Posted 9:34 PM by Angie Schultz

The Exotic Sounds of Exotic Exotica

A while back I bragged about my Christmas presents (at least, that's what it sounded like when I re-read it), especially a book called Exotiquarium, which billed itself as "Album Art from the Space Age", but concentrated more on the musical styles that were popular (in an "exotic" sort of way) during the early fifties to late sixties.

Well, reading Exotiquarium made me very curious about the music. In particular, I was curious about the styles that used "exotic" wooden instruments and cowbells and whatnot. Although I figured the probability was kind of low, I wondered whether this music would be anything like, say, Robert Rich's Rainforest, which is an "ambient" (or New Age, if you must) album of rather tuneless music that uses a lot of unusual instruments and a non-traditional tempering scale ("just intonation") which is Rich's pet project. I like it a lot, but it's music meant for an audience much different than the ancient hipsters the Exotiquarium albums were geared toward.

But, I got a Barnes & Noble gift certificate (Christmas gift from my parents) burning a hole in my pocket, so I figured I'd give some of these artists a try (after a precautionary listen to the sample clips, of course). Therefore I ordered

The Exotic Sounds of Arthur Lyman

Tamboo!/Skins! by Les Baxter.

The Exciting Sounds of Martin Denny: Exotica/Exotica II

Afro-Desia: The Exotic Sounds of Martin Denny

plus a couple other non-exotica CDs.

(I'm sending you to B&N, rather than Amazon, because they let you listen to clips of all the tracks on most albums, whereas Amazon usually has just a few.)

The first thing that strikes you about this music is how well you know it. This sound has been underneath countless TV shows, movies, filmstrips, and commercials. I'm pretty sure I've heard "Maracaibo" (on the Les Baxter CD) used as "bustling city" music somewhere. When I first heard the Arthur Lyman CD, my heart skipped a beat: I knew where I'd heard that before.

When Rhino Records first began issuing episodes of Mystery Science Theater 3000 on tape, it came with a Rhino commercial at the beginning. They had a bunch of odd characters wandering around in the desert, mock-pretentiously declaiming the goodness of Rhino:

When old age shall this generation waste
Thou shalt become the bastion of taste
Rhino rocks my world

And underneath this was a tune with tingly vibes and funky percussion. I'd never heard anything like it before, but I liked it a lot, and wondered what it was. I figured they'd written it for the commercial (never think this, by the way), and that it was unlikely I'd hear it again. But there in Arthur Lyman's music was the exact same sound. There were a lot of pieces like it, but none that was exactly right. Then when I got around to listening to the Martin Denny Exotica album, there it was: "Love Dance". Which, according to Exotiquarium, was written by Les Baxter and covered by Arthur Lyman on his Taboo 2 album (which I don't have yet). I'm pretty sure "Love Dance" also ran under the trailer of the film I Shot Andy Warhol, which I saw approximately a zillion times on repeat trips to see Mystery Science Theater 3000: The Movie.

Now when Barnes & Noble sent these CDs, for some reason they were sent from different locations, so that four of the CDs were shipped together, and the other two shipped from somewhere else. The first to arrive was the set of four, which included Martin Denny's Afro-Desia. When I listened to it, I decided I was not going to like Martin Denny.

Afro-Desia has a lot of strange sound effects and screaming. I listen to instrumental music while I'm working, and I can't work when there's a damned tsetse fly buzzing (throughout most of "Tsetse Fly"). (Also, as Niles pointed out, "Tsetse Fly" should end with a loud SLAP! Got the bugger!) It's also difficult to concentrate when people are shouting in my ear in fake (maybe) languages. The shouting is supposed to evoke African chants, but it's cringe-inducingly phoney. I wanted to shout myself: "You're white people living in the whitest decade in the history of mankind! Cut it out, you're embarrassing yourselves." On "Mumba", there's a high-pitched yell which sounds exactly like a redneck imitating an AME preacher. ("Mumba" and "Ma'chumba" are the chief culprits on this album. "Mumba" contains shouts of, well, "MUMBA!" which reminds me of the old joke whose punchline is "Death by BOOKA!")

[I was going to go into a major digression here, but instead you can find it in a future post. Maybe.]

However, when Martin Denny's Exotica/Exotica II arrived the next day, I was reassured, There are still bird calls---far too many bird calls for my taste---but the ersatz African had disappeared, so that was all to the good.

