The launches at Kennedy, delayed because of a fire at an Air Force radar facility, have now been rescheduled.
This includes a military launch by an Atlas 5 rocket on April 10 and SpaceX’s next Falcon 9 launch to supply ISS. The Falcon 9 flight will also include an attempt to bring the first stage back to a soft vertical landing over water.
The competition heats up: Even as India successfully launched its second homemade GPS satellite today, the head of of the Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre in India announced that it will launch a test flight of a manned capsule in June using that country’s powerful GSLV rocket.
Because of a $10 million shortfall in its astrophysics budget, NASA is weighing the fate of nine operating space telescopes.
Six of the projects vying for extended funding are U.S.-based. Three are overseen by international space agencies and have U.S. partners.
The NASA missions are: the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope; the Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array X-ray observatory; the infrared Spitzer Space Telescope; the Swift Telescope, which tracks gamma-ray bursts; a proposed Kepler space telescope follow-on mission known as K2; and the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, which was brought out of hibernation last year to help search for asteroids on a collision course with Earth.
Also in the running are two European Space Agency missions, XMM-Newton — an X-ray observatory — and Planck, which studied relic radiation from the Big Bang. Planck was decommissioned in October, but its data analysis program continues.
The final contender is Japan’s Suzaku X-ray telescope.
In hearings today, Pentagon officials said that they are considering building American-built engines to use on our rockets rather than buy Russian-made engines.
They could do this very cheaply if they simply allowed SpaceX to bid on all military launches.
UrtheCast has released its first image of Earth, taken from one of its cameras on ISS.
The UrtheCast (pronounced Earth-Cast) system, which was installed (not without trouble) on the International Space Station at the end of 2013, is composed of two cameras. The Theia “medium resolution” camera took this shot; the full picture has a resolution of 3200×8000, or about 25 megapixels. The high-resolution device, which will capture video, is still being calibrated.
Eventually UrtheCast plans to provide free, constant, near-real-time video of the globe from far above — that is, when it’s not being rented out to parties interested in a quick satellite snap of an area. Powerful cameras able to respond quickly to such requests are in high demand by everyone from law enforcement to disaster-relief coordinators.
McCarthyism of the left: A man loses his job merely because he has an opinion the left dislikes.
We also have a blacklist being used to harass and intimidate conservatives.
But this can’t be so! The left is home of tolerance and diversity!
A skydiver’s helmet cam videotapes a meteorite zipping past him as it falls.
The incident happened back in the summer of 2012, when skydiver Anders Helstrup and other members of the Oslo Parachute Club took to the skies above Hedmark, Norway. Helstrup documented the jump with two cameras fixed to the front and back of his helmet. Helstrup tells NRK (the largest media outlet in Norway) that on the way down he felt “something” happen, but didn’t know what. It was only after landing and reviewing his camera footage that he discovered something shocking: a rock had fallen from the heavens and missed him by just a few yards.
Video below the fold. The news woman is annoying, but the footage is quite cool.
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In a new study scientists confirm their belief that a sea of liquid water the size of Lake Superior exists inside the Saturn moon Enceladus.
The terrible close-mindedness of the left.
Watch the video below the fold. (The link above also transcribes much of the dialogue if you have trouble hearing it.) It is very disturbing. At the National Young Feminist Leadership Conference a female reporter merely wants to interview attendees, and she gets shunned for only one reason: They discover she is from a “conservative” organization.
The irony of this behavior is completely lost on the conference participants, which proclaimed its “inclusivity” and condemned any behavior that “makes folks feel uncomfortable, threatened, or demoralized.” Moreover, their behavior suggests they know deep down that their positions are indefensible, or else they would be glad to discuss them with their opponents.
Finally, this behavior is terrifying, as it suggests these individuals think their opponents are so evil that they will be willing to do almost anything to shut them up. With beliefs like this, from women being trained as future feminist leaders, the future for freedom in American does not bode well.
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Watch as a single graph illustrates how the policies of the radical leftwing Democratic Party during the past forty years has destroyed Chicago’s middle class.
Though the propaganda goal of this story is to push the Democratic Party’s new talking point of income equality, the graph does a better job of showing us the consequences of Democratic rule. Chicago has been run by Democrats forever, but only by radical leftwing Democrats since the 1970s, which is exactly when the middle class there started to flee.
Surprise, surprise! A scientist whistleblower has found that publicly questioning bad science papers vs privately notifying the publisher significantly increases the chances of getting them retracted.
[Paul] Brookes ran the blog Science Fraud from July 2012 to January 2013, before closing it down in response to threats of legal action. For the PeerJ study, Brookes compared the outcomes of two sets of papers — 274 whose alleged data problems he chronicled on his blog, and 223 that he was e-mailed about but did not post before he shut the site down. Those private e-mails, he says, were also copied to the relevant journals, funding agencies and authors’ research institutions, so authorities would also have had the opportunity to review the allegations.
Of the 274 papers Brookes blogged about, 16 were retracted and 47 corrected by December 2013, he reports, meaning that action was taken in 23% of the cases. But of the 223 unpublicized papers, only two were retracted and five corrected — a rate of 3%.
As always, the more freedom and openness we have, the better. The only people who suffer in such a situation are the incompetent and dishonest ones.
Brian Binnie, the man who flew SpaceShipOne for Scaled Composites, has left that company for competitor XCOR.
It might simply be the man got a promotion, but it also might be that he knows the problems SpaceShipTwo is having and sees his chances of flying there going down. His willingness to work for XCOR instead could also be looked at as a kind of endorsement of that company’s chances of success.
