Birding in the South Pacific

The South Island of New Zealand, has long been home to a beautiful black and white cormorant with the cool name of Otago shag (Leucocarbo chalconotus).  Birders and scientists wondered for a long time whether a mistake had been made in the 1800s when classifying the birds as one species: there were differences in plumage, skeleton, and more.  In 2016, the record was straightened out by naming  the Foveaux shag (Leucocarbo stewarti).  

By some estimates, about two-thirds of new vertebrates come from museum drawers or reclassifications, rather than being newly identified in the field. That doesn't mean we are not still spotting new ones all over the place - just less often, in fewer places, than in the last century.  The Australian snubfin dolphin and Omura's whale are recent reclassifications of large to VERY large animals, and orcas of course continue to drive cetologists to distraction: there may be ten valid "ecotypes," which may or may no be species or incipient species.

Speaking of new birds and wonderful names, the birds of paradise have captivated humans since earliest times (which included some later times when ladies wore them for hats, not a good deal at all for the birds).  Anyway, over in New Guinea in 2018, a new species was identified by, among other things, having a different courtship dance than the bird it had been lumped in with.  From the west end of the island, in an area known as the Vogelkop ("Birds Head") region, the Vogelkop Superb Bird-of-Paradise has been named.  The original species, the Superb Bird-of-Paradise, also got an upgrade to make the names more distinct, to the Greater Superb Bird-of-Paradise. Those are pretty fancy labels to live up to. I hope the birds are polishing their dance steps.

Link above is on this bird is to Science Daily: The original journal article is 

Edwin Scholes, Timothy G. Laman. Distinctive courtship phenotype of the Vogelkop Superb Bird-of-Paradise Lophorina niedda Mayr, 1930 confirms new species status. PeerJ, 2018; 6: e4621 DOI: 10.7717/peerj.4621 

Why ARE whales that big?

This fascinating bit from Dr. Nick Pyenson in the New York Times explores why whales, which have an earliest-known ancestor not much bigger than my dog (although probably less neurotic) became the giants they did.  We're generally conditioned to think of giants as things of the past (e.g., dinosaurs), but whales are the biggest they've ever been.  Dr. Pyenson believes whales exploded in size (cue joke about that exploding sperm whale in Taiwan) when the first Ice Ages changed the way their favorite prey was distributed, concentrating it in warming waters and essentially giving them such a buffet that limited food was never a factor. (See the study he and co-authors did on that here.)
So could they get bigger? He thinks not, citing studies indicating that the biggest blue whales are about as big as they can get and function physiologically. I think of airplanes as an analogue: you can design a 1,000-ton airplane, but the limits of materials, potential maximum engine efficiency, and so on mean you couldn't build a workable example. 
Pyenson also notes whalers cropped the biggest giants for a long time, and modern species might be a BIT smaller than they might have been.  While some big whales are doing ok, some are not (big animals are more likely to get hit by ships, caught in fishing gear, etc.)  and smaller cetaceans are still in serious trouble: one example, the little porpoise called the vaquita, is facing extremely steep odds of survival after a captive breeding venture failed and  the population has  been estimated as low as 12. We can still save most species, if we choose to.

Smallsat Conference is coming

A highlight of the year for me (when I get there: I can't always make it) is the Conference on Small Satellites, held in August at Utah State University in Logan, UT.  For over 25 years, this meeting has gathered the experts in smallsats, microsats, and nanosats from around the world.  
Microsats (to lump everything under one name) were tiny scientific or amateur satellites until the 1980s and early 90s, when advancing technology and funding from DARPA sparked the first wave of new applications. The MacSat-2 that delivered logistics orders to and from a Marine force in Operation Desert Storm was an example.  Today, there are applications for licensing for constellations totaling (this is not a misprint) 18,000 satellites.  High schools around the world have build CubeSats, those endlessly useful 10cm-cubes.  Continuing technical advances are behind this (ask any engineer in the 1990s if it was possible to get 3m imagery from a 5kg satellite: they would have laughed at you) and don' show any signs of hitting a wall.    
So I'll be there this year, talking about the use of microsats as a possible solution for improving the tracking of whales.  It will, I'm sure, be a lot of fun. It always is.  

