[LINK] “Harper’s appointment of Walter Natynczyk to Canadian Space Agency raises eyebrows”

The National Post article regarding the appointment of Walter Natynczyk, formerly head of the Canadian military, to head the Canadian space agency, hits the right notes. The only thing I can say is that the Canadian Space Agency is so small that, frankly, even a militarized Canadian Space Agency wouldn’t be notable globally.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper has appointed the country’s former top soldier to head the Canadian Space Agency in a surprise move that has raised questions about whether the civilian program is about to be militarized.

On Friday, Harper announced that former chief of defence staff Walter Natynczyk will become president of the Montreal-based space agency on Aug. 6.

[. . .] The appointment was unusual on two counts: Natynczyk had a long career in the military before he retired last year and his background was from the army, not the air force; and some of the previous presidents of the space agency had been astronauts such as Steve MacLean and Marc Garneau.

Steven Staples, president of the Rideau Institute, an Ottawa-based think tank, said in an interview that he thinks the appointment sends a troubling signal.

“It’s about the militarization of space,” he said.

“We’re moving from having astronauts heading our space agency to having generals heading it. I think that people should be asking questions about what the future of our space agency is going to be. And is it going to be more about military uses than scientific exploration.”

Staples said the military has been increasing its spending in areas such as satellite technology, and it’s important to note that two things have now occurred: Gen. Tom Lawson, formerly Canada’s top officer at NORAD, is now Canada’s top soldier, and his predecessor, Natynczyk, has come out of retirement from the military to head the space agency.

[BLOG] Some Thursday links

• blogTO’s Chris Bateman starts a discussion as to what should be done with the Gardiner Expressway.
• Centauri Dreams takes a look at solar system navigation from the radio signals of pulsars.
• The Dragon’s Tales points to a paper suggesting ways that astronomers could resolve planets in habitable-zone orbits orbiting nearby Sun-like stars, like Alpha Centauri A and B.
• Daniel Drezner considers trust in the state, particularly in the context of PRISM and the surveillance of Internet communications by the American government. (Trust does not seem warranted.)
• Eastern Approaches notes that the intersection of politics with the modernization of Poland’s energy infrastructure does bad things there.
• The Power and the Money’s Noel Maurer takes a look at political procedure in the Colombian congress.
• At The Search, Leslie Johnston takes a look at pre-Internet online communities, like BBSes and Compuserve and Usenet.
• Technosociology’s Zeynep Tukefci writes about how Gezi Park’s demonstrators have organized themselves.
• Window on Eurasia notes polls suggesting that Georgians, despite the more recent wars, are less worried by challenges to their country’s territorial integrity than Azerbaijanis.
• Yorkshire Ranter Alex Harrowell confirms that David Goodhart is not to be trusted when he talks about immigration, not at all.

[LINK] “China space capsule lifts off on 15-day mission”

Via James Nicoll, I learned of China’s newest manned space mission, the Shenzhou 10.

China’s latest manned spacecraft successfully blasted off Tuesday on a 15-day mission to dock with a space lab and educate young people about science.

The Shenzhou 10 capsule carrying three astronauts lifted off as scheduled at 5:38 a.m. ET from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center on the edge of the Gobi Desert.

It is China’s fifth manned space mission and its longest. The spacecraft was launched aboard a Long March 2F rocket and will transport the crew to the Tiangong 1, which functions as an experimental prototype for a much larger Chinese space station to be launched in 2020. The craft will spend 12 days docked with the Tiangong.

On the heels of Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield’s wildly popular YouTube videos from the International Space Station, the Chinese crew plans to deliver a series of talks to students from aboard the Tiangong.

The craft carried two men, mission commander Nie Haisheng and Zhang Xiaoguang, and China’s second female astronaut, Wang Yaping.

[LINK] “Astronaut Chris Hadfield announces resignation”

Thank you, Mr. Hadfield, for everything.

Canadian Chris Hadfield has announced his resignation and his intentions to move back to Canada following a 10-year career and decades of living in the U.S.

The newly minted Canadian icon made the announcement at the Canadian Space Agency just outside of Montreal on Monday, fresh off a visit with Prime Minister Stephen Harper in Ottawa.

The 53-year-old astronaut shared highlights from his five-month mission aboard the International Space Station where he dazzled Earth-bound star-gazers with breathtaking pictures, entertaining videos and a constant stream of poetic tweets.

The resignation means that Hadfield will finally return to Canadian soil. The astronaut has been living in Houston, Texas since his days as a fighter pilot in the 1980s.

“[I'll be] making good on a promise I made my wife nearly 30 years ago — that yes, eventually, we would be moving back to Canada,” Hadfield said.

He said he’s ready to pursue private interests, outside the government. Hadfield said he hasn’t decided what he will do next, but said he plans to do presentations on space while reflecting over the coming year on his next move.

[LINK] “How spaceman Hadfield’s sons pushed him to social-media stardom”

Peter Rakobowchuk’s Canadian Press article, carried in the Calgary Herald, goes into interesting background about Chris Hadfield’s media fame. It turns out that his sons pushed him into it, or at least into the social media that made him a celebrity.

