The uncertainty of science: Astronomers discover an exoplanet that their theories say shouldn’t exist.
Finding out what’s in it: Obamacare threatens to destroy volunteer fire departments.
It seems the law requires that volunteers be considered employees who must be covered by their organization. The money quote that sums up the entire law: “Welcome to federal regulations.”
The lawsuit by a doctor against Obamacare.
Though the law has harmed him and his business directly, what is interesting and important about his lawsuit is that it is demanding that Obama enforce the law as written.
Obama tells Chris Matthews what he really thinks of the IRS harassment of conservatives.
[Y]ou’ve got an office in Cincinnati, in the IRS office that — I think, for bureaucratic reasons, is trying to streamline what is a difficult law to interpret about whether a nonprofit is actually a political organization deserves a tax exempt agency. And they’ve got a list, and suddenly everybody’s outraged.
I seem to remember Obama himself expressing outrage to the press soon after the scandal broke and promising an investigation. Obviously, he lied about his outrage. He also lied about the investigation, since it is now more than six months later and the so-called investigation has yet to contact any of the victims of the IRS harassment.
Gee, he seems to lie a lot, doesn’t he? I also wonder if he has any outrage over the IRS’s auditing of that cancer patient and his insurance agent soon after the patient appeared on Fox criticizing Obamacare. I suspect not.
Sacrilege! No alcoholic beverages for the Russian astronauts to drink on ISS on New Year’s Eve.
Here’s another report on the planetary sciences/NASA dispute this week over funding and grant scheduling.
From this report it appears that the complaints by the planetary science community might have been a bit overstated. It doesn’t appear that NASA is cutting the planetary sciences grant program in any significant way.
I suspect that the reason the planetary scientists are so touchy is because they do not trust the Obama administration, based on its previous efforts to eliminate the planetary program entirely. (It is also possible that they are right.)
Does this make you feel safer? When a man denied the police entry into his house because they didn’t have a warrant, one officer threatened to come back with a warrant and “shoot and kill” the man’s dogs.
[When the] police asked to search his house, Crinnian refused multiple times. He said they needed a warrant. Then he said one police officer started threatening him saying, “If we have to get a warrant, we’re going to come back when you’re not expecting it, we’re going to park in front of your house, where all your neighbors can see, we’re gonna bust in your door with a battering ram, we’re gonna shoot and kill your dogs, who are my family, and then we’re going to ransack your house looking for these people.”
How nice.
Google Lunar X-Prize competitor Moon Express has unveiled its lunar lander, scheduled to soft land on the Moon in 2015.
Moon Express is generally considered the leader in this lunar landing X-Prize competition, and this story adds weight to that consensus.
A map of Opportunity’s journey on Mars as it approaches its tenth anniversary since landing on January 25, 2004.
The map gives some nice perspective of just how far the rover has traveled in the past decade, as well as the increasing scale of the geological features it has observed. Opportunity began inside tiny Eagle Crater, moved on to larger Endurance Crater, then to the even bigger Victoria Crater, and now to the truly massive Endeavour Crator, 14 miles in diameter.
A new poll shows Democrats as out-of-touch extremists. Hat tip to Doug Ross.
The public overwhelmingly believes the country is headed in the wrong direction, that current economic policies aren’t working, that President Obama is doing a bad job, that government should be smaller and that ObamaCare should be repealed. But not Democrats.
On issue after issue, in fact, Democrats are the outliers by wide margins, according to an analysis of the December IBD/TIPP survey. They are, by and large, Pollyanna-ish about the economy, they can see no evil when it comes to Obama or ObamaCare, and they are extremists when it comes to the size and role of the federal government.
This close-mindedness is increasingly disturbing. How can we fix our problems if one significant portion of the population refuses to consider that they might be wrong?
Let the space price war begin.
Two money quotes:
This latest launch is bad news for Russia, Europe, Boeing, and Lockheed Martin. SES paid $55 million to SpaceX for the launch; rivals typically charge $100 million to $200 million. SpaceX has a backlog of about $4 billion worth of launches, many for commercial customers that it can now begin to serve.
and this:
We’ll really get a sense of SpaceX’s abilities over the next year. The company plans to launch rockets at a much more ferocious clip, to refine their reusability and to prepare for sending humans to the International Space Station. You can also expect to see SpaceX tormented by politicians with ties to existing launch contractors and military suppliers. May we live in interesting times.
