New book chronicles American space history left rotting at the pad; not just at Cape Canaveral but across the U.S. Not sure what can be done with behemoth launch pads, but perhaps a non-profit effort at restoring them or at least cleaning them up might be worth the effort.

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Large swaths of America’s space heritage have literally been left to rot at the launch pad as is poignantly made clear in Abandoned In Place, a new book that chronicles long-neglected and largely forgotten aspects of U.S. space history.

Author Roland Miller’s oversized collection of photos and essays documents some 60 years of U.S. space history mostly at Cape Canaveral, Fla.

Abandoned In Place: Preserving America’s Space History includes coverage of both early U.S. Air Force and Army test launches as well as NASA’s first tentative steps with the Apollo program. In the process, Miller, Dean of Communications Arts at the College of Lake County in Grayslake, Ill., makes it painfully clear that although we have preserved and displayed crucial elements of U.S. space history in museums like the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum, there are still large gaps in such efforts.

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We might not think it, but we live in a pretty crowded part of the universe. But more than half our cosmos is made up of largely empty voids where there’s virtually nothing for hundreds of millions of light years of spacetime. At great distances, we still aren’t sensitive to dwarf galaxies that may lie within such voids. But even in the midst of such emptiness, these voids do have a few luminous elliptical galaxies not unlike the one seen here. Kudos to the team that crafted this new catalog map of these empty spots in our cosmos.

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Astronomers have released the largest and most extensive catalog of cosmic voids ever generated — extending out some 8 billion light years in an area covering a quarter of the sky, mostly observable from the Northern hemisphere.

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What a relief.

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One day, the Universe is going to die out — that’s something scientists can agree on.

But exactly how and when that will happen is a more of a gray area, and it’s not something we’ve really had to worry about, with current predictions putting any such event tens of billions of years in the future — long after our Sun burns out.

But what if our current predictions are wrong?

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