Dragon’s test rendezvous with ISS tonight has begun.
The rendezvous won’t be completed until 6:30 am (Eastern), with two orbital engine burns scheduled for 3 and 4 am. For further updates you can go here. Or you can watch everything on NASA TV.
No more banging that ketchup bottle: Engineers at MIT have developed a coating for the insides of food containers that will allow all the food to flow out.
More information on the leftwing activist, Brett Kimberlin, who is trying to destroy bloggers who criticize him, and the effort of the blogosphere to fight back.
We’re here to help you: The University of Arkansas has been forced by the Obama Justice Department to allow a male student permanent access to female bathrooms.
From the Palestinian Authority: “[Christians and Jews] are inferior and smaller, more cowardly and despised.”
Two points: 1. This was read on the PA’s official television network by a a young girl as part of a children’s show. 2. Our federal government, under the Obama administration, has sent the PA hundreds of millions of dollars to fund this kind of bigotry and hate.
An evening pause: “Nobody’s business what I do.”
Dragon has been approved to approach within 1.5 miles of ISS tonight in its first rendezvous test. More information here.
If this goes well tonight, Dragon will next attempt to approach the station close enough for its robot arm to grab it.
The work is good if you can get it: Four Princeton physicists received over $1.5 million in lodging subsidies from the Department of Energy while on “temporary” assignment to other labs, even after living at that assignment for as much as 14 years.
The above story, from Science, takes a more sympathic view of this misuse of government funds. The Washington Post is more blunt:
Four high-ranking federal lab workers found a way to turn “per diem” funds for a temporary assignment into a steady flow of extra income — at taxpayers’ expense. The overpayments, discovered in an inspector general’s audit, boosted the annual pay of some of the employees by as much as $64,000.
The Department of Energy paid the four scientists roughly $1.8 million for daily lodging and “inconvenience” during assignments away from home. But these scientists were paid as if they were on temporary duty for up to 14 years — long after most had permanently relocated to job sites.
The problem with this story is that it isn’t an exception but the rule. Right now the wolves are guarding the chicken house, and they are raiding it routinely for as much cash as they can get. Consider for example last week’s story about the NIH study that has spent a billion dollars without even getting off the ground.
You give someone the equivalent of a blank check, and they will make no effort to do things efficiently, or even to do what you hired them for.
Never mind! Scientists who published a study last month that said they could find no evidence of dark matter in nearby interstellar space have re-analyzed their data and found that the dark matter is apparently there.
The National Academy holds a panel of past and present presidential science advisers, and invites only Democrats.
It just wouldn’t be right to allow an alternative perspective into the discussion, would it?
Leftwing civility: How a leftist activist/convicted bomber is working to destroy the lives of several bloggers.
The new colonial movement: At a conference in Washington DC yesterday both Russia and Japan announced the Moon as their next primary space exploration goal.
If the U.S. gets a competitive private aerospace industry going — which seems increasingly likely — I’m willing to bet those companies will get to the Moon before either of these governments.
