Very brief descriptions, with appropriate links, of current or recent news items.
Hope and dispair for American bats: New results on the fungus that is killing them.
News from Mercury: A nice summary of some of the most important scientific results so far returned by Messenger.
It appears that both Boeing and Lockheed Martin are considering hiring the Russia aerospace company Energia to build components for the CST-100 and Orion manned capsules.
What is going on here is that both Boeing and Lockheed Martin are looking for a subcontractor who can build these components for less money. Since labor costs in Russia are much lower than the U.S., both companies are considering Energia for this work.
This quote, however, encapsulates the cultural war that still goes on sometimes between Russia and the U.S.:
“[Russian] achievements in docking sites and [thermal protection equipment] production are quite competitive, but I am not sure that the Americans will accept our offer because they not only have the task of building a spaceship but also of gaining competence in this matter,” Dmitry Payson, director of the space and telecommunication technology department in Russia’s Skolkovo hi-tech hub, told Izvestia.
In interviewing many Russian and American space engineers over the years I have found an amazing amount of contempt from each for the work of the other, often without justification. Just as the Russians above seem to falsely think that Boeing and Lockheed Martin know nothing about docking equipment or thermal protection, American engineers repeatedly have expressed to me unjustified disdain for the space station technology developed by the Russians for Mir. The result: both countries often don’t take advantage of the other’s skills.
NASA today unveiled for the press the Orion capsule scheduled for the program’s first test flight in 2014.
Today’s unveiling was essentially a PR event designed to boost political support for the Space Launch System (SLS) and the Orion capsule program. And though we should definitely give kudos to Lockheed Martin for its progress on Orion, it is also important to note that the building of this capsule took 8 years and about $6.5 billion. And it won’t go into space for still another two years at best. Compare that to SpaceX’s Dragon, which took about four years from concept to launch, with a cost of about $1 billion.
It is this contrast that is worrying the political supporters of SLS and Orion. Consider for example this quote from the above article:
But the Orion schedule assumes steady funding by Congress, which is an open question given the current debate over federal budget deficits, taxes and a general push to reduce federal spending. “We have to be concerned about that because we are in an era of government spending where you have to do more with a limited amount,” Nelson said. “That, of course, is going to be one of the main things we’re going to have to look at in the future.” [emphasis mine]
Nelson has been a big backer of SLS from the moment Congress decided to force it down NASA’s throat. It is very clear from his comments above however that he recognizes the political difficulties that this very expensive program faces.
As I’ve said before, I expect SLS to die sometime in the next three years. Faced with a ungodly federal deficit, the next Congress is going to look for ways to save money and — assuming the commercial space companies like SpaceX continue to have success — Congress will see this program as one of those ways.
A newly discovered fossil of a very early dinosaur strongly suggests that all dinosaurs had some form of plumage.
A investigation has found that Japanese anesthesiologist, Yoshitaka Fujii, fabricated a 172 scientific papers over the past 19 years.
The panel focused on 212 of 249 known Fujii papers. It tried to review the raw data, laboratory notebooks, and records on the patients or animal subjects involved. Committee members also interviewed relevant people. Among the 172 papers judged bogus, the report claims that 126 studies of randomized, double-blind, controlled trials “were totally fabricated.” The committee identified only three valid papers. For another 37 papers, the panel could not conclusively determine if there had been fabrication. …
The panel said that the responsibility of those co-authors ranges from “serious” to “none at all.” The only one of Fujii’s co-authors specifically named in the summary is University of Tsukuba anesthesiologist Hidenori Toyooka. The report says Toyooka “was not involved in fabrication but bears significant responsibility” since he was Fujii’s supervising professor both at Tsukuba and when they both worked at Tokyo Medical and Dental University. Toyooka is listed as a co-author of many of the papers cited by the 23 journal editors. … At the same time, the investigation found that some scientists were unaware Fujii had included them as co-authors. In one case, two supposed co-authors told the panel their signatures on a submission cover letter were forged. [emphasis mine]
For a scientist to get that many fabricated papers published for that long in peer-reviewed journals strongly suggests that there is widespread corruption in his field, which in this case is anesthesiology.
Rumors of Higgs: The U.S.-based physicists announced today that their data suggests that the Higgs boson exists.
