Making Meat On Mars

Perils Of Space Colonisation

The lockdown thing was very much like living in your very own Biosphere 2 experiment. And pretty much true to form we mostly stayed in with the occasional 'cheat' moment where we gave ourselves excuses to go to the shops. Otherwise, there was a lot of Doomscrolling headlines. Put it down to the pandemic and watching markets go haywire. 

I think I also watched a lot of 'The Expanse'. That's a show that really makes you reconsider whether you really want to go outing deep space just to make a mundane living. I mean, being an astronaut's only great if you get the celebrity, as amply demonstrated by the Mercury Seven in 'The Right Stuff'. By the time everybody is in space doing that space suit EVA thing and living on microwaved meal packs, there's not going to be anywhere near the glamour going around - but the food is likely going to really suck. 

In light of that you have to feel for the future space explorers eating stuff that tastes totally disconnected from what food is on their native planet. Meat, would be an absolute luxury unless you had the technology to weave it out of simple carbon compounds. Sure enough if you Doom Scroll long enough you can find this story about an Israeli outfit trying to synthesis meat, in preparation for the day colonists will be on Mars. They've even done early tests in space. 

It's amazing what can be done when people put their minds to it.  

Come And Join The Fun!

News That's Fit To Punt - 02/Oct/2015

The Bubble We Had To Have

Not sure how people construct notions like that, but here you can see it as the headline.

"The government has to try and talk it down and say it's inflated, but at the same time all they can try and do is control the ongoing growth as best they can," Mr Van-Petersen said. "If they wanted to prick it, they could, but Australia simply cannot afford to." 

New Zealand and Singapore have enacted strong policies to force adjustments in housing markets and Mr Van-Petersen said Australia could easily deflate the bubble by pulling the stamp duty tax charged to foreign buyers from properties of more than $15 million to, say, $1.5 million. 

But the property market is one of the few areas of the economy that is growing adequately as terms of trade plummet and mining companies shed value because commodity prices are falling in light of a slowing China. 

"Australia can't afford for property to have a hard landing. If housing prices bust, the banks will get hit hard. And then what is there? It's in everyone's interests right now."

Pretty spooky when they couch it that way. There are lots of places and things that can't afford to have hard landing - for instance China - but we know they're going through one as we speak; and if we are to understand correctly how our real estate market is connected to the Chinese economy and the money trying to get out of China, then it's likely not going to be the happy 9.8% growth prognostication.

What Banks Are Doing To Hide Bad Credit

You won't hear this anywhere else. This is my exclusive. :)
Recently a 20year old kid borrowed 25k from one of the Big Four banks. At the time he had a steady job, and he had the patter to sound like he was a good bet to pay it back. So they lent him 25k with a 5year repayment schedule. He then went and splurged the 25k on what you and I might surmise are more toys than chattels or assets. Then he lost his job and couldn't pay. Thus he marched into the bank and told them the situation. They asked him just how much he could pay, and he replied $20 a month. So the bank said that was okay and took the $20 per month on good faith. It took a few months for him to find a job again but by then the bank unilaterally closed out the account, saying the 25k had ben paid (news to the kid, he couldn't imagine who it might be). What happened is unclear, but basically the bank told him because the loan had been paid off, the loan account was closed.

I know it sound amazing but it's true. The bank closed out the 25k in bad debt by writing it off quietly, rather than pursue the money. The 20year old kid effectively walked out of the bank 20k or so richer, for no reason other than the bank didn't want that bad loan on its books. So the banks purged the bad loan off its books.

The question you should be asking yourself is, just how much of this kind of things going on? How safe then are the Big Four banks? I'll leave that with you to decide.

There's Water On Mars

The big announcement of the week was that NASA says there's liquid water on Mars. It seems like it's been coming for a long time, but it's taken until 2015 for NASA to verify all the data and say, yes, there's liquid water on Mars. If you stop to think about it, it seems quite obvious that there would be water, and liquid water at that given the conditions of the planet, but that is just an aside. Science says, not until all the data is in, is it incontrovertible, so here we are.

