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Green Swans: The Coming Boom in Regenerative Capitalism by John Elkington

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, agricultural Revolution, Anthropocene, anti-fragile, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, autonomous vehicles, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Black Swan, blockchain, Boeing 737 MAX, Boeing 747, Buckminster Fuller, business cycle, Cambridge Analytica, carbon footprint, carbon tax, circular economy, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, David Attenborough, deglobalization, degrowth, discounted cash flows, distributed ledger, do well by doing good, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, drone strike, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, energy transition, Extinction Rebellion, Future Shock, Gail Bradbrook, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, George Akerlof, global supply chain, Google X / Alphabet X, green new deal, green transition, Greta Thunberg, Hans Rosling, hype cycle, impact investing, intangible asset, Internet of things, invention of the wheel, invisible hand, Iridium satellite, Jeff Bezos, John Elkington, Jony Ive, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, M-Pesa, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, microplastics / micro fibres, more computing power than Apollo, move fast and break things, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, new economy, Nikolai Kondratiev, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, placebo effect, Planet Labs, planetary scale, plant based meat, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, radical decentralization, Ralph Nader, reality distortion field, Recombinant DNA, Rubik’s Cube, Salesforce, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, smart cities, smart grid, sovereign wealth fund, space junk, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, supply-chain management, synthetic biology, systems thinking, The future is already here, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Tim Cook: Apple, urban planning, Whole Earth Catalog

Carbon pricing, meanwhile, must move from a political improbability to an integral, taken-for-granted part of our economic operating systems and markets. And fast. WICKED PROBLEM 5: SPACE JUNK HITS CRITICAL DENSITY For a long time, space exploration was very far from profitable. It was done for science, or to control a new set of commanding heights as the superpowers competed to control the planet and our future. But the wicked problems came just the same, particularly in the form of space debris. Some years back Brian Weeden, a technical advisor for the Secure World Foundation, even described space junk as a “super wicked problem.”33 Interestingly, one thing that links antibiotics to space is the fact that antibiotic resistance research has now itself gone into orbit.34 It was already known that bacteria found on the International Space Station (ISS) were more resistant, for some reason, than bacteria isolated at the Antarctic Research Station, Concordia.

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“We’re at what we call a ‘critical density,’” says Donald Kessler, a former NASA scientist who used to run the agency’s Orbital Debris Program Office, “where there are enough large objects in space that they will collide with one another and create small debris faster than it can be removed.”35 He predicted that eventually there will be so much space junk that leaving Earth to explore deep space will become highly risky, if not impossible. That, someone might want to tell Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, might also eventually rule out sending manned missions to Mars. Anyone who has seen the film Gravity will have some sense of where all of this could now be headed. Talk about a wicked problem with super wicked characteristics. So how do serious space people themselves view the space junk challenge? Here’s how NASA sums up the problem:36 Space debris encompasses both natural (meteoroid) and artificial (man-made) particles.

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The collision added more than 2,000 pieces of trackable debris to the inventory of space junk. Next, while I was in that country, China carried out its 2007 antisatellite test, using a missile to destroy an old weather satellite. This single act, unlikely to be welcomed by future space travelers, added more than 2,300 trackable pieces of junk, more than 35,000 pieces larger than a thumbnail, and perhaps hundreds of thousands of pieces too small to track.37 So who has the worst space-littering record to date? Well, in 2015, it was discovered that while Russia had the most objects in space, more than 6,500 of them, it was not the biggest contributor to space junk. Instead, at the time, the United States held the title of the dirtiest country in space, even if by a whisker.

The New Gold Rush: The Riches of Space Beckon! by Joseph N. Pelton

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Biosphere 2, Buckminster Fuller, business logic, Carrington event, Colonization of Mars, Dennis Tito, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, full employment, global pandemic, Google Earth, GPS: selective availability, gravity well, Iridium satellite, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, life extension, low earth orbit, Lyft, Mark Shuttleworth, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, megastructure, new economy, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Planet Labs, post-industrial society, private spaceflight, Ray Kurzweil, Scaled Composites, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, skunkworks, space junk, SpaceShipOne, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Strategic Defense Initiative, Thomas Malthus, Tim Cook: Apple, Tunguska event, uber lyft, urban planning, urban sprawl, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, wikimedia commons, X Prize

There are today a number of new and developing space enterprises and activities that include space mining, the installation of solar power satellites, on-orbit servicing and retrofitting of satellites, and attempts to cope with the problem of orbital debris—including active removal, or the recycling of space junk in the skies. There are new military and defense-related capabilities in the skies, and some of these relate to the idea of planetary defense, which means the deployment of technologies in the skies to detect and monitor cosmic hazards such as asteroids, comets, and solar storms as well as systems to actually defend Earth against these perils from outer space.

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PeltonFormer Dean, International Space University Author of MegaCrunch: Ten Survival Strategies for the 21st Century Washington, DC August 2016 Contents 1 Why This Gold Rush Is Different 2 A Space Cornucopia of Jobs, Resources and More 3 The Expanding Use of Space in Communications, Navigation, Remote Sensing and Weather Satellites 4 Commercial Space Transport, On-Orbit Servicing and Manufacturing 5 Solar Power Satellites and Space Mining 6 Space Security, Defense and Weapons 7 Protecting Earth from Space Junk, Cosmic Hazards and Climate Change 8 Space Habitats, Space Colonies and the New Space Economy 9 Governing the New Space Economy 10 Policing the Gold Rush in the Skies 11 Looking Toward a More Hopeful Global Society Appendix: Current Status of the U. S. Commercial Space Launch Competitiveness Act, Public Law 114-90, as of June 2016 Glossary of Key Terms and Phrases Index About the Author Joseph N.

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Others are suggesting that they might change the orbit of near Earth asteroids so that they would ultimately orbit the Moon. Most agree on the need for careful prospecting to find reasonable asteroid targets before actually thinking of space mining operations. To some people asteroids are celestial bodies. But to those focused on space mining, the millions of asteroids that circle the Sun are just space junk that have no intrinsic value. In fact they see the literally millions of near Earth asteroids out there as being potentially very dangerous assault weapons that could do a great deal of damage. So why not mine them rather than let them destroy us? Countries Potentially Interested in Space Mining The fact that the four mining companies are all located in United States might suggest to some that it is only U.

Endurance: A Year in Space, a Lifetime of Discovery by Scott Kelly, Margaret Lazarus Dean

Apollo 11, clean water, dark matter, game design, inventory management, low earth orbit, Neil Armstrong, Skype, space junk, the scientific method, traumatic brain injury, twin studies, Virgin Galactic, Y2K

Once again, a Progress has failed to function properly, and, once again, we must worry about what that will mean for us. We are not in any immediate danger of crashing into the Earth—it would take many months for our orbit to decay to a dangerous degree—but we also use the Progress engines to move the station out of the way of space junk, so the failure could have frightening consequences. This is another strike against a piece of hardware everyone had thought of as rock solid, challenging our confidence in the Soyuz spacecraft, which are made with identical or similar components and by the same manufacturer—including the one that is meant to be my ride home.

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“This is a red late-notice conjunction,” Jay says, “with a closest point of approach within a sphere of uncertainty.” “Roger,” I say into the microphone. Then I make sure the microphone is off before I say what I really think about this, which is, “Fuck.” A “conjunction” is a potential collision—a piece of space junk is headed our way, in this case an old Russian satellite. “Late notice” means we didn’t see it coming or that we miscalculated its trajectory, and “red” means it’s going to get dangerously close—we just don’t know how close. The “sphere of uncertainty” refers to the area it could pass through, a sphere with a radius of one mile.

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This is the worst possible answer to my question. If the satellite were in an orbit similar to ours, the closing speed might be as low as a few hundred miles per hour—a devastating speed for a car crash, but a best-case scenario for a space crash. Instead, the space station is traveling in one direction at 17,500 miles per hour, and the space junk is traveling at the same speed in the exact opposite direction; a 35,000-mile-per-hour closing rate—twenty times faster than a bullet from a gun. If the satellite hits, the resulting destruction would be much worse than what happens in the movie Gravity. With six hours’ notice, the space station can move itself out of the way of oncoming orbital debris.

Yosemite, Sequoia & Kings Canyon by Fodor's

Columbine, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, space junk, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Works Progress Administration

Like the moon, Venus goes through phases—check it out through a pair of binoculars. You can also spot Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, and Mercury—with or without the aid of binoculars. METEORS It’s hard to match the magic of a meteor shower, the natural fireworks display that occurs as Earth passes through a cloud of debris called meteoroids. These pieces of space junk—most the size of a pebble—hit our atmosphere at high speeds, and the intense friction produces brief but brilliant streaks of light. Single meteors are often called “shooting stars” or “falling stars.” Since our planet passes through the same patches of interstellar refuse each year, it’s easy to roughly predict when the major meteor showers will occur.

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Each shower is named after the point in the sky where meteors appear to originate. If you’re not visiting during a shower, don’t worry—you can spot individual meteors any time of the year. SATELLITES Right now, according to NASA, there are about 3,000 operative man-made satellites (along with 6,000 pieces of space junk) orbiting the Earth—and you can catch a glimpse of one with a little practice. Satellites look like fast-moving, non-blinking points of light; the best way to spot one is to lie on your back and scan the sky for movement. Be on the lookout for satellites an hour or two before or after sunset (though you may see them at other times as well).

Infinity in the Palm of Your Hand: Fifty Wonders That Reveal an Extraordinary Universe by Marcus Chown

Albert Einstein, Anton Chekhov, Apollo 11, Arthur Eddington, Carrington event, dark matter, Donald Trump, double helix, Eddington experiment, Edmond Halley, gravity well, horn antenna, Isaac Newton, Kickstarter, Large Hadron Collider, microbiome, Neil Armstrong, Richard Feynman, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, space junk, Stephen Hawking, Turing machine

Arkhipov is not claiming that alien artifacts have been left on Earth deliberately as they were left on the moon in the film. Instead, he is asserting that they have fallen to Earth accidentally. Arkhipov points out that our space activities unavoidably pollute our solar system. Dead satellites, discarded rocket casings, and so on, end up cluttering Earth’s orbit. Such space junk is so hazardous that it caused the postponement of launches of NASA’s space shuttle for fear of a fatal collision. But, says Arkhipov, such interplanetary garbage does not stay interplanetary garbage forever. Inevitably, some manmade artifacts are ejected from the solar system and sail off towards the stars.

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Ultra-small particles in the exhausts of space rockets will be blown away by the pressure of sunlight; space probes that explode while far from the sun will eject debris into interstellar space. But all this works both ways, says Arkhipov. Just as human activities pollute the solar system with garbage, the activities of any space-faring ETs will fill their planetary system with space junk too. And, just as our technological activities lead to the scattering of artifacts into interstellar space, theirs will also. In other words, it is inevitable that some of their junk will come our way. “For Christopher Columbus, the evidence of new lands was strange debris which had floated across the ocean,” says Arkhipov.

