Israeli team enters Google Lunar X Prize competition
An Israeli team has entered the Google Lunar X Prize competition, hoping to land a nanosat on the moon for only $8 million.
Year: 2011
Russia regains contact with missing military satellite
Russia regains contact with missing military satellite, finds that it was placed in the wrong orbit.
Remembering Boris Yeltsin
A monument to Boris Yeltsin was unveiled today in his hometown on the 80th anniversary of his birth.
In this week of memorials to American space tragedies, this event in Russia brings to mind the far more important and significant events, affecting millions of people worldwide, that unfolded in the Soviet Union during the late 1980s and mid-1990s. The communist superpower was collapsing, and there was the real possibility that that collapse could lead to worldwide war and violence.
Yeltsin, far more than any other man, helped shepherd the former Soviet Union out of that chaos, and he did it as a civilized man, with relatively little bloodshed. As he shouted defiantly as he stood on a tank in front of the Russian parliament building on the day of the August coup, “Terror and dictatorship . . . must not be allowed to bring eternal night!”
Unlike many former communist leaders, Yeltsin had the openness of mind to recognize that the state-run centralized command society that he had grown up in and had helped run for years simply did not work. “We have oppressed the human spirit,” he noted sadly during a press conference shortly after the coup. More importantly, he also had the courage to take action on this realization, and force the painful changes that were necessary to save his country.
Yeltsin was no saint, and the Russian transition from dictatorship to freedom was far from perfect. No one even knows if that transition is going to hold, today, twenty years later. Nonetheless, the world should remember Yeltsin for his success, and honor that memory.
Vapor trails
White nose confirmed on Indiana bats
White nose syndrome, a fungus that is linked to the death of approximately a million bats throughout the eastern United States, has now been confirmed on two Indiana bats. You can read the actual Indiana Department of Natural Resources press release here. [pdf]
The bats are thus finally spreading the fungus north, as has been expected.
Remembering Columbia
An evening pause: On this day eight years ago, the space shuttle Columbia broke up as it returned from orbit. Rather than watch that sad sight again, I’d rather remember the shuttle’s achievements. Watch this footage of Columbia’s first landing on April 14, 1981, which proved it was possible to glide powerless back from space and land safely on a runway. Though we as a nation might be abandoning this approach right now, future generations will use this as their standard way to return to Earth.
Several things to note as you watch the video. First, the shuttle’s angle of descent is extremely and frighteningly steep, until the very last moment. And every shuttle landing is like this. The shuttle is heavy, but it is still attempting to glide powerless to a landing. To do so it needs the thickness of the atmosphere combined with high speed to give it lift. Thus, it plows downward at a mucher higher speed and angle than any airplane, then quickly levels out at the last moment.
Secondly, this first landing did not have a drogue chute to slow the shuttle down. Rather than complicate things, they simply let the shuttle roll until it came to a stop.
FEMA considers, than cancels spending a billion on MREs
Government stupidity in action: FEMA considered then canceled (thank goodness) a proposal to spend more than a billion dollars on Meals-Ready-to-Eat on the very slim chance that the New Madrid fault in the midwest might produce a major earthquake sometime in the three years.
Unfortunately, they still haven’t canceled plans to buy 7 million emergency blankets and 550 million gallons of water in individual 1-liter plastic bottles.
More McCarthyism, from the left
More McCarthyism from the left: How a university professor was threatened, then lost his job, because he disagreed with the mayor of Chicago.
WISE Completes Scan for Asteroids and Comets
The Wide-Field Infrared Survey Explorer, WISE, has completed its four month extended mission, finishing a scan of the heavens that discovered more than 33,000 asteroids and comets.
Fossil female pterosaur found with preserved egg
The fossil of a female pterodactyl has been found in China, including an about-to-be laid egg. Key quote:
The egg indicates this ancient flying reptile was a female, and that realisation has allowed researchers to sex these creatures for the first time.
Russia loses contact with new military satellite
Russia loses contact with newly launched military satellite.
finding out what’s politically correct
Want to know what the academic elite think is or is not politically correct? Make two different Freedom of Information Act requests at the same university for two scientists who just happen to be on opposite sides of the global warming debate and see how the university responds.
Not surprisingly, the university was glad to do whatever it could to hurt the global warming skeptic, while stonewalling any requests for information about the global warming advocate.