Army SMDC communications microsat (5 kg) 

Zanzibar leopard: Extinct or (maybe) alive?

The new TV show "Extinct or Alive" has apparently bagged its first big finding: that the Zanzibar leopard, presumed extinct, is still around. Here's a story with video clip.  Host Forrest Galante thinks the small island leopard is what was filmed - a leopard imported from the African mainland would be bigger. 
That puts "Extinct or Alive," in its first season, way ahead of "Finding Bigfoot' which taped 100 episodes without finding - well, anything. Every finding of a presumed-extinct species is a little bit of hope when we are living through Earth's sixth mass extinction.  (Elizabeth Kolbert's superb book on the big picture of this ongoing catastrophe is here.)  

What's on Mars? not life - yet

We have not discovered life on Mars. But we've discovered a tantalizing mystery - or mysteries - that need solutions. 
First, NASA has confirmed that Mars does have a methane cycle. On Earth, that's connected to the existence of of quintillions (or whatever) of living organisms, from microbes to roses to whales, doing their things as they respire, pass gas (yes, that definitely matters if you have enough life forms, which we do), dump waste, and die. The Martian cycle is far less robust, only a whisper of Earth's you might say. There are non-living processes that could be involved, but the LACK of a cycle would most likely mean there is no present life analogous to Earth-type life.  
Second, Curiosity, the not-so-little rover that could (we tend to think of it as desk-size, but it is in fact the size of a small car and weighs 900kg), has drilled into the surface and uncovered complex organic molecules.  Again, these are not by themselves proof of life, nor are they unquestionably endemic to Mars (they could be deposit from a meteorite or comet strike), but they are what we would find if microbial Martians had been - or still were - buzzing about under the surface. The source rocks, in the Gale Crater, are believes to be about 3 billion years old. 
There were preliminary discoveries on both these topics made in 2014, but this, to scientists, is much stronger evidence, derived from different locations, and basically the exobiologists are partying hard.  To them, the $2.5 billion dollars spent on this mission has been justified a dozen times over. 
Fingers crossed.
Below: NASA images: Curiosity: Methane cycle with possible inorganic and organic sources.  

Denver ComiCon looks great this year

Yes, it's time for Denver ComiCon, 15-17 June at the Denver Convention Center.  

I will be on two great panels 

Letters Written from Hell - The Horror Writing Process — Friday 1:30pm - in Room 405 (DeAnna Knippling (MOD), Emily Godhand, Matt Bille, Shannon Lawrence)
Creating Believable Monsters — Saturday 12:30pm - in Room 405 (Veronica R. Calisto, DeAnna Knippling, Sue Mitchell, Emily Godhand, Matt Bille (MOD), Shannon Lawrence)
(PANELIST NAMES NOT FINAL)

NASA and other have science/education panels, with scientists and SF writers interacting in some.  DCC is very education oriented, and there are educational programs and an award for Educator of the Year, 

See you there!

Review: The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs

The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs: A New History of a Lost World

Steve Brusatte
William Morrow, New York, 2018. 404pp.

In Rise and Fall, the latest in dinosaur science is presented in a highly readable science book doubling as a rip-roaring adventure tale. The story of dinosaurs, not just as fossils but as real animals, is masterfully presented here by paleontologist Steve Brusatte.  I've been reading dinosaur books for 50 years (they were, literally, the first books I ever read), and this volume belongs on the desk of every dino-lover.

