Confirmed: Shears, a “deft touch”; KiTE, a “rollicking sci-fi”"

According to this reviewer. And of course we would tend to agree.

KiTE book blog tour schedule

Haven’t read KiTE yet? What are you waiting for? KiTE is hard sci-fi with heart. Check these sites for reviews, a Shears interview, commenting and at least one giveaway at these book-loving blogs, starting about now and ongoing for a few weeks:

KiTE: Hard Sci-Fi with Heart

3/19 The Book Connection (Interview)
3/21 Designs by DeDe (Scrapbooking site? Hey, why not?)
3/23 The Bec-ster
3/24 Elizabeth Mueller
3/26 Husband and wife tandem reviews. Should be interesting: I Am  A Pistacio and Syncopated Musings
3/26 A Writer’s Eyes
3/26 J. Lloyd Morgan
3/30 The Musings of a Hopeful Writer
3/31 Karen Adair
4/1  Why Not? Because I Said So.
4/2 My Life in a Laptop
4/4  mormonhermitmom’s book habit
4/11 T.J. Types TMI
4/15 A Bookworm’s Tale

Reviews with no schedule, which like Billy Pilgrim, will be unstuck in time:

Azurescape
Critical Mass
Rememorandom
The Atomic Spud

KiTE: Make your own bookmarks

JPG suitable for printing. Right-click and Save Image as…Enough KiTE bookmarks to last you a lifetime. If you live longer then just print another one. KiTE is a novel set in Earth orbit starring Mason Dash, operator of Kite, Janet Dash, his genius AI researcher wife and Sheila, his beautiful virtual assistant. More information here.

Kite bookmark sheet

The Beekeeper – Short Story

Posted on ScriptD:

The Beekeeper is satisfied to tend his hives and live his life after getting bounced by his rival at a high tech mega-corporation until he’s called upon to go back up into Earth orbit. A mysterious unaccounted-for supply pod is returning to intersect the orbit of the new space casino. The Beekeeper is the only one, on the planet or off, who can deal with it.

NASA issues future space tech RFI

Anyone planning to respond and cite KiTE as a source don’t forget about proper attribution. Possible techs from this prescient comedy to include: energy-agnostic launch method; space junk detection, slicing, dicing and processing; “BIC” reusable orbit booster modules…and more!

Space sails to combat fight future debris

Here’s a team in the UK with a technique for clearing space debris. It’s not meant to clean up existing junk; but when deployed at the end of the orbital life of a new structure this CubeSail will provide drag  in the micro-atmosphere of Low Earth Orbit and hasten and control its descent.

But a good idea for a business.  They may sell a lot of space sail.

“That dirty lousy Oort Cloud. I hate it.” – Mason Dash, operator of Kite

Keeping earth orbit clean is (will be) Mason Dash’s job. So of course he wouldn’t be too keen on some invisible brown dwarf 25,00o AUs out, dislodging comets from the Oort Cloud. Could be. Sounds like an Invisible Sun to me, though, as predicted by The Police.

Hey, and can we get some “closure” on the dinosaurs, please?  They’re gone, okay? Why they’re gone is a matter of some interest, but does it have to come up in every story about asteroids or comets?

An invisible sun isn’t interesting enough?

Ever wonder what $6 billion worth of smoke looks like?

You’ll see on until Tax Day April 15 at the president’s Space “Summit”.  Skip the moon we’re adding some pocket change to the funding to zoom right out there to the…well, to the moon! And, oh yes, the asteroids, because that’s a spacey sounding word.And then evennnnntually…back to Mars. Mm hm. It would be back to Mars because as I’m sure the administration’s crack space advisers have told the summit organizers, Mars’ orbit is closer to Earth’s than the Asteroid Belt. 

The President’s ambitious new strategy pushes the frontiers of innovation to set NASA on a more dynamic, flexible, and sustainable trajectory that can propel us on a new journey of innovation and discovery.

Catch that? Pushing the frontiers of innovation to propel us on a journey of…innovation!

And of course it all must be sustainable. A word that is already has the early lead as the decade’s most meaningless.

Is it political at all? You bet your retro rockets it’s political.

Florida’s Kennedy Space Center, like Houston’s Johnson Space Center and Alabama’s Marshall Space Flight Center, face thousands of threatened layoffs from Obama’s decision to end space shuttle operations at the end of the year and scrap NASA’s $108 billion back-to-the-moon Constellation program.

But it is the swing state of Florida that is getting the president’s attention, not perennially GOP states like Texas and Alabama.

“The Obama administration could care less about offending Texas politically,” says Larry Sabato, a political scientist at the University of Virginia.

Earth from Space: Images from 1946 to present

NASA releases the clearest composite picture of Earth ever taken. Assembled from images taken by the Terra satellite. The Daily Mail story includes a retorspective of Earth images from outside the atmosphere, included the first, taken from 65 miles up by a camera on a captured V-2 rocket.

ISS’s Picture Window

The latest module added to the International Space Station has a cupola with as much glass as has ever been fitted to a space structure. The hexagonal blister allows a wide of the station and Earth below.  The article implies that it could be the start of a trend. Well we’d sure hope so.