A Glorious Dawn

I see that this fab remix of the late and much missed Carl Sagan's word from Cosmos that has proved popular on YouTube is getting a release as a traditional 7 inch vinyl. Funnily enough a friend sent me some music tracks he came across recently, from Cosmos, which we both remembered watching; it was instant nostalgia for me. As a boy I adored the series; I was already fascinated by astronomy and the exploration of space and this fueled it, as well as introducing me for the first time to Sagan. Years later I'd admire him for speaking out for the importance of scientific research for the sake of research and not simply for commerce, for the value of knowledge over susperstition and the need to take care of our own remarkable world, so different from the other planets we were exploring - he even publicly berated Margaret Thatcher once when she was Prime Minister, scolding her for her lack of support for pure research and environmental awareness, telling her it was shocking that someone who actually had proper scientific training could be so foolish.

Apparently the B side of the single looks like the cover of the famous gold record disc which was placed in the Voyager spacecraft, so that long after they had completed their mission of exploration (which they did so magnificently) and headed out of our solar system and into the deep, cold depths of interstellar space, should they by some remote chance be found by another civilisation they could play them and hear sounds from Planet Earth - greetings in many languages, poetry and snatches of music, which Sagan helped oversee. Carl's been gone a while now, sadly, but that gold disc is now travelling still, further than any man made object in the entire history of the world has ever travelled, waiting for the day when someone - something,perhaps - finds it and plays it. (via Third Man Records)








And while we're at it, here's a short video, the Pale Blue Dot, by Carl. As the aging Voyager reached towards the edge of our solar system he argued for NASA to turn it to face back towards us - no easy task when the vast distance meant even radio signal commands travelling at the speed of light would take some time to reach the craft, then longer for returns, assuming it even worked. But he argued and they did it and the result was 'the family portrait', a view of the worlds of our solar system as no-one else in the history of our species had ever seen it, a shot taken from the edge of what we know from a little machine about to cross that boundary, a parting gift from one of the great missions of exploration. And in that picture a tiny dot, a blue dot taking up even less than one pixel. That dot being the Earth. Everything we've ever known, every person who has ever loved and lived, every cat, every dog, every Triceratops, every dolphin, every fern, every bush, every fish, every work of art, all contained inside that tiny, tiny dot... Sagan had that wonderful gift of enthusiasm and the ability to communicate the sense of wonder to all, a great spokesman for science.

Giant steps are what you take, walking on the Moon...

How can it really be forty years to the day since the first human beings walked on the surface of a celestial body that was not our own little world? How can it be that we've never surpassed that magnificent achievement after four decades? Oh don't get me wrong, there have been other incredible, world changing endeavours - the Human Genome project springs to mind - but after four decades not to have striven beyond that Moon walk is dreadfully sad. Its like Concorde being retired without a next generation bigger, better, faster, more efficient replacement coming in, or the Shuttle due to finish its flights next year. Sometimes it feels like we've gone backwards a bit, not a good thing as a species.



Yes, I know there are other important priorities needing world resources, not least feeding the hungry and controlling runaway populations. And some will say we shouldn't 'squander' money on space when we have these problems to look at here. But as Bill Hicks used to say, if we didn't spend so much on every more devious ways to kill one another we could spend the money we spend on weapons to feed the hungry and still have plenty left over to explore space. Hell, if we took what women collectively spend on make-up every year we could do that! But still I feel sad that those things which marked the wave of a bright future when I was a wee boy now turn out to have been the highwater mark and the tide of progress has receded. Although I did really enjoy the image of all three of the Apollo 11 crew with Obama on the news. Three of my boyhood heroes. Still three of my heroes.







my signed copy of Two Sides of the Moon by David Scott and Alexei Leonov, a memento of the day when an Apollo astronaut came into my bookstore and I got to shake his hand.

1969

Hard to believe that on this day forty years ago human beings, for the first time in all of recorded history, were on their way to the moon. July 16th, 1969, and the enormous Saturn V lifts from its pad, its gigantic bulk suddenly no longer earthbound, and it reaches into the sky... and then beyond the sky. Humans have made many great explorations of new lands, uncharted oceans, jungles, deserts, mountains, but this, this was something completely new. Less than a decade after Gagarin had become the first man in space (an event itself which came only a couple of decades after jets made their first appearance, those in turn coming only four decades after Orville and Wilbur's historic first flight at Kittyhawk) humans were travelling to the Moon.



