Why Things That Fly Are Cool

I blame my main life obsessions on John Glenn and the Beatles: things that fly and making music. The flying bit started first, in 1962. In February of that year, John Glenn became the first American astronaut to orbit the Earth. I was nine years old and for reasons I don’t fully understand, the whole space thing was immediately very exciting to me. I must have watched the launches on TV and seen the pictures in LIFE Magazine. I started reading everything I could about the astronauts and soon learned that they were first military jet pilots. So I decided that’s what I would be. I’m sure around a million other American kids decided the same thing. The Beatles and making music came a few years later.

I stuck with my Air Force Academy, jet pilot, test pilot, astronaut dream for around three years until it was shattered by myopia. I get that military pilots must have uncorrected 20/20 vision, and even though I was too nearsighted to fly for the Air Force, my interest in space and aviation continued. I decided I would be an aeronautical engineer. I read books and built dozens of model airplanes, and when I was around 12, I joined Civil Air Patrol (CAP). It was something like boy scouts sponsored by the Air Force, but even better – they had airplanes! Cadets could go on demonstration flights in a Piper Cub! They would even let you fly the plane! It was the best thing ever.

CAP faded in high school as I developed other interests (e.g., the Beatles) and my parents got tired of schlepping me to the airport. I still built model airplanes and loved everything about flying, and I still assumed I would study aeronautical engineering and get a private pilot’s license as soon as I could. Of course, “life happened” and I tried a few different majors, quit college for a while to try being a singer-songwriter, and ended up studying physics and optics instead of aerospace engineering. A lot of other stuff happened too of course, like a family and a career.  I eventually did get a private pilot’s license, but not until I was 48 years old. That was great, but for various reasons, I couldn’t fly as much as I had hoped I would.

Which finally brings me to PC flight simulators. I played with a few in the mid-90s, military ones that were fun but not very much like real flying. By 1999 when I started taking real flight lessons, PC flight simulators had improved enough to be useful for some aspects of flight training, e.g., practicing some specific tasks like VOR navigation. But they didn’t look or feel very much like a real airplane, and I only used sims for a few things like preparing for a cross-country flight.

For a couple of years, the flying bug seemed to fade, other than reading my monthly AOPA Pilot Magazine and listening in to the cockpit audio on my United Airlines flights. In 2005, I discovered the free space flight simulator Orbiter, which reawakened my interest in space and in flying, since some of the simulated spacecraft in Orbiter had wings, like the space shuttle. This “space phase” lasted for a few years. It launched this blog and led me to become a NASA/JPL Solar System Ambassador, a volunteer educational outreach program for space and astronomy. I’m still a sucker for a rocket launch or landing, and I would go on a space flight in a heartbeat if I could manage it.

Flight Sim Renaissance

Throughout the 2000s, flight simulators continued to improve, but I didn’t pay any attention until sometime in 2020 when I heard that an amazing new version of Microsoft Flight Simulator (MSFS) would be released in August. I started reading articles and watching preview videos, thinking that it might be interesting to play with, since like many people, I was stuck at home due to the pandemic. Early in 2020, I had also started to get heavily involved in orchestral composition with sample libraries, so I decided I would wait a while before trying MSFS 2020. I was working with a composition coach and had started entering some competitions.

But by mid-September, the MSFS videos I was seeing were just too exciting. It was clear that MSFS 2020 was something entirely new and different, using modern cloud computing to model the entire world in incredible detail and with beautiful graphic quality. Not to mention airplanes! So I bought it, and within a month, I had upgraded to a new computer and monitor to run it better. My music took a back seat.

Why Is This Still Interesting?

Human dreams of flight started long before the Wright Brothers, and my personal dreams of flight started early in my life. Since I was also interested in travel and in foreign languages, I guess I hit the jackpot with the job I recently retired from, which would send me on international trips 6-8 times a year over many years. I spent a lot of time over the Atlantic and Pacific. And I spent some 120 hours at the controls of small airplanes (including flight instruction time) – a “low time” pilot for sure, but I’m grateful for the experiences and the memories.

With all that, you might think a flight simulator would pale in comparison. It’s definitely not the same as real flight but it still holds my interest for a few reasons:

• It exercises the same “muscle memory” as real flight – the simulation is accurate enough to follow similar flight procedures and see similar results, both good and bad.
• The simulated world and systems are accurate enough to allow for realistic flight planning, including “Live Weather” based on real-world data.
• If I choose to navigate visually (VFR) in a familiar area, my real-world knowledge applies directly, which is quite satisfying. So I can navigate by "IFR" (“I follow roads”).
• I never learned to use advanced GPS flight navigation systems that have become widespread in recent years, but now I have – and the simulated systems are very close to the real ones, which is fun to experience. So I can navigate by IFR (“instrument flight rules”).
• Using multiplayer features and communication software, I can fly and talk with other sim pilots from anywhere in the (real) world. On many group flights, I have toured national parks and various international destinations, adding some of them to my “must visit” list for future real travel. New Zealand is at the top of my list once it opens for international visitors. 
• I can learn what it’s like to fly airplanes I could never experience in real life, from a Stearman biplane to an F-14 Tomcat to a Boeing 787. Is it exactly the same? Of course not, but the better models highlight the critical flight characteristics and flight systems, rewarding you for handling them correctly, and "punishing" you for mistakes (RTFM to minimize this).
• The childhood model airplane builder in me appreciates that I can easily acquire a collection of visually stunning airplane models that I can also fly in the simulator, unlike the plastic models from years past (though I still have a few die cast models of favorite airplanes).
• As I mentioned in an earlier post, virtual travel is also a big attraction for me. It’s especially fun to fly around cities I know well from years of business travel, especially Tokyo, Paris, Seoul, and London. I like to recognize familiar sights and discover new ones I plan to visit.

