Orbital Sciences has set July 11 as the launch date for its next Cygnus cargo mission to ISS.
They have concluded their inspection of the refurbished Russian engines on the Antares rocket and are satisfied it does not have the problems that caused another engine to blow up during tests.
NASA and Boeing today signed a $2.8 billion contract for Boeing to build the core stage of the SLS rocket
Scheduled for its initial test flight in 2017, the SLS is designed to be flexible and evolvable to meet a variety of crew and cargo mission needs. The initial flight-test configuration will provide a 77-ton capacity, and the final evolved two-stage configuration will provide a lift capability of more than 143 tons.
It would be nice for the U.S. to have this heavy-lift rocket, but I fully expect the funds to run out immediately after it makes its inaugural flight, despite the wonderful pork it provides to so many Congressional districts. It just costs too much per launch.
Running from competition: The Russian space agency Roskosmos has decided not to spend the money necessary to buy Sea Launch and make it part of its consolidated United Rocket and Space Corporation (URSC).
Part of the reason the Russians are abandoning Sea Launch is that the rocket the ocean-going platform uses is the Ukrainian-built Zenit rocket, and Russia wants URSC to a wholly Russian operation. Rather than partner with Ukraine for profit, they will let the business die.
The competition heats up: The commercial satellite company Inmarsat has booked SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy rocket for one firm launch and two additional options.
The firm contract is for the launch, scheduled perhaps aggressively for late 2016, of a satellite being built for both Inmarsat and Arabsat of Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. Arabsat will use the satellite for conventional telecommunications services for its wholly owned Hellas-Sat fleet operator of Greece. The Inmarsat payload uses S-band to provide mobile communications in Europe as part of a satellite-terrestrial broadband network, which is a new business line for Inmarsat.
Inmarsat’s launch contract is for a rocket that has not even yet been tested once, which tells us something about the faith they have in SpaceX. While I would be shocked if they didn’t have an option to pull out should there be significant delays or problems in launching Falcon Heavy, that they are willing to commit to it now is a convincing endorsement of SpaceX.
Pushback: The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) today filed lawsuits against the speech codes at four universities.
Read the article. The specific examples are quite oppressive. For example:
At Citrus College in California, student Vincenzo Sinapi-Riddle is challenging three unconstitutional policies, including a free speech zone that the school already agreed to abolish after a 2003 lawsuit. Not only did Citrus College reinstitute its “Free Speech Area,” comprising a miniscule 1.37% of campus, but it also requires student organizations to undergo a two-week approval process for any expressive activity.
Federal officials have admitted that, of the 2.9 million Obamacare applications that have problems and thus cannot be processed, 85% cannot be resolved.
You ask a government bureaucracy to run things, you get these kinds of problems. Everyone knows this, even liberals, which is why I am endlessly puzzled that they still demand the government to do things for us.
The science journal Nature today announced the retraction of two controversial stem cell papers.
The two papers reporting the stimulus-triggered acquisition of pluripotency (STAP) phenomenon appeared online on 29 January. Questions about the papers arose almost immediately, leading to an investigation by RIKEN, the headquarters of the network of the nationally funded laboratories that is based in Wako near Tokyo. Investigators documented several instances of fabrication and falsification in the papers and concluded that some of these constituted research misconduct on the part of [Haruko] Obokata [the lead author].
Japanese media recently reported that authors had agreed to retract the papers but were discussing the wording of the notice. In the note that appeared today, the authors point to errors previously identified by RIKEN investigations in supplementary documents. They also identify additional errors in both papers, including mix-ups in images, mislabeling, faulty descriptions, and “inexplicable discrepancies in genetic background and transgene insertion sites between the donor mice and the reported” STAP cells. [emphasis mine]
The list of errors now documented sound astonishing. In fact, I can’t see how any serious review by any competent specialist in this field could have missed them all, which suggests that for this research at least the peer-review process is mostly a sham. In fact, in the article Nature admits that its
» Read more
Second time’s the charm: A Delta 2 rocket successfully launched the Orbiting Carbon Observatory 2 (OCO-2) into orbit on Wednesday, five years after the first OCO was lost at launch when its Taurus XL rocket fell into the ocean.
The Earth-observing satellite is designed to globally track the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.
I have to note that if the science of climate change was so “settled,” as President Barack Obama keeps insisting, why did we then spend half a billion dollars on this satellite? Wouldn’t it make more sense to drop the research and focus entirely on saving the planet?
A third lawsuit against the IRS, this one by True the Vote, will demand answers at a hearing on July 11 about those lost emails.
This lawsuit is in addition to the Z-Street and the Judicial Watch suits. Thus, we now have three different judges in three different courts pushing back at the IRS coverup, with hearings scheduled for July 10 and July 11.
As I said, things should get very hot for the IRS and the Obama administration come mid-July.
True the Vote, the organization harassed by the IRS and the Obama administration for investigating fraud at the polls, has sued the Mississippi Secretary of State over alleged voter fraud in last week’s Republican primary.
Though I found some of Cochran’s campaign efforts quite disgusting, I was not offended that blacks came out to vote for him. As long as their vote is legal, that is their right. However, the allegations of fraud that have been swirling around this election suggest that maybe a closer look is warranted.
After completing a preliminary search for potential Kuiper Belt objects which the Pluto probe New Horizons might visit, scientists have decided to use the space telescope for a deeper more complete search.
As a first step, Hubble found two KBOs drifting against the starry background. They may or may not be the ideal target for New Horizons. Nevertheless, the observation is proof of concept that Hubble can go forward with an approved deeper KBO search, covering an area of sky roughly the angular size of the full Moon. The exceedingly challenging observation amounted to finding something no bigger than Manhattan Island, and charcoal black, located 4 billion miles away.
