That '70s Show.

With tomorrow's launch of NASA'S Artemis I mission, we will see the long-awaited renewal of the American human-based space exploration program. 

Well, not exactly.  Without the pressure of trying to beat the USSR to a Moon landing (although they're keeping an eye on China, apparently) NASA is taking a more careful approach this time.  Artemis I is a 42-day unmanned mission that will orbit the Moon, launch ten compact Cubesats en route, and return.  Artemis II, scheduled for early 2024, will take four astronauts (one Canadian) on a similar flight plan around the Moon, and Artemis III will land the first woman at the south polar region of the Moon in 2025, along with a male astronaut. The eventual goal is to establish a permanent presence in the form of a lunar base - Moonbase Alpha, if you will.  

NASA also plans to start assembly of its Gateway lunar space station in 2024, with the intention of the Artemis III crew being able to make use of new station. However, if there are any delays in the construction schedule, Artemis III will not need to rely on Gateway to complete its planned mission.  

Graphic by The Daily Mail

 
The sad thing is that even though it's been not quite 50 years* since the last lunar landing, NASA is using almost exactly the same non-sustainable approach to space exploration that it used then. Given the delays in project completion** and the cost overruns, I was surprised to learn that the Space Launch System, successor to the legendary Saturn V rocket used for the Apollo missions, uses four RS-25 engines that were literally recycled from the space shuttle program, as was the Orion 1 main engine.  Sadly, this will be their last mission: apparently NASA decided that recovering any of the parts from the core stage of the SLS wasn't feasible.  Similarly, the twin booster rocket sections contain components from the shuttle program, but once again, they will not be recovered.

It seems odd that NASA has taken this approach to the Artemis program, given that SpaceX has been quietly transporting cargo to the ISS since 2012 - and crew since 2020 -  using reusable components such as boosters that land on floating rafts, and the Dragon cargo and crew modules that are salvaged and refurbished for additional missions.  Just to clarify what this means in practical terms, SpaceX charges NASA $67M USD per launch (they've just raised the price from $62M, apparently everyone is suffering because of the supply chain).  

Artemis I?  $23 BILLION TO BUILD AND ANOTHER $4.1 BILLION DOLLARS*** for tomorrow's launch - and it will only fly once.   Sigh...  NASA, the '70s called, they'd like their rocket back.

- Sid

* December 19th, 1972.

** The first SLS launch has been delayed a staggering 15 times since 2010 - I did a blog posting in 2019 with a more optimistic timeline for Artemis than the eventual result.

*** These number comes from The Daily Mail website.  NASA announced in 2017 that it wouldn't be giving cost-per-flight estimates for the SLS, which has to say something about how much it costs.

UPDATE:  The launch was cancelled due to engine problems and is being rescheduled  - well that can't be good...

Gnomic Statement XIX: Pork-adjacent.

I'm sorry, but it's actually spelled "inna", at least according to the books. 

- Sid

Resource wars on the Moon!

 From an article on CNN.com:

On one hand, this is terrible, it makes the Space Policy Institute spokesman sound like a jingoistic American Manifest Destiny cliché, and seems to suggest that the situation could escalate into active conflict between the Communist block countries and the American-aligned Artemis mission nations over the resources on the Moon.

On the other hand, I'm actually a bit pleased by how much this real-time article sounds like an excerpt from a science fiction novel.  Please don't judge me, as with the ISS, I somewhat love anything that reflects the degree to which we live in the future.

- Sid

Space Guns.

Another trailer has dropped for Andor, the latest of the Disney Star Wars series, and there's been some negative feedback regarding what appears to be an AK-47 in one of the shots.  Some viewers have found this to be completely unacceptable, and have voiced their disapproval in no uncertain terms:

Sigh...

Whereas I appreciate the passion that fans feel regarding what they consider to be insults to beloved franchises, in this case I feel that it reveals a lack of background knowledge regarding the origins of the Star Wars arsenal and the degree to which they can be considered to be "space guns".  This is also one of those rare situations where my other hobby - military history - overlaps with my genre interests.

Let's look at some examples from A New Hope, starting with the Imperial DL-19 Heavy Blaster, which is a WWII German MG34 with virtually no modifications other than covering up the ammunition feed.

