NASA will be conducting tank tests today on the Discovery’s external tank in an effort to find the cause of the recently discovered cracks.
Amen! The omnibus 2000 page trillion dollar budget bill is dead.
This is only a start. The spending must come down, by a lot!
Note also that yes, Congress will still be forced to pass a continuing resolution, but that will freeze spending at last year’s level, rather than the gobs of additional spending including in the omnibus bill. Like I said, this is a start.
Want to discover an exoplanet? A portion of the data being gathered by Kepler is now available online for anyone to peruse.
O joy! NASA, in releasing its preliminary regulations for “human-rating” a manned spacecraft., has also given the regulations a new name. They should not be called “human-rated.” This should solve everything! Also:
The five 1100-series documents outline mandatory crew transportation certification requirements, technical, safety and crew health specifications, the roles of NASA and industry and how to achieve government certification, design reference missions and goals for a space station human transportation system, and ground and flight operations processes. While the broad certification document released Dec. 10 only runs 39 pages, the 1100-series specifications reportedly run hundreds of pages each.
This is more a kerfuffle in the press than a real emergency: for about three hours today Russian mission control had problems communicating with either ISS or the Soyuz spacecraft that is on its way to it. Neither spacecraft was in any danger during the down time.
A scientist has made the first measurements of the strength at the Earth’s core of its magnetic field. What’s most fascinating is that he used the Moon and distant quasars to do it! First he used radio observations of the quasars to get very precise measurements of the Earth’s rotation axis and how the Moon was tugging at that axis and thus affecting its magnetic field. Then,
By calculating the effect of the moon on the spinning inner core, Buffett discovered that the precession makes the slightly out-of-round inner core generate shear waves in the liquid outer core. These waves of molten iron and nickel move within a tight cone only 30 to 40 meters thick, interacting with the magnetic field to produce an electric current that heats the liquid. This serves to damp the precession of the rotation axis. The damping causes the precession to lag behind the moon as it orbits the earth. A measurement of the lag allowed Buffett to calculate the magnitude of the damping and thus of the magnetic field inside the outer core.
Want to know what’s been killing our honeybees? It appears the EPA has known all along and looked the other way: A leaked EPA document shows that it knowingly allowed use a pesticide, despite warnings from its own scientists that it would kill honeybees.
Another violation of the Constitution: The DC subway police are about to begin random searches of passengers.
More polticially correct madness: The Red Cross in the United Kingdom has told all its offices to remove all Christmas decorations in order to avoid offending Muslims. Key quote:
“We have been instructed that we can’t say anything about Christmas and we certainly can’t have a Christmas tree. . . . We are not supposed to show any sign of Christianity at all.”
This story should give everyone the willies: One of the developers of the OpenBSD operating system (an open source OS comparable but different than Linux) has admitted that ten years ago, in exchange for cash, he and others helped the FBI place “surveillance-friendly holes” in the operating system.
I wonder what part of this sentence the FBI does not know how to read: “The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.”
Virgin Galactic has confirmed the story from Space News that it is part of the crew/cargo proposal that Orbital Sciences submitted to NASA this week.
Two Danish citizens are on trial for criticizing Islam. Worse, “under Danish jurisprudence it is immaterial whether a statement is true or untrue. All that is needed for a conviction is that somebody feels offended.”
The image below was produced by Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter by assembling data from numerous images over six months. The levels of brightness and darkness indicate the percentage of time in which an area is sunlight. The red dot just below the rim of Shackleton shows the approximate location of the south pole.
As you can see, the rim of Shackleton Crater nearest the south pole is illuminated by the sun most of the time, while the nearby crater floor never gets sunlight. This data confirms what Japanese scientists found using their lunar probe, Kaguya. The south pole has the ideal combination of locations with nearly continuous bright sunlight (to provide power) and nearly continuous darkness (where explorers will likely find significant amounts of frozen water), making this is an excellent location to build that first lunar base. And from the image you can see that the Shackleton Crater rim is not the only spot near the south pole with these conditions.
Also, if you look at the close-up image of Shackleton’s rim that I posted here, you will see that there is plenty of room to land and set up residence.
Feel the love! The Chicago Tea Party’s Christmas party was shut down by a bomb scare. So no one has any doubt about the goals of the arsonists, the written message that accompanied the incendiary devices was “F*CK THE TEA PARTY”.
Don’t slam the door on your way out! Check out this list of senators and the number of earmarks they placed in $1.27 trillion omnibus spending bill put together by the lame-duck Congress.
Freedom of speech alert: The FCC commissioner has made it clear in a recent appearance on the BBC that he strongly supports having the FCC regulate in some manner the news coverage of radios and television. You can see the video here. Key quote from the article above:
In practice, Copps’s recommendations — however well intended — necessarily entail expanding the power of bureaucrats to monitor media content, power which can then be used for objectionable and politicized goals.
For those that want to relive the experience of success, SpaceX has posted a short highlight video of last week’s successful test flight of Falcon 9/Dragon capsule.
