Well, That Was a Bust

So I’m sure everyone heard about the transit-of-Venus thing that happened Tuesday, right? That once-in-a-lifetime astronomical event when the next planet inward from us passed between the Earth and the sun? Did you all manage to catch a glimpse of it? Well, good for you… The Girlfriend and I, on the other hand, got hosed. And considering this only happens every 105 years, I’m a little peeved about it.

I heard a couple days prior that our local planetarium was going to host a viewing party at the Gateway mall in Salt Lake. That’s only a couple blocks from my office, so I suggested Anne pick me up at quitting time and we drive over there for a quick peek, then go for dinner some place in the downtown area. A great plan… if only the weather had cooperated with us. When Anne arrived at my office, the skies were overcast and a cold wind was making it miserable to be outdoors. We still had a couple hours before sunset, so we decided to reverse our schedule, have dinner first and hope the clouds would break while we were eating. No such luck, though; we walked out of Sizzler an hour later beneath churning gray skies. But I wasn’t willing to give up yet… looking off to the west, toward the Gateway, I thought I could see a little patch of sunlight. Surely, I thought, that spot ought to be visible from the Gateway.

It took us a mere five minutes or so to drive across town and find a parking space. The viewing party — such as it was — was set up atop the broad concrete stairs overlooking the Olympic Fountain, an interactive water feature that commemorates the 2002 Winter Games that put Salt Lake City on the map. Not to mention Mitt Romney, the presumptive Republican nominee for president. But that’s another blog entry.

There was but a single telescope there, a stubby, fat-barreled model presided over by three very dejected-looking young people. One of them stepped forward to meet us as we approached. Wrapped in a blanket, with a shaggy mane of dark hair and sporting a pointy Van Dyke-style beard with carefully waxed and curled mustachios, he gave the general appearance of a Spanish conquistador.

“Have you been able to see anything?” I asked, hoping he’d have a more hopeful answer than the one I anticipated.

“Nah, we’ve been here since four o’clock and we haven’t been able to see shit, man,” he replied.

Anne and I commiserated with him for a moment, then decided there wasn’t any point in pretending any longer. We thanked the conquistador for his time and wandered into the nearby Barnes and Noble, where we killed close to another hour browsing. We were disappointed to have missed the transit, but it’d been a long time since we’d been in a bookstore with nothing in particular to buy and nowhere in particular we needed to be. It seemed an adequate consolation prize.

The final insult remained to be delivered, though. When we finally made our purchases and left the bookstore, to our surprise, we found the plaza outside was awash in lovely, golden-hour light! The skies had cleared after all, just as we’d hoped they would, and the sun was setting directly in front of us, framed in the gap between the buildings across from where we’d spoken to the conquistador. Except… he and his science-loving buddies were gone. They’d evidently given up and called it a night, and they’d taken their telescope with them. So Anne and I were left with a perfect view, but no equipment through which to view it. We didn’t even have any of the specially filtered sunglasses the planetarium sells for viewing eclipses. Somewhere, I thought I heard quiet, mocking laughter. It might have been the little kid playing in the Olympic Fountain, oblivious to the chilly temperatures. At least, that’s what I’ve been telling myself.

The next transit is due on December 10, 2117. I suppose there’s always a chance that someone will develop a longevity serum in the next couple decades…

Jun042012

This Week’s Needlessly Provocative Political Comment

Thanks to some lucky quirks of geology and map-making, my home state of Utah encompasses some of the most varied, unique, and awe-inspiring landscapes in the world. You’ll find everything within our borders, from alpine meadows to the iconic red-rock deserts that countless movies have trained people to imagine whenever they think of “The West.” Hollywood location scouts love Utah, because pretty much any environment they need — including alien-planet weirdness — is within a day’s drive of Salt Lake City. As it happens, many of these same landscapes also contain vast mineral wealth, but due to another quirk — this one relating to history and politics — something like 60% of the state is tied up by the federal government in the form of national parks, military reserves, and designated wilderness areas. Given that Utah is culturally very pro-business and pro-development, as well as very anti-federal government, that doesn’t sit too well with a lot of people in these parts. Let’s just say residents of Utah tend to experience debates over environmental issues at a level of intensity that people who live in other places possibly do not.

