Author: Robert Zimmerman

The GAO is concerned about the future budget and schedule of the James Webb Space Telescope.

10:07 pm

O goody: The GAO is concerned about the future budget and schedule of the James Webb Space Telescope.

This is very bad news if true for NASA’s astronomy program. Webb was originally budgeted at $1 billion and scheduled to launch in 2011. Its budget is now $8.8 billion and its launch is now set for October 2018. And until it launches there is little money to build any other space telescope.

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A federal appeals court today expressed strong reservations about Obama’s non-recess recess appointments in January.

1:50 pm

A federal appeals court today expressed strong doubts about Obama’s non-recess recess appointments in January.

How dare they question our savior and lord Obama? What does it matter he wasn’t following the Constitution when he made his appointments when the Senate was not in recess? He has to get things done, no matter what the law is.

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The real fiscal cliff

1:42 pm

The real fiscal cliff.

But no one … at this point seems to have grasped that [nothing will be solved] unless the avoidance of the fiscal cliff includes measures that radically cut the deficit and end the unspeakable fraud of 70 percent of the country’s $1 to $1.5 trillion federal deficit being covered by phony notes cyber-clicked into existence from the Treasury’s 100 percent subsidiary, the Federal Reserve. No test of psychological confidence will be passed by this charade, nor any test of Grade 3 arithmetic either. The administration swaddles itself in a few weeks of a record-breaking rise in economic-growth and tax-collection rates. But this is only three weeks, and applies to a built-in annual budget deficit of $1.5 trillion on top of an accumulated national debt that took 232 years to get to $10 trillion in 2008 and made it to $16 trillion this year. (And there are still 5 million fewer people working in the U.S. than there were four years ago.) [emphasis mine]

This fake political term, “The fiscal cliff”, is an unmitigated lie, created by politicians to disguise their failure to actually deal with the debt. They are using it to avoid even cutting spending levels back to 2008 numbers, a reduction in spending that would hardly be noticed in the bloated, overweight, and increasingly oppressive federal bureaucracy.

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The Pentagon has decided to buy its launch services from more than just Boeing and Lockheed Martin.

8:49 am

The competition heats up: The Pentagon has decided to buy its launch services from more than just Boeing and Lockheed Martin.

Under the new plan, the Air Force can buy as many as 14 launches over the next five years from possible bidders such as Space Exploration Technologies Corp, or SpaceX, and Orbital Sciences Corp . The service may also buy as many as 36 launches from United Launch Alliance, the Lockheed-Boeing venture, with an option to purchase the other 14 launches if the competitors haven’t been certified to launch military and spy satellites that can cost up to $1 billion each.

Originally the military planned to purchase all of its launches from Boeing and Lockheed. Political pressure from SpaceX has now forced them to widen the competition, or at least, make noises that they are doing so. If you read the above paragraph closely the plan still favors the original two companies and is strongly stacked to hand all the launches over to them anyway.

Update: My pessimism above was premature. SpaceX has been awarded a contract for two launches under this new policy.

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NASA announced yesterday plans to launch by 2020 a twin rover of Curiosity to Mars.

8:42 am

NASA announced yesterday plans to launch by 2020 a twin rover of Curiosity to Mars.

Though it makes sense to use the same designs again, saving money, I must admit a personal lack of excitement about this announcement. First, I have doubts it will fly because of the federal government’s budget woes. Second, it is kind of a replacement for the much more challenging and exciting missions to Titan and Europa that the Obama administration killed when they slashed the planetary budget last year.

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The press lets Curiosity get the better of them

10:46 pm

The big news is out. Today the eagerly awaited press conference at the American Geophysical Society meeting in San Francisco on the recent results from the Mars rover Curiosity was finally held. The announced results had been hyped like crazy when rumors began to spread a few weeks ago that Curiosity had discovered something truly spectacular.

Well, here are some of the headlines heralding the results.
» Read more

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New data suggests that the icy crust of Titan is twice as thick as previously estimated.

7:01 pm

New data suggests that the icy crust of Titan is twice as thick as previously estimated.

“The picture of Titan that we get has an icy, rocky core with a radius of a little over 2,000 kilometers, an ocean somewhere in the range of 225 to 300 kilometers thick and an ice layer that is 200 kilometers thick,” [said Howard Zebker of Stanford University]. Previous models of Titan’s structure estimated the icy crust to be approximately 100 kilometers thick.

This means that the methane lakes and rivers of Titan are flowing across a bedrock of ice, which at the cold temperatures there would be as solid as rock is here on Earth.

