Toast for Brekkie

Happiness has found me

I am among the most blessed
of all beings to have ever
walked the earth

Infinite gifts are heaped
upon my head with
every breath

I have lived a thousand lives
in one

Never have I wanted for sustenance
of body mind or spirit

I am content

To die this very moment
or live the next
hundred years

Countless are the joys
I have known

Endless

the promise

of those to come.

Paging Dr. Braun

I had the distinct honor of attending the local AIAA dinner this evening where I witnessed a fascinating presentation on the ARES project.

Dr. Robert D. Braun, the Mission Architect, is a former employee of NASA at the Langley Research Center and is currently a professor at Georgia Tech.

ARES stands for Aerial Regional-scale Environmental Survey. If you're familiar with greek mythology, you'll realize that this is a clever play on the name the Greeks assigned to Mars before the Romans co-opted and renamed all the Greek gods. So what is ARES? Some call it a scientific gap filler. That is to say the science it carries out on Mars fits in between the microscopic work of landers and rovers and the global-scale observation of orbiting satellites. Or, put another way, it's the first plane to fly in the atmosphere of another planet.

If you've met me, you've probably gathered that among my strongest passions are air and space. It stands to reason, then, that I would become an aerospace engineer. So I hope you'll excuse my glee in describing anything that has to do with both the aforementioned topics and the loftiest related goal I hope is achieved in my lifetime: the exploration of Mars.

Without staying up too late or boring you all to tears, let me give you the rundown. If the ARES project is selected by NASA to fly in 2011, the mission will go something like this: a rocket-powered, carbon-composite aircraft about the size of a Cessna will be folded up into an aeroshell only 2.65 meters (8.7 feet) in diameter and launched on an Atlas-like rocket from Cape Canaveral. It will rest patiently in this fetal position for the nine-month transit to Mars, where the aircraft-containing capsule will separate from the orbital communications-relay spacecraft and begin an atmospheric injection (fire, heat, plasma, burning, HOTNESS). Once through the peak heating phase and slowed considerably from interplanetary speeds, a supersonic parachute will deploy, the heat shield will eject, and a "spider" structure will extend the folded aircraft away from the aeroshell. Upon separation of ARES from the spider, small drogue chute will deploy to provide stabilizing drag while the aircraft, still falling straight toward Mars' surface at several hundred miles per hour, unfolds the fuselage from the tail. Next, each folded wing, crossed like arms across a chest, will extend out and snap into place. The guidance, navigation and control computers will then determine which way is up (the spacecraft has been spinning for stability for the previous nine months), rotate itself to a belly-down position, then begin a long, slow "pullout" maneuver to transition to straight and level flight. Then it lights the rockets, fires up the scientific equipment (the video camera has been on since the heat shield deployed) and collects data for an estimated 1.5-hour, 700-kilometer (435-mile) flight. ARES will continue to measure the magnetic field, sample the atmosphere, and take hi-res photos from a one to two kilometer (I'm tired of converting units for you, figure this one out yourself) altitude right up until the point it, as Chuck Yeager would say, "augers in."

If that's not exciting I don't know what is.

Years of design, analysis, computer modeling and actual flight test have gone into this. In fact, ARES was already pitched to NASA a few years ago, and while it made the final four, it was passed over for a project that used existing, already-paid-for leftover hardware. The dream was kept alive by its diligent planners, however, and it's making another bid this year for a trip to Mars in 2011. You can imagine the disappointment of making it to the final four and then being rejected. When Dr. Braun expressed his dismay to his grandmother, though, she told him not worry, saying, "You have plenty of time." She's 103 years old.

Which, strangely enough, means that she was born in 1903, the year in which the famous brothers Orville and Wilbur Wright flew the first heavier-than-air, powered aircraft at Kitty Hawk for twelve seconds. So before you question ARES' flight plan of less than two hours, think of how far we've come in a hundred years. In a blink of an eye (at least as far as a four-billion year old planet is concerned), we've gone from flying planes on the sand dunes of North Carolina to flying them on another planet.

Now that's something to get excited about.

