Imagine being an astronaut and planning for a space mission you know you have no chance of joining; a journey that won’t even happen in your lifetime, or possibly even your children’s. We meet the long-term thinkers and planners – the space visionaries not afraid to think outside the square.
http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/futuretense/interstellar-travel/4527070
Tagged with space interstellar science
Ann Druyan is an author and television and film writer & producer whose work is largely concerned with the effects of science and technology on our civilization. She was co-writer with Carl Sagan and Steven Soter of the Emmy and Peabody Award winning television series COSMOS, and as the founder and CEO of COSMOS STUDIOS, she is currently working on a reboot of that series. Ann Druyan served as Creative Director of the NASA Voyager Interstellar Record Project to design a complex message, including music and images, for possible alien civilizations. These golden phonograph records affixed to the Voyager 1 and 2 spacecraft, the fastest moving vehicles ever created by the human species, are now beyond the outermost planets of the solar system on their way to interstellar space. They have a projected shelf life of one billion years. She is the author or co-author of several books, including Comet, which was on the New York Times best seller list for two months. Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors, written with Carl Sagan, was another New York Times best seller. She is also a credited contributor to the best-selling books Contact, Pale Blue Dot, The Demon-Haunted World and Billions & Billions by Carl Sagan. She was the co-producer and co-creator of Contact, a Warner Brothers motion picture, based on the story she co-wrote with Carl Sagan. Directed by Bob Zemeckis and starring Jodie Foster, Contact was released July 1997. Ann Druyan was married for nearly two decades to Carl Sagan, until his death in December 1996, and subsequently she was the Founder of The Carl Sagan Foundation.
http://www.sidrodrigues.com/2013/03/little-atoms-269-ann-druyan-voyager-cosmos-and-carl-sagan/
Tagged with little atoms science interview nasa space book:author=ann druyan
As senior astronomer of the S.E.T.I. Institute in California tells Dick he has no doubt life exists in other parts of the universe, and believes scientists are getting closer to finding it â itâs just a matter of time.
http://www.thestory.org/stories/2012-03/scanning-alien-signal
With the end of the shuttle program and an International Space Station still in need of supplies, the aerospace industry is working the kinks of out of a century-old idea to build a service elevator from Earth to outer space.
Tagged with space elevator engineering space
As the space shuttle programme draws to a close, Piers Sellers and Scott Altman describe what it was like to fly on the shuttle — and we recreate the sounds
http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/audio/2011/jul/12/science-weekly-podcast-space-shuttle
Tagged with space shuttle nasa sound science
Although you can’t hear anything in space, scientists can still use sound to understand the solar system by turning data collected by NASA satellites into sounds and music. Listen to how one sonification specialist creates music out of eruptions on the sun.
In his new novel 2312, legendary science fiction author Kim Stanley Robinson focuses on outer space and humans’ place in it.
As you probably guessed from the title, the story is set three centuries in the future. It hinges on “the idea that the solar system is our neighborhood, and could be inhabited,” Robinson tells Wired Senior Editor Adam Rogers in this episode of the Storyboard podcast.
In the book, which hits stores May 22, humans live not just on other planets, but also in miniature biomes in hollowed-out asteroids. Robinson’s oeuvre includes the Hugo-winning Mars trilogy and the global warming-focused Forty Signs of Rain. In the podcast, he talks about time travel, trips to Antarctica and the future of humanity.
http://www.wired.com/underwire/2012/05/storyboard-kim-stanley-robinson-2312/
This week, Americans have been remembering Neil Armstrong. But before he walked on the moon, he had to solve a much more prosaic problem.
"You’re about to embark on a mission that’s more dangerous than anything any human has ever done before," Robert Pearlman, a space historian and collector with collectspace.com, told me. "And you have a family that you’re leaving behind on Earth, and there’s a real chance you will not be returning."
Exactly the kind of situation a responsible person plans for by taking out a life insurance policy. Not surprisingly, a life insurance policy for somebody about to get on a rocket to the moon cost a fortune.
But Neil Armstrong had something going for him. He was famous, as was the whole Apollo 11 crew. People really wanted their autographs.
"These astronauts had been signing autographs since the day they were announced as astronauts, and they knew even though eBay didn’t exist back then, that there was a market for such things," Pearlman said. "There was demand."
Especially for what were called covers -– envelopes signed by astronauts and postmarked on important dates.
About a month before Apollo 11 was set to launch, the three astronauts entered quarantine. And, during free moments in the following weeks, each of the astronauts signed hundreds of covers.
They gave them to a friend. And on important days — the day of the launch, the day the astronauts landed on the moon — their friend got them to the post office and got them postmarked, and then distributed them to the astronauts’ families.
It was life insurance in the form of autographs.
"If they did not return from the moon, their families could sell them — to not just fund their day-to-day lives, but also fund their kids’ college education and other life needs," Pearlman said.
The life insurance autographs were not needed. Armstrong and Aldrin walked on the moon and came home safely. They signed probably tens of thousands more autographs for free.
But then, in the 1990s, Robert Pearlman says, the insurance autographs started showing up in space memorabilia auctions. An Apollo 11 insurance autograph can cost as much as $30,000.
James Fallows of The Atlantic met Neil Armstrong at a gathering of some of America’s greatest aviators and astronauts, and even in that crowd, Armstrong stood out. Saturday, the astronaut’s family announced he had died at the age of 82. Guest host Laura Sullivan speaks with Fallows about Armstrong’s legacy.
http://www.npr.org/2012/08/25/160046602/neil-armstrong-an-exemplary-life
Tagged with neil armstrong moon moon landing space
Neil Armstrong, the first man to walk on the moon, died over the weekend at the age of 82. Steve Inskeep talks to Neil Degrasse Tyson, director of the Hayden Planetarium in New York, about Armstrong’s impact on space exploration.
http://www.npr.org/2012/08/27/160095721/remembering-astronaut-neil-armstrong
Tagged with neil armstrong neil degrasse tyson moon space
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