I decided at the end of March that I wanted to try running. I had been walking several miles a day after lunch, at least a few days a week, and I knew that pretty soon I was going to need to move to more effective exercise. I started with the Running Mate 5K 101 podcast series, and moved through that steadily until I came down with strep in mid-April. That knocked me out for 2 weeks, after which I backed up my running just a little bit and took the next week to get back to where I was. Last week was just solidifying that, which was a 5 minute warmup walk, followed by 2 repetitions of 12 minutes running and 3 minutes walking, and then a 5 minute cooldown walk. Not too bad for someone who couldn’t run for a minute straight prior to March. I figured this is how I would run Carter’s Run 5K yesterday as well, which should give me a finish time somewhere between 35 and 40 minutes.

I got to the race nice and early and met up with my friend Loudoun Dirty and the rest of the NOVA Roller Derby crew that were there sponsoring the event. This 5K is a smaller run (there were only 202 running finishers), which was really nice for my first. Everyone was just hanging around, talking to the sponsors who were setting up, and getting ready to go. Eventually, Garrett got there as well and it was time to start getting ready. Stretches, the national anthem, and then we were off!

I quickly got a little personal space around me and started to get myself into a groove. I had to keep checking my Garmin to get my cadence and pace in line with what I knew they needed to be for me to last the whole run, but once I was about 6 or 7 minutes into the race I felt like I had it down. My plan was to keep running until I felt like I was at my limit, and then shift to walking for 3 minutes. I figured that would be around 15 minutes based on my comfort with the 12 minute intervals, but something unexpected happened.

I hit the one mile mark and felt pretty good. Then I got to the water stop about halfway in and I still felt good. I walked for about 10 or 15 seconds to drink, and got right back into it. I hit the 2 mile mark and it seemed like I had underestimated what I was able to handle as far as running goes. I was pleasantly surprised that my heart rate was steady (if at the high end of my range – I was able to continue at that rate) and while my breathing was heavy from exertion, it wasn’t hurting me and it wasn’t getting worse. I rounded the corner onto the street that the start/finish line was on, at about the 2.75 mile point and I realized that I was actually going to run the entire race!

Just before I got to the final curve before the finish line, my heart rate hit a point where I knew I was at my max. I also knew I was going to push as soon as I saw the finish line, and I didn’t want to fall across it. I slowed to a walk for another 15 or 20 seconds, let my heart rate drop about 10 bpm, and picked up the run again. The finish line came into sight, I poured on what little speed I had left, and crossed it with a chip time of 31:30. Talk about a high! I knew that I had come in with a time that far exceeded my expectations, and I ran the entire race, which I never would have thought possible!

Now, my Garmin says that I ran 3.3 miles at a 9:37 pace. That’s probably a combination of the GPS being off a little, and me taking corners wide. Either way, I know there’s room for improvement already. I’m already registered for the Ashburn Twilight Four Miler in 3 weeks. I’m also probably going to sign up for the Run With Dad 5K the week after that. I expect to have a lot of fun with those.

One thing I can say, though, is that I’ve completed the 5K 101 training program. So I’m moving on to a 10K training schedule. I’ve registered for the Run for Independence 8K at the end of June, as well as the Leesburg 10K in mid-August. And the ultimate goal is to run the Disney Princess Half Marathon at the end of February. From there, we’ll just have to see how it goes!

Hopefully, I’ll add more posts soon about the running, as well as my fitness work in general. Of course, as you can see from previous posts it can be few and far between when I get busy.

When Bella moved from daycare to kindergarten last year, I truly believed that we could make the public school system work for her. My parents did it for me, advocating with the school district to find me the additional challenges that I needed and always making sure that I was in the right place and was not bored. We started with asking the school to evaluate her for first grade, and we should have known something was wrong right then. At first the kindergarten teacher, not a new recruit to the school system, said that wasn’t something they did and the principal was confused when we asked her about it before school started. The school system’s policy on this is very clear, that we have to make the request and they will perform an evaluation and the decision has to be made in the first 30 days of school. When we sat down with them to review the evaluation, the teacher was obviously put out that she had to do this work. Her speech was rushed, she didn’t want to be in the meeting, and while she had a few complimentary things to say about Bella, the bulk of what she had to say was how unready Bella was socially and because she couldn’t follow directions or do everything a kindergartener needed to do at the end of the school year.