The weirder turn was how Ridley Scott knew that NASA knew, but couldn't revise his film 'The Martian' to include that new discovery, because it would have let the cat out of the bag. Ridley Scott also made news in that he spoke to Foreign Minister Julie Bishop saying he wanted to shoot the sequels to 'Prometheus' in Australia.

The fact that there is liquid water on Mars bodes well for a possible future human colony on Mars.What doesn't bode well still are the low gravity, thin atmosphere and punishingly cold temperatures. It's not like we can grow things with much ease on Mars which means we won't be getting a food cycle happening easily. Ironically, what Mars needs for human habitation is a good dose of greenhouse effect.

Mars Direct Is Back

Spacefreak Moment For Mr. Obama

Back in the day when this blog's predecessor was the 'Spacefreaks Weblog', and shared writers - yes it wasn't just me writing stuff - the big topic in 2004 was whether the space program should be looking to Mars or not and whether the Shuttle program should be continued in light of the Columbia disaster. There are a lot of pros and cons to both these ideas but the most important thing to come out of those discussions was how direct flight to Mars was probably going to yield far more knowledge than space stations and shuttle programs whose operations were always limited in scope.

So it's good to find today that President Obama has scrapped the Lunar missions for a Mars mission.

US President Barack Obama says he is aiming to send US astronauts into Mars orbit in the mid-2030s as he seeks to quell protests over his earlier space policies.

"By 2025 we expect new spacecraft designed for long journeys to allow us to begin the first ever crew missions beyond the moon into deep space," Obama told an audience at the Kennedy Space Centre in Florida.

"So, we'll start by sending astronauts to an asteroid for the first time in history. By the mid-2030s, I believe we can send humans to orbit Mars and return them safely to earth, and a landing on Mars will follow."

Obama, who was accompanied on his trip by astronaut Buzz Aldrin, the second man to set foot on the moon, vowed he was "100 per cent committed" to NASA's mission as he sought to set a new course for future US space travel.

The US president was making a whirlwind trip to the heart of the US space industry after he was hit with stinging criticism for dropping the costly Constellation project which had aimed to put Americans back on the moon.

"We should attempt a return to the surface of the moon first, as previously planned. But I just have to say, pretty bluntly here, we've been there before. Buzz has been there," Obama said.

"There's a lot more of space to explore and a lot more to learn when we do," the president said, as he unveiled a plan to increase NASA's budget by $US6 billion ($6.4 billion) over the next five years.

His plan includes ramping up "robotic exploration of the solar system, including a probe of the sun's atmosphere, new scouting missions to Mars and other destinations, and an advanced telescope to follow Hubble", he said.

"As president, I believe that space exploration is not a luxury, it's not an afterthought in America's quest for a brighter future. It is an essential part of that quest," he said at the Kennedy Space Centre in Florida.

"I am 100 per cent committed to the mission of NASA and its future."

Which is great. Back when George W Bush put forward his space project, the feeling was overwhelmingly, "why are we going back to the moon? Why are we wasting our money re-doing that trip?" At least this plan makes sense.

That being said I do sort of wonder what he means by "...new spacecraft designed..." The beauty of the Mars Direct plan is that it doesn't really need too much new in the way of new spacecraft.

Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter

After Delay, A Launch
MRO (Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter) has been launched. here's the article in whole:

Delayed by three days for bad weather and a last-minute software glitch, a giant two-ton spacecraft was bound for Mars today carrying telescopes, cameras and an array of instruments designed to examine the planet from orbit in far closer detail than any Mars flight has ever achieved before.

The spacecraft rose from its Cape Canaveral launch pad early in the morning aboard an Atlas V rocket and headed on a six-month voyage toward its target 72 million miles away.