The wee Thursday hours

First: Nas is getting married! To Greg! HOORAY! *throws confetti*

Second: You may have noticed a lapse on my flickr account. It's due to the transfer from Lappy to Elvis. Picasa doesn't work on Macs, so I posted the 17 photos of Utah I found on Tyrone's internal memory (not the memory card's) with only minimal editing in iPhoto. My BIL (Brother-In-Law) Daniel (BIL-Daniel? Isn't that confusing?) is bringing me down some software on Memorial Day Weekend that will hopefully help me tackle the 800-photo backlog that's built up in the meantime. Oi!

And can I just say how excited I am about next weekend? My parents, BIL-Daniel, and Delara are all coming down for an extended beach vacation. I got the jetski registered with the state of Florida today (been here a year and a half and never used it? Travesty.) and the hitch for the trailer is in the mail. Kneeboarding and tubing here we come! Anybody else up for a few watersports? Come on down!

Sprawling

I just walked in the door. Literally. The A/C is still off. My bag is still packed. The mail is unopened and my deodorant has worn off. But there's something in the air between Orlando and my house, and I have to put finger to keyboard to get it out before it leaks out my ears like so much smoke.

First off, where was I? The short answer: Macon. Macon, Georgia, home to Mercer University and one of its most illustrious students, my sister Caroline. No, it wasn't a three-day weekend. Only two. But it was Mother's Day and Macon is roughly halfway between the Cape and Nashville. So I met my parents and one of my sisters there (the other one, Dutchie, is too busy on the trauma rotation at the nation's 3rd-busiest ER for happy little jaunts to Georgia).

I know what you're thinking, Ez, so I'll stop you right here: yes, I passed through Valdosta. Twice, in fact. But the unforeseen circumstance of a passenger precluded our long-overdue visit. He had to be in Macon by 11:30pm. That's when the last car rental agency in town closes on Friday nights. And I left work at, oh, about 5:30pm Friday. Let's just say you're not supposed to be able to make it in six hours and leave it at that. On the return leg, well, I didn't know how much either of us would get out of a five-minute interaction. It'll happen one day, though. Trust me.

Speaking of fast cars, I had an interesting experience between work and picking up my rider in Orlando: a state trooper pulled me over on a deserted divided highway. "License and registration, please." Done. "I pulled you over for exceeding the speed limit. Is your speedometer broken?" "No, sir, I just have to be in Macon by 11:30pm and I was at work later than planned. I was just trying to make up some time." As he walked back to run my plates I realized he hadn't quoted me a number. No, "I clocked you at 70 in a 55." Odd. He quickly returned, handed me my documents and tapped the door sill. "I'm gonna let you off with a warning this time. Please slow down." "Thanks, officer." That's it. My first warning in nearly a decade. Hooray for good karma.

There is balance in the universe, however, because Dad was pulled over by Officer McI'vegotsomethingtoprove in Macon for running a stop sign. Only problem is, he was in a caravan between my sister and I, and we all stopped at that sign in succession. After the clever, "stop signs are the same in Tennessee as in Georgia" and a little grandstanding, he let Dad go. "Don't take my kindness for weakness," were literally his parting words. Any psychologists out there?

Whatever, all that's not the point. It's just the backstory. The point is this: well, I can't sum it up in a sentence. But considering I'm starting to sweat from the lack of A/C in here, I'll do my best to place the weekend's epiphany as succinctly as I can in the following paragraphs.

We are too sprawled. I'll spare you the requisite "I love America" preamble and I'll even forego a treatise on my profound and impassioned love of cars. But what I want to say has been fermenting inside my head for too long. It's time to let it pour.

Let see if I can draw a line through this tangle without coming across as a doomsday prophet. America's love affair with the car may not be her downfall, but it sure ain't helping anything. Of course the issue is complex, and I can't pretend to know every intricate detail, but I've been thinking about this long enough to see the big picture, and it's no Mona Lisa. Feel free to fill in any plot holes with your comments.

Europe enjoys the fortuitous accident of developing its cities before the invention of the automobile. This kept the city in the city and the country in the country. In between municipalities were vast expanses of farmland or unspoiled wilderness. Forests. Meadows. Mountains. River valleys. In town everything was on a human scale; you could walk anywhere you needed to go. Yes of course I know they're bulging around the edges now. But the city core has never really died, and city planners have had the foresight and maturity in budgeting and governance to provide for reliable public transit to the growing suburbs.