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Walmart, the nation’s largest private employer, will be eliminating healthcare coverage to its parttime employees due to Obamacare.

8:21 am

Finding out what’s in it: Walmart, the nation’s largest private employer, will be eliminating healthcare coverage to its part time employees due to Obamacare.

Essentially, the company is trying to avoid the high costs imposed by Obamacare by dropping coverage for anyone working 30 hours or less, and then moving more employees into that category when possible. As I noted before, this idiotic law is forcing us to be a nation of part time workers.

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Changes in the levels of sulphur dioxide since Venus Express arrived in orbit around Venus in 2006 now suggest strongly that the spacecraft has detected volcanic activity on the planet.

7:46 am

Changes in the levels of sulphur dioxide (SO2) since Venus Express arrived in orbit around Venus in 2006 now suggest strongly that the spacecraft has detected volcanic activity on the planet.

The SPICAV data show that the concentration of SO2 above the main cloud deck increased slightly to about 1000 parts per billion by volume (ppbv) between 2006 and 2007, but then steadily decreased over the next five years, reaching only 100 ppbv by 2012. This is very reminiscent of a pattern observed by Pioneer Venus during the 1980s, the only other multi-year dataset of SO2 measurements.

One of best explanations for these changes is a volcanic eruption back in 2006, which would have inserted a great deal of SO2 into the upper atmosphere. Since then, ultraviolet radiation from the sun has steadily destroyed it.

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North Korea has placed the first stage of its own rocket on the launchpad in preparation for a test flight later this month.

7:34 am

North Korea has placed the first stage of its own rocket on the launchpad in preparation for a test flight later this month.

Japan, South Korea, the United States, and the United Kingdom (as indicated in the article above) have protested this launch, as well as Russia and China. Interestingly, no one has objected to the South Korea’s effort to build its own orbital rocket, which tells us a great deal about the differences between the two Koreas.

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William Butler Yeats – The Second Coming

6:01 pm

An evening pause: In memory to the 20,000 or so violent attacks committed by Islamic radical since September 11, 2001, I think this poem by William Butler Yeats is appropriate. Written it 1920, it somehow sensed the the coming conflict.

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

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The ATF has taken action against the agents involved in running the illegal gun-running operation dubbed “Fast-and-Furious.”

4:18 pm

Better than nothing: The ATF has taken action against the agents involved in running the illegal gun-running operation dubbed “Fast-and-Furious.”

Most of these guys will still receive their full pensions. Moreover, this action suggests that they were in charge, something I doubt. Shouldn’t we know who inside the Obama administration actually conceived this illegal smuggling operation?

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A North Carolina elementary school removed the word “God” from a poem written by one its students because one student’s parents complained.

8:49 pm

Goodbye freedom: A North Carolina elementary school removed the word “God” from a poem written by one its students because another student’s parents complained.

After fully examining the issue during the BOE meeting, President and Chief Executive Officer Ken Paulson stated the school did in fact have the right to remove the word “God” from the child’s poem. “Courts have consistently held up the rights for students to express themselves unless their speech is disruptive to the school,” stated Patulson according to McDowell News. “When the little girl wrote the poem and included a reference to God she had every right to do that. The First Amendment protects all Americans. She had every right to mention God, (but) that dynamic changed when they asked her to read it at an assembly.” Paulson said that because the students were a captive audience – they were at a mandatory assembly with no place else to go if they didn’t want to attend – administrators had the right to remove the word “God.”

Hey, I thought being “edgy” and offensive was the way to go for truly creative people? Or does being “edgy” and offensive only apply when offending Christians and Jews?

Seriously, if the logic of this school official was taken to its natural limit, it would mean that you could silence any speech you disagreed with by merely complaining that you didn’t want to hear it. Under that logic, there is no such thing as freedom of speech.

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Messenger has found new and “compelling” evidence that there is water ice locked in the permanently shadowed craters of Mercury.

2:36 pm

Messenger has found new and “compelling” evidence that there is water ice locked in the permanently shadowed craters of Mercury.

On Monday I had spoken to one of the project scientists for this discovery, David Lawrence, in connection with an article I am doing for Astronomy on the evidence of water on the Moon. I knew the Mercury announcement was coming, and asked him for some details. Based on what he told me, it struck me that the evidence for water on Mercury is actually more conclusive than the evidence for the Moon. (In fact, inconclusive nature of the lunar data is the point of my Astronomy article, based on previous posts here and here on Behind The Black.

The more intriguing aspect of this discovery on Mercury, however, is the unknown dark material that covers and protects some of this water ice. That some scientists believe it might even be organic material deposited there by comets and asteroids is most interesting.

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