Some more details about the impending takeover and overhaul of the Russian space industry by the Russian government.
Sadly, Russian culture is strongly top-down and authoritarian. After two decades of wild freedom — when they claimed a large share of the launch market and made a lot of money — they are now returning to their centralized ways. It will not work.
How India’s cryogenic rocket engine program was hampered and delayed, by the United States.
The article is fascinating, and rings very true until the last section. George Bush Sr. was an old CIA guy who distrusted the Soviets enough to want to prevent them from having any dealings with India, and Bill Clinton was very hostile to India during his entire administration. It is very easy to believe both presidents worked to stymie India’s efforts to work with the Russians.
The Air Force’s X-37B is approaching one year in orbit.
The ship in space now is on its second flight, and the third total flight of the program.
The planetary science community is in an uproar over the Obama administration’s proposed restructuring and possible budget cuts to NASA’s planetary research program.
Though the Obama administration has been consistently hostile to the planetary program, attempting to cut it severely several years in a row, and though I generally have found these particular cuts to be short-sighted, in this case the article is not very clear about the cuts NASA is proposing. It appears they are going to eliminate for one year the general research fund. I suspect there is waste in this budget, but I also suspect that this is a meat cleaver approach that has not been thought out well, as suggested in the article.
One quote from the article reinforces the foolishness of these management decisions:
Next year, a high-level NASA review is likely to have to decide between shutting down either the Mars Curiosity rover or the Cassini mission to Saturn. Both are successful missions that cost around $60 million a year, a level that Green has said the division simply cannot afford for the long term.
Talk about penny wise, pound foolish. The cost to get these probes to their destination was in the billion dollar range, each. To shut them down when they are working and cost relatively so little now is beyond stupid.
As I have written repeatedly, we have a big federal deficit. We need to cut, and I think NASA’s budget can be cut. It just makes no sense to cut planetary research, when there are other portions of that budget that are accomplishing little and cost far more.
Cassini has obtained its highest resolution images yet of Saturn’s weird hexagon-shaped jet stream.
They’ve even turned it into a movie!
Five myths about hacking you probably believe, thanks to the movies.
The article is focused on hacking, but it really illustrates the general difference between reality and the movies in almost all things. You simply have to ask the same questions about almost every other Hollywood generalization to find out how far from reality those generalizations are.
A new poll suggests that the young are finally abandoning Obama and the Democratic Party.
They aren’t rushing to the Republicans very much either, but this detail is significant:
According to the poll, 57 percent of millennials disapprove of Obamacare, with 40 percent saying it will worsen their quality of care and a majority believing it will drive up costs. Only 18 percent say Obamacare will improve their care. Among 18-to-29-year-olds currently without health insurance, less than one-third say they’re likely to enroll in the Obamacare exchanges.
In other words, they are finally beginning to pay attention, and have discovered that their blind faith in Democrats was a big mistake. They might not like Republicans, but if Republicans offer to kill Obamacare the young will likely favor Republicans in the coming elections.
How to opt out of Obamacare, legally and intelligently.
The competition heats up: Blue Origin today revealed details of its successful tests of its BE-3 hydrogen rocket engine.
More details here.
All is go for today’s Falcon 9 launch with less than four minutes left in the countdown. You can watch it live here.
We have liftoff. The real moment of truth on this launch will be once the rocket is in orbit. Can its upper stage relight to lift the SES satellite to geosynchronous orbit?
The rocket is now in orbit. The final engine burn and payload separation will occur within the hour.
The second stage engine burn has been successful. We now await payload separation.
The payload has separated successfully and has been delivered to its planned orbit.
With this successful launch SpaceX is poised to dominate the launch industry. Every other launch company has got to cut its prices in half, or more, in order to compete.
The FBI has been stonewalling the House investigation into the IRS scandal.
Obama claimed he was outraged by this scandal and would hunt down the perpetrators. He lied of course. He instead apparently told the FBI to block all investigations wherever possible.