DL-19 Heavy Blaster

MG34 Light Machine Gun

The E-11 blaster, standard Imperial Stormtrooper issue throughout the original trilogy, is a Sterling submachine gun with some modifications tacked on, the magazine replaced with a cut-down plug, and a dodgy looking scope - by the way, is there a single scene in any of the movies where a Stormtrooper unfolds the stock and fires their blaster from their shoulder?

E-11 Blaster

Sterling Submachine Gun

And we'll end with Han Solo's iconic blaster, which is a Mauser C96 with a nicer looking scope than the E-11, and some added greebly dressing - the term used by the Star Wars prop team to describe the process of layering props and sets with futuristic accessories. Impressively, there's no attempt at all to conceal the distinctive hammer mechanism, even though I'm pretty sure Han isn't shooting 7.63 Parabellum.

DL-44 Blaster

Mauser C-96*

Coincidentally, the original DL-44 prop is up for auction - sort of.  After production completed for A New Hope, most of the gun-based props were returned to the supplier, the Bapty & Co. prop house, where they were stripped of their greeblies, and put back into stock.  After all, there was no expectation that the movie would prove to be as popular as it was, and as such there was no reason to preserve the props. Following the success of the first film, cast resin versions of the gun were used in the next two episodes.

After finding what he believed to be the original Mauser used to create the DL-44, the owner of Bapty asked the original lead armorer from the film to see if he could find the remaining parts needed to rebuild the prop.  The resulting creation, which will go up for auction by the Rock Island Auction House at the end of August, contains approximately 80% of the original version.  However, only serious fans need apply, bidding is expected to start at $300,000 USD and could easily exceed half a million - not bad for something that isn't really a space gun.

- Sid

* This image has been flipped horizontally for ease of comparison.

"To Infinity..."

In 1995 a boy named Andy got a Buzz Lightyear toy for his birthday.
It was from his favorite movie. 

This is that movie.

Pixar's Lightyear is based on the concept that the Buzz Lightyear toys from the Toy Story movies must have been merchandising from some sort of intellectual property, in the same way that Sheriff Woody and his gang had their origins in the 1950s children's program Woody's Roundup. Ultimately, that idea is irrelevant to the plot of Lightyear, although it's an interesting meta decision to introduce a fictional franchise within a fictional franchise.

The film introduces Buzz Lightyear as the pilot of a Star Command exploratory spaceship that crashes on an alien planet after attempting to escape hostile life forms encountered on the planet's surface.  Buzz, who is responsible for the crash due to egotistically ignoring offers of assistance and the advice of the autopilot, volunteers to pilot the ship being used to test an experimental replacement hyperdrive crystal.

However, he falls prey to the effects of time dilation and drifts increasingly out of sync with the rest of the crew, not to mention his best friend, who grows old and dies over the course of his repeated unsuccessful near-lightspeed test flights. Eventually his robotic cat companion solves the hyperdrive crystal problem, but on his return from a successful test, he discovers that robotic invaders have attacked the colony, and he must work with a misfit team to defeat the villainous Zurg and save the day.

Lightyear is a pretty good space opera. It's a solid little science fiction story with a couple of interesting twists, the art direction is excellent, Chris Evans does a near-perfect imitation of the original Buzz Lightyear voice (my apologies to Tim Allen, but really, it's very good), and it makes surprisingly good use of relativistic physics and the effects of travelling at near light-speed (although I'll be honest and admit that I haven't actually checked the math for the time dilation ratio).

All that being said, I found that it somehow lacked the emotional impact that Pixar normally brings to the table. When I watch a Pixar production, I expect there to be at least one scene that brings a tear to my eye - for example, in The Incredibles, it's the moment where Mr. Incredible tells his wife that he's not strong enough to lose her again. 

It's hard to say why Lightyear isn't more successful in that sense, you can certainly see them trying.  There are some inspirational bits, a couple of tragic moments, a message from a dead friend, and a redemptive conclusion, you'd think at least one of those would have rung the bell to make me well up, but somehow Lightyear doesn't manage to pull it off, in spite of how good it is otherwise.  It's possible that the script's just a bit too heavy handed: as I commented above, their attempts to create an emotional moment are quite obvious rather than being an organic part of the story.