America didn't really hit its stride until the last century. Things started picking up after the Industrial Revolution, sure. And cities that were large before 1900 still have incredible, manageable downtowns. New York. DC. Chicago. But look at places that exploded after the Depression and the World Wars, like LA and Houston and Atlanta and (insert large southern or western American city here), and you see grids (if you're lucky) that exist on an automotive scale rather than a human scale. We all know that a lack of city planning and zoning coupled with baby booms equals cheaper land further out. The tumult and upheaval of the sixties, and subsequent abandonment of city centers didn't help either. Yes, I know there's a rennaissance underway in certain lucky locales, as evidenced by the skyrocketing real estate values in places like Chicago and San Francisco. But it was during a conversation with my mother on the half-hour ride to Caroline's church this morning, passing through all the abandoned strip malls that dot the otherwise pristine pine forests of central Georgia, that the drawbacks crystallized in my mind.

1. Time wasted in transit. The further you are from your destination, the longer it takes to get there. You are wasting precious hours of your life simply waiting to arrive.

2. Isolation. You can't say hello to other people on the street when you're sealed away from the world in your car. It may be a sanctuary, but what is it a shrine to? Individualism, selfishness, waste.

3. Sedentary lifestyle. You're getting somewhere alright, but you're not burning those frappuccinos. You're burning dead dinosaurs. All that Starbucks is going straight to what you're sitting on.

4. Increased stress. The bald truth is that we are not courteous, attentive, well-trained drivers. The very sprawl that I'm bemoaning dictates that everyone have a car. Imagine the uproar if our government required American drivers to be as skilled as the privileged German or British drivers wealthy enough to afford a car, who have paid thousands on courses to be able to pass the rigorous tests, and who obey traffic laws, yield the right of way, keep in the right lane except to pass, et cetera. The path that we have chosen as a society, our laziness and inability to plan and manage our growth, has relegated us an endless ballet of road rage as we go about our daily tasks with every other Tom, Dick and "My-attention-is-so-divided-I-don't-realize-my-blinker-is-on" Harry on our clogged asphalt arteries. LA already knows that the solution is not more lanes on the freeway. Oh, there's a new, wider highway? Rest assured, we will rise to meet that challenge. We all get in our cars to go to work and the same time, to come home at the same time. "Forget staggering, that would never work." Welcome to the age of the super commute. I could write an entirely separate essay on the average American driver, but I'm getting too fired up.

5. Fatalities. The simple fact is that planes and trains piloted by trained professionals and maintained by responsible mechanics crash orders of magnitude less frequently than Suzy on her cellphone eating fries and yelling at the kids.

6. Wasted resources. We have to pave the continent to get anywhere. We build everything bigger than it needs to be because we can. Do you really need to carry two tons of steel with you everywhere you go? No. Have you ever seen a parking lot in the suburbs filled to capacity on an average day? The subway, a commuter train, sure. If they're designed and planned well. But think of all the parking lots in your town. All that wasted space. All that lack of nature.

7. Wasted energy. Speaking of nature! As energy is my pet topic, you'd do well to get comfortable in your seat for this one. Do you have any idea how inefficient it is to have each individual stop and go under their own power in ten thousand different directions versus everyone moving together in one direction at one time? Traffic jams are caused by one person hitting the brakes. The ripple effect lasts for hours. Every car on the road is too heavy. Every one. There's a misconception out there that more mass = greater safety. That is entirely untrue. Seatbelts save lives. Crumples zones save lives. Airbags and ABS and TCS and head restraints save lives. Attentive, focused, courteous, well-trained drivers save lives. SUVs do not. Cadillacs to do not. A hunk of steel does not. I'll spare you the physics. We don't have time.

