The competition heats up: Yahoo today published a 5 point comparison between a ride on Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo and Worldview’s Voyager balloon.
The winner, Virgin Galactic, but by a nose. As the story notes, Worldview is the better buy. “You can use the money you save for a nice vacation on Earth — where you can make new friends by telling stores about that time you went to space.”
In preparation for the first test flight of Orion later this year NASA successfully completed a full scale flight test of the capsule’s parachute landing system.
They even included some planned failures into the test to see if the system could recover and compensate, which it did.
The competition heats up: In several different news stories today China touted its future plans in space.
The landing test described in the first story above will also be the first test flight of China’s new heavy lift rocket, Long March 5.
That China is both politically and culturally serious about this effort can be seen by the nationalistic enthusiasm for this space effort that permeates these stories. They also can’t help comparing their plans to U.S. efforts.
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For those who wish to listen to the podcast of my two hour appearance on the Space Show yesterday, you can get the podcast here. You can also comment on my discussion with David Livingston and his callers at the Space Show blog, or here.
The two major topics we discussed were first, Russia’s future in space in the context of that government’s effort to retake control of its entire aerospace industry, and second, the evidence that there is fraud and data manipulation going on in the climate research units of both NOAA and NASA. I also discussed some recent space science stories, such as Yutu on the Moon, Curiosity on Mars, and Cassini’s recent imagery of the lakes of Titan.
The competition heats up: In an effort to compete with SpaceX, Arianespace has lowered the price it charges for launching smaller satellites on its Ariane 5 rocket.
According to Stephen Israel, the company’s CEO, the lower prices have already produced some contracts. However, the company has not been able to institute comparable cost savings in its operations, which means it
…will force the European launch supplier to ask European governments this year for a 16 percent increase in annual support payments. In its 2013 annual report, Evry, France-based Arianespace said it will ask European Space Agency governments in December to allocate 116 million euros ($158 million) per year for the period between 2015 and 2018 to enable Arianespace to reach financial break-even. That figure compares to the current allocation of about 100 million euros per year for 2013 and 2014 that ESA governments approved in late 2012.
I wonder if the company will get these additional subsidies. In the past there were complaints from the European partners about the inability of Arianespace to make a profit. For it to lose even more money now will not make people happy.
I think, however, that Israel recognizes this. He has been pushing the organization to streamline its operation. Whether he can succeed against Arianespace’s entrenched pork-laden structure remains the big question.
A cross-check of the voter rolls from 28 states has found almost 7 million duplicate registrations.
Note that the head of the organization that issued this report was one of the conservative individuals harassed by the IRS as well as three other government agencies. I guess the Democrats consider it voter suppression (and maybe racist!) to prevent these 7 million people from voting twice.
Working for the Democratic Party: Email evidence now shows that Lois Lerner attempted to instigate an audit of a Republican senator, without any evidence of wrong-doing.
Transparency! Subpoenaed emails at the EPA have been lost because of a hard drive crash.
The hearing also included a bit of deja vu for the committee when members grilled [EPA Administrator Gina] McCarthy on lost emails from a hard-drive crash (the same issue that wiped out emails from IRS employee Lois Lerner). In this case, the emails in question were from retired EPA employee Philip North, who was involved in the agency’s decision to begin the process of preemptively vetoing the Pebble Mine project in Alaska.
North, who declined an interview request by the committee, is retired, and committee staff say they have been unable to track him down. According to a committee aide, North’s hard drive crashed in 2010—which was around the same time that the committee is investigating the agency’s discussions of a potential veto—and the emails were not backed up.
This is all crap. The only way these emails get lost is if the people involved intentionally “lost” them.
A geological study of orbital images of Gale Crater has led scientists to conclude that the crater was once covered in glaciers.
To carry out the study, the team has used images captured with the HiRISE and CTX cameras from NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, together with the HRSC onboard the Mars Express probe managed by the European Space Agency (ESA).
Analyses of the photographs have revealed the presence of concave basins, lobated structures, remains of moraines and fan-shaped deposits which point to the existence of ancient glaciers on Gale. In fact they seem to be very similar to some glacial systems observed on present-day Earth. “For example, there is a glacier on Iceland –known as Breiðamerkurjökull– which shows evident resemblances to what we see on Gale crater, and we suppose that is very similar to those which covered Gale’s central mound in the past,” says Fairén.
This is not the first place on Mars where scientists believe glaciers once flowed. The northwestern slopes of Arsia Mons, one of Mars’s giant volcanoes in the Tharsis Bulge, is also believed to have once harbored glaciers.
A victory for civil rights: The Supreme Court ruled today that police do not have the right to rummage through your cell phone data without a warrant.
As welcome as this decision is, I must point out the threat posed by this last sentence in the article:
The court did carve out exceptions for “exigencies” that arise, such as major security threats.
Since the Obama administration wanted the right to do warrantless searches, don’t be surprised if this exception grows so that everything possible can be made to fit it.
