“By Dawn’s Early Light” was a made-for-HBO movie filmed and set just before the fall of the Soviet Union. In short, some PO’ed Soviet military jerks steal a Russian nuclear missile, sneak it into Turkey and launch it into Ukraine, sparking a limited nuclear war between Russia and NATO. Due to misunderstandings, mistakes, arrogance and bad leadership, a situation that’s already bad gets worse. While some of the effects are clearly dated, it remains an effectively creepy movie.

One scene that always freaks me right the hell out: the carrier (USS Midway) getting torpedoed and sinking. You don’t see it; it’s just radio messages. This shows an effective example of “less is more.” As there’s no chance that an HBO TV movie budget in 1990 would have been able to show the sinking of an aircraft carrier well, doing it off screen was the right choice.

Cities get nuked. Airplanes brought down. Presidents blinded. There is no happy ending. But at least James Earl Jones gets a real cigarette.

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In short: a contact binary star system (KIC 9832227) 1800 lightyears away in Cygnus has been found to have a possible end-date. The period of the two stars in their mutual orbit has been decreasing (currently about 11 hours), meaning that the stars are spiraling in on each other. If the trend holds, in 2022 they’ll merge, and BLAMMO. This will produce a “red nova” which will be naked-eye visible, perhaps one of the brightest stars in the sky.

Astronomers predict explosion that will change the night sky in 2022

The Expanse will shortly be returning for Season 2. If you haven’t seen season one or you’re a little rusty since it’s been so friggen’ long, here is a handy recap video:

This OSS film from 1944 shows something pretty odd… a method of building a “runway” that is just a suspended cable. A light aircraft can hang from the cable and accelerate, detaching just before the end and flying away; it can also fly low and slow and catch the cable, slowing to a stop while hanging. The idea was that this system could be set up by a truckload of guys in a forested or jungle area without the need to clear out the trees or create even a crude runway. One imagines that someone could set one of these things up over a shallow river or across a narrow canyon; the mind boggles at the possibilities. And the mind boggles at the myriad failure modes, which may be why this system didn’t seem to amount to much. Especially since helicopters were just coming on the scene.

I suppose like most people, the vast majority of the dreams I have are utterly forgotten when I wake. A few stick around for a few seconds and quickly fade, leaving nothing but a frustrating “feeling” of memory. But about once a year I have a dream that really sticks with me through the day, with the memory of it reasonably bright and clear. A dream like this about a year ago I scribbled down in story format; it will eventually make its way into my fiction, as it fits in quite well there. But Thursday morning just as I woke up I had another one. Normally I imagine people would have little enough interest in the dreams of others, but this one might amuse readers of this blog.

So: I’m in a lab coat. It is definitely me; while I don’t see me (it’s all first person, seen through my own eyes), I know it to be me. I am in a hurry and moving quickly. Not running, just sorta speed walking. I know that I am late, though it’s not immediately clear what for.

Where I am moving quickly *through* is what’ll be interesting: a giant factory. Brightly lit, mostly painted bright epoxy white, it is a vast facility for the production of a range of rocket vehicles, everything from (seemingly) small space launch vehicles to things bigger than the Saturn V. It’s clearly a mishmash of places I’ve actually been, such as United Tech, ATK and the VAB, along with places I’ve seen in photos and concept art. But at that moment there’s nothing much going on. The lights are on, there are boosters on the assembly lines, a *few* people poking around in the distance, but it’s clearly not the busy time. I’m moving from one vast assembly area to another. I go through a door and someone yells at me that I need a hardhat, which I grab off the wall, put on and continue on my way.

I finally enter one last facility, this one largely open space. A few hundred yards away vast hangar doors are open, mountains visible in the distance. I’m moving quickly towards the open doors. Before I can get to them, someone from my past – someone I knew in my college days – comes around the side of the open door, heading my way; when we meet up she tells me I’m late and that everyone is waiting for me. When we get to the open doors I see a large audience in bleachers, and a smaller group of people dressed like me in lab coats seated in front of the larger group.

And then my cat Buttons started jumping up and down on me, ending the dream.

The dream showed me an alternate history… one where I didn’t go to university at some place off in northern Iowa where Aerospace Engineering was one small subset of a vast array of disparate fields of study, but instead I obtained my education at a giant rocket production complex, seemingly in eastern Colorado (Wyoming? Montana?). Instead of an aerospace education that was almost purely theoretical, with the hopes of maybe finding someplace to put that education to work, here was an alternate history where the work is being done and students get to be surrounded by it while being educated. A place where you graduate in a lab coat and hardhat, not a robe and mortarboard. And likely a place with a *terrible* football team, but that’s ok because who the hell wants to play sportsball when they could be working on rockets? A place where the SJW’s find no purchase, where STEM is dominant.

Sigh.

So, for most of Thursday I was torn between being slightly elated at the basic idea of Just How Awesome That Vision Was… and being horribly bummed out that that not only it didn’t happen, but it couldn’t happen and likely never will happen.

But just imagine: The Musk-Bezos-Drax Industries factory complex northeast of Denver, cranking out interplanetary colonization ships and boosters and spacecraft for the orbital and lunar tourism industries and solar power satellites and asteroid mining, a facility so large it is its own small city with its own university. Students from around the world come there to Space City to learn aerospace, mechanical, electrical, chemical and nuclear engineering, surrounded by actual ongoing work in all those fields, with daily launches and landings from the Fort Morgan launch site.

Awww. I think I just gave myself a sad.

And because why not, here’s “Damnation Alley” from 1977. That year 20th Century Fox had two sci-fi movies for release. “Damnation Alley,” a post-apocalyptic yarn about some schmoes trying to cross the continent to reach safety after a major nuclear war had somehow knocked Earth off its axis, was expected to be the big moneymaker. The other one? A little film that Fox apparently had much less faith in. Something called “Star Wars.”

While “Damnation Alley” is justly forgotten these days, the Landmaster remains one of the most entertainingly badass vehicles ever built for the screen.

When I was ten I thought this movie was awesome. Well…. kids is teh dum, I suppose. In short, a Space Shuttle launches a satellite, which promptly smacks into a flying saucer, which promptly crashes in the Arizona desert and is scooped up by the Air Force and transported to… Hangar 18. Standard government conspiracy/1970’s-style Ancient Aliens hijinks ensue. It’s… it’s just terrible. Enjoy!

Modestly amusing (especially the music at the end):

I was recently poking around in an antiques store when I came across a binder full of notes on space science. Hand written stuff, seemingly a bit above basic college level… a proposal for a communications satellite, what looks like a long essay or perhaps the beginnings of a manuscript on extraterrestrial intelligence, some math on interstellar travel. I found a *single* date on the handwritten pages, sometime in 1962. There were also a few early 1980’s issues of “the Planetary Report” stuck in the back. The store only wanted 2 bucks for it, so, what the heck. I bought t with the possibility that the writings might prove interesting even if only academically, sort of a look back to 55 years ago.

The magazines still had their original mailing labels, to a feller in Ogden, Utah. Gave first name, last name, middle initial. Obviously impossible to say if the writings from 20 years earlier belonged to the feller the magazines were mailed to, but it seemed a reasonable supposition. So, off to Google I went, looking the name up with “Ogden, Utah.” And it actually turned up a guy, born in 1925, which would have put him in his late 30’s when he (apparently) wrote the space stuff. Since the age is appropriate and the name is an exact match, chances are *real* good that I found the guy, and he’s still alive.

Small problem. I didn’t find him online as “noted space scientist X receives lifetime achievement award.” Nope. I found him on a database. Guess what kind of database. Go on, guess.

Gah.