Thank you to the team at the Oxford University Space & Astronomy society for a very pleasant evening. I had a positive response to the seminar, with plenty of intelligent questions (as expected from the venue ;-) ). Some most rewarding conversations afterwards, including meeting a Virgin Galactic ticket holder.

I'll be at the UKSA Space Technology Roadmap meeting at the National Space Centre tomorrow (uh... today). Will try to take some notes (though I singularly failed to type up the notes I took from the departmental roadmap meeting... ;p).

Reposted by request:

Here's something a little different ;-) Some of the best and most interesting depictions of near-future space technology in recent fiction have been in the medium of anime, or Japanese animation. I gave a talk on this subject at the UK anime convention Aya Revolution, discussing some of the best space anime and how they touch on real-world space technology.

A video of slides and clips from the talk is available for download. Apologies for the quality, but it had to be compressed quite heavily to create a reasonable file size (the original MOV generated by Keynote was 1GB in size!).

• View in browser
• Download 80MB MP4

In my email this morning...

"Lord Mandelson, Secretary of State for Business, Innovation & Skills and Science and Innovation Minister, Lord Drayson invite you to the launch of the new executive space agency for the UK and the publication of the Government response to the Space Innovation and Growth Strategy."

Woohoo! (starts searching for a half-way decent shirt and tie...).

The event will be held at 10.45am on Tuesday 23rd March at The Queen Elizabeth II Conference Centre, Broad Sanctuary, London SW1P 3EE, London. All advance tickets to this event were already allocated by Friday, sorry :-).

(Source: Amazon)

The latest in the highly-acclaimed edumanga series from No Starch Press, The Manga Guide to the Universe explores the Universe, with the aid of manga cartoons. The story revolves around three students who develop an interest in the Universe after listening to a Japanese folktale about a girl from the Moon. The girls enlist Kanta, an astronomy major, to teach them more about the Universe.

The Manga Guide to the Universe begins with an overview of how ancient cultures thought about and studied the Sun, Moon, and stars, coupled with an overview of important astronomical work by Copernicus, Gallileo, and other seminal astronomers. Kanta explains how our solar system works; how we calculate distance in space; the Big Bang Theory; and theories about the Universe's evolution and cosmic expansion. Readers explore the Milky Way, faraway galaxies, supernovas, quasars, and black holes, as well as the history of space exploration, including the Moon landing, the launch of the International Space Station, and the Hubble Space Telescope--all with the aid of original Manga cartoons. This edumanga title is co-published with Ohmsha, Ltd. of Tokyo, Japan, and is one in a series of translations from Ohmsha's bestselling Japanese originals.

Well, that's going to make the next NewSpace industry conference....um... interesting....

Bearing in mind that Burt was himself part of an effort by the 'commercial guys' to go beyond Earth orbit, I find his comments particularly... erm... odd. Plus there's the whole "we shouldn't rely on free enterprise because it might fail". What kind of attitude is that for an American (and a successful entrepreneur at that) to have?? :-p The (very brief) article doesn't make it clear what Burt thinks we should be using, but it should be pretty damned obvious that it's not Constellation. That is D-E-A-D, and even the defibrillator of stimulus funding isn't going to make it walk again. Maybe it's something DIRECT-shaped? I guess we'll find out in due course...

Sigh. I can almost hear Sen. Shelby cackling with laughter from here...

Update: Clark has more details on Burt's actual views, which aren't quite as black-and-white as the WSJ paints them.. He laments the perceived loss of ambition in deep-space exploration, rather than lambasting the transfer of manned LEO capability to the commercial sector.

Burt says:

"I am concerned to see NASA manned spaceflight disappear, since they provided world leadership in the '60s and part of the '70s. The result was America’s universities being the leader in science/engineering Ph.D.s. Many American kids will be depressed by the thought that our accomplishments will not be continued and thus America will fall deeper away from our previous leadership in engineering/science/math. I believe our future success depends on our ability to motivate our youth."

Personally, I would have thought a whole slew of new American manned vehicles carrying more people into orbit much more frequently to multiple destinations would be pretty exciting, but there you go. All that Constellation was going to achieve (maybe by 2030) was flags and footprints. Again. We need a more affordable, sustainable and robust programme of exploration, and that means multiple providers enabling reliable and inexpensive lift to orbit.

If you're interested (like I am) in current research into extrasolar planetary systems (hey, those starships have to have somewhere to fly to!), then you should check out the Systemic weblog by Greg Lauglin of Lick Observatory. The blog also includes downloadable software (the Systemic console) which allows you to play with real radial velocity data from extrasolar systems, and try your hand at fitting planetary orbits.

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