Tuesday, January 04, 2005

Alexis A. Gilliland, Arlington Virginia USA

Thank you for Challenger #20, a very impressive issue. We note the splendid Frank Wu cover, which combines a mythical fire-breathing dragon with the real Baron Manfred von Richtofen and his Fokker triplane. Well, he was real, but the Red Baron had the good luck to die in 1918 before being associated with the Nazis, and flew into legend, so I guess it’s all right.

I never had any professional dealings with Julie Schwartz, but I knew him from going to conventions, and he was aware of my cartooning, and one Lunacon he presented me with a shiny gold Superman pin. And the next year, he asked me why I wasn’t wearing it, and I told him that when my son had seen it, he said All right! and all of a sudden it was his pin. Julie thought that was very funny, but he didn’t have any replacement for me. A fine look at olden times by focusing on one of the major olden timers.

Greg Benford’s article, “The Real Future of Space”, was interesting but does not offer any persuasive scenarios for the human colonization of space. Better rockets are needed less than better destinations. Earlier this month, the first civil spacecraft – a rocket launched from an airplane at 50,000 feet – made it up to 62 miles and then returned safely. They said it cost $20 million, and it’s really neat, but what it is is a glorified amusement park ride. One presumes that with modest (or maybe not so modest) scaling up, a plane-carried rocket could make it up into low Earth orbit, though NASA never chose to go that route.

The old dream, von Braun’s plan for an earth-orbiting station supporting a Moon-orbiting station, supporting a base on the Moon’s surface (from where Gerard K. O’Neil was building his L-5 habitats) still seems as far away as ever. Or receding – these days we can’t even make repairs on the Hubble. Given the rates of change in rocket science (slow, expensive, and pretty much mature) and computer science (going like the Energizer Bunny with no asymptotic limit in sight) it is likely that the move into space will have to robotic.

The only money-making space application is telecommunication satellites, which are controlled from the ground. Light-minutes or hours further out, ground control will be difficult to impossible, so the machines will need to be invested with intelligence. To do what? To do what they can. Compare the PCs of 20 years ago with the PCs of today, and then extrapolate today’s little Mars Rover 20 years into the future. If humans are going into space, then UberRovers of the future will have to go before them to construct a destination, a nice shirtsleeves environment, complete with biosphere, ready to be occupied.

What else? Nice to see a photo of Jerry Jacks again; he was, for a time a WSFA member, and a guest in my house. “Dope Court” is depressing; interesting, but sad. The editorial on Ronnie reminds me that the final verdict on that complex man is still out. Dick Cheney said, “Reagan proved that deficits don’t matter.” Reagan wouldn’t agree with him. When his deficit was heading for a whopping 6% of the GDP, Reagan took back some of his humongous tax cuts by enacting the biggest peacetime tax hike in history. His deficits didn’t matter because he didn’t let them get out of control. Currently the GOP looks to be shaping itself in the image of George W. Bush: rich, Southern, socially conservative and fiscally irresponsible. And hopefully out of power after this November.

Wouldn’t it have been nice ...

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