Space Cynic is hosting this week’s Carnival of Space. Brought to you by… Rod Serling?

Speaking of NASA, while looking to see if there was any news about Weiler being the new science chief on the NASA site (no, there isn’t as I write this), I saw this at the top of their page:

Not to put too fine a point on this, but are you kidding me? They’re comparing where NASA is now to the where we were projected to be in the movie "2001: A Space Odyssey"?

NASA folks, let’s be honest here: this does not cast NASA in a good light. Even the image itself is damning: in the movie, that space station was a rotating dock carrying dozens if not hundreds of personnel, and was used as a way station to the Moon, where there was a thriving and expanding lunar base. And that was all supposed to take place seven years ago.

NASA has a space station which is doing precious little if no science at all. It takes three people working full time to keep it operating. Yes, in many ways it’s a magnificent achievement, don’t get me wrong. But don’t show me a Volvo and tell me it’s a Lamborghini^*, especially when you charge me $150 billion for it.

In my opinion, the article linked from the picture does the exact opposite of what it aims to do. If you’re going to compare the predictions of a 40 year old movie — which showed an incredibly ambitious yet believable future — to today’s achievements in space, you need to do better than talk about glass cockpits and flat-screen monitors on the space station. They even say that exercise is routine on the station, and compare that to movie astronaut Frank Poole seen jogging around the rotating wheel of the interplanetary space ship Discovery. C’mon.

To me, this drives home the reality of where we are in the manned exploration of space. We have an aging Shuttle fleet which has 11 flights left before retirement, and no working rocket to replace it. We’ll have to rely on Russian spacecraft for years to ferry astronauts and equipment to space and back. The space station has taught us quite a bit about working and living in space, but we would have learned just as much — if not more — if we had built a space station that actually did something. And it’s unclear to me that we’ll be sending humans back to the Moon because of the political reality of funding long-term goals when we get new politicians elected on shorter cycles.

Which brings up a point I want to make clear. I’m a supporter of manned space flight, and you won’t find a bigger advocate for what NASA’s robots and space probes have done. And I also understand that NASA is beholden to a variety of forces, putting it at the mercy of whims and breezes from all directions. This is a very complex and delicate situation, with 535 Congresscritters all trying to get their say (with many, perhaps most, having no clue on the importance of space exploration), the White House’s desires on top of that, and a public very unclear on why NASA exists at all (and laboring under gross misunderstandings even then). The Administration at NASA has done an amazing job in most cases getting anything done at all under those circumstances.

But trying to compare where we are now to where visionary movies like "2001" were hoping we would be simply hammers home the cold hard fact that we’ve spent the past 45 years since Apollo circling the Earth. There are no Moon bases, no regular Shuttle flights to orbit, no rotating space habitats.

It’s politics, I know that. But politics is about choices, and we’ve chosen poorly. We need politicians who will choose wisely, who can see past their own term, past their own partisan desires, past the limits of gravity and atmosphere and current technology, and willing to do what we need to do, what we must do: go into space, do it the right way, the sustainable way, and explore it.

Our future is out there, just as our past predicted. We’ve stepped away from the right path, but that path is still there. We simply have to choose to step back on it.

Note added May 10, 2008: My friend and fellow astronomer and astronomy writer Chris Lintott has weighed in on this issue as well.

Last year I wrote about how some Apollo footage had been remastered in high definition. Now we’ve got even more: Discovery Channel has remastered more than 100 hours of footage from the early space age into high definition!

But what’s cooler than that is that this footage has been given to NASA and will be available for free from their archives!

Suhwheet.

It’ll come out in June in conjunction with a series on Discovery called "When We Left Earth: The NASA Missions", a show I will no doubt be watching. The link above to MSNBC has a few minutes of the footage, though currently it’s not streamed in HD. Still, it’s purty.

This is very exciting. I remember very little of the early space age, except for the Apollo missions (I was 6 when I went to Florida with my family to see Apollo 15 launch), so this will be a fantastic way to live through it all.

Tip o’ the visor to Yishai Mendelsohn for sending me the link.

NASA historian and gadfly James Oberg wrote up a very detailed and very interesting report on the near-disastrous re-entry of a Soyuz carrying three astronauts back from the space station. This is really an epic tale; it looks like there was a system malfunction that would normally have doomed the crew. However, a similar problem occurred decades ago, and apparently Soviet engineers redesigned the re-entry vehicle to account for it should it happen again. The redesign worked quite well, and saved the lives of the crew.