[Hadfield's] conversion began several years ago — long before Hadfield’s mission to the International Space Station, which ended with great fanfare this week.

He initially balked when his sons began preaching the merits of Twitter and Facebook more than three years ago.

During a family Christmas get-together in 2009 his son Evan, who now lives in Germany, and Kyle, who’s in China, pointed out that they relied on the Internet to find out what’s going on.

They got on his case again when his five-month mission was announced in early September 2010. It was then that they decided to set up his two social-media sites.

A few months later, in January 2011, Hadfield only had about 1,000 followers on Twitter and about 600 Facebook friends — a drop in the bucket compared to now.

[. . .]

He had only 20,000 Twitter followers when he blasted off with Russian space colleague Roman Romanenko and NASA astronaut Tom Marshburn on Dec. 19, 2012.

Upon his return to Earth this week, Hadfield was hovering around one million Twitter followers and more than 325,000 “Likes” on Facebook. His photography and music, distributed mainly through social media, eventually earned him mainstream news coverage around the world.

[LINK] “Space Is Now a Reality TV Show”

On the one-day anniversary of Chris Hadfield’s triumphant return to Earth, Megan Garber’s essay at The Atlantic does a great job analyzing just why Hadfield has become such a celebrity: he has managed to leverage social networking technologies with remarkable success.

Chris Hadfield — nom de tweet: @cmdr_hadfield — has been doing more than inspiring people, though. He has also been entertaining them. And delighting them. He has chatted with Captain Kirk. He has covered Bowie. He has written his own music, and performed it. He has publicly celebrated Valentine’s Day, and Easter, and St. Patrick’s Day, and April Fool’s. He has done a mind-boggling number of live chats and Q&As and video explainers. He has led Canada in a national sing-along. And all of these things have shared a remarkable predicate: They have been done, you know, from space. Hadfield has kept a running dialogue with Earth, documenting not just the numinous — those amazing views! — but also the mundane: the food. The fun. The exercise. The sleep. The tears. The bathroom situation.

Over the course of 144 days spent on the International Space Station (encompassing 2,336 orbits of the Earth and covering nearly 62 million miles), Hadfield didn’t merely do his day job — conducting more than 130 scientific experiments testing the effects of microgravity on masses of various types. He also helped to change our concept of what it means to be an astronaut in the first place. Hadfield is a space explorer in the Gagarin/Glenn/Armstrong model, but he is something else, too: just a guy. A guy who happens to be in space. Hadfield, availing himself of new technologies that are just beginning to be widely adopted, made space travel seem accessible. He made it seem normal (or, in astronaut-speak, “nominal”). He took it out of the realm of the awe-inspiring and placed it squarely in the realm of the awesome.

[. . .]

What Hadfield used to his advantage, [. . .] was the copious combination of social media tools that are just now coming into their prime, tools that transform documentation into conversation: Hadfield had Twitter and Tumblr and Facebook and Reddit, not to mention a public excited, especially after the successful landing the Curiosity rover last year, about space again. Not to mention a 20-person social media team eager to remind the world about Canada’s role in the space program. Not to mention a doppelgänger son, Evan, who handled Hadfield’s accounts when he couldn’t. Not to mention a good deal of luck. (William Shatner’s casual tweet to Hadfield back in January won him a flood of followers, Quartz notes, after which his popularity “became self-sustaining.”)

Hadfield also had … Chris Hadfield. He was the right guy at the right time — and in, wow, the right place: He’s a natural performer who seemed truly excited to share his sublime stage with the rest of us. But his performances were intimate rather than epic: He subtly rejected the aura of distant heroism we normally associate with space flyers. Instead, he was nerdy. He was excited. He was delightfully, winkily mustachioed. He was your dad, or your uncle, or your mentor, the kind of guy who probably gets a little choked up when he makes toasts at weddings. Which is to say: He is quirky and real, and he made a point of putting those facts to use. He took all the corporate logic of social media — the ethos of the “personal brand,” the edict of “conversation rather than presentation” — and applied it, seamlessly, to his life in space.

Also, I quite like her McLuhanesque conclusion.

“Communications tools don’t get socially interesting,” Clay Shirky has argued, “until they get technologically boring.” The same may be said of space. As a destination — as a place, as a dream — space may be, ever so slightly, losing its former mantle of foreignness, its old patina of awe. The final frontier may now be experiencing the fate that befalls any frontier: It ceases to be a frontier. Its settlers come to think of it, more and more, as an extension of what they know … until it becomes, simply, all that they know. Until it becomes the most basic thing in the world: home.

[BRIEF NOTE] On the import of Chris Hadfield after his return

Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield has returned to Earth. CBC has reported the news.

Astronaut Chris Hadfield, the first Canadian to command the International Space Station, has returned to Earth after almost five months in orbit.

Hadfield, along with flight engineers American Tom Marshburn and Russian Roman Romanenko, returned aboard a Soyuz capsule. They landed under a large parachute in the flat steppes of Kazakhstan at 10:31 p.m. ET

The astronauts are expected to emerge from the capsule about 20 to 30 minutes after landing.