These three groups sound very much alike, but there are differences. Arthur Lyman leans heavily on vibes, which is a bit unfortunate because it has the effect of making all the songs sound somewhat the same. Martin Denny (Lyman started out as his vibe man) has a somewhat smoother sound, except for the frequent birdcalls. Les Baxter is the smoothest of all, and many of his songs include a chanting chorus. They don't even try to sound African; any halfway decent volcano-bearing movie from the '40s and '50s---maybe a Hope and Crosby "Road" picture or an exotic Abbott and Costello---will have some homogenized chanting by what sounds like the Lemon Sisters. That's what Baxter's chorus sounds like, and even though it's not remotely authentic, it sounds better than the stuff on Afro-Desia. I find it very soothing. Lyman's album also has some muted chanting, but pulls it off much better without sounding like the Lemon Sisters at all.

[When my Atlantis aliens movie is made, there will be a lot of Lemon Sisters-like chanting during the human sacrifice scene, you can count on it. UPDATE: How convenient! Les Baxter has a chanting Lemon Sisters tune called "Atlantis" on the Ultra Lounge Mondo Exotica CD. (See end of post.)]

I suppose I should say something about the songs themselves, but I don't know enough about music to do so, and by and large they sound so similar as to flow into one another. I like that when I'm working, but others might find it boring. Les Baxter's Tamboo! is a bit less bad about this: the songs on that album include "Maracaibo", "Tehran", "Havana", "Mozambique", "Rio", and "Zambezi", and there's at least a suggestion of the namesakes about each one (though both "Maracaibo" and "Havana" sound like '50s New York to me). I particularly like the Middle Eastern sound of "Tehran", harking back to the time when the name Tehran evoked images of picturesque squalor and sharp-dealing rug merchants, rather than crazed jihadis.

The Exotic Sounds of Arthur Lyman is billed as a combination of Yellow Bird and Taboo, but there are only about six songs off of those two albums on the CD. The album Taboo has exotica on it, while Yellow Bird contains more mainstream fare, such as "Autumn Leaves" and "Arrivederci Roma". Besides "Yellow Bird" itself, the only other cut from Yellow Bird on The Exotic Sounds of Arthur Lyman is "Hava Nagila". That's a great song, but this arrangement sucks the blood out of it---it's "Hava Nagila" for the Lawrence Welk audience (and boy oh boy is that a spicy tune for them).

I am told that when I was a small and fussy baby, I would immediately grow quiet and listen when "Yellow Bird" came over the radio. I don't know what attraction it had for the baby me; the adult me thinks it's not really special.

"Quiet Village" is the tune that hit the top of the charts for Martin Denny, and it's on the Lyman CD. I don't think it's much special either, and am a little mystified at its appeal (maybe it was the bird calls). On the other hand, I liked most of the other songs, especially the haunting "Taboo" (for the first two minutes, until the drums take over), "Moon Over a Ruined Castle", and the rather odd "Aloha Amigo", and many more. I'm keen to get the full Taboo, but I think I'll leave Yellow Bird until I've collected Lyman's available exotica.

Cool Denny songs include the somewhat cheesy but fun "Hong Kong Blues" (now stuck inside my head) and "Similau" (which is an instrumental here, but has beautiful lyrics).

I like the Les Baxter sound best, but this CD is half taken up with Skins!: Bongo Party with Les Baxter. The words "bongo party" make me reach for the phone so I can schedule a root canal instead. Drum solos, it turns out, are just as annoying in '50s exotica as they are in rock and roll. I definitely do not recommend listening to this half of the album when you have a headache and are trying to typeset a mathematics appendix. Fortunately, there are only a couple songs which feature All Bongos All the Time; the rest are accompanied by other instruments. The album includes three bonus tracks, of which one is "Unchained Melody", which I think is the only real vocal number on the album. Perhaps you did not realize that the prelude (or whatever it's called) to the song has lyrics too: "Unchain me, unchain me, unchain me, unchain me..." over and over again. This is such an impossibly passionless version that you wonder how the song ever got unchained long enough for the Righteous Brothers to come across it.

Anyhow, this music's really cool. I look forward anxiously to getting more. (One 1996 Les Baxter CD is already scarce and apparently sells for around 100 bucks, which is way more than his 1950s vinyl albums are going for. I hope I can buy my favorites before they go out of print.)

