Author: Robert Zimmerman

Dragon reaches orbit

3:00 am

Another successful Falcon 9 launch for SpaceX this morning, placing a Dragon capsule in the correct orbit for rendezvous and berthing with ISS.

We still await word on the attempt to land the first stage of the rocket on a barge in the Atlantic. From the link above: “SpaceX founder Elon Musk has tweeted an update: ‘Rocket made it to drone spaceport ship, but landed hard. Close, but no cigar this time. Bodes well for the future tho.'” More details here.

Based on what they have released, SpaceX has achieved something pretty incredible for its first attempt, actually hitting the floating ship at landing. That the landing itself was not soft or gently is literally only a detail. They will have the opportunity on future launches to get it right.

9 comments

Senate Republicans call for gas tax hike

5:57 pm

Lying slime: A number of Senate Republicans have joined with Democrats to call for an increase in the gas tax.

Though the last time the gas tax was increased was during Bill Clinton’s presidency, the only reason the highway fund is short of money is that they don’t spend it wisely, wasting a lot on stupid projects. (Sounds a lot like almost everything the federal government does, doesn’t it?) Rather than increase the tax, Congress should take a close look at how the money is being spent, and clamp down.

I should note that House Republicans have already said that they will oppose this increase. Whether they stay that course however remains to be seen.

5 comments

California newspaper vandalized for defying pro-immigration groups

9:17 am

Fascists: A California newspaper has been vandalized because of its insistence on describing illegal immigrants as “illegal immigrants”.

The Santa Barbara News-Press’s front entrance was sprayed with the message “The border is illegal, not the people who cross it” in red paint, sometime either Wednesday night or early Thursday, according to the newspaper’s director of operations, Donald Katich. The attack came amid wider objections to a News-Press headline that used the word “illegals” alongside a story on California granting driver’s licenses to people in the country illegally.

So will someone explain to me how these pro-immigration vandals are any different from the Islamic terrorists who murdered the cartoonists at the French magazine Charlie Hebdo?

In truth, they are only different in their scale of violence. The pro-immigration vandals have not yet risen to the level of the Islamic terrorists, but give them time, give them time. Anyone who thinks violence and destruction is acceptable to prove their point will eventually decide that murder is acceptable as well.

14 comments

Airbus-Safran demand total control of Arianespace

9:00 am

The heat of competition: The European joint-venture between Airbus and Safran is now demanding that be given total control of Arianespace and the development of the new Ariane 6 rocket.

From Airbus’ perspective, the production of rockets in Europe should be done the same way commercial Airbus aircraft are built. “The launcher business in Europe in the beginning of 2014 was one in which the vehicles were designed by government agencies, commercialized by a company called Arianespace, produced by an ensemble of companies, and then launched by Arianespace. This is not an optimal situation,” [Airbus strategy director Marwan] Lahoud said.

“The optimal solution is to industrialize the process, with one prime contractor that designs, builds, sells and operates the launchers, with a supply chain — much as we do with Airbus today.”

Essentially, this would be a shift in ownership of the rocket, moving from the government to the private company. We have seen the same process in the U.S., with the new commercial space products no longer controlled or designed by NASA. The result has been lower cost, faster development, and greater profits.

One comment

Travel posters for alien worlds

8:46 am

NASA has produced retro-style travel posters for three alien exoplanets which you can download and print.

The posters are quite cool, which is not surprising, considering that, in the past four decades, the best interplanetary travel that NASA has been able to achieve has been its graphic power-point and pr images. Unfortunately, for NASA actually going there has not been so easy.

Leave a comment

New York Times explains why it won’t publish Charlie Hebdo cartoons

8:36 am

bombhead

Cowards: “[L]et’s not forget the Muslim family in Brooklyn who read us and is offended by any depiction of what he sees as his prophet.”

Note that the Times has had no reluctance to show images that are as equally offensive to its Christian and Jewish readers. I wonder why the Muslims get this special treatment?

Meanwhile, representatives of the religion of peace have now taken hostages, both in a factory near Charles De Gaulle Airport as well as in a kosher grocery store in Paris.

Update: It appears both hostage situations have ended.

7 comments

9 of the 10 worst countries for Christian persecution are Islamic

11:12 pm

The religion of peace: A new assessment of Christian persecution worldwide has found that of the top ten most religiously oppressive nations nine are Islamic.

North Korea tops the list, but the rest are all countries where the majority of the population is Muslim. The report also found that “Islamic extremism is the main source of persecution in 40 of the 50 countries on the 2015 World Watch List.”

I wonder what these facts tell us? Anyone care to venture a guess? Maybe we should condemn Israel for this oppression? Yeah, that makes sense!

Leave a comment

Ancient fossils on Mars?

8:41 am

A close look at features on the Martian surface seen by Curiosity suggests to one scientist the presence of ancient fossils of carpet-like microbiology.

On Earth, carpet-like colonies of microbes trap and rearrange sediments in shallow bodies of water such as lakes and costal areas, forming distinctive features that fossilize over time. These structures, known as microbially-induced sedimentary structures (or MISS), are found in shallow water settings all over the world and in ancient rocks spanning Earth’s history.

Nora Noffke, a geobiologist at Old Dominion University in Virginia, has spent the past 20 years studying these microbial structures. Last year, she reported the discovery of MISS that are 3.48 billion years old in the Western Australia’s Dresser Formation, making them potentially the oldest signs of life on Earth.

