David D. LevineScience Fiction Author

Worldcon continues to be Worldcon and it’s going quite well for me. In the last couple of days I have been privileged to spend a bunch of time in the presence of very big names. Amazingly, I have not yet lost my voice.

Yesterday I moderated a panel on “How to Sell Your Short Stories” with Cory Doctorow, Robert Silverberg, Campbell nominee Lezli Robyn (who broke in co-writing with Mike Resnick, whom she met online after losing an auction to him on eBay) and Angela Slatter. Spread across so many writing generations, we all had different stories about how we broke in so I ran with that and centered the discussion on that to begin with. We also talked a lot about networking, though I believe the work is more important. I was a bit afraid there would be problems between right-winger Silverberg and information-wants-to-be-free Cory but it was all very cordial and informative; several people said afterwards that they liked it.

During the panel, Cory folded about 15 origami cranes, without looking; he says that when he gave up smoking he took up folding cranes to keep his hands busy and still does it. I posted this amusing tidbit on Twitter. A little while later, while watching the “Online Interaction for Writers” panel, I checked my email and learned that Cory (who was on the panel) had seen my tweet and had just become my 500th Twitter follower. Naturally I immediately tweeted about this.

The “Just a Minute” game show with Paul Cornell, China Mieville, John Scalzi, Patrick Nielsen Hayden, and Cat Valente was very amusing once it finally started (room P1 was locked, so we all trooped to P3 and hung around there for a while before trooping back). I’m glad I wasn’t on this panel; it looked HARD. China was the best at the actual game mechanic (being familiar with the original BBC radio show helped a lot) but Scalzi played hard and won handily on points.

Yesterday evening was the Wild Cards writers’ dinner at high-end seafood restaurant “Fish,” which was awfully loud but had good food. I was honored to dine and converse with George R. R. Martin, Ian Tregillis, Melissa Snodgrass, Carrie Vaughn, Paul Cornell, and Brilliance Audio editor John Grace, who does the Wild Cards audiobooks.

The party situation at the Crowne Plaza has improved quite a bit. The London in 2014 party was extremely crowded and loud, while the Texas and Reno parties were more reasonably populated and we had nice snacks and conversation, but I was unduly irritated by having to cart hat, coat, and sweater around because of the mile-and-a-half walk in the cold drizzle between the Crowne Plaza and the Hilton. We retired to our room by midnight.

The next morning I slept in until almost 9:00. After breakfast, I headed off to watch “The Western’s Influence on SF” but was snagged on the way by an unpublished novelist named Saul, who really liked the “To Market” panel I moderated. We talked for most of the hour. It’s not necessarily what I planned to do with that time, but supporting newer writers is a mitzvah. The “Anachronist Fiction” panel was okay but they got hung up on the “punk” in steampunk, ignoring that the name was originally a joke. Complaining that there’s not enough punk in steampunk is like complaining there aren’t enough cubes in cubism.

Sunday afternoon was the peak of my programming for the convention. I moderated “Race to the Red Planet” with Kim Stanley Robinson and Jim Benford (Greg’s twin brother, I believe); it was in a big room, had a good crowd, and went well, providing an excellent lead-in to my Mars talk in the same room immediately following. But then I had to vamp for 15 minutes while the A/V techs got my computer to display on the big screen. I had made sure to suss out the computerized lectern control panel before my talk, but this particular room had just a blank space where the control panel was supposed to be, so I was entirely dependent on the A/V techs. While waiting I answered questions and sang Monty Python’s Philosophers’ Song. Despite the delay, the talk went well; almost 2/3 of the seats in the lower half of the large hall were filled and I finished with enough time for a few questions. After the talk, about 8 people followed me out of the hall and we talked about Mars in the lobby for 45 minutes. I also sold all the copies of Space Magic and The Mars Diaries I’d brought, which means I now have a little room in my overstuffed bag for books and souvenirs.

