It's Time To Go Back

Image courtesy of FoxNews.com

It was put into motion 48 years ago.

“I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the earth. No single space project in this period will be more impressive to mankind, or more important for the long-range exploration of space; and none will be so difficult or expensive to accomplish” – President John F. Kennedy, May 25, 1961, address to joint session of Congress

Then, 40 years ago, mankind set foot on a celestial body that we had admired in awe, fascination, wonder, and sometimes even fear, since the day that God put our ancestors on this planet.

We committed ourselves to a goal. And we achieved it.

It must have been a wonderous feeling to watch – as the Saturn V rocket launched forward from its launchpad on plume of 7.6 million pounds of thrust; as our astronauts, Neil, Buzz and Michael, soared through the vastness of space toward the moon; as the Eagle descended and then landed; and as Neil put his boot down on the surface of the moon.

He stumbled a little verbally as he searched for the words he wanted to say.

But he said the phrase that we all know: “That's one small step for a man – one giant leap for mankind.”

Awesome.

We had put a man (actually two men that time - 10 more would follow in their footsteps) on the moon.

And guess what…. There’s an AMERICAN flag on the moon. WE did it. It was our boys who were up there. The United States of America achieved that goal.

Granted, it wasn’t all for the nature of satisfying our curiosity. It wasn’t all just to inspire people. There was a Cold War going on. We were in a space race with the Soviet Union. It was a constant game of one-upsmanship and power plays.

Kennedy himself was known to have only set that goal of the moon and of NASA’s rapid rise in the 60s for the purpose of having the edge in the Cold War.

Even still, it’s amazing to think of. In less than 100 years, mostly since the turn of the 20th century, man had pioneered the telephone, radio, car, airplane, television – and space travel. And we put a man on the moon.

I would say that landing a man on the moon was probably mankind’s greatest technological achievement in modern history, if not all of history. It was definitely the most inspiring achievement to the most amount of people at probably any time in history.

But it’s been 40 years. And we haven’t been back in almost 37.

I can honestly say that I don’t think there have been any achievements of any kind anywhere near that magnitude, let alone that inspiring, in the last 40 years. We need to be inspired. We need to have something that we all collectively want to achieve.

It was a moment in which the WORLD came together in fascination. One which still captures the imagination.

We can all say we want world peace. That isn’t likely to happen soon. That would be the best achievement we could ever reach for. But more realistically, we can all reach for the moon. It’s out there. We've been there before. We know it’s not made of cheese. And we know that no cow can jump over it without a rocket system engineered for that specific purpose, with sound life support and environmental controls and an adequate supply of grass for it to chew on.

Man did it though – and we will do it again. We need something to recapture that fascination and imagination.

But by the time we make it back, given no delays on the proposed timeline, it will be 2020 and it will be 48 years since man last set foot on the moon. That’s too long of a time.

Space exploration is something that we can’t hold back on. It’s in our nature to be wonder – to explore – to see what’s out there past our newest frontier. We’re never going to be satisfied to sit here on this rock we call Earth and not explore the heavens.

God made it all for us. He made a race of explorers. He gave us a curious nature. And he provided us with the tools to satisfy that curiosity and to send ourselves out on new adventures.

I think we owe it to the men and women that built NASA, that built our space program, and pushed this nation and mankind to that new frontier to go back to the moon.

But we’ve been spinning our wheels. We’ve lost 17 fine, brave souls in the process, 14 of those in a program that should have long since paved the way for something even more amazing.

We owe it to them to go back. They would have wanted it. We owe it to them to go even further.

On Sept. 12, 1962, President Kennedy, in an address give at Rice University on the space effort, declared “We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too.”

We chose to go to the moon. And we did. Now let’s get back on track and go back to the moon - go to Mars, go further out, and “boldly go where no man has gone before.”

Stay tuned for Part 2: You Call This Support?

Is, Was, Thinks, Feels, Wonders, And Possibly Even Says

I realized today that I've let certain things go a little too far....

By that I mean, especially, Facebook. Somewhat, blogging. But mostly Facebook.

There was a time when my friends and I would spend hours on the *cough* Internet... or really a dial-up computer to Clemson-area bulletin boards. The one I distinctly remember was called the Mechanics Garage. I always envisioned these being run out of dark basements, something like the Warlock in the latest Die Hard movie had. Some nerdy dude, with a sinister laugh, doling out Castle Wolfenstein knock-offs, the newest freeware version of Duke Nukem or Barney the Dinosaur plug-ins for Doom. It would take four or five hours to download a 1 Meg file. Such was the life of a computer game geek in the early 1990s.

