The journal Science today published this detailed look at the cuts that would occur in all the federal government’s various science programs should the automatic budget cuts outlined in the sequestration legislation occur on January 2, 2013.
Not surprising, the article includes a great deal of moaning and groaning about the terrible harm the cuts would have on science research should they occur. From the Obama administration:
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The competition heats up: It appears that Texas, Florida, Puerto Rico and Georgia are all competing to be the location of SpaceX’s proposed private commercial spaceport.
Germany announced yesterday that it has approved funding for the design of an in-orbit test of a robot satellite servicing mission.
The DEOS project will for the first time demonstrate technologies for the controlled in-orbit disposal of a defective satellite. In addition, DEOS will practice how to complete maintenance tasks – refueling in particular – that extend the service life of satellites. DEOS consists of two satellites, a ‘client’ and a ‘servicer’. The client acts as the satellite requiring maintenance or disposal. The servicer carries out the necessary work on the client. The two satellites will be launched together and brought into orbit at a height of 550 kilometers. According to current planning, DEOS will be ready for launch in 2018.
Leftwing civility: For seventeen days Facebook approved and allowed a “Kill Mitt Romney” webpage to exist, despite numerous complaints.
To quote the webpage itself:
“This is a page advocating the murder of Republican Presidential candidate Mitt Romney.”
Lucky Sarah Palin didn’t comment about this or people might have gotten violent!
Islamic tolerance and justice: “Those who produced the movie should be tried and killed.”
Notice he didn’t simply say “Put them on trial,” which would have been bad enough, arresting someone for something he said. He wants them “tried and killed.” In other words, no trial in an Islamic nation is worth the electrons we use to read about it. They are merely kangaroo courts. If an Islamic preacher declares that you are guilty, you are guilty.
Which makes his other statements calling for peaceful demonstrations completely worthless and absolutely bullcrap. What is really going on is that they are now terrified that all that good U.S. money is going to be cut off, and want to placate the naive idiots in the U.S. To quote Senator Rand Paul (R-Kentucky):
“My position is not one penny more for Libya or Egypt or Pakistan until they act like our allies,” Paul said on the Senate floor Thursday. “Some say we’ve got to keep sending it. Fine. Let’s send it when they act like our allies. Let’s send it when they start behaving like civilized nations and come to their senses.”
As they used to say in the 1960s, “Right on!”
Americans say goodbye to Neil Armstrong.
A new astronomical constant: 149,597,870,700 meters.
The competition heats up: Scaled Composites, having finished glide tests of SpaceShipTwo, is now installing the rocket motor for powered flight tests.
Sanity: A federal judge has permanently blocked the use of the indefinite detention authority given to the President in the NDAA law passed by Congress last year.
To quote the judge’s opinion:
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Scaled Composites has successfully performed another test of the rocket motor that will be used on SpaceShipTwo.
Focused like a laser: The murder of four Americans in Libya, including the ambassador, appears to have been the result of failed security.
Sensitive documents have gone missing from the consulate in Benghazi and the supposedly secret location of the “safe house” in the city, where the staff had retreated, came under sustained mortar attack. Other such refuges across the country are no longer deemed “safe”. Some of the missing papers from the consulate are said to list names of Libyans who are working with Americans, putting them potentially at risk from extremist groups, while some of the other documents are said to relate to oil contracts.
According to senior diplomatic sources, the US State Department had credible information 48 hours before mobs charged the consulate in Benghazi, and the embassy in Cairo, that American missions may be targeted, but no warnings were given for diplomats to go on high alert and “lockdown”, under which movement is severely restricted.
This is a disaster, and suggests incompetence at all levels of the State Department and the White House.
An evening pause: July 6, 2012: Watch as 127,141 out of 128,000 dominoes fall, setting two world records.
Using space junk and 3D printers to build spaceships in space.
Words fail me: An American professor of religious studies has called for the arrest of an American filmmaker because his film insulted Islam.
The most revealing moment in this disgusting op-ed is when Butler explains that somehow this filmmaker’s free speech rights are less valuable than the filmmaker who made The Last Temptation of Christ.
Bacile’s movie is not the first to denigrate a religious figure, nor will it be the last. The Last Temptation of Christ was protested vigorously. The difference is that Bacile indirectly and inadvertently inflamed people half a world away, resulting in the deaths of U.S. Embassy personnel.
So in other words, free speech is only allowed when it offends Christians or Jews. Offend a Muslim, however, and you must go to prison.
As I said, words fail me. Though I might add that you can reach the head of Anthea Butler’s Department of Religious Studies here. It might be worthwhile to politely ask him what he thinks of his associate professor’s interpretation of freedom of speech.