When I took my computer back to the room, I discovered that my tweet of a comment by Kim Stanley Robinson about utopias had made the front page of Twitter and got retweeted over 30 times. Then I met up with Kate and headed off to the casino food court with New Zealand knitter Miche (MicheInNZ on Ravelry) whom we’d met at the Texas party last night. I got a hamburger which, alas, broke my string of wonderful meals but the fries were pretty good. Then we attended the Hugos, a nice tidy 1.5-hour show (the Japanese and other subsidiary awards having been taken care of earlier). I’m very happy with most of the winners, especially Moon and Will McIntosh who is one of the nicest, shyest writers I know and was totally not expecting to win.

After the Hugos we elected to go back to the room at 10:00 rather than walk to the Crowne Plaza in the cold drizzle and try to crash the post-Hugo reception (to which we were not invited, but where almost everyone I know would be). Maybe next year I’ll have another nomination (Ben Yalow said “Teaching the Pig” is getting some critical attention, but with podcast StarShipSofa winning Best Fanzine, I wonder if Bento will ever have a chance again). I’m looking forward to the nomination statistics to see if we just missed the ballot this year as we have in some previous years.

10:00 panel tomorrow, so I’m going to turn in early(ish) now.

Well, it’s a Worldcon, which means it’s all a bit of a blur, but I’ll see what I can remember.

It’s a little small for the Worldcon, about 1400 people and many of those Australians, so it’s a little thin on people I know, but on the other hand this also means I get to spend more time than usual hanging out with people I don’t know all that well, like John Scalzi and Cory Doctorow.

The brand-new hotel and convention center are in a brand-new urban-renewal neighborhood, which means there’s not much right nearby. The nearest neighbors are a huge casino (which spouts flames every hour on the hour during winter evenings) and a factory outlet mall, each of which does have some food options. You can also walk across the river to the Central Business District — “the mainland” says Kate — for more restaurants. Still haven’t had a bad meal, though, although the frites at the Belgian place were not up to true Belgian standard.

So far I’ve had a kaffeeklatsch and a reading and moderated one panel. All were moderately well attended and went well. I sold two copies of Space Magic and one of Mars Diaries out of the three copies of each I brought with me. Also attended several program items, including guest of honor Shaun Tan giving a presentation on the making of the short film of his The Lost Thing, as well as a showing of the film itself, which was delightful and heartwarming. Interesting to see reflections of Australian suburban and city life (tight-packed low hip-roofed houses, trams) in the made-up world of the story.

Have not purchased anything in the dealers’ room or any souvenirs, but did buy a pair of gloves; it’s colder here than I’d packed for. One fellow in the dealers’ room has some merchandise with pictures of Ned Kelly. This is the kind of guy who in the USA would be waving Confederate flags at gun shows, an extreme Australian (and Irish) patriot. Now I understand a bit about the phenomenon of Ned Kelly as a folk hero.

Another bit of Australian culture I’ve come to understand a bit is the square-framed clothes drying rack which is a symbol and fixture of the Australian suburban back yard. When we arrived in town there was an art installation titled Hoist in Federation Square, which used one of these racks as a place to hang photographs and writings and included some projections, and since then it seems I keep running into them. Many (perhaps even most) Australians don’t own clothes dryers, prefering in this generally dry and windy climate to air-dry their clothes, and the apartment we were staying in before the convention included a single unit described as a combination washer-dryer but that was actually just a washer-spinner; we found that the load of wash we did right before shifting to the con hotel came out pretty darn damp. Lacking a hoist, or a yard to raise it in, we had to wait until we got to the convention hotel to hang the damp clothes from a line strung over the tub.

The convention has generally been running smoothly, though the program is in rather a state of flux. The biggest problem is that the party hotel (Crowne Plaza) decided at the last minute not to allow people to throw any actual, you know, parties. There are a few “meet and greet” events (not “parties”) in hotel public space but last night I found them pretty inhospitable and spent the evening in the Hilton hotel bar instead. Ditto this evening, until they drove us away with holy-crap-that’s-loud salsa music that started promptly at 10:00.

Going to bed now. Another exciting day of Aussiecon tomorrow.