Five Billion Years of Solitude: The Search for Life Among the Stars by Lee Billings

addicted to oil, Albert Einstein, Anthropocene, Apollo 11, Arthur Eddington, California gold rush, Colonization of Mars, cosmological principle, cuban missile crisis, dark matter, Dava Sobel, double helix, Eddington experiment, Edmond Halley, Ford Model T, full employment, Hans Moravec, hydraulic fracturing, index card, Isaac Newton, James Webb Space Telescope, Johannes Kepler, Kuiper Belt, Late Heavy Bombardment, low earth orbit, Magellanic Cloud, music of the spheres, Neil Armstrong, out of africa, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, planetary scale, private spaceflight, profit motive, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, random walk, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Searching for Interstellar Communications, selection bias, Silicon Valley, space junk, synthetic biology, technological singularity, the scientific method, transcontinental railway

The ATA would not restart operations until December, buoyed by a brief flurry of small donations. The money raised was sufficient to fund only another few months of operations. The Institute was seeking a partnership with the U.S. Air Force, which later purchased time on the ATA to monitor “space junk”—cast-off rocket stages, metal bolts, and other debris that can strike and damage spacecraft. But that funding, too, proved only temporary, and time spent surveying space junk was time sucked away from the ATA’s SETI-centric goals. Unless more wealthy patrons swooped in with heavyweight donations, the ATA had very little hope of reaching its original target of 350 dishes—and during the long recession after the 2008 turmoil in the global financial system, potential donors were proving at least as elusive as any broadcasting aliens.

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., 258–59 planetesimals, 2 planets: extrasolar, see exoplanets formation of, in our solar system, 2–3, 31, 109, 238 Kepler’s laws of motion of, 82–84 protoplanets, 2 transits of, 53 plants, 130–32, 143 photosynthesis in, 29, 33, 131, 140–43, 154, 169, 175, 180–82 plate tectonics, 30, 105, 111, 128, 140, 144, 169, 172, 176, 179, 229 Plato, 78–80, 82 Pluto, 110, 191, 239 polarization, 115–16 POLISH, 115–17 Pollack, James, 158 Pong, Christopher, 259 Precambrian period, 139–40, 144, 154, 238 precious metals, 105–6, 111 primordial soup, 19 Proceedings of the Royal Society, 84 Project Ozma, 11, 14, 47–48 prokaryotes, 139, 140, 143, 144 Proterozoic Eon, 140–44, 171, 179 protons, 88 protoplanets, 2 Proxima Centauri, 94, 97 psychohistory, 152 pyrite, 173 Pythagoras, 78, 82 Quaternary Period, 133 Queloz, Didier, 58 radio, 42–43, 45 Radio Astronomy Laboratory, 12 Recession, Great, 13, 106–7, 165, 196 recombination, 248, 249 red beds, 131 redox reactions, 168 redwood trees, 30–31, 106, 110 Regulus, 239 Renaissance, 22, 81 Reynolds, Ray, 155–56 Ricketts, Taylor, 74–77 Rittenhouse, David, 86 Road Map for the Exploration of Neighboring Planetary Systems, A, 211–12, 214, 221 rocket equation, 186 Sagan, Carl, 16, 19, 20, 24–25, 174, 239–42, 243 San Diego Air & Space Museum, 100 Sasselov, Dimitar, 226, 249 Saturn, 28, 83, 109, 191 Saturn rockets, 151–52, 187, 188, 202, 203 Schmidt, Eric, 258 Science, 104 scientific method, 78 Seager, Sara, 243–65 children of, 251–53, 156, 160–61, 264 ExoplanetSat project of, 256–57 “Next 40 Years of Exoplanets” conference of, 225–35, 263 as Planetary Resources advisor, 258–59 TPF work of, 225–28, 232–35, 249–53, 255–58, 262 Wevrick and, 244–49, 251–56, 264 Wevrick’s illness and death and, 253–56, 264, 265 Wevrick’s marriage to, 249 SETI (search for extraterrestrial intelligence), 9–14, 38, 41 Arecibo Observatory and, 41 Drake equation and, 16–25 first modern search by, 10–11 Green Bank conference of, 15–25, 27–28, 101, 167–68, 240 lack of funding for, 10–14 Laughlin’s view of, 99 NASA and, 11–12 Project Ozma, 11, 14, 47–48 SETI Institute, 12, 43 Allen Telescope Array of, 12–14, 41, 42 shales, see black shales Simonyi, Charles, 258 Smith, Matt, 259 Snowball Earth events, 142, 174, 179 solar eclipse, 119 solar system, 19, 87 evolution of, as viewed from stars, 238–39 formation of, 1–3, 31, 139 formation of Earth in, 2, 7, 20, 139, 173 formation of planets in, 2–3, 31, 109, 238 heliocentric model of, 79–82 measuring size of, 86 shell of light surrounding, 237–38 Soviet Union, 11 nuclear weapons and, 23 Soyuz rocket, 233–34 Venera 13, 50 Space Age, 48, 50, 87, 99, 112, 151 Space Interferometry Mission (SIM), 215 space junk, 13 Space Launch System, 204 space missions, 187–99 Apollo, 1, 50, 151, 187, 202, 212, 239 Ares V, 203 Atlantis, 185–87 ATLAST, 198, 203, 230 Challenger, 3, 188–89 Columbia, 189, 196 commercial providers and, 233–34, 258–59 Constellation program, 196, 198, 203, 204, 215, 221, 223 ExoplanetSat, 256–57 Galileo, 241–42 Great Observatories, 192, 197, 209 Hubble Space Telescope, 189–93, 195, 197–99, 205–7, 209, 218–19, 226 International Space Station, 187, 189, 197, 202, 207–8, 210 James Webb Space Telescope, 193–99, 202–4, 209, 215, 216, 218, 220, 225, 262 Kepler Space Telescope, 13–14, 53–54, 56, 62, 71–73, 98, 108–9, 166, 201, 225, 229–30, 263 to Mars, 187, 188, 196, 207, 221 to Moon, see Moon, missions to New Horizons, 239 OpTIIX, 207–8, 210 Pioneer, 239–40 Saturn rockets, 151–52, 187, 188, 202, 203 shuttle program failures, 188–89 Terrestrial Planet Finders, see Terrestrial Planet Finders Tsiolkovsky and, 186–87 Voyager, see Voyager missions Space Telescope Science Institute, 198, 199, 212, 257–58 spectra, 200–202, 250 spectroscopy, spectrometers, 33–34, 51–52 in Alpha Centauri search, 94–98 CHIRON, 62 Hamilton, 58, 114 HARPS, 60–61, 63–69, 96, 98 HIRES, 59–63, 66 iodine cell calibration in, 58 radial-velocity (RV), 51, 53–58, 60, 61–64, 66, 68, 94–98, 108, 114 Spergel, David, 218–20, 249 Spitzer, Lyman, 189, 209 Spitzer Space Telescope, 192, 209 Sproul Telescope, 52 spy satellites, 188, 189, 205, 209 SRI International, 42 Stahl, Phil, 203 Stamenkovic, Vlada, 259 stars, 200–201 47 Ursae Majoris, 59 51 Pegasi, 50 61 Virginis, 55 70 Virginis, 59 Alpha Centauri, see Alpha Centauri binary systems, 18, 94 Dyson spheres for capturing energy of, 104, 105 in early cosmology, 78–80 of exoplanets, observations of, 33 formation of, 17–18, 27 GJ 667C, 65, 66 Gliese 581, 63, 68, 163 HD 83443, 60 HD 209458, 60, 228 HR 8799, 238 Kepler field, 41 laws of nature and, 155–56 M13 cluster, 39–41 measuring distances to, 86 Proxima Centauri, 94, 97 red dwarf (M-dwarf), 27, 172, 228–30, 262 spectroscopy and, see spectroscopy, spectrometers Sun-like, 18, 50, 55, 201, 228, 230, 238, 256, 257 transits of planets across, 53 Star Wars, 260–61 Stoermer, Eugene, 135 Struve, Otto, 15, 18–19, 25, 32, 47–48 sulfuric acid, 173 Sun, 31, 73, 87 birth of, 2, 31, 238 Dyson spheres for capturing energy of, 104, 105 in early cosmology, 78–82 Earth’s distance from, 83, 86 end of life on Earth caused by, 7, 31–32, 75–77, 159, 180–83 faint young Sun problem, 173–75 heliocentrism and, 79–82 orbit of, 95 shell of light surrounding, 237–38 as telescope, 35–37 Sun-like stars, 18, 50, 55, 201, 228, 230, 238, 256, 257 supernovae, 30, 88 Swarthmore College, 52 systemic, 71 Systemic Console, 54, 65 Tau Ceti, 10–11 technological civilizations, 29, 32, 104–5 emergence of, 21–22 longevity of, 22–25, 38–39, 41, 42 technological progress, 136, 183 Urey on, 101–3 and visibility of communication, 42–43 technological singularity, 43–44 tectonic plates, 30, 105, 111, 128, 140, 144, 169, 172, 176, 179, 229 telescopes, 34–36, 51, 61, 99, 170–71, 199, 201–4, 206, 208, 211–12, 223 active optics in, 204–6, 208 Allen Array, 12–14, 41, 42 ATLAST, 198, 203, 230 Automated Planet Finder, 61, 70, 114 ExoplanetSat, 256–57 Galileo’s use of, 81–82, 210 Gemini, 199–200, 203 in Great Observatories program, 192, 197, 209 Hubble, 189–93, 195, 197–99, 205–7, 209, 218–19, 226 James Webb (JWST), 193–99, 202–4, 209, 215, 216, 218, 220, 225, 262 Kasting and, 152–54 Kepler, 13–14, 53–54, 56, 62, 71–73, 98, 108–9, 166, 201, 225, 229–30, 263 mEarth Project, 228–29 Sun as, 35–37 Terrestrial Planet Finders, see Terrestrial Planet Finders see also observatories Teller, Edward, 101 temperature-pressure profile, 157–58 Terrestrial Planet Finders (TPFs), 165–67, 184, 194, 196–98, 214–35, 241, 242, 263 coronagraphic, 217–22, 224, 231, 249 interferometer concept for, 213–14, 216, 231 Seager’s work with, 225–28, 232–35, 249–53, 255–58, 262 starshade (occulter) concept for, 220–21, 225 TESS (Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite), 229–30 Thales, 77–79, 238 Thébault, Philippe, 97 thermodynamic disequilibrium, 168–69 Thoreau, Henry, 254 Time, 52 time, deep, 145–46 time capsule, 100–103 Todd, David Peck, 114 Toronto Sun, 74 transits, 53, 56, 84–86, 114–20, 204, 229–30, 251, 263 Traub, Wesley, 217–19, 221–25, 235 travel, interstellar, 44–45, 100–101 tropopause, 158–59 Tsiolkovsky, Konstantin, 186–87, 199, 225, 231 Turner, Edwin, 249–50 2063 A.D., 100–103 universe: Big Bang and, 89–91 evolution of, 88–89 expansion of, 87–90 inflation of, 89–92 recombination in, 248, 249 smoothness of, 89 universes, parallel, 90–91 University of California, 113 University of California, Berkeley: Miller Institute for Basic Research in Science, 48, 74 Radio Astronomy Laboratory, 12 University of California, Santa Cruz, 107–8 University of Vermont, 74–75 Uranus, 109–10 Urey, Harold, 15, 19 2063 A.D. entry of, 101–3 Utt, James B., 101 Valencia, Diana, 259 van de Kamp, Peter, 52–53 Venera 13, 50 Venus, 19, 49–50, 54, 87, 109, 154, 155, 179, 239 atmosphere of, 116, 159–60 climate of, 158–59 Galileo’s study of, 81–82 Kepler’s study of, 83–84 Laughlin’s valuation of, 73 transits of, 83–86, 114–20 water on, 28, 171–72, 179 Vogt, Steve, 55, 58–64, 66–70 Von Braun, Wernher, 1, 151, 186 Voyager missions, 35, 239–42 image of Earth from, 239–42 phonograph records on, 240 Walden (Thoreau), 254 Walden Pond, 254 Walker, James, 176–79, 181 water, 157, 170–71 on Earth, 3, 30, 158–61, 174, 177–80, 182 on Mars, 28, 179 on Venus, 28, 171–72, 179 Wevrick, Mike, 244–49, 251–56, 264 illness and death of, 253–56, 264, 265 Seager’s marriage to, 249 Whipple, Fred, 100 Whitfield, Michael, 181–82 Whitmire, Dan, 155–56 Wiktorowicz, Sloane, 115–19 Wolfe, Tom, 1 world government, 102 Wright, Orville and Wilbur, 186 Zachary, Pavl, 117–18

Yellowstone & Grand Teton by Fodor's

space junk, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Works Progress Administration

Like the moon, Venus goes through phases—check it out through a pair of binoculars. You can also spot Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, and Mercury—with or without the aid of binoculars. METEORS It’s hard to match the magic of a meteor shower, the natural fireworks display that occurs as Earth passes through a cloud of debris called meteoroids. These pieces of space junk—most the size of a pebble—hit our atmosphere at high speeds, and the intense friction produces brief but brilliant streaks of light. Single meteors are often called “shooting stars” or “falling stars.” Since our planet passes through the same patches of interstellar refuse each year, it’s easy to roughly predict when the major meteor showers will occur.

