Orbital Sciences has decided to delay the first launch its Cygnus capsule to ISS by one day.
They found a bad cable and are replacing it.
The first launch of SpaceX’s upgraded Falcon 9 rocket has probably been delayed by at least a week.
No new launch date has been set, but the article suggests that a September 30 date is being considered. Meanwhile, the company will perform another static engine test today.
India’s space agency has decided to completely replace the second stage of the GSLV rocket that leaked during the rocket’s scrubbed launch last month.
“Although the exact reasons for the leakage in the second stage of the engine, which prevented the launch on August 19, are being probed by the team headed by K Narayanan, it has been decided that a new liquid second stage (GS-2) will be assembled to replace the leaked stage,” said the official. He added that the process of assembling has begun, and that besides the GS-2, all the four liquid strap-on stages are being replaced with new ones.
That leak must have been quite significant for them to make this decision.
A good scientist, who also believes in global warming, explains the irrelevance of “extreme weather” to the climate change debate.
Yet [an increase in extreme weather] is not supported by science. “General statements about extremes are almost nowhere to be found in the literature but seem to abound in the popular media,” climate scientist Gavin Smith of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies said last month. “It’s this popular perception that global warming means all extremes have to increase all the time, even though if anyone thinks about that for 10 seconds they realize that’s nonsense.”
The scientist writing this op-ed is Bjorn Lomborg. He gives a lot of details. Here’s just one:
Global warming, in general, will mean higher temperatures. This causes more heat waves — more extreme weather. But it also causes fewer cold waves — less extreme weather. Many more people die from excessive cold than excessive heat, so fewer people will die from cold and heat in the future. By mid-century, researchers estimated in 2006, that means about 1.4 million fewer deaths per year. In the continental United States, heat waves in the past decade exceeded the norm by 10 percent, but the number of cold waves fell 75 percent.
Moreover, global warming will mostly increase temperatures during winter, at night and in cold places, making temperature differences less extreme.
The competition heats up: Japan’s new Epsilon rocket has successfully placed its first payload into orbit.
Another Russian space glitch: The astronauts who returned to Earth from ISS on September 10 were flying blind.
The altitude sensors apparently failed soon after undocking. Since the Soyuz craft is not piloted but returns to Earth automatically, this failure was not crucial. That it happened, however, sends another worrisome signal about declining Russian quality control standards. If this system failed, why couldn’t another more crucial one fail as well?
Finding out what’s in it: The Obama administration has decided to actually follow the law and not give its Democratic union buddies a waiver on Obamacare.
It shows us how far we have fallen that we are surprised that the Obama administration is going to follow the law, as written and passed by Congress, rather than arbitrarily rewrite that law illegally into order to help its political allies. Nowadays we are increasingly expecting this administration to treat the law as a plaything that it can ignore willy-nilly, without any opposition from anyone.
This story also illustrates the danger of blindly supporting the actions of one political party. Union leaders have for decades allied themselves with the Democratic Party, without ever really questioning the wisdom of anything those Democrats were doing. Obamacare was only one example of this foolishness. Now they are going to suffer badly for their blind partisanship.
It would have been much smarter for those unions to have done what conservatives and tea party advocates demanded back in 2009 and 2010: Read the damn law before you pass it!
Orbital Sciences has rolled Antares/Cygnus to the launchpad. With pictures.
Take a look. You will notice how simple this operation is, and how little infrastructure is involved, compared to the set up NASA has used for the shuttle and intends to use for SLS.
Gotta have your KGB: The increasing harassment of their members by Homeland Security has caused the Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association (AOPA) to begin a political campaign against the agency.
The link above takes you what looks like a fundraising letter sent about by the AOPA to its membership. The significance is that they are centering their campaign around the harassment by Homeland Security, which suggests that this harassment has become a very big issue within this community.
When will SpaceX launch the upgraded Falcon 9? We have competing news stories:
This is very puzzling. That the Canadian release was sent out today suggests that they have information we don’t have about the static fire test and thus knew they could announce the launch date. That Musk is more circumspect however suggests that the information the Canadians have is not correct.
Update: Stephen Clark at Spaceflight Now has more information. It appears the launch will not happen on Sunday, as SpaceX plans a second launchpad static test tomorrow to iron out the unexplained “anomalies” in yesterday’s static test.
That didn’t take long: Before the Minnesota Obamacare health exchange has even officially opened there has been a security breach of the private health records of more than 2,400 individuals.
Stay tuned for more screw-ups and the misuse of private health records for political purposes. The Obamacare health exchanges are inherently insecure.
Working for the Democratic Party: Fifteen so-called journalists have made their political preferences official by joining the Obama administration.
That almost all of these media types have ended up working for a Democratic administration illustrates the one-sided culture in the mainstream media. If you aren’t for the Democratic Party, you won’t survive as a journalist at these news outlets. In fact, it is likely that you won’t even get a job there.
