CNN And Space

This morning, CNN interviewed Charles Bolden, NASA administrator. Bolden said he expects U. S. astronauts to be flying into space aboard commercial American spacecraft by 2014 or 2015. CNN also provided live coverage of Atlantis docking with ISS.

The network further featured an interview with Myles O'Brien. O'Brien was CNN's science and space correspondent for years-- until CNN disbanded its science and space unit. O'Brien suggested that since most television journalists have educational backgrounds in history, political science, or some other social science they don't understand space projects and the physical sciences, so they don't, as a group, see the value of space exploration. That partly explains, he said, why coverage of space has declined over the decades since Apollo-- though he also pointed out that public interest in space seemed to have peaked with the safe return of Apollo 11.

In the years ahead, O'Brien said the excitement in space will be in the commercial space arena. We will see how CNN and the other televison networks cover that.

The Shuttle And The Media

Throughout this past week, as the launch of the final space shuttle mission approached, the major television networks covered the upcoming event as it only rarely covered the program over its thirty year run. Partly, that was NASA's fault. The agency had sold the program to Congress as a way to make human spaceflight "routine." The shuttle did nothing of the sort, of course, but NASA flew it well enough that the television networks gave shuttle missions less and less coverage. They seem to have bought NASA's line, if only because doing so may have fit their overall business strategy. Only occasional events-- the repair of the Hubble Space Telescope, the twin tragedies of Challenger and Columbia-- brought the networks back full steam.

That distance from the program, and from space in general, may have helped shape this week's coverage. For instance, the program has been scheduled to end around this time for several years, yet a focus of the coverage was how many shuttle workers were going to lose their jobs. True, the present economic situation has made the situation worse, but NASA, the rest of the federal government, and the workers themselves had time to plan-- perhaps the networks missed a story somewhere back there. If U. S. astronauts depending on the Russian Soyuz for access to space somehow seems wrong, perhaps the networks missed another story a while back. A more consistent approach to covering policy in general and space in particular-- as opposed to concentrating on drama-- might be more useful.

STS-135

The final space shuttle mission got off to a smooth, successful start yesterday as Atlantis launched into a cloudy Florida sky before a huge crowd of onlookers.

The mission of STS-135 is to deliver enough supplies to ISS to take the station through 2012.

Launching Atlantis

Florida's fickle weather is plaguing the space shuttle program right to the end.

Atlantis is scheduled to lift off Friday on the final shuttle mission, but weather forecasters say there's a 70 percent chance of storms in the area. There's also a 60 percent chance of storms Saturday, but that drops to 40 percent Sunday.

Transformers

Transformers: Dark of the Moon was a major box office success over the holiday weekend. The movie, of course, involves an alien invasion of Earth, which has been a favorite science fiction theme of Hollywood for decades. Advances in special effects technology also encourage such stories, allowing spectacular scenes to be credibly depicted.


The transformers of the title are, of course, intelligent machines. Many scientists speculate that our first contact with extraterrestrials will, in fact, be with intelligent machines. Machines, they argue, are better able to deal with the rigors of spaceflight than biological life forms are. Further, machine intelligence, once created, will quickly blow by biological brains. Once artificial intelligence starts designing computers, the pace of progress will quicken.

Will spacefaring intelligent machines be aggressive, acquisitive, political? For a while yet, at least in Hollywood, they probably will be.

Growing Galaxies

Scientists have generally thought that the main way galaxies increased in size was by merging, or by bigger galaxies swallowing up smaller ones. A new study suggests that accounts for only a small percentage of the growth. Most of it, instead, comes from a steady accumulation of gas.

Gravity is the key. A large gravity field will tend to bring nearby gas, and other stuff, under its sway. That, in turn, adds mass to the galaxy, further strengthening the gravitational field and allowing the capture of more gas. The incoming gas is the fuel that ignites and supports star formation.

It's a less dramatic, more systematic approach to the building of the cosmos we know. In that sense, it echoes the gradualism versus catastrophism debate in geology. We know Earth has suffered catastrophes that have profoundly changed the planet, just as we know galaxies do in fact merge, but slow processes may have a greater influence on the final product.

Dream Chaser

The Sierra Nevada Corporation is developing the Dream Chaser spacecraft, which is designed to ferry humans to and from low Earth orbit, launching on a rocket and landing on a runway, much like NASA's space shuttle. While it borrows from the shuttle, it also has a more interesting history.

In the early 1980s, U. S. assets recorded the Soviets recovering a small, sleek spacecraft, which seemed to be an answer to the American shuttle. (The Soviets also built Buran, a close cousin of the shuttle, which flew precisely once.) NASA engineers were given photos of the small craft, and they began to "reverse engineer" it. That effort was so successful it developed into the NASA project, the HL-20. The HL-20 was eventually canceled, but the work done on that project serves as the basis of the Dream Chaser program.

SNC-- which is based in Colorado, not near the Sierra Nevadas-- plans to have a short test flight of Dream Chaser in 2013 and an orbital flight in 2014.