Very brief descriptions, with appropriate links, of current or recent news items.
According to the Congressional Budget Office, seven million people — twice the number previously predicted — will lose their health insurance under Obamacare.
Push back: New York gun owners have now sued the state over its new gun law.
The day of reckoning looms: Iran could have the bomb within six months.
The Constitution is such an inconvenient thing: “The first detailed look at the criteria the Obama administration uses to judge if it can legally kill American citizens traveling abroad without the benefit of due process.”
Curiosity has drilled its first hole.
More bad news for Sea Launch: Boeing has sued the Russian company for $350 million.
This is a separate issue than Sea Launch’s failed launch earlier this week, which makes it even worse for the company.
Chicken Little report: An asteroid will miss the Earth by only 15,000 miles on Friday.
An image mismatch raises questions about Iran’s monkey in space.
An engine shutdown shortly after the lift off of a Sea Launch rocket destroyed an Intelsat satellite on Friday.
This is very bad news for Sea Launch and its Russian Zenit rocket.
The competition heats up: Sierra Nevada has hired Lockheed Martin to help man-rate its Dream Chaser manned space shuttle.
In related news, drop tests of Dream Chaser are now expected to begin within the next six to eight weeks.
The competition heats up: SpaceX has signed a contract to launch an Israeli communications satellite.
The competition heats up: South Korea successfully launched its first satellite, using its own rocket, on Wednesday.
The first stage was built by Russia, but everything else was produced in South Korea.
Kepler is back in operation after a ten day rest to save the mission.
When Kepler launched in March 2009, it had four reaction wheels — three for immediate use, and one spare. But one wheel (known as number two) failed in July 2012, so a major problem with the currently glitchy wheel (called number four) could spell the end of the $600 million Kepler mission. It’s unknown at the moment if the 10-day rest period will bring wheel number four back into line. “Over the next month, the engineering team will review the performance of reaction wheel #4 before, during and after the safe mode to determine the efficacy of the rest operation,” Hunter wrote.
A NASA experiment should produce a light show for those on the east coast tonight.
Resistance to a new gun control law in New York appears to be rising.
This is what happens when you make the normal activity of ordinary citizens illegal. You breed contempt for the law, which in turn make it even less effective in doing what it is supposed to do.
Virgin Galactic has begun paying rent — under protest — for its use of a New Mexico spaceport.
Iran today claimed it has successfully flown a monkey on a suborbital rocket flight.
The only sources for this story come from Iranian sources, so I remain unsure whether it actually happened.
Norwegian scientists admit that the climate has shown no warming since 2000.
They then spend a lot of time trying to explain this — and failing — in the context of the theory of global warming. The bottom line remains, however. All the predictions and models of the global warming advocates have been shown to be wrong. Carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has continued to rise, without causing any increase in global climate temperature.
Or to put it plainly: We don’t know what’s going on.
More Antarctica news: An American team has successfully obtained samples from Lake Whillans, buried half a mile under the Antarctic icecap.
No survivors from last week’s Antarctica airplane crash.
The robotic refueling demo on ISS successfully did a simulated refueling of a satellite on Friday.
The first nighttime photos from Mars.
Salvage in space: DARPA’s project to harvest parts from abandoned geosynchronous satellites.
Now this is a new law I can support: A Texas Congressman has introduced a law to repeal “Gun-Free School Zones Act” of 1990.
The law is such an inconvenient thing: An appeals court has unanimously decided that Barack Obama violated the Constitution when he tried to make appointments to the NLRB when the Senate was not in recess.
The Constitution is very clear on this issue (see article I, section 5). It is up to the Senate to decide when it is in recess, not the President. Obama’s attempt to ignore the clear words of the Constitution here is an ugly example of his willingness to place himself above the law, something no American citizen of either party should take lightly.
The Russian foreign minister today denied that there is any friction between Kazakhstan and Russia over the use of the Baikonur spaceport. More here.
Despite the denial, it appears that they are in some tough negotiations which to their chagrin got leaked to the press.
Back to the future: NASA engineers today test fired a major component of a refurbished Saturn 5 engine.
The seasons change on Mars.
With three years of data in hand the researchers report on the sequence and variety of changes that take place over the spring, including outbursts of gas carrying sand, polygonal cracking of the ice on the dunes, sandfalls down the slipface of the dunes, and dark fans of sand propelled out onto the ice. Gas escaping from under the seasonal layer of dry ice erodes channels in the dunes, reminiscent of the erosion that carves more permanent “spider” channels in the southern hemisphere polar region.
Bad news: Polio virus from Pakistan has been found in Egypt.
The importation of the virus into Egypt is another setback for the global program, which has finally been making significant progress in the past 2 years, with polio cornered in just three endemic countries: Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Nigeria. (India has now gone 2 years without a single case of polio.) Of the three, Pakistan was doing especially well in knocking out the virus, but the program there has recently been disrupted by the targeted assassination of nine polio workers in December and early January. Those killings, widely condemned, have stoked fears the virus will regain strength in Pakistan and then reinfect polio-free countries. “This is proof positive of long-distance importation from Pakistan, and there may be more,” Aylward says.
But don’t worry: the Muslim Brotherhood have us covered! “Experts are worried, Bari says, because Egypt has scaled back its national polio vaccinations campaigns from twice to once a year during the turmoil of the revolution.” [emphasis mine]
