Rocket man

Dan Ruby

Dan Ruby, associate director of the Fleishmann Planetarium and graduate student in UNR’s college of education, is among 26 educators to be accepted to conduct research on NASA’s Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy (SOFIA). SOFIA is a Boeing 747SP outfitted with a 100-inch diameter telescope, allowing astronomy educators to participate in intense, detailed research alongside NASA astronomers.

How did you hear about this program and what made you want to apply?

A friend of a friend was a flight engineer on this project, and this friend sent me this notice, so I kind of filed it away with every other NASA notice I get. But I thought, oh that looks kind of cool, that could be kind of fun. It could be fun getting to fly, but also getting, like, a flight jacket and a mission patch would be cool. Then I realized this was a fairly intense application process. … You have to have a teammate, and my teammate is Matt Oates at Dilworth Middle School [STEM academy]. He’s a guy I know that I thought might be interested. We had to put together an education plan, because it’s not just about teachers having fun, that’s not the point. It worked out pretty well because we get a lot of field trip visitors here [at the planetarium], like 10-15,000 kids each year come for field trips, and that’s a pretty good captive audience that I get to talk to about this stuff, and we get a ton of public visitors too. NASA is very interested in middle school kids, and getting middle school kids interested in science, so that they become high school kids interested in science, and then college kids interested in science. So we did it and got selected. … We’ll be airborne astronomy ambassadors.

So you’re not quite going into space, just pretty close, right?

No, it’s just a 747. We’ll go around 40,000 to 50,000 feet, around the same elevation as most commercial carriers. But with the telescope we’ll be able to see things really clearly.

What is the training process like?

I’m not exactly sure since they just let us know a few weeks ago that we were in. we got a bunch of packets in the mail, like cool

Vonnegut by way of hard bodies

After seeing that an estimated 36,000 people floated by JoePa’s casket last week in Stepford Valley, Penn., I’m once again reminded that if we Americans could somehow harness just one-tenth of the energy that we expend on our national religion (football, baby!) and divert that energy towards the building of better, stronger and more cooperative communities from coast to coast, we’d probably be real impressed. Just a hunch.

And after slobbishly dialing up TMZ so I could feed upon the latest prurient blab about who’s having sex with whom, I’m once again reminded that we Americans—well, I’m sure this is a cultural plague in Iceland, Spain, and Brazil, too—but goddamn, we sure appear to be completely strung out on gobbling up the latest scuttlebutt about which nice-looking celebrity is having intercourse with which nicelooking hard body. I mean, how many people are out there in the great wasteland thriving on the vicarious thrills generated by these up-to-theminute boinking bulletins?

packages of stuff of all the stuff we have to do. We have to take grad courses on astronomy, and that’s this semester, which is kind of crazy because that’s like, work, and I’m already taking other classes so it’s like, wow, a bigger course load. But I think the credits will actually count toward my degree, so that’s good. But that’s pretty intense. And you know, regular teleconferences, and there’s going to be some week where we have to go and do light instrument training, and then we go on an overnight flight. … We’ve got to take a week off to do the mission part of the program, and then classes this semester, and then another year to do our education plan for it.

So if you fail your classes, will they not let you fly?

Well, no, but at this point, no one is going to fail. It’s an astronomy class for educators.

What do you hope to bring back to your work at the planetarium?

The thing is focusing on what is intrinsically interesting about that experience, which is infrared astronomy. And you can learn a lot about how the universe is made up with those instruments [telescopes]. So it’s a way to talk about that and just add that personal touch like infrared astronomy is cool, airborne astronomy is cool, and I know because I did it. … We want the kids to focus on space. It has to be the science that’s cool, and just the neatness of the universe. Ω

Whatever the answer to that question, I’m positive it’s an absolutely awesome number that indirectly reveals that Kurt Vonnegut was on the right track when he wrote in his nifty novel Galapagos that the planet itself was in great peril because there were all these creatures with these huge and dangerous computers in their skulls, about 7 billion at last count, and they were just positively running amok with self-absorbed desires directly connected to either their (a) guts or (b) gonads. They needed to literally devolve because their behavior was utterly controlled by these outlandishly complex chunks of gray matter that were just too much, too wild, and too fucking crazy for Mama Gaia to tolerate any longer. And it took a few generations, according to Kurt, but the problem eventually got fixed in a most clever and humorous way.

Speaking of blab, there’s been much of this ever-cheapening commodity generated lately on the hot potato topic of the Keystone XL pipeline project, the one that would bring a nearly bottomless stream of tar sands to the oil refineries of America. In the midst of this particular blabstorm, someone asked a simple, direct question.

“Why not build refineries in Alberta, where the sludge could then be processed and this pipeline talk made moot?” Good question.

The instant nutshell answer is, of course, money. As usual. Duh.

Estimates now holding serve say the pipeline project would cost $7 billion. Meaning it would probably top out at about $12 billion. To build the refineries necessary to deal with the massive volume of goo (think cold molasses) getting scraped out of the mighty Athabasca lode, it would, say the oil giants, cost $15-20 billion. (How many billions? Are you serious? Come on!) So anyway, there ya go. The discussions and arguments are all online, but don’t bug me about that stuff because I gotta find out why Heidi and Seal are getting divorced, and just where did it all go wrong