Bryan Strawser

A friend points to the lyrics of “Fire in the Sky”, by Jordin Kare. It was while reading it that Buzz Aldrin, #2 man on the moon, broke down on TV…

Prometheus, they say, brought God’s fire down to man.
And we’ve caught it, tamed it, trained it since our history began.
Now we’re going back to heaven just to look him in the eye,
and there’s a thunder ‘cross the land, and a fire in the sky.

The lyrics in my own head were from Neil Young’s “After the Gold Rush“…

Well, I dreamed I saw the silver spaceships flying
In the yellow haze of the sun
There were children crying and colors flying
All around the chosen ones
All in a dream, all in a dream
The loading had begun
Flyin’ mother nature’s silver seed
To a new home in the sun

… and Jackson Browne’s “Late for the Sky.”

On a less musical (but more useful) note, Dana Blankenhorn has some interesting stuff to say about Space Elevators.

[The Doc Searls Weblog]

Pythagoras. “It is better wither to be silent, or to say things of more value than silence. Sooner throw a pearl at hazard than an idle or useless word; and do not say a little in many words, but a great deal in a few.” [Motivational Quotes of the Day]

Mahatma Gandhi. “In the attitude of silence the soul finds the path in an clearer light, and what is elusive and deceptive resolves itself into crystal clearness. Our life is a long and arduous quest after Truth.” [Motivational Quotes of the Day]

I generally like Tony Blair, but he’s dead wrong on this one.  Let the Lords be the Lords — why throw away so much tradition and history?

Blair thwarted on Lords reform. Tony Blair’s plans for Lords reform lie in tatters after MPs reject all the options from a fully elected chamber to a fully appointed one. [BBC News | UK | UK Edition]

NY Times: “Gene Kranz, the flight director who orchestrated the rescue of astronauts aboard the crippled Apollo 13 in 1970, said that from what he knew about the suspected tile damage, there was probably nothing that could have been done to save the flight. ‘The options,’ he said in a telephone interview, ‘were just nonexistent.'” [Scripting News]

Bush Leads Memorial in Houston for Seven Columbia Astronauts. As the search for remnants of the Columbia spacecraft continued today, President Bush led thousands of mourners in Houston. By James Barron. [New York Times: NYT HomePage]

I was thinking the same thing as Dave was when he wrote “Moon Missions.”  It was: weren’t those guys lucky to have participated in the space program.  Sure, they took a risk (a known risk), and they ended up paying for it with their lives.  However, they accomplished something that so few of us will ever get to do.  Would I take a 2% risk (there is probably a higher risk if the right statistical approach is used) of catastrophic failure to go to space?  In a NY minute.  After listening to the relatives of the astronauts that died on STS-107, one thing stands out: its clear both they and the astronauts knew the risk involved and accepted it as part of doing something that was truly exceptional. A true hero mindset.

There is something we can do to help make going to space both safer and more economical:  build a new space transportation system with modern technology.  The shuttle was designed with early 1970’s technology.  There is reason to speculate that we have made as much technological and scientific progress in the last 25 years than we had made in all the years before that.  Our inability to find it in our national will to apply that new technology to one of the few great human endeavors continues to astound me. [John Robb’s Radio Weblog]