I highly recommend reading this, even if you hadn’t read the original reports. I’m still very unhappy about how this played our politically, but I’m very glad that sensible engineers, whoever they may have been, were in the loop all those years ago.

OK, first: it’s the oneth anniversary of the Carnival of Space! It’s being hosted by the founder, Henry Cate, at Why Homeschool.

OK, second: I get email about Google Sky, and I’ve been remiss for not talking about it. But going through it is a major undertaking, and, well, I’ve got stuff to do. I really really want to sit down and spend like twenty hours just playing with it, but these blog feeds aren’t gonna read themselves! Happily, Orbiting Frog has some very cool stuff on GS, including mapping orbiting satellites. Whoa. I see several I’ve worked on! Swift, COBE, Hubble… wow. Very cool.

OK, third: remember when I ranted about NPR and the Science Channel putting up ads for that Expelled garbage? The blog NPRCheck has a lot more about this, and I have a hard time disagreeing with what’s said there. NPR really opened up a can-o-dumb with this one.

While I was in England, the good folks at nature.com let me glom on to their pub party, which turned into a Nature/Randi/BA/Brian Cox fan/meetup thingy. It was quite the good time.

In return, all I had to do was write up a soapbox speech and record it for their podcast! What a scam. Suckers.

As it is, they interviewed Randi on it, as well as Alan Marscher, another astronomer who talks about active galaxies! So it’s a skeptical and astronomical smorgasbord.

You can download the podcast directly, read the transcript, or check out their archives for tons more cool podcasts.

If you’re curious, the woman who does the voiceover ad at the very beginning is none other than Gia.

The Milky Way Galaxy is relatively typical of galaxies today, if a bit on the beefy side. It has about 200 billion stars, and is 100,000 light years across.

Now imagine a galaxy with that same mass, but only 5000 light years across. That would be an incredibly densely packed galaxy, and in all honesty, pretty freaky.

But that’s exactly what astronomers using Hubble and Keck have found! Probing the early Universe, 11 billion light years away, they found nine galaxies that are as massive as galaxies today, but far more compact. The galaxies are very young, only a half to one billion years old, judging from the types of stars they contain. Not only that, they appear to be quiet: unlike our galaxy today, these distant compact galaxies are not actively forming stars. It’s as if they formed all their stars all at once right from the start, and then that was that.

This plot shows that these galaxies really are small and massive. Size is shown on the vertical scale (bigger galaxies are near the top) and mass along the horizontal (more massive galaxies to the right). A big massive galaxy would be to the upper right, and a low mass, dinky galaxy to the lower left. These oddballs are marked, and are clearly separate from other galaxies: they are massive, yet small.

That’s really weird! What could cause such galaxies to form so tightly jammed with stars? One idea is that in the early Universe there were pockets of dark matter, places where it was somewhat denser than on average. Hydrogen would have collected there, attracted by the fierce gravity, and formed the galaxies. Constrained by the dark matter pockets, the galaxies would have been very dense and formed stars furiously for a short period until all the hydrogen was used up. That would explain their small stature, dense stellar population, and lack of ongoing star formation. But it’s just a hypothesis for now.

What’s also odd is that we do not see any galaxies like these today; any galaxy of comparable mass that we see in the current Universe today is far larger, like our Milky Way. So these galaxies existed in the past — possibly in large numbers — but we don’t see them now. Where did they go?

They may get bigger with time. It’s not clear how they would do that, but perhaps the more massive stars fall to the center, flinging lighter stars outward, puffing up the galaxies over time (I describe this process a bit in a post yesterday about globular clusters). Maybe they collide and puff up — though that means they would get even more massive than we see them, and they’re already as hefty as galaxies today. Maybe they grow dark over time, and we just don’t see them any more.

Actually, I don’t like any of these answers very much. We obviously need a lot more observations of these tiny dense suckers. However, we’re pretty much at the limit now; it took Hubble’s and Keck’s incredible resolution to be able to see these things at all. We’ll have to wait for the Hubble servicing mission in September to get even deeper images, when the new Wide Field Camera goes online. I suspect that STIS, the spectrograph that I used to work on, may be able to help as well, if the astronauts can fix it too.

Either way, it’s cool to know the Universe can still throw us the odd curveball or two. The more we look, the more weirdness we find.