Meanwhile, there are hints that a major announcement from the Large Hadron Collider concerning the discovery of a major new particle will be announced on Wednesday.
Freedom of speech in modern America: The Secret Service shut down a “Fire Holder” rally this morning in front of the White House.
After discovering a “suspicious package,” the Secret Service ended the protest. “Several agents seemed hostile to our march and seemed anxious for us to leave the area,” Maurice Lewis, a University of California student, told Campus Reform. “The discover[y of] the ‘unidentified package’ came just as the protest began gain traction.”
Not only should Holder be fired, so should Obama, for allowing this. And Romney should announce that he plans to investigate the Secret Service and fire them if this “suspicious package” report turns out to be false.
Obamacare: The final battle.
Mitt Romney said it best on Thursday. “If we want to get rid of Obamacare, we’re going to have to replace President Obama.” Those who have been sitting on the sidelines, out of complacency or loyalty to someone else from the primaries, must get out of their chairs and get to work. But while that work must end with Mitt Romney in the White House, it must begin with a Republican majority in the Senate.
As I said last week, the only right way to get this terrible law it is for the voters to insist upon its repeal. And the only way to do that is to elect politicians who say they will repeal it. Not only will that get rid of the law, but it will instill such fear in politicians that it will be decades before any of them will attempt to introduce another one of these kinds of draconian laws.
The stink bug, first seen in the east, has now invaded 38 states including the Pacific coast.
The religion of peace: Iran plans to attack U.S. commercial planes should an attack occur on its nuclear program. Also,
All political prisoners and all activists within the country are to be slaughtered, as are those Iranian opponents outside the country, to ensure no viable opposition will remain to guide an uprising to overthrow of the regime.
Tragedy: Retired astronaut Alan Poindexter has been killed in a jet ski accident.
Take a gander at these cool images from SpaceShipTwo’s most recent test flights.
Three astronauts have safely returned from ISS in a Soyuz capsule after 193 days in orbit.
Good news: The stuck solar panel on Intelsat 19, launched June 1, has finally deployed.
Does this make you feel safer? A SWAT team in Indiana broke down the unlocked front door, tossed in stun grenade, and then stormed into … (wait for it) … the wrong house.
Update: Thank you Steve for noting that I typed the wrong state, Illinois, in the post. This has now been corrected.
More on the Fast-and-Furious cover-up: “All these whistleblowers have axes to grind. ATF needs to f—k these guys.”
It’s not the crime but the coverup: Newly revealed wiretap applications by Eric Holder’s Justice Department show that top officials, including Holder, almost certainly knew about the Fast-and-Furious program and its smuggling of guns illegally into Mexico long before the murder of border agent Brian Terry by one of those guns.
This evidence provides an explanation why Obama, Holder and other Justice officials have been stonewalling Congressional investigations. The documents they are withholding likely prove that they have been lying, from the beginning, about what they knew about Fast-and-Furious. Worse, their willingness to let guns pass over the border into Mexico illegally would make them accessories in the murders of Terry and numerous Mexicans.
The sex life of a living rock. With video.
Science has once again decided to make excuses for scientific fraud.
The first link is describes Science’s willingness in 2011 to excuse the illegal effort of Phil Jones and Michael Mann to delete emails in the climategate scandal. The second link is Science’s effort today to protect another scientist, social scientist Dirk Smeesters, who — as described in the third link — was forced to resign from his university and retract two papers after being caught fudging data to produce the results he wanted.
This quote below however — from the Science article itself — should have been all a scientific peer-reviewed journal like Science should have needed to know:
Smeesters repeated in the interview what he told the university: That he only engaged in so-called data massaging, a “large grey area” in his field, and that the raw data for some of his experiments were lost when his home computer crashed. Paper records for the studies, he added, also disappeared when he moved his office. [emphasis mine]
A scientist who admits that he fiddled with his raw data to get the results he wants, and then admits losing that raw data so that no one can check him deserves no defense ever from the scientific community. That Science is willing to make such a defense is further evidence that something is really rotten in the established upper echelons of American science.
The competition heats up: Russia’s Deputy Prime Minister said today that his country needs to expand its commercial space services and grab market share from the United States and Europe.