Even speaking as someone with an obvious bias, I can say that Isabella has always been bright and creative. We’ve tried to encourage that as much as possible, such as finding science enrichment classes for her or getting her tools like a Leapster Tag so that she could learn to read on her own. Now she loves her chapter books and would spend all night reading if we let her. She always has a half a dozen little art projects going on. She asks questions constantly so she can understand what is going on around her. It’s sometimes hard to remember that she’s only six years old. But she’s also very stubborn. She’ll put her foot down and refuse to do things, especially if she doesn’t fully understand why it’s needed. She also loves to test her limits with everyone.

Even though I know with absolute certainty that if Bella was put in first grade she would have adapted to the environment within a month, I didn’t press the matter with the school. It was obvious they did not want to move her, and I did not want to create an adversarial relationship with them from the very start. We decided to take a “wait and see” approach and continue to help Bella with the few missing skills at home. From a selfish point of view she was now staying in a half-day kindergarten, heading off on the bus at 11 AM and returning at 3 PM, with nothing to eat at school but a milk break (where the kids get to pick chocolate milk). Marcy tried to get some lunch into her before she left, but still we would hear about “problems” that tended to be at the end of the day. What do you expect when the kids haven’t had anything to eat for almost 4 hours except a little sugar?

I have no illusions that Bella is a perfect child. Early in the year, in September, she had a problem where she took an item that wasn’t hers from school. We had a lot of things to say to her about this, and it seemed to mostly solve the problem. A couple weeks ago, there was another incident where she took a couple things belonging to other students, but it was only witnessed by another kid (not a teacher), and from all accounts it was a case where they were “found” items (on the carpet without the owner near them) and Bella was trying to do the right thing and return them or figure out whose they were. And then earlier this week, on Tuesday, she took a roll of stickers from near the teacher’s desk and handed them out to her friends in class. None of these things were the right thing to do, and all of them got her in a lot of trouble at home. But I believe the most recent incident was motivated by a bit of a “Mean Girls” incident in the neighborhood last week, and the one just before that she actually had good intentions, she just wasn’t sure of exactly what to do.

Marcy was at the school for something unrelated on Tuesday after school, and was cornered in the hall by Bella’s teacher. The teacher told her about the incident with the stickers, reminded Marcy that it was the third time and therefore a pattern, and proceeded to tell her how Bella would be in in-school suspension the following day. Marcy let her know that we were both available to talk with them at any point, as our schedules are flexible, but the teacher said it would be one to two weeks before they had all the paperwork done (because you know this goes on her permanent record) and could discuss a behavior plan with us. Marcy was floored, and relayed all of this to me. I read Bella the riot act after her karate class and started another round of lost privileges with her. I then made plans to go talk to the principal the following morning. Regardless of how wrong Bella might have been, there was no way I agreed with suspension as a solution to it, in school or not.

I ended up talking to the assistant principal the next day (who, as most parents know, is typically tasked with discipline in most schools), and here’s where it gets really interesting. She explained to me that all she was going to do was have Bella in her office when school started for about an hour to do her work and have a talk. While some might call it in-school suspension, she didn’t see it that way and there was no paperwork or record. Just a chance to give a little shock to the child and reinforce that the behavior was not acceptable (and this I have absolutely no problem with). She also said that she didn’t know anything about two weeks to create paperwork, and that if I wanted to talk about behavior I was to come in any time I wanted. She assured me she would talk with the teacher and find out where the communication issue was, and I relayed some of the neighborhood incidents that might be affecting Bella so that at least the assistant principal would have a more complete picture.

This all painted a very clear picture for us, and it’s clear that the problem was actually some combination of a bad teacher and a bad school. What I predicted at the beginning of the year had come to pass, and Bella was getting into trouble most likely because she was bored and was now being labeled as a discipline problem. The teacher, who after we requested the first grade evaluation we had never felt anything but resentment from, was not doing the right thing by our daughter, and it doesn’t matter whether that was because she was overworked or because she just didn’t care. And the school district is just too large for us to get them to help us solve this problem within the system. When I was in school, the state mandated that the school districts must teach all children to the best of the child’s ability, but now all that matters is the tests and ranking numbers. The official statements that kids in a grade are all at different levels and they adapt to challenge each child were just platitudes that they had no intention of executing on.

