Very brief descriptions, with appropriate links, of current or recent news items.
We’re here to help you: A Philadelphia woman faces a $600 per day fine from her local township for feeding needy children on her private property.
NASA has granted $45 million to Ball Aerospace to develop a “green” propellent to replace hydrazine, the toxic fuel used in by rockets, satellites, and even manned spacecraft.
Today’s use of hydrazine fuel for rockets, satellites and spacecraft is pervasive. Hydrazine is an efficient propellant and can be stored for long periods of time, but it also is highly corrosive and toxic. NASA is seeking new, non-toxic high performance green propellants that could be safely and widely used by rocketeers, ranging from government to industry and academia. Green propellants include liquid, solid, mono- propellant, which use one fuel source, or bi-propellants, which use two, and hybrids that offer safer handling conditions and lower environmental impact than current fuels.
The “green” terminology is meaningless in this context and is probably a politically-correct gesture to higher ups in the Obama administration. Nonetheless, finding a financially viable replacement for hydrazine would be quite helpful, as its toxic nature adds a great deal of cost to the production of any space vehicle that uses it.
What does this tell us? New data now suggests that in swing states there has been a significant decline in Democratic registration contrasted with big gains for Republicans voter registration in the upcoming election.
The numbers are startling. Two key quotes:
In Florida, Iowa, North Carolina, Colorado, and Nevada — tossup states where direct election-year comparisons could be drawn — the numbers are striking. Democratic rolls increased by only 39,580, less than one-tenth the amount at the comparable point in the 2008 election. At the same time, GOP registration has jumped by 145,085, or more than double for the same time four years ago. Independent registration has shown an even stronger surge, to 229,500, almost three times the number at this point in 2008.
And this:
Based on recent data, Democratic registration has declined by more than 800,000, or 5.2 percent; Republican enrollments were down about 80,000, or 0.7 percent; and independents were up 486,677, or 6.4 percent, in [battleground] states.
These numbers favor the Republicans by 3.5 to 1 and 10 to 1, respectively, numbers that are astonishing. More significantly, these numbers are for the swing states, the very places where voters have been undecided and willing to shift from one side to the other. Thus, these numbers tell us that these voters are now swinging strongly in one direction, and that direction is towards the Republicans.
Does this make you feel safer? A Texas policeman has been accused of shooting a woman’s pet dog, while the dog was still on its leash.
The Russian Prime Minister has given the Russian launch industry until September to figure out how to improve its quality control.
It also appears from the above article that there is some confusion about whether the head of the company that built the failed upper stage to the Proton rocket has resigned, as reported here and here.
More information on the the premature engine cut off during the attempt to boost ISS’s orbit earlier this week.
Carbon emissions have reached a twenty year low in the United States.
As the article points out, this trend occurred not because of government regulation, but because of the invisible hand of economic market forces — clean natural gas was simply cheaper to use.
Obama’s press chief said today that they have no plans to take John McCain’s advice and replace Joe Biden as vice president.
This public suggestion by John McCain might actually have been the best thing he has ever done for the conservative movement. As Biden has piled on the stupid gaffes in the past few weeks it seemed to me that to fire him and replace him with someone more respectable (and more intelligent) this close to the election would be a very smart political move. Having a Republican suggest it, however, has made the Obama administration decide they can’t do it. Truly wonderful.
The uncertainty of science: Scientists using Solar Dynamics Observatory have found that the Sun is possibly the roundest object every measured, far rounder than predicted by theory.
The law is such an inconvenient thing: It appears the Obama Justice Department is not going to prosecute Obama fundraiser and former Democratic Governor/Senator Jon Corzine for the embezzlement of customer funds at MF Global.
What Corzine and MF Global did was the equivalent of a bank president digging into his customer’s private bank accounts in order to fund their own private investments. That is called embezzlement. It is a felony. That the Obama Justice Department is going to let Corzine off the hook is more evidence that this administration doesn’t believe in enforcing the law, but in using the power of government for its own ends. Disgraceful.
Posting might be light today, as I am flying from Tucson to Newark with my 94-year-old mother, who is joining my brother and sister-in-law in their move to Israel to be closer to her four grandchildren and now eleven great-grandchildren. (As Diane says, “The most powerful attractive force in the universe is grandchildren.)
The Russians have pinpointed the cause for the August 6 Proton rocket launch failure to a problem during production of the upper stage.
In related news, the head of the space firm that made the rocket has resigned.
A routine engine firing to raise the orbit of the International Space Station failed to come off today.
Though it appears the engines on the European ATV cargo craft did not fire as scheduled, the report is very vague and does not make clear what actually happened. Stay tuned.
Leftwing debate: It now appears confirmed that the man arrested for shooting a guard at the Family Research Council in DC apparently did so at least in part because he disagreed with the Council’s conservative positions.
Since the Tucson shootings in January 2011, the left has gone out of its way to try to pin every madman’s violent terror spree on conservatives and their willingness to aggressively disagree with the left. “If only the right wasn’t so hateful in its rhetoric these acts of violence wouldn’t happen.” Or to put it more honestly, Shut up!
In every case the charges by the left have proven false. In every case, politics had little to do with the murders. In fact, the only political violence we have seen since the rise of the tea party movement in 2009 has come from leftwing protesters trying to shut that movement down.
Now we do have a case where political rhetoric can be directly tied to violence. And it has come from the left, which has been completely over the top in the anger and hate they have expressed for those who disagree with them on the subject of gay marriage.
Sadly, I do not expect Barack Obama to go on the public airwaves and call for civility. To do so would show us that he can rise above partisanship, something I do not think he is capable of doing.
A test flight of an Air Force hypersonic aircraft failed yesterday when it went out of control before its experimental scramjet engine could be started.