Right after posting my last entry we headed to the Old Melbourne Gaol (misspelled Goal in some brochures), but on the way we spotted posters for the free exhibitions at the State Library of Victoria, including Ned Kelly’s armor (which is what I’d been hoping to see at the Old Gaol). We happened to get the benefit of an amusing pair of docents doing Good Cop/Bad Cop on Ned Kelly for a group of uniformed schoolgirls (though he was a common criminal, neither revolutionary nor Robin Hood, he is considered a folk hero by some Australians).

In the evening we took a tour bus to Phillip Island for the nightly Penguin Parade. This is a highly touristy event but it was recommended to us by our friends Paul and Debbie and we’re really glad we went. It was about two hours’ drive from Melbourne. You wait in these bleacher-type seats watching the surf as the sun sets, and just as it starts to get dark you see what looks like a whitecap slowly moving up out of the ocean and across the sand. As it gets closer the shimmering white blob resolves into individual birds: tiny one-foot-high penguins waddling as fast as they can across the sand. Once they reach the vegetation line they slow down and stroll as much as a kilometer up into the dunes until they reach their burrows and waiting mates, and you can walk along the boardwalk and follow them. They make a weird cawing trilling racket, and you can hear the tiny pattering sounds of their wet penguin feet on the sand. Yes, we paid good money to see penguins commute. But they were so cute!! Highly recommended.

The next day I got a long black (Americano) from the coffee bar in the hotel lobby and tried the “Tim Tam Slam.” The cookie just melted and I dropped it in the coffee. Might have worked better if the coffee hadn’t been so hot.

That day we had signed up for a Savannah Walkabout along with Seanan McGuire, two other fans, and four non-fans. The point of this expedition was to view Australian fauna in the wild; if this had been Africa it would have been a safari. We drove out into the boonies (passing through the small town of Little River, after which the band is named, to You Yangs Park and Serendip Park), viewing a billabong (Australian oasis) and many cockatoos, corellas, magpies, gullahs, and other birds along the way. In the park we were joined by a nature guide who had been out spotting koalas for us; she led us to three of them, munching contentedly in their trees. After lunch and the Billy Tea Ceremony (which consists of swinging the billy (kettle) rapidly over your head to settle the sediments) we went off looking for kangaroos and emus. (How to tell the difference between a kangaroo and a wallaby: if you see one by itself and it’s less than waist-high it’s probably a wallaby; bigger and in mobs are kangaroos. “We’re not a mob,” said Seanan. “We are respectable business marsupials.”) We stalked the wild kangaroo and emu all afternoon, sneaking to within good binocular distance of the kangaroos and closer to the emus. The kangaroos and emus hang around together; the emus, being faster, provide an early warning system for the kangaroos. The ‘roos watched us at all times while we were near, and when we got too close (or when, for reasons of their own, they decided to move) they loped gently and silently away. We also saw the skeletonized remains of a ‘roo, which Seanan found fascinating (but she did not wish on its paw; probably wise). An exceptional day.

Today we checked out of our pre-con hotel and met up with Murray Moore, Leslie Turek, Pricilla Olsen, Karen Schaffer, Mike Ward, Andy Porter, and others to visit Bruce Gillespie and Elaine Cochrane and their suburban home, cats, garden, and collection of Ditmars. Elaine fixed us a delightful lunch and we spent the middle part of the day smoffing and chatting about fanzines. Then we returned to Melbourne, dragged our bags over to the con hotel, and checked in. The brand-new South Wharf Hilton has a lot of dark wood and glass and feels like the Doug Fir restaurang in Portland. We met George R. R. Martin, Amy Thomson, and John Scalzi in the hotel lobby, and had dinner with Lenore Jones at Cafe Keyif across the river (“on the mainland” says Kate). As we were finishing up dinner, Doug Faunt came in and we chatted with him for a while before returning to our hotel. We didn’t manage to get registered at the con but our convention has already begun.