The first thing Brusatte does, superbly, is to put the dinosaurs into context. From the end-Permian extinction through the first phase of the Triassic period, the dinosaur-to-be lineage was one of several vying for dominance, and not as the favorites. Dinosaurs ascended through adaptability and luck, radiating into niches all over Pangea. They left the sea and, initially, the sky to reptilian cousins, but their dominance of the land became absolute. As the world transformed several times over the next 150 million years, the dinos changed with it. They developed thousands of species (a new one is described, on average, every week, one of many things I didn't know before reading this book), culminating in the monstrous predators like T. rex and the stupendous sauropods of South America that grew longer than blue whales. In modern-day China and elsewhere, they also produced relatively tiny forms that adapted to flight and endured as birds.  Brusatte interweaves his science with dramatic tales of the great adventures and colorful lives that unfolded as people sought out new fossils and argued over what they meant. We also meet today's leading dinosaur palentologists in quick, incisive sketches that explore the frontiers of dino-science.
T. rex is the only dinosaur that gets its own chapter (and why should it not)? Brusatte weighs in on the controversies over whether T. rex had feathers and whether it hunted in packs, arguing for "yes" and "yes." (Also, did you know young rexes grew at the rate of 5 pounds per day? Neither did I.)
At the end, he takes us on a harrowing journey with the last dinosaurs as they watch death bloom from the sky.  Brusatte mentions other theories about dinosaur extinction but is adamant the global disappearance of fossils in the same era, geologically speaking at the same moment, is decisive.
The author reminds us repeatedly that dinosaurs are not merely skeletons or film stars (taking several shots at Jurassic Park along the way: indeed, he's a little too harsh, given the modern dinosaur-science revolution was far from mature). They were dynamic, evolving, living, breathing animals that ruled the Earth for a thousand times as long as modern humans have been dominant. The science will continue to evolve, but it's hard to imagine a better treatment of dinosaurs in a mere 350 pages of text is on the horizon. 

Alan Bean and Sally Ride

Today we say farewell to Alan Bean, aviator, moonwalker, and artist, dead at 86.  The date also reminds us of the loss of his fellow explorer, Sally Ride, who would have been 67 years old today. 

Bean, uniquely among the moonwalkers, was an artist in his space time. After retiring from NASA, he took up painting full-time.  John Glenn said, "He saw the same monochromatic world everyone else did. But he, with his artist's eye, was able to see the intrinsic beauty." I won't post any images of his paintings here, due to copyright, but they are amazing, many with the marks of the rock hammer and a mold of a boot he wore on the moon.
See them on his website here. 
His NASA biography is here.
Sally needs no introduction: the first American woman in space, and the first woman ever whose flight was earned and not a propaganda stunt (with all due respect to the courage of the two Soviets who preceded her, they were sent up to upstage rival America.)  Post-NASA, she dedicated herself to science education and died of cancer in 2012.
Her official NASA biography is here.

With apologies to Willie Nelson:

My heroes have always been astros
And they still are, it seems
Forever in search of
And one step ahead of
The world and its best hopes and dreams.

The monster waves are out there

A century or so ago, scientists were skeptical about sailors' tales of truly enormous waves. They're not skeptical today: there are debates about just how high waves can get, but no doubt that monsters can lurk in the oceans.  

An instrumented buoy just recorded a wave almost 24 meters (78 feet) high in the Southern Ocean some 700 km south of New Zealand. This was the largest wave ever definitively measured in the  Southern Hemisphere.  As with most such waves, it was formed in a storm, where the complex mathematics of wave science show the occasional monster arises when the force of several waves combines into one.  The sailors' saying that every seventh wave is a giant hasn't been borne out by science, but there's a titanic amount of energy in play.  By the way, the popular term "rogue wave" doesn't have a precise definition: according to NOAA a rogue wave is any wave that's  "large, unexpected, and dangerous." 

Swordboat captain Linda Greenlaw once wrote that "What's the biggest wave you've ever seen?" is a dumb question because captains are a little busy during big-wave conditions: they just divide sea states into "'This sucks" and "This really sucks." Nevertheless, the biggest wave on record was measured with surprising calmness and precision.  This king of waves was spotted in 1933, when officers on the bridge of the oiler USS Ramapo triangulated a wave at 112 feet (34.1m) from trough to crest during a severe Pacific storm. This wasn’t a wild guess: as laid out carefully in the captain’s account, it involved a bridge officer sighting a horizon-filling wave dead astern and lining its top up with a boom on the mainmast. It sounds clinical, but it must have been terrifying even to a 477-foot ship. (Given the conditions, the measurement was still not "exactly exact," and the wave may have been a few feet shorter - or taller.)

