Do you dream of interplanetary space travel?

In the summer of 1944, the population of London was accustomed to the loud rumbling of a buzz bomb flying overhead, the abrupt silence when the engine stopped and the bomb began its descent to earth, the anxious seconds of waiting for the explosion. Buzz bombs, otherwise known as V-1s, were simple pilotless airplanes, launched from sites along the French and Dutch coasts. As the summer ended and our armies drove the Germans out of France, the buzz bombs stopped coming. They were replaced by a much less disturbing instrument of murder, the V-2 rockets launched from more distant sites in western Holland. The V-2 was not nerve-wracking like the buzz bomb. When a V-2 came down, we heard the explosion first and the supersonic scream of the descending rocket afterward. As soon as we heard the explosion, we knew that it had missed us. The buzz bombs and the V-2 rockets killed a few thousand people in London, but they hardly disrupted our civilian activities and had no effect at all on the war that was then raging in France and in Poland. The rockets had even less effect than the buzz bombs.

In the latest issue of the New York Review of Books, Freeman Dyson reviews a new book, Von Braun: Dreamer of Space, Engineer of War. (Unfortunately the full text is behind the paywall.) His review is worth reading.

Dyson writes:

This book raises three important issues, one historical and two moral. The historical question is whether von Braun's great achievement, providing the means for twelve men to walk on the moon, made sense. ... The two moral issues are whether von Braun was justified in selling his soul to Himmler, and whether the United States was justified in giving sanctuary and honorable employment to von Braun and other members of the [V-2] team. ...

He also talks about his own feelings of responsibility for the firebombing of Dresden. You may recall, from 2006:

According to one who was present, Churchill suddenly blurted out: "Are we animals? Are we taking this too far?"

Publishers Weekly reviewed the book:

Neufeld, chair of the Space History Division at the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum, offers what is likely to be the definitive biography of Wernher von Braun (1912–1977), the man behind both Nazi Germany's V-1 and V-2 rockets and America's postwar rocket program. Spearheading America's first satellite launch in 1958, which brought the U.S. up to par with the Soviet Union in space, von Braun was celebrated on the covers of Time and Life. Neufeld has a deep understanding of the technical and human challenges von Braun faced in leading the U.S. space program and lucidly explains his role in navigating the personal and public politics, management challenges and engineering problems that had to be solved before landing men on the moon. Neufield doesn't discount von Braun's past as an SS member and Nazi scientist (which was downplayed by NASA), but concludes nonjudgmentally that von Braun's lifelong obsession with becoming the Columbus of space, not Nazi sympathies, led him to his Faustian bargain to accept resources to build rockets regardless of their source or purpose. A wide range of readers (not only science and space buffs) will find this illuminating and rewarding.

The book was also reviewed for the Washington Post last September.

Wernher von Braun: Rocket Man, by Freeman Dyson

The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency have successfully performed the world's first high-definition image taking of an Earth-rise* by the lunar explorer "KAGUYA" which was injected into a lunar orbit at an altitude of about 100 km on October 18, 2007.

Hijexx asked:

Have they released any true HD video or pictures yet? They list the camera's capabilities as 2.2 megapixel yet all I have been able to locate aren't even 0.5 megapixel.

Decius wrote:

If you find higher res stuff please post it!

At the JAXA web site for the mission, there are three full-resolution (1080 lines) images:

Earth-rise Images Wide Shot
Earth-set Images Tele Shot
Earth setting image (Montage)

Kaguya (Selene) Images of Earth-Rise Over the Moon

"Dark," cosmologists call it, in what could go down in history as the ultimate semantic surrender. This is not "dark" as in distant or invisible. This is "dark" as in unknown for now, and possibly forever.

