Chewbacca, the towering Wookiee best known from the film as Han Solo's co-pilot on the Millennium Falcon, will officially hand the lightsaber over to officials from Space Center Houston during a ceremony at the airport. Joining "Chewie" will be other characters from the six-part sci-fi classic, including Boba and Jango Fett and together they help push back the airplane on the tarmac.

"Together they help push back the airplane on the tarmac"? I'm sorry, what? I can't help but feel deep pity for the hard-up actors who agree to wear these costumes and carry out this "ceremony at the airport." Is there any more depressing place to carry out a weird photo-op "ceremony" than the Houston airport? With the beige tile floors and the announcements squawking overhead and the smell of jet exhaust and Cinnabons in the air?

Let's see how that went down:

Ugh. It makes me want to cry.

Review in Small Spiral Notebook

2007-08-28T09:03:00.001-05:00

Dean weaves together an insider’s story of the space-shuttle program and the life of protagonist Dolores Gray with a thread of cynicism about both adolescence and space technology. Ultimately, The Time it Takes to Fall is a tale about confronting and denying mortality.

Click here to read the full review.

MLD on NPR

2007-08-26T14:45:00.000-05:00

Check me out talking about Barbara Morgan's mission on WBUR's "Here and Now."

NASA Decides Not to Fix Heat Shields (or: Get your Outrage Goggles On)

2007-08-19T15:40:00.000-05:00

In the past, I've written about the Outrage Goggles through which we tend to view the actions of NASA now that they have proved less than completely reliable at keeping shuttles from disintegrating. Before the Challenger disaster, no one wanted to hear about how temperature affects the elasticity of O-rings. Before the Columbia disaster, no one wanted to hear about the insulating foam that kept popping off the External Tank or how long the scratches on the heat shield were. Now that disasters have been caused by lack of concern about each of these issues, media attention has been raptly focused on them to the exclusion of anything else, and we watch the coverage with a frisson of pre-disaster excitement, tingling slightly with the feeling that disaster WILL be caused by one of these things, and predicting the future satisfaction of knowing we were rightly concerned while NASA engineers blithely hit the go button. All this when the biggest danger to any space shuttle mission is, as it has always been, those kooky main engines with their tendency to crack their turbines and blow up.

I'm moved to think of the Outrage Goggles again this week, when NASA has decided, sensibly it seems, not to have their astronauts fix a gouge in the heat shield, a process that itself puts the shield in more danger than the gouge warrants. Coverage of this decision has ranged from the nervously mistrustful to the mildly alarmed. Every article recounts the Columbia disaster (though they've stopped retelling the Challenger story, have you noticed? What is the condition of those Solid Rocket Booster joints? We just don't know). The coverage is suffused with the feeling that NASA is putting its astronauts, and the orbiter we all own, at risk by refusing to fix it.

I'd be the last to say that we should all relax and assume that NASA knows what they're doing, but it's maddening to see our attention directed so narrowly toward the one thing that happens to have caused the last crack-up.

Look up at the sky.

2007-08-16T14:30:00.000-05:00

Endeavour is above us, scholars. And on board is Barbara Morgan, an educator-astronaut. (Some people tried to call Christa McAuliffe a teachernaut, but thankfully that didn't stick.) Anyway, here are my thoughts about her flight.

When Ronald Reagan announced in 1984 the plan to send a teacher to space, he anticipated that the mission would be a reminder “of the crucial role that teachers and education play in the life of our nation. I can’t imagine a better lesson for our children or our country.” These words would come to have an unintended meaning when the space shuttle carrying that teacher, Christa McAuliffe, broke up in the sky on January 28, 1986. I was among the children McAuliffe’s mission was intended to instruct, and the Challenger disaster became one of the more memorable lessons of my youth. The lesson was about the fallibility of NASA, of politicians, of technology—the hubris of adults. When we learned the truth about the astronauts’ deaths, that they had survived the breakup of the space shuttle and may have been conscious during a two-and-a-half minute fall back to earth, the lesson became even more pointed: these institutions, these ideals, are not to be trusted.

Most of us don’t remember that Christa McAuliffe had an alternate, Barbara Morgan. She trained for a mission that only Christa McAuliffe was meant to make, then watched as Challenger disintegrated with seven of her friends aboard. She moved her family to Houston to await assignment to another mission, then watched as Columbia, the shuttle she was meant to fly on next, disintegrated during re-entry in 2003. After waiting for a total of 22 years, Barbara Morgan will finally get to fly on or after August 8. And in many ways, her story encapsulates America’s ambivalence about spaceflight even better than Christa McAuliffe’s does.

For those of us who were changed by watching the destruction of Challenger, watching Barbara Morgan’s flight is going to feel strange. In a sense, it will mark a final end to the Challenger tragedy, tie up a loose end. To finally get to see a teacher fly will make us feel as though a promise made to us as children has finally been fulfilled. Christa’s message was that the fruits of American ingenuity should be open to anyone, not just “Right-Stuff”-era Apollo supermen. When I think of Barbara’s flight, I can’t help but reflect that surely this is what Christa McAuliffe and her crewmates would have wanted to see.