A 90-foot-ish wave was photographed crashing over the deck of the supertanker Esso Languedoc in 1980. The wave that hit the RMS Queen Elizabeth II during a hurricane in the Atlantic in 1995 was estimated at 95 feet (29m). In 2000, the British research ship RRS Discovery measured a wave of the same height in the Atlantic west of Scotland. A few years later, the RMS Queen Mary took a hit from a rogue wave estimated at 92 feet high. In 2004, Hurricane Ivan fostered a wave in the Gulf of Mexico that, according to pressure sensors deployed by the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory, was in the 90-foot range. 

Many huge waves are seen but unmeasured: famed explorer Ernest Shackelton, in a small vessel in the Southern Ocean in 1916, saw a wave so large  "I called to the other men that the sky was clearing, and then a moment later I realized that what I had seen was not a rift in the clouds but the white crest of an enormous wave. During twenty-six years' experience of the ocean in all its moods I had not encountered a wave so gigantic. It was a mighty upheaval of the ocean, a thing quite apart from the big white-capped seas that had been our tireless enemies for many days. I shouted, 'For God's sake, hold on! It's got us.'" They survived, barely.

Waves that strike a seaside cliff or lighthouse will wash much higher than the wave's actual height, making the wave size a guess, but it must have been an extraordinary wave  that hit the Eagle Island lighthouse off Ireland in 1861. According to contemporary claims, the wave smashed windows 66m (220ft) above the normal sea level, 40m of which was a cliff and the rest the lighthouse itself. A wave hitting the Fastnet Lighthouse in the same region in 1985 splashed 47m (154ft) above sea level. 

Waves not born of storms can become huge, too, mainly in certain areas of the world where bottom topography, shorelines, and/or reefs can concentrate incoming water. One such place is Nazaré in Portugal, where last November a Brazilian surfer named Rodrigo Koxa rode a 24.4 meter (80-foot) wave. There are requirements for photography and documentation for official records, and Koxa's wave is the largest ever confirmed as such a record even though there are online videos claiming to be of larger conquests.  Surfing legend Laird Hamilton rode a wave at Cortes Bank in the Pacific he told author Susan Casey (see her book, The Wave) looked to be not only past the 100-foot mark but closer to 120 (36.5m), but there were few witnesses and no photographs. 

Fortunately for mariners, the 200-foot (over 60 m!) waves described in the Preston-Childs thriller The Ice Limit don't exist, despite those authors' normally praiseworthy efforts to put in correct scientific detail.  It's hard to imagine they could, given the sheer mass of water that would have to pile up and the force or gravity tearing it down.  But we used to think 112-footers didn't exist, either. 

(The Ramapo account is from Lt Cmdr R.P. Whitemarsh, Proceedings, August 1934. Reprinted in Gardner Soule, Under the Sea, Meredith Press, NY 1968)

Kangaroo rat un-extinct

When scientists suspect an animal has gone extinct, they desperately hope they are wrong.  Sometimes, happily, they are wrong. No one had seen the ridiculously adorable San Quintin kangaroo rat (Dipodomys gravipes) of Baja California since 1994.  About 12cm long, it was a once-populous species ground down by habitat destruction and other factors until there wasn't anything left of it. 
Now we know they are still there, thanks to four specimens trapped in 2017.    It's good to have the little critter hopping around in the desert again. 

Thanks to the PPWC Staff and Guests

The Pikes Peak Writers Conference is in the books, as they say, and I'm prepaid for next year (as always).  We had a great time with new friends, old friends, and guest faculty. The speakers were all excellent. As for personal high points, well, three publishers asked to see the manuscript of my current novel, Apex Predator, and two agents are looking at queries.  Not bad.  Onwards!