Finally there is VR, a totally different way to experience simulated flight, where you feel like you are inside a cockpit and where clouds and buildings look 3D and startlingly real and massive mountains truly look massive.

The Joys of Virtual Travel

Is this thing on? This blog I mean. Since I haven’t written a post since 2018, I thought maybe the whole blog thing was over and nobody told me. We certainly seem to have passed the heyday of blogs if there ever was one. It was sort of cool back in 2005 when I was excited about Orbiter, a new space flight simulator I had discovered, and I decided to share my fascination with real and virtual space flight with anyone who cared to read those early posts. Cool to me anyway. I met a few other space bloggers and Orbiter fans and there was even a small online community of sorts for a while. Woo-hoo! If there are still any blog readers or old space blog colleagues around, welcome! Leave a comment! All my old posts seem to still be out there and we’ll soon see if this one joins them.

Of course, now it’s late 2021 and things have changed. You know what many of them are, but in addition, I retired from my job a few months ago, and between that and COVID, my travel has been sharply curtailed. But things have come full circle in a way. Last year I rediscovered an old interest, non-space flight simulators, and specifically Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020 (MSFS). I had played with various flight sims from 1994 to 2004, and between 1999 and 2004, I got my real private pilot’s license (2001). I didn’t fly as much as I hoped I would, but I feel lucky that I got to fly at all. For more information on that, please visit my other moribund blog, Flight SchoolRetrojournal.

When I say I didn’t fly much, I meant only as a pilot. As a passenger I flew constantly from 1983 until late 2019, just before COVID started. Hundreds of international business trips and a few cool vacations. I do miss that part of my working life, going places, seeing things, meeting people, doing things. It was great. In retirement, my wife and I plan to do some fun domestic and international travel once things settle down with COVID and a few other issues. Maybe next year.

In the meantime, MSFS allows me to experience some of the joys of flying and “virtual travel” from the comfort of my own office chair, with or without a VR headset. I’ll spare you the details you can learn from any number of websites or YouTube videos, but MSFS takes full advantage of the power of fast PC’s, graphical accelerators, and cloud computing to create a highly detailed simulation of the entire world, complete with “Live Weather” and stunning depictions of terrain, human-built structures, many different airplanes, and even other simulator pilots sharing the skies with you over the internet. It’s an amazing experience with a large high-res monitor, but even better with a modern virtual reality headset. I have the Hewlett-Packard Reverb G2 which works great with MSFS.

Where Have I Been?

I have spent some simulator time in a Cessna 152 flying around Central Massachusetts as I did in real life 15-22 years ago, and it’s fun to see how well Asobo has done recreating airports, towns, and terrain familiar to me (Asobo are the French makers of Microsoft’s current flight simulator). It is detailed enough to navigate “VFR” using familiar landmarks. You can usually even find your house! But with the whole world at my fingertips, and with a stable full of airplanes from ultralights to business jets to a Boeing 747, I’m not usually so close to home. When not flying a Beech Bonanza G36 or a tail-wheel XCub, I tend to favor an old Stearman biplane or the Aermacchi MB-339, an Italian-built jet trainer, both bought from third-party developers. 

Human and Robot Tour Guides

One thing I have enjoyed is a weekly group flight organized by Jules Altis, who happens to be an active private pilot as well as a simulator enthusiast. For months he focused on US National Parks of which there are many worth touring from the air. He would research the history and special features of each park and share those presentations and videos along with the flight plan for all of us to follow in the simulator and on Twitch or Discord. Olympia National Park, Washington, was my personal favorite. More recently he switched to a more informal format with international destinations like the Amalfi Coast of Italy, the Great Rift Valley of Africa, and the Tokaido Road in Japan. He makes use of a great free add-on developed by others called Bushtalk Radio which provides computer-narrated tours within the simulator of over twelve-thousand points of interest around the world. I’ve helped in small ways with Bushtalk Radio, especially with this brief trailer video that introduces it in the same synthetic “English lady” voice used for the actual tours (the music is mine).

Favorite Places

In addition to the “standards” like the Grand Canyon, Mount Fuji, and New York City, there are so many lesser-known mountains, lakes, cities, bridges, and dams, not to mention so many great airports. If you love airplanes you’ve got to love airports! Many of these sights are beautiful right out of the box, but there is also a facility for “add-ons,” both free and paid. In addition to an expanded air fleet (fancy a Spitfire or F-14 Tomcat?), you can find hundreds of airports with added details. Duxford Airfield, England is a current (free) favorite of mine. Scenery enhancements are also popular, many free, but many great commercial ones that are well worth a few dollars, like this improved version of Seoul, Korea which reminds me of my many visits there over the years.

I have created many videos which are usually short flights in some cool area I’ve discovered. I’ve experimented with adding my own music to a few, like this one of a Spitfire (White Cliffs of Dover, of course) or this flight around Tokyo. One of my favorite videos is this one (not mine) of many beauty spots, set to an instrumental version of “What a Wonderful World.”

This is already a long post so I will end here. I’ll probably write another one talking about what it is that makes the Microsoft Flight Simulator experience so engaging for me.

