Very brief descriptions, with appropriate links, of current or recent news items.
NASA has lost contact with its Deep Impact probe and is racing against time to save it.
The college teacher who went on an anti-Republican tirade in class and even threatened a student who disagreed has been suspended for the rest of the semester.
Cumulative data from a variety of space probes now shows that the direction of the interstellar wind has shifted during the past forty years.
The competition heats up: SpaceShipTwo is expected to make its second powered test flight today.
Update: The flight was a success. More details from Virgin Galactic here.
Video of the flight below the fold.
» Read more
The competition heats up: Orbital Sciences prepares its Cygnus capsule for its first flight to ISS, set for launch on September 17.
Orbital officials said the Cygnus spacecraft was scheduled to be attached to the upper stage of the Antares launcher Wednesday. Final cargo loading into the Cygnus spacecraft’s pressurized module is set for Saturday, followed by its enclosure inside the rocket’s 12.8-foot-diameter payload fairing.
Rollout of the Antares rocket from its horizontal integration facility to the launch pad one mile away is expected Sept. 13.
September will be a busy and important month for private space. We also will have SpaceX’s first commercial launch with its Falcon 9 rocket. If both are successful, the trend away from a big government space programs shall accelerate.
How to view the east coast launch on Septembert 6 of LADEE.
LADEE will attempt to solve the leftover question from the Apollo-era: Does the surface dust on the Moon levitate? The question is real, and the consequences could be significant for future lunar settlements.
Despite the astronauts’ success on ISS in recreating the spacesuit water leak, NASA engineers still do not know its cause.
What is unstated about this problem is that, because we used to have a big space shuttle with lots of cargo capacity, the American spacesuit was designed to be maintained and repaired on the ground. In the past the next space shuttle flight would have brought a new spacesuit to the station while taking this defective suit back to Earth for analysis and repair. Now that we don’t have a big space shuttle, our complex spacesuits are far more difficult to troubleshoot.
The solution? First, keep it simple. The Russians, limited by the capacity of their Progress and Soyuz capsules, made their Orlan spacesuit very simple and easy to use.
Second, get as many redundant replacements of the shuttle operating as soon as possible.
A survey of planetary nebulae near the Milky Way’s central bulge has revealed that they tend to be aligned with each other.
This discovery is unexpected and suggests that the influence of the bulge, probably its magnetic field, is far greater than predicted.
Astronomers submit a slew of proposals for using the partly crippled Kepler space telescope.
Ideas range from a survey of potentially hazardous near-Earth objects to a study of Jupiter-sized exoplanets in large orbits. Kepler scientists will sort through the proposals and decide by 1 November which ones, if any, to recommend to NASA headquarters for further review.
Sadly, none of these ideas excites me very much. The tragedy here is that we have this really good optical telescope above the atmosphere, and we can’t point it accurately enough to use it.
“The [US Justice Department] just stuffed a rag in Barrett Brown’s mouth, as well as his lawyers.”
The case might be complicated, and Brown might have even broken a reasonable privacy law, justifying his imprisonment. Nonetheless, it disturbs me greatly that the government’s response is to silence the man. Something about this stinks.
Leftwing civility: A college professor threatened a student during in a rant in which he insulted Republicans and even Mitt Romney’s wife.
Video at the link. The threat is veiled but it there nonetheless. The whole rant itself is quite disgusting, especially for a teacher to do it in class, when he has a captive audience.
A family whose dog was shot by police is now suing for half a million dollars.
Finding out what’s in it: Taxing both the rich and the sick to pay for Obamacare.
Key quotes:
The change will negatively impact parents who have special needs children and who use FSA funds to help pay for tuition in special needs schools, says Xavier Epps, owner of XNE Financial Advising.
and:
For the more than 10 million individuals and families that claim medical expenses in 2011, there’s more bad news. In order to claim medical expense deductions in 2013, the claims must be at least 10% of AGI, up from 7.5% in the past. There’s an exception for people who are age 65 and older at the end of the year and for married taxpayers with only one spouse age 65 or over. Their threshold will remain at 7.5% until the 2017 tax year.
Y’know, I have yet to find any documented evidence of Obamacare lowering costs or improving health coverage anywhere. So far, this law has done nothing but balloon costs, limit options, and reduce the ability of people to either get health insurance they can afford or healthcare they need.
But that’s all right. The Democrats passed it! It must be good! Let’s vote for them again so they can do this kind of masterwork in many other places. (Right now, the Middle East and Syria comes to mind.)
The thugs win: Militant gays force an Oregon bakery out of business.
The background:
On January 17, a mother and daughter arrived at Sweet Cakes By Melissa, an Oregon bakery owned by the Kleins. When the pair explained they wanted a wedding cake for a lesbian wedding, the shop owners politely refused informing the would-be customers that their religious beliefs don’t condone gay weddings and that, because of this, they did not want the women’s business. Before the week was up the bakery was beset by attacks in person, on the phone, and in email. The gay mafia from across the country had sprung into action to threaten the lives of the religious couple. [emphasis mine]
The threats and loss of business have now forced them to shut their bakery. And the reason: Their religious beliefs forbid them from catering to a gay wedding, an act which would be the equivalent of endorsing that event. Note also that they had not been refusing to serve gays, only refusing to cater a gay wedding.