We didn’t take this picture but the penguins are that small, that close, and that cute

Jeanine, our guide for the Savanna Walkabout

Took this shot of some ‘roos through my binoculars

Emus and kangaroos together

Jeanine and emus

Seanan was thrilled by the dead kangaroo

We got closer to the emus than the kangaroos

We’re having a great time in Melbourne, but haven’t blogged because free wi-fi isn’t widely available. Today is Melbourne Day, the 175th anniversary of the city’s founding. We saw a couple of hot-air balloons from our 28th floor balcony this morning.

The flight to Australia was about as painless as one could hope for. We’d upgraded to business class using miles and got these great lie-flat seats. I slept about 7 hours and spent the rest of the time eating and working on my current YA SF novel (it’s not going well, alas). On the first day we managed to keep going until dark and then crashed at 8 or 9, waking up around 6 the next morning, so we’re working on approximately Australia time, which is not to say we aren’t suffering from jet lag. It’s hard to tell the difference between jet lag and fatigue from touristing too hard.

Melbourne in August reminds me a lot of Vancouver in November (though not quite so cold) — multinational, multilingual, multicultural, and subtly not-American. It’s a very civilized place, very walkable and well-supplied with trams, and the tourist info office in Federation Square is top-notch. Many fine cafes and shops and much cool architecture can be found in the chaotic network of “laneways” that fill the spaces between major streets. We also haven’t had a bad meal or a bad cup of coffee yet. Given Australia’s location it’s not surprising that there are a lot of Indonesian, Malaysian, Chinese, and Indian restaurants, also Bangladeshi and Nepalese. Many aspects of the language here strike me as a weird mix of American and British; for example, tickets are one-way and return (American: one-way and round-trip, British: single and return) and the Parliament consists of two houses called the House and the Senate. Australia also has its very own words for many things, such as coffee (a “flat white” is a latte with no foam, a “short black” a shot of espresso, and a “long black” an Americano).

So far we’ve been touristing around Melbourne’s central business district, including the Tim Burton exhibit at the Australia Center for the Moving Image (ACMI). Spending that much time in Tim Burton’s head was kind of disturbing. Also very cool at ACMI was their exhibit on the history of film and video in Australia, including some snippets of Skippy the Bush Kangaroo. That kangaroo could do some amazing things, including getting letters out of the mailbox and reading them — Lassie was a piker by comparison. Also on display: a replica of the Last of the V-8 Interceptors. Yesterday afternoon we took the tram to St. Kilda, a slightly shabby beachfront tourist town featuring keen little amusement park Luna Park. I can’t imagine how crowded it would be on a summer Saturday.

Random notes and pics:

• My god, the moon really is upside-down here!
• Both Sydney and Melbourne from the air are a sea of tight-packed single-family houses, with remarkable uniformity of roof (all hipped, all red-tiled).
• All my instincts about “what is that bird” are wrong. Both crows and seagulls look almost the same as back home but sound very different. Pigeons, though, are still pigeons.
• Fluffy gray-green eucalypts look like lichen trees on a model railroad layout.
• Vegemite spread thin on a toasted English muffin is actually quite nice. Tim Tams cookies also very nice; have not yet tried the apparently traditional “nibble off two opposite corners and suck hot coffee or tea through the Tim Tam” thing.

Gog and Magog in the laneways

This is not the entrance to the Tim Burton exhibit

This is the entrance to Luna Park

“A Little Song, A Little Dance,” a ghost story co-written with Andrine de la Rocha, will appear in charity anthology Breaking Waves: An Anthology for Gulf Coast Relief from Book View Cafe. It will be published very soon but I don’t know if it will be an e-book, hardcopy, or both. All the proceeds will go to help victims (people and animals) of the recent Gulf oil spill.

Also, take a gander at the fabulous cover for Wild Cards I, coming in November! Might be the best cover I’ve ever had.

So much to do before our trip to Australia, but we had a pleasant afternoon hanging out with our friend Nevenah from New Orleans, a nice surprise.

Have I mentioned I won’t get a Thursday this week? We depart the US on Wednesday and arrive in Australia, 18 hours later, on Friday. On the other hand, when we come home our flight takes negative 53 minutes.