#PPWC2018

Thoughts on Lake Iliamna

Lake Iliamna, Alaska, is the size of Rhode Island and at least 250 meters deep.  It has the largest salmon run in the world, is still so isolated no roads lead to it, and has seven times the volume of Loch Ness.  It would be surprising if such a lake did not have "monster" stories surrounding it, originally told by the Alaska Natives (Tlingit, Dena'ina, Yup'ik, and others) who have lived there for centuries beyond count.  What's interesting is that its legend is unique. Iliamna (despite one fakey YouTube "monster" video) is not claimed to have the plesiosaur-like monsters of other lakes, but a colossal fish.   It's probable this legend (well fortified by modern sightings) concerns an undocumented population of white sturgeon, but it's impossible for us romantic natural history types to avoid speculating on what else it might be.

For details, see this article by yours truly. 

Images of Lake Iliamna taken by University of Washington scientists 

The white sturgeon (a baby: they approach 4 meters long and maybe even 5). US FWS photo

Lake Iliamna monsters? (low-res version of image provided by artist Bill Rebsamen for my book Shadows of Existence)

Kicking off the Pikes Peak Writers Conference

OK, Jim Butcher had to cancel, but a great cast of editors, agents and speakers are here. I'll put away my Harry Dresden duster and staff until Denver ComiCon. If you're in Colorado Springs, PPWC is THE annual event!

2017 with agent Donald Maas (dressed as the "story hook').

Dropping in on the Space Symposium

The Space Symposium (formerly the National Space Symposium) comes to Colorado Springs every April. The gathering, arranged by the nonprofit Space Foundation, has become enormous, filling all available space (hah-hah) at the extensive (and expensive) Broadmoor hotel/resort/convention  facility on the city's southwest corner. The 34th Symposium brought VP Mike Pence, who talked about the Administration's commitment to human spaceflight and to a bigger role for commercial firms. It brought in space leaders, public and private, from all over the world, and a galaxy of generals, who talked in frank (VERY frank) terms about their views on the perceived need to prepare to defend space assets and access in a realm that was no longer a sanctuary.  
I wasn't there the first day, but on the second and fourth days (when I visited the Exhibit Hall a lot: attendance to the main sessions is pricey) I saw zero protesters, which was odd. The  groups nervous about increased military presence in space group (whose concerns I understand but whose targeted train may have left the station already) is a fixture. There's usually a dedicated handful of die-hards sticking it out the whole way through, sometimes with a guitar-bearer doing 1960s and 1970s protest songs. (Side note: My dad, who is in his 80s but has never stopped singing Pete Seeger-style music in Seattle, feels no one has written a really good protest song since the 70s.)  Acting NASA Administrator Robert Lightfoot, who will FINALLY be replaced with President Trump's choice after a one-vote Senate confirmation, was there of course.
The person most prominently NOT there was SpaceX's Elon Musk.  Indeed, SpaceX had no exhibit space, no meeting rooms, nothing.  That is, in a sense, the kind of prominence SpaceX has achieved: if you want to talk, you go to them.  We can't all be Tony Stark and run into him in a restaurant. I wonder if Musk feels he can't really be productive at these things because his celebrity status warps the time and space around him to create his own gravity field, the way Stan Lee (alas, it seems, no more traveling) did at a ComiCon.  
The exhibit space was stuffed with everyone else, though, from giants like Boeing and Lockheed Martin to startups, some of them just making a better cable or release bolt and some with eye-opening stories, like small-booster makers Rocket Lab and Firefly and Earth-i's newest video observation microsatellites.  
It was an eventful, event-filled symposium, and next year is already being organized. See y'all then. 

Photographic high points

The Naval Research Laboratory showed off their Poppy electronic intelligence microsatellite from the early 1960s. This was a classified program for decades, and this is the first time I've ever seen one. 

Gil Moore, still going strong at 90, was on the Viking booster and Vanguard satellite programs in the 1950s and continues his work on the student built Project Starshine.

\

The Vanguard satellite, launched in 1958 (the original remains in orbit). Its contribution to the larger Poppy satellite above is obvious. 

