Tuesday Afternoon Photostream

My desk in my dorm. The monitor is, alarmingly, new.

For some reason I can’t quite figure out, I find this amusingly appealing. Something about the heedless and careless revision.

If John Adams had been in a biker gang, this would have been their emblem.

Afterthought: that desk picture’s thousand words is the best about-me description I think I could give.

Academic History

My father recently wrote a blog post in response to a post on Instapundit that linked to one Pravda Online, which reported that an official had come forward and stated that the USSR had tried to launch men in sub-orbital shots once in each of 1957, 1958, and 1959.

Upon reading that, I had to two reactions. The first was that this is all predicated on the word of this one man. It is entirely possible that this did happen, and the USSR covered it all up. As my father dutifully noted, however, even the medium — this “Pravda Online” — is suspect. The fact that the most credible news source that this fellow could get to publish his story was the “equivalent of a supermarket tabloid in the U.S.” also brings into question the validity of his story.

The other reaction was that if the Soviet scientists had been able to share the circumstances of their failures, it might have been possible for the Americans to learn from them and possibly save lives. But then again, we already know that from a much clearer example:

On March 23, 1961 Bondarenko was working in a training simulator pressurized with pure oxygen. After removing some biosensors from his body Bondarenko washed his skin with an alcohol-soaked cotton ball which he carelessly threw away. The cotton ball landed on an electric hot plate which started a flash fire in the oxygen-rich atmosphere and ignited Bondarenko’s suit.

A watching doctor tried to open the chamber door but this took several minutes because of the pressure difference and Bondarenko suffered third-degree burns over most of his body. In 1984 the attending hospital physician Vladimir Golyakhovsky said that while attempting to start an intravenous drip he was only able to find an insertion point on the sole of one of Bondarenko’s feet, where his flight boots had warded off the flames. According to Golyakhovsky, cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin spent several hours at the hospital as “deathwatch officer” and Bondarenko died of shock eight hours after the mishap.

News of the accident was not published. Bondarenko had already appeared in group films and photos of the first cosmonaut group and his disappearance sparked rumours of cosmonauts dying in failed launches. The incident was revealed over twenty years later.

If we had heard about the extreme danger of operating in pressurized 100% oxygen conditions in 1961, we probably wouldn’t have put three astronauts in an Apollo module with 16 psi of O2, where a bar of aluminum can burn like wood, for the plugs out test of Apollo 1 in 1967.

But anyways, about the blog post. One important thing for me was that it pointed out the unlikelihood of the story given the sequence of events. See, my grasp of the chronology of the space program is somewhat tenuous. So when the idea of trying to put a man above the Karman line in 1957 didn’t immediately perk up my ears as it did my father’s:

The USSR didn’t even launch Sputnik I until October of that year, and that was a metal sphere a mere 28 inches in diameter. It did weigh as much as a man (183 pounds), but a spacecraft capable of carrying a man, keeping him alive, and returning him safely to Earth would weigh a great deal more. The Soviets simply didn’t have the ability to loft anything that massive into space, even on a suborbital trajectory, in 1957.

Heck, I even had to look up the dates for Bondarenko’s accident and the Apollo 1 fire. Even though they are events I know of well, their space in the time line is still pretty fuzzy.

One-Album Wonder

The first honest-to-god CD I ever bought for myself, via my finanicial proxy at the time (my parents), was Eiffel 65’s Europop. You’ll probably recall Eiffel 65 for their pandemically catch song “Blue”. Now, here’s the part where I provide a link to a YouTube video or the band’s MySpace so that you can hear the song, remind yourself of it, and remember the agony of being unable to get it out of your head.

Well, the first part I can’t do. The official music video for the song is absolutely atrocious: it has computer generated animation of about — allow me to step out of the way-back machine — ReBoot, but with art direction from Blinky the Three-Eyed Fish. (Alternatively, perhaps it was an attempt to apply the infinite monkey theorem to music videos.)

At any rate, I it’s… yeah. And there are a few fan-made ones where the video consists of Macromedia Flash animated stick figures, clips from Halo, or clips from Sailor Moon. What I’m saying is that if you want to hear this song again, you’re going to have to avert your eyes.

Wait, but what about the MySpace? Well, as it happens, one of the three members of Eiffel 65 decided to go it solo, and the other two abandoned the name and adopted a new one (Bloom 06), whose MySpace has no Eiffel 65 tracks. See, apparantly the name “Eiffel 65″ is the property of the corporation that sponsored the band. I guess that’s how things work in Italy.