Though failures during engineering tests are not really failures, as the goal is to find out if the engineering works or doesn’t, this particular failure is a bit more like a real failure. They never got to test the scramjet engine, which was the point of the entire flight. Instead, they had a failure of a control fin on the aircraft, and it appears that this fin was “faulty.” Not a good sign, especially as the previous flight in June 2011 also failed prematurely.
Contrasting Paul Ryan with Barack Obama.
The next month, both [budget] plans came to a vote in the Senate. Ryan’s budget lost on a party-line vote; Obama’s lost 0-97. Erskine Bowles, a former chief of staff to Bill Clinton, and Obama’s own appointee to the deficit-control panel whose recommendations Obama completely ignored in that budget proposal, told a University of North Carolina audience in September 2011 that Ryan had proposed “a sensible, straightforward, serious budget and it cut the budget deficit by $4 trillion.” In contrast, Bowles told the audience, “I don’t think anyone took [Obama’s] budget very seriously.”
In February 2012, Obama proposed yet another unserious budget that ignored all of the realities of our short- and long-term fiscal shortfalls, with yet another trillion-dollar deficit. Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner tried to tell Ryan and the House Budget Committee that Obama’s budget proposal would “stabilize” the deficits. This time, Ryan only needed four minutes to dismantle that argument, showing that Obama’s long-term budget only “stabilized” deficits for a decade, after which they escalated out of control — unlike Ryan’s long-term budget reforms, which solved the problem of escalating costs. “We’re not coming before you to say we have a definitive solution to our long-term problem,” Geithner finally exclaimed. “What we do know is we don’t like yours.”
Bluntly put, Obama has never been willing to propose anything that might solve the federal budget disaster, while Ryan has at least made an attempt.
Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter has detected helium in the Moon’s tenuous atmosphere.
An inspector general’s report of the State Department’s climate change office has uncovered “inadequate oversight, lax bookkeeping, sloppy paperwork, haphazard performance agreements and missing financial documentation.”
Other than that, the Obama administration’s management of its climate research budget is just fine.
Another reason to repeal: Obamacare increases demand, but locks the price, resulting in a shortage in supply. The result: long waits.
A rarity today among Democrats: “I’ll just tell you the truth.”
And what is that truth? Democrat Erskine Bowles reveals the reason why the recommendations of his deficit commission went nowhere.
Pretty picture: The European Southern Observatory today released a spectacular image of the Pipe Nebula.
The test of Coperhagen Suborbital’s capsule launch abort system failed spectacularly on Sunday. With pictures.
“We had perfect launch, but quickly the entire configuration began to tumble,” said Kristian von Bengtson, co-founder of Copenhagen Suborbitals. “The main chutes clearly did not have complete deployment and the capsule hit water in high speed, buckling the bottom shield.”
An update on Dawn’s reaction wheel failure.
Essentially, this will delay the journey to Ceres for about nine days. The spacecraft is left with two working reaction wheels, with which it can complete all its science work. However, if they cannot get the failed wheel working again, Dawn will be left with no backup should another wheel fail.
Faced with these unappetizing choices [offered by Obamacare], the federal government has chosen to adopt a course of action that I have previously called, in a National Affairs article, “government by waiver.” Quite simply, the federal government has already told key plan operators—more democratic than republican, more labor than business—that they need not meet these requirements. These waivers have already been offered to more than 1,000 employers covering over three million employees. It could well be that the path of least resistance in these cases is to continue a waiver policy to avoid a massive institutional breakdown.
None of this should come as a surprise. The ACA was sold with a set of promises that were not sustainable.
Any law that can be “waived” at the whim of a politician isn’t a law but a ticket to corruption, blackmail, and payoffs. And that the Obama administration has played favorites (labor and Democrats) in who it has given its waivers illustrates this point.
No politician should have this power. Obamacare has got to be repealed.
Even if you built it, it must be torn down: An Obama campaign stop costs a vender $25,000 in lost sales.
UPDATE: a commenter noted that the story at the link was fiction, and, having done further checking, I have found he is right. This was a hoax, and because of that, I have pulled the link.
Stereo has spotted the fastest coronal mass ejection on record, rocketing from the Sun at approximately 2000 miles per second.
Uh-oh: One of Dawn’s reaction wheels, used to orient the spacecraft, shut down last week.
During a planned communications pass on Aug. 9, the team learned that the reaction wheel had been powered off. Telemetry data from the spacecraft suggest the wheel developed excessive friction, similar to the experience with another Dawn reaction wheel in June 2010. The Dawn team demonstrated during the cruise to Vesta in 2011 that, if necessary, they could complete the cruise to Ceres without the use of reaction wheels.
That the spacecraft can get to Ceres without reaction wheels is good. However, can it be oriented precisely to do science without these wheels? The JPL press release does not say.
“Obama lauds NASA for Mars landing, pledges continued investment.”
What a joke. This Reuters’ article is so busy campaigning for Barack Obama that it fails to note one fundamental fact: It is the Obama administration that gutted NASA’s science program so that there is little likelihood of any missions to Mars, or elsewhere, in the foreseeable future. As noted correctly in this Science article describing the same Obama telephone call to JPL,
The president’s sweeping endorsement of research, however, carefully avoids the fact that his 2013 budget would cut funding for NASA’s Mars exploration program by nearly one-third and end the country’s role in two Mars missions planned jointly with the European Space Agency for later in the decade. Both the House of Representatives and a Senate spending panel have added back money for Mars exploration, although Congress is unlikely to settle on a final budget for the agency until next spring.
Look, I freely admit the federal budget has to be cut. And I am freely willing to have those cuts occur in NASA. What I can’t abide is the kind of junk journalism seen in the Reuters piece above, selling Obama as a big supporter of space research when he clearly has not been.
