The Man Who Sold the Moon by Robert A. Heinlein

I first read this book about half a century ago when I was a teenager. I came back to it because I have a relative working for Space X, and the book is about a private enterprise effort to get to the moon. I was fascinated to see or remind myself that Heinlein was as interested in politics and business and human organizations in general as he was in the scientific aspects and engineering aspects of spaceflight. I gave this three stars on Goodreads but be warned this is a book that will seem really quite old to most readers. Already back in the 60s, when the stories were about 15 years old, it seemed quite old to me. Now it's a relic of an older era for sure.

Image: The edition I have. Not a typical science fiction cover illustration of the time. I'd guess that Signet was going for a more mainstream readership. I wonder if it worked?

Happy Lunar Landing Day!

 

Image:   Apollo 15.

Earth, ISS, aurora and clouds

Thanks, Atlantic.

This is no abstract, this is real

The moons Titan and Dione pose before Saturn and its rings.  Click that image!

Beautiful, but it makes late winter in the Near North seem cozy.

Thanks to Will McLean for pointing me to this feature from the Atlantic.

The Atlantis mission-- end of an era

Let's hope a new era succeeds it.


Again, brilliant photography from the Big Picture.

Thought for the 4th

From TomDispatch.com, on the non-withdrawal from Afghanistan:

"It’s increasingly apparent that our disastrous wars are, as Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee John Kerry recently admitted, “unsustainable.”  After all, just the cost of providing air conditioning to U.S. personnel in Iraq and Afghanistan -- $20 billion a year -- is more than NASA’s total budget."

Update: The more I think about this the more I realize that what I said once is literally true: the USA could have built a new world on Mars but settled instead for blowing up Iraq.