And that’s really the trick to all of this. The band and its three members are all Italian. They actually made a couple more albums, in Italian, but none of them have quite had the same feel of Europop.

This kind of leaves me in a bind, because the next bit was where I was going to write about how the whole album was good and deserved more attention than it got. However, the juxtaposition of this with a general panning of the band’s body of work strikes me as… unkind.

But there you have it, I suppose. Europop is synth-pop at its finest, but also tries to put some weight behind its words, instead of discussing non-specific life turmoil. Between a song about the PlayStation and a song about how if you want to change things you have to actually work for it, there’s a lot to like there.

So this brings me to ponder a chicken-and-techno problem: did I buy the album because I liked it, or did I come to like it because I had bought it? Well, I’d certainly like to say the former. I’ve definitely developed quite a propensity for the strong-beated musical stylings of the synthesizer and sampler.

But, deep down, it was really about being more like the cool kid who lived up the street. See, he owned the album.

Afterthought: he also had a lava lamp, but I’ve managed to resist that particular, er, siren song.

Happy Endings

Being an avid reader of the Consumerist, whose daily fare consists of horror stories caused by hellish customer service, when I finally decided to send my laptop to Gateway to have it serviced, it was with much trepidation. (Another side effect of reading the Consumerist is also an uncontrollable urge to laugh whenever you hear the phrase “taking it seriously”.) However, given that one of the two hinges on my computer that had been slowly cracking for some time was dangerously close to detachment, I thought that the choice had been taken out of my hands.

Well, I did feel I had a bit of choice. For many months now, I’ve ogled the Asus EEEPc, for reasons I find hard to pin down. It’s small and has a cramped keyboard, hardly suitable for the kind of loquacious writings I find myself so often inscribing. I think, however, it was an admiration for the founding principles of the EEEPc: a cheap, ultra-portable, computer that used Linux and a solid state hard drive to bring it into uncharted territory.

Sure, there have been dabblings with cheap Linux-powered computers, and there have been countless ultra-portable computers made. But the EEEPc brought these two things together into a product that at times consumed my entire thoughtstream.

So when I had the choice between paying about $200 to have my computer fixed and $400 for an EEEPc, it was neck-and-neck at first. But then the realization came that the 7″ screen just would not do for the kind of power-using and multi-tasking that I have come to expect. Sure, I could theoretically write papers on it, but such a foolhardy endeavor has been roundly discouraged in all talk I’ve heard about the product.

Where is this all going? Well, I just got my laptop back from the service center, and it is, externally, as shiny and new as the day I got it, while the hard drive was maintained, so I didn’t have to do anything to get it back to working condition. And once it was booted, I began surfing the net, which is also technically feasible on the EEEPc, however it certainly looked better on a 15″ screen.

But the real kicker to it all is that I then proceeded to install the Eclipse development environment on the computer, and begin working on an assignment for class. I feel sure that such a thing would be patently impossible on the EEEPc. And yet I keep having to justify my non-purchase to myself, as this post can attest.

What is it about those smooth lines and delicious bits of Linux that have me so mesmerized?

Afterthought: I actually installed Eclipse at the urging of my computer science teacher, as it will be the class standard. However, due to a series of unfortunate circumstances, I didn’t actually make it to the class where he covered how to install and set up Eclipse. That’s for the best, really, as I would have been bored out of my mind given that I’ve been using Eclipse for my job for some time now. Funny how that works.

When you gaze long into an abyss

No new posts today.

Been too busy.

Indulge me for a moment

Via Slashdot, an article was brought to my attention which asks the question: “How do you recognise a good programmer?”

This struck a bit of a nerve with me because I’ve never really been tested. I have a relatively high regard for my programming skills, but I’ve never actually had any of my code reviewed, nor had the merit of my ability land me a job. On the other hand, I got an “A” in each of my Computer Science classes in High School, and I’m already far ahead of the curve in my current class. But as I say, these things are hard to tell. Thusly did I press on, attempting to whittle from this article whether these criteria fit me.