MSFS screenshots above, from the top (* add-on aircraft):

1. Stearman* over north Australia; 2. Dorand AR.1* (WWI) over Minnesota; 3. Stearman* passing through Tower Bridge, London; 4. Diamond DA-40NG over Sphinx Observatory, Jungfrau, Switzerland; 5. Cubcrafters XCub, Milford Sound, New Zealand; 6. Cessna 208 on a group flight in Iceland; 7. XCub on floats, Nahuel Huapi National Park, Argentina; 8. Beechcraft G36 near Lotte World Tower, Seoul, Korea; 9. Nieuport 17* (WWI) over Duxford Airfield, England; 10. Aermacchi MB-339* somewhere over Ireland

Here's a link to a shared Google Photos album with a few other screenshots from Microsoft Flight Simulator.

My Inner Space Child

Not very deep inside me is a still-space-obsessed Inner Child who thinks space flight is the coolest thing ever. As a kid in the sixties, I was super-excited to follow the Mercury and Gemini and Apollo missions as they happened, and I covered the walls of my bedroom with the space posters NASA would send me by the ton whenever I wrote to ask. Space was real then. Apollo 8 orbited the moon in 1968, and in that same White Album year, 2001: A Space Odyssey convinced me that space ships full of people would be tooling around the solar system before I was even 50 years old. I wanted to go!

Of course it didn’t quite pan out that way. The moon landings ended in 1972 and I never got to be a test pilot and an astronaut which was my plan since I was ten. We did have a cool space shuttle for a while, and astronauts on the International Space Station (ISS) still circle the globe every 90 minutes. We’ve also sent a bunch of amazing robots to tool around the solar system on our behalf. This isn’t as exciting as the 2001 movie, but I like all of that stuff too.

Even though my obsession is usually turned down to a low simmer, every once in a while something will trigger my Inner Space Child and I will get super-excited again. Sometimes it’s a book, often by Kim Stanley Robinson. Sometimes it’s a movie like The Martian in 2015. But most often it’s something Elon Musk says or does. NASA is still doing lots of important work but it seems that SpaceX gets all the glory. That’s probably because of Elon Musk’s hyperactive Inner Child, and because Elon (yes, I call him Elon) has huge ambition, a huge fortune, and a huge ego, so he can say, “wouldn’t be cool if we could build a rocket that’s bigger than a football field that could fly dozens of people to Mars” and the SpaceX engineers will all say “I’m on it.” And they are. That’s the already-in-work “BFR” which stands for “Big Falcon Rocket” (sure it does). I’ve also seen it called BFS for Big Falcon Ship, and if it really happens as planned, it will certainly be the first true space SHIP, huge and fully re-usable. Elon says that “short test flights” will begin in 2019. That probably means 2020 or 2021, but still. They are seriously building a space ship to colonize Mars (it will do lots of other stuff too).

This week I got excited when I learned about a new SpaceX add-on for the Orbiter 2016 space flight simulator. Orbiter is a free space-flight simulator that runs on a PC. It has accurate physics and beautiful graphics and it is a Space Nerd Inner Child’s dream come true. I spent about a year obsessed with it when I first discovered it in 2005. I even wrote a book about it, Go Play In Space, which teaches you how to do just that.  I still fire up Orbiter on my PC every now and then, usually when I hear about some new features or some cool new add-on developed by someone in the Orbiter community.

The new add-on is a model of the SpaceX Crew Dragon spacecraft that is set to start carrying astronauts for NASA in 2019 (an “add-on” is a user-developed set of 3D models and computer code that work within Orbiter to simulate a specific spacecraft). This one was the latest work of “BrianJ,” a talented add-on creator who has also made an add-on of the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket needed to carry the Crew Dragon or other payloads into virtual orbit. In late 2017 another prolific add-on maker (“francisdrake”) created a model of the SpaceX BFR.

To capture the picture above, I created a scenario in Orbiter 2016 with the Crew Dragon docked to the “top” of the BFR in low Mars orbit (BFR's "wings" are actually solar panel arrays that deploy like Japanese fans). For scale, the SpaceX Crew Dragon with its “trunk” is about 27 feet or 8 meters long, taller than a two-story house. So you can see that the BFR is indeed a Big something Rocket. Search for "BFR size comparison" and you will find many illustrations of its incredible size. Also check out this speculative but suggestive cutaway diagram of the interior of the BFR's second stage (the part that will go to Mars). 

But Orbiter add-ons are more than just pictures or even 3D models. They are working models of the spacecraft, so they can be launched, flown to orbit (or to Mars), maneuvered, entered in the atmosphere, and landed. The Falcon 9 first stage and the BFR are “tail sitters” so they land with rockets blazing. I haven’t tried this yet with the BFR, but I have flown BrianJ’s Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy a few times (the built-in autopilot makes this rather easy). If you’d like to see it without bothering to install Orbiter, you can watch a video like this one. It's really amazing to see the first stage boosters turn around and fly themselves back to their landing pads. 

Is it weird to be so obsessed, still space-crazy after all these years? Maybe. But I prefer to think that I’m nurturing a sense of wonder that never quite left me. Or something like that. 

This picture shows BrianJ's SpaceX Crew Dragon orbiting the moon in Orbiter 2016.