For the record, I tend to lean more toward the environmentalist side of these debates, although I hasten to note that I don’t sympathize very much with the stereotypical treehuggers, i.e., the starry-eyed, misanthropic Edward Abbey fans who fantasize about dynamiting Glen Canyon Dam. Personally, I like driving a car and living in a fully plumbed, electrified, temperature-controlled, more-or-less permanent structure. I accept that such modernity comes with a price, and I’m also compassionate enough toward my fellow man to grok that the vast majority of ranchers, miners, loggers, and oil-rig workers are decent, hardworking people who are not out to rape and despoil Mother Earth, but simply want to make a living, often in locations where there aren’t many other career options.

That said, though, I’m utterly mystified by the other side of the political spectrum, whose attitude so often seems to be nothing short of unalloyed contempt for even the most mildest talk of conservation. You’d think the idea of restraining ourselves and setting aside something for the future, if for no other reason than to keep the family business going for the next generation, would appeal to conservatives. After all, the words “conservative” and “conservation” share the same root word, but no. What I hear coming from the right during Utah’s frequent environmental dust-ups is a defiant, almost gleefully lusty insistence that businesses be allowed to do whatever they want, wherever they want, to whatever extent they want. Or, to put it more bluntly, they seem to want to dig it all up, cut it all down, drive over every square inch of it in their giant SUVs, and burn everything as fast they can, maximizing their profits today for tomorrow we all die. The right’s response to the left’s environmental concerns — even such common-sense measures as the Clean Air Act, which seem as if they ought to be above partisan bickering in their obvious necessity — often strikes me as short-sighted greed. Or at the very least petty partisanship, i.e., if the liberals think its a good idea, we need to object to it. Never mind that it actually might be a good idea.

Perhaps I’m being unfair… but for what it’s worth, I’m not the only one who has that perception. Here’s what political blogger Andrew Sullivan — ostensibly a conservative himself, although he’s alienated himself from many on the right in recent years — had to say on the subject the other day:

When you feel no grief over a forest cut down or an old tree uprooted or a beloved beach eroded, you have ceased to be a conservative. When your response to the environment is solely instrumental – when you conceive it solely as something to be exploited rather than conserved – you are merely a capitalist. There are those who believe that conservatism is indistinguishable from capitalism. I am not one of them.

Hear, hear.

Jun012012

They Caught a Dragon by the Tail

When I awoke last Friday morning, I thought I’d missed all the fun already, and would have to content myself with a YouTube replay of the Dragon spacecraft arriving at the International Space Station. But whether because I miscalculated my time zones (always a possibility; I can never figure out how Utah’s daylight savings time works with the other zones) or because the Dragon’s approach was delayed by a small problem with its laser rangefinding device, it turned out that I was in fact just in time to watch live as the ISS grappled the spacecraft with its robotic arm.

(If you haven’t followed the coverage closely, I should explain, briefly, that Dragon was not allowed to maneuver into the ISS’s docking port under its own power, as the space shuttle used to. Rather, it closed to within a certain distance and matched speeds with the station, so it appeared from the ISS to be standing still, and then the ISS reached out and grabbed hold of the capsule with the Canadarm2 manipulator, which, as you can see in the image above, is a beefier version of the Canadian-built robot arm used aboard the shuttles. After holding the Dragon for a time while some final checks were made, the multi-jointed arm then pulled the capsule down to a port where it was made secure with latching bolts. This operation is called “berthing,” as opposed to “docking,” which involves some different hardware and techniques.)

I must confess, my expectations of how this sort of thing is supposed to look have been honed by countless sci-fi movies and TV shows, which rarely waste precious screentime on what usually amounts to an establishing shot as far as the plot is concerned. Which means fictional spacecraft meeting up with each other are usually depicted as moving with the same mundane carelessness as a city bus pulling to the curb. But in real life, the process is much more cautious and methodical, i.e., everything… moves… very… slow…ly… And that means I got a wee bit impatient before it was all over. At one point, it appeared as if the grappling head had stopped moving altogether, and when the voice of mission control announced that there was only half a meter’s distance remaining — a mere foot and a half — I actually yelled at my monitor something to the effect of, “Oh, come on!” But at last the grapple snapped down over the fixture on the side of the capsule, and the historic message came down from the ISS: “Looks like we’ve got a Dragon by the tail.” And I felt a warm glow of cheer spread through my chest that I haven’t felt since the space shuttle Discovery blasted off on her post-Columbia disaster “return to flight” mission.

