Flying and Other Vehicles

In sailing, flying, climbing and Arctic 'man-hauling' expeditions worldwide I've been lucky to build, board and use all kinds of craft. In the diagram below (made last year) I compare my balloon, an RX-7, to some other interesting craft. Back to flying after Christmas with the family! A lot of flights scheduled for 2017!

And a great photo showing balloon shadow during landing back in September! Landings are so interesting in part because our descent and horizontal rates, below 1,000 feet, are much like those of an Apollo lunar lander!

My Talk at the Tennessee Valley Interstellar Workshop

Early this year I was thrilled to receive an invitation from NASA's Dr. Les Johnson, of the Marshall Space Flight Center, to do a presentation on human biological and cultural adaptation to environments beyond Earth at the Tennessee Valley Interstellar Workshop. Les's expertise is in 'exotic propulsion systems', some of them entirely theoretical and aimed at allowing humanity to explore beyond our solar system. This is far-out stuff! But we must begin somewhere. I've arranged for Les to be here in Portland to talk for the Rose City Astronomers and at PSU's Aerospace Society in Spring 2017. Here's my 25-min talk and some Q and A at the end. All of this material is being worked into my upper-undergraduate / graduate-level text "Principles of Space Anthropology: Establishing a Science of Human Space Settlement" (Springer 2018).

Chilly Times

A snow and ice basting of downtown Portland has closed everything down. Walking the streets, when I inhale the icy air and smell the ice, and hear the crunches underfoot, I'm transported back to many snowy places. Today I thought about my first expedition to Arctic Alaska in 2007. What a place! I had a -70F windchill one day, the wind found a gap in my neoprene facemask and slashed at my skin like a knife!

New Research Brief!

A new Research Brief is out, I've posted this sixth Pacific Spaceflight report since 2014 at academia.edu. This brief statistically describes (but does not analyze for causes of variance, correlations or other interesting properties of the data) some of our biomedical data; particularly C02 levels inside the pressure garments we've been building, testing and--since 2014--flying.

Speaking of flying, lots slated for the next 44 days as I complete training (in Oregon and California) and earn my wings at long last!