Space Exploration
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Buran
The little pirates climb the metal scaffolds and bust open windows with sledgehammers they carry canvas satchels and metric screwdrivers they attack anything that looks like a computer or a digital display and twist and turn and pull until power cords hang like dripping intestines pulled from a slaughtered pig. Circuit boards broken apart for…
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National Poetry Month: “Obscured by Clouds”
There was a steady droning in the sky The horizon dimmed by a vast tower of cloud orange and red swirled together, flashes of lightning outlining lumbering sailors in the haze racing through was a silver pill heated and glowing before a strange umbrella unfolded to slow it and appendages emerged to taste the sea…
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Memories of ’89
There was a moment, in those dark days when we dreamed of putting our stars there together – one gold, fifty white. On the Red planet, on the god of war so we wouldn’t have to meet him on the battlefield. We schoolboys ducking under our desks the quaking of Southern California ground not as…
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Alpha Centauri
I will be in my sixties when the first signals from probes to Alpha Centauri cross the emptiness and those once hidden there become known family. Three stars three sisters of Sol would be near enough to our machines to be distinct added to the photo album of one time visitations. Before they…
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Cosmos Again
The finale of the new Cosmos series filled my heart with the purest sense of the numinous. Out there, in the gaseous clouds and the cosmic background radiation, among the billion billion chunks of ice and rock and the equally enormous numbers of other worlds, exists the wide universe. We are just toddlers come onto…
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Dichotomy Under Stars
In a giant room full of loud machines men and women sit or stand over their labors, working together to build what was once impossible. It’s a dream in plastic and carbon fiber, a wish built on a strong titanium framework. They strive with tools and minds to break home ties with this Earth, just…
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Inspace
Garcia held onto the fusion radiator assembly, looking towards the bright light of Beta Centauri. She felt at one with the cosmos, right now at this perfect moment in time. She knew-and soon the solar system of her birth would know too; humankind was not alone in the universe. The hour would come when we…
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The Power of Gravity
Gravity directed and written by Alfonso Cuarón, is one of the most intense motion pictures that I have ever seen. The overwhelming engineering that went into creating this technologically stunning work echoes and enhances the thing that it has set out to emulate; the intricate and ultimately fragile Erector sets that man has placed into the heavens.…
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Getting Warmer
“It’s been hot lately, the weather reports coming out of the San Francisco desert are surprising. 137 in the day, 24 degrees or lower at night! Old Evans said that the concrete shafts of the Trans-America pyramid are starting to expand and contract so much that you can hear cracking off in the Oakland shelters.”…
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On the Surface
Imagine archaeology on the surface of another world. Exploring the remnants of a civilization lost to the tides of time on a world totally alien to our own.
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On 35 Years of Voyaging…
It is the 35th anniversary of the launch of Voyager 1. I felt that it’s a good time to trot out a poem I have written for this occasion (though it does mention BOTH Voyagers). Enjoy. Taking our first steps away from home seeing just how far we could roam men in ships to our nearest neighbor walking…
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The Great Frontier
The history of space exploration is studded with examples of ‘what could have been’. So many missions of discovery shut down, underfunded, and left to rot as infeasible. The Soviet Union and the United States made an art form of one-upmanship-The Soviets had the first man in space, the US the better interplanetary probes; the…
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Upon What Ventures Gained…
So far out here the sun appears as faint as a firefly at twilight. The vast and terrible worlds of gas and thunder are imperceptible; the insignificant rocky retinue of the inner planets might as well not exist. The cold is tantamount. The spaces between molecules ensure that even dust is a stranger. Out here…
The Numinous Cosmos 