I had to switch off the computer at that point and get to work, and by the time I reached the office, Dragon was berthed. I intended to blog my thoughts about the event then, but naturally it was a busy day at work, as it always seems to be when something is going on that I really want to write about (it’s almost as if The Man knows). And a busy day led to a busy three-day weekend that blurred into another busy week. Meanwhile, high above our heads, the ISS crew had opened the connecting hatches and reported that Dragon had a “new-car smell” and looked “like a sci-fi filmset” inside, with its blue LED lights marking the deck (as opposed to the walls, difficult to distinguish when you’re floating in zero-g), before getting busy unloading the 1,100 pounds of food, water, clothing and equipment she’d brought up. This cargo was replaced with over 1,300 pounds of used equipment and other items scheduled for return to Earth, the first time the ISS has been able to send anything back since the last shuttle flight a year ago.

And then early yesterday morning, after nine days in space that seemed to pass with astonishing speed (at least from my perspective), Dragon was pushed away from the station by the Canadarm2, fired her thrusters to begin decelerating, and re-entered the atmosphere for a controlled splashdown in the Pacific Ocean, a little under 600 miles west of Baja California. For old-timers and space buffs who know their history, the scene looked like a return to the glory days of Apollo, with the scorched capsule descending beneath fat, red-and-white-striped parachutes. Today, she’s on a barge that will return her to Long Beach, California. The capsule will need to be thoroughly inspected, of course, but as of right now, it looks like the mission was a flawless success, aside from that one glitch with the rangefinder. The demonstration phase is over; SpaceX has proven it’s up for the job of supporting the space station, and now hopes to fly the first of twelve contracted cargo runs to the ISS as early as this summer. Looking a little farther down the road, the plan is to fly the first humans aboard a Dragon capsule in 2015.

I’m sure everyone who doesn’t live and breathe this stuff is sick of hearing it, since every news article has said the same thing, but this point must be emphasized again: this mission was historic, as much so in its way as the Mercury missions or the first space shuttle flight. This was the first time a private company did what has previously been the sole province of national governments: they designed, built, and successfully demonstrated both a booster rocket and a functioning, useful spacecraft. Yes, NASA provided some seed money and the parameters to follow, but SpaceX, and in particular the company’s founder Elon Musk, essentially did this on their own. And while there are several other private companies aiming for the same goal, SpaceX got there first. A plucky little company comprising fewer than 2,000 employees, mostly enthusiastic young people from what I can see, has brought us into the age of commercial space travel. It’s a great story. And you know, as much as I love my space shuttles and wish there was still a role for them up there, even if it’s a much-reduced one from what they previously enjoyed, I’m overjoyed about this development. It means that somebody still wants to go up there and has the will to do it. And it opens up… possibilities. As depressed as I was about our future in space only a few months ago, today I am hopeful. Hopeful that in only a few short years, the skies will be filled with spacecraft — manned, reusable spacecraft — from a dozen private-industry firms, and that NASA is back in the big-idea business, and maybe, just maybe, the public gives a damn again about seeing what’s over the horizon…

May242012

Book Recommendation: Lost in Shangri-La

Looking for something good to read over the long holiday weekend? Well, how about a story that begins like this:

The time is 1945, only months before the atomic bombing of Japan brings about the end of World War II. On the remote South Pacific island of Dutch New Guinea, Allied cargo pilots flying over the island’s largely unexplored interior spot a previously unmapped valley high in the rugged mountains that appears to be cut off from the outside world. Seen from the air, it is lush, beautiful… and obviously inhabited. The press dubs this valley “Shangri-La” after the exotic setting of a popular, decade-old novel called Lost Horizon, and soon bored and curious personnel stationed at the remote base on New Guinea’s coast are taking sightseeing flights over this valley and logging them as “navigation training.”

On May 13, 1945, twenty-four men and women board a C-47 transport plane with the ill-considered name Gremlin Special for their own “navigation training.” But something goes disastrously wrong during the flight, and the plane crashes in the steep mountains surrounding Shangri-La, with only three survivors, two men and a woman. Injured, completely unprepared, and mourning the deaths of their friends, comrades, and, in the case of one of the men, a twin brother, the trio now faces a hike through dense jungle to reach the only place where they can hope for rescue: the mysterious valley below, which they know is populated by stone-age headhunters who have never seen a white person.

And this is only the beginning.

Did I mention that it’s a true story?

Mitchell Zuckoff’s nonfiction book Lost in Shangri-La recovers one of the most fascinating tales of World War II from obscurity — the media of the time did report on the amazing rescue of the Gremlin Special survivors, but the story got shoved off the front pages by Hiroshima, and it was virtually forgotten until Zuckoff ran across a mention of it while researching something completely unrelated — and tells it with the breathless pacing of a pulp-adventure novel. In fact, the story sounds tailor-made for the movies, with an incredible cast of strong-willed, eccentric, and heroic characters; a rescue scheme so crazy, it’s amazing that it worked; and a bittersweet undercurrent of the inevitable changes wrought by one of the last true “first contacts” between modern Westerners and an aboriginal culture.