Orbiter: 2016 vs. 2010

As I wrote recently in this blog and in an article in The Space Review, Orbiter 2016 was released in September. This is the first major release of this freeware space flight simulator since Orbiter 2010, and as I mentioned, not all of the many third-party addons for the 2010 version are working in Orbiter 2016. If you are familiar with Orbiter, you know that it's quite easy to have multiple installations of the software on the same PC, so there is no need to replace the 2010 version with the 2016 version -- as long as you have the disk space, you can keep multiple copies of both versions installed in separate folders and just run the one that has the features and addons of interest at the moment. In the picture pairs below, the top screenshot is from Orbiter 2010, the bottom one is from Orbiter 2016. 

You should also know that although there are some user interface changes in the 2016 version, they are really quite minor, so even if you are new to Orbiter, you can install and use both the 2010 and 2016 versions quite easily. Some developers have already updated their addons for 2016, and others no doubt will when they have the time and inclination. But Orbiter 2010 is still readily available, so if you are interested in the Apollo program, the advanced Shuttle Fleet, the fictional spacecraft of 2001: A Space Odyssey (sample screenshot at the top of this post) or Colliers Magazine, and many other addons, there's no need to wait for 2016 versions to come along. Note that the final version of Orbiter 2010 is often called 2010-P1 (patch-1) or 100830 (August 30, 2010).

Here are some observations and tips for working with both Orbiter 2010 and the new Orbiter 2016:

1. The biggest user interface difference is that the "no-cockpit" full screen pilot view has a control bar that appears when you hover the mouse near top edge in the 2016 version. In the 2010 version, the F4 key will pop up a small menu bar with same controls (in the 2016 version, F4 will toggle the top edge menu between "on" and "auto-hide"). See "no-cockpit" comparison screenshots above. 

2. The biggest visible difference in the 2016 is in its support for highly detailed surface terrain data complete with elevations, so mountains and craters are true 3D objects. This makes for some incredible eye-candy especially when you are flying low over the terrain, but in most situations in Orbiter, you are orbiting (oddly enough) 200 km or more from the surface, and the flat 2010 terrain textures look just fine. 

3. In addition to the general high-res 3D surface data for all of Earth, the Moon, Mars, and some other bodies, Kennedy Space Center (cockpit view above) and the Edwards AFB/Mojave region (see shuttle final approach screenshot below) have been given super-detailed makeovers in Orbiter 2016. Again, this doesn't matter much if you are in orbit or cruising to the Moon or Mars, but it does add a lot to the realism before you launch or when you are landing at Edwards AFB. 

4. There is a thread on the Orbiter Forum that reports addons that are known to work in Orbiter 2016. There are quite a few and there are probably many others that have not been tested but may work. Orbiter Sound 4.0 works with Orbiter 2016 though there are a few minor glitches such as incorrect audio feedback for some actions (e.g., the G key for "landing gear" in the Deltaglider will deploy the gear but audio will say "radiator deployed"). 

5. Some popular addons that currently seem to work only in Orbiter 2010 include AMSO (Apollo program in great detail), Shuttle Fleet V4.8 (which is freaking amazing), and the excellent "World of 2001" and "World of Colliers" addons by "Sputnik." Note that even for 2010, some addons may only work with Orbiter's "native" graphics (not the D3D9 Orbiter_NG client which offers better graphics quality and frame rate). I'm not sure how to know this for sure, but if you find that your spacecraft are invisible in the D3D9 client, you should try the native graphics version. 

6. One addon I especially like is the videnie module for orbital path drawing by "artlav." It renders orbital paths for spacecraft, planets, and other bodies in exterior views (green, red, and purple lines around Earth in screenshot above from Orbiter 2010). This is super cool and very helpful in understanding orbital paths, but it only works in native graphics mode (not orbiter_ng) with Orbiter 2010.

7. If you have plenty of hard drive space available, a good general tip is to create two separate "clean" installation folders, one for Orbiter 2010-P1 and one for Orbiter 2016, including whatever terrain data you prefer, and perhaps with Orbiter Sound 4.0 installed. Make a copy of the clean installations and install any desired addons there. Note that Orbiter 2016 installations with full terrain data can be very large (I have one installation that is 58 GB). 

8. Orbiter Sound supports mp3 playback with control over when the music plays (e.g., exterior views only). But since modern versions of Windows support multi-source sound multiplexing, I tend to just stream music from Amazon or iTunes while running Orbiter. An album of Strauss waltzes is a particular favorite, especially with the World of 2001 addon.

Note: The screen shots here are from Orbiter 2010 and Orbiter 2016, without modification. You can find them and various others in full screen resolution in this Flickr album. 

Orbiter 2016 Is Here

Orbiter 2016 is the latest version of a space flight simulator I have been playing with on and off since 2005. And while I'm now old enough to be a grandfather, I find that Orbiter still brings out the "space kid" in me. The sixties were a great time to be a space- and aviation-obsessed kid, and I was a NASA fan from Mercury to Gemini to the Apollo moon flights and beyond. Aside from TV coverage, my only space resources back then were books from the library, plastic model kits, LIFE Magazine, and a huge trove of "NASA Facts" and other free publications I would write to Washington to request. Fortunately NASA had a pretty big public relations budget in the sixties and they were happy to send bulging envelopes of space info to a kid in upstate New York.

I never really lost my fascination with space and aviation, as I have often discussed in this blog (though not so much recently). Thanks to personal computers and the internet, there are now more space and aviation resources than ever. I spent a lot of time in the nineties playing with various flight simulators, and I got my real pilot's license in 2001, though I ended up not flying nearly as much as I had hoped, and I am not an active pilot now. Orbiter was a great find in 2005, because it allowed me to combine my interest and experience with flight simulators with my long dormant goal of being an astronaut, albeit only a virtual one. And Orbiter was free (it still is).