Fun with Megalodon: First Trailer

Well, the trailer is out for The Meg, and I'm not sure what to think.  The summer blockbuster-to-be from Steve Alten's novel could be a fun monster movie, like King Kong, or it could be a suspenseful undersea adventure movie, like the Abyss, but the American trailer (I've heard there's another for Europe that emphasizes the suspense side) looks like it's trying to get both audiences, which is very hard to do well.  (The original Jurassic Park hit the sweet spot of suspense and fun, as did Jackson's Kong: the recent American Godzilla was visually amazing but didn't quite get either side right.)  We don't see any discussion of the science in the trailer, but that's okay: no one went to Kong expecting scientific explanations, and indeed not a word was said about it on screen.

What I like:
They gave up on the movie's glowing albino shark (even if that's possible, it says to prey "here I come!") and basically did a giant great white shark, which is fine: no one knows exactly what Meg looked like, thanks to the very limited fossilization of any cartilage-based skeleton. 
There's a giant squid in it.
The underwater lab and submersibles look cool.
The trench ecosystem, possible or not, looks cool.
The Shark Week joke.

What I don't:
The shark looks different sizes in different shots.  This problem plagues giant-creature movies going all the way back to the original King Kong, but Peter Jackson's Kong shows you can do it right. (Maybe they couldn't get Andy Serkis to play the shark.)
Statham/Jonas (again, just from one trailer: he might be much better in the film) looks tough but  humorless and not very interesting.
I don't think the ecosystem shown at great depths is possible, or that the shark could survive the trip to surface waters.  To be fair, both these things have to be assumed: there's no other way to make the story work. 
I hate Beyond the Sea.

We'll see if the movie hits the spot or jumps the megalodon (I wanted to be the first to use that line.)

New Marine Reptile ALMOST Jurassic World-sized

The shark-eating mosasaur in the film Jurassic World, while accurate in some particulars (like the shape of its teeth) was ridiculously oversized.  It was supposedly about 15 short tons in weight, or the size of two average T. rex adults (discussion here), but that seems very inadequate for the size of the thing shown in the film, which I'd guess was well over 30 meters (m) (100 feet) long.  A blue whale that size would likely be pushing 150 metric tons (mt). The biggest mosasaurs known were about 18m (huge!) but not like that.
Anyway, National Geographic News reports we have a new contender for biggest fossil marine reptiles.  It is one of the icthyosaurs, which look like a bit like obese giant dolphins with an extra pair of flippers toward the rear. The newest fossil jaw, from Somerset in the United Kingdom, compared to the jawbones of more complete icthyosaur specimens, indicates an animal of just under 26m (85 feet)!
Dr. Darren Naish, a paleobiologist I know who is quoted in the article, is a cautious man when it comes to claims of gigantic prehistoric beasts: he has argued strongly that estimates of 27m for the giant fish Leedsichthys and 18m+ for the pliosaur called the"monster of Aramberri," are enormously overstated.  However, he agrees the estimate for this titanic icthyosaur looks correct based on the jawbone, which is nearly a meter long. (Darren knows icthyosaurs: for one of his related posts, see here.)
If the article writer is a little overenthusiastic in comparing the animal to a blue whale (a blue whale over 33m long is on record) it is nevertheless an awe-inducing creature. The new species (unnamed at present) was apparently larger than the biggest predator now living anywhere, the sperm whale.
So that will do fine as a monster.

Icthyosaur (copyright unknown)

Sitting down with a student of cryptozoology

Colin Schneider, an avid young cryptozoological researcher also known as "Crypto-Kid," will get this science writer's take on his topics in a live interview 8PM EST Monday.
https://www.wcjvradio.com/broadcast-schedule.html

Thanks for a great interview. It's archived on the wcjv site. We reviewed cryptozoology in general and two of Colin's favorite subjects, bears (we probably have all the species, although Asia is a little muddled) and cetaceans (we almost certainly don't have all the species.)