#1 : Passion
I believe that good developers are always passionate about programming. Good developers would do some programming even if they weren’t being paid for it. Good programmers will have a tendency to talk your ear off about some technical detail of what they’re working on (but while clearly believing, sincerely, that what they’re talking about is really worth talking about). Can you get this guy to excitedly chat up a technology that he’s using, for a whole half hour, without losing steam? Then you might be onto a winner.

This is actually something of a two-pronged point. The first article is that a good programmer programs even if they’re not being paid for it. Given that I’ve only in the last few months begun to be paid for writing code, but I’ve been coding for some years (extra-curricularly), I think this is a slam-dunk. The 60 kilobyte folder titled “Python Stuff” with a few years of accumulated coding snippets on my computer agrees.

The notion of rambling on about a technology without losing steam is something I certainly can do — I caught myself doing it just this Sunday. But that is not merely restricted to technology. It is, however, something that comes very easily to me. Take that as you will.

#2 : Self-teaching and love of learning
If you’re thinking of hiring someone as a programmer, and he ever utters the words “I can work with that, just send me on a training course for a week and I’ll be good at it”, don’t hire that guy. A good programmer doesn’t need a training course to learn a new technology. In fact, the great programmer will be the one talking your ear off about a new technology that you haven’t even heard of, explaining to you why you must use it in your business, even if none of your staff knows how to use it. Even if it’s a technology he doesn’t know how to use yet.

Given that my entire knowledge of my beloved Python programming language is self-taught, I can say this one fits quite ably as well. As my father pointed out yesterday, I did actually learn Python after being tipped off by him. He actually mentioned Python in connection with something Eric Raymond said, stating,

If you don’t know any computer languages, I recommend starting with Python. It is cleanly designed, well documented, and relatively kind to beginners. Despite being a good first language, it is not just a toy; it is very powerful and flexible and well suited for large projects.

Using free tutorials and, later, real dead-tree books, I took up the language with an internal zeal that surely qualifies. The love of learning was also manifest here, although it can also be seen in my far-reaching knowledge of all kinds of random stuff that I learned because doing so was, well, fun.

#3 : Intelligence
Good programmers aren’t dumb. Ever. In fact, good programmers are usually amongst the smartest people you know. Many of them will actually have pretty good social skills too. The cliché of the programmer who’s incapable of having a conversation is just that – a cliché. This doesn’t mean that they’ll all feel comfortable in every social context. But it does mean that if the context is comfortable and non-threatening enough, you’ll be able to have as great a conversation with them as you would with the most “socially enabled” people (perhaps better, since most good programmers I know like their conversation to revolve around actually useful topics, rather than just inane banter).

The emphasis here is mine, because I concur strongly with this. I have always struggled with this notion of small-talk, discussing things just to discuss them. I will always honor a good-natured inquiry into personal status, but any attempt to discuss ephemera like sports or — perish the thought — the weather will likely be met with terseness and laconicity.

The main thrust of this was, however, intelligence. Well, there’s not much I can say here that isn’t forth-right bragging. I got a 1460 on my SAT, for whatever that was worth. Above and beyond that, I can back this up only by offering to take the derivative of my word-per-minute, or prognosticating on the various ramifications of the EFF’s latest movement against the RIAA.

#4 : Hidden experience
I strongly believe that most good programmers will have a hidden iceberg or two like this that doesn’t appear on their CV or profile. Something they think isn’t really relevant, because it’s not “proper experience”, but which actually represents an awesome accomplishment. A good question to ask a potential “good programmer” in an interview would be “can you tell me about a personal project – even or especially one that’s completely irrelevant – that you did in your spare time, and that’s not on your CV?”

That folder of “Python Stuff” I mentioned earlier is probably the best indicator of this. Just browsing it, I find that I’ve got little code snippets for things like the Sieve of Eratosthenes, working with Mersenne primes, and a little program that asks “Does the verb phrase have its own subject?” If the user replies “yes”, the program responds “The word group is a clause, not a phrase.” and if the user replies “no”, then the program prints — I am not making this up — “bummer dude”.

I could also mention all the work I’ve done over at Project Euler, which ended up using some Python libraries that I had already coded up for just such an eventuality. My crowning achievement, though, is probably the program I wrote for the TI-83 that simplifies radicals. The trick is that, after I finished it, I realized it would be way more efficient using a list of primes instead of just iterating through each real number. So, naturally, I coded up a version of the Sieve for TI BASIC. The inter-operatory elegance present there is still impressive to me.