Orbiter even inspired me to write a book called Go Play In Space (free Orbiter tutorial ebook), and to volunteer as a NASA/JPL Solar System Ambassador to do some space and astronomy-related educational outreach programs, often using Orbiter in my presentations as a dynamic extension of PowerPoint slides and words. The years 2005 to 2010 were probably my "golden age" for space related study, play, conferences, and educational outreach, but shortly after the release of Orbiter 2010, my company was acquired, and my professional workload greatly increased. Side interests like Orbiter largely fell by the wayside.

Things are still busy at work, but I do again find time to pursue hobbies like music and space, and with the recent release of Orbiter 2016, I'm getting fired up again. The biggest visible change in the 2016 version is built-in support for detailed 3D terrain on planetary surfaces, with gigabytes of data available for the Earth, Moon, Mars, and some smaller bodies. This doesn't matter much visually from a 300 km orbit, but when you are down low, it makes a huge difference, especially for the Moon and Mars. Earth terrain is nice too -- though not as detailed as in Microsoft Flight Simulator, it covers the entire globe (clouds are modeled too). Orbiter is primarily a space flight simulator, and although atmospheric flight is modeled reasonably well, if you are mainly interested in flying airplanes and understanding realistic flight operations, a dedicated flight sim like MSFS or X-Plane is probably a better bet.

Orbiter 2016 includes some other updates, and thanks to user interface improvements and a wide range of community-produced video and other tutorial materials, it is easier to learn and use than earlier versions, though the learning curve is still pretty steep.

I will be writing more about Orbiter 2016 in the coming weeks. In the meantime, here are some possibly helpful links, including a collection of Orbiter 2016 screen shots I have placed on my Flickr site.

My review of Orbiter 2016, Kerbal Space Program, and Space Simulator (iOS app) on The Space Review

Orbiter 2016 Screen Shots on Flickr

Main Orbiter website with free download links

Orbit Hangar: Most Orbiter add-ons are hosted here for free download

Home page for the Orbiter Forum

Download my free ebook Go Play In Space here (PDF, 2006 version, Wiki version here)

David Courtney has a large number of Orbiter tutorial videos here

TexFilms has many Orbiter videos including tutorials here

SevenEves: Bye Bye Moon

When I got super interested in space flight technology and orbital mechanics back in 2005, I played with the Orbiter space flight simulator for a few months and wrote a 181 page tutorial book for it called Go Play In Space. When Neal Stephenson got interested in space technology and orbital mechanics, he researched it for 9 years and wrote 880 pages to create a novel called SevenEves. The only common thread I can claim is that Neal and I both did our homework on the physics of space flight. But Neal did his homework on much more than this, and tied it all together into a fantastic story. Two major stories, actually -- one an extremely detailed, near-future "disaster movie" (the first two thirds of the book), the other an imaginative and ultimately exciting speculation on the lives of the survivors' descendants, 5000 years in the future. How many survivors were there? The book's title gives a clue that's at least partially correct (it's also a palindrome).

I really enjoy most of Neal Stephenson's writing, and when I learned that his next book would be based in space, I pre-ordered it immediately. When it was released last Monday, it jumped the queue of all the books I was reading or planning to read. I saw a couple of early reviews, including a fairly negative one focused on Stephenson's relative lack of character development and other novelish niceties, in favor of nerdish discussions of all technical sorts. To me, this is a feature, not a bug. I loved the wide-ranging and carefully researched details, and I thought the characters were mostly well drawn. The storytelling and pace are good, although I did feel that it bogged down in the first third of part 3 (the 5000 years from now part). In fairness, there's a lot of explaining to do when you introduce a complex future civilization and many new characters, and after all that setup, the last 300 pages are quite thrilling. Good save, Neal!

The book starts with the moon exploding for no apparent reason. It initially breaks into seven major pieces, but a popular public outreach astrophysicist nicknamed "Doob" (clearly modeled on Neil Degrasse Tyson) and his grad students figure out that it will soon break further into trillions of pieces, many of which will reenter Earth's atmosphere, destroying the atmosphere and everything in it. In 25 months (plus or minus 2 months). Scientists in many other countries independently reach the same conclusion.

Two years is not much time to get ready for the end of the world, so most of the 7 billion people and virtually all other living things will die.  And unfortunately, the incoming swarm of debris dubbed "hard rain" is estimated to continue for some 5000 years. So immediate repopulation of Earth's surface will not be possible. People will have to learn to live deep underground or in space, indefinitely -- somehow. The first 600 pages are mainly focused on a gigantic space lifeboat effort, although it's clear that only a relative handful of people (a few thousand at most) can make it to space in that short time, even with all of Earth's resources, industry, and minds focused on this.

Of course this immediately answers the question, what is the International Space Station good for? Why, to serve as the centerpiece of a swarm of hastily constructed and launched habitat spacecraft that will be used to save this small number of humans in hopes of some sort of future. It's fortunate that in this near future world, the ISS has been expanded to include an experimental rotating habitat and a captured asteroid for experimentation with mining using a fleet of small robots. That at least gives the planetless survivors a fighting chance. But to say there are challenges is a vast understatement. There are many close calls and heroic efforts that turn out to be essential -- like a hastily organized mission led by an Elon Musk-like space entrepreneur to retrieve a chunk of a comet.  This huge mass of water is needed for radiation shielding and to make rocket fuel. You can do that (extract hydrogen and oxygen) if you have enough electric power, like a nuclear power plant repurposed from a submarine. Since part 3 takes place 5000 years in the future, you know that somehow humanity makes it, but it is by the very thinnest of margins.

