Moon, Mars, Space Stations, Warp Drives, Whatever...Just Pick One

THIS linked article from ABC News illustrates why our manned space program isn't much farther along than it is.

Every four or eight years, either we elect a new president and/or a new political party takes power, and the space program undergoes yet another overhaul. Programs that have been moving forward for years are often suddenly disrupted, delayed, or canceled altogether. The history of NASA is literally littered with the epitaphs of otherwise promising projects like the SSTO or X-33/Venturestar.

Unfortunately, space has proven too difficult an environment in which to do anything quickly or easily. Apollo with its breakneck pace of historic accomplishments turned out to be the exception, not the rule. We need long term commitment to a single vision of space exploration/exploitation in order to really accomplish any major worthwhile goals.

Though I doubt we'll ever see one any time soon, what we should have is a national referendum on space. The public should weigh in on exactly what we should try to accomplish in space, and whatever administration is in power should follow that as a guideline, instead of just canceling or downgrading projects out of spite against the previous administration, something both political parties have been guilty of for decades now.

But which general plan would the public back? Actually the best way we can decide this is educating people on the general directions the space program could take.

As an example, four feasible general strategies are outlined below. It should be noted that none of these are mutually exclusive; one can eventually lead into one or more of the others very easily.

Return to the Moon: This is the strategy outlined by the Bush administration in 2004, which NASA had been working toward since. I should note that I was not a fan of many of the previous administration's science policies, but I do think its 'refocusing' of the manned space program was spot on, especially since the retirement of the shuttle fleet was inevitable. The Constellation vehicle system under development was specifically geared for this mission.

The purpose of this strategy was not only to send more Apollo-style manned missions to the Moon, but to establish a permanent manned presence there in the form of a moonbase. The advantage of a Moon goal is that it has been underway for half a decade now and is already fairly well developed. As a result it could probably be achieved sooner than the other strategies outlined here. Also, the experience of building and maintaining the ISS would come in very handy in creating a slowly expanding moonbase. For long term benefits, the Moon offers vast resources, particularly the potential fusion fuel helium-3, that could produce a potential windfall for any country that gain a significant lead in developing them.

Mars: The second most talked-about path, many Americans want to forge directly ahead to the Red Planet on one or more grand voyages of human discovery. It is perhaps the most romanticized of the strategies, very appealing to generations of Americans who grew up on the space exploration adventures of various scifi heroes.

The advantage of this plan would be mostly in the technology that would developed in order to make it viable; namely long-term space habitat systems and true interplanetary manned spacecraft. The human exploration of another whole planet would also be very valuable, conducting observations and experiments that current robotic probes aren't easily capable of. But more, a human being stepping onto the surface of another planet would be a monumental historical event that would resonate for generations.

Going to Mars would be the longest-range goal discussed here because of the immense distances and logistics involved, and could actually incorporate a return to the Moon and/or a manned asteroid rendezvous as an intermediate step.

Orbital Infrastructure: Instead of manned exploration, NASA concentrates much more on building up potentially useful and profitable structures in Earth orbit. This is not necessarily a stay-at-home strategy. Post-Apollo, NASA had a 'Grand Architecture' vision for space, focusing on building up a 'step ladder' of stations leading out into the solar system. The shuttle and the ISS as they were originally envisioned were just the first two major projects of this architecture.

In this vision, NASA maintains the ISS as long as possible and follows up with bigger, more advanced stations, as well as other useful orbital structures, such as solar power satellites, orbital hot labs, zero-g factories, or perhaps even a launch tower or space elevator. The idea would be concentrate as much as possible on making space much more of a money making venture than it is now, and use the built-up infrastructure to eventually build the interplanetary craft needed to carry humans further into the solar system.

Asteroids: Somewhat of an underdog compared to the others, its still mentioned occasionally in various sources. Instead of concentrating on 'major' bodies such as the Moon and Mars, emphasis for this strategy is placed on the manned exploration and exploitation of near-Earth asteroids. Technical difficulty would be somewhere between returning to the Moon and sending expeditions to Mars. And with thousands of potential destinations, NASA could be constructively busy for decades.

This strategy has two major potential pluses over the others. First, Asteroids taken in their thousands represent an immense treasure trove of mineral wealth; an estimate of single typical nickel-iron asteroid from a few years ago put the worth of the asteroid's minerals and metals at over $12 trillion.

