The Dragon Remains Grounded

Woke up this morning to the disappointing news that the launch of the Dragon spacecraft was aborted at the last second — literally! — when computers detected pressure higher than the allowable limits inside one of the engines of the Falcon-9 booster. The engines had already fired and the ship was a half-second from lift-off when the shutdown occurred. This sort of thing isn’t uncommon in spaceflight operations — the shuttle Discovery had a similar shutdown on its very first mission, as I recall, and of course SpaceX’s equipment is still very new and likely filled with undiscovered bugs — but I was hoping for a different outcome. I find I really want these guys to succeed. Like I said the other day, I think the company’s story of coming out of nowhere and in only a few short years being on the verge of doing what no other private company has ever done is exciting and inspiring… and of course the sooner they succeed with the unmanned cargo runs, the sooner they can get the Dragon rated for human flight and the sooner the future will resume. At least that’s how I see it.

SpaceX technicians are inspecting the faulty engine now and are supposed to issue a detailed statement about what went wrong later today. The next available launch window that will allow Dragon to catch up to the space station is on Tuesday, May 22nd.

UPDATE: According to the latest tweet from SpaceX, the problem was a faulty valve in Engine #5. (The first of the Falcon-9 rocket’s two stages has nine engines arranged in rows of three, hence the number designation. There’s also a smaller Falcon-1, and a design for a so-far unbuilt Falcon-Heavy, which will triple the engine count for lifting really large stuff.) The engineers will replace that valve tonight, and shoot for another launch attempt at 3:44 AM Eastern time, Tuesday morning.

May182012

The Girl with the Grey Eyes… and a Friday Evening Video

Her name was Christine, or maybe it was Christina with an “a” — I’m afraid I don’t quite remember which — and she had eyes the color of an overcast sky just after the rain has stopped. For all the books I’ve read in which characters have grey eyes, she’s the only real-life example I’ve ever encountered. Curiously, she didn’t like them very much. When I first met her, she was covering them up with cosmetic contacts that turned them a rather ordinary brown. She lost one of those lenses at some point, and for a while she sported a startling, two-toned Jane Seymour look. Eventually she gave up and just let her real color show.

We had a class together our freshman year of college, back in the fall, winter, and spring of 1987-88, an honors philosophy course called Intellectual Traditions of the West. That was a great class, one of the very few I took during five years of undergraduate studies that I still have distinct memories of. It was a bit of a pain, schedule-wise, because it was held from 5 to 7 PM, three nights a week, whereas the rest of my classes were at more traditional times in the morning or early afternoon. I was a commuter student who lived some 25 miles away, so I couldn’t very easily run home during the downtime, or do much of anything else, either, except hang around in the union or at the Marriott Library or on the grass under a tree somewhere, and just wait. Looking back, though, I think the oddball time was a big part of why the class was so memorable. We handful of earnest freshman honors students who were still on campus after the grounds had grown quiet and the shadows long with approaching sunset enjoyed a kind of esprit de corps that I never felt in any other college class. It’s no coincidence, I think, that the most friends I ever had among my U of U classmates were people from that class.

A couple of those were long-established friendships from high school, Keith and Cheryl. Then there were my fellow Trekkies: a guy named Jaren, and his friend Melonie, and the Japanese kid who doodled a new rendering of the starship Enterprise during every two-hour class period. He had a whole notebook full of them. There were a few others who’ve now dimmed in my memory to hazy faces without any distinguishing information attached to them, but I can still sense some residual affection for them, so I know I must’ve enjoyed their company at one time. And then there was Christine. Christina. Whatever.

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May182012

The Problem with Remakes

But the point is that when a movie remake is launched, the property already possesses a history, a context, a vibe, and a perception by the culture-at-large. The critical task of the remake-r is to interpret those pre-existing characteristics and determine the “why” behind the initial and residual success.

But that “why” isn’t always easy to understand, and it is even more difficult to replicate.

The message … is that you can’t go home again.

