space chronicles - neil degrasse tyson

[...]... some of Earth’s own life-forms do Space Tweets #3 & #4 Just drove by the huge, 30-ft tall L-A-X letters near the airport – surely visible from orbit Is LA an alien space port? Jan 23, 2010 9:06 AM Last day in LA Like the big LAX letters at airport, the HOLLYWOOD sign is huge Visible from space? Must be where aliens land Jan 28, 2010 2:16 PM The chemical composition of Earth-based life is primarily... Voyager 1 spacecraft shows how underwhelming Earth looks from deep space: a “pale blue dot,” as the American astronomer Carl Sagan called it And that’s generous Without the help of a picture caption, you might not find it at all What would happen if some big-brained aliens from the great beyond scanned the skies with their naturally superb visual organs, further aided by alien state-of-the-art optical... the space race A year later, NASA itself was birthed in a climate of Cold War fears Mere weeks after the Soviets put the first person into orbit, the United States was spooked into creating the Apollo program to the Moon Over that time, the Soviet Union beat us in practically every important measure of space achievement: first spacewalk, longest spacewalk, first woman in space, first docking in space, ... giant, mean aliens: is it all possible? Let’s go up close with Neil deGrasse Tyson, director of the Hayden Planetarium in New York and, like Hawking, an astrophysicist I’ve been fascinated by this since I was a kid, given the fact that there are hundreds of billions of galaxies, with hundreds of millions of stars in each galaxy Neil deGrasse Tyson : Hundreds of billions in each galaxy SG: Hundreds of... there in space when we have pressing problems down here on Earth?” Apparently, the rest of world has no trouble coming up with good answers to this question—even if we can’t Let’s re-ask the question in an illuminating way: “As a fraction of your tax dollar today, what is the total cost of all spaceborne telescopes, planetary probes, the rovers on Mars, the International Space Station, the space shuttle,... you can barely see from a transcontinental jet Space Tweet #2 If Earth were size of a school-room globe, you’d find Shuttle and Space Station orbiting 3/8th of an inch above its surface Apr 19, 2010 5:53 AM Indeed, from Earth orbit—apart from the smoke plumes rising from the oil-field fires in Kuwait at the end of the first Gulf War in 1991, and the green-brown borders between swaths of irrigated and... altogether What happens next? The Russians “threaten” to build massive space platforms equipped to observe all that happens on Earth’s surface This decades-long effort, which begins in 1971 with a series of Salyut (Russian for “salute”) space modules, culminates with space station Mir (Russian for “peace”), the world’s first permanently inhabited space platform, whose assembly began in 1986 Once again, being... Meanwhile, space zealots who do not properly factor the role of war into the spending landscape are delusionally certain that all we need today are risk-taking visionaries like JFK Couple that with the right dose of political will, they contend, and we surely would have been on Mars long ago, with hundreds if not thousands of people living and working in space colonies Princeton space visionary Gerard K O’Neill,... on spaceborne platforms, and there’s a growing interest in space exploration from more than a dozen other countries around the world, including Israel, Iran, Brazil, and Nigeria China is building a new space launch site whose location, just nineteen degrees north of the equator, makes it geographically better for space launches than Cape Canaveral is for the United States This growing community of spaceminded... coherent plan had different consequences for different people As an academic with a long-term view, I focused on Obama’s thirty-year vision for NASA, and I celebrated it But to somebody who wants uninterrupted access to space, in their own country’s launch vehicle, controlled by their own country’s astronauts, any halt to our space access is simply unacceptable It’s worth remembering that during the halt in . 1959–2010 F. Space Budgets: US Government Agencies 2010 G. Space Budget: Global 2010 H. Space Budgets: US and Non-US Governments 2010 Acknowledgments Index EDITOR’S NOTE Back in the mid-1990s, Neil deGrasse. practically every important measure of space achievement: first spacewalk, longest spacewalk, first woman in space, first docking in space, first space station, longest time logged in space. By declaring the. living and working in space colonies. Princeton space visionary Gerard K. O’Neill, among others, imagined all this in place by the year 2000. The opposite of space zealots space curmudgeons—are