…

Each shower is named after the point in the sky where meteors appear to originate. If you’re not visiting during a shower, don’t worry—you can spot individual meteors any time of the year. SATELLITES Right now, according to NASA, there are about 3,000 operative man-made satellites (along with 6,000 pieces of space junk) orbiting the Earth—and you can catch a glimpse of one with a little practice. Satellites look like fast-moving, non-blinking points of light; the best way to spot one is to lie on your back and scan the sky for movement. Be on the lookout for satellites an hour or two before or after sunset (though you may see them at other times as well).

The Crowded Universe: The Search for Living Planets by Alan Boss

Albert Einstein, Dava Sobel, diversified portfolio, full employment, Gregor Mendel, if you build it, they will come, James Webb Space Telescope, Johannes Kepler, Kuiper Belt, low earth orbit, Mars Rover, Neil Armstrong, Pluto: dwarf planet, Silicon Valley, space junk, wikimedia commons, zero-sum game

The electron microscope had also shown that the iron contained a small amount of chromium and manganese, which meant that it was in fact a 13-ounce lump of stainless steel. Mother Nature does not make stainless steel; human beings do. The Nageswarans’ meteorite had turned out to be a piece of space junk, not a meteorite. But what kind of space junk? American space satellites do not use stainless steel, but rather titanium. That meant the Russian space program was likely to be the source of the object, because the American and Russian space programs were the primary polluters of the skies (at least before the Chinese used a warhead to destroy one of their own failed weather satellites later in 2007).

Space Chronicles: Facing the Ultimate Frontier by Neil Degrasse Tyson, Avis Lang

Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Arthur Eddington, asset allocation, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, carbon-based life, centralized clearinghouse, cosmic abundance, cosmic microwave background, dark matter, Gordon Gekko, high-speed rail, informal economy, invention of movable type, invention of the telescope, Isaac Newton, James Webb Space Telescope, Johannes Kepler, Karl Jansky, Kuiper Belt, Large Hadron Collider, Louis Blériot, low earth orbit, Mars Rover, Mars Society, mutually assured destruction, Neil Armstrong, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, Pluto: dwarf planet, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, SETI@home, space junk, space pen, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, the scientific method, trade route

For two and a half years, Genesis faced the Sun and collected pristine solar matter, including atomic and molecular particles from the solar wind—revealing something of the contents of the original solar nebula from which the Sun and planets formed. Given that L4 and L5 are stable points of equilibrium, one might suppose that space junk would accumulate near them, making it quite hazardous to conduct business there. Lagrange, in fact, had predicted that space debris would be found at L4 and L5 for the gravitationally powerful Sun–Jupiter system. A century later, in 1905, the first members of the Trojan family of asteroids were discovered.

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As though gripped by tractor beams, these asteroids are forever held in place by the gravitational and centrifugal forces of the Sun–Jupiter system. (These asteroids, being stuck in the outer solar system and out of harm’s way, pose no risk to life on Earth or to themselves.) Of course, we would expect space junk to accumulate at L4 and L5 of the Sun–Earth and Earth–Moon systems too. And it does. As an important side benefit, interplanetary trajectories that begin at Lagrangian points require very little fuel to reach other Lagrangian points or even other planets. Unlike a launch from a planet’s surface, where most of your fuel goes to lift you off the ground, a Lagrangian launch would be a low-energy affair and would resemble a ship leaving dry dock, cast into the sea with a minimal investment of fuel.

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., 175 Smith, Michael, 242 Smithsonian Institution, 216 solar sails, 159, 165–67, 170 solar system, 34, 259 many-body problem and, 117–18 perturbation theory and, 118 solar wind, 176, 235, 245 solid rocket boosters, 155 Soter, Steven, 256 sound, speed of, 108–9 sound barrier, 109 South Africa, xiv South Pole, 76 Soviet Union, xiii, 8, 94, 133, 194, 215, 218 US rivalry with, 5–6, 59, 79, 87, 121–27, 133, 192, 219 see also Sputnik space, space exploration: colonization of, 57, 60, 102–3 cosmic microwave background in, 92, 94–95 cross-discipline endeavor in, 24–25, 230 culture and, 72–74, 147–48, 210–11 early attitudes toward, 217–18 economic motivation for, 200–201 factions against, 8–10 in Galef/Pigliucci interview of author, 75–83 inventions statute and, 311 justification for funding of, 78–81 militarization of, 60 numbers employed in, 236–37 politics and, 3–5 proposed programs and missions for, 201–2 robots and, 57, 89–90, 128, 130–32, 187, 198, 199, 202 significance of, 102 Soviet achievements in, 122–26 special interests and, 5, 236–37 stellar nurseries in, 93 technological innovation and, 12 US-Soviet rivalry and, 5–6, 59, 79, 87, 121–27, 133, 192, 219 war as driver of, 219–20 Space Cowboys (film), 162 Space Exploration Initiative, 8 Space Foundation, 221–22 Spaceguard Survey, The: Report of the NASA International Near-Earth Object Detection Workshop, 50 space junk, 176 space shuttle, 7, 12, 25, 109, 160–62, 165, 201, 202, 228, 281 contingency funding for, 321–22 fuel of, 158 launch costs of, 320–22 main parts of, 154–55 pricing policy for, 314 retirement of, 14–16, 143, 214 speed of, 222 use policy for, 312–13 weight of, 155 see also specific vehicles Space Station Freedom, 6, 8 Space Studies Board, 169 Space Technology Hall of Fame, 221, 230–31, 237 Space Telescope Science Institute, 10, 23, 135–36 Space Transportation System, 314 space travel, 191–98 coasting in, 247 in Colbert–author interview, 186–88 danger of, 198 financing of, 193–94 in Hollywood movies, 194–95 Moon missions and, 192–93 robots and, 198 special relativity and, 195–96 Space Travel Symposium, 111 Spain, 7, 87 spectroscopy, 30 Spirit (Mars exploration rover), 130–33, 138 Spitzer Space Telescope, 139 Sputnik, xiii, 5, 59, 79, 113–14, 133, 192, 218 50th anniversary of, 226 US response to, 122–24 Star City (training center), 73, 74, 207 Stars & Atoms (Eddington), 107 Star Trek (TV series), 3, 164, 170 45th anniversary of, 178–81 human behavior and, 180 technology of, 179 Star Trek: The Motion Picture (film), 37–38 Star Wars (film series), 131 State Department, US, 312 Stewart, Jon, 4 Stone, Sharon, 203 subatomic particles, 94 Sugar, Ron, 221 Sun, 27, 28, 29, 33, 46, 58, 72, 97, 112, 117, 118, 138, 195, 245 Copernican principle and, 34 energy emitted by, 93 fusion in, 101 neutrinos emitted by, 94 planets’ orbits and, 115 Superconducting Super Collider, 6–7, 80–81 Sweden, 7 Swift, Philip W., 223 Swift Gamma Ray Burst Explorer, 139 Switzerland, 7 Sykes, Wanda, 17 Systems of the World, The (Newton), 113 Taj Mahal, 88 Tamayo-Méndez, Arnaldo, 122 TASS, 123 Taylor, Charles E., 219 technology, 89, 200, 226 aero-space integration plan for, 323–24 in alien observation of Earth, 29–32 CRDAs policy on transfer of, 304–6 energy conservation and, 96 engineering, 95 Industrial Revolution and, 95 information, 95 leadership and, 23 multiple disciplines and, 135–37 nonsectarian philosophies and, 206 predicting future of, 215–16 progress in, 218–19 space exploration and, 135 of Star Trek, 179 US lag in, 21–22 telescopes, 71, 82, 85–86, 94, 141, 225 microwave, 91–92 radio, 91 ultraviolet, 93 Tereshkova, Valentina, 122 Texas, 6 Thompson, David, 221 three-body problem, 116–17 Three Gorges Dam, 22, 233 Three Mile Island meltdown, 168 Titan, 31 Huygens probe to, 138–39 methane on, 138–39 Today Show (TV show), 210–11 Tonight Show (TV show), 144–45 Toth, Viktor, 250 Townsend, W.

Eleanor Rigby: A Novel by Douglas Coupland

space junk, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, uranium enrichment

The dirty bomb story was never allowed to make the newspapers (I suspect there are many stories like this that we never hear about), but the staff knew exactly who I was, what had transpired in the terminal—and also why I was now a guest in their hospital. I felt like an urban legend sprung to life: You know, that crazy lady who thought this chunk of space junk was a meteorite. She stuck it in her luggage and shut down the world’s seventh largest airport. I was placed in reverse isolation—yes, into the Bubble—as a precaution. I might have been immunosuppressed; others could easily pass their germs on to me. Dr. Vogel told me that the only real way to tell how severely one has been affected by radiation is by how rapidly the symptoms arrive.

…

Of all things, I yawned, breaking the silence. I apologized to the men. “Sorry, it’s not you. It’s fallout from that godawful airport in Frankfurt.” Klaus asked, “You were caught in that too?” “You might say so.” It turned out Klaus was one of the two million or so people who were inconvenienced when Frankfurt’s airport discovered the space junk in my suitcase. He’d been waiting to pick up his mother, who was routing through Frankfurt on her way back from a botanical expedition in Iceland—lichens and moss. Klaus had driven back to the airport three times before her flight came in. He looked at my face and Rainer’s, and knew something larger had happened than merely being stuck at an airport.

Seveneves by Neal Stephenson

Apollo 13, Biosphere 2, clean water, Colonization of Mars, Danny Hillis, digital map, double helix, epigenetics, fault tolerance, Fellow of the Royal Society, Filipino sailors, gravity well, hydroponic farming, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, kremlinology, Kuiper Belt, low earth orbit, machine readable, microbiome, military-industrial complex, Neal Stephenson, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, phenotype, Potemkin village, pre–internet, random walk, remote working, selection bias, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snow Crash, space junk, statistical model, Stewart Brand, supervolcano, tech billionaire, TED Talk, the scientific method, Tunguska event, VTOL, zero day, éminence grise

With the hand on the robot arm, Dinah was able to grapple this easily and pull the device out into the light. “Any reason not to just ’biner it onto the X-37’s arm?” she asked. “Can’t think of any.” “What is it you’re doing?” Julia asked. “Deorbiting that piece of space junk before it kills someone.” “That piece of space junk happens to be carrying the earthly remains of a brave man who gave his life in the name of—” Dinah said, “Ivy, you want to take this or should I?” “I’ll do it. You’re busy,” Ivy said. Dinah could hear her twisting around in the pilot’s seat to look at Julia. She spoke as follows: “Julia.