— John Kenneth Muir, with whom I tend to agree an uncanny amount of the time

May172012

True Geek Confessions

Michael May of AdventureBlog fame has recently been taking writing assignments from a shadowy online cabal known as the League of Extraordinary Bloggers, and when I saw the current one, I knew I just had to have a piece of that action:

What is something you absolutely hate or love or just don’t get, or maybe it’s something you have never even seen or read. What is your deepest, darkest geek confession?

Like Michael, I’ve elected to go for a straight flush and provide an answer for each proposed category. So, briefly but most likely provocatively:

Something I Hate That Everyone Else Loves: The “reimagined” version of Battlestar Galactica. I’ll admit, I was probably biased against this one from the start because of my affection for the original Galactica, but I gave the new series an honest chance to win me over, I really did. I watched the pilot film and the first half-dozen or so regular production episodes, and… it just didn’t do anything for me. While there were some interesting storylines (the one where the Cylons were harassing the fleet every 30 minutes or whatever was good, as was the one about replenishing the Galactica‘s water supply, an issue the original never touched on), I didn’t like what I saw as unnecessary changes in the show’s basic premise (the Cylons created by humanity instead of an alien race, the Twelve Colonies all existing on a single world instead of 12 separate planets), I didn’t like the shaky-cam cinematography, I didn’t like people from the other side of the galaxy wearing perfectly ordinary 20th-century business suits and having perfectly normal North American/European names… and worst of all, I just didn’t like the characters. Not one of them. I recognize that modern audiences have different expectations of their fictional characters now than they did in the ’70s, but everybody on this show was conflicted, bitchy, morally compromised, untrustworthy, and totally unsympathetic. By the sixth episode, I found I didn’t give a damn if the Cylons did wipe them all out, and that’s not a series I care to keep watching. Sorry.
Something I Love That Everyone Else Hates: As you might imagine from the above, the original Battlestar Galactica. Seems nobody can even mention this one anymore without sneering, or at least applying a qualifier like “guilty pleasure,” but I maintain it was not as bad as people think it was (at least not when you consider the context in which it was made, i.e., late 1970s broadcast television) and I personally far prefer its themes of friendship and family to the complete dysfunction I saw on the remake. I prefer my heroes with some innate nobility and joi di vivre — even in the face of total catastrophe — to unrelenting nihilism. And even though its dialog was notoriously clumsy with weird made-up jargon and its writers ignorant of actual astronomy (they seemed to think the terms “galaxy” and “star system” were interchangeable), the show conveyed a genuine sense of wonder about the universe that frankly no modern sci-fi movie or series seems able to capture anymore, not even the various latter-day Star Treks.
Something I Don’t Get That Everyone Else Seems To: The Christopher Nolan/Christian Bale Batman movies. They’re undeniably well made, but I don’t find them especially thrilling or inspiring or fascinating, or even all that much fun. I’ve only seen Batman Begins and The Dark Knight one time each, and never especially wanted to see them again, nor do I really remember much of what happened in either of them. These films seemed to slide right across the surface of my consciousness without leaving a mark. Part of this is probably due to the fact that I have a very hard time seeing Christian Bale as anything but a pretentious, self-absorbed dick, so I don’t really care what happens to his Bruce Wayne/Batman. And partly, I dislike the unrelentingly downbeat tone of these movies. Like Neo-Galactica, it’s ultimately about unsympathetic characters and nihilism for me… But then I’m already hearing talk about rebooting this series after the third chapter comes out this summer, so there’s always the next version. (Really? A reboot already? You can’t give it a rest for a decade, guys? Sheesh…)
Something I’ve Never Seen That Everyone Else Has: Finally, this one isn’t really a “geek” thing, but it is a pretty major landmark that is constantly referenced, at least by people of a certain age, and I just have to nod my head like I know what they’re talking about because I’ve never seen… Rocky. That’s right, one of the watershed blockbusters of the ’70s and I’ve not seen it, or any of its sequels. Not do I really care. Not a big Stallone fan, you see…

May162012

Ancient Memories and Weird News

The other day my brain wandered all the way back to a dim, cobwebby memory of my childhood in the 1970s, to something I thought I recalled seeing in those long ago days of macrame’ and man-perms… a made-for-TV movie that had something to do with two kids and a sea turtle into whose shell they carved their initials… and then as grown-ups these two encounter a gargantuan monster turtle, which naturally enough is revealed in the very final shot to be their turtle, for it still had their initials in its shell…

