Data gathered at Gusev Crater on Mars by the rover Spirit now suggests that the surface there was eaten away by an acidic fog, probably created during a volcanic event.
Posted from Tucson International Airport.
The competition heats up: China today unveiled a one-third scale model of its planned Martian lander/rover, scheduled for launch in 2020.
If they succeed in putting a lander and rover on Mars, China will have clearly demonstrated the capability to do almost anything in space that the United States can do. The competition in the coming decades should thus be most interesting.
Posted from Tucson International Airport.
Promises, promises! Richard Branson today predicted that Virgin Galactic’s second SpaceShipTwo suborbital spaceplane will begin flight tests in February 2016.
Forgive me if I am extremely skeptical. Branson has been making these kinds of promises now for more than a decade, none of which has come even close to coming true. I note this new prediction here merely to point out how bad his past predictions have been. Nowadays, I only believe Virgin Galactic is going to fly after they have do so.
Posted from Tucson International Airport, on the way to Mexico City for a week of sightseeing.
An evening pause: On the eve of this year’s election day, this scene from Becket (1964) expresses well what I wish the American voters would do to both the Democratic Party and the Republican leadership in Congress. They all need to go, for the health of the country and because of their repeated malfeasance in office.
Hat tip to Phil Berardelli, author of the new edition of Phil’s Favorite 500: Loves of a Moviegoing Lifetime.
Senator Ted Cruz (R-Texas) today put the Justice Department on notice that he wants all their documents relating to the IRS scandal preserved so that future administrations have the ability to complete their own investigation.
“It is important for you and other officials in this Administration to understand that this administration’s decisions to neither continue this investigation nor appoint a special prosecutor do not represent the conclusion of this matter,” Mr. Cruz said in a letter to Attorney General Loretta Lynch. “Given this Administration’s refusal to conduct itself appropriately, or take the issue of the potential illegal conduct of IRS employees seriously, any subsequent administration should reserve the right to reopen the matter, conduct its own investigation, or appoint a special prosecutor to conduct an investigation.”
I would not be surprised at all if the Justice Department, now working full time for the Democratic Party, decides to destroy these documents at first opportunity. They know that they will face no criminal charges, even though this would be a blatant act of obstruction of justice, because the Democratic Party in Congress will stonewall any investigation. And unless the next Republican President has the courage to fire the lot of them, they themselves will be able to stonewall the next President as well.
In fact, which Republican candidates running for President would have the courage to fire the lot of them? Cruz for sure. Trump probably. Anyone else? I don’t think so.
The coming dark age: A leading French television weatherman has been fired because he published a book expressing skepticism about global warming.
He said he was inspired to write the book after France’s Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius met with TV meteorologists and asked them to highlight climate change issues in their broadcasts. “I was horrified by this speech,” Verdier told French magazine Les Inrockuptibles last month. In his book, Verdier accuses state-funded climate change scientists of having been “manipulated” and “politicised”, even accusing the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) of publishing deliberately misleading data
In other words, he dared to expose the political roots of global warming that has nothing to do with science, and was thus immediately fired.
The International Space Station today celebrates the anniversary of the arrival of its first crew and the completion of fifteen years of continuous human activity in space.
The previous record of continuous human occupation, on Mir, was ten years. Hopefully, the record now is permanent and ongoing, and will never have an end.
The competition heats up: Reaction Engines, the British company developing a hybrid air-breathing rocket engine, today received obtained a significant funding boost from a new private partner as well as the British government.
The government has committed $60 million, while BAE has purchased 20% of the company with a commitment of an additional $20 million.
The craft Reaction Engines intends to eventually produce, known as Skylon, depends on the ability to cool an incoming airstream from 1,000 degrees C to minus 150 C almost instantly, at close to 1/100th of a second. That process doubles the technical limits of a jet engine, and would enable the craft to reach extremely fast speeds in Earth’s atmosphere, up to give times the speed of sound, before switching to a rocket engine to reach orbit.
Don’t start buying tickets however. They don’t expect to begin manned test flights for at least a decade
For those who want to read some interesting science papers, on Friday the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics published a special issue devoted to the results from Rosetta and Philae.
The issue includes 46 papers, many of which are open access and thus available at no cost to the general public. Many were published previously and include their press releases. These earlier results have already been posted here at BtB, but now they the results are gathered together in one place.
Finding out what’s in it: Health insurance premiums in 2016 will rise more than 20%, three times more than predicted by Obama officials.
The discrepancy is because the government excluded price data for three of the four Obamacare health insurance plans when the officials issued their recent forecast claiming enrollees would face only a 7.5 percent average rate increase in 2016. When data for all four plans are included, premium costs will actually rise on average 20.3 percent next year.
In other words, Obama administration officials purposely manipulated the numbers to hide the actual rate increase. Then, not surprisingly, “The mainstream media was quick to embrace the 7.5 percent number, claiming it reflected the real-world experience of most Obamacare customers,” when it truth the number was a lie.
Finding out what’s in it: New York’s Obamacare co-op, the country’s largest and the one that took the most government loans to get established, is now facing bankruptcy and collapse.
It is unclear if the co-op deliberately misled state regulators in its original filings, or if regulators found evidence of financial wrongdoing while they tried to close down the defunct non-profit. The co-op’s insolvency was announced September 25.
The New York Department of Financial Services, which regulates insurers in the Empire State, also revised its earlier announcement to the co-op’s 215,000 policyholders that they had until Dec. 30 to find new insurance coverage. Regulators now advise the co-op’s enrollees, many who are poor, that they have to secure new coverage within the next two weeks. DFS said in a statement late Friday that consumers “must take action to choose a new plan for the remainder of 2015 on or before November 15, 2015.”
It also appears that the co-op has been understating its bad financial condition to government officials. Other than that, things remain peachy-keen!
The competition heats up: ULA successfully completed its third Atlas 5 launch in October yesterday.
ULA’s has one more Atlas 5 launch scheduled this year, lifting Orbital ATK’s Cygnus capsule up to ISS on December 3.