Yet watching this launch will remind us of how long it’s been and what has happened since. The morning of that launch for which Barbara served as an alternate, I was a thirteen-year-old eighth-grader. Now I am a thirty-four-year-old mother. Challenger has become part of a set of eighties signifiers that have ossified with age, like legwarmers, sticker collections, and hair metal. It’s disconcerting to think that the space transport NASA is using to assemble its International Space Station is also old enough to invoke kitschy nostalgia. The shuttle was designed in the seventies and first launched in 1981, so when we see a launch now, are we to be impressed with the technological achievement it still represents? (After all, no better spacecraft has been build since). Or are we to be impressed that machines older than our cars are still running at all?

Also, of course, this flight takes us back to the space shuttle disaster—both disasters, actually—and to our ambivalence about sending everyday people into space. Not to mention our ambivalence about NASA, our disappointment when their astronauts, still idolized as the best of the best, are caught drinking before flights or chasing each other across the country in bizarre love triangles.

When questioned about the disasters that have gone before, Barbara Morgan gives this answer: she wants her perseverance to be a lesson to her students. Children are watching what adults do when something goes wrong, she says, and it’s important that they see us investigate, pick up the pieces, fix the problem, and keep on flying. This is a nicely crafted sound bite, of course, in the way it makes a virtue of the spotted past, yet there is truth to it. There aren’t many things that can still capture children’s enthusiasm the way spaceflight can. NASA made a mistake in 1986, and again in 2003, and if they are to keep our respect, and our tax dollars, it should be by finding some redemption in what has gone before rather than in sweeping it under the rug. And as odd as it feels to quote Ronald Reagan: I can’t imagine a better lesson for our children or our country.

...Of course, now we find ourselves face again with the question of why NASA can't stop their insulation foam from scratching up their tiles. More on this at a later date.

Insert "Houston, We Have a..." joke here

2007-07-26T19:02:00.000-05:00

Just don't know what to say about this, except that I'm dying to know what astronauts flew drunk, and why.

Nancy Pearl review on NPR

2007-04-18T16:09:00.001-05:00

"One of the nicest written coming-of-age stories that I've read in a long time. It's always hard to think of what an author can do to make a coming-of-age tale new, and what Margaret Lazarus Dean does in her novel is [...] meld the public tragedy of the Challenger disaster with the private tragedy of Dolores's family."

Click here to listen to a great review from Nancy Pearl of NPR.

Review in BookPage

2007-02-23T11:38:00.000-06:00

The Time it Takes to Fall is a deft reflection on the loss of national and personal innocence that skillfully explores a series of events rarely addressed in fine adult fiction. Writing might not be rocket science, but Dean's first novel does the science and art of both proud.

Click here to read the full review.

A review in the Minneapolis Star Tribune

2007-02-23T11:24:00.000-06:00

Lazarus Dean has created an immensely believable heroine and delivers a fascinating and approachable look at that most intimidating of all endeavors: rocket science. If there's any justice at all, her book will be read by women's book clubs across the country.

Click here to read the full review.

Ann Arbor News

2007-01-27T14:54:00.000-06:00

Check me out in the Ann Arbor News.

UPCOMING EVENTS

2007-01-07T22:09:00.000-06:00

I'm doing two upcoming readings at independent neighborhood bookstores.

In Minneapolis, I'm reading at Magers and Quinn on Thursday, February 15 at 7:30pm.

In Ann Arbor, I'm reading at Shaman Drum on Wednesday, February 21 at 7pm.

Please join me!

California Legislators Sign Resolution to Keep Pluto

2006-09-07T11:45:00.000-05:00

In an unusual move, I'm going to suggest that you read this California State House Resolution. Please especially appreciate these paragraphs:

WHEREAS, The mean-spirited International Astronomical Union decided on August 24, 2006, to disrespect Pluto by stripping Pluto of its planetary status and reclassifying it as a lowly dwarf planet; and

WHEREAS, Pluto, named after the Roman God of the underworld and affectionately sharing the name of California's most famous animated dog, has a special connection to California history and culture; and

WHEREAS, The deletion of Pluto as a planet renders millions of text books, museum displays, and children's refrigerator art projects obsolete, and represents a substantial unfunded mandate that must be paid by dwindling Proposition 98 education funds, thereby harming California's children and widening its budget deficits; and

Refrigerator art projects. Unfunded mandate indeed!

Maybe it's a picture hanger? No, maybe a garbage bag.

2006-08-20T11:09:00.000-05:00

I love that NASA is now obsessive about the space junk. Not only are they combing over the heat shields with cameras multiple times looking for damage, but they are also peering out the windows looking for junk that might scratch the tiles when they start to leave orbit. Apparently the junk is rather hard to make out:

A second mystery object was spotted midday Tuesday and photographed by astronaut Dan Burbank. Jett said the object looked like a picture hanging clip. But it may be a garbage bag, which would unlikely be a damage risk, but the issue will be moot if the heat shield looks good, Hale said.

