Patsy Cline – I Fall To Pieces
An evening pause: Performed live on “The Glenn Reeves Show” on February 23rd, 1963.
Hat tip Diane Zimmerman.
Year: 2016
SpaceX, Orbital ATK, and Sierra Nevada awarded contracts to ISS
The competition heats up: NASA has decided to award contracts to all three competitors, Orbital ATK, SpaceX, and Sierra Nevada, in the second round of cargo contracts to ISS.
Or as Yogi Berra once said, “When you come to a fork, take it.”
The main winners appear to be Orbital and SpaceX, with Sierra Nevada coming in later. Details at this moment remain vague, so stay tuned.
A detailed review of the climate data tampering at NASA and NOAA
Steven Goddard has once again taken a close look at the climate data gathering at NOAA and NASA and found clear evidence of tampering.
He not only documents how the scientists at these agencies have adjusted the raw data to cool the past and warm the present to create the illusion of global warming, they have done so with a limited data base.
The bulk of the data tampering is being done by simply making temperatures up. If NOAA is missing data for a particular station in a particular month, they use a computer model to calculate what they think the temperature should have been.
Those calculations are then designed to support the theory of human caused global warming, caused by increased carbon dioxide.
Goddard doesn’t just tell us his opinions, he backs up his conclusions with detailed graphs and data.
Do I accept Goddard’s conclusions entirely? Maybe. The two questions I ask that none of the NOAA or NASA scientists have been willing to answer are these:
» Read more
A cold-eyed look at Trump’s actual record
Link here. Key quote:
While Sessions, Cruz, and others on the outside like myself were fighting the worst immigration bill of our generation in 2013, Trump was promoting the Dream Act. When it really mattered he wasn’t with us.
Moreover, what sort of judges would Trump nominate? Where does he stand on proposals to rein in the lawless courts? If he believes the courts are the law of the land, even when they violate the most fundamental rights or original intent of the Constitution, as he did with religious liberty, what will he do when the courts inevitably use the same phantom 14th Amendment legal theory to toss out his immigration proposals?
While I will vote for Trump in a heartbeat should he be the Republican candidate running against either Clinton or Sanders, he isn’t yet that candidate, and conservative voters have an obligation to look at him honestly. From my perspective, he is not the candidate I want, as he in the end will likely not really change anything as President, but instead continue the general policies that have gotten us where we are. He might make some radical changes around the edges, on hot-button issues like immigration, but overall his political philosophy is that of a traditional liberal East Coast New Yorker.
Bush, Cruz, Carson, and Sanders on space policy
This article takes a look at the positions on space policy of four candidates for President.
Not surprisingly, there is not much substance to what these candidates have said. They mostly mouth positive platitudes about space, and often indicate by those platitudes a general lack of knowledge about the subject.
What is more important to consider is their overall political philosophies combined with legislative actions they have actually done. Cruz for example is clearly in favor of reducing the cost and size of government. He has also made it clear by his actions in the Senate that he considers space an important national priority. These facts tell me that, should he become president he will likely move to end SLS while shifting resources to private space, since it costs a lot less and the government (and nation) will get more for its money.
Sanders meanwhile has consistently voted for a smaller space program in all his years in the Senate. As a socialist and a liberal who sides with the Democrats routinely, he, like them, has generally opposed spending any money on NASA or space, generally arguing that the money would be better spend solving problems on Earth. While he might mouth support for NASA now, I would expect him to try to kill it once in office.
Self-healing composite developed
Scientists have produced a small amount of a self-healing solid composite that not only remembers its shape but can, under certain conditions, heal itself should it break or crack.
Don’t get out your checkbook yet. This is only the preliminary research, though the concepts look very promising.
Orbital ATK and SpaceX win Air Force contracts
The competition heats up: The Air Force has awarded Orbital ATK and SpaceX contracts to develop new rocket engines to help end the U.S.’s reliance on Russian rocket engines.
The Orbital contract is initially worth $47 million, with the company committed to spend $31 million of its own money., according to the Defense Department’s daily digest of major contract awards. Eventually the government could pay the company $180 million. SpaceX’s contract meanwhile was for $33.6 million initially for the development of its new Raptor upper stage engine, with a total government payment to be $61 million.
And that’s not all. Later today NASA will announce the winners in its second ISS cargo contract. The competitors are SpaceX, Orbital ATK, and Sierra Nevada. I am hoping the latter two win, since that would allow the construction of a fourth American spacecraft, Sierra Nevada’s Dream Chaser, capable of lifting cargo and crew into space.
Juno becomes most distant solar-powered mission
Scheduled to enter orbit around Jupiter in July 2016, the American space probe Juno has now broken the record as the most distant solar-powered interplanetary spacecraft ever to operate.
The previous record had been held by Rosetta. In the past most missions beyond Mars used nuclear-generated power plants, since the amount of sunlight is insufficient. However, improvements to the efficiency of solar power, combined with a lack of nuclear fuel in the U.S., has made it possible to fly missions using solar power farther from the sun.
That space junk was from Lunar Prospector
A research team at JPL has concluded that the unidentified piece of space junk that had been in lunar space but crashed to Earth in November was likely the engine module used by the 1998 Lunar Prospector mission.
The junk’s identity is by no means certain, but the “leading candidate” is the translunar injection module of Lunar Prospector, says Paul Chodas, an asteroid tracker at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. The module nudged the probe out of Earth orbit and then detached from the main spacecraft, which orbited the Moon for 19 months before it was deliberately slammed into the lunar south pole in July 1999.
Speculation about the source of the debris, known as WT1190F, ran rampant even before it plummeted through the atmosphere on 13 November. The only artificial object to make an uncontrolled re-entry at a precisely predicted place and moment, it presented a unique chance to witness such an event in real time. Researchers took advantage of the opportunity, monitoring the debris from a chartered jet as well as from ground-based observatories.
Water behavior on Comet 67P/C-G
A new paper based on accumulated data from Rosetta has given scientists a better understanding of the behavior of water ice on Comet 67P/C-G, including the process by which it escapes and is also covered by dust on the surface.
Although water vapour is the main gas seen flowing from comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko, the great majority of ice is believed to come from under the comet’s crust, and very few examples of exposed water ice have been found on the surface. However, a detailed analysis by Rosetta’s VIRTIS infrared instrument reveals the composition of the comet’s topmost layer: it is primarily coated in a dark, dry and organic-rich material but with a small amount of water ice mixed in.
In the latest study, which focuses on scans between September and November 2014, the team confirms that two areas several tens of metres across in the Imhotep region that appear as bright patches in visible light, do indeed include a significant amount of water ice. The ice is associated with cliff walls and debris falls, and was at an average temperature of about –120ºC at the time.
Note that many media sources today are falsely reporting the “discovery” of water by Rosetta on the comet. This is ridiculous, as water has been detected there for years. To suggest that “discovery” indicates a remarkable level of stupidity and ignorance by these news organizations about science. Either they think their readers are dumb, or they themselves don’t know anything.
Unfortunately, I worry that the answer is both.
Four-wheeled robot climbs walls
An evening pause: This short video demonstrates that all is possible if one combines flying drone capability with that of a road vehicle. I’m not sure if this has any practical value, but it sure is cool to see 1960s comic book engineering come to life.
Hat tip Danae.
On the radio
The John Batchelor Show is beginning to create podcasts of individual segments, including the ones I do with John twice a week. Below is an embed of last night’s appearance.
I am going to play with these to see how to routinely add them to the webpage. Probably, I will place them as a link in the right column in the section titled “Recent and upcoming appearances.”