#5 : Variety of technologies
This one’s pretty simple. Because of the love of learning and toying with new technologies that comes with the package of being a “good programmer”, it’s inevitable that any “good programmer” over the age of 22 will be fluent in a dozen different technologies. They can’t help it. Learning a new technology is one of the most fun things a programmer with any passion can do. So they’ll do it all the time, and accumulate a portfolio of things they’ve “played around with”. They may not be experts at all of them, but all decent programmers will be fluent in a large inventory of unrelated technologies.

The fact that, on a daily basis, I go between working in Windows & Kubuntu Linux and coding in Java & Python, as well as my dabblings in HTML & CSS proves this point as best I can. This one is a little nebulous simply because knowing a little about a lot isn’t something you can easily distill. Sure, I can program a VCR or do some audio engineering, but I was only able to pull those out of the air by staring off in to space and trying to think of random things that I wouldn’t even put on a resume.

#6 : Formal qualifications
This is more a of non-indicator than a counter-indicator. The key point to outline here is that formal qualifications don’t mean squat when you’re trying to recognise a good programmer. Many good programmers will have a degree in Computer Science. Many won’t. If you’re hiring for a small business, or you need really smart developers for a crack team that will implement agile development in your enterprise, you should disregard most formal qualifications as noise. They really don’t tell you very much about whether the programmer is good. As a final note to this, in my experience most average or poor programmers start programming at university, for their Computer Science course. Most good programmers started programming long before, and the degree was just a natural continuation of their hobby. If your potential programmer didn’t do any programming before university, and all his experience starts when she got her first job, she’s probably not a good programmer.

There’s really not much to add to this, as the previous discussion has well established that this doesn’t really apply. I learned to program and used that to get my first technology job, not learned programming to keep my job. I have no illusions that what I learn in college will only be a portion of what I will need to know to write good software, but that’s why I plan to keep working and learning — in and out of the office.

So, I fit the bill, it seems. I’ve got a ton of writing about how I am a good programmer, and it seems right. That just leaves one thing left to do: put my money where my keyboard is and make some good code. At the risk of sounding like further procrastination, as soon as I get my laptop back from Gateway’s Repair Dungeon, I think I’ll start using it to put together Futility Forever, an updated version of Futility, the Space Invaders clone that can never be won. This ought to be good.

Ooh, and while I’m at it, I can tinker around with and learn Google Code…

Like Escher’s “Drawing Hands”

The Revision3 show Systm recently did an episode on one of the many do-jiggers to increase gas mileage by using possibly-legit science to inject hydrogen into the air-fuel mixture in the engine to increase fuel efficiency.

A couple of things strike me about this. The first is that I can’t find any documentation either way on if the hydrogen has a disproportionate effect on efficiency. Essentially, for the purpose of simplicity, let’s say hydrogen gas burns twice as “well” as a proper air-fuel gasoline mixture. So if you have 99% gas-air, and 1% hydrogen, it seems to me that you would get a 1% better engine because the 1% of hydrogen is worth 2% of gas-air (twice as good). But really, that’s all beside the point — I just like to sound like I know what I’m talking about.

So even assuming Hydrogen does increase efficiency, the problem comes back to the same problem facing Hydrogen cars: where to get the gas.

Well, this particular do-jigger uses the same magic bullet that has been so often proposed as the solution to all of our hydrogen woes: electrolysis. If you run a current through water, you can cause the water to split into its components: hydrogen and oxygen. Capture the hydrogen and voila: “free energy.”

Except it isn’t. You have to run a beefy current through the water to split the water, so all the hydrogen does is simply “store” the energy in chemical potential energy. You release that energy it by setting it on fire.

Anyways, back to the do-jigger. It siphons current from your battery to conduct this electrolysis. This is where you science nerds are finally catching up with me. See, it’s a zero-sum game.

By draining the battery to put that energy into gaseous hydrogen, the engine then has to burn more gas to recharge the battery. It sounds perfect to the layman, because it’s easy to think that free energy exists: except it doesn’t. Everything costs something, until you’re all outta money.

(Comments telling me how wrong I am are quite welcome. Interestingly enough, my collegiate-level chemistry class has given me very little help in this, so I’m essentially going on inherited knowledge.)

But I was going to Revision3’s website to see if anyone had expressed the same flaw in the reasoning that seemed so apparant to me, and found the forum thread for this particular episode.