We took Bella that morning after I got back to tour a Montessori school. Before we left, Bella asked the following questions:

• Can I learn more math? (Yes, and science and everything else) Yes!
• Is it all day? (Yes) Awesome!
• Is it all year? (Yes, you’ll go there this summer) Awesome!

After we left, having made the decision immediately to move Bella there, we asked her if she wanted to start in 1 week and cancel the gymnastics spring break camp she was going to (at her request), or start in 3 weeks. She immediately told us that she wanted to start going to the new school now.

On the way back to her public school, she told us that she hoped she was in the class with the teacher she spent time with at the Montessori school while we were touring because she was nice and didn’t yell at her. Marcy and I looked each other, and I asked Bella who yells at her. She got very nervous, and we reminded her that she wasn’t in trouble. We asked if it was someone at her public school. She said yes, her teacher yells a lot. If we didn’t know before that we made the right decision, we certainly did now.

This is Bella’s last week in public school. She starts at The Boyd School on Monday, April 2.

I’d like to work from backwards from the end of your letter to your customers. You say that you have scheduled a face to face meeting with Mr. Limbaugh next week to discuss this topic. This tells me that one of two things applies here. Either you are a friend of Mr. Limbaugh’s, or your company spends such a significant amount of money on his show that you are accorded privileges that a normal advertiser does not get. In either case, you must already know that simply talking to him is not going to result in a change of behavior. Mr. Limbaugh has shown repeatedly, over many years, that he believes hateful, ad hominem attacks like this are OK.

You also state that you have no control over the editorial content of the shows that you advertise on. While this is true in that you do not dictate what the hosts say, you support their ability to say it by funding the show. In that sense, you do endorse the hosts. You cannot put your head in the sand and pretend to have no influence through the dollars you spend on advertising, especially while in the next breath telling your customers that you have enough influence to meet with the host face to face on a week’s notice.

There are many diverse opinions in this country we live in, which means that many of us disagree with each other. I can appreciate that you are constantly receiving complaints about the content of the shows you advertise on. However there is quite a difference between a disagreement on a topic that is discussed in a civil manner and hateful epithets directed at someone who is participating in the civil discourse that is the foundation of this country. Regardless of where the line is drawn, Mr. Limbaugh has left it far behind him. Not only is it far beyond inappropriate, it undermines one of the cornerstones of our country: the freedom to discuss and debate, and the right of every person to stand up for what they believe.

You say that you are offended by the actions of Mr. Limbaugh, but you have nothing to offer in response except talk. Actions speak louder than words, and a decision to no longer fund hateful attacks sends a message not only to Mr. Limbaugh that this cannot be tolerated in a civilized society, not only to Clear Channel that their decision to continue Mr. Limbaugh’s show has consequences, but to the public at large that differing opinions are good, but at the end of the day we are all one people and must be able to disagree in a civil manner. This is not a matter of whose politics you agree with, but rather the right to have that choice at all.

You still have a choice to make. Please consider it carefully and act, as an absence of action sends a clear message as well.

Get the following things laid out before you start:

• Turkey fryer (26 or 30 quart pot, depending on how big your bird is)
• A full tank of propane
• Enough peanut oil to almost fill the pot
• Marinade and injector
• Seasoned salt or other rub for the outside of the turkey
• A fire extinguisher near where you will be frying
• A length of 2×4, or a sturdy broomstick

The first step to prepping the turkey is to get it. You can spend the extra money on a Butterball if you like, but we have pretty good luck with a decent grade A turkey. Whatever you get, make sure that it will fit in the fryer pot that you have, with room to spare at the top. For these notes, I’m going to inject the turkey. You could also brine it, if you choose, though I’ve never done that.

Four hours, or so, before you want to eat, unwrap the turkey and remove the “surprise package”. The giblets, neck, etc. Remove the popup timer, if it has one. Trim any excess skin around the neck. If you don’t do this, it will flap and splatter oil, or sear shut. Don’t worry about washing the turkey just yet.

