Links for March
Slouching to the moon.
Because I spent last month travelling around Mexico and Peru, I’m behind on links. But here goes. Before we get to the links, here’s a centenary and a thought…
March saw the 100-year anniversary of the world’s first liquid fuel rocket, built by rocket pioneer Robert Goddard. It was a momentous moment in human history, but also, quite shit. It reached a lofty 12.5 meters before crashing. It didn’t even make the local paper.
His janky contraption didn’t get far, but it did pave the way for immense progress in rocketry over the next several decades.
This 100-year anniversary is just a few weeks apart from NASA’s planned manned lunar flyby on April 1st (tomorrow at the time of writing), which, although a bit of an Apollo re-run, will be the furthest humans have ever travelled from Earth.
It’s fascinating to reflect on the amount of progress humanity has made on this front in 100 years. Goddard’s rocket reached 12 meters. Just under 20 years later, V2s could make it to space. Another decade(ish), and we reached orbit for the first time. But for many decades, that remained rare. Now, we’re launching orbital-class rockets practically every day. Last year, there were about 320 orbital launches around the world, and it’s likely that this year will see more than one launch a day. Access to low Earth orbit is becoming increasingly routine.
The fact that NASA’s Luna flyby is being met with a bit of a collective shrug is itself evidence of progress, not a lack of it. To get to the moon the first time around required a huge effort, costing 4.4% of the US federal budget and around 0.7% of GDP. Now we’re going back in a bloated boondoggle of a launch vehicle, and yet only spending 0.05% of GDP on NASA.
Achieving something hard with maximum effort is impressive. But it’s even more impressive to achieve it without really trying. We’re slouching to the moon, and that’s amazing.
We went from 12 meters to the moon in 100 years. Where will rocketry take us in another century?
Other interesting links from this month:
First brain upload - a digital fly.
We were promised flying to Mars, instead we got 140 trillion parameters. Incredibly disappointing.
My review of the film Sirat got a link from MR, so that was cool. Second time my writing’s been linked to on MR now. Once is a fluke. Twice is a pattern. 😎
New approach to preserving memories in dead brains – could lead to breakthroughs in cryopreservation.
Independent detections of similar transients in European plate archives. Corroboration strengthens the case that something was up there. Was it matter lofted by nuclear testing? Maybe one day we’ll find out.
Big if true, but definitely bonkers.