Think you have finally enrolled in Obamacare? Think again.
It appears that even if you have struggled through and chosen a plan, the website might not tell the insurance company. Thus, you think you have a plan but the insurance company knows nothing about it. What fun!
More details here.
In a 376-5 bi-partisan vote, the House has approved a one year extension to the liability exemption of the 2004 Space Amendments Act.
Though this is helpful, it still leaves intact the regulations imposed by that 2004 law, all of which make difficult the future of space tourism. That this extension was passed in conjunction with an effort by Congress to overhaul the law is encouraging.
Art vs Engineering: A Connecticut museum, having switched its focus from art to science, has chosen to sell its most valuable statue to finance its own cubesat.
The Discovery Museum and Planetarium in Bridgeport is making a calculated trade-off as it launches a significant upgrade to its science education program for schoolchildren. The 55-year-old museum is auctioning a massive bronze statue Friday to raise money to outfit and program a satellite the size of a milk carton attached to a NASA rocket beaming back data on space dust. …
The statue [is] of a man handing a torch to another man reaching down while on a horse symbolizes the passing of the knowledge of civilization from one generation to the next. …
The satellite will be programmed to capture small space debris analyzed by students in high-school and younger at the museum’s Challenger Learning Center. “We’re building a mission control at the museum,” said David Mestre, director of space science education at the museum. “We’re developing software for a kid to run a space program.” [emphasis mine]
That last quote clinches the deal for me. The statue is impressive, but it merely expresses the idea. Having children operate their own space satellite puts the idea into action.
India has delayed the first test launch of its Geosynchronous Satellite Launch Vehicle (GSLV) from mid-December until the first week in 2014.
This delay appears to be simple prudence. They have no specific deadline for launch, and by giving themselves a few extra weeks they can make sure they have things right. I also have two additional comments.
First, I wish they would give this rocket a decent name. GSLV is not only hard to remember, it is ugly. A better name would help their marketing enormously.
Second, read the comments at the link. They are all from Indians, and the majority of them are very enthused. It will give you a sense of that country’s passion for technology and science.
Tonight I will make another of my many appearances on the Space Show with David Livingston. What makes this particular appearance special is that it will be the tenth anniversary of my first appearance on the show. Ten years ago tonight, on December 3, 2003, I appeared with David to discuss both the history of space exploration as well as its future — as we saw it then. (If you want to listen to that first appearance simply go to this link.)
For the first half of the show our discussion mostly focused on history, the 1960s space race, and my book, Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8 (now available as an ebook).
During the second half, our conversation began to range far and wide, speculating about the future of manned space exploration and what would be the best ways to jump start the American effort. Though I did not get everything right, what I said then has turned out to have been a remarkably accurate prediction of what has happened since.
To set the context, this appearance occurred only six weeks before George Bush’s January 14, 2004 speech where he announced his vision for space exploration. At the time we did not know what Bush would say, or even if he would propose anything, though there had been a lot of rumors that Bush was about to make a Kennedy-like speech proposing another Kennedy-like NASA mission to explore the solar system. David Livingston asked me what I thought would happen.
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O joy: According to one online hacker/security expert, no security was ever built into the Obamacare website.
The issue is not so much that the website is a dangerous place to enter personal information (bad as that is) but that no one should be surprised by any of this. Allowing the equivalent of the Motor Vehicle Administration to run the whole health insurance industry was guaranteed to produce these problems, as conservatives repeatedly noted in 2010.
Science discovers the obvious: Cats can recognize their owner’s voice, but choose to ignore it.
Russia consolidates its space industry into one giant government-owned corporation.
While the U.S. is working to increase the number of space companies and thus the competition to get into space, Russia is returning to its Soviet-era roots. This second story about this consolidation includes this telling quote:
The country is set to radically centralize its space industry in a bid to combat major inefficiencies and cut down on the misuse of funds under plans unveiled by Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin, who oversees the defense and aerospace sectors.
This decision does not really bode well for Russia’s effort to compete on the open market. You never solve inefficiencies or cut costs by eliminating competition. Instead, the lack of competition encourages inefficiency and increased cost.