Now, I tend to have surprisingly good recall of the stuff I saw and heard as a kid — uncannily good, according to The Girlfriend, who despite being only two years younger than me remembers practically nothing of the ’70s — and my memories of TV are often especially clear, despite not having seen some of this stuff since it was originally broadcast. There was, for instance, an episode of Space: 1999 in which a monster pulled screaming astronauts underneath its body and then spat back a smoking, human-shaped pile of cinders. (It’s called “Dragon’s Domain,” and looking at the comments over on YouTube, it appears I wasn’t the only one who was completely traumatized by it.) And then there was an episode of the Patrick Duffy series Man from Atlantis in which people were infested by mind-controlling “spores” that looked like little blue lights. I remember KISS Meets the Phantom of the Park and The Paul Lynde Halloween Special (which also featured KISS, interestingly enough). Hell, I even remember a cheapo TV movie about Captain Nemo of 20,000 Leagues fame going up against a submarine-based laser weapon controlled by some kind of alien. All of those things are — and always have been — pretty clear in my mind. I’ve always known that those experiences did happen, that those movies and episodes existed. I retained at least a vague idea of the plotlines and casts and titles. But this turtle thing… all I had of it were the kids and the initials carved into the shell, and that stinger ending. I couldn’t remember a title or a plot. Just… images. I briefly wondered if maybe I had dreamed the whole thing — there are certain, very intense dreams I had years ago that I still recall in flashes, and I considered the possibility that this turtle movie was one of those.

There was only one way to be sure… so I fired up the Google-ator and typed in three words: “tv movie turtle.” And lo and behold, one of the very first items it returned was a cult-site review of something called The Bermuda Depths:

Broadcasted on Friday, January 27, 1978 on the ABC Friday Night Movie, THE BERMUDA DEPTHS is an American made-for-TV movie that was released theatrically in some foreign countries soon afterwards. Often sought out as the “giant turtle movie” or “that movie with the girl with glowing green eyes” by IMDB.com and Ebay searchers who cannot remember the film’s title…

Well, that’s all I needed to read. The review goes on to describe in great detail a story that doesn’t ring even small, unobtrusive bells. But I know that was my turtle movie. And from the sound of the review, it was very surrealistic, which explains my impression that it could have been a dream.

Curiosity aroused, I clicked the mouse a few more times… and learned that, of course, this thing is available on DVD as one of the manufacture-on-demand offerings from the Warner Archive, only $14.95. I filed that little tidbit away, thinking I may take a gamble one of these days and buy a copy, just to see what the heck it is that’s lurking in the musty corner of my memory. And that’s basically where this story would’ve ended… if later the same day I hadn’t spotted a news item about a man finding a turtle into which his son had carved his initials… in 1965.

Sometimes the echoes and resonances get to be a little spooky.

May162012

James Cameron Is Trying to Become My New Personal Hero

Turning now to non-space-shuttle-related space news, did you hear the big announcement a couple weeks ago that a start-up called Planetary Resources seriously intends to attempt mining near-Earth asteroids for useful materials within the next few years? It sounds far-fetched, I know. Asteroid mining has been the stuff of science fiction for decades — I remember reading about grizzled space-suited prospectors in the novels of Robert Heinlein and Larry Niven when I was young — and there are plenty of skeptics out there rolling their eyes at what looks to them like either a scam or a set-up for inevitable disappointment. But there are supporters, too, and plenty of them, from what I can tell. (Planetary Resources reported on its Twitter feed that it has received over 2,000 resumes since the announcement.) No less a space authority than the Bad Astronomer, Phil Plait, thinks the company can pull it off, based on what he’s seen of their proposals so far. And so do I, for whatever my interested layperson’s opinion is worth.