A Russian military satellite fails.
What is significant about this event is not this particular failure in itself, but the context in which it occurs. As the article noted,
According to the newspaper, the satellite is worth more than 1.5 billion rubles, took about two years to create and had the expected service life of five-to-seven years. So far, of the eight early warning satellites launched by Russia since 1991, only two, Cosmos-2224 and Cosmos 2379, lasted longer than five years, the Kommersant says. The previous 71X6 satellite (Cosmos-2440), launched in June 2008, went wrong in February 2010, the newspaper recalls.
These premature failures once again suggest that Russia’s aerospace industry has a serious quality control problem.
The private effort to reactivate this 1970s science probe continues.
They attempted today to fire the thrusters to spin up the spacecraft as required, but were forced to abort. The information gained however tells them that they should be able to do what is necessary, including two major engine burns on June 30 and July 2, to put the spacecraft into its new orbit.
It appears that yesterday’s delay in the next Cygnus/Antares launch was to allow engineers time to inspect the rocket’s Russian engines.
They want to make sure that these engines do not have the same problem that caused another Russian engine to blow up on a test stand in May.
Coming to a hospital near you! A new report indicates that as many as 1,000 veterans might have died because of corruption and incompetence at the VA.
The report also alleges that the VA routinely performs unnecessary preventative care, cannot process claims in a timely fashion, employs health care providers who have lost their medical licenses, and – as has been widely reported – maintains secret waiting lists in order to create the impression that the department is meeting performance goals set in Washington.
The report further alleges that some VA staff have been implicated in criminal activities, including drug dealing, sexual abuse, attempted kidnapping, theft, and conspiracy. “Earlier this year, one former staffer at the Tampa, Florida, VA was sentenced to six years in federal prison for trading veterans’ personal information for crack cocaine,” CNN reported on Tuesday.
In spite of these failures, VA senior managers are still receiving bonuses.
I want to emphasize again that this is exactly the kind of mess we can expect to occur with our private healthcare system as Obamacare forces the government to interfere with it more and more.
Just a heads up that, assuming David Livingston can get back to the studio after flying in from out of town today, I will be doing another Space Show appearance tonight, beginning live around 7 pm (Pacific). Tune in and feel free to call in questions. It should be fun.
Working for the Democratic Party: The IRS has agreed to pay $50K to a political organization for leaking confidential tax information to its political enemies.
The Daily Signal has learned that, under a consent judgment today, the IRS agreed to pay $50,000 in damages to the National Organization for Marriage as a result of the unlawful release of the confidential information to a gay rights group, the Human Rights Campaign, that is NOM’s chief political rival. ,,,
In February 2012, the Human Rights Campaign posted on its web site NOM’s 2008 tax return and the names and contact information of the marriage group’s major donors, including soon-to-be Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney. That information then was published by the Huffington Post and other liberal-leaning news sites.
HRC’s president at the time, Joe Solmonese, was tapped that same month as a national co-chairman of President Barack Obama’s re-election campaign.
The information had been fed from the IRS to a gay rights activist who to this day refuses to reveal who his contact at the IRS was.
What are the odds of seven hard drives failing at the IRS? These are the odds: 78 billion to 1.
Of course, that number doesn’t include the fact that the seven failed hard drives just happened to belong to seven key figures in the IRS scandal and no one else, and that all seven failures apparently covered the key period of time when the harassment of conservative opponents to Obama and the Democrats was at its height.
But then, there’s “not a smidgeon of corruption” at the IRS or in Obama’s White House. Obama says so, and obviously we must believe everything he says.
The sixteen most expensive substances in the world.
This story unintentionally combines the sciences of geology, physics, and economy into one single bundle.
“They did not follow the law.”
Guess who. Its initials are I-R-S, and the person making the accusation is the head of the National Archives. said during House hearings Tuesday on the IRS scandal.
Archivist of the U.S. David Ferriero, speaking before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, made clear that federal agencies are supposed to report whenever their records are destroyed or even accidentally deleted. But he said that after emails from embattled IRS official Lois Lerner vanished after a computer failure in 2011, nobody told the National Archives.
“They did not follow the law,” Ferriero said.
But hey, just try playing this game if the IRS calls you in for a tax audit.
The religion of peace strikes again! The Sudanese Christian woman who had been sentenced to death for refusing to renounce her religion, then freed, has been rearrested as she and her husband tried to leave Sudan for the U.S.
Her American husband and their two children were also arrested or detained. No explanation was offered as to why. Some tidbits in the article give us a clue, however, as well as teach us something about the intolerant nature of Islam:
[The father] is not permitted to have custody of his son because the boy is considered Muslim and cannot be raised by a Christian man. … Sudan’s penal code criminalizes the conversion of Muslims to other religions, which is punishable by death. Muslim women in Sudan are further prohibited from marrying non-Muslims, although Muslim men are permitted to marry outside their faith. Children, by law, must follow their father’s religion.