I wonder if these comments stem from a realization that — because Russia’s Proton rocket, its main commercial space product, is twice as expensive as SpaceX’s Falcon 9 — Russia faces a significant loss of business if it does not adapt.
The cost of launch: Clark Lindsey posted today this interesting cost comparison between the Falcon 9 and the Russian-built Proton rocket.
The essence is this: The Proton rocket costs twice as much as the Falcon 9. If SpaceX can make a profit charging these low numbers, the launch industry is going to see a major shake out in the coming years.
The most powerful rocket presently in service, the Delta-4 Heavy, successfully launched a U.S. surveillance satellite this morning.
The booster features three core rocket boosters and is topped with a second stage to place payloads into orbit. It is 235 feet tall (72 meters) and can carry payloads of up to 24 tons into low-Earth orbit and 11 tons to geosynchronous orbits.
SpaceX’s proposed Falcon Heavy would launch about 50 tons into low Earth orbit, making it twice as powerful, should it be built. The next obvious question, which I can’t answer at the moment, is how do these two rockets compare in terms of cost?
Scientists have identified the oldest known impact crater on Earth, three billion years old.
“It’s all up to the voters now.”
It always has been up to the voters. Sadly, my baby-boom generation has too often turned to the courts to absolve themselves from responsibility for making tough decisions as voters. With Obamacare, that is no longer possible. If the public wants to get rid of this turkey of a law, which every poll says they do, the public had better come out to the polls in November and vote for candidates who are in favor of its repeal.
What could go wrong? The IRS has announced that it is going to increase its investigations of tax-exempt political groups.
Note that almost all the groups being targeted by the IRS are conservative. I wonder why.
Now that the Roberts Court has affirmed that the government has the power to mandate purchases of private goods and services as long as it’s structured as a tax, I propose that we put this new-found authority in the service of an explicit Constitutional right. For far too long, too many Americans have suffered from an inequal distribution of firearms, despite the Second Amendment’s express exhortation to “keep and bear arms,” in large part because income inequality in this nation has kept the poor and working classes from having the proper protection for themselves and their loved ones. We need to end this disparity now by applying the ObamaCare model immediately.
While thousands protest the restarting of any nuclear power plants in Japan following last year’s earthquake, some scientists have questions about one particular plant.
The article’s headline falsely suggests that the scientists oppose all nuclear power plants, which is not the case. If anything, the overall manner in which the Fukushima power plant withstood the biggest earthquake in history demonstrated that most of Japan’s nuclear power plants are probably safe from future earthquakes. For scientists to have concerns about one particular plant seems reasonable, however, and is not the same thing as opposing all nuclear power.
A skeptic takes an educated look at alternative energy.
The matter of affordable costs is the hardest promise to assess, given the many assorted subsidies and the creative accounting techniques that have for years propped up alternative and renewable generation technologies. Both the European Wind Energy Association and the American Wind Energy Association claim that wind turbines already produce cheaper electricity than coal-fired power plants do, while the solar enthusiasts love to take the history of impressively declining prices for photovoltaic cells and project them forward to imply that we’ll soon see installed costs that are amazingly low.
But other analyses refute the claims of cheap wind electricity, and still others take into account the fact that photovoltaic installations require not just cells but also frames, inverters, batteries, and labor. These associated expenses are not plummeting at all, and that is why the cost of electricity generated by residential solar systems in the United States has not changed dramatically since 2000. At that time the national mean was close to 40 U.S. cents per kilowatt-hour, while the latest Solarbuzz data for 2012 show 28.91 cents per kilowatt-hour in sunny climates and 63.60 cents per kilowatt-hour in cloudy ones. That’s still far more expensive than using fossil fuels, which in the United States cost between 11 and 12 cents per kilowatt-hour in 2011. The age of mass-scale, decentralized photovoltaic generation is not here yet.
Then consider the question of scale. Wind power is more advanced commercially than solar power, but with about 47 gigawatts in the United States at the end of 2011 it still accounted for less than 4 percent of the net installed summer generating capacity in that country. And because the capacity factors of U.S. wind turbines are so low, wind supplied less than 3 percent of all the electricity generated there in 2011.
Read the whole article. It is detailed, thoughtful, and blunt.
The competition heats up: China’s Shenzhou 9 spacecraft has landed safely, and all three astronauts have exited the capsule in good health. More details here.
