Shopped Tattoos von Cheyenne Randall. (via Blogrebellen)
Space is a weird place, and the quest to explore its mysteries in person has been no small source of strangeness and surprise. Here are some lesser-known facts about humanity's ongoing missions beyond Earth's atmosphere.
Above: Space Shuttle Endeavour lifts off on February 8, 2010, in the Shuttle Program's final night launch | Credit: NASA
Above: From the audio transcripts of the Apollo 10 mission, Lunar Module Pilot Eugene Cernan, Command Module Pilot John Young, and Commander Thomas Stafford discuss a close encounter of the turd kind. Via Distractions in Space.
So you wanna fly spaceships for NASA? You'll need a college degree in maths, science or engineering; a minimum of 1,000 hours a commanding pilot in a jet aircraft; and be able to pass a NASA space physical, which requires distant visual acuity, good blood pressure and – here's the real zinger – a height between 62 and 75 inches. You can prepare, train, and account for just about every other aspect of NASA's Pilot Astronaut requirements (you can even have your eyes corrected with laser surgery), but unless you're between 5'2" and 6'3", you aren't getting behind the wheel. (Fortunately, the height requirements for Mission Specialists – between 58.5 and 76 inches – are a little broader.)
Because – surprise! – designing spacecraft and getting humans to Earth orbit and the Moon usually means inventing brand new solutions to problems most people haven't even thought of yet.
Armstrong always maintained that the phrase he uttered while first setting foot on the Moon was not the grammatically incorrect "That's one small step for man," but rather "That's one small step for a man."
"I think that reasonable people will realize that I didn't intentionally make an inane statement and that certainly the 'a' was intended," he once told biographer James R. Hansen, "because that's the only way the statement makes any sense."
More recently, however, the controversial sentence has been attributed to a quirk of dialect – apparently central Ohioans (like Armstrong) tend to blend the two-word sequence "for a" into what Michigan State University researcher Laura Dilley describes as a "frrr(uh)" sound. As we wrote when Dilley's analysis first came to light:
The careful attention of the entire planet combined with what was admittedly a less than optimal transmission quality means that Armstrong's "for a man" sounded like "for man," even if he himself had no doubt he said the right thing.
Neil Armstrong maintained until his death that his "One Small Step" speech had been made spontaneously, and conceived shortly before setting foot on the lunar surface; but a recent interview with his brother, Dean Armstrong, suggests that Neil's iconic two-liner was actually planned several months before the Apollo 11 launch, over a game of Risk.
And if you already knew about Nixon's speech (which he obviously never delivered), we bet you didn't know this: The clergyman tasked with conducting burial services for the Apollo 11 astronauts was instructed to adopt the same procedure as a burial at sea, but to instead commend the astronauts' souls to "the deepest of the deep" – which is just terrifying and forceful and beautiful all at the same time.
Astronauts aboard several lunar missions have reported that moon dust smells distinctly of "wet ashes in a fireplace" and "spent gunpowder." (And according to Apollo 16 astronaut John Young, it doesn't taste "half bad.")
According to Louis Allamandola, founder and director of the Astrophysics and Astrochemistry Lab at NASA Ames Research Center, space is full of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons that smell not unlike metal, diesel fumes and barbecue (astronauts returning aboard the International Space Station after a 6-hour spacewalk have reported smelling "burned" or "fried" steak.)
Photo via collectspace.com
Life Insurance for a Moon-bound astronaut in the late 60s was, understandably, ridiculously expensive. To ensure their families were provided for in the event of their deaths, Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins devised their own life insurance policy. Via NPR:
"These astronauts had been signing autographs since the day they were announced as astronauts, and they knew even though eBay didn't exist back then, that there was a market for such things," [said Robert Pearlman, a space historian and collector with collectspace.com]. "There was demand."
Especially for what were called covers -– envelopes signed by astronauts and postmarked on important dates.
About a month before Apollo 11 was set to launch, the three astronauts entered quarantine. And, during free moments in the following weeks, each of the astronauts signed hundreds of covers.
They gave them to a friend. And on important days — the day of the launch, the day the astronauts landed on the moon — their friend got them to the post office and got them postmarked, and then distributed them to the astronauts' families.
It was life insurance in the form of autographs.
Today, it's not uncommon for one of these insurance autographs to fetch $30,000 at auction.
The Agency did its best to prevent and cover up the less radio- and family-friendly transmissions between its astronauts. One astronaut, in particular, had a habit of listing off profanities when his mind wandered. Anticipating a PR nightmare, NASA took an interesting preemptive step:
In preparing for his mission, NASA had the astronaut hypnotized. Rather than curse, a psychiatrist put the idea in his head that he would rather hum when his mind wandered. The hypnotized astronaut is rarely named, but only one man can be heard humming as he skipps across the lunar surface. Transmissions from Commander Pete Conrad are punctuated with "dum de dum dum dum" and "dum do do do, do do" making him the likeliest candidate.