…

She could watch their activities on video feeds if she wanted, but she had other things she needed to be doing. After the micrometeoroid/Luk incident, Dinah had scored a small victory for robotdom by putting her flock to work getting the surviving Luks squared away. Amalthea was attached to the forward end of Izzy, which, because of its orbital direction, was most exposed to impacts from space junk. In effect the asteroid had been put there as a sort of battering ram, protecting everything aft of it from collisions. There was enough space on its aft side that several Luks could nestle there, improving their odds of long-term survival as well as cutting down on cosmic ray exposure. Dinah’s crew of iron-mining robots had been made obsolete, at least for the time being, by her boss’s pivot toward frozen water.

…

Now she had gone silent. She was still out there—Konrad could still pick her up as a white dot on his optical telescope. Since she was merely coasting for thirty-seven days, not firing her engines, there was no way to tell whether the crew was still alive. A perfectly shipshape Ymir and a crumpled wad of space junk would have looked and behaved the same. They drew some hope from the fact that nothing came back from her. Ymir had automatic systems that were supposed to phone home without human intervention. If those had continued to function while communication from humans had ceased, it would suggest that the crew were all dead or incapacitated.

Do You Dream of Terra-Two? by Temi Oh

clean water, glass ceiling, Kickstarter, lateral thinking, low earth orbit, messenger bag, microplastics / micro fibres, Neil Armstrong, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, space junk, urban sprawl

Even with his new, more intuitive, understanding of the games, Jesse would still get stalled for a week on a single level, unable to master the delicate manoeuvres required to steer through a cloud of accelerating space junk, or to rendezvous with another craft. During those times, the task would plague him. His frazzled mind projected planets, darkly visible in the foreground, particles of dust suddenly and momentarily iridescent before a careening asteroid knocked him abruptly back into consciousness. One fine night, by some miracle of dexterity, Jesse managed to skate through every challenge. Though the hull of his ship was fairly dented, it remained unbreached. He dodged debris and space junk and avoided sudden death by decompression. His heart pounding and palms sweating, Jesse’s mind narrowed into a corridor of exhausted focus.

…

And as he did, it began to resolve before him. Jesse had been here before. He had been on this ship a thousand times, looking out at a sky that blazed destruction. During the game, Jesse had piloted his virtual crew through dusty asteroid belts when they were running low on oxygen. He’d navigated his way through space junk and landed in deserts without his ship burning up like a firecracker in the atmosphere. At least – not every time. Jesse saw, again, that his time had come. As adrenaline roared through his veins, he started to unbuckle his seatbelt. ‘I can do it,’ he said, lunging forward, just as he had the night of Ara’s death.

Accessory to War: The Unspoken Alliance Between Astrophysics and the Military by Neil Degrasse Tyson, Avis Lang

active measures, Admiral Zheng, airport security, anti-communist, Apollo 11, Arthur Eddington, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, Carrington event, Charles Lindbergh, collapse of Lehman Brothers, Colonization of Mars, commoditize, corporate governance, cosmic microwave background, credit crunch, cuban missile crisis, dark matter, Dava Sobel, disinformation, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, Dr. Strangelove, dual-use technology, Eddington experiment, Edward Snowden, energy security, Eratosthenes, European colonialism, fake news, Fellow of the Royal Society, Ford Model T, global value chain, Google Earth, GPS: selective availability, Great Leap Forward, Herman Kahn, Higgs boson, invention of movable type, invention of the printing press, invention of the telescope, Isaac Newton, James Webb Space Telescope, Johannes Kepler, John Harrison: Longitude, Karl Jansky, Kuiper Belt, Large Hadron Collider, Late Heavy Bombardment, Laura Poitras, Lewis Mumford, lone genius, low earth orbit, mandelbrot fractal, Maui Hawaii, Mercator projection, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, Neil Armstrong, New Journalism, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, operation paperclip, pattern recognition, Pierre-Simon Laplace, precision agriculture, prediction markets, profit motive, Project Plowshare, purchasing power parity, quantum entanglement, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, skunkworks, South China Sea, space junk, Stephen Hawking, Strategic Defense Initiative, subprime mortgage crisis, the long tail, time dilation, trade route, War on Poverty, wikimedia commons, zero-sum game

The difference is not inherent in the weapons themselves. One de facto category of space weapon has nothing to do with intentional deployment: space junk. It’s already up there, the inevitable but inadvertent result of smashups, explosions, rocket launches, space-walk maneuvers, the ordinary dumping of trash, and the inevitable demise of assorted spacecraft. From a distance, it looks like a cloud of dandruff ringing our planet, mostly in low Earth orbit, because that’s where most satellites are found. But space junk populates all of nearby space, extending six Earth radii out to the zone of geosynchronous satellites.10 Besides a few notable mementoes of the late 1950s, such as the final stage of the launch rocket for the USSR’s first Sputnik and the entirety of America’s first Vanguard, hundreds of thousands of unguided bits of flotsam and jetsam orbit Earth amid our working satellites.

…

Not until 2013 did the country’s armed forces have their own surveillance satellite, Sapphire, built in Canada and launched in India. This satellite, however, takes no part in warfighting. It serves to guarantee the safety of the world’s, not merely Canada’s, space assets by monitoring every piece of space junk larger than ten centimeters across. Think of it as an eminently peaceable example of the military’s traditional obligation to protect and defend, as well as the opening salvo in Canada’s amplified space capabilities. Beginning in 2014 the Canadian Air Forces Space Cadre has provided Joint Operations Command with 24/7 support, which includes missile warnings, launch notifications, GPS status updates, and detection of any electronic interference directed at satellites.

…

., 306 Sirius (Dog Star), 39, 40 situational awareness, 155, 157, 162, 329, 396, 397 Skunk Works (Lockheed Aircraft), 198, 276, 469n Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS), 224–25 Smith, John, 436n Snowden, Edward, 14, 413n Sobel, Dava, 73, 95 Socrates, 46 sodium, spectroscopy of, 145, 146 Sorrows of Empire, The (Johnson), 35 Sotheby’s, 361–62 Soviet Union atomic and nuclear bomb development, 263 Berlin blockade, 266, 303 collapse of, 357–59 intent to dominate the world, 304–5 Luna (Lunik) probes, 211, 271, 473n Mir space station, 359–60, 362, 522n missile defense program, 250, 252 political purges, 266 rocket development, 262, 263–64, 269, 486–87n, 490n satellite development, 262, 264, 268 science education in, 270 Soviet Star Wars (Skif and Kaskad), 359–60, 522n space program in 1980s, 359–61 US–Soviet cooperation in space, 357 Venera probes, 211 vilification by the West, 265 see also Sputnik Soyuz, 357, 363, 370, 372, 389, 521n space control, 157, 396, 530–31nn space debris from asteroid deflection, 255 monitoring by Sapphire satellite, 354 overview of space junk, 237–38 from satellite destruction, 3, 32, 235, 258, 393 “Star Drek” (Maher), 392 United Nations concerns about, 260, 486n space diplomacy, 260–61, 312–13, 531n space economy worldwide, overview, 349–50, 518n Space Foundation charter of, 15 National Space Symposium, 16–20, 24–25, 26, 414n, 415n, 417n Space Foundation Index, 15–16 Space Report: The Authoritative Guide to Global Space Activity, The, 15, 21, 510n, 520n Space Technology and Investment Forum, 414n Strategic Space Symposium, 414n Space Handbook, The (Buchheim), 248 Space Operations: Air Force Doctrine Document, 297, 321, 324, 503n “Space Pearl Harbor,” 12, 393, 411n space power China and, 5, 26, 32–33, 318–19, 372–73 competition and, 324–25 European approach to, 325–30 in first Gulf War, 330–36, 340–44 Five D’s: deception, disruption, denial, degradation, and destruction, 322 in future wars, 348–49 in Iraq War, 344–48 Kennedy’s strategy, 319–20 leadership and, 318, 323–25 nature of, 317–18, 379–80 and space economy, 349–56 see also space superiority space programs of various countries, 32 see also specific countries Space Report: The Authoritative Guide to Global Space Activity, The (Space Foundation), 15, 21 space science, links to military technology, 20–21 Space Security Index, 397 space shuttle Challenger disaster, 357 shrinking workforce, 27 termination of program, 27, 363, 370 viewed as possible ASAT, 258 space superiority, 236–37, 302, 321–22, 324, 366, 396, 479n, 530–31nn see also space power Space Surveillance Network, 238 Space Technology and Investment Forum, 414n space war cyberwar and, 235 Gulf War as first space war, 330–31 preparing plans for, 235–36, 238, 321–22, 478n remote possibility of, 312, 349, 392–96 satellites as potential targets, 235, 257 Spacewatch debate, 251–52 space weapons, 256–60, 286, 297–301, 312–13, 397, 485n Space Weapons Earth Wars, 297–301, 504n space weather, 160–61 SpaceX, 21, 300, 337 Spain Treaty of Saragossa, 88 Treaty of Tordesillas, 88 Twelve Years’ Truce with Netherlands, 104, 107 special theory of relativity, 218, 336 spectacle lenses, 102, 442n spectroscopy, overview and history, 140, 144–48 Spektr-RG orbital X-ray observatory, 364 Spencer, Percy, 189 sphaera of Posidonius, 422n Spinola, Ambrogio, 107 Spitzer, Lyman, 262, 487n Spitzer Space Telescope (NASA), 199, 487n SPOT, 343, 344 Sputnik booster rocket, 32–33, 210, 237, 269, 271 and “freedom of space” issue, 268–69, 301, 505n launch date, 32, 158, 210, 268, 269 radio transmitter, 33, 269 Sputnik 2, 269, 279 Sputnik 3, 271 tracking by Jodrell Bank, 210 spy satellites, 204–7, 228, 342–45, 471n, 517n see also remote-sensing satellites; specific types Square Kilometre Array, 183 Sri Lanka, 32, 64, 69, 430n Stalin, Josef, 263–64, 266, 282, 303 Standard Inscription of Ashurnasirpal, 33–34, 420n “Star Drek” (Maher), 392 Starsem, 363 stars, twinkling of, 152–54, 300 Star Trek (TV series), 175, 241 Star Wars (movie), 241, 249 static (noise), 177, 178 stealth aircraft albedo and, 197 B-2 stealth bombers, 198, 303, 470n control of reflection, 175, 196 development of, 197–98, 469–70n F-117A stealth fighter, 197, 198, 332, 470n, 514n Operation Desert Storm, 7, 197, 332, 514n Operation Iraqi Freedom, 197 stellar nurseries, 199 Stiglitz, Joseph E., 416n Stone, I.

Rise of the Rocket Girls: The Women Who Propelled Us, From Missiles to the Moon to Mars by Nathalia Holt

Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, British Empire, computer age, cuban missile crisis, Dennis Tito, desegregation, financial independence, Grace Hopper, Isaac Newton, labor-force participation, low earth orbit, Mars Rover, music of the spheres, Neil Armstrong, new economy, operation paperclip, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, space junk, Steve Jobs, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, women in the workforce, Works Progress Administration, Yogi Berra

Not only that, but they’d beaten the Soviets. It was their first win in the space race, and the victory was precious to all of them. Mariner would inch toward the sun before sending out its last signal on January 3, 1963. After that, JPL would lose contact with it forever as it became just another piece of space junk spinning around the sun. While Mariner 2 was sending out its farewell signals, the women watched the Rose Parade on New Year’s Day 1963. One of the floats was a giant planet Venus, constructed in yellow flowers with the words “Venus to Pasadena” written on it in red roses. They watched as a replica Mariner spacecraft, just like the one they built, floated above the big ball of flowers.

