Space Day 2013 - the Moon - and Sci Fi

Well, am still here on this Space Day in 2013, so it is time for me to do my usual blog post about space.

"Space" in this context means the immense volume that is above the atmosphere of Earth, as opposed to the remaining space in one's crowded closet, for example. The International Space Station is up there in space, in Low Earth Orbit, along with a growing horde of smaller objects in low earth orbit. They tend to stay up there because there is a nice balance between their forward earth-horizontal velocity straight line trajectory leading up and away from the planet, is exactly balanced by the force of gravity pulling down on the mass of the object, so it just goes round and round the round planet.

Another way to look at it is the angular momentum of the circling object generates a centrifugal force that exactly balances the opposite direction downward force of gravity.

Getting up there into orbit from the surface of the earth, takes a lot of effort, however.

But don't worry, am not going to use this place do another grouse about my concepts for hoop-type space escalators and even anchored tether space elevators, for high efficiency space orbital access, as having been suppressed and ignored, by some influence-expert folks behind the scenes.

What this post is about is celebrating that day when humans first set foot on our Moon, on July 20,1969.

As I have often said, people-stuff is complicated - especially to an Asperger's socially-dimwit viewpoint. In that frame of mind, the achievement of Apollo 11 setting people on the Moon briefly, is analogous to a can of fishing worms in the fisherman's bait can, all roiling around in coping struggle, and yet somehow the cooperate enough to manage to boos a couple of their kind up to the edge of the bait can - before they fall back in again. A highly unlikely thing to happen; but people did it, brought back some rocks and regolith from the Moon, and left some Earth stuff on the moon in repayment.

There are other viewpoints. One of my good friends who is quite intelligent and caring about people, says he believes that no humans actually landed on the Moon; that all the videos and pictures of those times were fabricated, as a NASA contract, by the moviemaker Stanley Kubrick. All fakery. However, I never could find out why my friend has this belief. Anyway, people do not have to agree about all things, Neither he nor I were there on the Moon to verify what happened, so it is all conjecture for both of us.

I used the Moon as environment most extensively in my high tech sci fi novels "The Ark of 1984's Future" and "The Torus City Ice Shields Returning Home" and those both involved rather detailed utilization of the Moon's environment.

In sci fi fantasy adventures, and in real life adventures like Apollo 11, the people-stuff is complex. Much like the aforementioned can of worms that somehow do make quite an achievement despite mostly just busy surviving while getting in each others' way. Indeed, is amazing to me that humans have not exterminated themselves long before this. Still, there is some good stuff despite the Machiavallian kind of stuff.

Drama, the hunger for drama, seems to be the motivator. Like in the years I was trying to get people to pay attention to my Mooncable Project concept of a lunar space elevator built using existing materials, for the benefit of civilization, a concept that assumed that people automatically worked together so all would thrive better, that by the mid-1970's it was still sandbagged while the public was starting to become enthralled by the "Star Wars" movies into which the put millions of dollars, but not one penny for my Mooncable project to enable those people live much better. With their dollars they showed that they much preferred the battles and heroes of Star Wars than the Mooncable Project adventures providing people with space resources in their time. I thin part of it is because with Star Wars movies, in a couple of hours of excitement, the movie is over and they can go back to their familiar world with which they know how to cope; no new stuff there to deal with for those moviegoers, for better or worse.

So I can take a hint. Sometimes, anyway, given time to figure it out, of course. So I write high tech sci fi. And I finally now have available in print a new high tech sci fi novel, this one about a generation starship in process of seeding a new planet; title is "Planetfall Twenty-Seven" and can be gotten from CreateSpace or Amazon. This is the one I wrote in 2011; in 2012 I wrote most of its sequel, but still needs a chapter or two and then the long left-brain struggle to format it for printing. CreateSpace had a new interior template, nice to have, but maybe I ought to put my time into getting the template to work with my Mac software with less endless chapter by chapter adding stuff afterwards; then put what I have of the novel into the template, so when inspiration arrives, I can just plug the finishing up of the novel and send off for a first proof copy. What fun. Yet it is the best I can do to help people eventually have real-life adventures, like that landing and foot-setting on the Moon on July 20, 1969; without the prior direction-pointg by sci fi writers, back then people would probably have settled their posturing by using a few nukes on each other before saying enough is enough. Yay space race team even if they did not like me.