The preliminary program schedule for Aussiecon 4 has been posted, and I’m on the following items:

Kaffeeklatsch
David D Levine
Thursday 1700 Room 201

I could do better than that
Whenever a Hollywood science fiction blockbuster enters cinemas, there seems to be a queue of fans lining up to complain how bad it is—and even that they could do better if put in charge of the studios. Here’s your chance: a team of panelists will lead the attempt to generate the better blockbuster: looking at Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace, Avatar and Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines.
Catherynne M. Valente, David D. Levine, Darren Maxwell
Friday 1300 Room 213

Readings
David D Levine, K. A. Bedford
Friday 1700 Room 207

To market: How to sell your short stories
Submitting a story to a journal, anthology or magazine might seem as simple as attaching a Word document to an e-mail and firing it off, but is it? How do you know the appropriate market for your fiction? How much is enough money to be paid for your work? How should you approach an editor? What are the dos and don’ts of getting published in the speculative short fiction marketplace?
Cory Doctorow, Robert Silverberg, David D. Levine, Angela Slatter
Saturday 1100 Room P3

The race to the Red Planet
Ever since the Apollo moon landings, it always seemed Mars was the next target for human space exploration. It’s been 41 years and we still haven’t been there. As the debate over a human mission to Mars continues, we ask the questions: should we go? What is stopping us? What will we need to do, and consider, to make a human mission to the red planet a success?
Kim Stanley Robinson, David D. Levine, James Benford
Sunday 1300 Room P3

Mission to “Mars”
In January 2010, Hugo-winning SF writer David D. Levine spent two weeks at the Mars Desert Research Station, the Mars Society’s simulated Mars base in the Utah desert. Although the Martian conditions were simulated, the science was real, as were the isolation, hostile environment, and problems faced by the six-person crew. Although his official title was Crew Journalist, he soon found himself repairing space suits, helping to keep the habitat running, and having interplanetary adventures he’d never before imagined.
David D. Levine
Sunday 1400 Room P3

The bioethics of terraforming
Let’s say we colonise Mars, and develop the technology to terraform its environment and create a warmer, breathable atmosphere for humans to breathe. Let’s also so that we discover bacterial life on Mars – life that cannot exist if the planet’s atmosphere changes. Do we have a responsibility to leave Mars intact, or simply try to save the bacteria the best we can. What are the bioethics of terraforming worlds?
Kim Stanley Robinson, James Benford, Sam Scheiner, David D. Levine
Monday 1000 Room P1

An everyday future: Including popular culture in science fiction
Most science fiction writers take care to present the broader culture and technology of their fictional futures – but what about the elements many writers forget? What is the media of the future like? What are the sports? A look at the everyday aspects of future life that can bring a science fiction world to life.
Paul Cornell, Gord Sellar, David D. Levine
Monday 1400 Room 219

I’m also listed in the preliminary program on panels The future of gender and sexuality, Music, movies and speculative fiction, The difficult second album: Middle parts of movie trilogies but I’ve had to drop those due to scheduling conflicts.

I’ve actually worked on the YA novel for three days in a row, which is a rarity so far this year. Unfortunately, most of today’s work consisted of messing with spreadsheets and Wikipedia to work out the calendar and timekeeping system of my fictional Mars settlers rather than any actual, you know, fiction. This is my comfort zone, to which I retreat when the writing itself is not cooperating. Oh well, it’s valuable worldbuilding and at least I typed it into my notes file rather than as yet another expository lump in the text which would eventually have had to be either excised or smoothed into the action.

Oh my gosh, we’re leaving for Australia next week! We have all of our hotels and internal flights arranged, and most of our major tourist activities reserved. Soon it will be time to pack!

Here’s our itinerary, in brief:

August 25-27: Fly to Australia.
August 27-31: Melbourne, plus at least one day trip out of the city.
September 1-6: Aussiecon 4 (68th World Science Fiction Convention), also in Melbourne.
September 7-9: Mungo Outback Journey at Lake Mungo in the Willandra Lakes World Heritage Area. Kangaroos! Emus! Cockatoos!
September 10-13: Adelaide.
September 14-16: Lady Elliot Island Resort on the Great Barrier Reef. Snorkeling! Manta rays! Sea turtles!
September 17: Hervey Bay. Whales!
September 18-21: Sydney.
September 22: Fly home.