It occurred to me while I was watching Lightyear that it could just as easily been done as a live action film, and I might well have found it more entertaining in that format.  When you look at the cast of voice actors, it's completely feasible for them to replace their animated counterparts: Chris Evans, Keke Palmer, Taika Waititi, Isiah Whitlock Jr. - okay, at 44, Bill Hader admittedly feels a bit old to play Star Ranger recruit Featheringhamstan.  That aside, it would be easy for Disney to add Lightyear to its list of animation-to-live-action projects, although they should probably bump it up the priority queue in case Chris Evans starts to lose his hair.

But that takes us to another question regarding the franchise within a franchise and the film within a film.  Granted, Lightyear is Andy's favourite movie, but Andy is a character in an animated world.  In that model, in Andy's reality, is Lightyear a live action production performed by actors, or is it an animated movie? 

- Sid

Missed opportunities.

This morning, my wife Karli and I experienced a rare crossover in our sleeping schedules: she woke up early and I slept in a bit, which resulted in both of us being awake at 8:00 AM on a Sunday morning.  We decided that we should celebrate this unexpected overlap by going out for breakfast, and strolled down Broadway to the Sunshine Diner, one of Vancouver's iconic breakfast spots.

We found a pleasant table in the shade, enjoyed a somewhat expensive breakfast (welcome to the 2022 economy, even eggs are not cheap right now), settled the bill, and started our walk home.

As we left the restaurant and headed past the rest of the outdoor dining, I unexpectedly caught sight of  what appeared to be a familiar face.  

Photography is funny, taking someone's picture can often embed them quite solidly in your memory, and in this case I was certain that I'd photographed the person in question eight years ago at a Vancouver Writer's Fest event, featuring cyberpunk legend William Gibson, and two newcomers on the scene, fantasy authors A. M. Dellamonica and Sebastien de Castell, the second of whom was apparently discussing toast options with a waitress at the restaurant we'd just left.

I waited until we'd walked a discreet distance along Broadway, and then excitedly told Karli of my sighting.  She urged me to go back and talk to him, but I felt reluctant to accost someone trying to have a quiet breakfast on the off chance that I had correctly recognized them from an eight-year-old memory, and convinced her that we should just head back to our apartment.

When we got home, I checked my original blog posting from 2014 and took at look at his web site, and decided that it might well have been Mr. de Castell after all. Conveniently, the web site included a contact form, and I thought it would be polite to pass along my best wishes, regardless of whether or not it had actually been him, and composed the following: 

As my wife and I were leaving the Sunshine Diner on Broadway this morning, I turned to her and said, "THAT was Sebastien de Castell ordering breakfast back there!!! He's a brilliant fantasy author, I saw him at a Writer's Fest event with William Gibson a few years ago!"

She said, "Did you want to go back?"

"No, I don't want to interrupt the man's breakfast just to be a fanboy, what kind of Canadian would I be? And I could be wrong, it might not be him."

But, just in case, I would have said that I've really enjoyed your Greatcoat books, excellent stuff, thanks so much! And if it was you, I also hope you enjoyed your breakfast, it took us forever to get coffee.

To my mild surprise and extreme gratification, I received a response a couple of hours later, presumably after he had finished breakfast, returned home, and decided to check e-mail.

Hi Sid,

Yes, that was indeed me. Why didn’t you stop by and say hello? I wouldn’t have minded at all. More importantly, it would’ve impressed my wife tremendously, which is really the primary motivation of my existence. The only occasion on which someone’s come up to my table at a restaurant and asked if I was myself was at the lovely Fable restaurant down on 4th. The person who came up was an as-yet unpublished novelist named Nicholas Eames, who’s now a much more famous novelist than I am.

So just think what you missed out on ;)

Thanks for the kind words about the Greatcoats!

Best,

Sebastien

It's always a pleasure when someone who is in the public eye in any way responds well to their fan base, and I feel that Mr. de Castell's response is both friendly and gracious.  In return, I strongly recommend his writing to anyone reading this post - for more information, please visit:

https://decastell.com/

And, if you believe that lightning strikes twice and you'd like to have your own brush with greatness, you are welcome to visit the Sunshine Diner at 2649 W Broadway in Vancouver, who knows, you may get lucky.  Although, full disclosure, I only go there for breakfast once in a while.

- Sid