The Stars My Destination

SpaceX has successfully launched a Falcon 9 rocket, which is excellent news by itself in light of June's catastrophic failure of a Falcon 9, but made exceptional in that for the first time they also landed the rocket's reusable first stage: B.B.C.-link & N.S.S.-link. I have been consistently underwhelmed by SpaceX, but if the first stage really can be reused after a relatively quick & inexpensive turnaround, delivering the promised cost-savings on which the whole endeavor is premised, well, then I will be happy to admit that I've misjudged Elon Musk & his company. (I am always happy to admit when I'm wrong, though too often it takes me too long to awaken to my error. 'Tis one of many ways I am trying to grow & improve as a man, a citizen, & a Christian.)

Elsewhere in space (news), N.A.S.A. is crowing about the year its had, with particular emphasis on long-term projects paying dividends, especially the New Horizons probe's fly-by of Pluto & the Dawn probe's orbiting of Ceres: N.A.S.A.-link. (The embedded video is mildly interesting, though the soundtrack is annoying & thematically inappropriate.) Of most interest to your humble narrator is the slow but apparently steady progress of the Orion spacecraft & the S.L.S.—*cough* Ares—rocket.

Liberty & Union
An article in a recent issue of National Review cited the motion pictures Gravity, Interstellar, & The Martian as evidence for a growing renewal of Americans' interest in the space program. We here at The Secret Base hope most sincerely that this in indeed the case, that after the Carter-esque years of the Obama administration's gutting of N.A.S.A.—lamentably cheered on from the Right by libertarians & the "Tea Party" movement—America is getting back into the business of manned spaceflight.

Hollywoodland
There is a new series on Syfy (formerly the Sci-Fi Channel), The Expanse, that in the finely parsed world of science fiction subgenres is tending toward hard science fiction. This itself is startling & most welcome, as television science fiction, even when not bastardized with fantasy elements, tends overwhelmingly toward space opera & soft science fiction. Mind you, there's nothing at all wrong with space opera, & with the interplanetary politics & intrigues there are elements of space opera within The Expanse, but the concern with resources—principally water—& the rigors of spaceflight—drugs & acceleration couches to deal with the effects of high thrust, the "Belters" inability to tolerate Earth's gravity, having grown up in the low-gravity environment of the asteroid belt—signal a hard science fiction sensibility that is something quite different, & most welcome. Three episodes in, The Expanse still looks promising.