It marks Hadfield’s first return from space in the Russian capsule — during his previous space missions, in 1995 and 2001, he travelled aboard one of the now retired space shuttles.

[. . .]

The trio undocked from the space station shortly after 7 p.m. ET for their journey home. When they were about 12 kilometres from the station, the crew on the Soyuz capsule performed a successful de-orbit burn, slowing the craft down for its descent.

I watched the whole thing on NASA TV.

Looking good.

[MUSIC] Chris Hadfield, “Space Oddity”

This morning when I woke up any number of blogs–Phil Plait’s Bad Astronomy, Joe. My. God., Supernova Condensate–linked to Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield‘s cover of the David Bowie classic song “Space Oddity”.

As for the social media coverage, he’s inescapable. (Hadfield had nearly 1.9 million views when last I checked.)

The Telegraph’s Neil McCormick is probably right to place this in the context of David Bowie’s astounding revival of the past year.

A lot of musicians have dreamed of being the first rock star in space. Prog rockers Muse talk about it in almost every interview and claim to have made serious feasibility studies. U2 had a live satellite link up with the International Space Station during their 360 Degree tour. In 2009, it was reported that Spandau Ballet had actually been booked to perform on the maiden voyage of Richard Branson’s commercial spacecraft Enterprise, although one would have thought passengers paying over $200,000 a ticket would demand something more exclusive than cruise ship entertainment. So far, the Enterprise remains grounded.

And now Commander Chris Hadfield has beaten them all. The Canadian astronaut has become the first rock star in space, posting an astonishing video of himself playing guitar and singing in zero gravity aboard the International Space Station. The song, appropriately, is David Bowie’s Space Oddity, with music recorded on earth and vocals recorded in space. As the astronaut bobs weightlessly around singing “here I am, sitting in a tin can far above the world”, we see our big, beautiful planet looming behind him. The video would have cost a small fortune to shoot in a studio but presumably just took the singing spaceman a couple of spare hours with a handicam.

What it is worth to Bowie is incalculable. Not just in earnings (as the songwriter he makes money every time someone clicks on the video on YouTube) but in the way it seems to further affirm his current ubiquity in pop culture. Bowie is popular music’s Starman, a space age rock singer who always seemed like a character out of science fiction. And here he is again, beaming into our computers from outer space. For someone who, a year ago, was deemed to be a sickly recluse who had quietly retired from public life, Bowie has become all but inescapable.

Congratulations, however, are also due to Hadfield. He has made space travel cool again.

[BLOG] Some Friday links

• Centauri Dreams has more on the electric sail.
• Daniel Drezner is unimpressed with Niall Ferguson’s claims that he’s being unfairly criticized when the blogosphere, when the strongest online critiques have come from news services like The Atlantic and professors of various disciplines.
• The Dragon’s Tales notes that astronomers looking at white dwarfs in the Hyades star cluster 150 light-years away have found their atmospheres polluted by dust from asteroids which have crashed onto their surfaces.
• At the Everyday Sociology Blog, sociologist and new homeowners Karen Sternheimer notes that investment firms have been buying up real estate. What of regular homeowners?
• Language Log’s Victor Mair notes a new site seeking to document all of the various dialects and language forms of Chinese.
• Progressive Download’s John Farrell notes the Catholic Church’s qualified support for evolution.
• Savage Minds’ Carole McGranahan argues that a properly curated Twitter account can produce numerous benefits for the academic.
• Torontoist wonders if maps of Toronto showing walking routes and times might be worthwhile.
• At Window on Eurasia, Paul Goble quotes a Russian blogger who argues that the Soviet annexation of territories in Europe after the Second World War, including the Baltic States and Moldova as well as western Ukraine and Belarus, ultimately destabilized the Soviet state.

[BLOG] Some Thursday links

• Bag News Notes features photographs of the aftermath of the Bangladeshi factory collapse.
• Centauri Dreams takes a look at the electric sail, propulsion method for spaceships currently being tested.
• At The Dragon’s Tales, Will Baird links to a study suggesting that China’s Yangtze river is at least 23 million years old.
• Daniel Drezner doesn’t think that an age of cheap energy globally will necessarily destabilize the world, at least outside of oil exporters, since globalization binds in other ways.
• Eastern Approaches notes the continuing sensitivity of the post-Second World War deportation of the Sudeten Germans from the Czech Republic, as recently emphasized by the Czech president’s defense.
• Geocurrents examines the reasons for the sharp shift in most of India towards below-replacement fertility rates, suggesting that television shows featuring women with small families may be as important a factor as anything else.
• At Lawyers, Guns and Money, Erik Loomis notes that one of the first victories of organized labour in the United States occurred in 1882 with the implementation of a ban on Chinese immigration. (Canada followed in 1885.)
• The Volokh Conspiracy’s Sasha Volokh examines the implications of prisons being reviewed on Yelp.
• Window on Eurasia notes that Ukrainians and Moldovans, not Central Asians, are more likely to be undocumented migrants in Russia. (They’re less visually and culturally distinctive, apparently, and harder to catch.)