Gawker: valleywag, space

High-Flying MIT Nerds Shame Filthy Rich NASA

Andrew Belonsky — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 21:33:31 EDT

The government pumps about $20 billion into NASA each year to levitate mice and study crystals. Whatever. All most of us want from space are pictures. And some MIT students did that for a far cheaper fee. Math lesson, anyone?

In a move that should earn them national kudos, MIT-goer Oliver Yeh and his equally brainy friend, Justin Lee, grabbed these images of earth by putting a cell phone into a Styrofoam box, stuffing the box with disposable hand warmers and attaching it all to a helium balloon. The camera snapped a picture every 5 seconds for a journey 17 miles above the planet and back after the balloon popped. A GPS in the phone helped track it all down. And it only cost $150!

Meanwhile, NASA's over paid nerds are looking to build a base on the moon, which will serve as a stop-off station for missions to Mars, a trip that will itself make astronauts radioactive. To achieve all of their unnecessary and harebrained schemes, NASA would need another $3 billion a year. MIT costs about $48,000 a year — give or take a few grand.

Wouldn't the country be better off just sending kids to MIT and receiving these pictures in return, rather than sending red-blooded Americans into space to become the Fantastic Four? Who needs that dang universe, anyway?

Google party plane watches spaceship go down in flames

Owen Thomas — Mon, 29 Sep 2008 12:00:00 EDT

It's good to be the Googlers. Part of Larry Page and Sergey Brin's sweetheart deal to park their fleet of private jets at Nasa's Ames Research Center involves letting the space agency use their Gulfstream V for so-called "scientific experiments." What that really means: Getting a front-row seat for some really bitchin' real-time space porn. A European space freighter, full of trash from the International Space Station, was sent down from orbit to burn up in the atmosphere early this morning over the Pacific Ocean. A Gulfstream owned by H211 LLC, the flight-operating company through which Larry and Sergey own their party planes, participated in observing the event. "It was decided to postpone the reentry by three weeks so that the reentry would happen at nighttime for best viewing conditions," two researchers wrote in an article on Space.com. That raises one key question.

Were Larry and Sergey aboard the Gulfstream? If so, someone ought to tell Google shareholders that the companies' cofounders were in close proximity to a flaming fireball. And someone ought to tell American taxpayers that Nasa is now scheduling its missions around the viewing requirements of loopy billionaires. (Illustration by the European Space Agency)

Jeff Bezos getting spaced out in middle age

Nicholas Carlson — Wed, 14 Nov 2007 14:08:52 EST

Amazon.com topper Jeff Bezos possesses an estimated personal wealth of $9 billion. He's come a long way, too. Born to a teenage mother and a disappearing dad, Bezos also survived the dotcom bust. But according to a weekend profile in the Times, all the success has gone straight to Bezos's head and exploded it. The man is nuts. As in, he's trying to monetize space travel.

The plan behind his new company Blue Origin, Bezos toldTimes interviewer Andrew Davidson is for zero-gravity flights to be a go in 2010. Rivals say Bezos has spent nearly $500 million on his thin-air venture. But Davidson couldn't get Bezos to confirm it. "We don't say," Bezos tells Davidson and then laughs a laugh Davidson describes as a "nervous tic." (Photo by AP/Ted S. Warren)

Land on moon, collect $30 million

Nick Douglas — Fri, 14 Sep 2007 17:28:29 EDT

One-upping the $10 million non-profit X Prize for commercial space travel, Google is offering $20 million to the first private enterprise that makes it to the moon. Of course, this is a Google venture, so the winner has to compete some secondary tasks to get the prize. Once they're done with the main bit of landing on the freaking moon, prize seekers must take video and walk some specified distances. Google offers bonus prizes for finding ice, spotting Apollo equipment, and surviving the lunar night. Great, the next lunar landing will play like an episode of Survivor.

A fire breaks out at a Mojave airport building...

Owen Thomas — Fri, 27 Jul 2007 00:35:33 EDT

A fire breaks out at a Mojave airport building belonging to Scaled Composites, Burt Rutan's space-rocket company. Two people are dead, four are critically injured from the incident, which a local fire inspector blames on nitrous oxide. [CBS2.com]

Spider Jerusalem award: The best blurb in journalism

Nick Douglas — Mon, 28 Aug 2006 09:00:00 EDT

Tech journalism is boring. It's hard to make a world of chips and software exciting without sounding like a Wired cub reporter or a BusinessWeek bubble-blower.

That's why Valleywag presents its first Spider Jerusalem Award for Best Blurb in Technology Journalism to the Wall Street Journal's Jason Fry. He sums up the frustration of so many former tech news fans when he introduces a story about private space travel by lamenting the fall of the brave space-scientist archetype:

C'mon, kid: Your square-jawed rocket engineers of future histories past are now tattooed, pierced software engineers coding social-networking sites.

Second Thoughts on Outer Space [WSJ]

Esther Dyson addicted to Zero G

Nick Douglas — Thu, 11 May 2006 16:10:43 EDT

Having run out of trendy locales to visit on Earth's surface, philosopher-futurist Esther Dyson takes a zero-grav trip in G-Force One:

"Don't you wish your morning commute was this cool?"

She went with Google AdSense director Kim Malone and Hot or Not founder James Hong — no weightless pics of them yet — and returned exhilarated, gushing in her comments, "I need more! It's addictive."

Photo: Found in Zero Gravity [Esther Dyson on Flickr]

Valley players: Elon Musk, rocketman

ndouglas — Wed, 29 Mar 2006 18:38:14 EST

My God, it's full of stars! The Valley is crowded with big-league bigshots, and each deserves a testament to their lasting contributions to technology: in other words, a fake trading card.

Our first Valley player is Elon Musk, the mogul who used millions from his first dot-com sale to fund his second — X.com, later PayPal. Now he plays with rockets at SpaceX, cutting launch prices for government and commercial space work. But the economy class carries some hazards — his company's latest launch crashed and burned last week.

Elon Musk [Wikipedia]
Rocket Fails in SpaceX's First Launch [LA Times]

Google in space — and in Houston

ndouglas — Mon, 20 Mar 2006 12:01:30 EST

The world is not enough: All of Google's heavy petting with NASA will pay off when the two hop into bed.

Google's opening a Houston office, where it will continue its work with NASA, according to a secondhand source.

Hopefully this will be more substantial than Google Mars (as cool as that is). Think of the possibilities — a Googleplex moonbase, Adsense among the stars, Google-branded von Neumann probes (seeking out strange civilizations and charging 5 cents per click to sell to them)...

Earlier: Google Earth plays with VR at NASA [Valleywag]