More here.
The competition heats up: WhiteKnightTwo took off on its first test flight since January today.
No word on what they are testing, though I suspect it is related to the cracks rumored to have been found on the ship’s wings.
Who says they’re conservatives? The House Ethics committee, run by Republicans, has quietly eliminated the requirement that elected officials list any privately sponsored travel they receive in their annual financial-disclosure forms.
The move, made behind closed doors and without a public announcement by the House Ethics Committee, reverses more than three decades of precedent. Gifts of free travel to lawmakers have appeared on the yearly financial form dating back its creation in the late 1970s, after the Watergate scandal. National Journal uncovered the deleted disclosure requirement when analyzing the most recent batch of yearly filings. “This is such an obvious effort to avoid accountability,” said Melanie Sloan, executive director of the watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington. “There’s no legitimate reason. There’s no good reason for it.”
Once again more evidence that we the voters must replace as many of these crooks, from both parties, as we can.
The competition heats up: According to Russian Deputy prime minister Dmitry Rogozin, the new Vostochny spaceport is on schedule to begin operations in 2015.
The competition heats up: The merged Airbus/Safran rocket division has surprised the European Space Agency with a proposed new design for Ariane 6.
The Airbus-Safran proposal, if carried to its logical end, would mean a single company building Ariane vehicles, with fewer subcontractors and much less government oversight. It would likely mean the end of the CNES launcher division as industry takes more control of Ariane design and operations.
In other words, the contractors who build the rockets for ESA want more power over that construction. They want less government oversight, and more ownership of the rocket they build.
Sounds like what’s happening in the U.S., doesn’t it? Giving ownership to the rocket builders means they not only have more flexibility and thus can be more efficient, it makes it easier for them to innovate in both construction and sales.
The first test flight of Russia’s new Angara rocket was scrubbed because loss of pressure in the fuel system because of a valve failure.
As expected, this failure requires them to take the rocket off the launchpad to replace the valve.
A survey of professional academic economists finds that a large percentage are quite willing to cheat or fake data to get the results they want.
From the paper’s abstract:
This study reports the results of a survey of professional, mostly academic economists about their research norms and scientific misbehavior. Behavior such as data fabrication or plagiarism are (almost) unanimously rejected and admitted by less than 4% of participants. Research practices that are often considered “questionable,” e.g., strategic behavior while analyzing results or in the publication process, are rejected by at least 60%. Despite their low justifiability, these behaviors are widespread. Ninety-four percent report having engaged in at least one unaccepted research practice. [emphasis mine]
That less than 4% engage in “data fabrication or plagiarism” might seem low, but it is a terrible statistic. Worse, the other results make me think that the many of the 96% who said they didn’t do this were lying. 40% admit to doing what they agree are “questionable” research practices, while 94% admit to committing “at least one unaccepted research practice.”
In other words, almost none of these academic economists can be trusted in the slightest. As the paper notes, “these behaviors are widespread.”
A wild herd of hippopotamuses that once belonged to a Colombian drug lord are now spreading across the countryside and no one knows what to do with them.
Situated halfway between the city of Medellin and Bogota, the Colombian capital, Hacienda Napoles was the vast ranch owned by the drugs baron Pablo Escobar. In the early 1980s, after Escobar had become rich but before he had started the campaign of assassinations and bombings that was to almost tear Colombia apart, he built himself a zoo.
He smuggled in elephants, giraffes and other exotic animals, among them four hippos – three females and one male. And with a typically grand gesture, he allowed the public to wander freely around the zoo. Buses filled with schoolchildren passed under a replica of the propeller plane that carried Escobar’s first US-bound shipments of cocaine. While Don Pablo masterminded the operations of the Medellin Cartel from his villa on the hill, the locals gazed at the strange animals and even stranger concrete dinosaurs that Escobar built for his son.
When Hacienda Napoles was confiscated in the early 1990s, Escobar’s menagerie was dispersed to zoos around the country. But not the hippos. For about two decades, they have wallowed in their soupy lake, watching the 20sq km (8 sq mile) park around them become neglected and overgrown – and then transformed back into a zoo and theme park, complete with water slides. All the while, the hippos themselves thrived, and multiplied.
The hippos also escaped from the zoo, and because the environmental conditions in Colombia are ideal for these invasive hippos, they are prospering wherever they go.
As Rosetta approaches Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerisimenko, it has measured the amount of water evaporating of the comet as it slowly comes to life as it approaches the Sun.
ESA’s Rosetta spacecraft has found that comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko is releasing the equivalent of two small glasses of water into space every second, even at a cold 583 million kilometres from the Sun. The first observations of water vapour streaming from the comet were made by the Microwave Instrument for Rosetta Orbiter, or MIRO, on 6 June, when the spacecraft was about 350 000 kilometres from the comet. Since the initial detection, water vapour has been found every time MIRO has been pointed towards the comet.
That rate of evaporation will increase with time.
The Supreme Court today struck down the Obamacare contraceptive mandate imposed by the Obama administration on all businesses.
Despite the opinions of many on the left, some of whom have even threatened to burn Hobby Lobby to the ground for making this challenge, this is a victory for religious liberty. Since when in this country did the government get the right to force religious people of any religion into doing things that directly violate their religious beliefs? This rules clearly says the government does not yet have that right.
No one who supports freedom, however, should rest easy. The decision was 5-4, and with a Democratic Party today quite willing to put restrictions on free speech, we must be prepared for more assaults on freedom.