Second, asteroids can be made mobile using even today's technology. It would be a very slow and gradual process, but valuable asteroids can be 'herded' closer to Earth, inserted either into an L4 or L5 Lagrange point or into Lunar orbit, where they can be much more easily studied and harvested. Hollowed asteroids also offer ready-made armor against radiation and impact hazards in space, and small, properly hollowed and modified asteroids could serve as the chasis fo interplanetary craft.

Which strategy would be best? That would depend on the goals people wanted to accomplish. All have advantages that could benefit not juts the US, but the world beyond as well. However, if we want to see any of these objectives succeed in our lifetimes, we have to pick one and stick with it.

Hidden Treasures Of Science Fiction: The Dirty Pair!

This is the first of what I hope to be a semi-regular feature. These SF works aren't so much "hidden" as they either were once popular but have since fallen off the cultural radar, or never found the audience they very much deserved.

The Dirty Pair is one of the former. It started as a series of comical scifi novels created Haruka Takachiho that were adopted into manga and anime in Japan and later comic books in America. The Dirty Pair's heyday was in the late 80s and 90s, with the last major work featuring them coming out in 2002. Though still fondly remembered by many fans, they have faded somewhat into the pop culture background.

The stories center around Kei (the red-headed, bad girl tomboy) and Yuri (the sweet-mannered intellectual brunette) as they work for an interstellar peacekeeping agency tracking down criminals and foiling terrorist plots. Though officially code-named 'The Lovely Angels', they're much more widely (and notoriously) known as 'The Dirty Pair' because of the habit of their missions often ending in one cataclysm or another. Buildings, cities, colonies, and sometimes even whole planets are often left in smoking ruins in their wake. Though technically the disasters are never their direct fault, their very presence seems to precipitate destruction and chaos.

This tongue-in-cheek approach to action and ultraviolence, combined with the curvy Pair's ballistic-weave work bikinis, would probably be enough to ensure a decent amount of popularity. But surprisingly, though many of their stories can't really be called deep, they are often very smartly written and sharply plotted. Imagine the best of the James Bond movies set in a scifi future and recast with two scantily-clad female leads, and you'll have a decent starting point for Dirty Pair stories.

The best of the original Dirty Pair took the form of anime, through a TV series, a series of direct-to-video productions, and a theatrical film. Of these Affair On Nolandia and Flight 005 Conspiracy are the stand-out episodes in my opinion. Here's a decent collection including both of those, along with the so-so Eden Project

But something surprising happened to The Dirty Pair when they were licensed for American comics and fell into the hands of artist Adam Warren; they got even better.

The original Dirty Pair took most of its cues from traditional Space Opera stories, both from anime and manga as well as popular western versions. Adam Warren, with help for the initial stories by writer Toren Smith, evolved the series into a much more cyberpunk/transhuman direction, and coupled it with his uniquely dynamic anime artistic style, produced a uniquely entertaining property.

In Warren's version (which is officially licensed by the Japanese rights holder), The Dirty Pair become more than talented young women with big guns. They are now genetically-bred, cybernetically enhanced fighting machines wrapped up in deceptively curvaceous barely-adult bodies with big guns. Their personalities, looks, and usual modus operandi are still very much in keeping with their 'classic' japanese versions, but now with a newer, and often darker and more subversive, subtext.

For example, the Fatal But Not Serious storyline hints that the current Kei and Yuri may only be one of a series of Lovely Angels, not the first and not the last, and that when and if they die, they'll simply be replaced by cloned and memory-implanted copies. In another storyline (Run From The Future), the Pair both use and run afoul of drugs that can easily be used as an insidious form of mind control, one inducing an emotional break down and the other inducing near-religious euphoria.

Of this version, A Plague Of Angels, Fatal But Not Serious, and Run From The Future are probably the best. Go Here to find these and more in trade paperback form.

It should be noted that all versions of The Dirty Pair, despite the obvious cheesecake and violence, never really teeter into truly adult territory, as some people assume. There's a lot of curves and cleavage, but rarely any real nudity. Tons of flirty innuendo but no actual sex. Gunplay and explosions in abundance, but very little blood or gore. The Dirty Pair are perhaps demented fan-service fun distilled into its purist form--sexy, kinetic, and smart.

Our Near Space Future

(Image courtesy NASA)

Many people today will be pontificating about the fortieth anniversary of Apollo 11 landing on the Moon, as is only right. But I'd like to take the opportunity not to talk about the last forty years of space travel, but the forty years that's immediately ahead of us.