What I found particularly alarming here is the same thing that I’m sure the MythBusters discovered in their days of covering psuedo-science: you can find loons in even the most normal bunch.

For example, in that forum thread, there’s this Hklax character whose posts are a little peculiar. One, in particular, sounds like a commercial for this one type of electrolysis aparatus, which seems rather trivial. The fuel cell produces so-called “brown gas”, which is water in gaseous form, which is to say 2:1 gaseous Hydrogen:Oxygen. But we don’t need gaseous Oxygen. It’s everywhere around us. Even in an internal combustion engine, having the Oxygen in the “brown gas” would be redundant.

But Hklax really seems to show his stripes when another poster points to the debunking of the magic fuel-saving devices done by the MythBusters. He really lashes out at them for crushing his dreams of a hydrogen utopia, responding thus:

when talking about the myth busters, you also need to think about the fact that they’re ENTERTAINERS, the results are rarely actual, the show is made to ENTERTAIN you, they also often seem to leave out convenient important facts. like when they tried out the Bedini-engine in the “free energy” episode, there they somehow didn’t attach the magnets of which this engine is so famous for, also, if that “professor” they used, actually was some kind of real professor in alternative energy, he’d tell them right away that they had forgotten the magnets.

On a side note, when referring to myth busters as a reliable source, you need to take into account that they have been, and ARE STUNT coordinators, meaning that they plan and organize stunts for entertainment purposes ONLY. Another thing to note is that they are “well funded” which means that they have OTHER people in charge of the show, these other people isn’t always interested in showing real results, often they are interested in making more MONEY.

I know that someone posting gibberish on a forum isn’t news in any way, but this was just too good to pass up. The MythBusters being a front for The Man? “Real professor in alternative energy”?

I think the word he’s looking for there is “wizard”, given that that is the word I use to refer to practicioners of magic.

Always another problem

I was picking through the XKCD archives the other day and came across this comic, which stands by itself as being entirely true and hilarious. But all XKCD comics have a second part, a second punch-line, listed in the image’s “title” text.

This particular comic’s title text read as follows: “I first saw this problem on the Google Labs Aptitude Test. A professor and I filled a blackboard without getting anywhere. Have fun.”

This struck me as one of those nerd experiences that Randal Munroe, author of XKCD, occasionally writes about, that would be really cool to actually experience. To have a teacher so cool that not only would he would take the time to lend his expertise to help solve some purposely inscrutable problems, and spend quite a while at it. But after contemplating this for a few moments, I realized that it already had happened to me. Well, sort of.

See, many years ago, in the fall of 2004, a billboard appeared in Silicon Valley that said “{the first 10-digit prime found in consecutive digits of e}.com” and word of this reached my high school sophomore ears, during Linux class.

Tabling that week’s lesson — it was a some-what self-paced course — for a later day, I began to crack in to this problem with the kind of zeal shown by the physicist in the above comic. It made sense to solve the problem in Python, which I had been teaching myself, and the Fedora Core Linux computers in the class room had it already installed, so I just opened a vi window and started in.

That part only took a little while, because Python’s string slicing made iterating through an arbitrarily long string (stored in a text file from one of these websites that has e to the millionth digit) a piece of cake. Mix in a function that probabilistically test for primes, and you’re done.

But, of course, this was just the beginning. After chewing its cud for a while, my program spit out “7427466391″, which took me to 7427466391.com. That, of course, had another problem. This one was much trickier:

f(1) = 7182818284
f(2) = 8182845904
f(3) = 8747135266
f(4) = 7427466391
f(5) = ???

Just looking at the provided results, I could tell that it wasn’t any kind of conventional f(x) = kx function, or even any function there f(x) varied directly or indirectly with x. Aside from that, my math schooling through Honors Geometry provided very little help.

But at this point, some of the rest of the class began pitching in. See, somewhere along the way, while I had been solving the first part, I guess some of my classmates had noticed the, uh, concentrated look on my face, and wondered what I was up to. Stumped at this second puzzle, I opened the floor for input. A number of theories were floated and eventually sunken, to no avail.

Eventually, the teacher of this Linux class, one of the best teachers in the whole school, became interested in what was taking up so much attention. After explaining what was going on in full, and repeatedly reinforcing the fact that this was being done in Linux and was undoubtedly scholarly, he tacitly admitted the project’s merit and began providing assistance.