LATE UPDATE: Bought the Ultra-Lounge Mondo Exotica CD, which is a nice sampler of exotica, containing many songs on my other CDs. Has Yma Sumac singing "Babalu" and "Wimoweh". I don't like Sumac's voice; I think she tries too hard. But I never knew "Babalu" was such an interesting song; I thought it was an I Love Lucy punchline. "Wimoweh" is clearly the precursor to "The Lion Sleeps Tonight". Some background on that here. There's also a song called "Alika" by Webley Edwards, which is the only tune which contains a Hawaiian slack key guitar, and therefore the only one that sounds like what most people think of when they think of Polynesian music.

Some exotica links:
Savage Rhythms: reviews of several exotica albums available on CD.

The Exotic World of Les Baxter
The Temple of Martin Denny
ArthurLyman.com

Space Age Pop pages:
Les Baxter
Martin Denny
Arthur Lyman

Don Tiki is a Hawaiian band that plays exotica. Their site is entirely Flash-driven, so you primitives without it can get used to being have-nots in the Flash-enabled global marketplace. Can you spot the virgin?

They have two CDs out, The Forbidden Sounds of Don Tiki, and Skinny Dip with Don Tiki. From what I can tell from the clips, they sound real good. There's more singing (especially on the latter album) than on most of the exotica I've listened to so far.

Posted 1:24 PM by Angie Schultz

Nebulous Knowledge

Well, this is annoying---er, I mean---cool. This is really cool:

Julian W. McNeil II, an amateur astronomer from Paducah, Kentucky, reports the appearance of a new cometary reflection nebula 1.1 arcminutes in diameter in the Lynds 1630 cloud in Orion. The nebula was found on several images taken on 2004 Jan 23 UT with a 7.6-cm Takahashi refractor + CCD, and it is not present on seven sky survey images from [several sky surveys] taken between 1951 and 1991. Coordinates for the new optical nebula are: R.A. = 5h 46m 14s, Dec = -00d 05.8' (J2000). McNeil's Nebula is apparently associated with IRAS 05436-0007, which consequently may have erupted.

(Sorry, the source is classified.)

Get that---McNeil's Nebula. An amateur astronomer gets a nebula named after him, in a very well-studied part of the sky. Ordinarily you have to be a guy like, well, Lynds, who did a big survey of dark clouds way back in the Paleozoic. (1962, actually, and Beverly Lynds was a woman, and so not technically a guy.)

McNeil has a labelled picture of his nebula here. It only looks tiny---that's a big field. Note the two stars apparently close together to the left of the new nebula.

Here's a pretty color picture of a much larger field which contains the nebula. It's hard to find, not least because the picture is rotated 90 degrees (er, I guess) clockwise from the other. You see the big blue-white blob of M78. Just above it is a chain of blobs, which sort of terminates in a yellow star. The very faint blob just to the left of the yellow star is the HH object labelled in the B&W phot, and the next blob as you go to the left (and down a little) is McNeil's Nebula, with the two stars beneath it (looking like one star here).

One of the sky surveys mentioned in the secret source is here (assuming that works). (This is POSS I R, for those of you playing along at home.) M78 is off the top of the field. The yellow star mentioned above is at the bottom, and the thing that looks like a crossbow is the Herbig-Haro object. If you follow the axis of the HH object, you run into those two little stars again, but you don't see McNeil's Nebula. This picture was taken in the 1950's---a long time ago, but astronomical objects don't usually change greatly in a timescale like that.

The secret source goes on to say that professional astronomers have confirmed this discovery, including the fact that it's visible in the infrared. Well, let's see if an infrared survey caught it. I checked the 2MASS database, but couldn't get a static URL for my results. I couldn't see McNeil's Nebula in any of the wavelengths (1.2, 1.6, and 2.2 microns), though it could have been there a little at the longest wavelength. You can also see the field in their color composite of the M78 field here (WARNING! 4.5M image!). M78 is in the middle of the field; McNeil's Nebula should be in the lower right. The fuzzy blue blob is the star beneath the Herbig-Haro object, which is the yellowish patch above the blue blob. Above and a little to the left of the HH object you can see the two stars I mentioned above, and to the right of them (and down) a yellow star. That's the star that accompanies McNeil's Nebula. You can maybe sort of see the beginnings of a whispy patch which may be the nebula itself.

So apparently the nebula (or rather, its exciting star) has brightened since this image was taken (probably in 1998, that's when the individual wavelength images---that I couldn't link to---were taken).