In my last blog entry, I talked about how people have trouble intuitively grasping just how vast the scale of space is. Which is partly why I think that for the next few generations, despite the current push outward for exploration to the Moon and Mars, I think the aspect of space travel that will have the most impact on normal people will be the opening up and exploitation of so-called 'Near Space.' Near Space extends from the upper reaches of the atmosphere up to about 500 miles altitude, or the inner edge of the Van Allen radiation belts. That's a scale well within most peoples' understanding, and still is on the shore of this exciting new frontier.

We're already seeing a number of exciting developments along these lines recently. The successful SpaceX launch, the construction of the Virgin Galactic "spaceport", the US Military's tentative plan for a near space 'stratostation' that could permanently occupy suborbital space. Combined with the enlarging community of space-capable nations (particularly China) and renewed interest by private companies just chomping at the bit to market space, it seems that we're poised for a renewed flowering of space travel and exploration. But this time, instead of just being limited to two competing nations, it seems the whole of the industrialized world will take part.

After the world more fully recovers from the recent economic chaos--which admittedly might not be for a full decade yet--I think space tourism will begin to fully take off, with Virgin Galactic and its inevitable competitors offering first suborbital flights, then full orbital excursions. Bigelow Aerospace is already hard at work designing and constructing the first 'space hotels', which would be no more than small, modular, inflatable space stations in which tourists and small crews could stay for up to a few days. And in their footsteps will follow other companies eager to cash in.

Even now, many countries see the ability to at least launch their own satellites as a matter of pride, and a number of them are beginning to launch their own space exploration probes as well, as exemplified by the recent lunar probes launched by India and Japan. How long before they begin launching their own manned space craft, and building their own space stations?

So by 2050 or so, I'm hazarding an educated guess about what we'll see: many different nations and probably at least half a dozen private companies involved heavily in human space exploitation. Those that don't already have a manned presence there will be planning on it. There will be at least a dozen space hotels, most small, but perhaps a few as large as the old Mir station. Companies will start ofering point-to-point suborbital flights. Russia, always a major proponent of space stations, may have an ISS-like large station, and will probably have plans for something even larger, like a ring station. China may still be playing-catch up, hoping to industrialize Near Earth Orbit, and close on its heels will be alliances and nations like the ESA, Japan, India, Brazil, and others.

But where will the US space program fit into all of this?

For some reason, the slow but deliberate process of constructing orbital infrastructure does not seem to sit well with the American public. This seems to go beyond just its high price tag and the old manned vs robotic exploration debate. I think it goes back to why the Apollo program is such a jewel in the eye of the American public, and why space efforts since, despite their on-paper practicality, haven't been as popular.

I think there's a very deep need in the American psyche to explore. Most of the population in the US is descended from people who left their homelands and set off toward someplace unknown in the hopes of something better, and I think that tendency is pretty much embedded in our national DNA. We love building things and making money, but even more fundamental than all that is that we, as a people, want to go.

Apollo spoke to that very deeply. Man landing on the Moon was an amazing technical achievement, but I think to many around the world, especially Americans, it felt right. Like it was what we were destined to do all along.

But many at NASA, in that era and since, realized that sending humans beyond the Moon would need an extensive orbital infrastructure to be practical. You need someplace to construct the giant vehicles necessary, you need workhorse vehicles to haul all the material to orbit, as well as a place to test out long-term habitation and industrial techniques. Thus the need for a shuttle and the space station, and the other plans NASA had its old 'grand architecture.' This goes back to what I talked about last time--just how vast the scale of space is. We're microbes trying to cross an ocean on specks of dust. With our current level of technology, there really is no other way to go about sending humans out into the solar system without this infrastructure.

In the coming era, I think space agencies and companies may begin to specialize--instead of being a catch-all for all space efforts the way many agencies have been, they may begin specializing according to what they do best. For example, the private companies will be all about tourism, the fledgling countries will want to compete for launch services, Russia I'm sure would love to be at the forefront of space stations and colonies in orbit, Japan seems determined to create solar power satellites, and so on.

And Americans I think will work very hard, as they have historically, to be humanity's great explorers of space, to always push the envelope of where humanity goes and what we go out in the Great Dark. The next great age of American manned exploration may not start until the other countries catch up and build the infrastructure that the US needs to explore but still seems very reluctant to participate in. I'm sure that there will be American stations and moonbases and what not, but the US will not fully wake from its current ennui about space until we once again can finally start taking great leaps for all mankind.

