As everyone is busy wrangling whether the future of human spaceflight will be dictated by either the public or private sector, which destinations will be targeted, and which architectures will take us there- I’m going on record that all of this is moot for “human” spaceflight is going to take on this form of telepresence for the forseeable future.

Why?  Because it provides solutions to both problems which plague human spaceflight at present- cost and risk.  

Robots do not breathe, they do not eat, and they cannot die. 

However, while this has obviously always been the case, these points alone have not been sufficient in overcoming the fact that robots have also been slow, much less capable, clumsy creatures with little to no adaptibility.  Over the years as I heard stories of the trials and tribulations of Earthbound personnel working to resolve issues on distant robotic spacecraft I could not help but feel a sense of frustration.  From the Engineers in the 90’s attempting to use repeated fast-forward and rewind operations to free the frozen magnetic tape record on Galileo which had been continually bombarded by Jovian radiation to the Mars Exploration Rover engineers whom crossed their fingers for windstorms to clear the dust on the energy generating solar panels when a brief brush of a human hand with a broom would have more than sufficed.

Steven Squyres whom was made semi-famous (at least in aerospace circles) by the overwhelming success of the aforementioned Mars Exploration Rovers, famouly mused in an interview that despite the accolades of his robots, humans to Mars was a more desirable scenario for exploration because a human can accomplish in one minute what a rover does in an entire day.

Yet, huge amounts of capital have and are being poured into overcoming these limitations.  When I was in graduate school the mode of thesis presentations in the computer engineering field were in applications of remote sensing- working in harsh environments where humans cannot or prefer not to (due to cost and risk).  From unmanned aerial vehicles which can wage war wihtout the political and miliarial ramifications that come from the loss of a pilot to track-bound snowmobiles measuring the thickness of the ice shelf, there are many terrestrial examples of the rapid progression of this technology.  Next time CNN or Fox News shows a video clip of the Deepwater Horizon oil plume, take notice of the upper-left portion of the video feed and you will see the “name” of the submersible robot-worker, which without, the rate of the flow would not have been stemmed at all.

Jump back to Robonaut and you will see yet another leap in technology.  One in which the sensory data of the robot to a remote operator and the dexterity of a remote operator to the robot can be transmitted in a more accurate and complete form than ever before.  Increasing the ability and efficiency of these beasts while continuing the lack of requirements that come along with sustainment of biology.

In an industry where upmass is king of costs, if you can replace food, water, air, heat shields, parachutes (the robot isn’t coming home) and all the other environmental life control systems then you greatly reduce mission cost.  And loss of payload due to critical mission failure, while however unfortunate, does not carry the ramifications that come along with human passengers.

There will come a day when launch technology encounters a radical innovation that removes the exhoribant expense of putting mass in orbit, and when it does, humans in space will immediately become a more viable option.  But until it does, and we are relegated to riding a flame to orbit, Robonaut and his cousins are going to be the ones nestled underneath the nosecone.

Spam on blogs is completely out of control.  I’m talking- everyday is a Red Day. 

Initially, I had a forum enabled on the website which lasted approximately twelve hours before I had to disable it due to registration/comment abuse of the red-light district in Amsterdam variety.  Apparently the spammers have been busy over the years writing sophisticated bot-software which combs the Internet for form fields and proceeds to rapid fire information into the fields in hopes of publishing marketing links to genitalia growth products.

I had been reserved to manual acceptance of comments so that I could filter through them individually, but I should have some time this weekend to look into plug-ins which support “Captcha”.  In lay-mans terms, Captcha generates those squirrely looking, sometimes hard-to-read characters on websites that you then have to re-enter in order to prove that you are a carbon-based life-form.  This is purely speculative on my part, but it does seem that the spammers have even made strides against Captcha in recent years as it seems that the characters are growing increasing difficult to read over time.  So much so, that often times I apparently provide the incorrect response to captcha forms upon which it rudely clears all form fields.

I also have been busy working with my new Windows Home Server which was a Happy Birthday to Me gift.  It has a ton of exciting features, but one in which I am planning to also delve into this weekend is the Microsoft IIS server.  Windows Home Server comes with a web-hosting capability which is meant for remote access to the server, but could easily be extended to support general web-hosting.  As WordPress (this blog software) runs on Microsoft ASP.net, I’m going to attempt to transplant my blog from the godaddy host site it is running on right now to the Windows Home Server if my office for the sake of saving $5 / month.  If all goes well, come Monday, you shouldn’t notice any difference.

Hopefully my DSL can handle intermittent web hits without introducing dynamic latency on my Xbox Live connection.  :-p

Ah yes, THC.com has returned. After a long hiatus of disinterest by yours truly, I intend to re-launch THC.com with personal wisdom and insights in my journey that is my life.  Historically, (when I utilized the blog), it conveyed items of humor, often satirical, which then later evolved into simply a platform for communicating to friends and family during periods of unique interest (or perhaps meteorological distress).  I would like for THC.com to continue to provide the occasional tongue in cheek, amusing item, but moreover, I would like this to be a rather frank and semi-personal journal of sorts. 2009 has without a doubt been the most educational of my life thus far. In an effort to bring clarity to myself, I would like to attempt to capture and verbalize what I perceive to have been a great deal of wisdom that can be applied toward acquiring and maintaining happiness in life.

Now for the technical details.  You will probably notice a new look and feel to the website, hopefully you will find it improved over the original incarnation.  I have a new provider with a much more appropriate cost model with a slew of server side support that will provide me with a sandbox for toying around with new dynamic web technologies.  I’ve upgraded the blog itself from an ancient MovableType version to WordPress which greatly enhances the accessibility and maintainability of the blog.  I hope to continue to launch features on this, my personal site, as a launch pad and test bed toward technologies that will be applied elsewhere. I thought about changing the domain name given that it is, uh, setting specific, and may not be appropriate as time goes on, but more on that as time progresses and certainly a topic for future posts.  I would like the accessibility of the site to be enhanced and tied to my various social networking platforms, but upgrading the layout of the site is on the back burner and something that I will delve into as time permits.  Suffice it to say, that the social networking links will at some point in the future actually go someplace meaningful, but for the time being are simply placeholders.

So as the end of the decade approaches (I like the term “noughts” for the 00’s, let’s start a trend), I am looking forward to new chapters all around, and THC.com is no different.  For those that are reading- old friends, new friends, and potentially future friends alike, I look forward to discussion and interaction that will hopefully be fruitful and beneficial to each one of us individually.

Now, without further ado…