The first test flight of the Copenhagen Suborbitals rocket, designed to carry one passenger, launched successfully today, though there were problems with the parachutes.
Facebook tells Tea Party advocates: no more organizing.
The Russian/ESA Mars 500 mission has completed a year of its 520-day simulated flight to Mars.
The crew, who spent 250 days working on maintenance and scientific experiments before a 30-day stint performing tasks on a simulated Martian surface, are currently on their “return trip” to Earth.
This simulated all-male flight is going better than the last:
In 1999, an experiment in the same Moscow warehouse fell to pieces after a Russian team captain forced a kiss on a Canadian woman, and two Russian crewmembers had a bloody fistfight.
Oil money in Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan and Venezuela is fueling their modest space efforts.
What if every state did this? The Texas law to ban any TSA full body pat downs, shelved last week, may still be passed.
And in more TSA news, video of a woman screaming for help while accusing a TSA agent of molesting her. Her son meanwhile is threatened with arrest and the confiscation of his luggage for videotaping the event.
Opportunity’s travels on Mars have now exceeded 30 kilometers.
A federal judge has prohibited prayer at a Texas graduation ceremony.
So how does this fit into anyone’s idea of freedom of religion or speech?
I’m so glad they are thinking of my best interests: Obama solicitor general tells court if you don’t like the Obamacare mandate, you can simply earn less money.
An evening pause: , The song “Impossible,” sung by Julie Andrews and Edie Adams, from the live 1957 television production of Rogers & Hammerstein’s Cinderella.
For the world is filled with zanies and fools
Who don’t believe in sensible rules
And won’t believe what sensible people say
And because these daft and dewy-eyed dopes
Keep building up impossible hopes,
Impossible things keep happening every day.
The day of reckoning beckons: Moody has threatened to lower the US credit rating if the debt ceiling negotiations don’t show progress soon.
And this is good? The TSA is testing a sensor system for detecting terrorists before they act.
The Future Attribute Screening Technology (FAST) security programme is designed to spot people who are planning to commit a terrorist act. The U.S. government system can ‘sense’ when you are planning and measures physiological factors such as heart rates and eye movements.
Our tax dollars at work: Under both the Bush and Obama administrations, the EPA has given $1.29 million in grants to various Chinese government agencies.
Why the Endangered Species Act doesn’t work.
[R]adical green groups . . . [are] engaged in an industry whose waste products are fish and wildlife. You and I are a major source of revenue for that industry. The Interior Department must respond within 90 days to petitions to list species under the Endangered Species Act. Otherwise, petitioners like the Center for Biological Diversity get to sue and collect attorney fees from the Justice Department.
And this:
Amos Eno runs the hugely successful Yarmouth, Maine-based Resources First Foundation, an outfit that, among other things, assists ranchers who want to restore native ecosystems. Earlier, he worked at Interior’s Endangered Species Office, crafting amendments to strengthen the law, then went on to direct the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation. Eno figures the feds could “recover and delist three dozen species” with the resources they spend responding to the Center for Biological Diversity’s litigation.
“The amount of money [Center for Biological Diversity] makes suing is just obscene,” he told me. “They’re one of the reasons the Endangered Species Act has become so dysfunctional. They deserve the designation of eco-criminals.”
Former astronaut calls for the dismantling of NASA.
This week there was a bit of a political kerfuffle during House hearings over a House report [pdf] that stated that the cost per pound for launching cargo to ISS was much cheaper using the shuttle versus the new commercial companies under the COTS program. This is shown in this table from page 5 of the report:
The problem is that these numbers are a complete lie, as they are based on a yearly cost of $3 billion to operate the shuttle (highlighted in yellow). I have been following NASA budget battles now for decades, and the shuttle operational budget has never, ever been that low. Routinely, NASA figures the cost to operate the shuttle per year, regardless of number of flights, to be about $4 billion per year.
» Read more
Government in action: A bureaucratic fight stalls an oil drill project in Alaska.
The project has put two federal agencies at odds. The Environmental Protection Agency has maintained that a roadless alternative, which would route the pipeline under the Nigliq Channel and use an airstrip instead of a road and bridge, would be less damaging to the reserve’s environment. The Interior Department backs Conoco’s proposal as environmentally preferable.
Freedom dies: A student was banned from graduation for criticizing his school on Facebook.
In a letter to [the student], [Vice President for Student Development and Services Eric W.] Jackson explained that the reason for his prohibition was the Facebook comments, adding that “[a]ll students enrolled at Saint Augustine’s College are responsible for protecting the reputation of the college and supporting its mission.”
In other words, the students at this hack of a school are required to promote the school at all times. What idiocy.
More government stupidity: Because California’s gold-mining environmental rules cost five times more than what they earn in fees, the state legislature can’t afford to fund the process. The result: an end to all gold-mining in California.
First Texas, now Alaska: Pressure from legislators there has forced TSA officials to consider the use of common sense profiling.
To the museum: Endeavour will not arrive in at its Los Angeles retirement home until late 2012.
Lockheed Martin buys the first commercial quantum computer. More here on the science of quantum computing.
Quantum computers could revolutionize the way we tackle problems that stump even the best classical computers, which store and process their data as ‘bits’ — essentially a series of switches that can be either on or off. The power of quantum bits — or qubits — is that they can be on and off simultaneously. Connect enough qubits together using quantum entanglement and a computer should be able to zip through a multitude of calculations in parallel, at astonishing speed.
NASA lunar lander test sparked a grass fire yesterday.
Good news for trout fisherman: A new study of the evasive algae Didymo has figured out why the algae blooms in places it shouldn’t.
The result may help managers identify water bodies susceptible to Didymo blooms, and develop management strategies. “It also has the potential to lead to discoveries that may stem this organism’s prolific growth in rivers around in the world,” says [P.V. Sundareshwar of the South Dakota School of Mines and Technology in Rapid City].
The Russian greenhouse on ISS underwent an upgrade today.
The onboard greenhouse was dismantled in April last year, as a need arose to replace the outdated control unit, recalled head of the Rasteniya-2 (Plants-2) experiment, chief of the laboratory of the Institute of Medico-Biological Problems (IMBP) of the Russian Academy of Sciences (RAS) Vladimir Sychev. In early 2010, the crop area of the orbital garden was extended twice – the second leaf chamber was delivered to the ISS in which the crew managed to harvest the Mizuna lettuce, before the greenhouse was dismantled. Now, the cosmonauts will plant in these two chambers different cultures – super-dwarf wheat and dwarf tomatoes.
As I described in detail in Leaving Earth, the Russians have decades of experience in growing plants in space, with the goal of not only providing a natural system to recycle the station’s atmosphere, but also giving the astronauts a morale-boosting activity (gardening) that also gives them something tasty to eat. Though the engineering has still not made it possible to germinate seeds in weightlessness and then have grow there, this will be an absolute requirement if humans are ever to travel to the planets and beyond to the stars.
The last shuttle mission: Atlantis has now begun its journey to the launchpad.
Bigelow expands its space station factory. Via Clark Lindsey.
Endeavour lands safely, for the last time.