Take the fryer pot and put the turkey in it, on the rack provided. Fill the pot with clean tap water, until the entire turkey is submerged. If the very tips of the legs are still sticking out (the bone), that’s OK. Take the turkey out and let it drain. Use a tape measure to measure the distance between the top of the pot and the water level. Add 1.5″, and remember the number (so your number should now put the tape measure end below the surface of the water).

Take the turkey off the rack and pat it dry. You should have something flavorful to inject the turkey with. We use Cajun Injectors, usually half the turkey with Creole Butter, and the other half with Roasted Garlic. Follow the instructions on the jar to inject the marinade into the breast and legs. Try to poke as few holes in the turkey as possible, but spread it around. Put the turkey somewhere cold (on a tray in the fridge, for example). This will give the marinade a little time to soak in. You could start earlier if you want, but I usually don’t bother.

Empty and thoroughly dry out the fryer pot. About 2 hours or so (depending on the size of your turkey) before you want to eat, Set up your fryer outside, not inside, not in a garage, and not near anything flammable. I can’t stress this enough. It may be cold outside, but just wear a jacket. And whereever you put the fryer, plan on spilling a little oil, or having it splatter. You might want to put some damp newspaper under and around it to soak up the oil (and not create a fire hazard). Put the fryer pot on the burner, but don’t light the burner yet.

Make sure you’ve got peanut oil. Peanut oil has a very high temperature at which it will break down, and it will not adversely flavor the turkey. Trust me on this. Don’t try to use another oil or shortening. It might work, it might not, but peanut definitely works. Fill the pot with peanut oil to the mark from earlier (1.5″ below the water level after the turkey was removed from the pot). Your fryer should have come with a thermometer and a clip, so clip it to the side of the pot so the end of the thermometer is in the oil.

Now you can start the burner. Follow the directions for the particular fryer that you have. Once you have the burner lit, the flame should be almost completely blue. If it’s not, adjust the air shutter. Crank it up as high as you feel comfortable with. It’s probably going to take longer to heat the oil than it will to actually cook the turkey. With 6 gallons of peanut oil, it took me about an hour to heat the oil.

You want to get it up to 400 degrees. We’re not going to cook the turkey at 400, but the temperature will drop when you put the turkey in, so getting it up to 400 is good. I wouldn’t go higher, though. More importantly, now that the oil is on, keep an eye on it. I would suggest always having someone with the fryer. You don’t want the burner to go out, the temperature to go too high, or anything to catch fire.

Once the temperature is close to 400, get the turkey out of the fridge. Pat it as dry as possible with paper towels. The more water is on the turkey, the more the oil is going to boil and splatter when you put it in, so dry is good. Get your seasoned salt and sprinkle it over the entire surface of the turkey, inside and out. This is going to give the skin some flavor when it crisps, so be liberal, and rub it in pretty good. Put the turkey on the fryer rack, and take it out to the fryer.

For this part, it’s good to have two people, so you can both stand back from the fryer. The fryer rack should have a hook that goes with it (kinda like a coat hanger) that hooks onto the top of the rack for lowering it into the oil. Hook this onto the rack, and run the 2×4 or broomstick through it, so you can each hold one end of the 2×4 and stand back from the fryer. You might want to have gloves on as well, just in case it splatters. Hopefully, your oil is up to 400 now. Otherwise, wait until it is.

Do not just drop the turkey into the oil! That’s how accidents happen. Instead you want to lower the turkey into the oil very slowly so that it does not boil over or splatter excessively. Just take your time, and lower the turkey in evenly a couple inches at a time. But don’t go slower than you have to to keep the oil from splattering or overflowing. Once the turkey is completely in the oil, unhook the handle from the rack. The oil should have expanded a little when it heated up, and it should be covering the turkey completely (except possibly for the tips of the leg bones). If it’s not, add a little more oil so that it is.

Start your timer. You’re going to fry the turkey for 3.5 minutes per pound. So a 16 pound bird would cook for 56 minutes. Continue to watch it to make sure there are no problems. You also want to keep an eye on the temperature. Once the bird is in, the temp will drop. It might go down as much as 100 degrees. Keep the burner on high, and bring the temperature back up to 350. Once it hits 350, level it off.

When the time is up, shut the burner off first. Use the hook and the 2×4 to lift the turkey out of the oil. Hold it over the pot for a minute to let it drain, then take it inside and let it cool down for 10 or 15 minutes. Carve it like you would any other turkey, and enjoy. The wings will be a little crispy, but the breast and legs should be perfect. Leave the oil to cool.