This is really an incredible book about an incredible story, and it tends to linger with you — I actually finished it over a month ago, and I’m still thinking about it. It’s so many things: an adventure tale with all the elements you’d expect from an Edgar Rice Burroughs novel, a tale of survival and the indomitable human spirit, and an interesting bit of World War II lore, with a dusting of ethnography and biography. It’s been a long time since I read anything so thoroughly captivating. I can’t recommend it highly enough.

Check out Zuckoff’s official site for more information, including photographs and even vintage film footage!

May242012

Clever Ad Makes Me Smile

Up until two days ago, I’d never heard of “Jeremiah Weed,” even though it’s supposedly the alcoholic beverage of choice for U.S. fighter pilots, at least according to the company’s official Facebook page. (You’d think something like that would’ve impinged on my Trivia Detection Net at some point. I strongly suspect this claim is nothing more than the feverish imagining of some copywriter somewhere who was going for the same macho/funny vibe behind Dos Equis’ “Most Interesting Man in the World” campaign.) Anyway, this Jeremiah Weed stuff is, again referring to that Facebook page, “a 100-proof bourbon liqueur distilled in Kentucky” that is “relatively strong and somewhat sweet.” It’s an ingredient in a number of products marketed by the company, including:

Jeremiah Weed Bourbon Liqueur
Jeremiah Weed Blended Bourbon
Jeremiah Weed Sweet Tea Flavored Vodka
Lightning Lemonade® Premium Malt Beverage
Roadhouse Tea™ Premium Malt Beverage
Spiked Cola™ Premium Malt Beverage

Honestly, those all sound pretty horrible to me. I’m not a bourbon drinker and I’m not a fan of overly sweet booze (when I do drink, which admittedly isn’t often these days, I usually prefer Irish whiskey on the rocks, nice and simple and not likely to leave me with a splitting headache the next day, which syrupy mixed drinks and sugary liqueurs always seem to do). However, I’d be willing to sample any of these beverages if it was personally handed to me by a member of That L’il Old Band from Texas:

I always wonder when I see ads like this if the reactions are genuine, i.e., are these really just random good ol’ boys dropping into the local Kwik-E-Mart with no idea ZZ Top was behind that wall, or was it all scripted and acted? Either way, it’s a fun ad. I love those guys… the hot rod, the beards, the dancing girls. Yeah, that’s rock and roll, and that’s what I’m all about, baby. Still not sure about that Weed stuff, though.

May232012

Geek Misreads Headline!

When I opened my browser this morning, this was the first item in my news feed:

Doctor Who Helped Find Bin Laden Given Jail Term, Official Says

Is it just me, or did you also interpret the first two words as a proper noun on the first read through? In other words, did you at first think the headline meant the U.S. government had some assistance in its search for Bin Laden from this guy:

Well, why the hell not? He’s always mucking about in British government stuff, so why not U.S. affairs as well? The Doctor somehow involved in the search for bin Laden… who of course must have been more than he seemed to attract the attention of a Time Lord… Sounds like a good start for some fanfic… if I were into that sort of thing…

May222012

Of Course the Launch Went Well…

…Scotty was on board!

Following up on this morning’s successful Falcon-9/Dragon launch, I’ve learned that ashes of the late actor James Doohan, who of course played the irascible Chief Engineer Montgomery Scott on the original Star Trek and who died in 2005, were along for the ride. Remains of 300 people, including Doohan and Mercury-era astronaut Gordon Cooper, were carried aloft on the Falcon rocket’s second stage; while this payload was not technically part of the Dragon capsule, I like to think Starfleet’s Miracle Worker at least imparted a little good luck to the fledgling spacecraft.

Also, if you don’t quite understand what the fuss over this one little launch is all about, allow me to direct your attention to a nice piece by space reporter MIles O’Brien,* who spells it out the significance of today’s events quite handily:

Supporters of [NASA’s Commercial Orbital Transportation Services program] say it is tantamount to subsidizing nascent airlines in the barnstorming days by giving them contracts to fly the mail. The government didn’t tell Henry Ford how to build his Tri-Motor, but the mail those planes carried was an effective taxpayer tool to encourage a whole new industry – eventually making it possible for millions of people to board planes with as much fanfare as if they were buses – and then moan if they are five minutes late pushing back from the gate.