Note that the patch of red and yellow blobs below the fuzzy blue blob does not appear in McNeil's image. That's because his is an optical image (that is, usingvisible light), and that object is so obscured by dust that visible light can't get out. The very bright star to the right of the red and yellow blobs appears in McNeil's image, but it's (comparatively) much fainter in visible light.

Anyhow, congrats to McNeil for a really cool discovery. And to think, some people go to the trouble of getting PhDs and never get an object named after them.

Posted 8:45 PM by Angie Schultz

Copenhagen

For three years, we lived inside the atom.[*]

When you're a physicist, you stand in the cold shadow of gods. Not just Newton (distant from us now) and Einstein (who was sui generis), but men like Pauli, Fermi, Schrodinger, Heisenberg, and Bohr. From the late 19th century to the middle of the 20th, these men revolutionized physics, and the world. At the end of the 19th century, many believed that we were approaching the end of physics, that soon we'd know all there was to know about the way the universe worked, and there were only the details to be worked out. (Or, I should say, we knew most of what we could know---for example, how could we ever hope to discover the nature of the stars?) And then Max Planck looked into a little problem of the way in which hot things glowed...and the world was changed.

Much of the groundwork for modern physics was laid in the twenties and thirties in Europe, especially in Germany, by a group of brilliant men (mostly men) who collaborated closely with one another. That was a heroic time, when vast, previously-unknown layers of reality were exposed---a new wonder found under every rock.

And this Age of Legends culminated, in a way, with the creation of the atomic bomb. The mind of Man started with some mathematical equations and and primitive experiments and, in a few short years, was able to tap one of the fundamental forces of nature. This was an almost magical act, like a fairy-tale wizard summoning the lightning.

Physics students read these tales of old with awe, marvelling at the time of intellectual ferment and flowering, imagining themselves in the role of the gods and heroes in some future physics revolution.

Or maybe that's all horseshit. Maybe it's just me.

This is all leading up to the fact that Niles and I went to see the play Copenhagen at the Main Street Theater in Houston last night. Copenhagen, by Michael Frayn, centers around Werner Heisenberg's visit to Niels Bohr in Copenhagen in 1941. Bohr (a Dane) and Heisenberg (German) were two of the giants of modern physics; Heisenberg had worked for Bohr in Copenhagen, and the two had been working together on and off for nearly twenty years, and were good friends.

But in 1941, Denmark was under German occupation, and Heisenberg was head of Germany's nuclear weapons program (not that Bohr knew that). Their meeting would've been awkward in any case, given the political situation; Bohr didn't want to be seen to be "collaborating" with the Germans. But Heisenberg had something urgent to discuss with Bohr. Fearing that Bohr's house was bugged, they took a walk in the open, just the two of them, and had a discussion which is mysterious to this day.

It evidently involved the progress (or lack thereof) of Germany's weapons program. Bohr returned early from the walk, greatly agitated, and Heisenberg left soon afterward. What did Heisenberg want from Bohr? Did he want Bohr's help on a physics problem? Did he want to pass information to the Allies? Did he want to reassure them that he would ensure Germany would not get the bomb? Or did he want to suggest to Bohr that the two of them had the ability to slow down any research on the weapons, preventing anyone from having them?

The play begins with the ghosts of Heisenberg, Bohr, and Bohr's wife Margarethe, hashing over the visit once again. These are the only three characters in the play, and they're all on stage the entire time. Sometimes two of the characters discuss things, or one has a soliloquy, while the other[s] stand[s] aside silently. Margarethe is there to have an excuse for the men to tell their history again, and as a layman to explain the science to, since they'd hardly need to tell or explain to each other. The narrative wanders back and forth across time, from the ghosts' discussion in the present to the meeting itself in the past, and at either time the characters are liable to lapse into a flashback on some other event.

They talk about physics a lot, and use various phenomena as analogies for their own behavior. For example, the two-slit experiment, which shows that an electron goes through two slits simultaneously (because it's a wave), seems to be related to the choices people make in life. For example when skiing, it might be deadly to think about which way to turn when encountering an obstacle. You can swerve right, you can swerve left, or you can stop to think about it, and die. (This isn't a particularly good analogy with the two-slit experiment, by the way.)

Another theme is the drowning death of Bohr's oldest son Christian, at the age of 18. They were out sailing together when Christian went overboard, and his father couldn't save him. They live those moments over and over again, relating Bohr's failure to save Christian with his failure to "save" his other "son", Heisenberg.