From there, I don’t remember how exactly the algorithm for finding the correct answer was determined, although I’m sure it was implemented in the same Python used on the first problem. But someone eventually figured out that the numbers were ten-digit sequences of numbers from e whose digits summed to 49. Once the fifth such number was found, and provided to this challenge website, it informed us that this was, in fact, a test.

As the message from Google Labs read:

One thing we learned while building Google is that it’s easier to find what you’re looking for if it comes looking for you. What we’re looking for are the best engineers in the world. And here you are.

As you can imagine, we get many, many resumes every day, so we developed this little process to increase the signal-to-noise ratio.

The sense of accomplishment seeing this was tempered only by the disappointment at having no resume to send given that I hadn’t yet held my first job, much less still being in the midst of achieving a diploma.

Of Role-Models and Dreams

People often ask kids what they want to be when they grow up. At the proper age, a knee-jerk “Astronaut” or “Firefighter” or “Horse-riding ballerina-princess” might be returned, with a gleeful grin.

But as the respondent’s age increases, the question makes less and less sense. To render an answer to “What do you want to be” becomes an exercise in blurring what the respondent is thinking, in order to fit the question. See, the proper question becomes “Who do you want to be when you grow up?”

When someone asks you the “What” question, and you think “Steven Spielberg”, you mentally reduce the resolution of that answer to the fuzzier version: “A director.” But deep down, you keep wishing to be like that person.

On a coplanar and intersecting tangent, Gabe & Tycho from Penny Arcade recently did something really stupid. See, when they received a review copy of the recent Nintendo DS game Orcs & Elves, they found that it also came with a Nintendo DS, actual and whole. Tycho had this to say about it:

We didn’t even open the thing. If you have been doing this for almost a decade, as we have, you develop a very comprehensive and far reaching cynicism that applies to anything that a company sends you. We arm ourselves in this way because we think it will make us deliver you a more robust assessment of the medium. Also, we are assholes. Professionally.

So, believing it to be equivalent to their own well-loved DSes, they offered it as a prize in a recent contest, and sent it out in the mail a few days ago. As it happens, however, the DS was signed by the game’s chief developer, who had been attempting to donate it to raise funds for Penny Arcade’s charity Child’s Play, which endeavors to bring video games to hospitalized kids and make their stays easier. As Tycho concludes,

He used his position to secure something incredible for the charity, and believed that I would be literate enough to read the enclosed letter. He was wrong.

Now, the locus of these two threads: the game designer in question is, much to my surprise, John Carmack. This is the man that co-founded id Games, and wrote Wolfenstein 3-D, Doom, and Commander Keen, the very games on which I cut my teeth. But what I found most interesting is the fact that, in the midst of reading Tycho’s post about this signed DS, after he revealed the existence of this object, but before he revealed its fate, I was consumed with an urge to track down any sign of it and find pictures or some other evidence of this item’s existence. Why, you ask? So that I might salivate in admiration of such a thing.

See, in the past, I had idly considered how my answer to the above-mentioned questions would be this man, who established the FPS genre as we know it. But somewhere along the way, I have come to genuinely idolize him. The idea of not only setting the bar for an entire generation of games, but then being the only one to effectively rise above that bar, consistently, is so appealing I can hardly verbalize it.

To put it another way, I would be happy to make video games a tenth as successful as his.

But deepening this worshipfulness is my recent discovery (during the research phases for my Money and Space posts) that he is an active contributor to the field of civilian space exploration with his company Armadillo Aerospace.

So, to review, this guy kick-started the first-person shooter genre, got pretty wealthy doing so, has continued to do work in the computer gaming field (including discovering a rendering technique that bears his name), while taking his wealth and plowing it back into the pursuit of outer space. Can you blame me for liking him?

And if he’s reading this, given that he is known to be active around the intertubes, I just hope he realizes that I realize it hasn’t been all lollipops and bubble gum, but it sounds like it’s been a fun ride.

Money and Space, Part 1

I recently had a conversation with my father, which elicited from me a great deal of vehemence I didn’t know I held for this particular issue. The topic under debate was the commercialization of space.

The basic underpinning of my argument is two-fold, based on the two current uses for space. The first, most obvious, and entirely unexplored side is that of space tourism. Sure, the Russkies are asking a cool $30 million and more than two years of waiting for a shot at hitting the Kármán line, but that is almost irrelevant for a few reasons.

