Building Boeing’s CST-100 manned capsule, the smart way.
From pressure seals used on the international space station to rendezvous and docking sensors developed for the Pentagon’s Orbital Express experiment, Boeing is drawing heavily on heritage space and aviation programs for its proposed CST-100 commercial human spacecraft.
Cheaper also.
An evening pause: Einstein explains E=mc²
The uncertainty of science: New data suggests the global climate is not as sensitive to changes in the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere as predicted by past climate models.
Another carbon trading scheme is failing, this time in Alberta Canada.
One scientist’s perspective on the new Climategate emails.
Long time readers will recall that in 2004 and 2005 (before Katrina), I led an interdisciplinary effort to review the literature on hurricanes and global warming. The effort resulted in a peer-reviewed article in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society. That paper, despite being peer-reviewed and standing the test of time (as we now know), was ignored by the relevant part of the IPCC 2007 that dealt with extreme events. Thanks to the newly released emails from UEA [University of East Anglia] (hacked, stolen, donated, or whatever) we can say with certainty why that paper was excluded from the IPCC 2007 report Chapter 3 which discussed hurricanes and climate change. Those various reviews associated with the release of the UEA emails that concluded that no papers were purposely kept out of the IPCC may want to revisit that particular conclusion.
Read the whole thing. It is worth it to get a real sense about how petty and political the IPCC process is. It has little to do with science, and everything to do with forcing a conclusion down everyone’s throat.
A preview of the new Mars unmanned rover Curiousity, set for launch on Saturday. This is the part of its mission that scares me the most:
The final stages of the entry, descent and landing sequence will be especially tense as the rover, dubbed Curiosity in a student naming contest, is gently lowered to the surface on cables suspended from a rocket-powered “sky crane” making its debut flight. Too large to use airbags like those that cushioned NASA’s Pathfinder, Spirit and Opportunity rovers, Curiosity will rely instead on landing rockets positioned above the rover, avoiding the challenge of coming up with a reliable way to get a one-ton vehicle off of an elevated, possibly tilted lander. Instead, Curiosity will be set down on its six 20-inch-wide wheels, ready to roll.
If it works.
The ESA tracking station that had made contact with Phobos-Grunt earlier this week failed repeatedly yesterday to re-establish contact.
An evening pause: George Winston at the piano.
Gingrich’s presidential campaign has gotten him no endorsements from Republican lawmakers.
Considering how incompetent these Republicans have been in getting the federal budget under control, and considering that the last time the budget was balanced was during Gingrich’s reign as speaker in the 1990s, I would consider their lack of support as the best endorsement Gingrich could get. We need real change in DC. The status quo has left us on the verge of economic collapse and bankruptcy.
New evidence from a cave in Australia suggests that humans were doing deep sea fishing — with the sophisticated maritime skills such ocean-going requires — far earlier than previously believed, as much as 42,000 years ago.