In the end, they never conclude what it was that Heisenberg wanted. Bohr (in reality) ought to know, but in the play it's as if Heisenberg started to say something and Bohr fled in anger (or terror), and Heisenberg was never able to explain his mission. (Bohr is also painted as rather forgetful.) Now Heisenberg can't remember. He keeps offering explanations, but can't settle on one.

As a play, I enjoyed it, rather unexpectedly. Most reviews I've seen fasten on the explanation that Heisenberg wanted to keep Germany from having the bomb, and for that reason I was prepared to be displeased, but the play doesn't go that far. Towards the end, there seems to be an assumption that of course making the bomb was immoral. Bohr tries to minimize his part in it, and his wife tries to assure him that he had done nothing wrong. I don't think the historical Bohr believed he had, although after the war he, like many who worked on the bomb, promoted some very naive (translation: dumb) ideas for international control.

The play is certainly very talky, and often the characters argue---about history, philosophy, physics. Sometimes their arguments are pointless---as when they argue who it was that Bohr "shot" with a cap pistol---and then the play gets a bit tedious.

The Main Street Theater is a theater in the round (only it's a rectangle), and very small, so you're close to the action. Their set for the play was simply three ordinary wooden chairs, which the characters keep rearranging, sitting in, and bouncing out of, and a floor painted with very inaccurate copies of illustrations from physics textbooks, among other things. (Their two-slit experiment in particular was very mangled; they had one slit behind the other! Maybe it was some subtle dramatic license thing.) Even though I was in the back (third) row, I found the setting too intimate, and with no scenery or other characters to distract me, discovered I could not watch the play except by focussing on the lights, or the floor. I could barely stand to look at the actors, out of some vague sense of embarrassment.

I was surprised at the amount of physics in the play---which is accurate from what I can remember---and the emphasis on it. I would think a lot of people would be quite lost.

For me, it was like being a member of a small tribe who suddenly sees their richbut obscure mythology made into a movie. Or perhaps like someone whose father took part in a thrilling but little-known battle, which is then made into a movie. With every scene you find yourself nodding, "I remember that!"; remembering, of course, Dad's war stories, not the actual events. When a name is mentioned you know not only the name but the history, significance, and fate of the name. And no one else in the theater does.

(After a bit, though, it begins to sound a little bit like name-dropping: Schrodinger, Einstein, Fermi, Pauli, Ehrenfest, Goudsmit, Uhlenbeck, Dirac, Frisch, Peierls, Hahn, Meitner, Gerlach, Jordan, Chadwick, Kramers, Wheeler, Born, De Broglie, Casimir, Landau, Gamow, and Oppenheimer are all mentioned at one time or another.)

Niles, also a physicist, was bored. He is not as steeped in the lore as I am, and he wanted there to be a point to the play, an ending and a conclusion.

So what was the point of Heisenberg's visit? He told Robert Jungk, author of the book Brighter Than a Thousand Suns (and an anti-nuclear activist), that he had gone to try to convince Bohr that they could work together to slow down the research into atomic weapons. But apparently he told various people different stories at different times.

Because of the interest aroused in the matter by the play, the Bohr family authorized an early release of a draft of a letter Bohr wrote (but never sent) to Heisenberg after reading Heisenberg's quotes in Brighter Than a Thousand Suns (Bohr's papers are scheduled to be released in 2012). Bohr remembers that Heisenberg told him that Germany's victory was inevitable---possibly telling him about the nuclear weapons work as proof---so that Bohr and his institute had better start collaborating with the Germans. This wasn't so much a threat as an effort to forestall future threats from the German government.

Apparently the play has been made into a movie. If we'd known that, we probably wouldn't have gone to the play.

Epilogue: Bohr's mother was Jewish, and in 1943 he was slated to be arrested and probably deported. He and his family were smuggled to neutral Sweden (this is mentioned in the play). After Bohr reached Sweden, a disarmed Mosquito bomber was sent to take him to Britain. There was no room for passengers, so Bohr had to ride in the bomb bay. The oxygen mask they gave him was too small for his big ol' head, and he passed out from lack of oxygen. When the pilots couldn't raise him on the intercom, they hurriedly descended to a more congenial altitude, and had to fly on to Britain at that altitude, at an increased risk of being shot down. Bohr was delivered safely in the end. (This part isn't mentioned in the play, more's the pity.)

