space

From TheBrad comes news of a project to put a Geostationary Banana Over Texas. Obviously I am in love with the URL. (It’s hard to believe that someone else hadn’t already registered that particular domain name.) Plus it gives me another reason to use my favorite banana image before the end of the year. And I’ve been a big fan of putting things in geosynchronous orbit ever since I was a kid reading about the JLA’s space station …

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Am I the only one that is just completely amazed that the Voyagers are still going strong? “NASA’s Voyager 1 spacecraft has entered the solar system’s final frontier, a vast, turbulent expanse where the Sun’s influence ends and the solar wind crashes into the thin gas between stars.” That’s really crazy. Voyager I is about 8.7 billion miles from the sun.

This part is insane:

“For their original missions to Jupiter and Saturn, the Voyagers were destined for regions of space far from the Sun, so each was equipped with three radioisotope thermoelectric generators to produce electrical power for the spacecraft systems and instruments. Still operating in remote, cold and dark conditions 27 years later, the Voyagers could last until 2020.”

I can’t get a cell phone with a battery that lasts more than a year, and twenty-something years ago NASA was making batteries that don’t even need THE SUN to charge them?!

“There!” said Ford, shooting out his arm; “there, behind that sofa!”
Arthur looked. Much to his surprise, there was a velvet paisley-covered Chesterfield sofa in the field in front of them. He boggled intelligently at it. Shrewd questions sprang into his mind.
“Why,” he said, “is there a sofa in that field?”
“I told you!” shouted Ford, leaping to his feet. “Eddies in the space-time continuum!”
“And this is his sofa, is it?” asked Arthur, struggling to his feet and, he hoped, though not very optimistically, to his senses.
“Arthur!” Ford shouted at him, “that sofa is there because of the space-time instability I’ve been trying to get your terminally softened brain to come to grips with. It’s been washed up out of the continuum, it’s space-time jetsam, it doesn’t matter what it is, we’ve got to catch it, it’s our only way out of here!”
He scrambled rapidly down the rocky outcrop and made off across the field.
“Catch it?” muttered Arthur, then frowned in bemusement as he saw that the Chesterfield was lazily bobbing and wafting away across the grass.
With a wild whoop of utterly unexpected delight he leaped down the rock and plunged off in hectic pursuit of Ford Prefect and the irrational piece of furniture.

If the space program teaches us anything about electroshock conditioning, it’s that a strong mind can get past it. Enos, a 39-pound chimpanzee, was trained with the technique to run through the routine he’d need to complete the first primate orbiting of the Earth. During months of training, if he pulled a switch or lever out of succession, he received a mild electric shock. If he pulled the correct one, he received a food pellet reward. Trouble was, when he finally went up on his mission in 1961, the system got fouled up. While in space, he was punished for correct answers! They clearly underestimated Enos as he bravely stuck to his guns and forged ahead successfully with his mission despite having to endure 79 punishing shocks.

What’s going on up there?

It’s good to be able to follow your dreams. If your dream happens to be to blast off into space one day, then more power to ya, I say!

Crazy news about humankind’s first planned venture outside our solar system …