I was stumbling around with StumbleUpon, a Firefox extension that helps you discover some of the best websites and came upon this incredible long exposure of a shuttle launch.

You can view the photo here, it was taken over the course of five minutes. By leaving the shutter open and using film with low sensitivity to light you can achieve some beautiful effects. This one isn't just about the aesthetics, it's an awesome arc of light, but it also illustrates the whole launch process. If you browse the comments you will see Swedish visitor commenting on the color of the arc and how it actually tells us something about the steps of the launch. You can actually see the point where the booster rockets (SRBs) are dropped which is at an altitude of about 48 km. Now you got to take into account that the atmosphere will cause some distortions but it's still quite amazing watching a shuttle start from sea level and reach the thermosphere in such a short period of time. Speed is of the essence here since it has to be fast in order to reach escape velocity and escape most of the gravitational pull of Earth. Fact is even in orbit gravitation is in play, it's what's keeping the shuttle in free fall.

I hope I'll have the chance to watch a shuttle launch some time. I doubt I'll ever be able to go to space, I was born in the wrong age for that kind of stuff, but it's my dream to one day be able to see Earth from orbit.

Space has always been the playground of science fiction, it's where the wildest ideas can be tested, in space and in the future, in the unknown there are no known limits. I recently read Poul Anderson's Tau Zero, quite a brilliant piece of fiction even though the theories it's based on are over 40 years old by now. It's an interesting read, not just because of the role Sweden happens to play in it, the man had Swedish parents after all and seems to know more about this country's cultural heritage than I do, but it explores some rather fascinating consequences of the theories of modern physics. The core of it is about time dilution, i.e. the fact that time will stretch out as you're approaching the speed of light. It is a common element in modern SF but back in 1968 when it was written it was novel stuff. Recall humankind had never set foot on a foreign body until 1969.

In Tau Zero this idea of relativity is something Anderson successfully employs to drive the story forward as well as give the reader much reason to think about our own existence. What separates us is, in essence, not space but time, two which pardoxically are more or less the same. Time doesn't really exist, it's a result of human cognition, but in terms of relativity everything's relative and it's the relativity of the vast distance of the universe that is the true obstacle of space exploration. We're rather alone out here, and unless some ingenious engineer actually invents warpdrive, that wondrous FTL drive that would allow us to travel at c+ speeds (as an SF geek like me would say it). Unless some modern prodigy of physics creates it, any dreams we might have of ever building that galactic empire and not just spread like a thousands seeds of a civilization long gone and out of reach of each other, are, given Einstein's physics, nothing but stardust.

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