After dinner, and after the oil is cold, you have a choice to make. If you’re going to fry another turkey soon, save the oil. It’s good for at least 2 turkeys, provided you filter it a little. Otherwise you can just toss it. Either way, put it back into the containers you got it out of. If you’re going to save it, filter it through a strainer to get all the turkey bits out of it. Clean everything else up and store it properly.

These are my notes, as updated from this Thanksgiving’s turkey. If you’ve got more notes or questions, please post them here. Always looking for more tips.

I’m very fortunate to work in a job where it is not tied to my physical location. I’m a manager, and I need to spend most of my time in the office so that I can interact both with my team and with other teams. This does not preclude working from home a day a week, which is a perk that my department has maintained for everyone for many years now, or working from other places when appropriate. Originally, I took advantage of this to escape on Friday afternoons to perform my GTD weekly reviews so that I would not be distracted. Now I’ll often spend an afternoon a week working from a coffee shop just so I can focus on some of the more creative tasks that I don’t tend to attack when I’m at my desk. I was doing this before I even knew there was a name for it.

A third place is usually defined as a social space separate from the two traditional environments (home and work) where people can go either to interact or just to be around other people while they work. Coffee shops are a very common version of this, as most provide the traits of a third place: free or inexpensive, close by, food and drink, regulars, and an environment that is comfortable to spend time in. They are also my third place of choice, as I can generally count on wireless access for free or with purchase, and there’s always another one around if my chosen location begins to get too crowded. I get a coffee, put my headphones on, and get down to the business of writing posts, or crafting policies or plans, or researching topics that I just need a little time for.

I’ve also been developing some interest in the idea of coworking, but not just the basic shared environment where you can be around others while you work. I look at it more for the ability for like-minded folks to collaborate on an idea. Some of this is what we’ve been working on in the space tweep community: someone comes up with an idea and a few of us “gather around” to discuss and create it. There’s a problem with it, in that we don’t have a decent place to collaborate except for 140 characters at a time on Twitter (hence my previous post about a Spacepoints collaboration space). I look at places like NASA’s sp.ace and I wonder what an environment like that could accomplish at my company.

Of course, what did they do? The new office in Reston will have an open floor plan. The cubes, if you can even call them that, are 6 foot square, with very low glass walls (only about 3′ high). Everyone has a cube except for directors and above, who will have some of the very few offices. This is going to be a huge change for a company where most people are in offices right now, and those who are not are in full-height cubes. I look at this design and I’m trying to figure out how I’m going to make phone calls, how I’m going to concentrate when other people are making phone calls, how I’m going to have private conversations with my team, and who’s going to be looking over my shoulder while I’m working. It allows for almost no personalization of our workspace, and I really don’t think it’s going to be conducive as a primary workspace for most people.

So it comes down to the fact that I want to spend time in a coworking space, but I want it to be a limited amount of time and I want to actually have a second place (work) to come back to. As much as I am trying to approach the new office with an open mind (I like the huge gym, and the cafeteria, and the collaborative spaces), I just can’t see how the actual desk space is going to work. I think it will actually force me to a third place more.

More so than previously, I have come to know a number of people working for NASA in the last year through the Tweetup program. I’ve been watching as they announce that they’ve gotten the call, and that their last day is coming. These are the people who have made this program work. The astronauts take the final risk, and a big one it is. But it’s the people who work at Kennedy Space Center, at Johnson Space Center, at Michoud, Dryden, and other sites who have made that possible. They are the ones who know that their names will never be known, that they will not be going on media tours, and that they have truly uncertain futures. My friend CraftLass wrote a beautiful post about these heroes. And while nobody would argue that the astronauts are not heroes, I think even they would agree that the true heroes are the people who solve the hard problems in obscurity.

I’ve been to the Space Coast a couple times recently, and after being in Titusville for several days, I have seen what a depressed economy truly looks like. With the combination of the real estate market being where it is, and the economy in that area being even worse, nobody can afford to pick up and move to where a job might be. But despite this, the technicians, engineers, managers, and other NASA employees are doing their jobs, and responding in a dignified manner. They are true professionals. They know that tomorrow morning, Shuttle Mission Control at JSC shuts down, the last shuttle is handed over to the Transition and Retirement team, and they will be there right up until they are told they are no longer needed.

