The Dedly Blog

Another Senior Moment For NASA

Back in May, I wrote in this blog about NASA losing the blueprints to the mighty Saturn V rocket, the vehicle that got them to the Moon. Well, now they've gone and lost the original tapes containing the video from the Apollo 11 Moon landing. "The tapes aren't lost, insists the NASA official put in charge of the search. But he doesn't know where they are."

I don't even need a witty reply for that one.

(Update 2009: The plans were found and remastered.)

But the private sector isn't very encouraging these days either. You've got Space Services, Inc. whose sole purpose is to launch your ashes into space: orbit and back, locked in orbit, moon orbit or landing, or deep space forever. Boasting customers like Astronaut Gordon Cooper and Star Trek actor James "I can't change the laws of physics" Doohan the company is sure to appeal to the families of dead people who yearned to go to space while they were alive but were foiled by the end of the Space Race and a government monopoly on space travel.

Maybe Virgin Galactic will take Burt Rutan's creation and make things a bit more promising for the rest of us dreamers. Former eBay billionaire, Elon Musk's Space Exploration Techonologies doesn't seem to be doing much, as noted by their own failure to launch.

And you may have heard about the big planet classification debate going on at the International Astronomers Union (IAU). What does this mean to the average person? Absolutely nothing. Really, it's not important at all and I'm a space enthusiast. While I think Ceres should remain an asteroid and Pluto should remain a planet, it's all semantics in the grand scheme of things. And the debat won't end here. When the New Horizons spacecraft arrives at Pluto in 2015 and we get to see the first ever pictures of that world and it's moon/companion, Charon, the debate should flare anew.

But the debate is moot. So long as we're "grounded" here on Earth, how we categorize these distant places means nothing. When we're finally colonizing these other worlds we can debate their relative "planet-ness" then.

Now where did they I put those warp drive blueprints.....

\_/
DED

posted by DED at 4:13 PM

 Mike said...

A little journey through the deepest reaches with Ded.

You know, I've been meaning to write something about the "Is Pluto A Planet Debate" for days now. Maybe you've given my the impetus to do so.

8/22/2006 5:44 AM