For a change, we were in town for the weekend, and we decided to take advantage of the many fine activities offered by our own home town for a change. It was uncharacteristically hot all weekend but we made the best of it.

On Saturday we drove up to Mt. Hood for a tour of five cabins built by Henry Steiner and his family in the 1920s and 30s. Steiner himself hand-carved the massive hexagonal columns in the grand hall of Timberline Lodge, and he is also responsible for the Oregon Writers Colony’s Colonyhouse. These cabins on Mt. Hood share the same aesthetic and hand-built details that make the Colonyhouse so delightful. You can read an article and see some pictures of one of the cabins we visited, and a few small pictures of another.

Today the city closed a bunch of streets in our section of town to cars, an event called Sunday Parkways, creating a couple of bicycle-only loops and offering a variety of bike- and pedestrian-oriented activities. Kate took her bike around and had a grand time while I stayed home and did laundry and other chores. When she returned we went back out again to hit the Hawthorne Street Fair, our neighborhood’s annual festival of food, shopping, and face-painting (we saw Tina Connolly taking a breather from her day job). And of course, it wouldn’t be Hawthorne without a visit from the local unicycle-riding bagpipe player.

After a nap, we went downtown to the India Festival, which was hot, crowded, noisy, and otherwise completely authentic. We ran into an old friend, Keith Lofstrom, there and talked about novel methods of launching satellites into orbit while sitting on a park bench and eating delightful Indian food.

Then we came home to enjoy our air-conditioned house.

A rather ordinary day in some ways. But it’s ours.

I’m on an hour-and-a-half layover at the Salt Lake City airport, where there are little carrels with power outlets and free wi-fi. Why can’t all airports be like this? (Though, all in all, I’d rather have returned the way I came, via Seattle, which would have given me at least an hour less time in the air.)

The day started with the usual end-of-convention prepositions: get up, wash up, dress up, pack up, check out, eat up, and check in (for my flight). I bought my ticket from Alaska Air, but the flight is actually a Delta flight, and since Alaska doesn’t actually fly to Cincinnati itself I was unable to check in on the Alaska web site (which for some peculiar reason requires you to specify the originating city as well as the confirmation code). Fortunately, they gave me a Delta confirmation code as well and I was able to use it to check in via the Delta web site. But the boarding pass, when printed on the hotel’s printer, had its outer half-inch cut off and would probably not be acceptable at the airport. Grr. (As it happens I had to check a bag anyway, so it cost me little time to reprint my boarding pass at the gate. My bag, by the way, weighed the same 50 pounds as my Monster Bag from MDRS on the way out, but I seem to have sold at least 12 pounds of books at the conference.)

Having dealt with all that, I was only a bit late for the morning’s plenary session by David Chuss, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, about The Early Universe. Much of this talk was not new to me, but it’s nice to be reminded about what we know and how we know it.

He started with the earliest development of cosmology, going back to Tyco Brahe and Newton and the statement “Mathematics starts with a truth and looks at the consequences; cosmology starts with the consequences and looks for the truth.” Einstein’s general relativity implied that the universe was either expanding or contracting, not static, and he added a term (the “cosmological constant”) to get rid of that. Not too much later, Hubble’s observations of the apparent motion away from us of distant objects showed that the universe was indeed expanding, and Einstein took the constant back out, saying it was his “greatest blunder.”

So, astronomers reasoned, if the universe is expanding it must be cooling. This prompted them to look for the red-shifted light of the early, hot universe, but they were scooped by a couple of microwave engineers who were trying to track down the source of some interference in their antennas and wound up with a Nobel Prize.

NASA has launched several satellites to map this cosmic background radiation, with increasing detail and sensitivity, and they are telling us a lot about the early universe. This radiation is slightly uneven (anisotropy), which tells us that the early universe was lumpy; these lumps coalesced into galaxies, stars, and us. Doing a Fourier transform on this radiation reveals the power curve of the early universe, which (through math I have never been able to follow) explains where the fundamental particles like baryons came from and whether the universe is positively curved (closed, leading to an eventual collapse) or negatively curved (open, continually expanding). Weirdly, the data tells us the universe is exactly flat, which is unexpected and unstable (the slightest curvature in either direction will tend to increase). No one quite understands yet how this can be.

