Duo Scarlette – Trapeze
An evening pause: Here’s a different kind of flying, compared to yesterday’s evening pause.
Hat tip Edward Thelen.
Year: 2015
Giant lava tubes possible on the Moon
New analysis of the lunar geology combined with gravity data from GRAIL now suggests that the Moon could harbor lava tubes several miles wide.
David Blair, a graduate student in Purdue’s Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences, led the study that examined whether empty lava tubes more than 1 kilometer wide could remain structurally stable on the moon. “We found that if lunar lava tubes existed with a strong arched shape like those on Earth, they would be stable at sizes up to 5,000 meters, or several miles wide, on the moon,” Blair said. “This wouldn’t be possible on Earth, but gravity is much lower on the moon and lunar rock doesn’t have to withstand the same weathering and erosion. In theory, huge lava tubes – big enough to easily house a city – could be structurally sound on the moon.”
You can read their paper here. If this is so, then the possibility of huge colonies on the Moon increases significantly, as it will be much easier to build these colonies inside these giant lava tubes.
Arkansas agrees to let Stanley children go home, but only for awhile
The Arkansas government has agreed to return to their parents the children it had kidnapped, but only provisionally.
Four of the seven Arkansas Christian homeschool children who were removed from their parents home in January will finally be returned to live full time on a 60-day trial basis after the family reached a mediated agreement with the Arkansas Department of Human Services on Tuesday. The children’s mother, Michelle Stanley, told The Christian Post on Wednesday that the agreement will also allow for the three older children to return home on the weekends and to stay at home during their spring break, which is next week.
Isn’t this nice of them? The parents have been accused of no crime, there is absolutely no evidence of abuse, but the state has decided it can take the kids anyway and than determine if the parents can ever see them again. Doesn’t that make you feel really safe?
Ohio wedding photographer threatened with legal action over beliefs
Here we go again: A Christian wedding photography now faces legal action because she declined photographing a same-sex marriage.
Although the [same-sex] couple filed the complaint, Ohio is one of 13 states that does not allow same-sex marriages, and Bexley is also a municipality that does not prohibit discrimination based on sexual orientation. Additionally, the Bexley Chamber of Commerce does not prohibit its members from discriminating based on sexual orientation.
The Bexley Chamber of Commerce issued a statement through Facebook on Monday condemning Schmackers’ refusal of service. The post continued by stating that board members have decided that the chamber’s policy must be changed so that this type of “discrimination” does not happen again.
Damn right. These evil Christians have got to be squelched and destroyed. They have no right to their religion. In fact, maybe we should round them up and put them in camps! That will show them that we believe in tolerance and freedom!
Obama administration considers Munich-like UN deal to partition Israel
Having failed in its effort to depose Benjamin Netanyahu as Israel’s elected leader, the Obama administration is considering making several international deals that will bypass Israel’s government and force that country to accept a Palestinian state — even though the leaders of the Palestinians are still vowing to destroy them.
More here.
Anyone with any education at all knows how well Chamberlain’s deal at Munich with Hitler worked out. Expect the same from Obama and the Palestinians.
Mars One finalist kicked out for publicly criticizing company.
The Mars One finalist who publicly criticized the company’s proposed one-way Mars mission has been kicked out.
The company claims he breached their confidentiality rules. In addition, other finalists have contested his criticisms. Their points seem reasonable, but the bottom line remains that the project is unrealistic and will not fly. They lack the funding and the technology to do it, and won’t have it for decades.
Obamacare is crushing small business with its cost and complexity
Finding out what’s in it: Obamacare is costing small businesses thousands of dollars to fulfill its complex regulations that they didn’t have to spend beforehand.
The Affordable Care Act, which as of next Jan. 1 applies to all companies with 50 or more workers, requires owners to track staffers’ hours, absences and how much they spend on health insurance. Many small businesses don’t have the human resources departments or computer systems that large companies have, making it harder to handle the paperwork. On average, complying with the law costs small businesses more than $15,000 a year, according to a survey released a year ago by the National Small Business Association. “It’s a horrible hassle,” says Mete, managing partner of the Miami-based company.
