A wonderful weekend (part I)

[felis_stellaria]

I went to Astrofest this weekend, and I had a great time. This astronomy festival has kinda fallen on some hard times after a change of venue and just some poor planning the last few years, so I'm kinda glad I missed it until this year (I had attended a few times...around 2000 I'd guess?), but this time was very good. So if any passing astronomy

Comments

[giada]

Oh man. I love star parties. I've never been to a big one, but I'd love to go someday.

NASA is being expected to do too much with too little money. I think they probably know this, but they can't acknowledge it for fear of losing public support for manned space exploration. I don't think the public realizes how much we're going to have to invest to make NASA's "Vision for Space Exploration" happen, not to mention how many other NASA programs are going to be cut or scaled back. They've diminished their education budget, and their unmanned exploration project is not going to grow with the rate of inflation as of their last budget projection I saw.

Oh, yes. Lilo and Stitch is fantastic :D

[felis_stellaria]

Yeah, I guess I'm lucky, Illinois seems to have quite a good number of big ones, and I don't think they're generally that expensive either...there also used to be NIAGfest in Indiana which was easy enough to get to, but I think that hasn't been running anymore the past few years...sad.

Yeah, I agree with everything you say. It's all just absurd, we need to wake up and let NASA do its job and help everyone out.

Of course it is! XD (unfortunately I don't have any Lilo & Stitch icons yet:()

[lady_estella]

Whoah... the whole 'mining on the moon' reminds me of Enterprise, that short-lived star-trek series; they had a few episodes centered around the moon mining colonies.

How much more futuristic can you get :D
It sounds really cool... did he say anything about the legal aspects of it? 'Cause, you know... even if the US is the only one that actually sent people to the moon, it's still essentially joint property of the world.

[felis_stellaria]

Heh. Neat, I haven't seen those eps.

Hmmmmm, actually he did not mention that, and that's a very good point. But the possible benefits are so great we should at least be working towards something in that area, and instead you only hear about it now and then if you go to Astrofest and stuff; what the heck is congress and the Department of State doing? At the moment we're one of only three countries that might be capable of this at all, and I'm willing to bet everyone could be placated by getting a chunk of the energy and if the world were reasonable (which it's not) they'd be able to see that they'll benefit so much just by having dibs on all the coal etc that we no longer need that they would have very little problem with it...*sigh* It's probably a lot more complicated than that in the real world, though...