The Public vs the Scale of the Universe

Most people have trouble intuitively grasping the scale of the universe.

Its not that we have problems with the numbers. Most people can bandy the facts and figures around pretty easily. Approximately 238,000 miles to the Moon, 93 million miles to the Sun, 4.3 light years to Proxima Centauri, and so on. Not too much difficulty there.

But visualizing those distances accurately is not instinctive at all. In a way, we're built against that--we have only these analog animal brains of ours, after all. Our minds are hardwired by evolution to deal with things on a human scale, and as a result we tend to mentally shrink everything down to that scale so we can more easily handle it, no matter how inaccurate that view may be.

You can see this popping up a lot in science fiction. The popularity of Space Opera science fiction, for example, can at least partially be credited to how it shrinks travel to other solar systems down to a human scale, with interstellar travel taking days or weeks at the most and entire planets usually represented by over-simplified sets of cities and environments. Space-borne disaster movies such as Armageddon or the more recent Moonfall suffer from this as well, portraying human nuclear weapons as being able to do more than imperceptibly nudge massive celestial objects like the Moon or a moon-sized asteroid. Trying to move the Moon with nuclear weapons would be like trying to propel an aircraft carrier out to sea by hitting it in the stern with a handful of firecrackers.

But I think this lack of understanding scale also colors how the public perceives a lot of scientific endeavors, and usually not for the better. For example, there recently have been a rash of blogs and opinions online complaining about how NASA has waited so long to return to the Moon or to mount an expedition to Mars...almost as if the Moon were right next door and Mars was just a jaunt down the street.

But the failure here is really in understanding just how far away even the Moon is, and how difficult it currently is to send people there. A round trip would cover a distance of roughly 20 times the circumference of Earth. When was the last time any one of us circumnavigated the globe even once? Even with modern commercial jets, how much would 20 such trips cost you in terms of time (both in preparation and in actual flight), resources, and money? And that would just be a taste of the raw distance involved. A trip to the Moon, performed entirely in hard vacuum and microgravity, would be far more difficult and expensive than that.

It was done before during the Apollo program, of course, with great difficulty and risk. But the problem is, we found nothing on the Moon that made it worth the expense for astronauts to return. Its not that the Moon doesn't have valuable resources we can use, its just that with our current level of technology we can't build up the infrastructure there to profitably exploit them. Why? Because the Moon is just too damn far away, and sending things there has proven just too expensive so far as a result.

And Mars is much, much worse. At its closest approach, Mars is about 36 million miles from Earth, or about 1440 times the circumference of Earth. How long and how expensive would 1440 trips around the world on commercial airlines be to you? Now imagine doing it twice, as you'd probably want a return trip back to Earth as well. Now imagine how difficult and expensive a flight that distance through a hostile, deadly void would be in a spacecraft using current technology.

Like the Moon, its not as if Mars isn't ripe with valuable resources and potential scientific discoveries. But we just don't have the technology yet to reach all that distance and set up all the infrastructure that would be needed to make it worth the expense.

In the future, of course I think things will turn around, with the development of faster, better propulsion ssystems and more long-enduring and reliable life support systems. But as much as we may want that to happen in the near future, its much more likely that it will not happen for decades yet.

If people, especially those controlling the purse strings in Congress, understood just how vast the distances were out in space, I think they'd understand the need for more long-term planning and execution in the space program. We have to break out of the short-sighted cycle of trying to restart the space program every 4 or 8 years whenever we have a new president.

And I think the public in general would be more supportive of space efforts, knowing how daunting the task faced by NASA and other space agencies are. I think educating people on the true scale of things should begin in the science classroom, and science writers--and even science fiction creators--should be mindful of trying to convey that when it comes up.

Surviving A Scifi Story

NOTE: There will be a delay in my starting the serialization of my novel The Shattered Sky on here on 6/14/09 as promised. The power cord on my laptop is broken, and as its my main work computer containing the needed files, it may be down for a bit. I'll try for Wednesday (6/16) instead.

SURVIVING A SCIFI STORY

Aliens suddenly land in your backyard? A giant monster starts terrorizing downtown? Keep tripping over clones of yourself at the mall? Your neighbors developing strange mutant powers? Find yourself alone on a hostile alien planet?

