New Space: Sierra Nevada plans to drop test its Dream Chaser spaceplane in 2012 using Scaled Composites’ WhiteKnightTwo.
Endeavour’s last launch has slipped to at least May 10, possibly later.
Did a microbe survive 2.5 years attached to Surveyor 3 on the Moon, and then come home on Apollo 12? New research says no.
An evening pause: Let’s go for a drive! Jeff Zwart in a Porsche runs Pikes Peak, setting a record for the fastest time.
More information on the asteroid “flyby” of Earth this coming November 8.
“On November 8, asteroid 2005 YU55 will fly past Earth and at its closest approach point will be about 325,000 kilometers [201,700 miles] away,” said Don Yeomans, manager of NASA’s Near-Earth Object Program Office at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. “This asteroid is about 400 meters [1,300 feet] wide – the largest space rock we have identified that will come this close until 2028.”
Justice: The U.S. military finally tracked down and killed Osama bin Laden yesterday.
Some additional information and analysis:
Scaled Composites is ramping up the test rate for SpaceShipTwo.
The launch of space shuttle Endeavour has now been delayed by NASA until May 8 at the earliest.
An evening pause: The last part of “The Guns of John Browning” from Tales of the Gun.
The documentary correctly honors Browning for the quality of his designs and workmanship. To me, it is more important to honor him for making the weapons that allowed the United States to defend freedom in the twentieth century. Without these tools in the hands of our soldiers, the wars would have been longer and many more lives would have been lost. And worse, the fascists and Nazis and dictators might have won.
As George Bernard Shaw wrote in Major Barbara, “The people must have power.”
This from someone who believes in climate change: “The solutions are a joke.”
Technical problems have delayed the last launch of the shuttle Endeavour at least 48 hours.
The world’s ten creepiest abandoned cities.
Putin sacks the head of the Russian space agency.
Space telescopes Hubble and Swift have proven that the debris that suddenly surrounded asteroid Scheila last year was caused by a collision.
If only this was true: Budget crisis forces Detroit to cancel half its murders.
Gee, you’d think he would have noticed this a long time ago: The Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke went on record today to warn that the US deficit “is not sustainable.”
Astronomers are considering the merger two space missions to create a new optical/ultraviolet space telescope. The mission would be designed to do both deep cosmology and exoplanet observations.
The two communities would both like to see a 4–8-metre telescope in space that would cost in excess of $5 billion. “Our interests are basically aligned,” says [Jim Kasting, a planetary scientist at Pennsylvania State University]. Such a mission would compete for top billing in the next decadal survey of astronomy by the US National Academy of Sciences, due in 2020.
This story is big news, as it indicates two things. First, the 2010 Decadal Survey, released in August 2010, is almost certainly a bust. The budget problems at NASA as well as a general lack of enthusiasm among astronomers and the public for its recommendations mean that the big space missions it proposed will almost certainly not be built.
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Sixty years late: A North Sea oil pipeline is threatened by a World War II Nazi bomb.
Islam tolerance: A Muslim actress posed for Playboy and is now threatened with death.
More details, including images, of China’s proposed space station.
The countdown for Endeavour’s last launch has begun.
Confirmed: one of two tickets for a lunar flyby on a Soyuz has been sold. More here.
An evening pause: As this year is the 100th anniversary of the M1911 pistol, probably the most popular pistol ever made, here is the part one of a four part documentary telling the story of the man who designed it, John Moses Browning.
Technology marches on: The last typewriter factory in the world has shut down.
