Woot! It’s finally happened! Researchers have announced the discovery of an Earth-sized planet in the star system nearest to ours. Called Alpha Centauri Bb for now (it orbits the star in the Alpha Centauri group called Alpha Centauri B), this planet is roughly 3.6 million miles from its sun, compared to our 93 million miles from our sun. So it’s pretty hot, certainly not in the range for most Earthlike life forms. But this discovery suggests the likelihood of other planets in the star system. Most systems have multiple planets, and the ones closest to their suns are the easiest to detect.
This is so insanely, massively cool. We’ve dreamed of it for years. And now we’ve learned that our nearest neighboring star system has a planet the size of ours, and may have other planets in the habitable zone.
The news takes me back to memories of one of the first paperback SF novels I ever read as a kid: Robert Silverberg’s Revolt on Alpha C.
Who’s ready to join me in starting construction of a starship?
Safe on the ground, after shattering a host of records.The streaming has been cutting in and out, so I don’t know yet whether or not Baumgartner broke the sound barrier. Press conference about to start.
Edit: He did break the sound barrier, at 833.9 miles per hour in freefall!
I’m watching the live coverage of Felix Baumgartner’s balloon flight to the edge of outer space. He’s presently at 127,000 feet and still ascending, well past the previous record for manned balloon flight. The plan is for him to jump in his specialized pressure suit and freefall through the sound barrier before parachuting to the ground.
Live shot of capsule at nearly 128,000 feet
He’s having problem with the heat not working in his faceplate, but they’ve just announced that he will jump regardless. They’re beginning now to depressurize the capsule, preparatory to his stepping out of the capsule and jumping…
Here’s a lovely video of some flight tests of Virgin Galactic’s and Scaled Composite’s Spaceship Two. I meant to post this a while back, but I don’t think I ever did. Anyway, it’s worth watching twice!
This has been a good summer for ebook sales. Although my short story collections haven’t gained much traction (Whattza matter, you don’t like short stories??), the other books have been gaining steadily. There was a big jump in July, for no obvious reason, and August was almost as good, with September so far following suit. I’m talking mainly about the backlist books I put out myself, because those I have timely numbers for—but I have reason to think Sunborn, in its Tor edition, is doing pretty well, too.
We’re not talking headline numbers here, like some indie authors you may have read about. But over a thousand ebooks a month generates a meaningful contribution to the family budget, and represents continuing growth in the audience.
The vast majority of those sales are through the Amazon Kindle store, with Nook, Apple, and Sony bringing up a distant rear. That makes me a trifle uneasy, I admit—not because there’s anything wrong with the Kindle store, but because I wish there were more healthy competition in the marketplace. I wish, for example, that I had more sales in Book View Café, because it’s a terrific little store and a terrific cooperative of great writers. And I wish the Nook store would get its mojo back.
So what’s the funny thing? Here it is: My sales in the UK have taken off in the last two months. In fact, they now account for about half my total sales. In fact, in September, I’ve sold more books through Amazon UK than I have through Amazon US. That’s amazing, and I have no explanation! But I’m delighted to have a lot of new British readers. Welcome to the Chaos Chronicles! And welcome, too, to the daring few German readers who are trying the books.
I’m grateful for every book sale and every new reader. Still, it’s fun to try to figure out the patterns. Only this time I can’t! I’m stumped!
Watch a sweet, kind of sad, 9-minute film that has nothing to do with the topic of this post. I just like it. It’s about a robot marooned in space.
A giant of a man died today, and I feel great sadness, even as I celebrate my own birthday. Neil Armstrong has left us.
I remember it like it was yesterday: July 20, 1969, holding my breath as the Apollo 11 Lunar Module finally landed on the Moon, with Neil Armstrong at the controls. And then, some hours later (late at night in Huron, Ohio), watching the grainy black and white TV images of Armstrong, and then Buzz Aldrin, stepping onto the surface of the Moon. I knew then that the world would never be the same, and that history would forever be divided between the time before humanity walked on another world, and after.
Neil Armstrong steps off the Eagle
Neil reads the plaque declaring that Apollo 11 has come on behalf of all Mankind.
A defining moment for humanity, but also one for me personally. Many of my friends lost interest in the space program soon after, but I never did. To me it was, and will always be, one of mankind’s grandest adventures.
Others will write more knowledgeably of Armstrong’s life and career. But I’m pretty sure of one thing: a thousand years from now, if we’re still around, the name Neil Armstrong is one that people will remember.
One small step… and another, and another. Godspeed, Neil Armstrong.
I can never seem to catch our animals, or for that matter, my family members, on camera when they’re in the act of doing something interesting. I always get something blurred, or dull, a few moments later. But NASA does a better job. The Mars Orbiter, with split-second timing, caught this photo of Curiosity on its way down to the planet’s surface.
The inset is a close-up of the landing craft hanging from the huge, supersonic parachute that helped slow Curiosity to a safe landing speed. If this doesn’t win an award for best action photography, I don’t know what will.
I’m in my office, working. But Curiosity lands on Mars at about 1:30 a.m. Eastern time, and I don’t intend to miss it. It doesn’t seem that it’s going to be carried on any of the two thousand channels Comcast offers, so I have NASA TV set up via several different URLS, in different browser windows.
America’s first woman astronaut died Monday at the age of 61, of pancreatic cancer. Sally Ride was an inspiration to millions, and not just girls and women. I remember what a triumph it felt to me, back in 1983, when she rode Challenger into space, ending once and for all the perception that American space travel was solely the domain of men. Nowadays, women fly missions all the time, and sometimes command them. It’s easy to forget that as recently as the early 1980’s, women were simply not part of the NASA equation. The Soviet Union had sent a woman, Valentina Tereshkova, into space twenty years earlier, but that had not signaled a general welcome of women into the Soviet space program. In the case of Sally Ride, it really was the shattering of a glass ceiling. After the loss of Challenger in 1986, Dr. Ride was named to the presidential commission that investigated the cause of the tragedy. She later went on to found Sally Ride Science, an organization devoted to supporting girls’ and boys’ interests in science, math and technology.
Here was a woman who made a difference. It’s sad to see her passing. Godspeed, Sally Ride.