And how are these small businesses paying for this? Either they have to raise prices, so that you the customer pay, or they
cut back on workers’ bonuses and raises. “[The employees] understand it didn’t emanate from us,” Patton says. “They’re just disappointed that $25,000 could have gone into a bonus pool.”
Obviously, it is Bush’s fault that this is happening! Who would dream of blaming the Democrats and Obama, even though they wrote this law and were the only ones who voted for it? If Bush hadn’t been President, they would never have done it! In fact, I am sure it is Reagan’s fault also!
Dubai World Record Eagle Flight
An evening pause: Hat tip tdub. As he noted, “The final tuck and dive to its master is breathtaking.”
Launch date for one-year mission to ISS set
The launch of three astronauts, two of which will spend a year in space, has now been scheduled for March 27.
It is because these two astronauts will not be returning to Earth in six months there was room for the Russians to sell a seat to space tourist Sarah Brightman.
Obama prosecutor stonewalls Congress to protect Lois Lerner
Working for the Democratic Party: The Obama-appointed U.S. attorney for D.C. is about to step down after five years without ever acting on the contempt of Congress charge against Lois Lerner.
An iron rain fell on Earth early in its formation
New research attempting to explain why the Earth but not the Moon has so much iron splattered through its mantle has found that iron can be more easily vaporized during impacts than previously thought, and thus rained down on the planet during the early asteroid bombardment.
Principal investigator Kraus said, “Because planetary scientists always thought it was difficult to vaporize iron, they never thought of vaporization as an important process during the formation of the Earth and its core. But with our experiments, we showed that it’s very easy to impact-vaporize iron.” He continued, “This changes the way we think of planet formation, in that instead of core formation occurring by iron sinking down to the growing Earth’s core in large blobs (technically called diapirs), that iron was vaporized, spread out in a plume over the surface of the Earth and rained out as small droplets. The small iron droplets mixed easily with the mantle, which changes our interpretation of the geochemical data we use to date the timing of Earth’s core formation.”
The Moon’s gravity in turn wasn’t sufficient to pull its own iron vapor down. Thus, it does not have much iron in its mantle.
Unexpected findings from Mars
The uncertainty of science: MAVEN has discovered both an unexpected dust cloud high in Mars’ atmosphere along with an aurora very deep down in the atmosphere, much deeper than expected.
The dust cloud, at around 90 miles elevation, is especially mysterious, as they have no idea how it got there.
Sierra Nevada introduces its cargo version of Dream Chaser
The competition heats up: Sierra Nevada has unveiled a revised cargo version of Dream Chaser, competing for NASA next round of freighter contracts to ISS.
They have made a number of changes, but the most significant is the new folding wings, allowing the spacecraft to fit inside the fairings of most rocket systems. This also eliminates one of the concerns I have read about the previous design on whether its wings could have withstood exposure to the maximum atmospheric stresses experienced during launch.
Nanci Griffith & The Chieftains – Red Is The Rose
An evening pause: The melody is the same as Loch Lomond, which illustrates how much in common there is between the Scots and the Irish, no matter what they tell you. (And I would include the English too!)
Hat tip Tom Biggar.
Lockheed Martin enters the competition to supply cargo for ISS
The competition heats up: Lockheed Martin has joined Sierra Nevada, Orbital ATK, Boeing, and SpaceX in bidding for NASA’s next contract to ferry cargo to ISS.
Lockheed’s proposal is different in that it proposes a two spacecraft operation. The cargo would be hauled up in a very simple storage bin, where a long-term orbital tug would grab it and take it to ISS. The idea is that they would only have to build and launch the complicated thrusters, robot arms, computers, and avionics of their cargo freighter once, thereby saving money.
Two companies will be chosen. Since the first competition back in the mid-2000s, when NASA picked SpaceX and Kistler for the first cargo round, the quality of the bids has improved remarkably. Back then, NASA had to choose from a bunch of new companies, none of which had ever done this before. The big companies (Boeing, Lockheed Martin) then poo-pooed the competition, saying that it couldn’t be done as cheap as the new companies claimed. After Kistler went under and was replaced by Orbital, they and SpaceX proved the big companies were wrong.
