University shutters manned sub research program after forty years
Feeling the pinch: A Florida university has shuttered its manned submersible research program after forty years of operation due to lack of funds.
Category: Points of Information
Very brief descriptions, with appropriate links, of current or recent news items.
NASA pushes for funds to save the James Webb Space Telescope
NASA pushes for funds to save the James Webb Space Telescope.
NASA announces awards for three technology demonstration space missions
NASA has announced three awards for technology demonstration space missions, all set to fly within four years. More details here.
The three missions are:
- A solar sail demonstration mission, flying a sail 38 by 38 meter sail.
- A demonstration of in-space laser/optical communications technologies.
- The use of a high-precision atomic clock in space.
I especially like the solar sail mission because of its long range possibilities, though the other technologies would probably be put to practical use more quickly.
“He’s a moron.”
From a Democratic voter in blue-state New York, talking about Obama.
Link fixed. Sorry.
Early hints of the Higgs boson fade with fresh data.
Early hints that scientists had found the Higgs boson at CERN have faded with fresh data.
New data presented today at the Lepton Photon conference in Mumbai, India, show the signal fading. It means that “this excess is probably just a statistical fluctuation”, says Adam Falkowski, a theorist at the University of Paris-South in Orsay, France.
Bringing the Delta 2 back to launch unmanned science probes
Rocket shortage: NASA is reconsidering the Delta 2 rocket as a vehicle to launch its unmanned science satellites.
Social Security disability on verge of insolvency
The day of reckoning looms: Social Security disability on the verge of insolvency.
One man’s response to Obama’s demand that taxes on the rich be raised
One man’s response to Obama’s demand that taxes on the rich be raised.
I deeply resent that President Obama has decided that I don’t need all the money I’ve not paid in taxes over the years, or that I should leave less for my children and grandchildren and give more to him to spend as he thinks fit.
and
Governments have an obligation to spend our tax money on programs that work. They fail at this fundamental task. Do we really need dozens of retraining programs with no measure of performance or results? Do we really need to spend money on solar panels, windmills and battery-operated cars when we have ample energy supplies in this country? Do we really need all the regulations that put an estimated $2 trillion burden on our economy by raising the price of things we buy? Do we really need subsidies for domestic sugar farmers and ethanol producers?
Read the whole thing.
The new commercial space companies question NASA contracting policies
The new commercial space companies are challenging NASA’s new contracting policy.
The article covers the conflict that I described in this post, whereby NASA is abandoning the more flexible contracting approach used for the commercial cargo contracts of SpaceX and Orbital Sciences and going instead with the contracting system it used for all past NASA subcontracts.
The article is errs badly when it calls the new contracting approach that NASA wants to use “non-traditional.” It is instead the way NASA has been doing things for decades, whereby the agency takes full control of everything and requires contractors to fill out so much paperwork that the costs double and triple.
Researchers have found what could be the oldest microbial fossils yet, discovered in 3.4-billion-year-old Australian rocks
Researchers have found what could be the oldest microbial fossils yet, discovered in 3.4-billion-year-old Australian rocks
Europe and Russia talk of joint manned mission to Mars
Europe and Russia talk of joint manned mission to Mars.
I’m not sure how seriously to take this story, though its implications are intriguing regardless. More than any other country, Russia knows how to build the kind of spaceship necessary for the journey. What Europe will contribute more than anything else would be money.
Did Obamacare cause the economic collapse
By the spring of 2010, private sector job growth turned positive. In April job growth increased to 230,000 net private-sector jobs. The economy appeared on track for a normal recovery from an awful recession. The administration began confidently predicting a “Recovery Summer.” But Recovery Summer fizzled instead of sizzled. In May private sector job growth dropped sharply to less than 50,000 net jobs. Thereafter, monthly improvement in private job growth averaged just 6,500 jobs.
What else happened in the spring of 2010? Despite obstacles that many believed would kill the bill, Congress passed the Affordable Care Act. Within two months, the trend in job growth dropped sharply. Monthly job creation had been on pace to top out in the hundreds of thousands. Post-Affordable Care Act, it has barely kept pace with population growth. [emphasis mine]
and
The health-care measure raises business costs and makes planning for the future more difficult. It should be expected to slow hiring.
Federal Reserve officials report that the law has had exactly this effect. Dennis Lockhart, president of the Atlanta Fed, reports that “prominent among these (factors businesses explain are impeding hiring) is the lack of clarity about the cost implications of the recent health care legislation. We’ve frequently heard strong comments to the effect of ‘my company won’t hire a single additional worker until we know what health insurance costs are going to be.'” Surveys bear out these warnings. In a recent poll one-third of small business owners identified the healthcare bill as one of their top two obstacles to hiring. [emphasis mine]