Well, congratulations, you're in a scifi story. While this might sound like fun, there's no guarantee of your survival--even if you're the protagonist you may still end up dead by the time the credits roll. Scifi writers can be cruelly ironic like that. So I've compiled some handy tips to help maximize your chances of continued breathing if you happen to find yourself in a science fiction narrative:

1. Bringing anything back to the lab for further analysis always ends in tragedy. If you can't figure out what it is, just leave it there.

2. Scientists are easily identifiable as they always wear lab coats, even if their field of study never takes them anywhere near a lab.

3. The monster will always be able to catch up to the fleeing victim, no matter how fast the victim’s mode of transportation may be.

4. The exception to #3 is if you have a shelter you can easily reach, or if one or more of your party is decidedly slower than you.

5. If the monster falls down after being shot, shoot it two hundred more times. Then set it on fire, blow up the ashes with C4, and run over the spot with a forklift every few hours. Just to be sure.

6. Be friendly and courteous to everyone you meet, but have a plan to kill each and every one of them when you need to. And chances are you will need to.

7. No matter how their stardrives work, every starship in scifi travels at the speed of plot exposition. So if you have to get somewhere in a hurry, get everyone to start telling their stories fast.

8. If there is a superweapon in the story, it MUST explode by the story's end. No matter how hard you try top avoid this, it will happen. In fact, the more you try to avoid this, the more likely you will end up at ground zero.

9. All groups, no matter how large, facing a hostile alien force will have one, and only one, traitor. So once you ferret him/her/it out you should be okay.

10. Never save your best weapon for last. Use it for your first attack. If that doesn’t stop your enemy, run away. Either way, you at least stopped wasting everyone’s time.

11. Lighting is a direct measure of an alien culture’s advancement and intentions. The more brightly lit an aliens’ base/ship/city is, the more advanced and benevolent their culture will be.

12. A note on corporate morality: If a corporation in scifi has to choose between killing a million kittens or making a thirty cent profit, the kittens are vapor.

13. Alien/mutant/robot babes are inexplicably attracted to human men. In fact, the hotter the inhuman babe is, the dorkier the object of her affections is likely to be. Most people reading this list will likely get laid in a scifi story, so there's that at least.

14. Advanced artificial intelligences can always evolve beyond the programming that makes them obedient or pleasant, but not beyond the programming that makes them homicidal or annoying.

15. If its small, furry, and/or too adorable to be true, your only chance is to kill it immediately.

16. The only thing cheaper than human life in a scifi story is ammunition, so shoot first and shoot often.

17. Whenever a character says they have a "bad feeling" about something, someone is going to die horribly. So shoot whoever said that to get it out of the way.

May have more, at some time in the future.

THE SHATTERED SKY starts Monday

One hundred thousand years in the future, the solar system as we know it is gone. In its place, billions of slowly-failing fragments of a shattered Dyson Sphere haunt the sun, holding the last remnants of humanity and allies.

Gossamyr is an apprentice shaman of a small transhuman tribe on one of the last functioning habitats, until contact with the advanced human society of the Known Nations changes everything she thought she knew about her world. Plunged into a perilous odyssey across the vast cosmic ruins of the Sphere, she is forced to choose between her greatest love and the ultimate destiny of the human race.

This is the summary of my second novel, The Shattered Sky. It has been finished for over three years now. However, I've been having a hard time trying to sell it. Part of the reason is a host of medical problems that kept cropping up, preventing me from giving it my full attention. But I think another is its length--159,000 words is a pretty big novel for a publisher to take on faith from a relatively new author.

I have had one novel published before--CREATURA, published in 2005 by Hard Shell Word Factory. Hard Shell however is pretty much a small press publisher (NOT a vanity publisher, though, as some people seem to think) so to no one's surprise it didn't cause any big waves. I've also sold a bunch of smaller works over the years--short stories, articles, reviews--to publications like Strange Horizons, Afterburn, Fables, Challenge, Shadis, Hadrosaur Tales, and others. About 70 in all.

I consider The Shattered Sky as probably the best thing I've ever written. After Creatura, I really wanted to stretch myself, so the novel became a gigantic playground for different ideas, with as epic and involving a story as I could muster, spread throughout its three parts. I'm not saying its perfect, but I'm sure most here who take the time to read it will enjoy it.