Again from the Apollo 10 audio transcripts, Cernan, Young and Stafford discuss, somewhat abashedly, how to drink water in space. Via Distractions in Space.
Check out an exclusive first look at the thrilling book trailer for the Return of Zita the Spacegirl, the triumphant conclusion to the graphic novel trilogy about Zita and her space-faring adventures. So much killer action. And below, writer/artist Ben Hatke explains what he's learned from doing this series.
Here's the official description of The Return of Zita the Spacegirl, which comes out May 13:
Zita the Spacegirl has saved planets, battled monsters, and wrestled with interplanetary fame. But she faces her biggest challenge yet in the third and final installment of the Zita adventures. Wrongfully imprisoned on a penitentiary planet, Zita has to plot the galaxy's greatest jailbreak before the evil prison warden can execute his plan of interstellar domination!
And here's an exclusive essay from Ben Hatke about the experience of crafting this epic trilogy:
Watching Your Characters Grow
(Or What I Learned About Character Development from Zita the Spacegirl)
In my last year of college, I met a really cute girl. She was adorable and quirky, with an Audrey Hepburn haircut and a smile that would . . . anyway, I started looking for ways to impress her. You know, like you do.
One day she told me about the comics she used to make in high school — comics about a space girl from the future. And I thought, "maybe I should develop this character and make a comic for her."
So I designed a costume and drew my first Zita comic. It had time travel and a tyrannosaurus in a cape and it was very, very silly. But it was a start, and the comic totally worked because that really cute girl married me. So go team comics!
As the years went by, I revisited Zita as a web comic.As I continued to develop her, she got younger, her personality began to take shape, and she slowly developed a cast of friends. And then (to gloss over some in between stuff) I found myself writing three books about the why of it all, about what exactly this girl was doing out in space.
Developing a character with a specific, fleshed-out and believable personality takes time. I was lucky with Zita because I spent a lot of time working with the character before I ever started working on the books. And all that work helped Zita to hit the pages of the first book armed with a more fully-formed personality than she would have otherwise.
In my case, all this advance character development was more luck than planning.
With this third volume in the Zita trilogy, I'm saying goodbye to Zita (at least for a little bit), and it's given me the chance to look back on how she has developed as a character through the years and reflect a little bit on what Zita and her friends have taught me about developing character personalities.
Here are a few things that I've learned and that I try to keep in mind:
1. Personality is different from, and just as important as, backstory:
In other words, what a character knows/experiences + how a character reacts/behaves = who that character is.
I've found that writing or drawing your character into a variety of different, even random situations can be a lot of help in developing a full personality. How does your character react when s/he accidentally squirts way too much ketchup on a sandwich? Is your character calm under pressure? Frantic? How does you character react to other strong personalities? Don't worry about canon, just put your character in a grocery store and see what they do.
2. Gesture: I harp on it all the time, but I think it's important. Even if you're writing a novel and not a comic I still feel it's important to know how your character moves. Do they talk with their hands? Is your character very expressive or is s/he physically reserved? Zita, for instance, moves with more energy than grace. Even if you aren't an artist you might try sketching your character to get a sense of how they move through the world.
3. Goals and feelings change but basic personality traits do not: As a character moves through a story s/he grows and changes. In many ways that what a story is. But certain things will and should always be hardwired into the characters personality. Zita's journey has a lot to do with the pull between home and friends and Zita grows in experience and her feelings about going home change through the course of her journey. But she will always struggle with impulse control and a quick temper. It's who she is.
4. Characters begin as pieces of you, but then they grow into distinct personalities all their own that exist in your head. It's weird and a little unsettling — and it's part of what's so cool about making stories.
It's also why there are so many stories of authors being really sad when they say goodbye to a character.
Now that many environmentalists are coming around to the idea that GMOs don't have to be evil, we need a more nuanced view of how we want to use GMOs in agriculture. When is it a good idea to use GMOs, and when is it overkill?
University of Guelph professor Evan Fraser suggests some ideas in this video. It's part of a series on GMOs and food security, and serves as an excellent introduction to what is a much more complicated issue than many of us realize. Fraser explains that GMO crops are part of a toolset we can use to improve crop productivity and maintain delicate food webs that are harmed by many pesticide solutions (including Roundup-ready crops).
Fraser says:
We should always investigate whether low-tech solutions exist to problems before we start thinking about such high-tech strategies as moving genes between species.
For instance, in large parts of the developing world a lack of phosphorus in the soil limits yields[13]. But in India a traditional variety of rice called Kasalath is able to grow without much phosphorus[14]. In 2012, scientists figured out how Kasalath's amazing ability works[15] and are now using a scientific method called "marker assisted plant breeding" to move the gene responsible for this trait this into other rice varieties.[16] This illustrates the potential for biotechnologies that avoid many of the problems associated with GMOs.
