Pixel Scroll 6/24/20 Pretty Pixels In The File, They Twinkle On The Screen, And Then Get Refreshed So That New Ones Are Seen

(1) JUMP ON THE TRUCK. In the Washington Post, Robert Zubrin and Homer Hickam have an opinion piece where they say that SpaceX Dragon’s success should make the preferred launch vehicle for a return to the Moon and NASA should shelve the Orion rocket as too unwieldy. “Send the SpaceX Dragon to the moon”.

In March 2019, Vice President Pence challenged NASA to land astronauts on the moon by 2024 “by any means necessary.” This was a potential breakthrough, because after nearly 50 years of drift, the White House was finally giving NASA’s human spaceflight program a concrete goal with a clear timeline and forceful support — a necessity for any progress and the restoration of the agency’s can-do spirit. The purpose for the mission itself is a blend of economic, scientific and world leadership goals designed to make the investment worthwhile to all Americans.

NASA’s response to Pence’s challenge was to proceed with what it already had in the pipeline: the Orion crewed spacecraft and the massive shuttle-derived Space Launch System (SLS) heavy-lift expendable booster rocket. SLS has been in slow-walk development since 2006, with more than $18 billion spent, but it is still years away from launch. Considering this track record, we unhappily doubt the SLS/Orion combination will meet the vice president’s challenge.

But now we have an alternative. The contract that resulted in the Dragon crewed spacecraft was issued by NASA in 2014. Six years and $3 billion later, it has flown astronauts into orbit. What SpaceX did was show that a well-led entrepreneurial team can achieve results that were previously thought to require the efforts of superpowers, and in a small fraction of the time and cost, and even — as demonstrated by its reusable Falcon launch vehicles — do things deemed impossible altogether. This is a revolution….

(2) RWA. The Romance Writers of America will hold a virtual RWA Conference from August 28-30. A full list of the RWA 2020 Conference Scholarships are at the link. Some new ones have been added.

RWA also has clarified a recent announcement about Dreamspinner Press to say they are available to advocate for non-members, too. Thread starts here.

(3) FROM THE CANOE. Elizabeth Bear posted “an open letter to my friends and acquaintances in the publishing community who have been outed as serial harassers, and to the ones who still think they’re getting away with something.”

It begins:

Hey there. I know you’re having a rough time right now, and I’m sorry to say you earned it. I wish I had known about your behavior sooner; I wish I had known that you weren’t just making rank jokes among friends, as we all do once in a while, but engaged in serious abuses of your power, engaged in harming people.

I am, needless to say, very very disappointed in you.

I’m saddened for the people you have hurt, and I’m really disappointed that you have turned out not to be the person I thought you were. Even more, I’m wondering if you even have the self-awareness to realize how much you have harmed not just the people you harassed or gaslit or backstabbed, but also the communities you were a part of. How much you have damaged the people who care about you and who have tried to be your friends, as well….

(4) STOKERCON UK. The StokerCon UK committee has announced a new set of dates for the Horror Writers Association event which has been chased around the calendar by the coronavirus. The post is here.

…Secondly, we are grateful to the majority of you who, since our previous announcement, have allowed us to get on with trying to save the convention—or at least a version of it—by rescheduling it.

To that end, we are pleased to let you know that, at the moment, we have agreed tentative dates for the event with the two convention hotels of 28-31 January 2021. With events and advice changing so quickly, the hotels have agreed to follow UK Government advice and are prepared to reassess or postpone the event once again nearer the time, depending on the spread and hopeful containment of the virus.

(5) YOU ARE HERE. Kristine Kathryn Rusch writes about this moment with empathy and wisdom: “Business Musings: Shock, Survival, and Forgiveness”.

… We now know where we are. We’re in that prolonged change. It’s a transition, and we’ve finally hit it. All of 2020 will be a year of half-measures, making do, and getting through.

Frankly, I find knowing where we are calming. I now know how to proceed day to day. I don’t like it, but I don’t have to like it.

I, you, all of us just have to survive it.

The knowledge of where we’re at, though, took me out of survival mode. I’m no longer obsessively reading the news every day, trying to figure out where we are. I’m donning my mask when I go out. I make that daily calculation—is it worth the risk to my health (and Dean’s health) to do whatever it is I am planning to do?

I can calculate risk now. And, more importantly, Dean and I are agreed. We consult if we’re going to do something outside of our usual schedule, based on the level of risk.