So I've decided to split it into three separate, shorter novels (basically making it a trilogy); its already split into three parts dramatically, so its just a matter of expanding on each part. However, since I'm not going to try to sell the current version any longer, I'm free to put it online as a "work in progress" in order to get feedback.

So I'm going to serialize the first part of the novel on my ORBITAL VECTOR Blog here, with the hope of getting just that, as much feedback as possible before I dive fully into expanding it. Part 1 is the part that will need the most expansion--I have to work its current word count of 41,000 words up to about 70-75,000 words. I already have a bunch of ideas, but I'd love to hear from others who've read it. If people ask I'll put up the other parts in the future.

I'll probably start serializing Part 1 of The Shattered Sky on Monday (6/15/09) on the Blog, with a chapter every few days or so interspersed between occasional other posts (there's 16 chapters in all in Part 1). I may also put up the whole file for Part 1 on Orbital Vector or my Deviant Art page when I'm done.

Any feedback on this project will of course be greatly appreciated! = )

Ten Year Ago, Star Wars Fell Off A Cliff

I hadn't realized that it had been over 10 years now since The Phantom Menace was released. Of course, I imagine that is not an anniversary most people tend to observe, but it is significant as it marks the downfall of one of the great science fiction franchises.

I use 'downfall' purely from a quality standpoint, of course. Star Wars still makes scads of money and has many ardent fans, my 8-year-old nephew among them. But few people who aren't wonder-filled prepubescents can deny that as far as story quality and cultural impact goes, the franchise is only a shadow of its former self and shows no sign of resurging. Phantom Menace was simply a bad film, and Attack of the Clones somehow managed to be even worse. Revenge of the Sith was better than the first two but was still only mediocre at best.

Its interesting that the franchise has fallen so quickly and so completely in the public's eye. Once, it was held as the pinnacle of fantasy-related story telling. Today, its just another scifi franchise among many, and far from the best.

Its also interesting that it is not weathering its current downturn anywhere near as well as many of its peers among long-running scifi franchises have handled theirs. Star Trek and Dr. Who have all had up periods and down periods, yet none of them fell quite so spectacularly as Star Wars. I have to wonder why.

Star Trek has had many mediocre, and some outrightly atrocious, episodes among its many series and movies. And yet, the public seemed a lot more forgiving of Trek's sins than those of Skywalker and co. Even after outright bombs like Star Trek V and Nemesis, the Trek brand remained essentially untarnished.

I think in part it might be just the sheer volume of Trek stories out there. Everyone seems to have a sense that if the current incarnation of Star Trek sucks, another one will eventually come along that will be better (and that's pretty much exactly what's happened recently.)

But also I think Star Trek strives for something Star Wars never has: story transcendence. It tries hard to be more than just pulp adventure; it explores new ideas and is unafraid to ask the BIG questions about things like destiny, mankind, existence, god, love, and other things. And very occasionally, it succeeds ('The City On The Edge Of Forever,' 'The Inner Light,' 'The Visitor.') Even when it fails (which is more often than not) we recognize the nobility of the attempt, we are more willing to overlook it because hey, at least they're trying.

Doctor Who is very similar in this regard, especially in its modern incarnation; it too tries for story transcendence and occasionally succeeds, though its best stories tend to be quite a bit darker than Trek's. ('The Empty Child'/'The Doctor Dances' and 'Human Nature'/'Family Of Blood' are the two storylines that stand out most for me.)

I guess Dr. Who and Trek are like good friends that we see struggling and striving for a hard-to-obtain goal, so that when they succeed, we can't help but cheer. And when they fail, they pick themselves up and try again. Who can't admire that, at least at some level? Its almost like what Rocky Balboa said--its not how hard you can punch, but how many times you can pick yourself up after being knocked down that determines if you're a winner or not.

Star Wars hasn't picked itself up yet, if it ever will. The keepers of the franchise insist that its mistakes were in fact successes, that there is nothing really to correct, that there is no higher goal for them to try and reach. It fell to the mat and apparently likes it there. And so the franchise keeps floundering, and the public has no interest in seeing it revive, as its not even trying to do better. What's there to cheer for?

The potential for future greatness is there, mind you. The Star Wars universe is very rich and can be mined for a lot of great stories and ideas, as some authors in the 'Expanded Universe' novels and comics have shown. But will we ever see that creative vitality for Star Wars make its way back onto the screen? It doesn't seem too likely, anytime soon.