The Mandelbear's Musings

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)

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 )

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.

Fifty years after Sputnik launched! Let's see; I was 10 years old then, and already reading science fiction and non-fiction books about astronomy and rockets. Still have some of them on the shelf behind me, in fact. I remember seeing Sputnik a couple of times; I think that was one of the occasions where Dad hauled us all out on the patio to look. I remember the beep.

I was one of the beneficiaries of the space race -- the US reacted to Sputnik by sharply raising the priority of science and math education. Junior high and high school were fun! Well, except for PE and history, of course, and finding out just how lousy I was at learning languages.

Fifty years ago. Wow!

(E.t.a.: excellent picture at APOD, by the way.)

PUBLIC DOMAIN WORKS DONE FOR NASA.

These are some of my works commissioned by various NASA facilities. They are offered here to provide something like definitive digital versions of such images for anyone who wants to have them. You paid for them and they're yours.

The National Space Society (NSS) is looking for artists to create visions of a spacefaring future — a future of space settlement, be it on the Moon, on Mars, on asteroids, or orbiting independently in space. To bring attention to our goal of creating a spacefaring future, NSS is sponsoring a contest for such artwork to be used in a calendar promoting a future of humans living and working in space. The best of the submitted artwork will be selected for inclusion in the 2008 NSS Space Settlement Calendar. Judges include world-renowned space artists David A. Hardy and Pat Rawlings.

The NSS Space Settlement Art Contest will run until January 31, 2007.

1st Heinlein Prize Awarded: Press Release May 26, 2006

HOUSTON, TX (May 25, 2006) - Trustees of the Robert A. and Virginia Heinlein Prize Trust announced today that the first-ever Heinlein Prize will go to Dr. Peter H. Diamandis. The Heinlein Prize was founded to reward individuals for making practical contributions to the commercialization of space. Dr. Diamandis will be honored at a dinner and award ceremony on July 7, 2006 at the St. Regis Hotel in Houston, Texas and receive $500,000, a gold Heinlein Medallion, the Lady Vivamus Sword (as described in Heinlein’s book Glory Road) and a Laureate’s Diploma.

“Dr. Diamandis’ accomplishments have started space settlement and commerce,” explains Art Dula, Trustee and literary executor of the Heinlein Estate. “He has catalyzed space activities by hundreds of people and organizations all over the Earth who are creating a proud and prosperous future for humanity.”

(from slashdot)