We build big cars because we can. Because there is no incentive to be efficient. Because our economic system is flawed. Because there is no value given to natural resources. The free market could work on this problem if we simply set the initial conditions properly. Spare me the complaints about gas prices. Understand this: you do not pay as much as Europeans. Hell, you're not even paying for the gas! You're paying the price of drilling and extracting and refining and transporting and storing and marketing. The energy is free as far as you're concerned. You're not paying for the gravity-driven fusion inside the sun that provided the radiation for the prehistoric plants to grow. You're not paying for the chemical process that takes place over millions of years to turn organic matter into long, burnable carbon chains. You're not paying for the heat and pressure inside the earth's crust. We're going about this all wrong. Petroleum is the cheapest on paper. But it's not the cheapest in reality. Every tank I pump into my car is borrowed. Our entire economy, your job, your way of life is dependent on oil. It is the lifeblood of this country, not merely an addiction. It will be a long and painful process to convert. But it is a necessity if you want your current luxurious lifestyle to continue. And I don't care if you live in a trailer in Micanopy. If you can jump in your two-ton steel box and drive anywhere you want for less than what you make in a day, you're in the lap of luxury.

You can see how this idea can quickly get out of hand. And I haven't even touched on the price we pay! Global warming. Intense weather. Changing climate. Extinction of species. Air pollution. Wars in petroleum-rich countries. It's not all petroleum's fault, I admit. A lot has to do with the paradigm that applied no value to natural resources in the first place. A lot has to do with an accelerating population. Something big is going to happen while my generation is alive. Can't you feel it coming?

"Ok, fine. But what are the solutions, Chicken Little?"

The first is to get a clue. Energy is not free. If you're treating it as such, someone somewhere down the line is going to pay. Maybe not with their money, either. Maybe with their job. Maybe with their house. Maybe with their life.

The second is to step up and take responsibility. Society is not some nebulous other. We are society. You yourself are a walking, talking, thinking microcosm of society. Be the change you wish to see. Do what you can to conserve. Tell others. Push for change in any way you can imagine.

All energy can be traced back to the sun. I don't care if it's uranium from the formation of the earth, fossil fuels from organic materials plus time, wind, water, waves, tides, or geothermal (you could argue that last one due to the Earth's own heat, but I'll trump you with the Earth forming from the protoplanetary disc of the sun). It is the ultimate solution to the maintenance of the lifestyle to which we've convinced ourselves we're entitled. Of course there are drawbacks to everything. You have to create solar panels or solar towers from something. But I'd much rather mine a relative handful of exotic metals to produce enough solar cells to cover Texas than convert every drop of dead dinosaurs into carbon, sulfur and nitrogen oxides. Notice I haven't even touched on fusion. When you figure out how to bottle the sun, you let me know.

That was much longer than I intended, and I don't even know if I got my point across. But I'm sweating, and there is mail to be read and clothes to unpack. And it's past my bedtime. Time to turn off the coal-powered laptop, turn on the coal-powered air conditioning, and get some shut-eye.

Appreciate what you have now. Love the internet for everything positive it can do. I'm not saying it won't always be there, or that we won't progress to the point where we can responsibly venture off this rock and get our eggs out of one basket. I'm just saying there's a mountain of work to be done, and you're much more likely to lend a helping hand if you know why.

Companion Peace

They say when it rains
Well, you know what they say
And the crisp, single piano note rings out
Marking the end of a song and the beginning of this

Which began as a seed
At the song's beginning
And grew with the pulsing happiness of Death Cab
Into a gentle, soft sentiment free from the tough outer shell

Humpty and his wife
Smile sweetly at each other
While surf shorts and bikinis
Walk in with nothing on and out with something in

And what beautiful vessels
Holding the sweet water of life inside
Like the student with the other laptop
Glancing around at the laughter like me

Or the table of hell's angels
Tattooed, sunglassed and pony-tailed
Weathered faces wrinkled into laughter, eyes smiling
Giving up the secret

Concealed.

Thanks J

Sitting here reading J's poetry
At the corporate conglomerate megaplex
(but it's nice and shiny and new and cool)
(and I had to get out of the house)
(and they have free wireless)

And my brain has metamorphosed

Just like I pick up accents
After talking with a foreigner
The legos of my synapses
Have snapped together
Into a replicator
And are now cranking out words
In that same breathless rhythm
My eyes are gulping down

Maybe I'll finally finish that entry
Now that the crazy is unstirred
And the kink unknotted.