Today's Quotes: William Beebe

Charles William Beebe was most famous for his pioneering descents in a bathyscaphe (his best known book is called Half Mile Down)  but he had a very long career as a writer, naturalist, and conservationist as well as an explorer. He was born in 1877, at the end of the great age of naturalist explorers, and lived to see the first humans orbit the Earth.  A few of his thoughts: 

• The beauty and genius of a work of art may be reconceived, though its first material expression be destroyed; a vanished harmony may yet again inspire the composer; but when the last individual of a race of living beings breathes no more, another heaven and another earth must pass before such a one can be again.
• These words should be ready for instant use by every honest scientist➖ 'I don't know.'
• To be a Naturalist is better than to be a king.
• The isness of things is well worth studying; but it is their whyness that makes life worth living.

Beebe has a somewhat controversial record as an observer of marine life in the deeps, having reported several fishes, some of them spectacular, no one else has been able to find.  His greatness as an explorer and his impact as a scientist, though, will live on forever. 

Book Review: Live from Cape Canaveral

Live from Cape Canaveral: Covering the Space Race from Sputnik to Today
Jay Barbee
Smithsonian, 2007, 336pp.

Jay Barbree, one of the first radio reporters to focus on space and a correspondent on that medium as well as TV for 50 years, had a front-row seat to much of the American program.  It's a fun read, but I wanted to like it more than I did.
Despite the book's adequate length, it feels like the reader is on a rushed tour bus, hitting the highlights with some pauses for personal interludes.  Barbree came to know almost everyone in the space program, and he offers interesting anecdotes involving the astronauts in particular.  He humanizes these larger-then-life figures well, although almost nothing is said of their families.  He offers some poignant moments preceding and surrounding the Apollo 1 and Challenger disasters.
Barbree comes across (it is, of course, his book) as a guy you'd like to sit down with and just talk, maybe for days. He clearly admires space exploration in general and the astronauts in particular. The reader can share his disappointment in fighting hard for the first "Journalist in Space" slot only to have the project canceled, and his account of his own heart attack and near-death is harrowing.
There are just too many inconsistencies and omissions in here to make the book a great one. Barbree messes up the the nomenclature of Soviet launch vehicles. He tells the Skylab program story in two paragraphs, never once mentioning the near-disaster and superb salvage efforts involved. (Granted, this book is not meant as an exhaustive history, but here was a great achievement Barbree helped cover, by men he thought of as heroes, and not a word gets in.) 
Barbree condenses John F. Kennedy's decision to commit to Apollo into three lines of dialogue in one meeting, when it was an extensive process that involved non-space options like ocean desalination as national objectives as well as the two main space options (Moon or space station).  Weirdly, he re-creates a conversation where he (Barbree) says, years before the  decision was made, that Armstrong was "destined" to be the first astronaut on the Moon. He credits Reagan's SDI with ending the Cold War by bankrupting the USSR: I agree in part, but it was infinitely more complex than that, and no single cause dominates all the others.   There are no footnotes or references: Barbree of course had his own material built up over decades, but as his version of events (like those leading up to Apollo 1) sometimes conflicts with other sources, I'd like to know which broadcasts of his own, which NASA documents, which interviews, etc. supported important points.
I grew up watching the Apollo launches from our home in Florida, and I was excited as any kid could be. Barbree, at that point a veteran with many years of reporting under his belt, clearly had, and kept, the same kind of fascination.  His account of covering the space program is valuable, but it could have been better.

Farewell, Stephen Hawking

Dr. Stephen Hawking has passed. His was a mind that transcended Earthly limits to probe the universe, theorize how it came to be, and make it all at least somewhat understandable to the rest of us. 
He is probably right now saying to God, “I know you think that’s how you created the universe, but the mathematics are incorrect, so you must have done it this way.” 
If he was not the infallible giant that myth and The Big Bang Theory made him out to be, nor perfect as a human being, he was nonetheless inspirational, a man who showed the world what a great mind can do regardless of a failing body. 
Ad Astra, Doc.