A London university has digitized and placed online a collection of historic space images.
I don’t think the press release’s claim that these images have never been online before is true for all the images. Nonetheless, the online availability especially of the Russian Venus images is very welcome.
Brazil stalls paying its share for the construction of the Extremely Large Telescope.
They signed the agreement in 2010, but can’t get their legislature to allocate the money.
Speaking of architectural blunders: A London building melts a parked Jaguar.
A NASA veteran slams the Space Launch System (SLS).
The problem with the SLS is that it’s so big that makes it very expensive. It’s very expensive to design, it’s very expensive to develop. When they actually begin to develop it, the budget is going to go haywire. They’re going to have all kinds of technical and development issues crop up, which will drive the development costs up. Then there are the operating costs of that beast, which will eat NASA alive if they get there. They’re not going to be able to fly it more than once a year, if that, because they don’t have the budget to do it. So what you’ve got is a beast of a rocket, that would give you all of this capability, which you can’t build because you don’t have the money to build it in the first place, and you can’t operate it if you had it.
Q: What do you see as the alternative?
A: In the private sector we’ve got an Atlas and a Delta rocket, and the Europeans have a rocket called the Ariane. The Russians have lots of rockets, which are very reliable, and they get reliable by using them. And that’s something the SLS will never have. Never. Because you can’t afford to launch it that many times.
A businessman fights a federal regulatory effort that destroyed his business. The government responds by trying to destroy him.
Read the article. It will send chills down your spine. The business was legal, did no harm, and was very successful. The government shut it down, killed it. Now they are going after the creator because he had tried to stop them.
The next IPCC report: “The timing couldn’t be worse.”
The author describes how the new report, due out in just a couple of months, is probably already obsolete because of a slew of new papers documenting the long 10 to 15 year pause in global warming that was not predicted by any of the climate models used by the IPCC.
This quote I think sums things up nicely, however:
Due to a ‘combination of errors’, the models have overestimated warming by 100% over the past 20 years and by 400% over the past 15 years.
The Russian way: In an effort to deal with their quality control problems the Russians plan to consolidate their space industries into a single company controlled by the government.
This is not a good sign for the future competitiveness of the Russian aerospace industry. Consolidation will only reduce competition and innovation, while placing the government in control will only increase bureaucracy.
More extreme weather, eh? There were no Atlantic hurricanes in August this year, for the first time in eleven years.
As I’ve noted repeatedly, there is no evidence yet of an increase of extreme weather events as predicted by global warming advocates. In fact, some recent data suggests a decline, though I personally wouldn’t take that seriously either.
So, when Al Gore or Barack Obama or Dianne Feinstein starts running around like Chicken Little, claiming the sky is about to fall, remember these facts.
Working for the Democratic Party: The IRS harassment of conservatives continues.
An IRS letter sent to [a tea party] group last week and obtained by The Washington Times contains a laundry list of requests related to virtually all the group’s activities, including its involvement in the 2012 election cycle and its get-out-the-vote efforts, fundraising activities, all radio and TV advertising, and other information. The IRS also is asking for detailed financial records, including “the amounts and percentages of your total expenses that were for fundraising activities in the tax year 2011, 2012 and 2013.” [emphasis mine]
Key quote: “We got away with discriminating against you and we’re not stopping.”
Finding out what’s in it: Five large population groups are losing their healthcare insurance because of Obamacare.
The five groups are spouses, part-time workers, retirees, individuals, and unions. I wonder how many of these — especially the unions — will continue to blindly support Democrats, even after this disaster.
The launch date for India’s GSLV rocket has been pushed off until December in order to thoroughly investigate what caused the fuel leak during the scrubbed launch last week.
Curiosity makes a three frame movie of Phobos eclipsing the Sun.
“Democrats are just goddamned liars.”
He is referring to professional Democrats, not your typical Democrat voter. To continue:
The fact that one of their more politically useful falsehoods nowadays is telling black people that their problems are caused by white racism should not require us to treat that lie any more seriously than we do any other Democrat lie.
When Democrats say we need “a conversation on race,” what they really mean is they want to have a monologue, a tedious lecture about all the evils perpetrated against black people by those evil racist Republicans. Your part of the “conversation” is, shut up.
The competition heats up? An Iranian news release today says that researchers at a local university have “designed and built” a manned spacecraft.
Sounds very dubious to me. I suspect what really happened is that these Iranian university researchers did some work outlining their proposed design, and this has now been translated into a “built” spacecraft.
Hubble sees a cosmic caterpillar.
I am always astonished at the weird loveliness of these astronomical objects. They are big, tenuous, faint, and almost impossible to see. And yet, when we tease them out of the darkness they blind us with beauty.