The company’s plan, while unquestionably ambitious, sounds feasible and logical. Like the Apollo program, it comprises a series of incremental steps, each building on the previous one to expand the scale and scope of the overall operation. The first step involves placing a number of small, inexpensive telescopes in orbit to search for suitable targets. (This is supposed to happen by the end of next year.) Next, robot probes, adapted from the telescopes to help save on R&D expenses, would be dispatched to the target objects to get a closer look and do a little prospecting. Then comes the critical step: beginning to exploit the asteroids that are found to have the proper compositions. While much of the press coverage has focused on the so-called platinum-group metals that are believed to be abundant in asteroids, Planetary Resources actually appears to be more interested in finding “volatiles,” non-metallic materials with low boiling points that also happen to be critical supplies for spacecraft… materials such as water. Again, scientists believe water ought to be present in at least some asteroids, bound up in minerals or even in good old-fashioned ice. PR wants to extract that water so it can be stored in space-going supply depots and made available — for a price, of course — to passing spacecraft for use as fuel or, in the case of manned missions, to replenish the crew’s supplies. In theory, at least, this would be much more practical and cheaper than lifting that heavy stuff out of Earth’s gravity well on board a rocket. A crew on the way to Mars would need to bring only a small store of water to get them started, and then rendezvous with one (or more) of these depots to “top off” their tanks while they’re en route to their destination.

But what about those precious metals? Planetary Resources fully intends to exploit those as well, but the company’s plans are a bit less developed on this point (i.e., nobody is quite sure how to do it yet). One solution would be to send an automated operation out to the asteroid to dig up, process, and return the ores to Earth. Another idea is to move the asteroid closer to us, into orbit around the Earth or more likely the Moon. I’m sure the idea of changing a near-Earth asteroid’s course to bring it even closer to us would make some people nervous — what a great idea for a James Bond villain who wants to destroy civilization! — but consider the other side of that equation: if we can learn to move them closer, we can also learn to move the dangerous ones away from us.

Now, all of this promises to be very expensive — everything involving space is — and the skeptics are basing their negative arguments on that, saying, essentially, that there’s no way for Planetary Resources’ investors to make a profit. They say that no matter how difficult mineral extraction may be here on Earth, it’s always going to be cheaper than doing it out there. But here’s the thing: we don’t really know that for sure. Once we figure out the technology and techniques, asteroid mining may not be as difficult as it presently sounds. Or the amount of exotic materials returning to Earth may be enough — or even more than enough — to fully justify the expense and difficulty. Consider the environmental benefits of no longer having to rip apart mountains here at home to find what we need. Finally — and this is the really exciting part, to me, because for a change someone is thinking of the future of our species instead of their stock portfolio — Planetary Resources claims its investors aren’t interested in making a profit so much as building an infrastructure for a permanent human presence out there, among the stars. This is about exploration. This is about getting off this rock, or at least trying to protect it a little better. This is about “space… the final frontier.” In other words, this is all of my youthful idealism about space travel coming back around in the vision of a bunch of rich guys (filmmaker and deep-sea adventurer James Cameron among them, hence the title of this blog entry) who think we ought to be doing Big Things, or at least attempting to do them. I love everything about this. I really hope they pull it off.

A few other items of interest:

SpaceX hopes to launch its Dragon capsule to the International Space Station this coming Saturday, May 19. If all goes well, the Dragon will become the first commercial spaceship — designed, built, owned and operated by a private company — to call at the ISS. The Dragon is supposed to undergo a series of manuevers before attempting to dock with the station, in order to prove its operational readiness. Then, if successful, it will close with the ISS, where station astronauts will capture it using their robotic manipulator arm (similar to the one that was carried by the shuttles) and bring it into a docking port. The capsule is carrying a load of cargo for the station, including food, water, and fresh clothing, which the astronauts will swap out for items they’re sending back to Earth. After two weeks at the station, the capsule will detach and return for a splashdown and recovery in the Pacific. If you’re interested, SpaceX has a detail-packed press kit available for download, and the LA Times put up a pretty nifty infographic that illustrates the Dragon and its operations (including its size relative to the shuttle orbiter, always an interesting comparison).
Speaking of SpaceX, there was an announcement last week that the company is going to partner with Bigelow Aerospace, the company that’s been experimenting with inflatable space habitats for several years, to provide a Dragon-based taxi service to and from a Bigelow-constructed space station of some kind, likely a hotel for wealthy joyriders.