We are more or less staying home, but we did anyway, since we work here.  That sense of ease, that feeling of no longer being on the knife’s edge, has made it easier to focus, although not always easier to work.

I’m one of the few people I know who has made the mental transition out of survival mode. (If one of us gets sick, I know I’ll head right back into it.) Now that I know how we’re going to be living day to day, I’m willing to live day to day. I don’t need to be ever vigilante for another tow truck, coming at us out of the dark.

Because I’ve made this transition, I can see other folks who haven’t. In my various social media feeds, I’m watching writers talk about their process or their lack of one. Writers, discussing how their work has changed or just plain stopped. Writers, who can’t face any of their usual projects, and who are feeling lost and don’t exactly know why.

Everyone knows the changes in their writing habits come from the pandemic, but most don’t understand what to do. And many people are worried that the changes to their writing methods are permanent.

Are those changes permanent? It depends on the change. They seem to fall into two categories…

… We are in a new place. Like any new place, it will take time to learn all its ins and outs. We have to explore it and understand it—and survive the transition into it.

If you’re dealing with actual life and death issues, from someone being very ill in your life to a major loss of income or career, then give yourself time to recover. Take the pressure off your writing. There’s enough pressure in your life….

(6) MEDIA BIRTHDAY,

  • June 24, 1982 Blade Runner premiered. It was directed by Ridley Scott, and was written by Hampton Fancher and David Peoples. It starred Harrison Ford, Rutger Hauer, Edward James Olmos and Sean Young. It was based very loosely on Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? It would win the Best Dramatic Presentation at ConStellation, beating out The Wrath of KhanE.T.The Dark Crystal and The Road Warrior. Critics were puzzled by it and t generated little street buzz nearly thirty years ago. It would vastly raise its stature over the years, now being considered one of the Best SF works ever done. It’s worth Warner Bros. released The Final Cut, a 25th-anniversary digitally remastered version; this is the only version over which Scott retained full artistic control.

(7) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.

[Compiled by Cat Eldridge and John Hertz.]