It would be nice if space travel could be that routine some day. And the Shuttle, a vehicle that I love and miss, was never going to get us there.

That’s pretty much my attitude as well. As hard as I’m grieving for my shuttles and wish they could still be flying in some capacity, they hard reality is that they didn’t bring us the future we imagined. SpaceX and the Dragon might not either, but it’s a step in the right direction.

* I always smile when I run across an article by Miles O’Brien. He’s an excellent reporter who has a real flair for boiling technical information down to where laypeople can understand it, and he genuinely seems to love the aviation and space-related subjects he specializes in. He also happens to share his name with a fictional character from the Star Trek universe, Chief Miles O’Brien, played by Colm Meaney, who was a Scotty-type engineer who could fix anything on both The Next Generation and Deep Space Nine. It’s not quite irony… but it is an amusing coincidence.

May222012

The Dragon Is Soaring

Following what a NASA press release called a “flawless countdown,” the SpaceX Falcon-9 booster rocket lifted off from Cape Canaveral this morning at 3:44 eastern time. The Dragon spacecraft successfully separated from the booster minutes later; its solar arrays are now deployed and all systems look good as the vehicle chases the International Space Station around the Earth for a rendezvous three days from now. There are still plenty of tests for the Dragon to pass, including of course the climatic docking operation, but so far SpaceX seems to be on track for making a historical first… and perhaps the start of a whole new era in human spaceflight. Exciting stuff.

I did not get up in the wee hours to watch the launch live, but of course that’s no longer necessary in the Internet age: a full hour of coverage is available on YouTube, if you’d like to check it out. (If you just want to see the highlights, you can find the lift-off at 44:43, the spacecraft separation at 54:10, and the deployment of the solar array at 56:20.) I find the audio associated with this clip really amusing… the control voices you hear are SpaceX employees, not NASA people, so there’s a different flavor than what I usually associate with space launches. Everyone sounds so bloody young, for one thing, especially one female voice (I’m not sure who is performing what role). And then there’s the enthusiasm… spontaneous applause breaks out at the moment of lift-off, and again when the Dragon separates from the booster. The announcer has a shake in his voice when he declares at about 55:10 that Dragon is now in free flight orbiting the earth, and the eruption of noise when the solar array opens sounds like a sporting event. It’s endearing, and it’s contagious. These people know they’ve accomplished something very, very big today.

I’m really thrilled for them, and also more than a little jealous. I’ll confess, I wish I was part of their team, forging the future we ’70s kids dreamed of…

May202012

Sunday Morning Movie Review: Stay Hungry

With the DVD format now in its final death spiral leading out of the marketplace, I find I’m buying more of them than ever. What’s happening is that retailers and budget stores that specialize in closeout merchandise are dumping old inventory at ridiculously low prices, in some cases lower than it would cost to rent them, assuming there were still any rental stores around. But of course browsing a video store for back-catalog stuff I haven’t seen is no longer an option, and Netflix’s recommendation algorithms just never seem to generate the same level of serendipity I used to experience as I wandered up and down aisles of actual, physical media. So I’ve taken to rolling the dice and buying el-cheapo DVDs at Big Lots sight-unseen on the off chance they may be something I’ll like. I admit I’ve ended up feeling like I wasted my money more than once. But I’ve also gotten lucky with a few titles that turned out to be really good. Or at least really interesting for some reason. Case in point: a 1976 film called Stay Hungry.

Directed by Bob Rafelson, who’s best known for the Jack Nicholson vehicle Five Easy Pieces — that’s the one with the famous scene of Jack dealing with an unpleasant waitress in his own inimitable fashion — Stay Hungry stars an achingly young Jeff Bridges as the only son of a wealthy Southern family who’s trying to find his place in the world following the death of his parents. Having fallen in with a group of real-estate developers who want to build a high-rise office tower, Bridges is given the assignment of acquiring the last hold-out property on the block, a broken-down old gymnasium. But the situation becomes complicated when Bridges finds himself drawn to the eccentric family of characters who inhabit the place, notably a perky receptionist and a charismatic bodybuilder named Joe Santo, who is in training for the upcoming Mr. Universe contest.

