Today is the 50'th anniversary of the launch of sputnik and the beginning of the space race.

I was musing yesterday about the varying opinions of the space race: to some, it was a group of humankind's greatest achievements. To others, it was just a great big pissing contest between two superpowers; often people with that opinion speak about the space race in fairly disparaging tones.

My thought about that is this: pissing contests between nations and peoples are common, practically a force of nature. Most of the time, they result in wars: the death of millions and the impovershment of billions more. In that context, a space race is about the most benign outcome one can conceive of between two pendulophallic nations. Frankly, if more contests between nations resulted in a race to outdo each other in scientific and engineering achievement instead of a race to exterminate each other, we'd be a hell of a lot better off than we are.

People who know me know that I'm pretty convinced we're headed for a dick-swinging contest between China and the USA mid-century as china's economy combined with it's current dedication to education and science starts to pull ahead of America's century-long head start. I can only hope that the visions of China doing things like landing on the moon and developing new biomedical and nano technologies before us has the effect of galvanizing another space (or bio-) race rather than an arms race or cold war.

This is just way too much fun.

Sure, the guy's interpretation of these ring-shaped shadows on mars may not be the only one, but he's done a fairly good job backing up his hypothesis, which is that these are shadows of large tree-shaped living structures near the martian poles. He provides a ton of links to images, etc. in this thread at the Setiathome website.

So far, my critical thinking skills aren't 100% offended, though I remain a long way from convinced. This is pretty cool.

Did you know that a Japanese probe is about to land on an asteroid, collect samples, and return to Earth?

I didn't. Bet you didn't either. Go Nippon!

Dear NASA:

I was born two years after the last human walked on the moon, and five months after the last mission of Skylab. I grew up reading science fiction, and watching the development of the space shuttle. Dad taught me to believe in our future in space: the glorious development of technology and industry that was to come. I went to space camp. I bought books about the plans and development of space station "freedom" ... in 1983. I read The High Frontier by Gerard K. O'Neill. I learned that a single near-Earth nickel-iron asteroid contains $5 trillion in metals, and could be cheaper to extract than strip-mining our own planet.

And what's this I read now? No shuttle flights for another year? On top of the fact that the planned retirement of the shuttle comes four years before the availability of a replacement vehicle.

Yes, the loss of Columbia was a tragic incident. I spent a good part of the day in tears. But space travel is risky - certainly the astronauts know and accept the risks - and NASA wasn't always so gun-shy. Apollo 1 set the program back just over a year. Apollo 13, ostensibly a more serious engineering disaster, was followed by a successful lunar landing in only nine months ... and we weren't even under pressure to "beat the Soviets" anymore by that point.

These days, when you take a system offline, you seem to take it offline for two or three years at a time, fly it once, and take it offline again. What's to blame for this? A growth in timidity? A growth in incompetence? I want to understand.

Dear Congress,

In high school, I watched Freedom get delayed, scaled back, funding cut, then cancelled. Then, in college, the National Aerospace Plane died. In grad school, I watched the X-33 / VentureStar project start, stumble, lose funding, and fail. More recently, it's been the ISS and its escape vehicle, the X-38 - without which the ISS is doomed to a maximum crew of three instead of the ten originally planned. A dozen other examples exist - just in the space program - of crap you spend a few billions on, then give up.

What gives? How much of our money have you spent on programs that get 50% done and then cancelled? It's not just a bait-and-switch that distresses all of us true believers, it's also a profligate waste. My folks grew up with the space race. All you've got for me is a space disgrace.

I'm sure both of you will wake up and get your asses in gear when China puts people on the moon. But I might be sixy years old by then. Please, give me a reason to hope.

Yours,
Evan

I've been way too busy to blog much lately, but the space news this week is just to good to resist.

• Our solar system now has ten planets. The new one is about 50% larger than pluto!
• ESA Mars Express snaps a stunning picture of a frozen lake of water on Mars.

Scientists have found a rocky, terrestrial planet outside our solar system. This is the first extrasolar planet found that isn't a gas giant. 'Nuff said. Read the article.

Today, the NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day is a photo of evidence of Water on Mars. Hot damn.

WOW #1: Two NASA areologists believe they have convincing evidence for life on Mars; the continuous outgassing of methane.

WOW #2: The ESA has strong evidence of an 800-by-900 kilometer, 45 meter deep ice sea just underneath the surface of Mars, very near the equator.

This is one of the all-around coolest sentences I've ever read. It's talking about the Huygens probe landing on Titan.

When the probe landed, it was not with a thud, or a splash, but a 'splat'. It landed in Titanian 'mud'.

(Giggle). In my sleep-deprived state, the thought of multimillion dollar spaceprobe making a successful splatdown on a remote planet just tickled me beyond pink.

And, of course, the scientific implications that whatever the heck it is on the surface of Titan is soft. In a location that is a couple hundred degrees below freezing, that's pretty remarkable.

A lovely composite image of dranage channels on a lighter-colored highground leading to a flat (flooded, or formerly flooded?) darker lowlands. Taken as Huygens descended.

There's a ton more great stuff starting to appear on the ESA homepage