  • Born June 24, 1842 – Ambrose Bierce.  Four hundred short pieces, sixty poems.  A pioneer in realistic fiction; a great fantasist; a biting satirist.  When William Dean Howells said AB was among our three greatest writers, AB said “I am sure Mr. Howells is the other two.”  Translated into Croatian, Dutch, Finnish, French, German, Italian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Spanish, Swedish.  (Died 1914, maybe) [JH]
  • Born June 24, 1915 – Sir Frederick Hoyle.  Coined the expression “Big Bang”, rejected the theory.  Radar research in World War II with more personnel than the Manhattan Project. Mayhew Prize, Balzan Prize, Crafoord Prize.  Founded the Cambridge Institute of Astronomy and resigned from it.  A dozen SF novels, two dozen shorter stories, some with co-authors; translated into Danish, Dutch, French, German, Hungarian, Japanese, Portuguese, Romanian, Serbian,  Spanish, Swedish.  (Died 2001) [JH]
  • Born June 24, 1937 – Charles Brown.  Founded Locus (with Ed Meskys and Dave Vanderwerf) as a fanzine; it grew, changed, and “semiprozine” was invented to describe it; 29 Hugos by the time of his death.  You could disagree with him; on panels with him I opposed his “mainstream literature is about the past, science fiction is about the present, nobody can write about the future”; no one has outdone him.  Writers & Illustrators of the Future Award for lifetime achievement.  (Died 2009) [JH]
  • Born June 24, 1947 Peter Weller, 73. Yes it’s his Birthday today too. Robocop obviously with my favorite scene being him pulling out and smashing Cain’s brain, but let’s see what else he’s done. Well there’s The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension, a film I adore. And then there’s Leviathan which you I’m guessing a lot of you never heard of. Is it of the Naked Lunch genre? Well, Screamers based on Philip K. Dick’s short story “Second Variety” certainly is. Even if the reviews sucked.  And Star Trek Into Darkness certainlyqualifies. Hey he showed up in Star Trek: Enterprise! (CE)
  • Born June 24, 1948 – Kris Neri, age 72.Two novels for us; four more, sixty shorter stories.  After living in San Francisco, and Southern California, moved to Sedona (Arizona); now at home in Silver City (New Mexico).  Teaches writing through the U. Cal. L.A. Extension School.  Says her Samantha Brennan and Annabelle Haggerty magical mysteries feature “a questionable psychic who teams up with a modern goddess/FBI agent”.  Website here.  [JH]
  • Born June 24, 1950 Mercedes Lackey, 70. There’s a line on the Wiki page that says she writes nearly six books a year. Impressive. She’s certainly got a lot of really good series out there including the vast number that are set in the Valdemar universe. I like her Bedlam’s Bard series better. She wrote the first few in this series with Ellen Gunn and the latter in the series with Rosemary Edghill. The SERRAted Edge series, Elves with race cars, is kinda fun too. Larry Dixon, her husband, and Mark Shepherd were co-writers of these. Lackey and Dixon are GoHs of this year’s Worldcon, CoNZealand. (CE)
  • Born June 24, 1950 Nancy Allen, 70. Officer Anne Lewis in the Robocop franchise. (I like all three films.) Her first genre role was not in Carrie as Chris Hargensen, but in a best forgotten a film year earlier (Forced Entry) as a unnamed hitchhiker. She shows up in fan favorite The Philadelphia Experiment as Allison Hayes and I see her in Poltergeist III as Patricia Wilson-Gardner (seriously — a third film in this franchise?). She’s in the direct-to-video Children of the Corn 666: Isaac’s Return as Rachel Colby. (Oh, that sounds awful.) And she was in an Outer Limits episode, “Valerie 23”, as Rachel Rose. (CE)
  • Born June 24, 1961 Iain Glen, 59. Scots actor who played as Ser Jorah Mormont in Game of Thrones, he’s also  well known for his roles as Dr. Alexander Isaacs/Tyrant in the Resident Evil franchise; and he played the role of Father Octavian, leader of a sect of clerics who were on a mission against the Weeping Angels in “The Time of Angels” and “Flesh and Stone”, all Eleventh Doctor stories. (CE)
  • Born June 24, 1970 – Nicolas Fructus, age 50.  Recently, comics and storyboard art for animated films and video games.  Worked with Moebius, Philippe Druillet; founded Delcourt publishing house.  Here is a cover for Bifrost.  Here is one for Kij Johnson’s novella “The Dream-Quest of Vellitt Boe”.  Here is A Year in the Air.  [JH]
  • Born June 24, 1982 Lotte Verbeek, 38. You most likely know her as Ana Jarvis, the wife of Edwin Jarvis, who befriends Carter on Agent Carter. She got interesting genre history including being Geillis Duncan on the Outlander series, Helena in The Last Witch Hunter, Aisha in the dystopian political thriller Division 19 film and a deliberately undefined role in the now-concluded cross-world Counterpart series. (CE)
  • Born June 24, 1988 – Kasey Lansdale, age 32. Country music singer-songwriter who has been writing in our field with her father Joe Lansdale; six short stories with him, two alone; edited two anthologies, recently Impossible Monsters.  “Tremble” with JL was in Pop the Clutch from Dark Moon last year.   Website here.  [JH]
  • Born June 24, 1994 Nicole Muñoz, 26. You’ll perhaps best remember her for role as Christie Tarr (née McCawley) in the Defiance series. Her first role was playing a Little Girl in Fantastic Four. Likewise she was A Kid with Braces in The Last Mimzy, and yes, Another Girl, in Hardwired. The latter was written by Michael Hurst, and has apparently nothing to with the Walter Jon Williams novel of the same same. (CE) 

(8) COMICS SECTION.

(9) STICK WITH IT. USPS announced “New Stamps Celebrating Bugs Bunny’s 80th Birthday Coming Soon to a Post Office Near You”.

The U.S. Postal Service will issue commemorative Forever stamps celebrating Bugs Bunny’s 80th birthday. The Postal Service and Warner Bros. Consumer Products are excited to dedicate these stamps at a virtual ceremony on July 27, the 80th anniversary of Bugs Bunny’s official screen debut.

Bugs has always been known for his impeccable impersonations and his masterful masquerades, so the soon-to-be-revealed 10 designs on this pane of 20 stamps each showcase a costumed Bugs Bunny in some of his most memorable getups.

(10) A BIG IDEA. Rosamund Lannin is “Searching for Body Positivity in Fantasy” at Tor.com.