First, the price tag, slow schedule, and long training regimen make it only an option to richest hundreth of a percent of the world. I agree with Rand Simberg’s sentiment that, at this stage of the game, sending a few people isn’t good enough.

But the more important problem with flying high-rollers into micro-grav in a Soyuz capsule is, well, the Soyuz. These things entered use half a century ago. As an aside, the Soyuz despite its age, is slightly suited for space-tourism in one respect: partial re-usability of components; the whole stack doesn’t have to be replaced for each launch a la Apollo, et al.

See, space tourism is going to require radically different thinking. The idea of having a giant rocket of which less than 5% splashes down in the ocean with people inside is utterly impractical for any kind of economic venture. The X PRIZE Foundation realized this when they set up their rules for space competition: the winner had to reach 100 kilometers twice in a two-week period with the equivalent of three people on board, and no more than ten percent of the non-fuel weight of the craft replaced between flights.

Both the mention of radically different thinking and the X PRIZE dovetail nicely into something of great interest to many of us: SpaceShipOne, the craft that handily won the X PRIZE.

If you’re like me, you still get the warm and fuzzies when you think about it, because it is the locus of so much hope for space exploration. Just as Von Braun took 14 men to the surface of the moon, Burt Rutan very well may be the man who takes 14 men into space every week.

But the problem with SpaceShipOne is that it has terrible writers: after kicking down the door to space and earning the first two civilian astronauts their wings, it disappeared. Since the winning flights three and a half years ago, so little has been heard of this little spaceplane that could, I ended up acquiring a sense that it was sitting in a warehouse somewhere just molding.

As it happens, SpaceShipOne was actually retired from service to prevent damage and was immediately stuck in the Air and Space museum between the Spirit of St. Louis and Yeager’s Bell X-1 (“Glamorous Glennis”).

And while I don’t begrudge Rutan and company their spot in the museum, the idea of sticking this craft in the museum and calling it a day irks me. It’s like they’re saying “Good job, guys, let’s go home!” And I’ll fully admit I’m a little over-sensitive to this sort of pat-on-the-back-and-prop-up-your-feet mentality because it’s happened before. It is almost this exact reason that Dick Gordon never went to the moon on Apollo 18, or Fred Haise on Apollo 19, or Pete Conrad on Apollo 20. After Neil took his small step (and Pete his long one), the American public stopped caring.

And this lack of public attention, more than anything, I believe will be what condemns any given space tourism program to the scrap heap. Luckily, however, there are a number of projects going on behind the curtain, where the public need neither see nor care.

The first is one that I mentioned earlier, as the company flying those who can pay millions: Space Adventures. According to that link, they have a number of pokers in the fire, developing both sub-orbital and circumlunar craft, although I was unfamiliar with either and am wary of neither coming to fruition. On that topic, we’ll have to keep our eyes open.

The second, and more promising next step, is the aptly named SpaceShipTwo, for which the wait claims to be almost over. According to public statements, we should be hearing from Rutan and company this month, unveiling the final design of the ship, and launching it into a series of test flights (fifty to one hundred of them), before the fleet of five SpaceShipTwos enters commercial service “late” next year.

Now, if you’re like me, reading that “late next year”, you think that’s a long time to wait. But then you may, as I did, realize that that figure isn’t nearly so bad. That’s when paying customers (i.e. almost certainly not you or I) will begin taking rides in this thing. What’s more exciting, in the grand scheme of things, are these test flights, which promise to be like winning the X PRIZE every week. To me, it’s mid-2004 again, and it’s almost time to see some new civilians with those astronaut wings.

But to bring everything back down to Earth, the incredible number of test flights (relative to, say Apollo) hammers home the idea that this is a business. And the business has to be proven safe, the pilots have to be expertly trained, and the infrastructure must be shown reliable.

Viewed differently, there is an enormous wealth lying untapped, far and above the “mere” $10 million X PRIZE purse, which can be shown by the fact that there is a two-year wait to pay $30 million to go into space. See, a waiting list is a sign of a shortage (obviously, in this case), and in the free market, such conditions are remdied by increasing the price.

There were 26 competing teams in the X PRIZE, and Scaled Composites is the only one we’ve heard from since. What gives?

To put it another way, with an untapped billion-dollar industry waiting to be opened, why are there only two games in town with any hope of turning a buck?