I knitted something

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















I think I invented it.

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?

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

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

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!

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

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.

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

Challenger anniversary

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

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.

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.

That is all.

Just As I Suspected

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!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.