I remember the first time I encountered an attractive fat woman in a fantasy novel. My heart flipped a little as I read about a woman was for-real fat. She wasn’t your usual fictional overweight woman, either: there was no zaftig or curvy or voluptuous to be found near the Scientist’s Daughter in Haruki Murakami’s Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World. But she was definitely attractive. The narrator describes her as follows:

“A white scarf swirled around the collar of her chic pink suit. From the fullness of her earlobes dangled square gold earrings, glinting with every step she took. Actually, she moved quite lightly for her weight. She may have strapped herself into a girdle or other paraphernalia for maximum visual effect, but that didn’t alter the fact that her wiggle was tight and cute. In fact, it turned me on. She was my kind of chubby.”

(11) THE NEXT SHIFT. At The Mary Sue, Cree Myles advises: “If You Really Want to Unlearn Racism, Read Black Sci-Fi Authors”.

… Society generally views the science fiction genre as one of leisure. You read it because you have time, not because you want to learn something. However, this couldn’t be further from the truth. While all writers are charged with the task of creating a more empathetic society, science fiction writers have the additional burden of telling us what happens next.

Some of our best thinkers, and certainly our most comprehensive hopers, have been sci-fi writers. N.K. Jemisin has given us black female demigods who, despite their powers, still somehow suffer at the hands of an oppressive society. Octavia Butler has given us shapeshifters, time travelers, and voyagers who all had to react and survive under patriarchy and racism. Ursula K. Le Guin was creating entire non-binary societies … in the 1960s.

(12) IT’S IN THE OH! E. D. Ursula Vernon coins a word:

(13) BACK FROM THE FUTURE. “Segway: End of the road for the much-hyped two-wheeler”

Segway is ending production of its original two-wheeler, which was popular with city tour guides and some police forces – but not the public.

Launched in 2001, the much-hyped self-balancing vehicle promised to revolutionise personal transport.

The Segway, invented by US engineer Dean Kamen, debuted with much fanfare, but struggled to make a profit.

Accidents didn’t help with the Segway’s popularity, and the company was bought by Chinese rival Ninebot in 2015.

Made at a factory in New Hampshire, in the US, production of the Segway Personal Transporter will end on 15 July.

Announcing the news, Segway president Judy Cai said: “Within its first decade, the Segway PT became a staple in security and law enforcement, viewed as an effective and efficient personal vehicle.”

However, in the vehicle’s almost two decade-long history it has also been the subject of mockery and high-profile collisions as well as a tragic death.

(14) THE PASSENGER PIGEON OF VIDEO STORES. Atlas Obscura leads readers to something that’s the last of its kind: “Bend Blockbuster Video”.

In early summer of 2018, there were two Blockbusters left in Alaska and one in Oregon. The Alaska stores finally closed that summer, leaving the Bend store as the last one standing. National media attention soon followed and the Bend Blockbuster became a tourist site as well. And after the last Blockbuster Video in Australia closed in 2019, the Bend store became the only one left in the world. 

[Thanks to Microtherion, JJ, John Hertz, Lise Andreasen, Chip Hitchcock, John King Tarpinian, Martin Morse Wooster, Michael Toman, Cat Eldridge, Mike Kennedy, and Andrew Porter for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Kip Williams.]

25 thoughts on “Pixel Scroll 6/24/20 Pretty Pixels In The File, They Twinkle On The Screen, And Then Get Refreshed So That New Ones Are Seen

  1. (13)
    I saw someone fall over backward on a Segway, once. (They weren’t paying attention to where they were when they turned and backed up, and they went down on a corner cut they should have noticed.)

  2. (13) Segways didn’t catch on with the public because (a) they’re expensive and (b) mixing heavy unstable vehicles that travel at 10-15 mph with pedestrians is a terrible idea.

  3. 7/Weller) — Leviathan is thoroughly unmemorable underwater blue-collar horror — set on a facility kind of like that of The Abyss, but instead of a CGI water tentacle, it’s some kind of deep-sea beastie that wants to eat your face.

  4. @1: AFAIK, the latest from SpaceX can only get a serious payload to LEO; the SLS (which I was reading about a few hours ago) was always intended to put people on the Moon. The article is paywalled so I can’t see whether they have an answer to this, or whether they believe SpaceX can scale up before the SLS is ready.

    @12: history repeats itself; I remember when the Republicans were getting hysterical over alleged “yellow rain” in Southeast Asia. A few years later, someone who actually, yunno, knew Science (he’d previously proved what Watson et al had only theorized about DNA copying) looked at the evidence and said it was pollen husks shat out by bees (who unlike some creatures don’t do it where they live).

