History teaches that when big operations falter, small upstarts often rise to the challenge. In the case of NASA, the process may already be at work, and the upstarts are emerging: SpaceX, Blue Origin, Virgin Galactic. Out in the wilds of Las Cruces, New Mexico is building a spaceport. In fact, says Russell Saunders, Jr., the time has come to consider contingency plans. 'Saunders' is a pseudonym for a space scientist who works for a major aerospace organization. His essay appeared this afternoon on the NASA Watch site. Saunders believes NASA is fixated on an iconography that's half a century old, referring back to the spectacular space series that ran in Collier's magazine in the early 1950's. These were glorous, von Braunian visions of enormous rockets and flotillas of spacecraft pushing outward to Mars, but they're an uncomfortable fit with today's realities. Here's what Saunders is talking about: Imagine what the artists and pioneers behind the Colliers vision might have done with...

The news that NASA intends to close its Institute for Advanced Concepts has many in the space community concerned, and Centauri Dreams' comment on the matter was but one of many to fill the Net when the news broke in March. Now, however, there appears to be at least an attempt to keep the Institute alive. People who have had some connection with NIAC are being asked to step in with demonstrated benefits from its activities. That news comes via this post on the Space Elevator Blog, as passed along by Joseph Mahaney. I've just confirmed it with sources inside NIAC. Here are the areas for which contributions are solicited: Subsequent investment by NASA, other government agencies, or the private sector. Intellectual contributions that have resulted in an agency putting resources into its own studies of a concept. For example, prompted by the success of a Phase I or Phase II concept, an agency convenes panels to study the work or otherwise funds studies of its own. Unexpected spin-off...

I wish I had something profound to say about Wally Schirra. But when I think about him, what I get instead are moments. Great moments. I remember watching Schirra's Atlas booster muscling Sigma 7 downrange that day in 1962. A space-struck kid, I thought the astronaut was as cool and unflappable as any man who would ever ride a rocket. His sense of humor was irrepressible, especially in the context of hazardous early space missions. Thus the 'Jingle Bells' moment on the harmonica, and his sighting of the 'UFO' -- Santa Claus and his reindeer. "We have an object, looks like a satellite going from north to south, probably in polar orbit... I see a command module and eight smaller modules in front. The pilot of the command module is wearing a red suit..." Tom Stafford was in on that gag on Gemini 6 (he would later go on to command Apollo 10). I was in college when Apollo 7 flew and recall the squabbles with controllers on the ground. To be fair, Schirra had a cold, a famous one that he...

Bohdan Paczynski, the Princeton astrophysicist who died April 19, was a major contributor to the exoplanet hunt, fine-tuning the techniques used in gravitational microlensing. Coming to Princeton in 1982 after twenty years at Warsaw's Copernicus Astronomical Center, Paczynski understood early on that the bending of light by foreground objects, predicted by Einstein, could be applied to surveying stars in our own galaxy. A star passing directly in front of another can focus the light from the background star, producing a natural lens that allows investigation of objects otherwise impossible to observe. The consortium of scientists that Paczynski led would go on to found the Optical Gravitational Lensing Experiment (OGLE), now active at Chile's Las Campanas Observatory. Says Michael Strauss, a professor of astrophysical sciences and a colleague of Paczynski's: "The next thing Bohdan realized was that when you observe lensing that often, you can do other clever things, such as use it to...

Having had time to decompress from their exhausting Asian trip, Gregory and Elisabeth Benford have revised and enlarged the account of their travels that Centauri Dreams published in late March. The text contains numerous additional insights, but what makes this revision truly stand out from the original post are the photographs, fully seven times the number first published, each illustrating a unique facet of their journey. I've inserted the new Asia Emerging in the archives. Don't miss its unforgettable images and insights into a part of the world that will have much to say about our future on this planet. I told Gregory that my favorite photograph is the one of him at the Raffles Hotel in Singapore, Singapore Sling in hand. Shades of Somerset Maugham...

Philosophia Naturalis #9 has just become available, with numerous links to stories on the Gliese 581 c discovery and intriguing looks at everything from quantum mechanics to gamma ray bursts. Nobody can keep up with all the weblogs out there, which is why a blog 'carnival' like this one is must reading to see how the latest findings play among scientists and laymen alike (this is where I discovered Clifford's Johnson's Asymptotia, itself a sufficient reason to keep reading in hopes of future finds). Hosted this month by Science and Reason, the carnival moves from site to site with each new edition, none of which are to be missed.