I think what bothers me most about this entire situation is the loss of so many talented people. While there are some commercial space players who have set up shop in Florida, such as SpaceX, they can only employ a fraction of the people who are losing jobs at NASA. This doesn’t even take into account people working at JSC and at other facilities. These people have years of experience with space flight; some have been at NASA for 30 years or more! It saddens me that this incredible pool of talent is dispersing. The lucky ones will be able to put their skills to use in a new job. Many others will take whatever work they can find. What is even worse is that when the commercial space business picks up in a year or two and has some real momentum, these same people will likely be tossed aside because they have a gap in their resume.

This is not how we, as a nation, should treat our heroes. I have always been of the opinion that industries will grow and change, and that we should not eschew that change because someone will lose their job as a result. Automation, improved processes, the failure of individual businesses to adapt: these are all natural changes, and we can’t avoid it just to make sure that an assembly line worker keeps his job. We cannot save the jobs, but we must save the people. It is our responsibility to help them retrain, to develop new skills that will enable them to move forwards.

I don’t know how to solve this problem. I wish I did. I wish I could tell my friends at NASA, and the myriad others who have made the dream of a little boy or girl to grow up to be a spaceman a reality, that there is a way through. I can only hope that they will keep their positive outlook, and find a path themselves.

What I need is something along the lines of a virtual thirdplace, an incubator, and coworking, all mashed up. It’s no secret that most of what has been inspiring me lately is space related. And as I said in my previous post about Spacepoints, there’s a need to coordinate the resources available to the community so that you don’t need to know people to be able to get something done. Additionally, I’m a practicioner of Getting Things Done, which says that you should only have a thought once (in an ideal world), at which point you capture it and decide what to do with it. Roll all this together and it’s a pretty interesting concept for enabling people interested in STEM outreach to do, without worrying as much about the “how”. Not to mention the multiplicative effect of putting lots of ideas out there.

We’ll start with users signing up. As part of connecting to the system, they will fill out a profile that lets them specify what their skills are. This can be hobbies (like an amateur photographer, or a woodworker), professional (e.g. a lawyer), or anything in between (someone who used to do graphic design professionally but is now writing books). They can also add in resources they can reach within 1 degree (someone they know directly). This would be along the lines of they have a relative who is a publisher, for example. By doing this we build up a resource database that can be used when working on a project later.

Now we add in the ability for users to quickly capture ideas. Whenever someone has an idea about something to do, no matter how small the idea is, how impossible they think it is, how ill-defined it is at the moment of conception, the person should be able to quickly save it in the system. They can send it by logging into the site and writing it down, by emailing it in, by sending an SMS or a tweet, or any other way we can think of. Reliable capture is an important GTD concept, and here it will let all the possible ideas be captured. Additionally, as soon as an idea is captured, it should be open to the rest of the community for comment. This lets everyone start fleshing out the idea, expanding on it, spinning off of it, and most importantly, turning it into a reality. It will be important to treat this as brainstorming, and keep it positive and constructive.

Once we have an idea and comments on it, we’re ready to start executing. This is where things start to get tricky, because there’s a big difference between talking and doing. For any project, leadership could be collaborative, or it could be coordinated by a single person. If it’s a single person, it could be the person who originally came up with the idea, or it could be someone else who wants to run with it. Regardless, this is where the database of resources comes in. Users should be able to search what’s available, contact folks to find out if they can help, and attach people to the project. Much like an incubator, there should probably be some amount of common resources available to use, such as web hosting or database servers, for those projects that will exist online.

There are a lot of gaps in this idea right now. For example, how do you handle projects that you want to keep somewhat closed? And how do you track credit for a project? That’s less important than a lot of technical details, but it’s critical for continued engagement that people have their contributions recognized. And when an idea really takes off, the people who made it happen should be identified and celebrated. We’ll figure out the details along the way.