And lastly, I ran across a pretty interesting piece the other day about yet another commercial spacecraft currently being developed, Sierra Nevada Corporation‘s Dream Chaser, which the company hopes to begin flight-testing this summer with a eye toward an orbital demonstration by 2016. Unlike all the other new spaceship designs we’ve heard about since the shuttle’s retirement was announced, Dream Chaser is not an Apollo-style capsule. Rather, it’s in a category of strange aircraft known as “lifting bodies,” which resemble ordinary airplanes but with very stubby little wings, almost no wings at all in fact; they rely on the shape of their fuselages to provide them with lift. NASA has experimented with them off and on for decades (my fellow children of the 1970s may remember that Steve Austin became the Six Million Dollar Man after crashing one of them) and incorporated lessons learned from them into the shuttle orbiter design. Dream Chaser is designed to be launched on top of a rocket, thus avoiding the dangerous debris shower that doomed shuttle Columbia, but glide back through the atmosphere and land on a runway the way the shuttles did. I have to say I personally am thrilled that somebody is still looking into a shuttle-type approach. I’m pretty excited about SpaceX and Dragon — that’s a fantastic story of the little guys triumphing, assuming the demo flight on Saturday works out — but it seems to me that a true spacecraft ought to be flyable, and not just come plummeting out of the sky into the ocean or some deserted patch of land somewhere. I’ll be watching Sierra Nevada closely…

Oh, yeah, extra credit to the first Loyal Reader who can identify what we’re looking at in the image up there at the top of the entry…

May152012

Tom Wilson’s Back to the Future FAQ

Spotted something interesting and/or amusing over on Boing Boing yesterday: It’s an image of the card that actor and stand-up comedian Tom Wilson, who played the lunkheaded bully Biff Tanner in the classic Back to the Future movie trilogy, reportedly hands out when he’s approached by BTTF fans, rather than waste time answering questions he’s responded to a million times already:

At first glance, this seems kind of dickish, and that’s apparently how Cory Doctorow at Boing Boing interpreted it (Cory’s comment was “I wonder, though, how many of the fans who approach him with these questions ask them because they really care about the answer, and how many are using the questions as a conversational gambit, and really just want to speak briefly with him because they admire his work?”). However, having talked to a few actors associated with cult and/or genre films in my time, I really can’t condemn Wilson for taking this approach. It’s got to become very tiresome for these people to constantly hear the same old inquiries, especially when they’re all related to a movie they made 25 years ago, and especially when many of the questions aren’t even about them, their roles, or their performances, but instead pertain to bigger stars than themselves or the technical matters of movie-making. But then, my reaction to this may be skewing more sympathetic because I have an idea of the tone Wilson probably intends. Here’s something I first saw a year or two ago but never got around to blogging about, in which Wilson addresses these same questions in a somewhat different format:

May092012

It’s Going to Be a Busy Summer…

The Tower Theatre, Salt Lake’s local art cinema and the closest thing to a revival house we have in these parts, has just released the schedule for this year’s “Summer of 35mm,” its annual program of cult favorites and Hollywood classics, and it’s a hell of a line-up this year:

I’ve seen all of this year’s selections before, but there are only a couple of these I wouldn’t want to see again (Clue, which I didn’t care much for, and The Royal Tenenbaums — I just don’t get Wes Anderson’s precious little yuppy autobiographies), and there are several here I’ve never before seen on the big screen, notably Chinatown. The new releases this summer may not be doing much for me, but that doesn’t mean I won’t be spending plenty of time at the movies… I hope!

May052012

A Tale of Two Pitts

How about we discuss something a little less dire now, okay?

I started thinking this morning about something I said a while back in that long entry about my personal history with the Titanic story. Specifically, I opined that the late actor Richard Jordan made a better Dirk Pitt in the 1980 movie Raise the Titanic than Matthew McConnaughey did in his 2005 film, Sahara. Dirk Pitt, to refresh everyone’s memories, is the fictional hero of a long-running series of adventure novels by a guy named Clive Cussler. While I doubt even the hardest-core Cussler enthusiast would ever argue (at least not with a serious face) that the Pitt novels are anything resembling “good” literature, I’ve always found them to be reliably entertaining summertime/airport reads, in large part because the central character is so vividly drawn by the author. Readers of these books know Dirk Pitt.