…

They attached four large solar panels and a crowning antenna before testing all the systems. Watching the designs come together before their eyes was both thrilling and frightening for the computers. They could never be sure if these creations were headed for greatness, would explode into a million pieces, or would simply become floating space junk. On the evening of November 5, Mariner 3 was ready to go at the former Cape Canaveral, now known as Cape Kennedy. It sat atop the Atlas-Agena rockets on the same launchpad from which Ranger 7 had so recently experienced its success. The team in the control room wasn’t superstitious, but just in case, peanuts were again passed out.

Spacewalker: My Journey in Space and Faith as NASA's Record-Setting Frequent Flyer by Jerry Lynn Ross, John Norberg

Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Boeing 747, Charles Lindbergh, Gene Kranz, glass ceiling, low earth orbit, Neil Armstrong, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, space junk, Ted Sorensen

There are a lot of industrial plants in the area, and there was an incredibly bright flare burning at one of the plants that really caught my attention. As we passed on across the central US, over Detroit, and into Canada, I could still look back at Houston and see that flare. We did not see any flying saucers, no aliens, and no UFOs, but I did see several meteorites and pieces of space junk burning up as they entered the Earth’s atmosphere underneath us. On my first mission we had two spacewalks scheduled, but before we got to them we had a lot of other work to complete. Using Atlantis’s computers and control panels in the aft flight deck, Woody and I launched three communications satellites from the payload bay.

…

In less than a minute the orders came from Houston to Steve: “Why don’t you send Jerry and Jay downstairs to get ready for an EVA.” This was going to be my third spacewalk and my first unplanned EVA. I was a little nervous. If we couldn’t fix the $670 million Observatory, we would have to deploy a very large and very expensive piece of space junk. Once Jay and I were outside the air lock, I asked Linda to move the Observatory down and closer to the starboard (right) side of the payload bay. Linda operated the arm to bring the satellite into position. Then I looked for a path so I could move to where the antenna boom was mounted. The satellite’s large propellant tanks were right in front of me, and I knew I had to be very careful not to rupture them or to do any damage to the satellite while moving around.

The Zenith Angle by Bruce Sterling

airport security, Burning Man, cuban missile crisis, digital map, Dr. Strangelove, glass ceiling, Grace Hopper, half of the world's population has never made a phone call, information security, Iridium satellite, Larry Ellison, market bubble, military-industrial complex, new economy, off-the-grid, packet switching, pirate software, profit motive, RFID, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, Ronald Reagan, satellite internet, Silicon Valley, space junk, Steve Jobs, systems thinking, thinkpad, Y2K

Van could handle that question. “That’s BUMPER, your space-junk debris collision program. I looked at BUMPER, too. BUMPER has an unexamined assumption in its design specs. BUMPER assumes that debris cannot intercept a spacecraft from more than ten degrees above or below a plane tangent to the Earth normal.” Wessler scratched the back of his neck. “Of course. Otherwise that debris would fall right into the Earth’s atmosphere and burn up immediately.” “No,” said Van. “Not if the debris were coming off of the spacecraft itself. Not big chunks of space junk, not yet. But a fine haze of debris. Ionized. Ablated.

Affluenza: The All-Consuming Epidemic by John de Graaf, David Wann, Thomas H Naylor, David Horsey

Abraham Maslow, big-box store, carbon tax, classic study, Community Supported Agriculture, Corrections Corporation of America, Dennis Tito, disinformation, Donald Trump, Exxon Valdez, financial independence, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, full employment, God and Mammon, greed is good, income inequality, informal economy, intentional community, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, It's morning again in America, junk bonds, low interest rates, Mark Shuttleworth, McMansion, medical malpractice, new economy, PalmPilot, Paradox of Choice, Peter Calthorpe, planned obsolescence, Ralph Nader, Ray Oldenburg, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, single-payer health, space junk, SpaceShipOne, systems thinking, The Great Good Place, trade route, upwardly mobile, Yogi Berra, young professional

More than seven million pounds of spaceship pieces are hurtling around the planet at 22,000 miles an hour. At that speed, a piece of space debris the size of a small marble has the kinetic energy of a 400-pound boulder dropped from a hundred feet. To get out beyond the hazards of Earth’s space clutter, future astronauts may spend much of their time dodging bullets of space junk. Meanwhile, back on Earth, space-junk collectors like Jim Bernath of British Columbia anxiously await the descent of more debris, to add to their collections. Bernath already owns chunks of comets and bits of the Canadarm, a device built to retrieve satellites. He’s especially hopeful that a piece of the junked MIR space station will fall somewhere in Canada—possibly right into his own backyard.5 ANALYZING THE AMERICAN DREAM: WHERE CLUTTER COMES FROM America’s 111 million households—the authors’ among them—contain and consume more stuff than all other households throughout history, put together.

Remix by John Courtenay Grimwood

clean water, delayed gratification, double helix, fear of failure, haute couture, Herbert Marcuse, Kickstarter, linked data, space junk

Brother Michael was waiting for her, sitting in a huge steel chair below the altar. Steel pillars rose to a crystal ceiling and the whole dark sky was revealed above his head, so that from where she stood in the Otis doorway LizAlec could see all the way through to eternity. If eternity was what was really out there beyond the dust and the space junk. She left the crystalMeth-fuelled cosmic ramblings to Fixx. “You wanted to see me?” LizAlec demanded, staring at the seated man. No way was she praying with him. She’d decided that before the lift even blasted off from her level. The man didn’t answer. Instead, he just clicked his fingers twice and the lift door shut behind her, vanishing down the spindle with a low hiss.

…

“Sure,” she said glibly, “it’s yours.” The boy nodded and walked over to the nearest flatscreen. Running his fingers over its flickering surface he woke an icon called lasso and watched as a cartoon drone navigated slow circles around a cartoon dustbin, wrapping it in monofilament. “Salvage,” the boy explained. “Space junk. You’d be ‘mazed how much there is out here.” Leon knew, it was his ship. Well, seventeen per cent of it was and the figure was rising. Jude had put up the guarantee, but then that was what mothers were for, and he’d never missed a payment. Didn’t intend to, either. All that other shit was just stuff he’d told the other two.

Bringing Columbia Home: The Untold Story of a Lost Space Shuttle and Her Crew by Michael Leinbach, Jonathan H. Ward

Apollo 13, back-to-the-land, low earth orbit, Maui Hawaii, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, restrictive zoning, space junk

The analysts noticed that another object was in the same orbit as Columbia beginning on the second day of the mission. After refining the radar data, the analysts determined that a slow-moving object, about the size of a laptop computer, gradually drifted away from the shuttle. Its slow motion implied that it was probably not a piece of space junk or a meteor. Further tests showed that the radar properties of the object were a close match for a piece of RCC panel—possibly part of the wing’s leading edge. It appeared to separate from the shuttle after several thruster firings that changed Columbia’s orbital orientation. Whatever it was, the object reentered the Earth’s atmosphere and burned up on January 20, twelve days before the end of Columbia’s mission.

…

Robert Crippen, remarks at the KSC Columbia Memorial Service, February 7, 2003, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ubYGeGU8jOo. 35. FEMA, “FEMA Updates Search, Find, and Secure Activities for Columbia Investigation,” news release 3171-13, February 7, 2003. 36. Pat Oden email, February 8, 2003. 37. Interview with Larry Ostarly. 38. Interview with Scott Thurston. 39. “NASA Studies Possibility of Space Junk Role,” Florida Today, February 6, 2003, 2S. 40. Mike Leinbach believes that perhaps the foam strike on the wing displaced an RCC panel on Columbia’s wing by compromising its support structure and pushing it back into the cavity behind the leading edge. From there, it could have eventually broken off due to thermal expansion and contraction as the shuttle moved back and forth between orbital day and night.

Visual Thinking: The Hidden Gifts of People Who Think in Pictures, Patterns, and Abstractions by Temple Grandin, Ph.D.

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, 3D printing, a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, air gap, Albert Einstein, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, Apollo 11, Apple II, ASML, Asperger Syndrome, autism spectrum disorder, autonomous vehicles, Black Lives Matter, Boeing 737 MAX, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, clean water, cloud computing, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, coronavirus, cotton gin, COVID-19, defense in depth, Drosophila, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, GPT-3, Gregor Mendel, Greta Thunberg, hallucination problem, helicopter parent, income inequality, industrial robot, invention of movable type, Isaac Newton, James Webb Space Telescope, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Jony Ive, language acquisition, longitudinal study, Mark Zuckerberg, Mars Rover, meta-analysis, Neil Armstrong, neurotypical, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, phenotype, ransomware, replication crisis, Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, Robert X Cringely, Saturday Night Live, self-driving car, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Skinner box, space junk, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Tacoma Narrows Bridge, TaskRabbit, theory of mind, TikTok, twin studies, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, US Airways Flight 1549, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, web application, William Langewiesche, Y Combinator

Threading the ropes in loops through the carabiners reminded him of the long strands of DNA connecting the chromosomes. Pure visual connection. It was like the string on a bolo tie or the multiple loops that I embroidered to make daisies in third grade. According to Raffi Khatchadourian, in a New Yorker article titled “The Elusive Peril of Space Junk,” astronauts on a spacewalk were horrified to find that the Hubble Space Telescope’s cylindrical surface had been pockmarked by tiny pieces of debris, the way sand on a highway will pit your truck. Astronaut Drew Feustel said, “A fleck could come from anywhere, any time.” A satellite research project known as RemoveDEBRIS was launched to develop technologies to combat interstellar debris.

…

Cytokine and Anti-Cytokine Interventions.” Autoimmunity Reviews (July 2020): 102567. Jensen, A. R. “Most Adults Know More Than 42,000 Words.” Frontiers, August 16, 2016. Keogh, R., and J. Pearson. “The Blind Mind: No Sensory Visual Imagery in Aphantasia.” Cortex 105 (2018): 53–60. Khatchadourian, R. “The Elusive Peril of Space Junk.” The New Yorker, September 21, 2020. Khatchadourian, R. “The Trash Nebula.” New Yorker, September 28, 2020. Koć-Januchta, M., et al. “Visualizers versus Verbalizers: Effects of Cognitive Style on Learning with Texts and Pictures.” Computers in Human Behavior 68 (2017): 170–79. doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2016.11.028.

Wasteland: The Dirty Truth About What We Throw Away, Where It Goes, and Why It Matters by Oliver Franklin-Wallis

air freight, airport security, Anthropocene, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, barriers to entry, big-box store, bitcoin, British Empire, carbon footprint, circular economy, clean water, climate anxiety, coronavirus, COVID-19, Crossrail, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, Elon Musk, epigenetics, Ford Model T, fulfillment center, global pandemic, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, John Snow's cholera map, Kintsugi, lockdown, meta-analysis, microplastics / micro fibres, oil shale / tar sands, planned obsolescence, refrigerator car, sharing economy, social distancing, space junk, Suez canal 1869, Tim Cook: Apple

‘Microplastics and synthetic particles ingested by deep-sea amphipods in six of the deepest marine ecosystems on Earth’, Royal Society Open Science 6(3), 2019: DOI: 10.1098/rsos.180667 3 United Nations Environment Programme, From Pollution to Solution: A Global Assessment of Marine Litter and Plastic Pollution, 2021. 4 Plastic Pollution Coalition, ‘New Research Shows The Great Pacific Garbage Patch is 3 Times The Size of France’, 2018: https://www.plasticpollutioncoalition.org/blog/2018/3/23/new-research-shows-the-great-pacific-garbage-patch-is-3-times-the-size-of-france 5 Raffi Khatchadourian, ‘The Elusive Peril Of Space Junk’, New Yorker, 21/09/2020: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/09/28/the-elusive-peril-of-space-junk 6 S. Kaza, L. Yao, P. Bhada-Tata and F. Van Woerden, ‘What A Waste 2.0: A Global Snapshot of Solid Waste Management to 2050’, The World Bank (2018): DOI: 10.1596/978-1-4648-1329-0 7 Ibid. 8 Sandra Laville and Matthew Taylor, ‘A million bottles a minute: world’s plastic binge “as dangerous as climate change”’, The Guardian, 28/06/2017: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/jun/28/a-million-a-minute-worlds-plastic-bottle-binge-as-dangerous-as-climate-change 9 Tik Root, ‘Cigarette butts are toxic plastic pollution.

