The 67P Project
When I was a teenager, my friend Rob Heyman and I used to geek out over a computer game built around exploring and navigating the solar system, The Halley Project. The game would give you cryptic directions, as if issuing instructions to Charlie’s cosmic angels, as to where to go. Sometimes it would be “go to the third moon of Jupiter.” Sometimes it would rely on more fine-grained space knowledge: “go to the only moon in the solar system with a dense atmosphere.” (In which case, of course, you’d go to Titan, the large moon of Saturn.) You’d complete each round of tasks by returning to the “base” of the Halley Project, Halley’s Comet itself. Yeah, sure, land on a comet. The game was criticized by some educators and scientists for mixing its science with science fiction.
Those critics evidently couldn’t see a mere 28 years into the future. A robot launched in 2004 by the European Space Agency has now put a lander on a comet. … Read more
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I’ve initiated a new category here at Scribblings to encompass my rants, musings and occasional artistic dabblings on the subject of real space exploration. If there’s a surprise here, it’s that I haven’t had a category for such things in the past.
With everyone in agreement that the two space-related destinations in central Oklahoma were worth going to, we set out from Fort Smith in the Martins’ vehicle to strike out westward. The kids were surprisingly well behaved for the whole trip; it occasionally got a bit noisy, but since the back set was filled with boys, that’s hardly a surprise.
Today was the day everyone on Earth was supposed to 
Though I try not to get hung up on it, my mind is really good about playing the what-if game: what had happened if the course of my life zigged – presumably for great justice – when, as we all know by now, it zagged with a vengeance. Sometimes it’s “what if I’d passed on the chili dogs at Sonic and eaten something else or, perhaps, nothing at all” (a not uncommon thought when I’m on bathroom trip #7 at two in the morning), sometimes it’s major life decisions, and the beauty of the human brain is that it can pierce the veil of the possible and imagine what didn’t happen. I sometimes wonder if, perhaps, we’re closer to being Douglas Adams’ “pan-dimensional beings” than anyone truly imagines. But every once in a while, one pauses to consider a cosmic “if… then” statement that defies imagining. … 