More here. This second article is absolutely worth reading because it dissects the leftwing and partisan culture of the mainstream press by looking at the employment history of these mainstream media journalists as well their history of bad and biased reporting.
It is now eight years since a major hurricane made landfall in the United States.
[N]ot a single major hurricane, defined as a Category 3 storm or higher on the Saffir-Simpson scale —with minimum wind gusts of at least 111 mph (178 km/h) — has directly hit the United States in nearly eight years. That’s twice as long as any major hurricane landfall “drought” since 1915, and by far the longest on record since data began being collected prior to 1900. As of today (Sept. 12), it’s been 2,880 days since Hurricane Wilma, the last major hurricane to strike the United States, made landfall on Oct. 24, 2005.
And guess what? The reasons have nothing to do with global warming!
Two Earth-based radio telescopes have detected the radio glow of the Voyager 1 spacecraft, now in interstellar space.
After a journey of 10 years, astronomers are accelerating preparations for the arrival of Europe’s Rosetta space probe at Comet 67P/Churymov-Gerasimenko.
The spacecraft will be awakened in January 2014, with rendezvous later that year.
SpaceX successfully completed a static test of the 9 first stage engines of its upgraded Falcon 9 rocket today.
SpaceX’s upgraded Falcon 9 rocket briefly fired nine Merlin 1D engines on the launch pad Thursday, but engineers will review data from the prelaunch static fire test before confirming the mission’s targeted Sunday launch from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California, sources familiar with SpaceX’s launch preparations said.
Finding out what’s in it: Indiana University is laying off 50 maintenance workers to avoid Obamacare costs.
The employees will now work for an independent company, which I am sure will either make sure its total staffing is under 50 or those employees work less than 30 hours per week in order to also avoid Obamacare.
The numbers here aren’t gigantic, but the story is notable in that these employees and the university that had employed them almost certainly supported Obamacare and Obama blindly this last five years. The sad thing is I doubt they will finally face reality and link their troubles with his policies.
And then there’s this: Trader Joe’s to drop health insurance for part-time workers because of Obamacare.
SpaceX’s static fire test of Falcon 9R that was scrubbed yesterday is about to happen today.
Finding out what’s in it: Major unions are now calling for the repeal of Obamacare.
Maybe a wiser action would have been to to read the damn law beforehand, or at least demand that Congress do so, before supporting it blindly because it was proposed by their saint and savior, Barack Obama?
Working for the Democratic Party: New emails show that Lois Lerner and the IRS specifically targeted conservative groups for harassment in 2011.
NASA has announced a press conference for later today about the Voyager spacecraft.
The rumors are that all the scientists involved with this data from this spacecraft now finally agree that Voyager has left the solar system. More to come.
The rumors were true: NASA has confirmed that Voyager 1 is out of the solar system and in interstellar space, and has been since last summer.
The competition heats up: Orbital Sciences plans to roll Antares and Cygnus to the launchpad tomorrow for its Tuesday launch.
The competition heats up: Virgin Galactic held a job fair this weekend and almost 600 applicants showed up.
They want to hire a 100 new engineers to help build additional spaceships like SpaceShipTwo.
Update: This report says that more than 1300 people showed up for these 100 jobs.
Astronomers have compiled the first detailed 3D map of the inner regions of the Milky Way. More here.
They find a box/peanut shaped bulge with an elongated bar and a prominent X-structure, which had been hinted at in previous studies. This indicates that the Milky Way was originally a pure disk of stars, which then formed a thin bar, before buckling into the box/peanut shape seen today.
The Russians have delayed the next Proton launch, scheduled for September 17, for at least a week.
They have not described the problem in any article I can find, but considering their recent failures it doesn’t surprise me if they are being extra careful now.
Using photos from Dawn astronomers have now assembled an online atlas of the asteroid Vesta that the public can explore.
Wednesday’s static fire test and launch rehearsal of SpaceX’s Falcon 9R rocket was scrubbed.
I hear rumors that there was a fuel leak, but this is not confirmed. Regardless, this scrub could cause another delay of Sunday’s planned launch of the upgraded Falcon 9R with its first commercial payload, as the company wants to do this test prior to launch.
Pushback: The two Colorado Democrats who were key instigators of that state’s new gun control laws were both decisively voted out of office yesterday in recall elections.
The election, which came five months after the United States Senate defeated several gun restrictions, handed another loss to gun-control supporters. It also gave moderate lawmakers across the country a warning about the political risks of voting for tougher gun laws.
The recall elections ousted two Democratic state senators, John Morse and Angela Giron, and replaced them with Republicans. Both defeats were painful for Democrats – Mr. Morse’s because he had been Senate president, and Ms. Giron’s because she represented a heavily Democratic, working-class slice of southern Colorado.
The article says almost nothing about Angela Giron’s defeat, which I find intriguing. She was not expected to lose, considering her district was so Democratic, but her margin of defeat was actually larger than Morse’s. See also this article for a very good election analysis which suggests that any effort by Democrats to impose oppressive gun control laws is going to backfire for them very badly.