Recent observations of extremely distant objects reveal that they appear to be accelerating away from us — that is, the expansion of the universe is accelerating. This implies that the universe is mostly (over 75%) composed of “dark energy,” whose properties are completely unknown — all we can say is that it accelerates expansion. A negative value for Einstein’s cosmological constant fits this data, but we still have no idea what this might mean in real-world terms.

Careful examination of lumpiness in the cosmic background radiation hints that the very early universe expanded faster than the speed of light (“inflation”); we don’t know how this is possible, though perhaps in the first moments of the Big Bang the laws of physics had not yet coalesced into their current form. NASA is launching the Dark Energy Explorer and Webb Telescope satellites to investigate these questions.

In 1900 they thought 20th century physics would be boring, with only a few questions left to answer (the “ultraviolet catastrophe” and the presence or absence of ether). The search for answers to these questions led us to relativity, quantum dynamics, transistors, and GPS. We don’t have such low expectations today, but we know we will be surprised.

Kevin Sloan was up next, talking about the Mars Society’s University Rover Challenge, which is held each year at the MDRS in Utah (students participating in the challenge stay at a hotel in Hanksville, not at the hab).

The University Rover Challenge gives engineering students a concrete project that they can use to build skills, work in teams, and maybe win cash prizes. This year’s URC had 12 teams from 4 countries; 7 teams made it to Utah for the final trials.

We believe that astronauts will work together with various kinds of machine to amplify their abilities. Rovers can, for example, be used to perform tasks outside a Mars base without having to suit up. The rovers in the challenge are wheeled (or tracked) vehicles with cameras and a manipulator arm; they are remotely operated, not autonomous. This is an engineering design, construction, and operation challenge with no artificial intelligence component. Rovers are limited to 50 kilograms and must perform 4 different tasks (they can be reconfigured with different parts for each task, but no configuration can be over 50kg). Most rovers weigh in at right around 49.9kg, but one team was surprised at the official weigh-in and had to quickly strip the rover of unessential cameras and batteries to get under the line.

The four tasks are: Equipment servicing task: navigate to a panel, read the instructions posted there using the rover’s camera, and perform several tasks such as flipping switches and plugging in an electrical cord (this part was really hard, only the Oregon State University team was able to do it). Site survey task: find and survey several markers in a field, recording their coordinates with GPS-like accuracy. Sample return task: search for and return samples of biological interest, perform field analysis, and deliver field briefing to judges. This task requires engineers to work with biologists who are directing the work, rather than just drive and scoop. Emergency navigation task: cross difficult terrain, find a stranded astronaut, and deliver emergency supplies in less than 20 minutes. This one too was won by the Oregon State team. One of the Polish teams would have won the contest if they had gotten the full 100 points for this task, but their rover with its single camera was looking the wrong way and drove right past the astronaut.

We got a talk from the winning Oregon State team about their rover design and the lessons they learned from the previous challenge, which was very cool, but I’m running out of time here.

The final session I saw before departing the conference was Joseph Palaia from the NewSpace Center, talking about a planned “themed attraction” called Interspace. He said that the current wave of commercial space development is a “new barnstorming era” and very exciting, but direct participation is extremely expensive and the facilities are too isolated and not set up for the public. Current science and aerospace museums are focused on the past, not this new technology. Interspace is intended to be an interactive, immersive experience for tourists based on what’s happening now and in the near future in space. They have a 75-acre site in Florida, near the Kennedy Space Center, and are currently trying to nail down the $72 million they’ll need to build it. It looks like a lot of fun and I hope they succeed.

Then I drove to Cincinnati, dropped off the car, and flew to Salt Lake City without incident. At the moment it looks like my flight to Portland is about 15 minutes behind schedule, but I don’t anticipate any problems getting home. See you soon!