Space Colonies: Space: Section Three
Jun. 2nd, 2009 02:35 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
james_davis_nicoll Section Three
This section is mostly but not entire composed of recommendations of various sources of reference material.
Education for Space work suggests some fields likely to be fruitful and interesting in the next few decades, provides (what I assume is a long obsolete) list of places to apply to for job information and explains which specific fields people interested in space should take an interest in. The list is fairly logn and applied-math intensive.
The Directory of Aerospace Education. This section lists some publications people might be interested in.
Are any of them still around?
Colonies in Space: this briefly reviews and then quotes T.A. Heppenheimer's book on space colonies.
The book will date quickly as a result [...].
It had a lot of company, as it turned out.
The assemblers will not be robots. They will be linked to small computers, programmed to guide the assemblers through repetitive operations on command.
Is Heppenheimer using robot in the narrow sense of "something along the lines of a mechanical man from an I. Asimov story"?
Space Age Review: This plug comes with a quotation from "Michelle"[sp] Nicholls:
To black people I say, we'd better get in, sit in, fit in and grow in it as though your very lives depended on it - because they do. Humankind is going into space whether we like it or not. And when we colonize space, we don't want to be there as chauffeurs and tap dancers.
The plug for Earth/Space News allows us to guess editor Paul Siegler may have seen one episode too many of Salvage One.
No offense intended to Mr. Siegler but I've not had much luck tracking down what he did after the 1970s.
Space Settlements was available from the US government printing office and I think I owned a copy. Don't recall anything about it, except that it might have been orange (It was the 1970s and orange was very popular for some reason).
Space Manufacturing FacilitiesSpaceflight and Journal of the British Interplanetary Society are (were?) both from the British Interplanetary Society. I am sad to say I've never even seen a copy of Spaceflight, the local library that used to carry Journal of the British Interplanetary Society stopped doing so years ago and the one time I subscribed, I never got my copies. I did like the back issues of Journal of the British Interplanetary Society that I read in the library.
Concise Atlas of the Universe. The fact that I can find things that fill this niche online is one of the wonders of the early 21st century.
The venerable Sky and Telescope is still with us. I don't often pick it up because I hate paying for so many ads.
Astronomical Calendar is a rival to the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada's Observer's Handbook. Both are as far as I know still around (Online sources of information are, alas, serious competitors for both).
Olber's Paradox by Lawrence Ferlinghetti is a poem.
Solar Sailing by Eric Drexler is pretty much what it says on the books. Drexler is unsurprisingly bullish at some length on the potential for this mode of propulsion and not too concerned about the technical challenges involved.
Sadly very little since the article was written has been done to develop solar sailing. Proposals (like the idea of solar sail regatta to celebrate the 500th anniversary of Columbus' discovery's of the New World) have failed to attract funding, I believe Znamaya 2.5 ran into deployment problems and the Cosmos 1 was destroyed on the way up to orbit when the crappy but cheap Russian booster it was on failed. Some demonstrations of sail deployment have succeeded and of course light pressure has been used for attitude adjustment by a number of space probes.
Heliogyro solar sail is a short plug for a specific design of solar sail that was not used for the Halley's Comet missions.
This section is mostly but not entire composed of recommendations of various sources of reference material.
Education for Space work suggests some fields likely to be fruitful and interesting in the next few decades, provides (what I assume is a long obsolete) list of places to apply to for job information and explains which specific fields people interested in space should take an interest in. The list is fairly logn and applied-math intensive.
The Directory of Aerospace Education. This section lists some publications people might be interested in.
Are any of them still around?
Colonies in Space: this briefly reviews and then quotes T.A. Heppenheimer's book on space colonies.
The book will date quickly as a result [...].
It had a lot of company, as it turned out.
The assemblers will not be robots. They will be linked to small computers, programmed to guide the assemblers through repetitive operations on command.
Is Heppenheimer using robot in the narrow sense of "something along the lines of a mechanical man from an I. Asimov story"?
Space Age Review: This plug comes with a quotation from "Michelle"[sp] Nicholls:
To black people I say, we'd better get in, sit in, fit in and grow in it as though your very lives depended on it - because they do. Humankind is going into space whether we like it or not. And when we colonize space, we don't want to be there as chauffeurs and tap dancers.
The plug for Earth/Space News allows us to guess editor Paul Siegler may have seen one episode too many of Salvage One.
No offense intended to Mr. Siegler but I've not had much luck tracking down what he did after the 1970s.
Space Settlements was available from the US government printing office and I think I owned a copy. Don't recall anything about it, except that it might have been orange (It was the 1970s and orange was very popular for some reason).
Space Manufacturing FacilitiesSpaceflight and Journal of the British Interplanetary Society are (were?) both from the British Interplanetary Society. I am sad to say I've never even seen a copy of Spaceflight, the local library that used to carry Journal of the British Interplanetary Society stopped doing so years ago and the one time I subscribed, I never got my copies. I did like the back issues of Journal of the British Interplanetary Society that I read in the library.
Concise Atlas of the Universe. The fact that I can find things that fill this niche online is one of the wonders of the early 21st century.
The venerable Sky and Telescope is still with us. I don't often pick it up because I hate paying for so many ads.
Astronomical Calendar is a rival to the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada's Observer's Handbook. Both are as far as I know still around (Online sources of information are, alas, serious competitors for both).
Olber's Paradox by Lawrence Ferlinghetti is a poem.
Solar Sailing by Eric Drexler is pretty much what it says on the books. Drexler is unsurprisingly bullish at some length on the potential for this mode of propulsion and not too concerned about the technical challenges involved.
Sadly very little since the article was written has been done to develop solar sailing. Proposals (like the idea of solar sail regatta to celebrate the 500th anniversary of Columbus' discovery's of the New World) have failed to attract funding, I believe Znamaya 2.5 ran into deployment problems and the Cosmos 1 was destroyed on the way up to orbit when the crappy but cheap Russian booster it was on failed. Some demonstrations of sail deployment have succeeded and of course light pressure has been used for attitude adjustment by a number of space probes.
Heliogyro solar sail is a short plug for a specific design of solar sail that was not used for the Halley's Comet missions.
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no subject
Date: 2009-06-02 07:34 pm (UTC)A book from ~1978 I used to have on "Building your own robot in X easy steps" made a distinction between robots (who carried around their computer brains with them) and parabots or pararobots (I can't remember which it was) which were remote controlled, either by humans or a computer too large to be mobile (Weren't the 70s great?). They might be using something like this terminology.
no subject
Date: 2009-06-02 07:59 pm (UTC)Shoot, you can substitute pretty much any space development cheerleader for "Drexler" and still have a high probability of being right.
JBIS
Date: 2009-06-02 08:41 pm (UTC)(Sudden thought-- it's a new century, is this still true? Checks proximity calculations at Worldcat.org 33 miles, 36 miles, 90 miles. Some things don't change.)
They also don't seem to have hooked up with online journal aggregators. I could be mistaken about this.
I do still have the tie.
no subject
Date: 2009-06-03 06:12 pm (UTC)Unless I'm confused, the material you're looking at is "reprinted from the August '76 National Space Institute Newsletter"; the IMDb says that "Salvage 1" (and its tv-movie/pilot "Salvage") premiered in 1979.