Then there was Gopher and FTP. Brand-spanking new ways to download even more crappy games and waste more time.

Phase 3 was discovering interactive bulletin boards. I heard about this one called ISCA and decided to check it out. I ended up spending the better part of six years on it before it folded in the early 2000s. At one point, you could get on there and talk to any one of more than 1,000 people. The last time I logged in, there may have been 25 people online.

Along came the World Wide Web. This was cool. When we could get it to work. On the dialup accees to the Engineering VAX, we could run this program called Lynx and read all kinds of cool stuff from around the world. I cited a Department of Defense paper on Hezbollah that I found online in a paper for my Political Terrorism class once and my instructor asked me, "What's this? WWW? How did you access this?"

Then the levee broke. Graphical web browsing. You would hear that someone had gone in and put something called Mosaic on the the third computer over on the fifth desk in the second floor computer lab; or on the fifth computer from the door in the library lab. Massively cool stuff. Trying to get the same stuff on the computer in the apartment was another thing. Dial in to the VAX, start Winsock, initiate your TCP-IP stack, start up a SLIRP connection - I may be missing a step.... and I'm taking a long time to get to the point of this post, so to wrap this paragraph up - I've discovered that my newest computer toy has given me a totally new outlet and new outlook.

A friend of mine from church wrote an interesting article on Facebook a few weeks ago that was published in one of the local weeklies. It was on how she has started to think in terms of status updates.

What's your status?

I am thinking that .... I am going to sleep.... I am frustrated about... I'm wondering when someone is going to...

Ok, yeah. I've started doing that pretty frequently lately. I will see, hear, or experience something that I will then react to with a "that would make for an interesting status update or an interesting blog."

Now I know people who are on Facebook that could care less about getting on it more than once every couple weeks. I know people who spend several combined hours on it throughout the day. Left to boredom, I could probably spend the better part of at least several continuous hours on it.

I have the potential to spend a lot of time on it since I keep up a few Facebook pages for our college -- post photos, update events on them,etc. But I'm usually content for a few minutes on it to skim first thing in the morning, on my lunch break and once I get home from work. Then probably at least a little time at night.

So, again, I'm constantly going over in my mind "What would be a status update that would be funny, or interesting -- what could I say to make people laugh? what could I say to get a reaction out of a particular person?"

I got a Blackberry a few weeks ago that has Internet access. I realize that could potentially be a bad thing. I'm already checking Facebook on it when I get bored waiting on a prescription or pumping gas, situations where there is no real risk of death involved.

Today I was driving down one of our busiest thoroughfares in G-vegas when I noticed a local bank had, programmed into their big LCD along the roadside, a screen that said "Say no to TARP". My first thought was "Awesome! Gotta mention something about that in my Facebook status."

So I reached for my phone -- and then I realized: No, this is bad. I'm reaching for my phone to update my Facebook status while I'm driving. Not good. On various fronts.

I immediately put the phone back. Although once I got to where I was going I broke the phone back out and keyed in a new status before I had the chance to forget to do it.

Not that anyone really cares about what I think about the bailout or about opposition to TARP from an actual bank.

So despite the fact that I may not always be in a position to update my Facebook status, it appears that it's become a new outlet for my creativity to unload at random times.

I probably need to get a new hobby to keep my mind off of letting people know that my mind is on Facebook rather than on going to bed. Maybe I can talk my wife into letting us get a dog. Good luck to me on that though.

Oh, I just forgot. I've got an Atari 2600 emulator in the living room. Maybe if I start spending more time on that, I'll forgot about getting on Facebook so much and letting the world know that I just got a new high score on River Raid. Who knows.

The Last Hurrah of the Rabbit Ears?

My wife and I have never had our cable TV or internet with our current provider go out due to an electrical storm. On the random occasions when it's been out, they've never really given us an explanation.

We had gotten out of Praise Team practice at our church this evening about 8:30 when it started to thunder and lightning pretty intensely. We hadn't eaten dinner so we decided to stop by our favorite local meat&three/grease joint. As we were eating, the lightning was getting closer and the thunder was getting louder. Then here comes the local fleet of fire trucks barreling down the road past the restaurant in full response mode.

"There goes Scott," I said to my wife. Scott is a friend of ours from church who is a member of the local fire department.

Knowing some nasty rain was about to start dropping, we hurried up, got in the car and headed home. It poured for about half of the way home and then stopped, along with the lightning and thunder.