Now the competition includes all the big players, except that those big players are no longer offering expensive systems but cut-rate efficient designs that are as cost effective as SpaceX and Orbital’s first designs.
New evidence of child-smuggling in ancient Mayan human sacrifices
Isotope testing of the teeth of the skeletons of children found in a cave in Belize has found that none had come from that region, suggesting that the children were kidnapped from other neighboring communities before they were sacrificed to the Mayan gods.
Though the data is still being crunched (the full report will be published when Lorenz presents her thesis later this year), initial analysis indicates that the children whose bones littered the Midnight Terror Cave did not come from the surrounding Upper Roaring River Valley, where the cave is located, or even from Belize. In fact, the young victims appear to have been brought to this spot from as far as 200 miles away (an enormous distance in the 9th century), before being taken deep into the earth to have their beating hearts cut from their chests to appease any number of angry gods.
The article is fascinating not only for the profound archeological discoveries it documents but also for its detailed description of the science process itself. It also is brutally honest. Even though these results cast a poor light on ancient Indian culture, something that is very political incorrect in today’s world, the author minces no words, even if he does wring his hands a bit about these conclusions.
The lost tomb of Cervantes found
Scientists think they have found the remains of Miguel de Cervantes, the author of Don Quixote, in a long forgotten tomb in Madrid.
Water ice volcanoes on Ceres
Data collected by Dawn since it entered orbit around Ceres on March 6 now strongly suggests that the bright spots on the surface are produced by venting water,
Andreas Nathues, principal investigator for Dawn’s framing camera, says the feature has spectral characteristics that are consistent with ice. Intriguingly, the brightness can be seen even when the spacecraft is looking on edge at the crater rim, suggesting that the feature may be outgassing water vapor above the rim and into space. “Ceres seems to be indeed active,” he says. The feature brightens through the course of the day, and then shuts down at night. Nathues says the behavior is similar to that of comets.
More here. By mid-April Dawn should finally settle this with high resolution images.
Airline passengers subdue man screaming “Jihad!” on airplane
A United Airlines flight had to turn back when passengers on board were forced to subdue an unruly passenger who was yelling “Jihad!” as he charged the cockpit.
This is another example of why the TSA is a complete waste of money while doing terrible harm to our culture’s concept of freedom. No matter what the TSA does, it can never prevent bad guys from getting on a plane. In the end, it will always be the job of the passengers and crew to resist a terrorist. We should just give that responsibility back to them, as free Americans, and get rid of the TSA. It might increase the risk, but I promise you, if every flight had armed Americans aboard, randomly placed, terrorists would go elsewhere to try to do their dirty work.
Most Americans think my opinion here is crazy, but it is the way our country did things for its first two centuries, and things were actually no more dangerous but we all had much greater freedom.
Virgin Galactic says LauncherOne will make its first flight in 2016
The competition heats up: The CEO of Virgin Galactic, George Whitesides, revealed at a satellite conference that they are on schedule for LauncherOne to make its first flight before the end of 2016.
The company recently started hot-fire tests of an engine called Newton 3 developed by Virgin Galactic for the first stage of LauncherOne, Whitesides said. That engine, capable of generating 265,000 to 335,000 newtons of thrust, uses liquid oxygen and kerosene propellants. “We’re now to the point where we’re very confident that we can build a very affordable rocket,” Whitesides said. After his speech, he said the company was on schedule to begin flights by the end of 2016, with even initial test flights likely carrying some satellites.
That it is Whitesides and not Richard Branson saying this makes me more confident that it is true, though I remain very skeptical of any promise made by anyone these days at Virgin Galactic. However, the impression from this article confirms an earlier impression I have had, that the company is beginning to shift its resources away from suborbital tourism with SpaceShipTwo and towards orbital launch services with LauncherOne. Branson had announced LauncherOne as a concept in 2012, but only recently have we begin to hear of any actual work on it.