    @Andrew: aauugghh!

    @PhilRM: being a terrible idea wasn’t enough to prevent a bunch of selfish gits from using them (and a bunch of lazy gits from using them as cheap ATVs); I suppose we can take some hope from the fact there weren’t that many selfish gits.

    fifth again!

    edit: ISTM Bear is being far too generous, allowing harassers to claim their misbehavior comes from being abused; ISTM some people were just taught that way from the beginning. (Elana Arnold leans toward something like this in Red Hood, with no sympathy at all.)

  5. 12) During the big Northeast blackout of 2003 several hundred people called the police to report mysterious lights in the sky. They were …. stars.

    13) Segways are just too expensive. A kids electric scooter is almost the same functionality for 1/20 of the price.

  6. Born June 24, 1947 — Peter Weller, 73.

    Not genre, but he also did a great job in the Longmire series. I was tickled to see him there.

    Scroll-a While You Can, Pixel Boy!
    — That one MUST have been done before, but I’m too lazy to check.

    No matter where you scroll, there you pixel.
    — This one probably too!

  7. 13) The tragic death they mention in the article was Segway company owner Jimi Heselden, who died after accidentally riding one of the scooters off a cliff near his Yorkshire estate. There is definitely a safety issue.

  8. 7) Another vote for Longmire. Back before the end of the world I went to Santa Fe once a weekend; occasionally I would come home the long way, through Los Alamos and the Jemez Mountains, and past Walt’s house. And while the show was in production, it was common to see a coroplast sign tied to a traffic light pole in Santa Fe marked ‘LM’ with an arrow. If I recall, they filmed at my mother’s workplace once or twice.

    Did I ever tell you about the man who taught his pixel to scroll?

  9. Lela E Buis on June 24, 2020 at 11:07 pm said:

    13) The tragic death they mention in the article was Segway company owner Jimi Heselden, who died after accidentally riding one of the scooters off a cliff near his Yorkshire estate.

    Ouch!

  10. (3) Lots of sad and depressing stories being shared on SFF and comics Twitter about sexual harassment, although I’m not sure what’s kicked it all off.

    I must admit that I’ve never been to a con, but they kind of sound weird and unpleasant?

  11. @Chip: There was a plan for a ‘Grey Dragon’ trip which has now been replaced by the ‘Dear Moon’ project and Starship. That would have used a Falcon Heavy to send a slightly modified Dragon round the moon with tourists on board. A similar set-up ought to work for trips to the Lunar Gateway station, and is how the resupply contract recently awarded to SpaceX will work although that uses a Dragon in name only.

    The thing about being able to put a lot of mass in LEO is that the mass can include a lot of propellant to take you somewhere else. Having someone footing the bills who will pay for expendability is also a bonus from some points of view.

  12. although I’m not sure what’s kicked it all off.

    Kicked off in comics by the accusations against Warren Ellis and Cameron Stewart, I think. But there’s also a wave of stories coming out in video games, standup comedy, and apparently wrestling as well.

  13. @rob_matic : Conventions can and should be a great deal of fun for all. I’m glad that people are calling out the harassment that has been going on at conventions. That’s got to be the first step in stopping further harassment and making conventions truly the welcoming places that they always claimed to be.

  14. (1) On the other hand, SpaceX wouldn’t exist without NASA. In the same sort of way that Facebook wouldn’t exist without DARPA. (And let’s not forget that both of those were largely the product of the Cold War, which is a whole ‘nother issue.)

    And also, it rather assumes that the only thing NASA does is launch spacecraft. I sometimes have this argument here in the UK about the BBC; people want to stop funding it because they don’t like the way it does the news and some terrible sitcoms. They really don’t understand how much it actually does (or how close to a collapse point it is, but again that’s a whole ‘nother issue.)

  15. @bookworm1398 13) Segways are just too expensive. A kids electric scooter is almost the same functionality for 1/20 of the price. Not really; Segways not requiring the unstable feet-in-line position is significant, but ~auto-balancing makes at least as much difference to anyone a little uncertain about their own. But the design also made it sufficiently neither flesh nor fowl that there was no place for it; it was too wide&slow to go well on streets (as I’ve often seen motorized scooters do, fitting like bicycles), and too wide&fast to play well on a sidewalk.