Spacepoints is just such a grand idea. It’s not a game. It’s not an app. It’s a dozen apps, and a hundred different games, and so much more. The problem is that even trying to describe it is difficult, because there’s no way to do it without talking in concrete terms. So we talk about a system where people can tell other people about the space outreach things that they do and earn points. But what about a check-in app? OK, so we add that in. And what about the next idea for how to increase outreach and awareness? Why does it have to be space? What about particle physics? I could go on, but hopefully you get the point. This is why we talk about “Spacepoints: The Flame Thrower”. By injecting what seems ludicrous, we’re trying to remind people to think outside the box.

Even more than that, we really have to just do something. This is why whenisthenextrocketlaunch.com is a great example of what Spacepoints is after. Sean Herron, sitting at SpaceUp Houston wanted to do something, and in less than an hour he registered a domain, created a website, and had a finished project to provide people with information about when and where the next rocket launch is. It’s about ISS Notify, where Nathan Bergey created a device to show when the ISS is going overhead, shared the design, and then got other people excited about the project on KIckstarter! He didn’t need the incentive of Spacepoints for that, just a desire to share his excitement for space with everyone else.

So how do we not fall into a trap where a single implementation becomes the definition for what Spacepoints is? The people who get it, the ones who couldn’t care less about the idea of Spacepoints if it gets in the way of the outreach, need to own the idea. As much it is about the community and getting people to go out and do, there still needs to be some kind of organization that are watching out against corporate entities coopting the idea (among other problems). This could be a non-profit organization, a “board of directors”, or something less formal. It is a place to provide guidance, to organize resources, and to make sure that the grand idea stays intact. If someone is working on a project and they need web design help, or graphics, or coding help, or anything at all, there should be a place they can go to find some help.

This is what I see Spacepoints as. It’s a way to enable people to do STEM outreach. Not just by incenting them to do so through points and prizes, but by making it easy for them to take something from an idea to a reality at ludicrous speeds. The more we can come up with to get people excited, the easier it is to find the next big idea that will be the breakout hit. So why are you still sitting here reading this? What idea have you thought of that you haven’t started creating yet? What’s stopping you?

Yet another achievement for our last space shuttle, Atlantis, she was responsible for launching the Galileo probe to Jupiter on STS-34. The was only the second time a probe leaving our local neighborhood was launched from the space shuttle, the first having been the Magellan probe to Venus that was launched by Atlantis during STS-30 earlier in 1989. Galileo’s path would take her around Venus in 1990 and then around Earth twice, in 1990 and 1992, in order to use the gravitational assist to build up enough velocity to get to Jupiter. Even along the way, she had plenty of work to do, examining asteroids and determining if it was possible to detect life on Earth from space. This was accomplished through a series of experiments devised by Carl Sagan during Galileo’s first flyby of Earth. And it was not a trip without problems, either, as her high-gain antenna failed to open. This forced us to rely on her low-gain antenna, which was only intended to transmit at 8 to 16 bits per second (whereas the high-gain antenna would have transmitted at 134 kilobits per second, over 8000 times faster). The NASA engineers, resourceful as always, were able to boost this to 160 bits per second by utilizing compression and receiver upgrades. Just before arriving in Jupiter orbit, Galileo launched an atmospheric probe that made a death dive into Jupiter, collecting 58 minutes worth of data about the weather and composition of the atmosphere. In total, Galileo returned about 30 GB of data and around 14,000 images before performing her own dive into Jupiter (to prevent any possibility of introducing Earth bacteria to Europa).

Juno, with the benefit of 20 years of additional engineering advances, will perform almost as many orbits (32) as Galileo (35) in just a single Earth year, and will perform much more sophisticated science. Once she arrives at Jupiter, in 2016, she will provide a better estimate of Jupiter’s core mass and precisely explore the planet’s magnetic and gravitational fields. She will also fill in many of the gaps in our knowledge of the atmospheric composition. You may ask why we really care. Why would we bother using our resources to send another probe to Jupiter, rather than exploring our closer neighbors? But Jupiter was probably one of the first planets to form in our solar system, and its giant mass has a huge effect on the rest of the planets, including Earth. By understanding Jupiter, we will learn more about how our solar system, and our planet, formed.

