NASA completes a successful first test flight of an Orion capsule.
The flight went off like clockwork this morning, and appears to have had no issues throughout the entire test flight.
One minor anomaly: NASA has not been able to recover the capsule’s forward bay cover, drogue chutes and pilot chutes as expected.
An evening pause: Hat tip Keith Douglas, who noted to me that Nile is “fairly well known around the NYC club scene. I’ve seen him live maybe 3 times, but he never brought this friend to the events I attended.”
I like watching how much fun these guys have playing this song.
According to spaceport officials, it will take a year to repair the damage sustained by the launchpad at Wallops Island from the Antares launch failure last month.
The damage didn’t look that serious in the initial assessments. I wonder if this long repair schedule isn’t a negotiating ploy for funding.
The National Science Foundation (NSF) and a contractor have been accused by both an audit and by Congress of a significant misuse of funds in a major ecological monitoring project costing almost a half a billion dollars.
With a construction budget of $433.7 million, NEON is planned to consist of 106 sites across the United States. Arrays of sensors at each site will monitor climate change and human impacts for 30 years, building an unprecedented continental-scale data set. Although some initially doubted its merits, the allure of big-data ecology eventually won over most scientists.
But a 2011 audit of the project’s proposed construction budget stalled three times when, according to the independent Defense Contract Audit Agency (DCAA), NEON’s accounting proved so poor that the review could not be completed. Eventually, DCAA issued an adverse ruling, concluding that nearly 36% of NEON’s budget proposal was questionable or undocumented.
When the NSF green-lit the project, the agency’s inspector-general ordered the audit released on 24 November, which found unallowable expenses including a $25,000 winter holiday party, $11,000 to provide coffee for employees, $3,000 for board-of-directors dinners that included alcohol, $3,000 for t-shirts and other clothes, $83,000 for “business development” and $112,000 for lobbying.
Republican members of Congress have since been attacking NSF for this lax management. And though the amount of funds apparently misused does not seem very large compared to the size of the entire contract, I am willing to bet that this audit only uncovered a tiny portion of the misuse. Based on the recent behavior of federal agencies, I would expect this to only be an indicator of much worst abuse that is still buried behind stone-walling.
A side note: Remember how only a few weeks ago the NSF head was claiming that a shortage of funds was the reason they were unable to cure ebola. What really happened was that they were too busy spending money having parties to do their job.
Faced with stiff competition from SpaceX, Europe has handed the construction its next generation rocket, Ariane 6, from Arianespace to a joint venture between the European companies Airbus and Safran.
The new venture will be dubbed Airbus Safran Launchers, and will take over as Europe’s launch company.
I had known that Airbus and Safran had proposed this venture to build Ariane 6, but until I read this press release I hadn’t realized that the agreed-to deal to build Ariane 6 means that Arianespace has essentially been fired by Europe as the company running Europe’s rocket operations. Arianespace, a partnership of the European Space Agency’s many partners, was never able to make a profit, while its Ariane 5 rocket costs a fortune to launch. They have now given the job to two private companies who have promised to rein in the costs. We shall see what happens.
The heat of competition: Russia hopes to compete 11 Proton launches in 2015.
That sounds nice, but they haven’t yet officially rescheduled the scrubbed November 28 Proton launch of a commercial satellite because of a faulty gyro in the upper stage. Considering the problems they have had with Proton in the past three years it will be a major accomplishment if this schedule gets completed as planned.
The first test flight of an Orion capsule was scrubbed this morning due to high winds followed by a valve problem in the first stage of its Delta 4 Heavy rocket.
They have tentatively rescheduled the launch for tomorrow, though both the weather and the valve issue could cause a further delay.
Europe has approved the construction of the European Extremely Large Telescope (E-ELT), which when completed will be the largest ground-based telescope.
The E-ELT will have a mirror 39 meters across, almost four times bigger than the world’s largest telescope today.
A word to the wise: This very month Sky & Telescope’s cover article, written by yours truly, describes the many difficulties the world’s present generation of giant telescopes have faced. Four out of five have not produced the science promised. Two of the four were dogged by so many technical problems that they required complete reconstruction. The builders of E-ELT will face even greater engineering challenges. Do not be surprised if this telescope does not get completed by 2025 as promised, and even if it does, do not be surprised if it takes another half decade or more before the engineers work out all the kinks.
A yearly survey of incidents of religious discrimination in the U.S. has found a steady rise in the past three years.
For the last three years the Liberty Institute and the Family Research Council has published Undeniable: The Survey of Hostility to Religion in America. The legal group says they’re seeing cases of discrimination against those of faith rising rapidly. “The first time we did it, we collected about 600 cases,” Jeff Mateer, general counsel of the Texas-based Liberty Institute, told CBN News. “We went from 600 to 1,200. And this year we’re up to about 1,600. So, the threats are continuing to increase at a dramatic pace.”
The article outlines some specific stories that are quite horrifying. The worst was the case of a man fired from his job because of the sermons he gave during his free time. Sadly, that is only a sample.
An evening pause: From Stephen Spielberg’s 1987 film Empire of the Sun.
Hat tip to Phil Berardelli, author of Phil’s Favorite 500: Loves of a Moviegoing Lifetime.
The Obama administration announced this week that it is withholding all of the more than 2,000 documents demanded by the court in connection with the IRS scandal and the possibility that the IRS divulged confidential taxpayer information to the White House.
Secretary of the Treasury Jacob Lew, Obama’s former White House Chief of Staff, took the documents that were set to be released and now refuses to ever turn them over. His rationale? Lew cannot release information about improper disclosures of confidential taxpayer information because that would be an improper disclosure of confidential taxpayer information.
Does anyone with any brains actually believe Lew and the Obama administration in this? I certainly don’t. The real reason they are are withholding the documents is because those documents will prove that the Obama administration used confidential taxpayer information for political purposes, and they must prevent that fact from being proven at all costs.
The uncertainty of science: Did an ancestor of humanity etch zig-zags on a shell half a million years ago?
This story is a fascinating illustration of the difficulties of pinning down facts in the field of science. The researchers do an impeccable job of checking all possibilities, and finish by cheerfully admitting that their conclusions could be wrong. If right, however, the discovery is significant, as it tells us that 500,000 years ago an ancestor of the human race was capable of drawing an abstract design on the surface of a shell.
