The space race is heating up.
It really is, you know. Oh, not the race to the moon conducted by those two behemoths, the US and the USSR, back in the 1960s (although that one did catch my imagination at the time). This one is different.
This one, these days, features not only other nations, although others there certainly are: India's Chandrayaan-1 made it to the moon last year, and in fact the suspicion of ice and water is due to the Indian landing.
Bill Whittle will tell you all about private industry attempts at reaching space, at PJTV and so will Dale Annon at Samizdata. Start here and here.
But that's not all. It's not just private rockets that are now headed to space, but private balloons. Yes, balloons.
Last spring, a small team of Spanish teenagers (and an adult supervisor), sent a balloon up to the stratosphere (approximately 20 miles up) and took pictures and atmospheric readings while aloft. All for about 56 British pounds.
In 2007, Alexei Karpenko performed a similar stunt, launching a balloon from Ontario to an altitude of over 30 kilometers. He offers photos, videos, and data at this site. Alexei verifies, he says, "that the earth is round and that space is black." Thanks, Alexei!
And then there's MIT.
Two MIT students, Justin Lee and Oliver Yeh, recently popped a balloon up to approximately 18 miles above the surface of Massachusetts on September 2 of this year. Took pictures, too, and they intend to post detailed instructions of how they did it. And their budget? $148 US.
Wow. Think on this: 56 British pounds? A hundred and forty-eight bucks US? This is a model rocketry/ham radio/buid your own Linux computer/beer brewing budget, for crying out loud.
Again, wow: this is enough to make you want to check out MITOpenCourseWare. And see Gary North's comments on that effort here.
It's enough to make you want to go back and reread, and rewatch, Cosmos. Twice, even. I highly recommend doing both.
(Look, especially, for Sagan's description of how Eratosthenes successfully measured the size of the earth, and for the proof of why there are only five Pythagorean solids.)
And why do I wait to report all of this? Laziness, and other priorities, yes -- but also because on this day in 1942, according to Wikipedia, a V2/A4 rocket (and don't ask me what the A4 variant was) was launched by the Germans and is said to have been the first man-made object to reach space, at least briefly.