An evening pause: One week ago today the rocket company ATK test fired the first stage solid rocket motor of the Ares I rocket. At the moment, no one knows if this rocket will even be built, as the Obama administration opposes it while Congress argues a variety of options. Regardless, watch this video of the test and you will understand why it is fun ito build rockets.
The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter has released another lunar cave image, this time showing a double pit entrance with a natural bridge between them. [Thanks to reader James Fincannon for the tip.]
From the caption: “The bridge is approximately 7 meters wide on top and perhaps 9 meters on the bottom side, and is a 20 meter walk for an astronaut to cross from one side to the other.”
A Russian astronaut has been twice denied a routine but financially important honor after returning from space, and the Russian astronaut corps might strike over it.
Alex Callage, one of the members of my gun range, has just been chosen by the Air Force to train for the Olympics as a pistol shooter. Go Alex!
The uncertainty of science: The melt rate of the icecaps is half what was previously calculated.
Collision alert! Two small asteroids are going to zip past the Earth this week, both passing closer than the Moon.
New poll news from several normally liberal news sources (Washington Post, NBC, ABC) all show that the voters are really eager to fire Congress in 2010.
A preprint paper published today on the Los Alamos astro-ph website shows further evidence of the decline in the strength of the Sun’s magnetic field over the past ten years. Extrapolated into the future, this data also suggests that the next solar maximum will be the weakest in 200 years, and that the solar maximum after that will have no sunspots at all. You can download the paper here [pdf].
This is not how I would try to boost their morale: Cannibalism survivors of plane crash talk to Chilean miners. Key advice from one of the crash survivors:
“They are much luckier than we were because they didn’t have to make the terrible decision to eat their friends.”
The space war continues: On Friday the chairman of the House committee of Science and Technology responded negatively to the letter by 30 Nobel laureates demanding the House revise its budget authorization for NASA and accept the Obama administration’s plans for the agency. Two key quotes from Gordon’s response:
The hard reality is that the Administration has sent an unexecutable budget request to Congress, and now we have to make tough choise to the nation can have a sustainable and balance [sic] NASA program.
Reluctantly, the Committee came to the conclusion that the president’s new human space flight program, much like the current Constellation program, was unexecutable under the current budget projections and other NASA priorities we all agree must be addressed.
The first test launch of that privately funded Danish suborbital rocket had to be scrubbed on Sunday when a valve jammed.
An evening pause: This clip is only one segment from what Johnny Carson himself considered the best Tonight Show of all time. George Gobel comes on last and steals the show. Also, watch Dean Martin closely during the segment.
Notre Dame fires employee for attending pro-life rally protesting Obama’s speech at the Catholic university.
That test flight of a Danish privately built suborbital rocket has been delayed from today till tomorrow due to weather, with tomorrow’s flight having a 70% chance.
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New research now suggests that it was premature to conclude that Mars has no life, based on the data from the Viking missions to Mars in the 1970s. This is vindication for Gilbert Levin, one of the chief scientists for those missions, who had said so then and was subsequently pilloried for it.
NASA managers have decided to defer that spacewalk to finish up the work items leftover from the spacewalks to repair the station’s cooling system, leaving the work to the space shuttle astronauts during the upcoming the November shuttle flight.
Bill Harwood gives a good write-up of the uncertain status of the extra shuttle flight, approved by the Senate but not by the House.
This won’t be good for home life: The wife and mistress of one of the Chilean miners happened to meet, at the entrance of the mine.
UCLA has fired a scientist after 36 years because according to them, his “research is not aligned with the academic mission” of his department. In other words, his research uncovering flaws in the such politically correct subjects as secondhand smoke and diesel emissions is something the academic community at his campus cannot stomach. Key quote:
[The fired scientist] questions the science behind the new [California diesel] emissions standards, and he has raised concerns about the two key reports on which they were based – exposing the author of one study as having faked his credentials and the panel that issued the other study as having violated its term limits.
Meltdown of the climate ‘consensus’. Key quote:
What does the best evidence now tell us? That man-made global warming is a mere hypothesis that has been inflated by both exaggeration and downright malfeasance, fueled by the awarding of fat grants and salaries to any scientist who’ll produce the “right” results. The warming “scientific” community, the Climategate emails reveal, is a tight clique of like-minded scientists and bureaucrats who give each other jobs, publish each other’s papers — and conspire to shut out any point of view that threatens to derail their gravy train.
An evening pause: My Neighbor Totoro (1988), Hayao Miyazaki’s classic animated film. This short segment near the film’s beginning, showing the family’s arrival in a new home, illustrates Miyazaki’s incredible ability for creating real characters in a real story, even if that story has a fantasy element.
No cigarettes or wine for trapped Chilean miners.
Here’s another Congressman who has a problem with free speech, and it appears he wants [pdf] to use campaign laws to silence his opponents.
South Korea and Russia fighting over rocket construction.
Here is what one elected governor thinks of freedom of speech: “It’s a free country. I wish it weren’t.”
NASA might not be able to build any rockets, but its outreach to the Muslim community continues.
An evening pause: Lawrence of Arabia (1962). One of the greatest epic films ever made. And though the story is heavily dramatized, it captures quite accurately the substance and reality of T.E. Lawrence’s time in the Middle East during World War I. Sadly, I wonder if anything has changed.