Is this book realistic? You have to just accept the premise that the Moon just blows up for some reason. The "agent" responsible for this is never really explained, but it doesn't really matter. Everything else within parts one and two ("now") is constrained by realistic physics and plausible current or near-future technology. Orbital mechanics is a major constraint and is handled very well. The problems of radiation, microgravity, growing food in space, living in crowded spaces, and many other issues are handled realistically. Space debris is a constant problem, especially once the "hard rain" starts throwing parts of the former moon in all directions. Space construction requires the help of thousands of small robots, but these are not especially smart robots -- plausible extrapolations of things I have read about in MIT Technology Review. All in all, I consider parts 1 and 2 to be some of the best "hard SF" that I've ever read.

Part 3 is more problematic for me, though ultimately enjoyable. The future space construction technology is massive, though still believable by extrapolation of robotic capabilities. But the tight connection between the personalities of the few survivors and the characteristics of the resulting race-driven civilization in 5000 years often did not ring true to me. There are a lot of interesting and plausible ideas, but also a lot that I thought was very silly, seemingly just made up, "because I said so." These are extrapolations of genetic and social engineering over 5000 years. I don't think you can say anything definitive about this based on anything we know, even if you accept genetic manipulation of the human genome as a required and well-understood tool.

Of course it is all just made up by the author. But it is in part 3 that I have to say to myself, "that's why they call it science fiction." It's still more than fantasy or magic, though I wouldn't call it hard SF. But overall, it's a really good book, and most of those 880 pages flew by over the last six days (actually 14,403 Kindle "locations," read mostly on my iPad).

It's a long book, full of interesting ideas and good writing. I learned a lot, as I always do from Stephenson's books. It is ultimately a hopeful book -- humans are resourceful and manage to barely survive, and eventually go on to build a new and very different civilization and to start to repopulate the Earth (with genetically engineered plants and animals, synthesized from a comprehensive DNA database that was saved from "Old Earth," since no actual animals and very few plants were brought to space -- the Old Earth mission planners did manage to preserve much of Earth's knowledge, genetic and otherwise). But as different as their new civilizations are, aggression and racial stereotypes remain -- even though the races are completely new. Even if we were capable of building a future "paradise," even a small handful of people will fail to agree that it is paradise -- some will want something else. Humans are difficult creatures. It will always be so.

The images here are my own screen captures from the Orbiter space flight simulator, loosely inspired by early events in the book. Some of them are from a project I did in 2006 called "Mars for Less," a partial simulation of a human Mars mission using existing launch vehicles and orbital assembly. We used some of the techniques discussed in SevenEves, such tethering two spacecraft together and rotating them to generate artificial gravity. There are better artists' conceptions of some of the objects in the book here. There's a companion website for the book here, including the author's book tour schedule. He's in Cambridge, MA next Friday, so I'm going to hear him speak about the book. I hope to learn a little about how you go from a palindrome and some concerns about space debris to an 880 page book.

Orbiter 2014 (Beta)

While I'm still quite interested in all sorts of "space stuff," it's been a very long time since I did anything with the Orbiter space flight simulator. When I first discovered Orbiter in 2005, I was pretty excited. I was always interested in space, in flight simulators, and in physics, and Orbiter combined all those interests into one very cool piece of (free!) software. As part of the process of teaching myself how to use Orbiter, I wrote a tutorial manual called Go Play In Space, and I did a substantial update for the 2006 version of Orbiter. In late 2010, I started to work on an update for the 2010 version, but I got sidetracked by other interests and priorities, and never finished that project.

Last week I noticed a YouTube video by David Courtney called called "Orbiter 2014 Beta - A Quick Look" (David has recorded a large number of excellent tutorial videos on Orbiter 2010).  Wow, it's alive! Orbiter creator Martin Schweiger has released an early beta of a new version that includes 3D terrain (with high-res data so far for most of Earth as well as Mars and the Moon), along with various improvements in the physics engine and user interface. I read some of the discussions at the Orbiter Forum and decided to at least check it out.

The terrain for the new version must be downloaded and installed separately from the Orbiter beta itself (there are instructions and also a beta installation video by David Courtney). I installed the high-res terrain tiles for the US west coast, since I'm familiar with the Los Angeles area, which has some interesting mountain and valley terrain. I flew the default Deltaglider around for a while, and the general impression is similar to Microsoft Flight Simulator, though it's not quite as detailed.

You might question why 3D terrain is even necessary in a space flight simulator, since most of the time you are too far from any planet's surface for this to make any difference. I guess it comes down to realism, and "because you can." I have spent a lot of time with the wonderful AMSO add-on for Orbiter, simulating Apollo missions in great detail, and it is certainly cool to land in the great lunar terrain that is supplied with that add-on (check out this AMSO Apollo 17 video, complete with real mission audio - skip to 9:00 or so to see the mountainous terrain up close).

I'm happy to see Orbiter development continuing, and I hope to do something with the 2014 version. Updating Go Play In Space is a lot of work (it's a 181 page book), but it really needs a 2010-2014 update, so maybe that will happen, time and energy permitting!