Stay Hungry is pretty typical of early-70s mainstream cinema, an uneasy blend of comedy and drama with a loosey-goosey plotline that sometimes feels aggravatingly aimless, as well as a tone that veers from whimsical to discomforting to downright horrifying, before veering into straight-out farce at the story’s climax. To be honest, I wasn’t sure I was even liking the film until it was over — for the record, I’ve since decided that, yes, I did like it — but the one element that kept me going through my uncertainty was the cast. Jeff Bridges wasn’t yet the national treasure he has since become; in certain scenes, he comes off as trying too hard. But in others he was so perfectly naturalistic and utterly inhabiting the character, it’s easy to forget who you’re watching. And of course he’s always been an amiable presence, even in films where he’s played more unsympathetic characters.

The adorable Sally Field made her feature-film debut in Stay Hungry, successfully transitioning away from child-star television roles in Gidget and The Flying Nun, in part by baring her behind in a post-lovemaking scene. But even without that bonus attraction, she turns in a professional, layered performance and it’s very easy to believe Bridges would fall for her hard enough to change his entire life. (Full disclosure: I’ve always had a bit of a thing for Miss Frog.)

The supporting cast includes several familiar faces that are fun to see so much younger than we’re accustomed to, including Scatman Crothers as Bridges’ family butler, a pre-Freddy Krueger Robert Englund, Ed Begley Jr., and Roger C. Mosley, a.k.a. TC the chopper pilot on Magnum P.I.

But the really fascinating presence in this film is the guy playing Joe Santo, a real-life bodybuilder named… Arnold Schwarzenegger. Although Stay Hungry was technically his third film following Hercules in New York and Robert Altman’s The Long Goodbye, this was the first time audiences had heard his true voice and his distinctive Austrian accent (he was dubbed in Hercules, and menacingly silent in the Altman film), so his credit in Stay Hungry justifiably reads “Introducing…” Arnie was at the height of his Mr. Universe days here — Joe Santo’s story is a thinly disguised version of his own biography — and his body is simply a wonder to behold, especially in the film’s conclusion when we see him in competition, flexing and posing alongside a man who is his equal in size, but lacks Arnold’s definition and — just as importantly — his showmanship. He truly was astounding. But far more captivating than his physique in this film is the character he played, so completely unlike the familiar wisecracking action-figure persona he adopted later on in the ’80s. Joe Santo is inhumanly focused on his workouts, yes, but other than that he’s… nice. He’s friendly and supportive of his friends and self-effacing and sympathetic. After a lifetime of “I’ll be back”-style quips, it’s downright startling to see Arnold playing just a guy. And even though I doubt he ever would have become a great actor, certainly not someone on the level of his Stay Hungry costar Jeff Bridges, I find myself a little sad that he didn’t play more regular guys in his acting career.

Anyhow, even with the caveat that this film is somewhat dated and something of a rambling shaggy-dog story, I recommend Stay Hungry purely on the strength of the cast, and especially on the unusual and refreshing performance by a very young Arnold. It turned out to be one of my better Big Lots gambles. If nothing else, it’s worth seeing for the scene in which The Terminator plays fiddle with a bunch of backwoods good old boys:

May192012

The Dragon Remains Grounded

Woke up this morning to the disappointing news that the launch of the Dragon spacecraft was aborted at the last second — literally! — when computers detected pressure higher than the allowable limits inside one of the engines of the Falcon-9 booster. The engines had already fired and the ship was a half-second from lift-off when the shutdown occurred. This sort of thing isn’t uncommon in spaceflight operations — the shuttle Discovery had a similar shutdown on its very first mission, as I recall, and of course SpaceX’s equipment is still very new and likely filled with undiscovered bugs — but I was hoping for a different outcome. I find I really want these guys to succeed. Like I said the other day, I think the company’s story of coming out of nowhere and in only a few short years being on the verge of doing what no other private company has ever done is exciting and inspiring… and of course the sooner they succeed with the unmanned cargo runs, the sooner they can get the Dragon rated for human flight and the sooner the future will resume. At least that’s how I see it.

SpaceX technicians are inspecting the faulty engine now and are supposed to issue a detailed statement about what went wrong later today. The next available launch window that will allow Dragon to catch up to the space station is on Tuesday, May 22nd.

UPDATE: According to the latest tweet from SpaceX, the problem was a faulty valve in Engine #5. (The first of the Falcon-9 rocket’s two stages has nine engines arranged in rows of three, hence the number designation. There’s also a smaller Falcon-1, and a design for a so-far unbuilt Falcon-Heavy, which will triple the engine count for lifting really large stuff.) The engineers will replace that valve tonight, and shoot for another launch attempt at 3:44 AM Eastern time, Tuesday morning.

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