A response to Kat's awesome link!

Food science is AWESOME! I totally want to be a food scientist! When I become a teacher--because it's inevitable--I'm definitely using space food as a teaching tool.

I think we should all do food experiments at Candlewood. (Except the mold growing ones.)

Also, what if during out "Mars simulation" we tried to eat what astronauts would have to eat? (I know Pete needs his high caloric intake, but the rest of us can adapt.) That would be another thing we can discuss in our movie. Rad! Well, I think it's rad now...we'll see how I feel about it once I get hungry.

More links!

Ok, here is some cool stuff (if you are into space politics):

Video of Bush’s "New Vision" speech with cool animations


Transcript of Bush’s speech


Zubrin article discussing "New Vision" for space exploration

In other news...I thought the meeting with Tracy Murnan about script writing went pretty well and was very useful, even if it did run on a bit long. I'm glad that our creative vision is coming together (we've all agreed that we prefer the more "active" 20/20 style reporting where we are going into the "front lines" of NASA to do research to the Ken Burns documentary style), and I feel a bit more confident about our movie now (even though everyone keeps telling us that we are too ambitious).

Also, we met with Julian Earls today (director of Glenn), and he's totally awesome. I love that he's a runner and a comedian. Anyway, we didn't get the one-on-one interview with him that we wanted, but we did get some good footage and he said that he's interested in meeting with us later. Rad.

Ok, I should get some work done because my whole morning was shot as far as dust mitigation is concerned...

Ooooooooooooh!

I know I just posted but...

I wanted to do some research for my "politics of going to Mars" segment, and I wanted to go to a link for an article called "Manned Mission to Mars: Worth $120 Billion?" But guess what? I got this message:

Access Denied for client 139.88.81.25
Restricted Categories: Provocative Attire;Personal Pages;Forum/Bulletin Boards;Profanity
Access to this site has been blocked by the GRC third-party web filtering service which has categorized it as being non-work-related because it contains Provocative Attire;Personal Pages;Forum/Bulletin Boards;Profanity material.

So, Glenn uses a web-nanny to censor their employees? Sheesh!

Yesterday I emailed Diane Evans and Dr. Julian Earls about interviews. Haven't heard back yet (sigh...). But, we are meeting with Dr. Earls for (a not free) lunch this week (thanks to the fact that the Goddard Academy is coming), so maybe we can confront him about getting an interview then.

Also, I have a friend working at JPL this summer. She gave me the contact info of an important Mars dude and said he seems interested in our project. I unfortunately left that info on my laptop, so I'll email him as soon as I get back from work.

Anyone get any positive responses on interviews yet?

Preliminary Group Presentation

Well, our presentation of the project proposal went well, even though we were only presenting to Marshal and Dr. Kankam (who didn't seem to know why he was there). Our project obviously has a lot of "potential", now we just need to start actually working on it.

We are definitely going to have segments on the reasearch that each one of us is doing here at Glenn this summer, right? How about, to get the script-writing ball rolling (because, according to our timeline, we need to have the script pretty much finalized by the end of next week), each of us attempts to script his or her own research segment. It can just be a rough draft and we can always change it. Like Rob mentioned at our meeting on Tuesday, the difficult part is going to be tying all of the segments together, so we can work on that part of the script as a group (after some more brainstorming with "Flashback Idea-Man" Chris).

More links!

A chronology of all Mars missions

Future missions to Mars

The Mars Society

The Mars Desert Research Station (MDRS) They do stuff kind of like the simulation we want to do...only out in the desert with fake spacesuits.

The official statement of the President's "new vision for space exploration" So we can see exactly what kind of long term goals we're dealing with.

All right, that's all for now...I'll keep looking for more useful things.

We really must be hip...

...because the MiniAERCam we saw at Houston last week was featured in an article on SpaceDaily.com last week as well.

NASA Demonstrates Innovative Nanosatellite Docking System


But where's Robonaut?

Some rambles from me, too!

Yay, I like that you have the creative juices flowing, Moses. I agree that the mission simulation segment should be the climax of the whole show. I think we should look into the engineering and scientific challenges (and political and economic challenges, as well) of a mission to Mars (that feasibility study paper that a former Academy published that Marshal showed us could give us some places to start), and do kind of a "Well, it maybe be possible in the year 20XX [2012 is a bit soon, don't you think? The goal is to back to the Moon by 2020, and then use that as a stepping stone to Mars] to go to Mars, but we couldn't wait that long," type of seguay (or maybe not that cheesy?).

We should definitely interview Dr. Landis. He's so awesome. Who is writing his thank you note? Maybe in the thank you mention that we'd like to talk to him again.

I've been doing a big of reading on NASA policy and news, as well. Maybe we could do a bit on the upcoming missions to Mars (i.e., the one that is being launched in August, and the ones that are being planned for 2009, etc.).

Also, a good book for us to check out (I have to confess I haven't read it yet, I just know the main jist of it) is Zubrin's The Case for Mars. He describes how a manned mission to Mars (and colonization and terraforming) could be both feasible and affordable. Here's a link to it on amazon.com. (Ha, now I feel like our show is turning into "Reading Rainbow" with Lavar Burton.)

I think we should have short segments on the engineering, biological, political, economic challenges of a manned mission to Mars. But, with each of those we have to tie in stuff to interest interns and potential interns. So this is where all of our research comes in. We should also ask the USRP kids, and people at the other Academies, if any of their work is directly (or indirectly) relevant to going to Mars (i.e., the Goddard group project is about designing a Mars mission).

Ok, I've done a lot of regurgitating, so I'll stop now. See you all at the meeting today.

A link for Kat...

We were talking about the problem of space garbage after Dr. Landis' talk today, and then my brother randomly sent me this link. How relevant!

Orbital Debris

An experiment...

All right, let's see if Blogger.com will fill all of our blogging needs. I just picked the simplest template, so we can change the layout to our customized needs if we want (anyone have some html skills? mine are primative at best). Maybe we can get cool logos and whatnot.

Let me know if you guys like this blogging system. We can always try another.