Scribd: Getting Even Cloudier

I've noticed that more and more of my "media experiences" are streaming from the internet. With the help of Apple TV or the wifi connection in our Blu-Ray player, we rent movies from iTunes or Amazon Instant Video. Although I have local mp3 copies of most of my music, I do most of my music listening from two cloud sources, Amazon Cloud or Apple's iCloud. Sometimes for variety or laziness I will stream music from Pandora or iTunes Radio. I even stream pictures of my granddaughter from my daughter's iPhone (Apple's shared photostream).

Now I've started "streaming books." For several years, I've been doing most of my reading with Kindle e-books, buying several a month from Amazon. This is convenient but somewhat wasteful, since I read most books only once, and Kindle books cannot be shared or sold. Books are very small files compared to video or music, and they usually download in seconds. This also means that books could easily be "streamed," i.e., read directly over the web, once someone comes up with a business model to support this.

Now someone has, a company called Scribd ("the world's digital library") that's been around for years as a document sharing site, mainly for free documents (I have long had my Orbiter tutorial book Go Play In Space on Scribd for free PDF download). I haven't really looked at Scribd for a long time, but it's clear that they have been busy, and they have expanded into "non-free" books. Their latest thing is a subscription service which gives you online reading access to many commercial e-books for a flat rate of $8.99 a month. It's currently limited to only a few publishers, and mainly "back catalog" books, with relatively few current best sellers, similar in that respect to Netflix for movies.They currently offer over 100,000 titles, and they are working to add publishers, so I'm sure this number will increase over time.

They have a 30 day free trial, so I'm trying it. I'm pretty sure I will continue, because I have already found at least 10 books that I have previously considered buying on Kindle, as well as a dozen more that are new finds. My idea is that rather than buying 2-4 books a month on Kindle (for maybe $20+ a month), I'll probably read a couple of Scribd books and buy maybe 1-2 Kindle books if they aren't available on Scribd. It doesn't bother me that I won't "own" those books (I'm guessing I don't technically own my Kindle books either, only a license to download and read them whenever I want). I'm OK with the "paid borrowing" model, and Scribd allows you to download up to 10 books onto mobile devices for offline reading. The Scribd app for iOS works really well on iPhone and iPad, similar in most respects to the Kindle app. Since $8.99 is less than the typical cost for a single Kindle book, Scribd will be a good deal even if it only keeps me from buying one Kindle book a month. This makes me wonder how long it will be before Amazon or Google buys Scribd (maybe they will wait a couple of months and see how the subscription service does).

So I like this. Now if I could only eliminate my real book bottleneck - the fact that I can still only read one book at a time, and that there are still only 24 hours in a day. Severely limited mental bandwidth! As soon as they invent a multi-threaded brain, I'm ready to upgrade.

Carnival of Space #316

The 316th Blog Carnival of Space is running now at Next Big Future. I especially liked the one about colonizing Venus with balloon-like floating cities some 50 kilometers above the surface, where the atmospheric pressure is roughly the same as Earth at sea level (though the atmosphere itself is not exactly breather-friendly). This idea was floated some years ago, but it was fun to hear about it again.

The picture here is not exactly a floating city, but it is the only graphic I could quickly locate purporting to show something navigating the clouds of Venus. Simulated clouds of Venus with an Orbiter add-on "space yacht" based on the cover art for a 1970's album by Yes called Yessongs. Google any of that that doesn't make sense to you.

P.S. There are many strange and marvelous add-ons available for the Orbiter space flight simulator. I have pictures of many of them on my Flickr site.

Kerbal Space Program?!?

I read something about KSP (Kerbal Space Program) a couple of years ago but I didn't do anything about it. Then the other day I saw this comic on xkcd, referencing KSP. If you hover your mouse over the comic, the comment says "Ahem. We are STRICTLY an Orbiter shop." Me too! But I was curious about what had happened to KSP since it was last (vaguely) on my radar.

Quite a bit, it turns out. It's still in an extended alpha development phase, but it's already got some interesting capabilities for people who like to "play in space" (something I once wrote a book about). After looking at a few web sites and videos, I decided to download and try KSP for myself (current version is 0.21.1, and it costs $23, including future updates). So what is KSP? From the web site:

KSP is a game where the players create and manage their own space program. Build spacecraft, fly them, and try to help the Kerbals to fulfill their ultimate mission of conquering space.

Essentially it's a space flight simulator with reasonably accurate physics, wrapped in a game-like interface with pretty decent graphics and some quirky alien-like astronaut characters (KSP's developers also seem to have a quirky sense of humor). It is just now starting to emerge from its "sandbox" phase (with the ability to build and fly your own spacecraft, but without any specific game-like goals). At this point, it's something like 3D simulated model rocketry, but with the ability to launch the rockets you design into space (orbital mechanics is involved, but the math is hidden behind clever controls and displays). You can dock with space stations, travel to and land on other planets, and try to navigate your spacecraft back to Kerbin for a safe landing.

Yes, Kerbin, not Earth. This fictional solar system has real physics (orbital mechanics and atmospheric flight) but it doesn't use the names and specific physical properties of our own solar system. Kerbin is an Earth-like "exoplanet" with two moons (Mun and Minmus - you can fly to and land on them).