"Crazy Upstate storms," I thought.

When we got in, we turned on the TV to check the local weather -- and we saw snow. I went into the office to check the Internet connection. Nothing.

Called our cable provider's service line. They said the electrical storm had knocked out service for a large part of the county, and they would call us when it was restored. I still haven't received that call.

Top Chef was about to come on, which we both wanted to watch. Now we couldn't. Neither of TVs were picking up any air signals on their own.

Then my wife asked, "Don't we have a box somewhere of all kinds of wires? Can't you rig something up?"

Yeah, sure. I'll McGyver something together. So as I hunted through our storage closet, I found the box I was looking for --- and inside was the set of rabbit ears that that my dad had bought probably 20 years ago or more at Radio Shack and I had taken to college. Sweet, let's give these a try.

I was hoping they would come out of the box with a coax adapter attached. No such luck. I did some more rummaging and found one. I did a little bit of repair work on one of the wires, crossed my fingers, and connected the rabbit ears to the TV.

Snow.

Ok, time to pirouette with the antenna, bend over backwards, point my finger in the air like John Travolta and see what we get. After some manuvering of the antenna to and fro, turning of its dial back and forth, and bracing one of the ears on the window curtain, we were set.

They picked up pretty good -- all of the immediate local channels and even, to a degree, the ABC signal coming down from the mountains of North Carolina.

"Enjoy it while it lasts honey," I said, "Next year this time, this isn't going to work."

H-Day. Feb 16, 2009. The day when all the TV stations are to have stopped broadcasting analog signals.

Maybe the the first electrical stom to take out our cable will end up being the last time I take out the rabbit ears. If that winds up being the case, they just got their last 75 minute hurrah.

I'll keep them around until then. But I'm not sure if after that February day next year I'll keep them stuffed in that box or throw them out. I really would have no reason to keep them around, other than as a prop for a forthcoming "When I was your age, I didn't have millions of little 0's and 1's coming down a beam of light into the TV. I used this baby right here to pick up TV signals" anecdote to be told to my yet-to-be-born children.

Following the Water

I'm a big space nerd. I always have been. I think the idea of space exploration is fascinating.

Today was a big day for NASA. I can only imagine how tense but exciting it was today at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena.

The Phoenix Mars Lander touched down on the Martian north pole today. It was the first time in 32 years that we've had what is called a successful "soft landing," a descent controlled by thrusters, on Mars. The few probes that have landed on Mars since the Vikings of the 1970s have landed using airbags.

The next probe to be sent to Mars will be the 2,000 pound Mars Science Lab, a third generation rover set to be launched next year, which will also utilize a soft landing system.

But the big deal about this mission is that it will be analyzing soil and ice samples for traces of organic compounds - traces of the life. It may also tell us if Mars was ever warm enough to have flowing water on its surface.

This is a key part to NASA's Mars strategy dubbed "Follow the Water."

We've learned some amazing things from Phoenix's predecessors to Mars.

The rovers Spirt and Opportunity, which have been on planet since 2004, have provided us new information about the Martian terrain. The Mars Pathfinder and its rover Sojourner provided analysis of Martian soil and weather during it operation from 1997 to 1998.

The Mars Odyssey has been in orbit over the planet since 2002, searching for signs of past or present water and volcanic activity on Mars. The Mars Reconaissance Orbiter has been mapping the planet for the last two years, along with the European Space Agency's Mars Express Orbiter which has been there since 2004. The Mars Global Surveyor recently spent nine years in orbit studying Mars and its moon Phobos.

I know this may sound really geeky, but this stuff really excites me.

I wholeheartedly believe that the operation of NASA is very justifiable. Granted there are probably areas within the agency and its programs, as with every governmental agency, that need to be streamlined and/or eliminated and/or monitored more closely.

As time goes on, we'll more than likely see private industry become more and more of a player in space exploration - and someday they will probably take over as the primary platform. But for the time being, NASA has a very critical role in keeping the spirit of exploration alive and development of space technology moving forward.