[*] A line from the play, one of the few that I thought was beautiful in its own right. Heisenberg is remembering his awe at H.A. Kramers, who was Bohr's assistant (a much grander position than it sounds) when Heisenberg was a grubby lecturer in Cophenhagen. The lecturers had crummy offices, while Kramers had an office adjacent to Bohr, "like a single electron with its nucleus". Then Kramers moved on and Heisenberg became the assistant, and "For three years, we lived inside the atom." (I can't find that this is exactly historically accurate.)

Posted 9:14 PM by Angie Schultz

To Boldly Stay Home in Bed

Lileks kicks the crap out of Patrick Stewart, because Stewart opened his mellifluous piehole to hock up some Rocks Have Rights vomit about how space travel is "arrogant" and how we shouldn't mess up the nice clean universe until we've learned how to keep our beds tidy and our shoes shined.

Lileks begins:

Great job, Pat! Nice of you to wad up all the goodwill you've accumulated and flush it down the toilet.

But this is nothing new for Stewart. Back when ST:TNG was about to launch, Paramount (or some associated entity) put out a press package, which included a few quotes from Stewart. When he was asked how it felt to be playing an American icon, he said something along the lines of (and remember this is a paraphrase from a badly-decaying memory): An American icon? What do you mean? Oh, yes, there was a previous series called Star Trek; I'd almost forgotten. And that was iconic? Do tell. You know, I find it quaint that you Yanks have heroes still. Most other cultures have outgrown that.

Well, as you might imagine, this was a less than auspicious way for the new series to begin, so Paramount (or whoever) rushed out a new press release with a more pallid, though palatable, quote.

Sorry I cannot be more explicit. This would have been in '85 or '86, not only before the Web, but when dinosaurs still stalked the Earth. It was in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, probably in Eric Mink's TV column. I am geek enough to collect Star Trek clippings, but if I kept that one, it's somewhere in storage at the moment.

(Actually, here's a Stewart interview with the "Cranky Critic" which backs up the first part of my recollection:

Cranky: When you were offered the part of Picard, you knew that you were offered the opportunity to create what could become an icon...
Stewart: [surprised] I did? I knew that?

Cranky: You had no idea that Trek was what it was?
Stewart: No idea. Believe me, I was an absolute innocent. My kids had watched it. I'd heard some of these phrases but I had no idea of the role that it played in the contemporary culture of North America. Or indeed worldwide, though, since it's become bigger since then. When I was offered the role I was staying in the guest room of a friend's house in Los Angeles. When I came back that night he had stuck on my door a little note which said "Can I be the first to congratulate the new American icon?" I didn't know what the hell he meant by that.

So at least it's true that he didn't know, when he auditioned, about the power of Star Trek and in this ill-conceived press package he was rather dismissive of it.)

I seem to recall that Mink wondered what chowderhead had allowed the original to go out, and figured this did not bode well for the new series. I was very disappointed.

But, as we all know, the series did not suck. Though it didn't recapture the beloved spirit of the original (for me, anyway), it was in many ways better than the original, and so lumbered on for seven years, occasionally bad, occasionally brilliant, usually good.

And I agree with Lileks: if all those shiny-souled actors like Stewart are so concerned about the problems down here, they can give up their ludicrously-inflated salaries to fix them. Whenever someone tells me that it's stupid to waste money on space, I always wonder if they're the kind of person who thinks baseball players are underpaid, or will fork out a wad of dough to see Britney tongue Madonna.

(Yeah, yeah, I know, free enterprise and all. I can dream, can't I? I dream of of a world where space exploration has all the money it needs, and Janet Jackson has to pay people to look at her personal hardware.)

Posted 8:17 PM by Angie Schultz

Hubble Updates

Here are a few updates on the situation with Hubble. Events are moving faster than I have been able to post. As I noted in my previous post, NASA Administrator Sean O'Keefe has decided that the final Hubble servicing mission, scheduled for next year, would be cancelled. This would mean not only shortening Hubble's life, but abandoning work on two instruments which were nearly ready for deployment. This is a really terrible decision, made for (in my opinion) foolish reasons that don't bode very well for space flight in general. Read the previous post for more.

It's possible that this decision is not final, and that it can be changed by public (or scientific) pressure.

