China has successfully put into orbit its first three person crew, including its first female astronaut, on its first manned space docking mission.
An evening pause: A 1965 live television performance.
Despite the continuing lack of an agreement, Kazakhstan today gave Russia permission to resume launches from the Baikonur spaceport.
Their new as yet unfinished spaceport in Vostochny must appear increasingly important to the Russians.
An evening pause: And now, we address a really important issue.
Geologists think they have finally identified the volcano that in 1258 AD produced the largest eruption in 7,000 years — an event that was completely unnoticed by humanity at the time.
On exhibit in New York: A mock mission to Mars, built by an artist using, among other things, duct tape.
Orbital Sciences has delayed the first testing firing of its Antares rocket until late July or early August.
This fact is buried about halfway down in the article, and does not mention what caused the delay. (Hat tip to Clark Lindsey.)
O goody: Scientists have concluded that a 460 foot diameter asteroid only has a 1 percent chance of hitting the Earth in 2040.
Observations to date indicate there is a slight chance that AG5 could impact Earth in 2040. Attendees expressed confidence that in the next four years, analysis of space and ground-based observations will show the likelihood of 2011 AG5 missing Earth to be greater than 99 percent.
It appears that they won’t really be able to pin down the impact odds for 2040 until 2023, when the asteroid passes the Earth at a distance of 1.1 million miles.
The day of reckoning looms: The federal government is on a pace to exceed its $16.394 trillion debt limit sooner than expected, by October, just before the election.
On June 4 NOAA’s Space Weather Prediction Center posted its monthly update of the ongoing sunspot cycle of the Sun. Now that I am back from Nevada, I’ve had a chance to take a look at it, and have posted the new graph for April below the fold.
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This should help the economy: The EPA will propose today stricter standards for the release of soot by factories and power plants.
The nightmare of being a conservative on a modern college campus.
From my experience, the author only scratches the surface. The level of intolerance for conservative thought in academia has worsened in recent years, and in many cases has even risen to the level of physical danger for those who express any criticism of liberalism or the left.
And you thought Obamacare was about healthcare: The IRS’s budget has grown by almost a billion dollars due to Obamacare.
We have a date: China’s next manned mission, with one female astronaut aboard, will launch Saturday.
The McCarthyism of the environmental movement: A UCLA professor who exposed corruption while also challenging the legitimacy of certain California fuel regulations, has sued the university for firing him.
Enstrom charged in 2008 that his colleagues exaggerated the adverse effects of particulate matter in order to justify expensive diesel fuel regulations to the California Air Resources Board (CARB). Enstrom testified in the same year to the state Senate that the lead contributor to the CARB report, Hien T. Tran, paid $1,000 for his Ph.D. from a fake university, and members of a CARB panel had exceeded their mandated three-year term limits by decades.
Shortly after Enstrom revealed the misconduct, UCLA began sending him notices of termination and has refused to compensate him for more than a year’s worth of work….
Tran was eventually suspended for 60 days, and one professor who had served on the CARB panel for 26 consecutive years was removed and later put back on the panel. John Froines, who has publicly supported diesel fuel regulations, was on a committee that voted to dismiss Enstrom.
Read the whole thing. It illustrates why attending UCLA for a science education is clearly a waste of time. They don’t want to teach their students science. They want to teach them propaganda.
Engineers have successfully tested a spare reaction wheel on Mars Odyssey in their effort to bring the spacecraft back into full operation.
After more than 11 years of non-operational storage, the spare reaction wheel passed preliminary tests on Wednesday, June 12, spinning at up to 5,000 rotations per minute forward and backward. Odyssey engineers plan to substitute it for a reaction wheel they have assessed as no longer reliable. That wheel stuck for a few minutes last week, causing Odyssey to put itself into safe mode on June 8, Universal Time (June 7, Pacific Time).
Copenhagen Suborbitals: The crazy DIY spaceflight project that just might work.
An evening pause: Live performance, from 1975.
A painted red disk of cave art has now been dated at 40,800 years old, making it the oldest known art that might even have been painted by the Neanderthals.