The agency has accomplished some really exciting stuff in the last 20 years -- even with their faster, cheaper, better attitude. Just consider some of this:

• As of March of this year, the Voyager I probe (launched in 1977) was 9.82 billion miles from Earth and the farthest manmade object from Earth
• The Galileo, launched in 1989, spent 14 years studying Jupiter, conducted man's first asteroid flyby, discovered the first asteroid moon, and launched the first probe into Jupiter's atmosphere
• The Ulysses Probe has been studying the sun for the past 14 years and has flown through the tails of two comets in the process.
• In 2001, the Near Earth Asteroid Rendezvous - Shoemaker probe was the first manmade probe to land on an asteroid.
• The Cassini probe was the first probe to orbit Saturn in 2004. The Huygens probe which separated from Cassini in 2005 was the first to land on another moon (in an ocean of liquid methane, nonetheless)
• In 2005, the Deep Impact probe was the first manmade object to impact a comet's nucleus and study its interior
• In 2004, the Genesis probe returned samples of solar wind particles back to Earth. Then in 2006, the Stardust probe returned cosmic dust from a comet back to Earth
• The New Horizons probe launched in 2006 will be providing the first close-up images of Pluto, sometime in 2015.
• The Dawn probe launched last fall will study the two largest members of the asteroid belt - the asteroid Vesta and dwarf planet Ceres
• The Kepler Space Observatory to be launched next year will join the ESA's COROT telescope in looking for Earth-sized planets outside our solar system

From the launch of Sputnik to the landing of Phoenix on Mars, space exploration has provided countless benefits and allowed mankind to solve many mysteries of our solar system that were centuries old. No one can tell me that space exploration is not justified. Anyone who believes so is a moron. But there are a lot more mysteries that we will solve in the future.

There will also come a day when humanity will exhaust all of its existing resources on Earth and will be forced to look elsewhere to sustain our race. The steps we take today are important for that reason.

The steps we take today are providing and will continue to provide new technological breakthroughs to benefit all of mankind -- and advances in countless fields of science, from medicine to agriculture.

Mainly though, we're a race of explorers. We always have been. We can't sit still. We want to learn how to better oursleves. We have to know what's out there. Whether or not we ever come in contact with another race of sentient beings is beside the point --- we're going to learn more about ourselves, our creation, our solar system, and our universe in the process.

During the course of its history, NASA has lost 17 of its own either in flight or in launchpad exercises. Let's make sure that they didn't die in vain -- that their spirit of exploration lives on -- and we keep following the water.

When Pressing Zero Doesn't Work

I typically don't enjoy confrontation. As a matter of fact, I try to avoid it.

But calling customer service numbers really gets me riled up sometimes. Generally the hold times are enough to anger me. I spend 10, 20, 30 minutes waiting to talk to someone - and when I finally get to talk to someone, in the middle of the conversation they ask if they can put me on hold for no good reason.

NO YOU CANNOT PUT ME ON HOLD - I JUST SPENT 30 MINUTES WAITING TO TALK TO YOU. YOU ARE A MORON. DO YOU THINK I WANT TO WAIT LONGER?

"Sure, fine, go ahead" -- and so I wait for them to come back on the phone. Drumming my fingers on the desk.

So for today's story, I just had a really fun experience that took me nearly an hour to resolve.

This started with a notice I received in the mail a few days ago saying I had not submitted a UPC along with a rebate form for a cell phone I recently purchased. Which I had. I cut it off the box and included it with the rebate application, stapled to it at that, just like the instruactions said, and mailed it off. Then I get this notice.

So I call the phone number listed on the notice. Go through the automated menu -- several dozen times. No obvious way to talk to a rep -- it's all "Press 1 for a FAQ on this", "Press 2 for a FAQ on that." I press "0" repeatedly. With a lot of systems, doing this will put you in touch with an agent. Not this time. It instantly hangs up. So I call the headquarters of the rebate company.

"We're sorry. The only number we can give you is the one you already have," they say.

"A lot of good you are," I say, as I hang up. Then I call my cell phone provider. They give me the same blasted number. So I call it back. Go through every submenu, selecting every option. Finally I get an option to talk to a real person. By this time my blood is boiling and I'm about to go off on someone.

Luckily, this person was pretty understanding. They told me that there IS a record that I submitted a UPC. She didn't know why I was sent the notice that started this whole debacle in the first place, and she authorizes my rebate check. Problem solved.

Sort of.

In my eyes, the problem won't ever be totally solved until they either eliminate automated menus and your call goes directly to a customer service agent -- or they tell you up front on the main menu of their automated system that you can press "0" or whatever to talk to a real person.

What they have in place I wouldn't call customer service at all. Technology and computers are great and all, but sometimes I just wish we could have prevented automated menus from ever being invented. I generally get better customer service from the person behind the speaker at the McDonald's drive thru when they ask me if I want fries with my order.