If so, such a development would presumably not be without philosophical consequences of the civilization-altering variety. Cosmologists often refer to this possibility as "the ultimate Copernican revolution": not only are we not at the center of anything; we're not even made of the same stuff as most of the rest of everything. We're just a bit of pollution, Lawrence M. Krauss, a theorist at Case Western Reserve, said not long ago at a public panel on cosmology in Chicago. "If you got rid of us, and all the stars and all the galaxies and all the planets and all the aliens and everybody, then the universe would be largely the same. We're completely irrelevant."

All well and good. Science is full of homo sapiens-humbling insights. But the trade-off for these lessons in insignificance has always been that at least now we would have a deeper "simpler" understanding of the universe. That the more we could observe, the more we would know. But what about the less we could observe? What happens to new knowledge then? It's a question cosmologists have been asking themselves lately, and it might well be a question we'll all be asking ourselves soon, because if they're right, then the time has come to rethink a fundamental assumption: When we look up at the night sky, we're seeing the universe.

Not so. Not even close.

Out There

A vast array of virtual tunnels that winds around the sun, planets and moons could slash the amount of fuel that spacecraft need to explore our solar system, according to NASA.

The so-called interplanetary superhighway (or interplanetary transport network) would take advantage of the gravitational pull between celestial bodies. In many cases, the competing forces cancel each other out, leaving corridors where ships could travel using little or no fuel.

I highly recommend the American Scientist article linked from this page. Seek out the magazine at your local newsstand.

The Interplanetary Superhighway

A new Boston website aims to bring order to the tens of millions of weblogs proliferating online and provide one-stop shopping for overwhelmed Internet surfers. In the process, it could put some cash in the pockets of Internet scribes pecking away in obscurity.

The company is set to disclose next week a $6 million funding infusion led by Jim Manzi, former chief executive of Lotus Development Corp. and the New York investment bank co-run by Bill Bradley, the former US senator.

CEO Tom Gerace sees Gather less as a mere host for bloggers than as a social networking site, like teenage blogger favorite MySpace.com, but for an older and more sophisticated audience.

Sorry, MemeStreams; the window is closed. David Brooks just got his highbrow MySpace.

One-stop site for blogs offered

This month, the first telescope designed specifically for SETI began scanning the skies. It is still in its early stage of development, but when it is completed the telescope will be so powerful that it will be able to look at more stars in a year or two than we have in the past 45 years.

I still think this is a waste of time, but a lot of people seem to be into it ...

Finding Support in the Search for E.T.

NASA chief Dr. Michael Griffin said he would reconsider the Hubble mission after the first two shuttle test flights determined if it would be safe to attempt it.

Hubble: Not Dead Yet

Oh! I feel it. I feel the cosmos!

Best Hubble Space Telescope Images

Sean O'Keefe is to Hubble as Frankie Dunn is to Maggie Fitzgerald, if you just swap out compassion for selfishness and soul searching for obstinancy.

Don't you think?

Update: Sean O'Keefe has replied with a letter to the editor.

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/19/opinion/l19nasa.html

He says that the CAIB recommendations dictated the Hubble decision.

"Nothing less than the credibility of the agency hangs in the balance. This is not about being "petulant," nor is it personal. It's about meaning what we said, doing what we said, and being responsible regardless of the popularity of the consequences."

I can respect him for his willingness to take responsibility for an unpopular but well-founded decision. It seems his absolute rationality on the matter is frustrating to a public that plays itself as an avid risk taker -- that is, until something bad actually happens, at which point the public has shown itself to be quite the dutiful flip-flopper. It's a no-win situation for O'Keefe, to be sure.

America's Billion Dollar Baby, Left to Die Cold and Alone

This is not "news", but the download is worth waiting for, and the video is worth the time.

It's a Flash presentation of selected images taken by the Hubble Space Telescope. If you liked the images of the Ultra Deep Field that were published back in March (and cited widely, including here), you'll probably like this, too. Whereas the UDF was a panoramic view, these are more like "close-ups", although the term takes on a rather new meaning when the scale is on the order of one light year to every four inches.

The Best of Hubble