    @Lela E. Buis:

    13) The tragic death they mention in the article was Segway company owner Jimi Heselden, who died after accidentally riding one of the scooters off a cliff near his Yorkshire estate. There is definitely a safety issue.

    Do you have more info? ISTM that’s no more a safety issue than somebody riding their dirt bike off a cliff — the user has to have some responsibility. IIRC, the Segway kept its rider upright while both wheels were on the ground, but never promised obstacle avoidance.

    @rob_matic (expanding on @Andrew’s response): Cons vary massively, and/or the attendees do; they’re more crowded than most employment and more social than most public recreation (e.g., movies), so jerks have more opportunity and more cover — but there are also far more opportunities to connect and to wallow in information and other new things. (And note that I’m saying this from the PoV of someone who leans toward the antisocial end of a one-dimensional scale.) I can see the average con being overwhelming for some people on the Asperger’s hypersphere (or much more antisocial than I am), and I wouldn’t recommend (e.g.) Libertycon (or certain now-defunct cons that had a possibly-deserved reputation as hookup sites) to someone I didn’t know well enough to think they’d fit, but you might want to ask around and (after the pandemic settles enough that they start happening again) try something local enough that you can walk out if you don’t like it, and small enough that you won’t be overwhelmed. (I’d say something about type — gaming/~anime/furry/genre-commercial/genre-run-by-fans — but I know sufficiently little about all but the last that I can’t give a fair perspective, not to mention that the types sometimes overlap.)

    @Anthony: I get that putting lots of mass into LEO is a start, but is Dragon putting up the mass equivalent of a Saturn V third stage plus CM/SM/LM? (Wikipedia says the Saturn V put 140 metric tons into LEO, or >2x the ?53? that IIRC SpaceX has achieved.) Note that sending passengers around the moon takes a lot less mass than landing them and getting them off again.

  16. 13: I live near bike paths in Vancouver and see a fair number of electric no-handle unicycles. I guess these must be the heirs of the Segway. There’s a definite cool factor that Segways lacked.

    10: I feel like we don’t talk about Haruki Murakami enough since he is about as genre as it gets. His characters are always slipping into other modes of existence, meeting weird and fantastic characters, and displaying odd powers. Plus, he’s an amazing writer. After Dark is one of my favourite books, in any genre.

  17. So this might be of interest to some besides me. The Sun Ra Arkestra, which is one of the first musical acts to heavily feature science-fictional themes, is releasing their first new album in 20 years!

    This extremely bizarre jazz collective, which was founded in the 1950s by self-proclaimed interplanetary traveler Sun Ra, is considered a pioneer of proto-Afrofuturism. Before there was George Clinton and the Mothership Connection, there was Sun Ra. While Ra himself passed away in ’93, the Arkestra has continued touring.

  18. I used to get the weekly (Thursday afternoon) emails from The Arcanist with a link to their new flash fiction piece but about two weeks ago they stopped (the weekly stories are still available on their website). Anyone else have that problem?

  19. @Chip:

    I get that putting lots of mass into LEO is a start, but is Dragon putting up the mass equivalent of a Saturn V third stage plus CM/SM/LM?

    No-one is considering a single launch lunar project (*) these days so Saturn V capabilities are not required. The NASA plan is for a crew launched in an Orion capsule on an SLS booster to rendevous in high lunar orbit with a lander and possibly a tug that have got there by other means. The crew transfer to the lander (which may use a tug to get to low lunar orbit) and carry on down to the surface. Once they’re done, back to LLO and HLO, transfer back to the Orion and return to Earth. What Zubrin is currently pushing is to replace the Orion taxi with a cheaper Dragon.

    Note that the SLS is not currently capable of delivering an Orion to LLO, hence the need for the Lunar Gateway station. Orion is a very heavy capsule, some may consider this a feature as it forces the use of an SLS.

    Doug Loverro apparently considered launching the lander as a single package rather than with some assembly required as being the only way to meet the 2024 target. It looks like hs resignation was prompted by him discussing this with Boeing. Even he didn’t consider the Apollo style single launch as viable.

  20. (7) Sharing a birthday with Peter Weller (same age) and me (not same age) is Mick Fleetwood, drummer of Fleetwood Mac and actor who was in a ST:TNG episode, and the film The Running Man.

Comments are closed.