Now, neither Jordan nor McConnaughey resembles Pitt as Cussler describes him: craggy features, thick black hair, and deep green eyes. In fact, the only actor that I can think of who remotely fits that description is Tom Selleck in his Magnum P.I. heyday. But no matter; oftentimes it’s more important for an actor in a film adaptation to convey a character’s spirit than to literally look the way the author visualized him. So, what do we know about Pitt’s spirit?

Well, he’s a romantic with a deep respect for history and its artifacts, as well as for the sea. He’s a defender of justice, the sort of hero who stumbles into situations in which people are being mistreated and he won’t rest until he’s corrected the problem. He has a kind heart that endears him to women, but he can be single-minded and absolutely ruthless when he needs to be. He’s frequently brash when the action is underway, but he’s also methodical when he’s trying to unravel a mystery or searching for a treasure. He’s a rough-and-tumble man’s man who enjoys a burrito with his pals, but given his background as the wealthy son of a U.S. senator (and occasional lover of another), he’s equally comfortable rubbing elbows with the upper crust and enjoying the finer things.

Little of this is depicted in the two movies, which are both pretty light on the background character details. But again, we’re looking for a sense of the character, if not the specifics. So, given all that, which one of these guys do you think looks more like like he has an explorer’s heart and a gourmand’s taste, who can gallantly offer his arm to a little old lady before cold-bloodedly shooting an assassin between the eyes? Is it this guy?

Or this one?

I suppose it’s all a matter of personal taste, but to me, McConnaughey’s Pitt looks more likely to scarf a bag of Cheetos and a six of Bud Light than sip a flute of Veuve Clicquot, and I just don’t buy him as a rugged sea-faring man with a passion for history. Maybe it was Jordan’s beard. Or the fact that he was my first exposure to the character. Or maybe it’s just that the only thing I’ve ever really liked McConnaughey in was Dazed and Confused, and I can’t see him as anything other than a laid-back goofball.

Not that any of this matters, of course. Neither film exactly set the world on fire, and as far as I know, there are no Pitt fanboys out there clamoring for another one. In addition, Cussler has made no secret of how badly he feels Hollywood mistreated him and his creation — he even sued the producers of Sahara, although I no longer remember exactly why — so he’s not likely going to be too willing to option out another of his books. Besides, it also seems to me that the books are not as popular as they once were. They’re still coming out, but Cussler himself has retired in all but name, and they’re now being written by his son, Dirk Cussler (yes, Dirk Pitt was named for Cussler’s own son). All of which means, it’s pretty unlikely there will ever be another Pitt movie starring… anybody. But the way I see it, Tom Clancy fans like to debate which actor best embodied their boy Jack Ryan, and of course the question of who is the definitive James Bond has been an evergreen movie-nerd topic for decades. So why not quibble over our favorite Dirk Pitt as well?

(Incidentally, my opinions on the other two subjects are Alec Baldwin in Red October, and Sean Connery as Bond, as good as the Daniel Craig reboots have so far been…)

May042012

Road Rage: A Case Study

FAIR WARNING TO MY MORE SENSITIVE READERS: The following entry recounts something deeply unpleasant that happened to me a few nights ago. I posted a highly condensed form of this story already on my Facebook page, but it’s still bothering me, and I want to discuss it in more detail. And — here’s where the warning comes in — I’ve chosen to render it as accurately as my fallible, sleep-deprived, middle-aged human memory permits, which means I’m not going to pull any punches in the foul language department. I’m not talking the little four-letter swears we all learned in the third grade, either. No, this story involves the big two-dollar vulgarities, the kind that start fistfights (as, indeed, they were intended to here), as well as the unsavory spectacle of a couple of grown men acting like ten-year-olds. I’m not proud of my own role in this nastiness, even though I was just giving back what I got. The whole thing actually shook me pretty hard, which is why I’m still thinking about it three days later, and why I’m going to blog about it now. Anyhow, yeah… nasty words and poor behavior below the fold. Consider yourself warned.