Is asteroid mining about to begin?
Considering some of the major players who are either investors or advisers for this company, this story could get very exciting when the company’s full plans are revealed on April 24.
An evening pause: Though this video is about Switzerland, its philosophy jives perfectly with the events that took place on this day, April 19, at Lexington and Concord in 1775.
NASA budget battles: House panel proposes giving commercial space $500 million.
The Obama administration proposed giving commercial space $830 million, the Senate appropriations subpanel earlier this week proposed $525 million. All in all, this looks good for commercial space.
One other thing: that the House did not propose taking from NOAA the job of launching weather satellites and giving it to NASA is more proof to me that the proposal was merely an attempt by Barbara Mikulski (D-Maryland) to shift federal dollars to the Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland.
Uh-oh: That Mexican volcano near Mexico City is now spewing ash a half mile into the sky.
Amen to that.
The first stage of the Antares rocket is now vertical on the launchpad at Wallops Island in preparations for launch tests.
Senate Democrats don’t even bother to show up for a budget meeting called by their own leader.
Since the year 2009, not one single Democrat or Democrat-aligned member of the United States Senate has voted “yes” on any budget. They’ve refused to present their own ideas, of course, but they’ve also unanimously voted down every last alternative, from both Republicans and their own party’s president. Think about that.
Dawn’s mission at Vesta has been extended for forty days, while still allowing the spacecraft to reach Ceres as scheduled.
An evening pause: Some more harp jamming, this time by a Japanese performing music from Paraguay.
We’re here to help you: Two seniors “lose” $300 in cash going through a TSA security checkpoint.
Only two? “Two scandals could hurt Obama’s reelection lead.”
The article only mentions the GSA spending spree and the Secret Service sex scandal in Columbia. I wonder how this reporter missed Fast and Furious and Jon Corzine, just to name two that come to mind immediately. And there are others, for sure.
“Our spaceships to fly from here to Abu Dhabi to New Mexico in no more than an hour.”
The suggestion from this story is that not only will Virgin Galactic fly suborbital tourism flights out of Abu Dhabi, but the deal includes an effort to turn SpaceShipTwo into a transportation vehicle as well. Most interesting.
Caving for science! A bacteria, naturally resistant to all antibiotics, has been found in Lechuguilla Cave in New Mexico.
The uncertainty of science: A new study has found no evidence of dark matter within 13,000 light years of the Sun, something that had not been expected.
According to widely accepted theories, the solar neighborhood was expected to be filled with dark matter, a mysterious invisible substance that can only be detected indirectly by the gravitational force it exerts. But a new study by a team of astronomers in Chile has found that these theories just do not fit the observational facts. This may mean that attempts to directly detect dark matter particles on Earth are unlikely to be successful.
These findings will be as controversial as the now abandoned faster-than-light neutrino results last fall. Here, however, the new data is likely going to be more robust, which will cause the entire astrophysical community some real conniptions.
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Eleven ancient buildings built on a cliff’s edge.
A Senate panel today proposed shifting the responsibility for building weather satellites from NOAA to NASA.
It is very unclear from this article why the Senate panel proposed this shift. They claim it will save money but I don’t see how.
What I can guess is that there is probably a turf war going on in Congress over this money. For example, shifting these weather satellites to NASA almost certainly means that the Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland will get more money, which is almost certainly why Senator Barbara Mikulski (D-Maryland) is for it.
One thought however: NASA generally focuses on individual missions, not long term operational stuff like weather. I suspect it probably is not a good idea to give this work to NASA.
The same article above also outlined the panel’s proposals for other areas of NASA’s budget. To me, the key issue is the budget for commercial space. The White House requested $830 million. The Senate panel has instead proposed $525 million.
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An evening pause: Cats aren’t the only ones.
You can’t make this stuff up: A mathematical journal has retracted a paper because “the article contains no scientific content.”
Mexico has raised its volcano alert level in response to increased activity of Popocatepetl volcano, southeast of Mexico City.
We’re here to help you: New government regulations will likely end the ability of teenagers to get summer jobs on farms.