Distrust That Particular Flavor by William Gibson

AltaVista, Alvin Toffler, Bletchley Park, British Empire, cognitive dissonance, cuban missile crisis, disinformation, Disneyland with the Death Penalty, edge city, Future Shock, imposter syndrome, informal economy, Joi Ito, means of production, megastructure, military-industrial complex, Neal Stephenson, pattern recognition, proxy bid, restrictive zoning, Snow Crash, space junk, technological determinism, telepresence, Vannevar Bush, Whole Earth Catalog

The techno-cultural suppleness that gives us Mobile Girls today is the result of a traumatic and ongoing temporal dislocation that began when the Japanese, emerging in the 1860s from a very long period of deep cultural isolation, sent a posse of bright young noblemen off to England. These young men returned bearing word of an alien technological culture they must have found as marvelous, as disconcerting, as we might find the products of reverse-engineered Roswell space junk. These Modern Boys, as the techno-cult they spawned came popularly to be known, somehow induced the nation of Japan to swallow whole the entirety of the Industrial Revolution. The resulting spasms were violent, painful, and probably inconceivably disorienting. The Japanese bought the entire train set: clock-time, steam railroads, electric telegraphy, western medical advances.

Ghost Fleet: A Novel of the Next World War by P. W. Singer, August Cole

3D printing, Admiral Zheng, air gap, augmented reality, British Empire, digital map, energy security, Firefox, glass ceiling, global reserve currency, Google Earth, Google Glasses, IFF: identification friend or foe, Just-in-time delivery, low earth orbit, Maui Hawaii, military-industrial complex, MITM: man-in-the-middle, new economy, old-boy network, operational security, RAND corporation, reserve currency, RFID, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, space junk, stealth mode startup, three-masted sailing ship, trade route, Virgin Galactic, Wall-E, We are Anonymous. We are Legion, WikiLeaks, zero day, zero-sum game

Chang wanted to shout. All the targets have been serviced! The only real threat they had faced came from a U.S. Air Force jet — an F-15, Huan said later, flying at its maximum altitude — that had fired an antisatellite missile at the station. The Tiangong’s laser-defense system turned the missile into more space junk and would have lased the plane if it hadn’t had some kind of high-altitude mechanical failure first. The worst part about that action was that it was all automated. Chang wanted his son to think he was a hero, but the onboard systems had handled the targeting while Chang slept. He ate another mooncake and gazed longingly down at the blue Pacific.

…

This part of space is going to light up as the American ASAT missiles start knocking down the Chinese and Russian birds. Then they’ll try to launch their satellites, and the Directorate will do the same. With no one commanding space, each side will just knock the other’s satellites down as fast as they’re launched. Pretty soon any orbit above the Pacific is going to be one big cloud of space junk.” “Makes you wish you worked for someone who had the foresight to invest in the rocket-fuel business,” said Cavendish, starting to calculate a new set of gains. “To the Tallyho, then! Mr. Tick, are you up for it?” “I’m feeling no pain, sir,” said Tick. The commando’s forehead was swollen and his eyes were bloodshot.

50 Future Ideas You Really Need to Know by Richard Watson

23andMe, 3D printing, access to a mobile phone, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, BRICs, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, carbon credits, Charles Babbage, clean water, cloud computing, collaborative consumption, computer age, computer vision, crowdsourcing, dark matter, dematerialisation, Dennis Tito, digital Maoism, digital map, digital nomad, driverless car, Elon Musk, energy security, Eyjafjallajökull, failed state, Ford Model T, future of work, Future Shock, gamification, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, germ theory of disease, global pandemic, happiness index / gross national happiness, Higgs boson, high-speed rail, hive mind, hydrogen economy, Internet of things, Jaron Lanier, life extension, Mark Shuttleworth, Marshall McLuhan, megacity, natural language processing, Neil Armstrong, Network effects, new economy, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, pattern recognition, peak oil, personalized medicine, phenotype, precision agriculture, private spaceflight, profit maximization, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Richard Florida, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, self-driving car, semantic web, Skype, smart cities, smart meter, smart transportation, space junk, statistical model, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, strong AI, Stuxnet, supervolcano, synthetic biology, tech billionaire, telepresence, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Malthus, Turing test, urban decay, Vernor Vinge, Virgin Galactic, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, web application, women in the workforce, working-age population, young professional

There’s no air in space either, so the solar radiation is not being filtered by atmospheric gases. And the system produces no pollution. Putting collecting dishes into space would obviously be a mammoth task, but we have done it already on a very small scale. There’s also the issue of maintenance. Space is not a benign environment, and equipment will get damaged from rocks and manmade space junk, so how will we repair it? Robots permanently stationed in space probably. Likewise how can we beam the energy back to Earth without losing energy in transmission? There’s the difficulty of keeping the space-based energy beams locked onto the rectifying antennas (or rectennas) connected to the receiving stations back on Earth.

The Cardinal of the Kremlin by Tom Clancy

active measures, airport security, cuban missile crisis, false flag, invisible hand, low earth orbit, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, space junk, Stephen Hawking, Strategic Defense Initiative

The camera system was put in the MTI-mode. A computer that registered all the energy sources the telescope found began to search only for targets that were moving. The technicians on the screens watched as the Moving-Target Indicator rapidly eliminated the stars and began to find a few low-altitude satellites and fragments of orbiting space junk. The camera system was sensitive enough to detect the heat of a human body at a range of one thousand miles, and soon they had their choice of targets. The camera locked on them one by one and made its photographic images in digital code on computer tape. Though mainly a practice drill, this data would automatically be forwarded to NORAD, where it would update the register of information of orbiting objects.

…

The solar cells arrayed on the body of the satellite-which were designed to absorb light energy-appeared to be burned off entirely. On closer inspection, the entire satellite body was distorted from the energy that had blasted it. Pokryshkin nodded, but his expression hadn't changed. "We were supposed to have chopped a hole right through it. If we can do that, it would look as though a piece of orbiting space junk had impacted the satellite. That's the kind of energy concentration we were looking for." "But you can now destroy any American satellite you wish!" "Bright Star wasn't built to destroy satellites, Colonel. We can already do that easily enough." And Bondarenko got the message. Bright Star had, in fact, been built for that specific purpose, but the power breakthrough that had justified the funding for the installation exceeded expectations by a factor of four, and Pokryshkin wanted to make two leaps at once, to demonstrate an antisatellite capability and a system that could be adapted to ballistic-missile defense.

Chasing New Horizons: Inside the Epic First Mission to Pluto by Alan Stern, David Grinspoon

Apollo 11, Apollo 13, crowdsourcing, Dava Sobel, delayed gratification, four colour theorem, Kuiper Belt, Mars Rover, Neil Armstrong, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, Pluto: dwarf planet, space junk, SpaceShipOne

The second big setback came just months later, in August 1993, when NASA’s Mars Observer spacecraft blew up three days before it was to fire its engine to go into orbit around the red planet. This orbiter had been conceived as NASA’s triumphant return to Mars, ending a long hiatus since the Vikings, which were launched in 1975, but now it had become space junk orbiting the Sun. Goldin’s response to the Mars Observer failure was typically bold: he started an entirely new program of multiple spacecraft to be sent to Mars, replacing the lost science and doing much more, with a whole series of missions to be launched over many years. He would use this new Mars program to implement his “faster, better, cheaper” philosophy, investing less in testing and redundancy, and accepting more risk as a trade-off against more-frequent missions.

The Water Will Come: Rising Seas, Sinking Cities, and the Remaking of the Civilized World by Jeff Goodell

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Airbnb, Anthropocene, carbon footprint, centre right, clean water, climate change refugee, creative destruction, data science, desegregation, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, Elon Musk, failed state, fixed income, Frank Gehry, global pandemic, Google Earth, Higgs boson, illegal immigration, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Large Hadron Collider, megacity, Murano, Venice glass, negative emissions, New Urbanism, ocean acidification, Paris climate accords, Pearl River Delta, Peter Thiel, planetary scale, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Florida, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, smart cities, South China Sea, space junk, urban planning, urban renewal, wikimedia commons

In 2008, when a storm surge flooded the base and destroyed all the freshwater supplies on the island, the military responded with expensive desalination machines and heavy-duty barriers made of a fortified granite commonly called riprap. The Pentagon is apparently feeling confident enough about these fortifications to invest $1 billion in a new radar installation on the atoll designed to help satellites and astronauts avoid colliding with space junk as they orbit the Earth. “It is a different world out on the base,” one Marshall Islander who works at the test site told me. “It is a place where you feel safe.” Outside the base, there are only sand and crumbling seawalls and water as far as you can see. The questions that view provokes in the Marshallese are elemental: How long can I stay?

Rocket Billionaires: Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and the New Space Race by Tim Fernholz

Amazon Web Services, Apollo 13, autonomous vehicles, business climate, Charles Lindbergh, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, Colonization of Mars, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, deep learning, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, fail fast, fulfillment center, Gene Kranz, high net worth, high-speed rail, Iridium satellite, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, Kim Stanley Robinson, Kwajalein Atoll, low earth orbit, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mars Society, Masayoshi Son, megaproject, military-industrial complex, minimum viable product, multiplanetary species, mutually assured destruction, Neal Stephenson, Neil Armstrong, new economy, no-fly zone, nuclear paranoia, paypal mafia, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Thiel, pets.com, planetary scale, private spaceflight, profit maximization, RAND corporation, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, Ronald Reagan, satellite internet, Scaled Composites, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, SoftBank, sovereign wealth fund, space junk, SpaceShipOne, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Strategic Defense Initiative, trade route, undersea cable, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, VTOL, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, X Prize, Y2K

“You have goals, and then you have engineering reality,” Kathy Lueders, the respected NASA manager in charge of the Commercial Crew program, told me. The biggest problem was micrometeoroids and orbital debris from old spacecraft. When the shuttle maneuvered in space, it always flew backward—engine first—to protect the crew; a minuscule piece of space junk impacting at orbital velocity could threaten even a well-protected spacecraft. To make that one-in-a-thousand standard, Lueders told me, “you would probably have to have a spacecraft that had so much tile on it that you would never get it off the ground.” The Constellation program was able to reach a loss-of-crew metric of one in 270, and even that was “really, really tough.”

The Moon: A History for the Future by Oliver Morton

Anthropocene, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Charles Lindbergh, commoditize, Dava Sobel, Donald Trump, Easter island, Elon Musk, facts on the ground, gravity well, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Johannes Kepler, Late Heavy Bombardment, low earth orbit, Mark Zuckerberg, Mars Society, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, multiplanetary species, Neal Stephenson, Neil Armstrong, Norman Mailer, Pierre-Simon Laplace, planetary scale, Pluto: dwarf planet, plutocrats, private spaceflight, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, space junk, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Stewart Brand, Strategic Defense Initiative, Ted Nordhaus, UNCLOS, Virgin Galactic, Whole Earth Catalog, X Prize

There is a story that a LM fuel tank unwisely tapped with a ball-point pen during outdoor testing resulted in that pen being embedded in a fence post some way away, along with some of the unwise tapping finger. During development, the fuel and oxidizer lines will not stop leaking. When Grumman ships the first purportedly flight-ready LM down to Cape Kennedy, it is rejected as not fit for the launch pad let alone for space: “Junk. Garbage.” Trying to solve the problems makes the third LM so late to the Cape that there is not enough time to ready it for its scheduled flight.7 What was expected to be a routine vacuum test for the fifth LM goes catastrophically wrong when one of the windows explodes. The windows are crucial.

