Space Colonies: Space: Section One
Jun. 2nd, 2009 09:49 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
james_davis_nicollSection One
This begins a series of non-fiction articles that I will label arbitrarily by web-page.
Who's Earth by Russell Sweickart
Russell "Rusty" Sweickart attempts to convey the experience of seeing the Earth from space.
Do Shuttle astronauts talk about the same kind of experiences?
Where!? by Carl Sagan
Sagan goes into detail about some phenomena he described in an article and in one of his books.
I thought tiny grains between the stars with the size and atomic composition of bacteria was a bit misleading since as far as we know they don't have the internal structure of bacteria. I wonder how many readers thought he meant we'd found life?
Gas clouds falling into the Milky Way. In fact, the Milky Way consumes passing dwarf galaxies.
Steel asteroids by Eric Drexler
This is one of those true but not necessarily useful observations one sees in the space advocacy field: a certain fraction of asteroids are composed of metals. Note that iron and the materials to make steel are not particularly rare on Earth, despite which I seem to recall JEP once triumphantly demonstrated that we could recover a years worth of steel from the belt using only all of the nuclear explosives on Earth.
A House in Space (uncredited)
This is a fairly enthusiastic review of Henry S.F. Cooper, Jr.'s A House in Space, which was a short but as I recall fairly well executed account of the Skylab missions (I can think of at least one SF novel I thought was influenced by it: Robinson's Stardance. I thought Dickson's The Far Call might have been another example but I don't think the original publication dates support that).
It's interesting that from the Moon, the Earth looks like an oasis but up close it looks barren and hostile to human life.
There Ain't No Graceful Way Astronaut Russell Sweickart talking to Peter Warshall
Sweickart explains in some detail how human waste control works in space. He has something of a failure of imagination at one point:
Schweickart: It's really wild. And you know, people say, "Why don't you fly women?" Well, Jesus, I'd hate to think about the plumbing. You know, it's really funny, because a lot of the girls at Purdue asked that, "When are you going to take women in the program?" and I always throw that one out, the part about the plumbing requirement. We haven't had the proper plumbing in the past. Well, the fact of the matter is, we're designing it into shuttle. I don't know what it looks like, I haven't looked at any of the detailed design from Washington here, so I don't know what it looks like, but we are ready for women on this one.
But it was the 1970s and that's not the stupidest reason I've seen to keep women out of an all-male field. One does suspect it wasn't a problem he thought much about beyond "Huh, I wonder how that would work?"
This begins a series of non-fiction articles that I will label arbitrarily by web-page.
Who's Earth by Russell Sweickart
Russell "Rusty" Sweickart attempts to convey the experience of seeing the Earth from space.
Do Shuttle astronauts talk about the same kind of experiences?
Where!? by Carl Sagan
Sagan goes into detail about some phenomena he described in an article and in one of his books.
I thought tiny grains between the stars with the size and atomic composition of bacteria was a bit misleading since as far as we know they don't have the internal structure of bacteria. I wonder how many readers thought he meant we'd found life?
Gas clouds falling into the Milky Way. In fact, the Milky Way consumes passing dwarf galaxies.
Steel asteroids by Eric Drexler
This is one of those true but not necessarily useful observations one sees in the space advocacy field: a certain fraction of asteroids are composed of metals. Note that iron and the materials to make steel are not particularly rare on Earth, despite which I seem to recall JEP once triumphantly demonstrated that we could recover a years worth of steel from the belt using only all of the nuclear explosives on Earth.
A House in Space (uncredited)
This is a fairly enthusiastic review of Henry S.F. Cooper, Jr.'s A House in Space, which was a short but as I recall fairly well executed account of the Skylab missions (I can think of at least one SF novel I thought was influenced by it: Robinson's Stardance. I thought Dickson's The Far Call might have been another example but I don't think the original publication dates support that).
It's interesting that from the Moon, the Earth looks like an oasis but up close it looks barren and hostile to human life.
There Ain't No Graceful Way Astronaut Russell Sweickart talking to Peter Warshall
Sweickart explains in some detail how human waste control works in space. He has something of a failure of imagination at one point:
Schweickart: It's really wild. And you know, people say, "Why don't you fly women?" Well, Jesus, I'd hate to think about the plumbing. You know, it's really funny, because a lot of the girls at Purdue asked that, "When are you going to take women in the program?" and I always throw that one out, the part about the plumbing requirement. We haven't had the proper plumbing in the past. Well, the fact of the matter is, we're designing it into shuttle. I don't know what it looks like, I haven't looked at any of the detailed design from Washington here, so I don't know what it looks like, but we are ready for women on this one.
But it was the 1970s and that's not the stupidest reason I've seen to keep women out of an all-male field. One does suspect it wasn't a problem he thought much about beyond "Huh, I wonder how that would work?"
