I woke up this morning to several pieces of cool news, including great new national polling numbers for Obama and a story about how Barack and Michelle Obama will receive the Jerald Washington Memorial Founders' Award, the highest honor given to advocates of ending veteran homelessness. "Barack Obama is the first person -- in history -- to receive the award more than once.". This is in contrast with Republicans, who are ASSHOLES that voted last week against a bill that would have helped war veterans find jobs. The choice really is clear, but I digress...
Another unexpected and unrelated piece of coolness came by way of a DYNOMITE schematic discovered by a MAKE Magazine journalist after a ten-year search, a flowchart that just might be the world's most amazing graphic organizer + roadmap to space colonization by humans: Rockwell's Human Integrated Space Plan.
The thing is massive, so you need to download the PDF to zoom in enough to read the thing. I recommend you print it out on 11x17 (or larger) paper to take it all in.
In the context of the newly-discovered secret JFK tapes recorded by the young president himself, this diagram provides a fascinating lens into the mindset and technocultural optimism of late 20th century America. Speaks JFK, in 1960, candidly, of the space program at the time, regarding getting to the moon:
"This is important for political reasons, international political reasons, and for, this is, whether we like it or not, a race. If we get second to the moon, it's nice, but it's like being second anytime... the policy ought to be that this is the top priority program of the agency and one of the two, except for defense, the top priority of the United States government...
We're talking about fantastic expenditures which wreck our budget... the only justification for it, in my opinion... is because we hope to beat them and demonstrate that starting behind as we did, by a couple of years, by God, we passed them."
Nine years later, of course,
we did it (unless you're a tinfoil-hat wearing right wing conspiracy theorist troll, that is). Sadly, the young President didn't live to see his vision realized, but the impact of our lunar landing is still on full display five decades later, with our successful deployment of MARS Curiosity Rover and whatever
fun things we may find on the red planet evidence that humanity's spirit of exploration is not dead.
Anyhow, the schematic was made in the 1980s by a large, Fortune 50 company by the name of Rockwell Industries (no longer in business), and the document is detailed as hell. Sadly, we are woefully behind the imagined timeline, in part because we're not investing enough in the kind of educational and technological brain capital that it takes to make warp drives and such, and simultaneously in part because the GOP's disastrous policies of unpaid wars, unpaid tax cuts for the rich, and shortsightedness on healthcare spending have pinned such a large bill on our national tab that cuts to NASA have been largely unavoidable.
If you need a dose of optimism to kickstart your week, download the Human Integrated Space Plan now. For a fun conversation about the thing, visit Metafilter here.
Bonus: For a double dose of human awe, if you missed this AMAZING xkcd panel from last week, go play with it immediately. It will bring back waves and waves of childhood-class nostalgia as you click-and-drag and discover all sorts of cool little references and other hidden things.
Now go vote for Obama on November 6. Who knows, maybe we can catch up to 2100 after all.