"It couldn't have gone any smoother," said launch manager Charles Dovale, and James Garvin, NASA's chief scientist, exclaimed. "I'm bouncing off the walls. We're ecstatic."

Flying over both Martian poles at an average altitude of only 190 miles, the new spacecraft will cover Mars' entire surface for nearly two years during its $720 million mission, pinpointing features as small as a desk top and probing nearly half a mile deep beneath the planet's shifting sands with specialized Italian-built radar.

No planet aside from Earth has undergone such intense scientific scrutiny as Mars. It is a full 40 years since, in the early days of the space age, America sent the world's first Mariner mission swinging by the red planet to begin an unceasing quest for understanding a planet that just might prove to be one of the solar system's earliest abodes for life.

Now, with two weather-beaten but still lively robot rovers continuing their explorations across the Martian surface more than a full year beyond their expected lifetime, and with two other craft circling high above the planet on different paths, the fourth planet from the sun is about to be probed by the new Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.

Like all the American and European missions before it, this spacecraft, known simply as MRO, is assigned, as NASA scientists say, to "follow the water." It will hunt for evidence that the single-most critical ingredient for life as we know it exists or once existed abundantly somewhere amid the stony plains, the deep canyons, the crater beds, the layered rocks, the icy polar caps and the rolling red hills of the ever-beckoning planet.

The orbiting spacecraft's uniquely high-resolution camera will also seek safe landing sites for future Mars missions, some already scheduled and others still in the planning stages: For example, MRO will scout out the edges of the planet's polar caps for the 2007 Phoenix lander whose robotic shovel will dig beneath the permafrost. The spacecraft will seek another site for a full-scale roving analytical laboratory scheduled for launch in 2009 in search of hospitable habitats for life.

With NASA's Mars Odyssey and the European Space Agency's Mars Express already in orbit around the planet, MRO will add a third communication link to the array data being relayed back to Earth from the two exploration vehicles, Spirit and Opportunity. The Spirit and Opportunity have been traversing the planet's landscape since their arrival in January of last year.

Among the spacecraft's six instruments are three cameras, one more powerful than any ever sent to explore another planet, according to project scientist Richard Zurek, who told reporters recently that "higher resolution is a major driver for this mission."

Another instrument is an imaging spectrometer for identifying key minerals in patches of terrain as small as a swimming pool -- minerals that could reveal whether they were originally formed in water eons ago.

Two other instruments will look both downward and horizontally to measure variations of water vapor, dust and temperatures in the Martian atmosphere and track changes in the planet's weather and wind patterns.

"Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter is many things," said Zurek. "It's a weather satellite, it's a geologic surveyor, and it's a pathfinder for future missions."

Richard Hoagland's blog has an article on it too.

Also unlike any previous unmanned Mars missions, not only is the on-board imaging capability of MRO unprecedented ... but there is also an unprecedented political framework created specifically for this Mission ... to solicit public images during the nominal orbital surveys of this spacecraft! Needless to say, we will be thoroughly testing this unique aspect of the MRO Mission in the months and years ahead ....

What makes this policy position of the MRO Mission so challenging and tantalazing is that, for the first time in the history of the NASA Program, the American People will have a legal framework to challenge any NASA or Principle Investigator, to acquire a specificly requested image! And, subsequently, to challenge the scientific and imaging quality of any images so acquired ... that are "mysteriously" degraded.

This already-in-place political and scientific infrastructure guarantees that "we the People" will FINALLY get to really look at Mars ... or, the full weight of the American legal and media systems will descend on a NASA committment not fulfilled ... asking the embarrassing question "why not!?"

Obviously, Cydonia will be high on our own Enterprise initial target list; knowing what we know about Cydonia ... MRO's unique HiRISE camera (to say nothing of its other instruments' multi-spectral capabilities ...) will finally be able to resolve (literally) the overwhelmingly important question: are there intelligently-designed artifacts on Mars?!

Make of that what you will. The reference to getting more info about Cydonia is where I get cold feet. :)