Now who was hanging a picture in space and forgot to pick up after themselves?

Songs that mention (or allude to) the space shuttle Challenger

2006-07-17T12:47:00.000-05:00

Prince, "Sign 'O' the Times"

American Music Club, "Challenger"
MC Paul Barman, "School Anthem"
John Denver, "Flying for Me"
Jean Michel Jarre, "Rendezvous (Ron's piece)"

Richard Feynman, my bf

2006-06-23T20:31:00.000-05:00

I think that now, while we're waiting together for the launch of STS-121, is a good time to tell you about my private boyfriend, Richard Feynman. What is a private boyfriend, you ask? Well, it's a relationship entirely distinct from the one I share with my Associate (which relationship involves actually knowing each other and, as it happens, a marriage certificate). It simply means that I heart him.
Look at this picture of him at a televised hearing of the Presidential Commission on the space shuttle Challenger. He'd just soaked a piece of O-ring in his glass of ice water in order to demonstrate that when cold, rubber gets brittle and squeaky and allows rocket fuel to burn blowtorch-like holes in the sides of External Tanks full of more rocket fuel. The best part is that, as he's holding up this chilled O-ring for the cameras, he goes, all casual, "I believe this might have something to do with your problem." Damn he's smoov.

So what if the O-ring thing wasn't really his insight, but that of co-Commisioner General Kutyna? Only my private bf could have pulled off the moment with quite this dramatic and irascible bravado.

I should probably mention that he's most famous for his work on quark theory, coming up with the idea of nanotechnology, starring in Calthech's production of King Lear, and entertaining people with amusing quotables such as, "Physics is like sex: sure, it may give some practical results, but that's not why we do it."

Let's look at him in younger years. Here is, I'm not kidding you scholars, in his Nobel-Prize portrait.

Damn baby.

Doesn't he look like he's about to lead a big band? Or win the girl using nothing but Brylcreem and snappy dialogue?

Another time I'll tell you all about my other private bf, Daniel Schorr.

Fine, let's go to the moon

2006-06-03T20:42:00.000-05:00

Scholars, I'm often asked what I think about NASA's new plan to return to the moon. (Probably people ask this just to be polite.)

This plan was, you'll recall, the result of a weird gesture by President Bush, who for about ten minutes had been led to believe that announcing a trip to the moon would revitalize his floundering public image. Of course, the suggestion that we spend billions of dollars going to the moon and then Mars (dollars that would presumably be added to the national deficit, as I don't see him instituting a moon tax) was met with deafening silence cut through with bits of derision. The administration dropped the idea as if it was on fire— I'm pretty confident that he has literally never uttered the word "moon" since—but no one informed poor NASA, god bless them. Those guys have been working overtime trying to spiff up the detailed plans for our Return to the Moon.

NASA's website offers lots and lots of stuff to help us get psyched about the moon missions. One is a video they made using mainly footage of Bush's Moon speech. I recommend watching this for a sad giggle. For one thing, you can actually hear Bush getting bored reading out the speech. Like, he can't even muster fake enthusiasm to get through a description of how the astronauts will mine minerals on the moon to power a transport to Mars. You can hear him start to slow down and emphasize the wrong words— you know the way he does, like a fourth-grader who has trouble with reading comprehension.

in the video, NASA tries to jazz up the flatness of his delivery and the Bushian long pauses with exciting music and animations envisioning the not-far-off day when we will live out the exciting plans Bush is describing. (My favorite of these shows some kind of robot dog scurrying off a spaceship onto the lunar surface).

In addition to this video, the site also offers some pictures of the vehicles that will be used for this space travel:

The thingy on the left is for hauling heavy stuff, like pieces of a space station or lunar home or what have you. The thing on the right is the Crew Exploration Vehicle— it's what the people ride in. It consists of a capsule atop a rocket, a concept familiar to anyone who has ever heard of the moon landings. Let's compare the Crew Exploration Vehicle to the Apollo-era Saturn V, which you will recall was developed in the EARLY NINETEEN SIXTIES:

Comparing these two sort of sums up my feelings about going to the moon. Going to the moon is really fun. I will be glued to the coverage. I envy the astronauts who will get to go. But there's something really sad about spending billions of dollars to recreate a technological feat that was accomplished many years before I was born.

Imagine what would happen if you took a time machine back to the sixties and told all those NASA engineers in their awesome short-sleeved dress shirts that you were visiting from 2006. They'd lean forward eagerly and ask, have you solved the fuel problem? is there a transport to Mars? No, wait, are there colonies on Mars? And you'd have to look them right in their geeky glasses and tell them, No, none of that has come to pass. The President wants to go to the moon, in a vehicle that looks just like the Saturn V. That is, if we can get the Congress to fund it. (Which we won't.) Scholars, I think those engineers would cry.