The science is exciting, but even more exciting and immediate for me is that NASA has invited me down to Kennedy Space Center to learn more about Juno, and Jupiter, from the experts and to witness her launch on August 5th. As part of NASA’s Tweetup program, where they open up events to some of their social media followers in an effort to increase awareness of NASA’s work, 150 people have been invited down to KSC for a two day event around Juno’s launch. My first NASA Tweetup experience was for Sun-Earth Day at Goddard Space Flight Center, in Maryland, earlier this year, and I am honored to have been selected again to go down for this launch. At GSFC, we were able to participate in NASA Edge, their unscripted webcast, as well as take a tour of the GSFC facilities and go down to the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum to observe the sun and meet with other experts. I can only speculate on what we will be involved in at KSC, based on previous (shuttle) launch Tweetups, and I am so excited to find out!

There are many who are upset over the end of the Space Transportation System (STS) program. We can debate the politics, lament what is past, or get angry over the decisions that have been made, or we can channel that energy into moving forward. Yes, many people are losing their jobs right now, and this is sad because there is so much still to do. The Space Launch System (SLS) program continues to be stuck in limbo, and as a result there are a lot of people who have the skills needed for SLS but are being laid off. The commercial players in the future of space are hiring, but definitely not everyone being laid off, and in many cases not in the same physical locations. This transition period is going to be very hard, but we need to look forwards, and not back.

One of the many things that NASA is good at is solving the difficult problems. We all know their resume: they’ve put men and women in space, on the moon, and they’ve built a home and laboratory 240 miles above us. They have gone from the Cold War mentality of beating the Russians at all costs to working together with them to launch and assemble the pieces of the International Space Station. But the STS only went as far as low earth orbit (LEO): NASA has sent vehicles to Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, and beyond. Voyager 1 is now over 17 billion kilometers from Earth (or more than 116 times the distance from the Earth to the Sun) and still receiving and transmitting data! And they keep sending them out: the Juno mission to Jupiter will launch August 5th, and the Curiosity rover (the Mars Science Laboratory) will launch later this fall. NASA continues to look to the future, including landing humans on asteroids and getting them back to the Moon and to Mars.

These are the hard problems that NASA should be working on, and we must continue to fund this exploration work. But LEO is no longer a hard problem. The STS is complex and expensive, in part because it was so novel when it started, but also because the orbiter is a compromise vehicle: it is designed to carry both 7 people and up to 26 tons of cargo to LEO. These are two completely different types of cargo, and very difficult to launch together. But if we launch them separately, it is much easier, and much less expensive. We know we can get cargo to LEO much less expensive on expendable vehicles like Atlas, and soon on commercial vehicles like SpaceX‘s Falcon 9 and Boeing‘s CST-100 as part of NASA’s Commercial Crew Development program. And SLS will take what we have learned from STS and become a launch vehicle capable of taking a payload up to 130 tons to low earth orbit! Getting people to LEO is simpler too using a capsule, rather than an orbiter. The Russians do it with Soyuz, we’re developing the Multi-Purpose Crew Vehicle (MPCV), and companies such as SpaceX are developing Dragon and other vehicles. Where once we had only NASA and Roscomos, we now have competition both for the launch vehicles and crew vehicles. Should we not celebrate these developments?

So where does that leave us? Space exploration is important. We have to keep sending vehicles out and figuring out how the universe works. We need to explore the other planets, both within our solar system and beyond, because we cannot understand our own without doing that. We need to continue to launch observatories, such as Hubble, Chandra, Spitzer, SDO, and JWST, because our own atmosphere hampers our ability to see all that there is to see. And above all, the results of these endeavors must be shared with the world in an open and collaborative manner. It is up to all of us to make sure that our representatives in government support this work. If nothing else, this is what each of us can do to further space exploration. However, there is a reason I have provided so many links in this post. Read about what we are doing, and look at the results. What we have accomplished so far is amazing, and the best is still coming.

At the same time, we must continue to expand our nearby capabilities outside Earth’s atmosphere. The future craft that will carry people to our nearest neighbors and beyond will need to be launched from there by necessity, because the first 200 miles from Earth requires the most power. But now that there is competition, the work has to be shared by both the governmental and commercial entities. The STS has laid the groundwork for this, and shown what can be done. It has given us a staging area in LEO. It has fostered international collaboration in space exploration. Celebrate this, and celebrate its end, but we must not allow ourselves to wallow in sadness for the end of the program. It is but one small step beyond this little rock we call Earth. Let’s take the next step.