It is difficult to overstate the importance or magnifience of this achievement, accomplished not by a government but by a private company. As SpaceX rightly brags on its website:
This marks the first time a commercial company has successfully recovered a spacecraft reentering from Earth orbit. It is a feat previously performed by only six nations or government agencies: the United States, Russia, China, Japan, India, and the European Space Agency.
What I find even more telling is how quickly SpaceX got this done. The first launch attempt of their first rocket, Falcon 1, took place in March of 2006. About that same time they began work on Falcon 9, and were able to successfully fly its first mission only four years later. Contrast that with NASA. President Bush proposed building a replacement for the shuttle in 2004, and six years later all NASA could do was fly a mockup of Ares I/Orion, not the actual article. And that leaves out NASA’S numerous previous attempts to build a shuttle replacement that spent billions, and never did more than produce pretty powerpoint presentations.
SpaceX’s speed of operation (a sure sign of efficiency) is reminiscent of the early days of the space age. Then, NASA might have laid out the overall plan, but everything was built by private companies, all used to fighting for profits and market share. None could afford a leisurely pace, nor could they afford to do things badly. If they did either, their business would suffer. As a result, the United States was able to go from having no ability to put anything in orbit to putting its first man in space in less than three years, and was able to follow that up with the first manned lunar mission only seven years later.
After a string of failures going back to 2004, the Indian space agency is set to try to launch its most powerful rocket again, this time with its heaviest cargo.
This might be the best news I’ve heard in years! The government may shut down on Saturday due to the stalemate in Congress over the $1.27 trillion pork-filled spending bill.
Dead alien life arrives on Earth! Not really but still exciting anyway: Scientists have found the remains of space-born amino acids — essential to life — in the meteorite that crashed in the Sudan in 2008. Key quote:
“This meteorite formed when two asteroids collided,” said Daniel Glavin of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. “The shock of the collision heated it to more than 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit [1,093 degrees Celsius], hot enough that all complex organic molecules like amino acids should have been destroyed, but we found them anyway.”
The discovery is further evidence that the basic elements of life can form in even the most hostile of environments.
NASA’s inspecter general has found fraud, waste, and abuse in NASA’s small business research program. Nor is this new news:
Problems with NASA’s SBIR program have been repeatedly criticized in recent years by the agency’s inspector general. Of some 46 investigations related to the SBIR program over the past decade, 17 percent resulted in criminal convictions, civil judgments, or administrative action, the inspector general told a Senate Commerce Committee hearing last year.
The Air Force has agreed to share the meteorite data its surveillance satellites detect.
Though the article above makes it sound like this data includes a lot of Earth-destroying asteriods, almost all of these detections are of smaller rocks burning up in the atmosphere, information researchers need to produce a more complete census of the solar system.
A software glitch prevented Kepler from making science observations for 13 hours this week.
At least the Russians can still do this: At 2:09 pm (Eastern) today a Russian Soyuz rocket lifted off, carrying the next crew to the International Space Station.
In an article today on spaceref.com “NASA: It’s Our Space Station – Not Yours,” Keith Cowing has some harsh words for NASA and its management of the research on ISS. Based on what he witnessed at a NASA meeting, it appears that NASA wants to retain control over all research on the space station, while denying access to outside other researchers. Key quote:
In addition to prohibiting the ISS National Laboratory contractor from getting its hands on human-based research, Mark Uhran also stated that any proposal that proposed to do anything with spacecraft systems or engineering would be similarly deemed non-responsive. In other words two of the most interesting things you can do on the ISS – the sorts of thing you’d want a larger research base to focus on (assuming you are really interested in outside participation) are off limits due to executive fiat.
Where is NASA’s justification for limiting the ability of the private and educational sectors from making full utilization of the amazing capabilities that are offered by the ISS? Answer: NASA made it up. Truth be known, NASA was dragged kicking and screaming into supporting this National Laboratory concept. Congress had to enact a law to make them do it.
None of this surprises me. NASA is a government agency, and as a government agency it is going to protect its turf, come hell or high water. It is for this reason I think it a bad idea for the new space rocket companies to take any NASA money, up front. If they do, NASA will immediately use those funds as a club to force these new companies to do things as NASA wishes, rather than being free to compete and innovate on their own. In other words, NASA will use the funds to maintain control of all space exploration.
Better the new companies build their rockets and spaceships on their own, and then sell these new inventions to NASA or whoever else wants to use them. Let the profits pay for the work, not the needs and regulations of a government agency.
Not only will this free competiton produce a lot more creativity and innovation, it will almost certainly help to reduce the cost of space travel, as these companies fight to gain market share. And most importantly, it will frame the future exploration of space in the context of freedom rather that a state-run endeavor.
And isn’t freedom the principle that the United States of America stands for?
A cyclone on Saturn has now lasted more than five years, since scientists started tracking it closely in 2004 with the arrival of Cassini in orbit around Saturn.
Opt out! Doctors say that, for health reasons, you should avoid the TSA’s full body scanners.