But there other even simpler stories about how science and technology can play a major role in feeding the future. Take the case of the geneticist Manish Raizada who works at the University of Guelph and has spent part of his career using GM techniques to understand how plants function. Unlike a lot of plant geneticists, instead of starting in the lab, Manish begins his research by talking to farmers in the developing world to identify what they actually need. While working with farmers in Nepal with a local organization called LI-BIRD, his team found that farmers traditionally plant grain by scattering handfuls of seeds into the dirt[17]. But by simply planting seeds in orderly rows, Manish's collaborators showed farmers they could increase yields by 25-40%.[18]
This is because evenly spaced seeds have equal access to soil nutrients, moisture and sun light. This team developed an elegantly simple tool kit to make it easy to plant in rows: two sticks and a string to mark lines in the ground, and a hollowed out stick drops one seed at a time into the prepared earth. It's the perfect marriage of science and locally appropriate technology.[19]
The moral of this story is that of the fly swatter versus the Cruise missile – we should always look to see what fly swatters are at hand before we launch a cruise missile.
Nathaniel Johnson makes a similar point today in Grist, where he notes that we shouldn't be looking at GMOs as a monolithic entity. There are good uses of GMOs and bad uses — and that's what we should focus on:
The anthropologist Glenn Davis Stone has pointed out that each side of the debate has agreed to talk about GMOs as if "GMOs" are a single entity up for approval or rejection. This makes zero sense. Pro-GMO partisans, for example, often lump all the different GM plants together as a universal good that we must accept if we want to avoid starvation. The logic here is Malthusian: We are outgrowing our food supply, and the productivity gains of the Green Revolution are falling off, so we need something to save us. That thing, according to this line of thought, is genetic engineering. Set aside the problems with the Malthusian argument for a moment. We still have to ask: What type of GMOs? Are we talking about rice engineered to feed the poor in Indonesia, or soy engineered to feed pigs in a country suffering from calorie surpluses? Those two plants don't belong in the same argument.
Anti-GMO partisans also frequently treat GMOs as a monolithic entity, and that's not any more logical. If you care about the environment it would make sense to support the responsible use of insect-resistant GMOs to help farmers move beyond chemical agriculture. It's hard to argue with scientists like Bruce Tabashnik when they present evidence that insect-resistant plants have helped the environment in the places they've been used fastidiously. Thoughtful greens might, at the same time, oppose herbicide-tolerant GMOs until we can figure out a better solution than just spraying more. Again, the different forms of GMOs don't belong in the same argument.
It's time for us to start looking at GMOs as a part of the toolkit we'll use to feed humanity in the future. To do that, we can't reject GMOs outright. We'll have to educate ourselves enough to distinguish between sustainable uses of GMOs and unhealthy ones. Most importantly, as Fraser points out, we need to realize that there may be low-tech solutions that are cheaper and easier to implement than gene splicing in a wet lab.
GMOs are not the enemy in a sustainable future. But there are companies, like Monsanto and others, whose GMO practices need to be reformed or stopped entirely. The better we understand the actual science and policy underlying the use of GMOs, the more likely we are to have good food security.
Read more, and watch more videos about GMOs and food security, on Feeding Nine Billion.
A certain character from George R.R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire series is going to be having a shocking twist in his next book, The Winds of Winter. Yes, that sounds like every character in his books — but apparently, this one will be extra "controversial." Spoilers ahead...
Now that you've agreed to look at some spoilers, they're actually pretty vague — but there's plenty of speculation attached to them. A new Vulture article about encounters with George R.R. Martin includes a chat with superfan Elio Garcia (who's helped us with our speculation about the TV show) in which Garcia reveals that he's read portions of The Winds of Winter.
And that includes "a Sansa chapter that is sure to be controversial."
Immediately the fan community set to work speculating. Sansa Stark, though sometimes belittled, is one of our favorite characters. But what event involving her could be "controversial?" It's probably not just her being brutalized or molested, because she's been victimized so much over the years that people might be upset, but not surprised.
Readers of the books will know that Sansa is living at the Vale, where Littlefinger has passed her off as his bastard daughter Alayne Stone. Also living there is frail Robert Arryn, the heir to the Vale. The other heir to the Vale, Harold Hardyng, is now betrothed to Sansa, not realizing who she really is.
So chances are the "controversy" involves Sansa doing something unexpected. Maybe she kills Lord Robin, so that she'll be in a stronger position? Maybe Littlefinger pushes his luck with her and she kills him, or injures him severely? Maybe she marries Harold and then reveals her true identity? Or maybe something completely different happens, like she wargs into Arya's direwolf or something.
In any case, most fan speculation doesn't seem to involve Sansa getting killed — not after all the build-up she's had — or killing Littlefinger before he gets to play his final moves. But it seems somewhat likely she'll finally learn to start playing the game instead of being a pawn. [Vulture via Westeros.org]