[extropy-chat] ASTRO: A piece of the Universe

[Robert J. Bradbury]

For those of you who don't know Stardust has successfully passed
through the halo of the comet Wild-2 and is on its way back
home with some of the dust from which our Solar System was
formed.  More along with the closest picture of a comet
I've ever seen are here:
  http://www.spacedaily.com/news/stardust-04d.html
and more details are here:
  http://stardust.jpl.nasa.gov/

We will have to wait a couple of years to get our hands on the
material but my hat is off to those folks at Lockheed who
constructed the Stardust and the folks at Boeing who built
the rocket that launched it and the folks at JPL that built
some of the instruments).  [If you know any of those
folks Spike -- give them my best regards.]

For those of you don't know -- Stardust had some camera
problems with blurry vision early on in the mission --
the solution reminds me of...

   Harry: Come on! You're NASA for Christ's sake!
      You're the ones who come up with this shit!
      Why I bet you have a bunch of guys sitting
      around somewhere right now just thinking shit up,
      and somebody backing them up.
      What's your contingency plan?
   Truman: Our contingency plan?
   Harry: Yeah, your back up plan. You've gotta have a back up plan.
   Truman: No, we don't have a back up plan.

Also -- as a frame of reference ~200 Lockheed engineers
were involved in creating Stardust -- suggests one needs
an Extropic community at least 10x but more probably between
100x and 1000x bigger than the current community if one is
ever to hope to get lots of us out of harms way (be it
asteroids, comets or luddites).

Robert