Beyond: Our Future in Space by Chris Impey

3D printing, Admiral Zheng, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, AltaVista, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Berlin Wall, Biosphere 2, Buckminster Fuller, built by the lowest bidder, butterfly effect, California gold rush, carbon-based life, Charles Lindbergh, Colonization of Mars, cosmic abundance, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, dark matter, Dennis Tito, discovery of DNA, Doomsday Clock, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Eratosthenes, Great Leap Forward, Haight Ashbury, Hans Moravec, Hyperloop, I think there is a world market for maybe five computers, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, Kickstarter, Kim Stanley Robinson, Late Heavy Bombardment, life extension, low earth orbit, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Andreessen, Mars Rover, Mars Society, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, Neal Stephenson, Neil Armstrong, Nick Bostrom, ocean acidification, Oculus Rift, operation paperclip, out of africa, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, phenotype, private spaceflight, purchasing power parity, quantum entanglement, radical life extension, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, risk tolerance, Rubik’s Cube, Scaled Composites, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Searching for Interstellar Communications, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, Skype, Snow Crash, space junk, SpaceShipOne, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, supervolcano, technological singularity, telepresence, telerobotics, the medium is the message, the scientific method, theory of mind, There's no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home - Ken Olsen, Virgin Galactic, VTOL, wikimedia commons, world market for maybe five computers, X Prize, Yogi Berra

A climber on a space-elevator cable would move more slowly on each successive part of the cable onto which it moved. This acts as a deflection or a sideways drag on the cable. The effect works in the opposite direction for a descent of the cable. In practice, this Coriolis force limits the speed at which a cable can be ascended. Finally, there are risks from meteorites and from the 6,000 tons of space junk orbiting the Earth in its potential path, plus vulnerability of such a large target to a terrorist attack. One elevator isn’t very efficient. There would have to be at least one for going up and one for going down. To avoid nasty oscillations, the speed might have to be kept to around 100 mph, making the journey take several weeks.

Soonish: Ten Emerging Technologies That'll Improve And/or Ruin Everything by Kelly Weinersmith, Zach Weinersmith

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, 23andMe, 3D printing, Airbnb, Alvin Roth, Apollo 11, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, connected car, CRISPR, data science, disinformation, double helix, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Google Glasses, hydraulic fracturing, industrial robot, information asymmetry, ITER tokamak, Kickstarter, low earth orbit, market design, megaproject, megastructure, microbiome, moral hazard, multiplanetary species, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, personalized medicine, placebo effect, printed gun, Project Plowshare, QR code, Schrödinger's Cat, self-driving car, Skype, space junk, stem cell, synthetic biology, Tunguska event, Virgin Galactic

If the rope is weak but light, it’ll snap the first time it encounters rough conditions, like the high atmospheric winds of Earth. Supposing you can build the cable, the last part is your base station down on Earth. Most proposals call for a moveable sea platform. This is because a moveable platform can maneuver away from bad weather and can adjust the position of the cable in order to avoid space junk higher up. Also, out at sea there is no law. Well, okay, there’s some law. In fact, it’s called the Law of the Sea. But none of it pertains to cables going to space. The laws that’ll govern a space elevator are actually pretty important. It was our sense that most scientists who work on this stuff would like the space elevator, if it’s ever built, to be something that no single nation controls.

The Human Age: The World Shaped by Us by Diane Ackerman

23andMe, 3D printing, additive manufacturing, airport security, Albert Einstein, Anthropocene, augmented reality, back-to-the-land, carbon footprint, clean water, climate change refugee, dark matter, dematerialisation, digital divide, double helix, Drosophila, epigenetics, Google Earth, Google Glasses, haute cuisine, Higgs boson, hindcast, Internet of things, Lewis Mumford, Loebner Prize, Louis Pasteur, Masdar, mass immigration, Medieval Warm Period, megacity, microbiome, mirror neurons, Neil Armstrong, Nick Bostrom, nuclear winter, ocean acidification, personalized medicine, phenotype, Ray Kurzweil, refrigerator car, rewilding, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, SETI@home, skunkworks, Skype, space junk, stem cell, Stewart Brand, synthetic biology, TED Talk, the High Line, theory of mind, urban planning, urban renewal, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog

We already harness its rays to power our whims, a feat the gods of ancient mythology would envy. Like supreme beings, we now are present everywhere and in everything. We’ve colonized or left our fingerprints on every inch of the planet, from the ocean sediment to the exosphere, the outermost fringe of atmosphere where molecules escape into space, junk careens, and satellites orbit. Nearly all of the wonders we identify with modern life emerged in just the past two centuries, and over the past couple of decades, like a giant boulder racing ahead of a landslide, the human adventure has accelerated at an especially mind-bending pace. Every day, we’re more at the helm, navigating from outer space to the inner terraces of body and brain.

The Caryatids by Bruce Sterling

bread and circuses, carbon footprint, clean water, commons-based peer production, failed state, impulse control, machine translation, megaproject, negative equity, new economy, no-fly zone, nuclear winter, precautionary principle, semantic web, sexual politics, social software, space junk, starchitect, stem cell, supervolcano, urban renewal, Whole Earth Review

But—some global pundit is absolutely sure to invade that facility, even if it’s just to float around in free fall making snarky comments about the bad industrial design.” “I would go up there,” said Lionel. “I love orbit.” “Oh, I’m definitely going up there, if we somehow survive down here. I’m going to retrieve the body of my dear correspondent, Yelisaveta Mihajlovic. I wouldn’t dream of having that lady jettisoned into outer space … I don’t care how much space junk there is up there already; I swear she won’t become part of it.” Sonja sat heavily on the comfortless floor of the desert. It had never occurred to Sonja that anyone would go to fetch her mother’s body down to Earth. That concept had not crossed her mind for one instant. She had been blind to that idea.

Amazing Stories of the Space Age by Rod Pyle

Apollo 11, Apollo 13, built by the lowest bidder, centre right, desegregation, Elon Musk, Gene Kranz, James Webb Space Telescope, Jeff Bezos, low earth orbit, Mars Rover, Neil Armstrong, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, Ronald Reagan, space junk, SpaceShipOne, Strategic Defense Initiative, Virgin Galactic

After the Challenger incident, the joints between the SRB segments were redesigned to add another O-ring, and also had a rim-capture feature—basically, rather than allowing the joint to bend open if the booster flexed, it would tighten. This is how it should have been designed in the first place. And there were dangers while in orbit as well. Low Earth orbit, where the shuttle operated, is filled with space junk. Debris from exploded satellites, spent rocket boosters, meteorites, and dozens of other sources, orbit Earth at the same altitudes as the shuttle did and the International Space Station does today. And the numbers are frightening: over 500,000 pieces of space debris are tracked by the air force, and it's estimated that over 170 million bits smaller than a half inch are roaming Earth orbit.8 And it doesn't take much to damage a spacecraft--a piece of detritus the size of a BB carries the destructive punch of a bowling ball traveling at 60 mph.

Bit Rot by Douglas Coupland

3D printing, Airbnb, airport security, bitcoin, Burning Man, delayed gratification, dematerialisation, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Google Glasses, Guggenheim Bilbao, index card, jimmy wales, junk bonds, Lyft, Marshall McLuhan, Maui Hawaii, McJob, Menlo Park, nuclear paranoia, Oklahoma City bombing, Pepto Bismol, pre–internet, Ray Kurzweil, Sand Hill Road, Silicon Valley, Skype, space junk, Stanford marshmallow experiment, tech worker, Ted Kaczynski, TED Talk, The Future of Employment, uber lyft, young professional

It enforces confrontation between people who come to the country to do nothing, and those locals who now have nothing to do—which has to be galling. But remember, Greece is just now reaching a place where we’re all going to be sooner or later, a world of massive labour obsolescence where unless you actually know how to do something useful, you’ll become one more piece of middle-class space junk. Don’t forget, while people in the West see the erosion of the middle class as downward mobility, for most of the world, getting online with Android devices to comparison shop for Martha Stewart towels is proof positive they’re on the way up. It’s just that everyone on Earth is reaching a new middle, and we’re still unclear where that middle will be and what it will look and feel like.

The Power of Geography: Ten Maps That Reveal the Future of Our World by Tim Marshall

Apollo 11, Ayatollah Khomeini, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, carbon footprint, centre right, clean water, coronavirus, COVID-19, David Sedaris, disinformation, Donald Trump, drone strike, Elon Musk, European colonialism, failed state, glass ceiling, global pandemic, Great Leap Forward, Jeff Bezos, Johannes Kepler, low earth orbit, Malacca Straits, means of production, megaproject, Mikhail Gorbachev, mutually assured destruction, Neil Armstrong, new economy, New Urbanism, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, space junk, Strategic Defense Initiative, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, trade route, uranium enrichment, urban planning, women in the workforce

Conflict in Earth Space creates another problem: a huge amount of debris which would hurtle around in orbit, smashing into the satellite infrastructure of all countries and devastating the global economy. This is something that is already a risk given that there are currently 3,000 dead satellites and 34,000 pieces of space junk at least 10 centimetres in size, and many smaller, orbiting the planet. Some countries are trying to address the problem. If you’ve been to Japan you will have noticed the absence of something – litter. Japan’s SKY Perfect Corporation and the Japanese government have been working on a satellite to remove space debris with lasers that will push bits of debris into the Earth’s atmosphere, where they will burn up.

The Deepest Map by Laura Trethewey

9 dash line, airport security, Anthropocene, Apollo 11, circular economy, clean tech, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, digital map, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Exxon Valdez, gentrification, global pandemic, high net worth, hive mind, Jeff Bezos, job automation, low earth orbit, Marc Benioff, microplastics / micro fibres, Neil Armstrong, Salesforce, Scramble for Africa, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, space junk, sparse data, TED Talk, UNCLOS, UNCLOS

He piloted the submersible over to investigate, and his lights illuminated what looked like a cracked oil drum. Someone had been here before, or at least his trash had. Victor wrinkled his nose in disgust, like a hiker who finds his mountain peak sullied by discarded candy wrappers and beer cans. Here is yet another reason we’re drawn to outer space: there are no humans there. Apart from the space junk orbiting Earth, the universe is devoid of other people and all their baggage (and garbage). We can imagine entire untouched extraterrestrial landscapes. The ocean, on the other hand, has long suffered as humanity’s dumping ground. Victor insisted that none of that—the limited outlook, the unimpressive seafloor, the trash—had dampened his enthusiasm for reaching the deepest place in the Atlantic.

Apollo 8: The Thrilling Story of the First Mission to the Moon by Jeffrey Kluger

Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Charles Lindbergh, cuban missile crisis, Gene Kranz, indoor plumbing, Isaac Newton, low earth orbit, Neil Armstrong, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, space junk, white flight

Soon enough they would be able to do that; once the ship was headed in one direction, physics dictated that it would continue moving in that direction no matter which way its nose was pointed. For the moment, though, the more important issue was that the Saturn V’s third stage was still hanging off the back of their service module. The rocket’s final stage had done its job well, but now it was space junk and it had to go. The third stage was connected to the spacecraft by a ring of explosive bolts. The separation maneuver called for the crew to detonate the bolts, then pulse their thrusters to add a few extra feet per second to their speed. That would open a gap between the spacecraft and the third stage.