(As an aside, a fellow familiar with these things once told me that Congress decides appropriations on the Scream Method (I forget his exact phrase). That is, when looking at too many projects and not enough money---a perennial problem, naturally---they will decide to cut one that looks like it won't have many supporters. Then the Word is given, and the supporters of this particular project all write their Congressman or talk to their contacts, and raise bloody hell, and the project is reinstated. Once this is done for every marginal project, those whose supporters have not screamed loudly enough are cut permanently. I don't think it's exactly the same thing here, but close.)

Here's an account of Sean O'Keefe's meeting with the Hubble Team, written by Steve Beckwith, director of the Space Science Telescope Institute (STScI). The notable bits of this article, in my opinion, are:

• O'Keefe said that his decision was a close one, in that there were no overwhelming arguments for either side.
  
  
• It was Beckwith's impression that O'Keefe believed that the mission would extend Hubble's life for only a few years, and that was a factor in his decision. As Beckwith points out, this is not really correct.
  
  
• O'Keefe said he would speed up the deployment of the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST, formerly NGST), and that money would not be an object there, only manufacturing capability.
  
  
• Beckwith wants to think about ways to service Hubble without using the shuttle. I tend to think he's being rather naive here, but I'm not certain.
  

Meanwhile, Sen. Barbara Mikulski (D-MD) has urged O'Keefe to re-think his decision. (STScI is in Maryland, and so is NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, where NASA communicates with Hubble. Furthermore, Mikulski is ranking Democrat on the subcommittee that deals with NASA's budget.) Apparently, this effort has borne fruit; O'Keefe has decided to review the decision. Apparently, this entails asking Admiral Hal Gehman, head of the board that investigated the loss of the Columbia, to look into it. I don't know whether this is actual good news, or if O'Keefe figures he knows Gehman's conclusion.

Space.com has this article on Mikulski's letter. Steve Beckwith is quoted as saying, "We're in the mode of pursuing every wacky concept out there," (to continue the servicing mission). Sky & Telescope has an appropriate quote from the manager of Hubble servicing, Frank Cepollina:

"In the spirit of exploration, we cannot allow ourselves to go into handwringing mode," he told Sky & Telescope. "We have to stay upbeat. We'll find a way to fly COS and WFC3 if the astronomers want to do it badly enough."

[COS and WFC3 are the two new instruments that were going to be put on in the next servicing mission. This was in addition to fresh batteries and gyroscopes.]

Space.com is flooding the Hubble zone, with a jillion articles including this one on options that are being considered, including Beckwith's "wacky concepts". Apparently that includes accepting private donations. This option was mooted over at Samizdata. I commented that it wasn't a question of lack of money, it was (ostensibly) the safety of the shuttle. So I'm not quite sure what even billionaires' donations would buy us, unless of course it's an entirely new replacement program for the shuttle. More power to 'em, if so.

(Some of the articles linked on that page are kind of old, so remember that events have overtaken some of them.)

Sky & Telescope has an article about how you can help, but I'm not sure how useful the information is now that O'Keefe is reviewing the decision.

After my last post on this topic, a fellow wrote in suggesting that it didn't matter that Hubble would not be serviced, because, hey, NASA had two more telescopes to replace it, the recently launched Spitzer telescope (formerly SIRTF), and the in-development JWST (formerly NGST).

The Spitzer is most certainly not a substitute for Hubble! They have completely different wavelength ranges: Hubble's various instruments work from 1150 Angstroms out to 2.5 microns (25,000 angstroms), whereas Spitzer's wavelength range is 3.6 to 120 microns. The two telescopes are meant for different types of science. The JWST does have a greater overlap with Hubble: it works from 6000 Angstroms out to 28 microns. This leaves out some visible and all the UV wavelengths that Hubble can observe.

(For a quick visual guide to the Spitzer's instruments, see here. I couldn't find a nice overview like that for the Hubble; I could only find these eye-glazing tables, meant for astronomers. A few facts about the JWST's instruments are here, but mostly in text. The instrument designs probably haven't been finalized yet.)

Note that both these telescopes will be put into solar orbit, they will not be serviceable on-orbit. The Spitzer has a hoped-for maximum lifetime of 5 years; the Hubble could still be working when it dies. The JWST lifetime is 5 - 10 years.

I'm all for cheap, disposable telescopes that are not intended to be serviced (not that these really fall in that category). Better yet, let's have observatories on the Mooooon! But until we have those, let's not throw away what we do have unnecessarily.