Its hung over every human culture there has ever been, since the days of hunter-gatherers, its been observed by the early priest-astronomers of the first civilisations in what we now call the Middle East, worshipped as a goddess by many cultures, observed by the first modern scientists like Galileo and Copernicus, its affected our weather and our tides for billions of years. But the idea of men on the Moon was a dream, a work of fantasy. Until July 1969. When it became something truly remarkable. An event that for one brief spell drew together all the peoples of our divided world into one species, dreaming the same dream, hoping the same hopes, willing Collins, Aldrin and Armstrong to succeed in the daring, dangerous endeavour. A magnificent moment.







NASA's restored video of Neil Armstrong's 'giant leap' (link via Boing Boing)

Welcome to the Space Age

As Russians mark the 50th anniversary of planet Earth's first satellite, Sputnik, taking flight IEEE Spectrum has an interview with the legendary grand old man of science fiction, Arthur C Clarke (link via Boing Boing). Clarke, of course, before becoming the hugely influential SF writer he would later become (we're talking about a man who talked to presidents and kings as well as scientists and writers - also one of the few who was so respected he was friends with both astronauts and cosmonauts during the Cold War) wrote a speculative paper in the 1940s in which he imagined using geostationary space stations to act as relays for beaming radio signals across the entire globe, pretty much what we now have with a legion of satellites linking us up in ways we don't even think about anymore - we use phones and watch TV largely without considering the world-changing technology which brings it to us so damned easily. All starting with a little silver ball called Sputnik going beepbeepbeepbeep around the world.

Giant steps are what you take, walking on the Moon...

This afternoon at the Edinburgh Film Festival I caught the UK premiere of the documentary by David Sington, In the Shadow of the Moon, detailing the glories (and the tragedies) of one of the biggest undertakings humans ever launched themselves on, the Apollo programme. As soon as I saw this in the EIFF programme this year I knew I was going to see it. I was born at the height of the Space Race; Mike Collins, Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong's astonishing, history-making flight to the Moon on Apollo 11 was still a year and a half away. I grew up with an astronaut space suit costume to play in while Gagarin and Armstrong were on posters as my boyhood heroes (they still are, some things you never grow out of); the idea of space exploration has lived inside me my entire life and as I approach the big four-oh birthday on the last day of this year I get a little sad that those promises of holidays in space we were told the future would hold have never materialised and it looks less and less like that boyhood dream will ever come true.

But still it weaves a magical spell on me; as the footage of those enormous Saturn Vs ascending the heavens on a column of fire flickered across the screen I could feel the old excitement rising - the boy in me is never far from the surface and images and ideas like this always bring it out. Much of the footage has never been seen before and is literally out of this world. The story of our first tentative steps out of the cradle of the Earth to our nearest neighbour is told in their own words by many of the NASA astronauts who made those epic journeys, voyages of discovery that stand in a long line of human endeavours such as the explorations of James Cook, Magellan or those unknown Polynesian sailors who crossed vast oceans on small boats made of reeds.

One of those men featured was David Scott, an Apollo commander - a man I actually met a few years back when his publicist came in to my old bookstore to say he was across the road in the Balmoral Hotel doing interviews with the Scottish press and would we like him to come across and sign some copies of the book he had co-authored with his friend the Soviet cosmonaut Alexei Leonov (the first man to walk in space; his friend Arthur C Clarke would name a spaceship in his honour in the sequel to 2001). An ordinary day at work and then suddenly there I am chatting to a former astronaut and shaking hands with a man who had walked on the Moon; a man who got to live that boyhood dream of mine. Naturally I got one of those signed copies for myself; I've many signed books in my collection but only one signed by an author who has traveled far enough into space to look back and see the entirety of our world hanging in the void. We've all seen the pictures, but it wasn't until the crew of Apollo 8 voyaged around the dark side of the Moon that humans actually saw the entire Earth from space. They took the famous 'Earthrise' photograph, our world rising in the dark above the surface of the Moon, the furthest humans have yet been from our world.

