Sally Ride, Pioneering Astronaut, Dies at 61

"More than anything else, our venturing into space has taught us to appreciate Earth — it’s revolutionized our view of our planet and our understanding of its complexity, and made us see the impact that we’re having on it."

That was Sally Ride, reflecting on the famous Earthrise photo and what it meant to her. Sally Ride was like that herself, in the way that she taught us to look at ourselves. 

The first American woman in space, Ride was a media darling when she blasted into space in 1983 aboard Challenger, itself now gone except in the annals of space exploration history. 

One longtime observer went so far as to say that Ride was "to the shuttle era what Neil Armstrong is to Apollo."

She was a top-rate scientist (with her specialties including laser physics), and her expertise with the robotic arm was in part why she was chosen to fly on that 1983 mission. She operated the arm in a satellite retrieval mission.

At 32, she was the youngest American in space. When she and the rest of the Challenger crew took off on June 18, 1983, she was just five years removed from answering a newspaper ad for astronauts. She rose through the ranks to become one of the industry's most-respected and pioneering figures.

She flew again in 1984 and then retired after Challenger exploded. Ride was on the panel that investigated the Challenger disaster and, indeed, was the only person to be on both disaster panels, taking part in the Columbia investigation as well.

Many photos of her aboard the two spaceflights show her smiling. Ride had a sense of humor as well. She good-naturedly answered the loads of silly questions forced on her by journalists who couldn't wait to find out what color shoes she would be wearing in space. A keen athlete, she considered a career in tennis before deciding to focus more on physics (and English – she also claimed an English degree with a specialty in Shakespeare). No less a champion than Billie Jean King urged Ride to go pro, but she chose science instead and, when asked years later why she made the choice, said, "A bad forehand."

She accepted her role in life, as a role model for other young girls, and continued to promote science education, especially for girls, throughout the rest of her life. 

In her post-NASA days, Ride was a science fellow, a physics professor, a director of the California Space Institute, and the founder of a company. This last was Sally Ride Science, which provides science-oriented programs and materials to schools.

And yet the one thing that she wanted to do above all else, and the reason that she doggedly pursued a career as an astronaut, was fly. Trained as a pilot, she dreamed of going into space. She got her wish, twice.

Not even 30 years after her historic flight, Sally Ride is dead, the victim of pancreatic cancer. She will be missed but remembered, for her spirit, her smile, and her part in making history.

Monitor Your Home Through the Cloud

A big home improvement company will soon offer computerized home security systems via the Cloud. It's the latest innovation in technology for your smartphone or tablet or (Remember these?) computer.

The system is apparently called Iris (Isn't that Siri backwards?), but it doesn't require you to scan your eye or anything as a password. That's too bad, actually, because that could be a clever ad slogan if somebody could find a way to tie it in with idea of keeping an eye on your home.

At any rate, you soon could be able to monitor and change settings on your home alarm system, your home thermostat, and even your home lights (inside and out). It all works via a cloud-based system that you control through cloud access. Nominally, it's an opportunity to get a smartphone alert if something activates your home alarm system. But it also should allow you to switch the lights on from the garage or turn on the heater while you're on the way (if you've forgotten to set the timer). Presumably, you could also turn off lights that you've left on. This kind of thing could also come in handy if you had access to individual electrical outlets — so you could turn off the iron that you happened to leave on when you rushed out of the house.

But I'm also thinking that this could be an opportunity to have a bit of fun with your housemates or your family or your kids or your pets or whoever else lives in the house with you. If you can access all of these systems from the cloud, then all you need is a Cloud connection. So conceivably, you could be sitting in the home office, door closed, fire up the home computer, and dim the lights in the room where the kids are playing — things like that. Surely that's only the beginning of all kinds of fun. The downside of that, of course, is that you don't want to repeat the experience of the Boy Who Cried Wolf.

Seriously, though, this is a good step forward in our ability to monitor home security and use technology to improve our lives.

Pluto Still a Planet, as This New Moon Proves

If Pluto isn't a planet, then why does it have so many moons?


The Hubble Space Telescope has provided evidence of yet another satellite orbiting the erstwhile Ninth Planet in our Solar System. This one is unimaginatively titled P5, presumably an abbreviation for Pluto's 5th Satellite. It follows by a year the discovery of another moon, P4, also discovered by Hubble.