The Coming Wave: Technology, Power, and the Twenty-First Century's Greatest Dilemma by Mustafa Suleyman

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, 3D printing, active measures, Ada Lovelace, additive manufacturing, agricultural Revolution, AI winter, air gap, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic bias, Alignment Problem, AlphaGo, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Web Services, Anthropocene, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA, ASML, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, barriers to entry, basic income, benefit corporation, Big Tech, biodiversity loss, bioinformatics, Bletchley Park, Blitzscaling, Boston Dynamics, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, ChatGPT, choice architecture, circular economy, classic study, clean tech, cloud computing, commoditize, computer vision, coronavirus, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, creative destruction, CRISPR, critical race theory, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, data science, decarbonisation, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, Demis Hassabis, disinformation, drone strike, drop ship, dual-use technology, Easter island, Edward Snowden, effective altruism, energy transition, epigenetics, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ernest Rutherford, Extinction Rebellion, facts on the ground, failed state, Fairchild Semiconductor, fear of failure, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, future of work, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, global pandemic, GPT-3, GPT-4, hallucination problem, hive mind, hype cycle, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet Archive, Internet of things, invention of the wheel, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John von Neumann, Joi Ito, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, lab leak, large language model, Law of Accelerating Returns, Lewis Mumford, license plate recognition, lockdown, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, meta-analysis, microcredit, move 37, Mustafa Suleyman, mutually assured destruction, new economy, Nick Bostrom, Nikolai Kondratiev, off grid, OpenAI, paperclip maximiser, personalized medicine, Peter Thiel, planetary scale, plutocrats, precautionary principle, profit motive, prompt engineering, QAnon, quantum entanglement, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, Richard Feynman, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, satellite internet, Silicon Valley, smart cities, South China Sea, space junk, SpaceX Starlink, stealth mode startup, stem cell, Stephen Fry, Steven Levy, strong AI, synthetic biology, tacit knowledge, tail risk, techlash, techno-determinism, technoutopianism, Ted Kaczynski, the long tail, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Thomas Malthus, TikTok, TSMC, Turing test, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, uranium enrichment, warehouse robotics, William MacAskill, working-age population, world market for maybe five computers, zero day

Quite simply, any technology is capable of going wrong, often in ways that directly contradict its original purpose. Think of the way that prescription opioids have created dependence, or how the overuse of antibiotics renders them less effective, or how the proliferation of satellites and debris known as “space junk” imperils spaceflight. As technology proliferates, more people can use it, adapt it, shape it however they like, in chains of causality beyond any individual’s comprehension. As the power of our tools grows exponentially and as access to them rapidly increases, so do the potential harms, an unfolding labyrinth of consequences that no one can fully predict or forestall.

The Last Man on the Moon: Astronaut Eugene Cernan and America's Race in Space by Eugene Cernan, Donald A. Davis

Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Berlin Wall, Charles Lindbergh, Eratosthenes, full employment, Gene Kranz, Isaac Newton, Neil Armstrong, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, space junk, Teledyne, white flight

We had found the elusive Blob in record time, completing the first true assignment of our mission, and were in perfect position, 15 miles below and only 126 miles away. We carefully closed the gap and soon were able to see the flashing strobe and some bright blinks from an unknown source. Nothing was supposed to be doing that. Something was wrong. We maneuvered through a cloud of about a dozen small pieces of space junk that had once been part of the Atlas launch package and had stayed in orbit, flying in peculiar formation with the Blob through the dark sky. Several newspapers ran stories that called the debris “Mysterious UFOs,” and for years thereafter, I would be questioned periodically about my “confirmed” contact with unidentified flying objects and mysterious flashing lights in outer space.

Vertical: The City From Satellites to Bunkers by Stephen Graham

1960s counterculture, Anthropocene, Bandra-Worli Sea Link, Berlin Wall, Boris Johnson, Buckminster Fuller, Buy land – they’re not making it any more, Chelsea Manning, commodity super cycle, creative destruction, Crossrail, deindustrialization, digital capitalism, digital divide, digital map, Dr. Strangelove, drone strike, Edward Glaeser, Edward Snowden, Elisha Otis, energy security, Frank Gehry, gentrification, ghettoisation, Google Earth, Gunnar Myrdal, high net worth, housing crisis, Howard Zinn, illegal immigration, Indoor air pollution, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jane Jacobs, late capitalism, Leo Hollis, Lewis Mumford, low earth orbit, mass immigration, means of production, megacity, megaproject, megastructure, military-industrial complex, moral panic, mutually assured destruction, new economy, New Urbanism, no-fly zone, nuclear winter, oil shale / tar sands, planetary scale, plutocrats, post-industrial society, Project Plowshare, rent control, Richard Florida, Right to Buy, Ronald Reagan, security theater, Skype, South China Sea, space junk, Strategic Defense Initiative, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, trickle-down economics, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, white flight, WikiLeaks, William Langewiesche

– The UK Government’s Satellites Application Catapult There comes a point, as one ascends into the sky from the earth’s surface – and the largely upright human experience of living on it – when the conventions that surround the human experience of the vertical dimension must inevitably break down. At the margins of the earth’s atmosphere and on the threshold of the vast realms of space we enter a world of orbits. At this point we start to encounter the crucial but neglected manufactured environment of satellites and space junk. ‘Verticality pushed to its extreme becomes orbital’, multimedia artist Dario Solman reflects. At such a point ‘the difference between vertical and horizontal ceases to exist’. Such a development brings with it profound and unsettling philosophical challenges for a species that evolved to live upright on terra firma.

Come Fly With Us: NASA's Payload Specialist Program by Melvin Croft, John Youskauskas, Don Thomas

active measures, active transport: walking or cycling, Apollo 13, Berlin Wall, crewed spaceflight, Elon Musk, Gene Kranz, gravity well, Johannes Kepler, Kickstarter, low earth orbit, Neil Armstrong, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, private spaceflight, Ronald Reagan, Scaled Composites, space junk, SpaceShipOne, Strategic Defense Initiative, Virgin Galactic, X Prize, Yom Kippur War

Thus, the payload crew was more than willing to give up their leisure time to work longer hours on the experiments to ensure they came off as planned. Messerschmid felt that the pressure to do the experiments correctly was far greater than the worry of a life-ending accident occurring. Challenger might be struck by a stray meteroid or errant piece of space junk, causing it to depressurize, inviting the vacuum of space into the bodies of the crew, and sending them into paralysis and convulsions within seconds. Their bodies would swell, and their hearts would stop beating shortly thereafter. Their blood pressure would drop to zero, blood would cease to flow, gases and water vapor would spurt out of their mouths and noses, and their bodies would cool slowly.

The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation by Jon Gertner

Albert Einstein, back-to-the-land, Black Swan, business climate, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, Clayton Christensen, complexity theory, corporate governance, cuban missile crisis, Dennis Ritchie, Edward Thorp, Fairchild Semiconductor, Henry Singleton, horn antenna, Hush-A-Phone, information retrieval, invention of the telephone, James Watt: steam engine, Karl Jansky, Ken Thompson, knowledge economy, Leonard Kleinrock, machine readable, Metcalfe’s law, Nicholas Carr, Norbert Wiener, Picturephone, Richard Feynman, Robert Metcalfe, Russell Ohl, Sand Hill Road, Silicon Valley, Skype, space junk, Steve Jobs, Telecommunications Act of 1996, Teledyne, traveling salesman, undersea cable, uranium enrichment, vertical integration, William Shockley: the traitorous eight

Not far away is a bronze bust of Claude Shannon, rubbing his chin and looking slightly amused. According to the U.S. Space Objects Registry, as of late 2010, Telstar—the first active satellite—is no longer functional. Yet it still orbits the earth. An exquisite machine requiring a year of nonstop work by hundreds of engineers, it is now a rotating piece of space junk. BELL LABS’ most durable contributions were not things that could be touched or seen. Many of the ideas and innovations that came out of the Labs have been subsumed into a global electronic network far larger and more wondrous than existed when Shannon and Pierce agreed, in the late 1940s, that the Bell System was the most complex machine ever created.

SuperBetter by Jane McGonigal

autism spectrum disorder, data science, full employment, game design, job satisfaction, Kickstarter, longitudinal study, meta-analysis, Minecraft, mirror neurons, randomized controlled trial, risk tolerance, social intelligence, space junk, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, TED Talk, theory of mind, traumatic brain injury, ultimatum game, Walter Mischel

Phillip’s cancer was advanced, and he had been given a prognosis of just two to three years. “When I was diagnosed, I had no idea what multiple myeloma was. My doctor explained that it wasn’t something that could be treated with an operation, because it was in my bones, and not a body part. I was shocked. At my age, getting cancer seemed as likely as getting struck by space junk in my kitchen.” Over the next six years, Phillip underwent many rounds of chemotherapy, which he describes as “lonely, challenging, and exhausting.” He hit his lowest point three years into treatment, when he developed glaucoma, from the side effects of one of his medications, and nearly went blind.

Riding Rockets: The Outrageous Tales of a Space Shuttle Astronaut by Mike Mullane

affirmative action, Berlin Wall, blue-collar work, Boeing 747, dark matter, disinformation, Donald Trump, Donner party, Easter island, feminist movement, financial independence, Gene Kranz, invisible hand, Magellanic Cloud, Neil Armstrong, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, Pepto Bismol, placebo effect, Potemkin village, publish or perish, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, space junk, space pen, Stephen Hawking, urban sprawl, Winter of Discontent, your tax dollars at work

The tolerances were exceedingly tight and I finessed the controls with the deliberation of a soldier probing the dirt for a booby trap. The payload, like all satellites, was as delicately constructed as fine crystal. Any mistake that caused a satellite-to-Atlantisimpact could damage a critical component and turn the object into a billion-dollar piece of space junk and win me an open-ended assignment to Thule, Greenland, where I would get to hone new skills as a urinal scrubber. An impact could also foul the payload bay-door closing system, a mistake that could kill us. Needless to say, the other members of the crew were as focused as I was. All went well.

House of Suns by Alastair Reynolds

autonomous vehicles, cosmic microwave background, data acquisition, disinformation, gravity well, megastructure, planetary scale, space junk, sparse data, time dilation

Because he played no part in human affairs, humans eventually forgot about him. There were stories about a thread of ghostly transmissions webbing the Oort, but no one took them any more seriously than a million other myths. When explorers stumbled on one of his elements, they normally assumed it was a piece of space junk from the dawn of the expansion. He sacrificed it anyway. He was incapable of being hurt, or even inconvenienced, by any imaginable human agency. Even the growing power of the Lines caused him no qualms. But the Sun might be a problem. In the decelerated frame of his consciousness, the end of its main sequence lifetime lay only a few thousand subjective years away.

The uplift war by David Brin

Great Leap Forward, machine translation, mass immigration, mutually assured destruction, out of africa, space junk, trade route

Ahead of him, about twenty feet away, dawn’s light showed the edge of a steep dropoff. The sound of rushing water rose from far below. Uh, he thought in bemused wonder at his near demise. Another few meters and I wouldn’t’ve been so thirsty right now. With the rising sun the mountainside across the valley became clearer, revealing smoky, scorched trails where larger pieces of space-junk had come down. So much for old Proconsul, Fiben thought. Seven thousand years of loyal service to half a hundred big-time Galactic races, only to be splattered all over a minor planet by one Fiben Bolger, client of wolflings, semi-skilled militia pilot. What an undignified end for a gallant old warrior.