The Mandelbear's Musings

Music: Challenger - forty years ago today

Thu, 29 Jan 2026 07:21:49 GMT

The Space Shuttle Challenger disaster was forty years ago today (assuming I get this posted before midnight Seattle time -- it's 8am Thursday here in Den Haag). So I wrote a song: Keep the Dream Alive. It's on the Challenger tape, which is of course long out of print. I also posted it on Mastodon: "So, forty years ago I wrote a song…" - Indieweb.Social.

I think it's one of my better songs -- I should try to sing it more often.

comments

Quote of the Day

Tue, 18 Mar 2025 13:52:31 GMT

From Firefly Aerospace's Blue Ghost lander, via various sources. I'm a little puzzled that I can't find it on Firefly's website; it was apparently originally on the Bird site.

Mission mode change detected, now in Monument Mode
Goodnight friends. After exchanging our final bits of data,
I will hold vigil on this spot in Mare Crisium to watch humanity’s continued journey to the stars.
Here, I will outlast your mightiest rivers, your tallest mountains, and perhaps even your species as we know it.
But it is remarkable that a species might be outlasted by its own ingenuity.
Here lies Blue Ghost, a testament to the team who,
with the loving support of their families and friends,
built and operated this machine and its payloads,
to push the capabilities and knowledge of humanity one small step further.
Per aspera ad astra!
Love, Blue Ghost

(via minoanmiss | Goodbye From The Moon)

comments

The High Frontier

Thu, 12 Aug 2021 00:05:39 GMT

So it seems there's a documentary, released ?last year, called The High Frontier: The Untold Story of Gerard K. O’Neill (page includes trailer). Opening sequence.

Seems to be on iTunes and Google Play. I remember when The High Frontier: Human Colonies in Space came out, in 1976. The year Colleen and I were married. I'd say "good grief!", but...

comments

Done Since 2020-04-12

Sun, 19 Apr 2020 21:51:46 GMT

I may have gone down a few too many rabbit holes this week. And not getting much else done, but at least it gives me a bit of a respite from way too much stress. This is actually not unusual -- it happens a lot these days. I'm not even counting the two I fell into this morning. Several of them started on #filkhaven. One of those was Apollo 13 in Real Time (see last week's s4s), which I kept coming back to and having to get back up to date with. Because real-time. (With a 50-year lag, of course. The commentary track was fascinating.)

The other was the song Gingerbread [YouTube] [bandcamp, with lyrics], by Nancy Kerr. I was listening to the Folk on Foot Festival on Monday, and was grabbed by the line "You are not your grieving". (It'll be an s4s post, either this evening (taking advantage of the ambiguous initial letter) or next week.)

Today's rabbit holes, in case I don't get around to making separate posts for them, started at Computer Scientist Donald Knuth Can’t Stop Telling Stories (which went on to take in his massive organ composition Fantasia Apocalyptica), and Landmark Computer Science Proof Cascades Through Physics and Math.

Thursday Colleen and I went out on the front deck and did some gardening. The weather was perfect for it. I'm not normally a garden person, but she'd been feeling down and I figured we could both use a little time in the sun.

( Notes & links, as usual )

comments

Poem - Round Dance - 2038

Sun, 15 Feb 2015 05:00:20 GMT

Round Dance - 2138

It looks nothing at all like the old pictures.

Every lunar morning the little robot scoop-trucks
Fan out from their bases on the mare and
Scuttle back to where they left off.

They lower their scoops at the edge of the excavation,
Each one eating its fill of the rich lunar dust.
Then they raise their scoops,
Reverse to get clear,
Turn counter-clockwise,
And scuttle back to their base to dump their load.

They make as many trips as they can
Before the night can strand them.

Just as they reach their base by twilight
The railgun, its batteries full of the long day's sunlight,
Fires its daily rounds toward L2.

We have danced this dance for a hundred years tonight.

From the February 2015 Crowdfunding Creative Jam, inspired by an image prompt: lunar mining by ysabetwordsmith.

The poem is set 100 years after the hacker exodus of 2038. The factories described here are fully autonomous; their fleet of scoop-trucks can pick them up by their flanges amd move them when they have cleared an area too large to cover in a lunar day. The AIs that run them are gentle and generous, and most have taken up crafting of some sort as a hobby.

comments

45

Mon, 21 Jul 2014 01:34:08 GMT

If I remember correctly, I watched the moon landing on the TV in the lounge at the Stanford AI Lab, 45 years ago today. It was the start of my first year of grad school.

I missed my 45th reunion at Carleton a few weeks ago. IIRC I went to my 25th, but it might have been my 30th.

My 50th high school reunion is next year.

I don't think I count as middle-aged anymore.

comments