So back for another Open Dome event with CELS at Nottingham Trent‘s Observatory.

The theme for this month’s lecture was Space Law.  This started with a section taken by Daniel Brown outlining the basics of Space Law at the moment. He started with the various companies that offer to sell you a piece of the moon, or to name a star for you.  Quickly pointing out that these are nothing other than a nice joke gift and not to bother handing over any money (he covered Dennis Hope‘s Lunar embassy in some depth, and pointed out just how many countries have brought fraud proceeding against their ‘embassies’).  He then went on to talk about Nemitz vs NASA (http://www.erosproject.com/) where Gregory Nemitz is claiming parking fees and storage costs against NASA for their landing/crashing of NEAR Shoemaker on it.

Moving on then to the problems of Liability in space. Now there’s so much ‘junk’ orbitting the earth there’s a real problem of a major collision that could disable some very expensive equipment. Or the problem of larger pieces not burning up completely on re-entry and then hitting people/property on the surface.

Which led onto the fact that space exploration/exploitation is moving away from states to corporations. And that this will be accelerated now that Obama has cancelled various portions of NASA’s programme (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/8489097.stm), leading to NASA to outsoure a lot more projects. Which will lead to an increase in the private sector’s ability to work without the government.

Dan then handed over to a Postgraduate from the Law school (Favio, I think) who went through some of the issues from a legal perspective.  While admitting that this is a very new area with almost no precedents he went on explain how the future for Space Law may well be modelled on existing laws. Mainly on those put in place by the Antartica treaty and also the Maritime Law of the Sea.

There then followed a discussion on the various points raised. Topics covered included the problems with Settler’s right, whether the aquisition of space rights would be skewed in favour of the existing powers, under what frameworks laws would have to work (just when does a rocket launch move from existing flight laws into space law?), and whether we could end up with space craft operating under flags of convenience the same as existing shipping does?

The most interesting part of the evening was discovering that the UK is trying to rush through a UK Space Agency (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/8404213.stm) to enable us to offer a proper legal framework to encourage launches and other Space related programmes to take place in the UK. Bonus

Another very well run event and well worth turning out for. Just a shame that I’ll have to miss March’s event as it’s on a Thursday and my girlfriend and I have already booked tickets to see Hedda Gabler at the Theatre Royal.

So Google’s Buzz went live this morning. Got to admit I’m completely underwhelmed so far. Unusable on the iPhone, even when running over wifi. And not much better running on a full laptop, when they eventually managed to release it into Gmail many hours after the announcement.

As far as I can see the only use is as an aggregator for all the sites I like to track. But until I can pull in Myspace and facebook stuff as well it’s just another thing to check, rather than a useful site in itself.

That said, let’s see if this does something to buzz now it’s a linked feed.

Looks like I’ll be making a return vist to the Nottingham Contemporary (aka The Fag Packet). Running through Febuary to April they are running an exhibition called Star City that appears to be based around 60′s Russian space imagery. Looks interesting to me, so we’ll give it a go. Plus I’ll probably pick up that nice book of pushout cardboard rocket models they had last time.

And in other incoming nottingham space news, Cels are having another Open Dome event on the 22nd, after the last one I’ll be there again. Details are here

well that’s a relief. It appears that Mathcad will run fine under Parallels on a Mac. Installed with no problems and I’ve run through the first chapters workbooks with no problems. Would have been nice if the Open University could have made a slightly firmer yes/no answer. So that’s another worry out of the way. Handy really, as technically the course started on Friday.

Another slightly geek night out, an Open Dome event at Nottingham Trent University’s observatory organised by CELS.

We were running a few minutes late so unfortunately missed the first 5 minutes of the lecture. But when we got there Daniel Brown was conducting a lecture on the expanding universe and Edwards Hubble’s part in proving that. When we got there he was explaining Einstein’s ideas of a 4 dimensional space and the fact that he wanted it to be a static universe, even to the point of adding the Cosmological constant to ensure it was balanced. Then using some balloons (and a squealing device on a string) daniel introduced the ideas of how movement affects wavelength and also how the distance to stars can be measured. I found the historical information very interesting and the technical information was easy to follow.

Unfortunately due to the weather conditions (very cloudy) we didn’t actually get to observe anything using the telescopes at the dome. Instead we were given an overview of the equipment installed and given a planetarium session on the inside of the dome roof to show us things we should have been able to see that evening, and examples of what we could see with binoculars versus the extra detail that comes from using a larger telescope

A pretty good evening out, and I’ll be keeping an eye on their upcoming events page