Pluto was discovered by Clyde Tombaugh way back in 1930. Its largest moon, Charon, was discovered in 1978. For many years, the one planet-one moon tradition was accepted worldwide. But some dastardly elements of the astronomical community got together, got enough funding and influence, and got Pluto downsized.


Pluto, you'll remember, was demoted to dwarf planet status in 2006, to the hue and cry of science teachers bemoaning the impending purchase of new eight-planet Solar System models for their classrooms. Oddly, in the same year, Hubble found two other moons orbiting Pluto. These were given the names Nix and Hydra. 


Now that Hubble has found even more satellites, surely the promotion of Pluto can't be far behind. These should be big times for the Little Planet That Used to Be. A NASA spacecraft will finally reach flyby status in 2015. That's just three short years away. Surely in that year, we will discover enough evidence to prove that Pluto is indeed a planet. Just because it's smaller than other objects orbiting the Sun doesn't mean it isn't still a planet. The Pluto nay-sayers would be hard-pressed to come up a comet or some other form of heavenly body that has so many things orbiting it. 


Pluto the Planet in 2015!

Cooperstown's 'Mona Lisa' Found in Ohio Attic

Talk about not knowing what you have.

In a dusty cardboard box stored under a wooden dollhouse for decades was a treasure trove of extremely rare and valuable baseball cards, so much so that estimates are that the collection in total could bring $3 million at auction.

The cards now belong to a Ohio guy who knows a bit about baseball, but it was his grandfather who collected about 700 cards and kept them all in pristine condition. And pristine they are, part of the E98 series, one of the more famous of the card series in baseball's less recent past, with half of the 30 players appearing on plaques on walls in the Baseball Hall of Fame. Unlike other, more dog-eared members of this series, these are mint. Among the shining lights in this newly discovered Ohio collection are cards representing Christy Mathewson, Connie Mack, Cy Young, Ty Cobb, and Honus Wagner.

One enthusiast compared it to finding the Mona Lisa in your attic.

The cards originally belonged to a man who died in the 1940s. When the man's wife died, one of their daughters continued to live in the house. When she died last year, she left everything to her 20 nieces and nephews, the youngest of which was put in charge of the estate. It was during a recent clean-out that the guy found the gems.

Once the guy and the family figured out that they had something valuable on their hands, they sent some of the cards off to a professional authentication company, which rated the cards very highly indeed. On a scale of 1 to 10, the company rated the Ty Cobb card a 9 — and there were 16 in the collection. And, for the first time ever, the company gave out a 10, a rating of perfect condition, to a Honus Wagner card. Wagner, of course, is the Holy Grail of baseball players, having used his considerable influence to get his cards pulled from the market. The biggest price ever paid for a baseball card was for a Honus Wagner: $2.8 million, in 2007. Honus was also a hit for some nuns, who gained the system for more than $200,000 in 2010.

As for the owners, they are dividing everything among equally, with all but a few vowing to sell the cards and take the money.

Telescope to Give Early Warning on Deadly Asteroids

It's not exactly space sharks with laser beams, but it could be the first step.

A nonprofit foundation formed a decade ago has announced its intention to build a telescope to detect Earth-targeted asteroids. The head of the foundation is Rusty Schweickart, who should know a thing or two about things outside Earth's orbit. The Apollo 9 astronaut is chairman emeritus of the foundation, which aims to raise in the hundreds of millions of dollars in order to fund the telescope project, to be titled Sentinel. The chairman and CEO of B612 is former shuttle astronaut Ed Lu, who septa long periods of time abroad the International Space Station.

After the success of SpaceX, private groups might find it a bit easier to raise money and find success in space. B612 is pointedly not asking for NASA for help, although it the foundation says it will work with a face familiar to NASA: Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corp., which worked on teams that produced both the Kepler and the Spitzer telescopes.

The telescope would be an infrared one and would orbit the Sun, on a trajectory similar to the planet Venus. Launch date is planned to be in 2017, and the minimum lifespan for the telescope is between five and six years. During that time, scientists hope to identify hundreds of thousands of uncharted asteroids, the idea being that we will have a long time to mobilize Bruce Willis or whoever needs to be involved to deal with any potential threat.

The B612 Foundation takes its name from the Earth name for the home of The Little Prince. In the novel by Antoine de Saint Exupery, the Prince says he comes from Asteroid 325 but that Earth people call it B-612.