A short but cogent summary of Obama’s response to the embassy attacks in the Middle East.
As Ross notes, “This president needs to be pink-slipped. He’s Jimmy Carter squared.”
The uncertainty of science: A new and very large study now suggests that — even though no one really knows why — acupuncture might actually be effective.
The key mystery here is the lack of any explanation for why acupuncture seems to work. And without that explanation, a large number of doctors will justifiable still refuse to use it as a course of treatment.
Focused like a laser: Not only has Barack Obama not attended an intelligence briefing since Sept 5, he canceled the briefing yesterday, the day after the attacks on our embassies in Egypt and Libya.
And why did he not have a briefing yesterday? He had a campaign fundraiser he just had to attend in Las Vegas.
The competition heats up: SpaceX today signed a contract to launch three additional satellites for the European company SES.
SpaceX already has a contract to launch one SES communications satellite next year.
We’ve only just begun: The private company Hobby Lobby has sued the Obama administration over the Obamacare mandate requiring them to pay for their employee’s contraceptives.
It’s only money! At the AIAA meeting this week in Pasadena, NASA officials admitted that the Space Launch System (SLS) will likely cost half a billion dollars per launch.
That means that after only two flights this rocket will have cost about the same as the entire manned commercial program, from which three different space companies are building three different methods for getting humans into space. After three missions it will cost more, and after four missions it will have cost double. And this is assuming that the half billion dollar “target” number ends up correct.
We can’t afford this. We never could, which is why the Saturn 5 rocket was abandoned, and why the shuttle never fulfilled its stated goal of lowering the cost of access to space and after thirty years was abandoned as well. Instead, we have got to find a cheaper way to do this, and to my mind, competition and private enterprise is the only hope.
An evening pause: From Ukraine’s Got Talent, an amazing performance by Kseniya Simonova, telling the story of World War II from the Ukrainian perspective, all with sand. From the youtube webpage:
What she depicts is love and the chaos of war, it is set amidst the turmoil of the opening stages of Operation Barbarossa (Nazi invasion of USSR during World War II) and the impact it had on a Ukrainian couple, the husband is drafted into the Soviet military and never came back home, years later his wife grows old and visits a war memorial to mourn him. The last picture is her younger self and her baby saying farewell to him… with the quote, “You are always with us.”
A dispute over launch pricing between Arianespace, the launch company, and Globalstar, the satellite company.
The article only quotes an executive from Arianespace, who suggests Globalstar has been having troubles making payments. I wonder instead if maybe Globalstar has been balking at Arianespace’s prices (knowing there are other companies that can do it cheaper) and has been holding out for a price cut.
Fifty years ago today, John Kennedy gave a speech at Rice University in Texas, outlining his reasoning behind his proposal that the United States send a man to the Moon before the end of the decade. The key phrase:
But why, some say, the Moon? Why choose this as our goal? And they may well ask why climb the highest mountain? Why, 35 years ago, fly the Atlantic? Why does Rice play Texas?
We choose to go to the Moon. We choose to go to the Moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too.
Video below the fold. The full text can be found here. (Interesting sidebar: When I posted Monday’s evening pause that quoted this speech I hadn’t realized the 50th anniversary of the speech was this week!)
This speech is worth watching, in full, if only to see the passion of both Kennedy and the audience for what he says. It also reveals a somewhat higher level of sophistication coming from a politician than one would see nowadays. Kennedy not only understood the deeper philosophical reasons for exploration, his thoughts were grounded in history as well as recent events, all of which he referenced repeatedly.
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An experimental vertical take-off and landing rocket crashed during its most recent test flight on Tuesday.
The Xaero had already flown more than 100 test flights, so this crash does not make it a failure. Like all engineering tests, the flight will only be a failure if they cannot figure out what went wrong.
This update says they have located the problem, the failure of a valve.
Whiskey in space? Not really, just some chemicals taken from a distillery up to ISS to test the effects of gravity on “the maturation process.”
Nonetheless, the distillery has issued a limited edition whiskey to celebrate the experiment.
Scientists have discovered well-preserved frozen woolly mammoth fragments deep in Siberia that may contain living cells.
From a liberal: “Progressive thinking and the rise of the anti-science left.”
The White House has disavowed the apology to the Muslim protesters issued by its embassy in Egypt earlier today.
“The statement by Embassy Cairo was not cleared by Washington and does not reflect the views of the United States government,” an administration official told POLITICO.
In other words, the Obama State Department isn’t cowardly, it’s simply incompetent. What a relief!