So far I've only scratched the surface of KSP, and I don't know how much time I will spend with it. It depends in part on whether I start to do some space-related educational outreach again. I haven't done any for quite a while. When I have done school presentations, I have generally used Orbiter to dynamically demonstrate certain aspects of space flight and the solar system. That's cool for demos, and it beats simply using PowerPoint, but Orbiter's learning curve is quite steep, and it's hard for me to recommend to any students younger than maybe 11 or 12. KSP is definitely more kid-friendly. The rocket building section (see picture at top of this post) is simple yet powerful (though there is no guarantee that what you build will fly well or at all - the physics is pretty realistic, so you have to worry about mass, thrust, stability, etc.). As the Minecraft craze shows, kids (and adults) love to build stuff inside virtual worlds (and real ones). While building your own spacecraft for Orbiter is certainly possible, it's a separate "add on" development process, not integrated with the simulation itself.

KSP also integrates the instruments and controls needed to change orbits directly within the 3D views (spacecraft and map), making it easier and less abstract to see the effects of firing your rockets at certain times, locations, and directions. The screenshot above is from the integrated Orbiting 101 tutorial, and it shows the "maneuver node system" being used to predict the effect of a pro-grade burn at the low point of the orbit (periapsis). Dragging the pro-grade symbol changes the delta-V (speed change) value, and the dotted orbital path shows the predicted effect in real time (your path doesn't actually change unless you make that proposed burn at the proper time and with the correct ship orientation). Orbiter has similar capabilities (and much more) with its various "MFD" instruments, but these work like display screens in the cockpit, not directly in the 3D view. More realistic but also harder to visualize and understand.

KSP allows you to build and fly some pretty cool and complex space vehicles such as multi-stage rockets with strap-on boosters, and even Apollo LM-like landers such as the one shown above (docked with an Apollo-like command module housing three Kerbals who are about to land on the Mun - this is a supplied sample scenario). Although it's easy to build monster rockets with many engines, you do need to pay attention to structural integrity, symmetry, and stability or your giant booster may tumble out of control, crash, and burn. Unlike in Orbiter, things can and do blow up in KSP, though at the moment the hardy Kerbal astronauts are immune to G-forces, allowing you to perform high-G atmospheric entries and the like with impunity (this will undoubtedly change in future versions).

Future versions will also include a flight sim-like "career mode" with awards for completing certain missions or milestones like docking or landing on the Mun). I suppose that training options will also expand, although there is already some basic training in the game, and a variety of user-created tutorial videos and PDF's available on the web. Note that since changes between versions can be pretty extreme, there is no guarantee of backwards compatibility for previously built things when you upgrade.

I think KSP is already a great educational tool, because it is sufficiently "toy like" to be fun and non-threatening (think building robots with Lego MindStorms, but much cheaper), but powerful enough to allow really interesting and challenging activities. I really like the emphasis on what is essentially engineering - designing, building, testing, and thinking about why things work or don't work so the next iteration can be better. And remember, to engineer is human (and sometimes fun too).

iPad Astronomy

I love my iPad Mini. It follows me everywhere and is the most wonderful little tool for reading books and magazines, creating music, studying Japanese, and exploring the Universe, to name only a few frequent uses I have for it. I have around 13 astronomy and space related apps on my iPad right now, including my favorite "game," F-Sim Space Shuttle (I probably have bought a dozen more astronomy/space apps not currently installed - 32 gigabytes is not as big as it sounds). Back in April, I wrote about one of my favorite apps, Exoplanet. Recently I've found a few other astronomy apps that are really awesome. Here's some info on two of them.

Luminos is currently my favorite general astronomy or "planetarium" app. It is beautiful and packed with features, more than I have really managed to learn so far, although I can't say the interface is poor - it's just that there's a lot of stuff to see and do. It is comparable to Stellarium, the (free) planetarium program I have used the most on Windows, but of course more portable and with a touch-based UI. I like that in addition to the usual planets, stars, and deep-space objects, it also includes small bodies (comets and asteroids) and satellites. Everything is easily configurable for how much information to collect, update, and display.

Cosmographia is one of two really beautiful astronomy apps from Fifth Star Labs LLC (the other one is Sky Guide, which is based on real astrophotography and has the interesting feature of assigning musical tones to different types of sky objects when you touch them). Cosmographia is focused on the solar system, and it reminds me in some ways of my favorite (free) space flight simulator for Windows, Orbiter, though it doesn't include the user-controlled space flight aspects of Orbiter. It is wonderful for tooling around the solar system, exploring the planets and their moons, as well as various minor objects and spacecraft including including Cassini (Saturn), ISS (Earth), Galileo (Jupiter), the two Voyagers (now leaving the solar system), and several others. Each of these typically includes one or more "highlights" which are scripts you can select to run a simulation of an event such as a close fly-by of Enceladus by Cassini (select the spacecraft, then the circled i for info, then scroll down to the mission highlight links at the bottom).

This is the part that most reminds me of a replay in Orbiter (though in Orbiter you have the ability to define or change spacecraft encounters by flying the spacecraft yourself, assuming you have learned the operations and orbital mechanics needed to do this, as explained in my free e-book Go Play In Space). The planetary and spacecraft graphics are beautiful, and there is also extensive information on each of the objects. You have full control over time, so you can also use this app to see the positions of the planets at any given time and date, as well as control time acceleration to speed things up and observe the motions. The app is very configurable. You can see and control orbit trails, stars, asteroids, labels, etc. You can even watch Curiosity (MSL) approach Mars and enter its atmosphere - in theory anyway. If you choose one of these highlights, it works for a while, but when it gets close to Mars - poof! MSL just disappears, showing up as a labeled dot on the surface that you can't zoom into.  Aside from that small defect, this app looks and works great, and I highly recommend it to fans of the solar system and space exploration.