Only a tiny handful of humans have ever seen that sight with their own eyes to this day, all now old men - to look at them in this film you could easily mistake them for someone's favourite uncle of grandfather. But in their prime these men dared death, road on a column of scientific dragon's fire further than anyone in the entire history of the world and in the process changed the way we see our little, beautiful world. It's so sad we've pulled back from those days; I'm not stupid, I'm well aware of my history and understand much of the colossal cost of the space programme was only met because of politics of the Cold War. And yet I can't help but feel we let ourselves become that much smaller as a species when we stopped pushing at the final frontier. Yes, I know we can spend the money on problems right here on Earth, but if we weren't so busy squabbling among ourselves we wouldn't need to waste so much on creating weapons - then we could spend that money on feeding and taking care of people here on Earth and have enough to explore, to go where no-one has gone before.

I still want to go.

Saturn

JPL and the ESA have announced that the Cassini probe has found a small, previously unknown moon around the giant world Saturn the sixtieth so far discovered around the ringed world. It may be a tiny lump of rock and ice but I love the fact that almost 50 years after Gagarin's first space flight our own solar system is still surprising us. Makes me wonder what we will discover when we finally get further out (and why haven't we pushed further, we let ourselves get so small after the Apollo missions...)



Elsewhere on the ESA site there's a function to listen to the Huygens probe which descended into the large moon Titan from Cassini. The sound files aren't especially interesting as such, in fact is is just a rather dull sequence of white noise, but the fact the first one is a recording of sounds heard on an alien world is. Sounds from a world no human has walked on, beamed across millions of miles to be heard for the first time in human history. Now that is impressive.

"My god, it's full of stars..."

I looked at this astonishing image from the Hubble Space Telescope on the BBC's site today of the red giant V838 Monocerotis, a star which exploded in 2002 and the first phrase that leapt to mind was astronaut Dave Bowman from Clarke and Kubrick's 2001: a Space Odyssey - "my god, it's full of stars."



Dammit, why don't we have those holidays in space I was promised as a kid yet?!?! I want to see these things for myself.

Eruption

The BBC site had this astonishing photograph taken by the New Horizons space probe. This is Io, one of the moons of Jupiter, a world so large its collection of moons around it are like a miniature solar system (in fact it is reckoned if the gas giant Jupiter had been a bit bigger it would have reached the threshold to ignite the nuclear fires at its core and become a star, just as the sun did billions of years ago). Io is one of the Galilean satellites, one of the four larger moons first seen through an early telescope by one of my great heroes, Galileo, when he turned his new optical device on the king of planets. I've seen Jupiter through a large telescope at the University of Glasgow's observatory myself, in enough resolution to see the coloured bands and even the mighty, centuries-long storm of the Great Red Spot; on either side of Jupiter's glowing disc I saw two bright points shining like diamonds on black velvet and realised they were the moons Galileo had seen centuries before.



Io itself is a world which looks like an old-fashioned view of Hell, a surface covered in decaying yellows from sulphur, constantly reshaped by a continual series of volcanic eruptions as the enormous gravitational power of Jupiter twists the core of the little moon keeping it geologically active when most worlds that size would long have become inert, like our own moon. As well as tremendous gravitational tides the space between the moons and Jupiter is often filled with enormous amounts of high energy radiation - a beautiful but very inhospitable place; it increases my admiration for the skills of those who designed and operate these missions that these little probes can even function in such conditions. At the top of this image, almost on the terminator line separating dark from light, is an eruption from the volcano Tvashtar; this eruption is actually shooting out some 180 miles into space.

It reminds me of the triumphant Voyager missions years ago, when one woman noticed an anomaly on shots taken of Jupiter as the little probe left the system to continue its grand tour of our solar system (still the greatest voyage of discovery in human history to date). The data from those incredibly early computers was slow to process, even before taking into account the time taken to transmit that information to Earth over the vast distances. She noticed something strange and was at first unsure what she was seeing. Only slowly did she realise that one shot had, quite by accident, caught an eruption shooting right out into space from Io; a fluke shot and a chance find by that scientist to come across the first volcanic eruption humans had ever seen on another world. I'm just disappointed that all the promises of my childhood of holidays in space by the time the 2000s came around still hasn't come to pass. When I hear idiots complaining about the money being spent on space exploration and how it could be better spent on problems on Earth (that bloody Davina McCall was the latest, showing her incredible ignorance) it infuriates me. As a percentage of budgets we spend very little on this actually; don't demand cuts to exploration, cut the money on bloody massive weapons programmes, then we would have the budget for Earth bound problems like hunger and disease and to explore new worlds and learn more.