In a paper published online last month in the journal Astrobiology (the print version comes out this week), Noffke details the striking morphological similarities between Martian sedimentary structures in the Gillespie Lake outcrop (which is at most 3.7 billion years old) and microbial structures on Earth.

Noffke is very careful in her analysis. She doesn’t claim any proofs, only that her expert eye sees the same things on both planets. Most intriguing.

4 comments

The sunspot cycle update for December

3:49 pm

The monthly update by NOAA of the solar cycle, showing the sunspot activity for the Sun in December, was released this past weekend. As I do every month, I am posting it here, below the fold, with annotations to give it context.

Even though sunspot activity in December increased, the slow ramp down to solar minimum continues to track the 2009 prediction of the solar scientist community. The overall intensity of the solar maximum prior to 2014 was considerable less than this prediction, but the numbers throughout 2014 matched that prediction remarkably well.
» Read more

Leave a comment

Do not submit!

12:34 pm

Mohammed Bomb cartoon

The cartoon on the right prompted the first Islamic riots. More recent ones in the French magazine Charlie Hebdo apparently prompted today’s violent murders.

The goal of these Islamic acts of violence: To stop people from criticizing Islam.

My goal in publishing this cartoon: To defy these thugs and to encourage people to criticize Islam. In the past two decades we have seen nothing but violence, terrorism, death, and destruction from this Arabic religion, fed by hatred and bigotry of Jews and Christians. It is time to say so, bluntly.

If Muslims wish this criticism to stop, they need to do something about it themselves, as the President of Egypt has, instead of demanding others to shut up.

One comment

Islam murders 12 people at magazine

9:12 am

The religion of peace strikes again: Twelve people were murdered today by Islamic terrorists at a French satirical magazine.

The magazine, Charlie Hebdo, had published many cartoons making fun of religion. Fortunately, they were able to avoid the hoards of Jewish and Christian terrorists that tried to kill them.

In addition, a car bomb has exploded in front of a synagogue in the suburbs of Paris. Update: An accident unrelated to terrorism.

The Obama administration has been quick to act, condemning the attacks while once again insisting that Islam is “a peaceful religion.” That is a quote, today, by Obama’s own press secretary.

Make sure you read James Delingpole’s prediction of what will happen next as our leaders will do anything to avoid facing reality so they can continue to live in a fantasy world where Islam is our friend and it is the evil racism of the west that caused this tragedy.

In defiance of Islam’s effort to impose its will on us all, here is a link to some of the cartoons Charlie Hebdo previously published making fun of Islam. Click on it. Spread it around. Let’s have everyone see it!

7 comments

Comet impact theory replaced by common house fires

8:56 am

The uncertainty of science: Fused droplets found in many places across the globe and theorized to have come from a comet major impact that caused a major climate change around 13,000 years ago have now been found to have instead come from common house fires.

Since the 1970s when the Walter Alvarez found evidence of an asteroid impact in the Yucatan that could have caused the dinosaur extinction 65 million years ago, planetary scientists have seen asteroid or comet impacts everywhere. After all, impacts are cool disasters that play well to television producers and funding agencies.

Read this story however. It describes some very solid scientific work that wipes out one one of those cool theories, replacing it with something quite mundane.

Leave a comment

New Hubble images to celebrate its upcoming 25th anniversary

8:46 am

The Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) that operates the Hubble Space Telescope yesterday released two spectacular new images at the January meeting of the American Astronomical Society.

They also announced new data from Hubble that suggests a major eruption had occurred at the center of the Milky Way about two million years ago.

Leave a comment

More Earthlike exoplanets confirmed

8:28 am

Worlds without end: Astronomers have confirmed from Kepler data the existence of 8 new exoplanets, all capable of having liquid water on their surface, with two more like Earth than any previous discovery.

These findings nearly double the number of known planets in the habitable zone, but researchers are especially excited about two of the new exoplanets: Their size, location, and star type means they could be rocky planets like Earth — which means they could have evolved life as we recognize it.

One of the planets, Kepler-438b, is only 12 percent bigger than Earth in diameter. That means it’s quite likely a rocky planet. Scientists have given it a 70 percent chance. Kepler-442b is a bit bigger at around 33 percent larger than Earth, but still has a 60 percent chance of being rocky.

But while 438b hits the sweet spot in size, 442b has it beat when it comes to distance from the sun. Both planets orbit a small red dwarf star, cooler than Earth’s Sun, but they also orbit more closely. 438b gets 40 percent more light than Earth, which means it has around a 70 percent chance of being able to hold liquid water. But with 66 percent as much light as our own planet, 442b has a 97 percent chance of being in the habitable zone.

Leave a comment

Europe reconsiders reusability in its rockets

8:45 am

The competition heats up: Pressured by SpaceX, Europe has restarted a research program into developing a reusable first stage to its rockets.

The headline is actually an overstatement. The European managers quoted in the article actually spend most of their time explaining why trying to reuse a rocket’s first stage makes no sense, but they feel forced to reluctantly look into it anyway because of what SpaceX is doing with its Falcon 9.

This story makes me think of two blacksmiths around 1900. One poo-poos cars, saying that the repair cost is so high no one will ever buy them. He goes back to pounding horseshoes. The other decides that if he learns how to fix cars, he can turn his shop from fixing horseshoes to fixing cars, and make more money. Europe is the first blacksmith, while SpaceX is the second.

Which do you think is going to succeed?

8 comments
1 … 692 693 694 695 696 … 1,082