A Day in Astronomy: The Birth of Philip K. Dick

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Credit: Gollancz

On this day in 1928, American science fiction writer Philip Kindred Dick was born in Chicago, IL. He would go on to write some of the best known books on science fiction, including:

  • The Man in the High Castle (1963), which won the Hugo Award;
  • Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968), later made into the film Blade Runner; and
  • Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said (1974), which won the John W. Campbell Memorial Award for Best Science Fiction Novel and was nominated for both a Hugo Award and a Nebula Award.

Mr. Dick had a troubled life with multiple wives, yet he created some of the most memorable characters and fiction. You may recall some of his other books and stories that became films in recent years, including Total Recall with Arnold Schwarzenegger, Minority Report with Tom Cruise, and A Scanner Darkly with Keanu Reeves.

In his last interview of his life, Mr. Dick discussed how he left behind his writing in the late 1950s:

Many writers had left the field. We could not make a living. I had gone to work making jewelry with my wife. I wasn’t happy. I didn’t enjoy making jewelry. I had no talent whatsoever. She had the talent. She is still a jeweler and a very fine one, making gorgeous stuff which she sells to places like Neiman-Marcus. It’s great art. But I couldn’t do anything except polish what she made.

Fortunately, he returned to writing, thereby provided all of us with amazing stories that live on today.

A Day in Astronomy: The Birth of Edwin Hubble

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Image (Credit): Edwin Hubble at the Mount Wilson Observatory in California. (Edwin P. Hubble Papers, Huntington Library, San Marino, California)

On this day in 1889, Edwin Powell Hubble was born in Marshfield, Missouri. He would go on to become an important astronomer who found that the “nebulae” in his time were actually galaxies far beyond our Milky Way. He also determined that the galaxies were moving away from one another, indicating an expanding universe. Of course, name is probably most recognizable to the pubic today as it relates to the Hubble Space Telescope.

Edwin Hubble knew he was part of long list of astronomers seeking answers about our universe when he said:

From our home on the Earth, we look out into the distances and strive to imagine the sort of world into which we were born. Today, we have reached far into space. Our immediate neighborhood we know rather intimately. But with increasing distance our knowledge fades … The search will continue. The urge is older than history. It is not satisfied and will not be suppressed.

You can read more about Edwin Hubble here.

A Day in Astronomy: The Birth of Ursula Le Guin

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On this day in 1929, Ursula K. Le Guin was born in Berkeley, California. She would gain her masters degree in French only to later become a well known author of many fantasy and science fiction stories, including the Earthsea series and stories set in a Hainish universe of her making. She would go on to win eight Hugo Awards and six Nebula Awards.

Her style was different from many other authors of her period, focusing more on planetary culture than spacecraft hardware. When asked about her style, she stated the following:

The “hard”–science fiction writers dismiss everything except, well, physics, astronomy, and maybe chemistry. Biology, sociology, anthropology—that’s not science to them, that’s soft stuff. They’re not that interested in what human beings do, really. But I am. I draw on the social sciences a great deal. I get a lot of ideas from them, particularly from anthropology. When I create another planet, another world, with a society on it, I try to hint at the complexity of the society I’m creating, instead of just referring to an empire or something like that.

Given that her mother an anthropologist, it is not surprising that she saw a different way of telling story.

Her books represented a unique part of the science fiction genre that has only expanded over time as the writing community has expanded.

If you need an entry point to her work, you cannot go wrong starting with the short story “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas.” However, one of my favorite short stories is “The Island of the Immortals,” which you can find here.

I doubt you will be able to stop with one short story.

A Day in Astronomy: The Birth of Ray Bradbury

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On this day in 1920, Ray Douglas Bradbury was born in Waukegan, Illinois. Mr. Bradybury would grow up to be a famous American author and screenwriter.

One of his science fiction works,The Martian Chronicles stories, tells the story of mankind’s colonization of Mars and the ultimate effect on the colonizers.

He wrote numerous other famous books and short story collections, including Fahrenheit 541, Something Wicked This Way Comes, The Illustrated Man, and Dandelion Wine.

Speaking on science fiction, Mr. Bradbury once stated:

Science fiction is any idea that occurs in the head and doesn’t exist yet, but soon will, and will change everything for everybody, and nothing will ever be the same again. As soon as you have an idea that changes some small part of the world you are writing science fiction. It is always the art of the possible, never the impossible.

Asked in a 2004 interview what he thought about the US space program, he stated:

It’s too late, isn’t it? We’ve let 30 years go by. It’s stupid. It’s stupid. We should have stayed on the moon. We should have made moon the base, instead of building space stations, which are fragile and which fly apart. The moon is a good, solid base to build a space travel organization in the community. Then we take off from the moon and we go to Mars. But it’s terribly late. We’ve let too much time go by. We’ve been busy with war instead of being busy with peace. And that’s what space travel is all about. It’s all about peace and exploration and wonder and beauty.

Fortunately, it is not too late to visit the Moon or Mars, as demonstrated by NASA’s Artemis program. It’s the art (and science) of the possible.

A Day in Astronomy: Launch of the Manned Saturn V Rocket to the Moon

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Image (Credit): The launch of the Apollo 11 space vehicle from the launch pad on July 16, 1969. (NASA/ Kipp Teague)

On this day in 1969, NASA launched the Saturn V rocket that carried astronauts Armstrong, Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin, and Michael Collins on the first manned lunar landing. The 363-feet tall Saturn V rocket was launched from Pad A, Launch Complex 39, Kennedy Space Center, at 9:32 a.m. EDT. 

While this was the most significant use of the Saturn V at that point in time, it was the backbone of the Apollo program. The first crewed Saturn V to launch was Apollo 8, which orbited the Moon without landing.

You can listen in on the control room chatter surrounding the launch at this NASA launch history site.

NASA has a number of events planned for this month to celebrate the 55th anniversary of the Moon landing. You can read about the planned activities at this NASA anniversary site.