Category: Points of Information

Very brief descriptions, with appropriate links, of current or recent news items.

NASA budget compromise

8:27 am

Congress has come up with a NASA budget compromise. More details here.

Overall, the NASA budget is cut by about a half billion dollars, the total matching what the agency got in 2009. The key figures are $406 million for commercial manned space, $3 billion for NASA’s in-house heavy-lift rocket and capsule, and $529 million to finish the Webb telescope.

I predict that the $3 billion will be a waste of money, the project getting cancelled before completion.

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The Supreme Court has agreed to hear the challenge to Obamacare during this term

8:48 am

The Supreme Court has agreed to hear a challenge to Obamacare during this term, with an expected decision to occur prior to next year’s elections.

No matter how the court rules, the timing here is not good for Obama and the Democrat Party. If the court kills the law, it will illustrate how misguided it was. If they uphold it, it will only fire up the voter base that wants it repealed to vote against the party that passed and still supports the law. And that voter base has consistently been made up of large majorities of the population, based on every poll taken since the law was first proposed.

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Russian space agency head says there is still a chance to save Phobos-Grunt

8:27 am

The head of the Russian space agency said yesterday that there is still a chance to save Phobos-Grunt.

“The probe is going to be in orbit until January, but in the first days of December the window will close” to re-programme it, he told Russian news agencies at Russia’s Baikonur cosmodrome in Kazakhstan.

He also said that the probe will not pose a threat, and will burn up in the atmosphere if it should fall to Earth.

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Police clear out Occupy protesters in Portland, arresting fifty

8:57 pm

Update in Portland: The police have cleared out the Occupy protesters there, arresting fifty in the process.

Fortunately, it doesn’t appear that any serious violence occurred. Kudos to the police, as well as the protesters.

I take back my kind words about the protesters above. There is now evidence that at least some Occupy Portland protesters wanted to do serious harm, using “homemade grenades”.

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Occupy Portland protesters prepare to confront police

7:51 pm

Peace and love: It appears the Occupy Portland protesters are preparing to confront the police with homemade weapons and reinforcements.

People in the camp are expecting 100-300 re-enforcements from various locations. There may even be as many as 150 anarchists who will arrive soon. There is information that people may be in the in trees during a police action and that there are people who are attempting to obtain a large number of gas masks. There is a hole being dug in one of the parks and wood is being used to reinforce the area around it. There are reports that nails have been hammered into wood for weapons and that generally there are people in the camps preparing for a confrontation with police. . . People were seen carrying pallets into the camp shortly after 1:00 a.m. this morning. The destination of the pallets is a structure with graffiti in the northwest part of Chapman Park, also known as “The 420 Hotel”. The people there are very suspicious of any passers by, we are not sure at this point what exactly they are doing. We have been told it looks like they were making shields.

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NASA halting work on its J-2X rocket engine

6:30 pm

Par for the course: NASA, having successfully completed a 500 second test of the J-2X rocket engine, has halted all further development work on that engine.

The NASA program to build the heavy-lift rocket is expected to get $1.2 billion per year, and yet it doesn’t have enough money to develop both its first and second stages simultaneously? Kind of proves my point that NASA’s fixed labor costs, imposed on it by Congress, makes it impossible for the agency to ever build anything at a competitive price.

The result: every project dies stillborn.

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Toxic Russian Mars probe aims for Earth

5:50 pm

It now looks like the stranded and toxic Russian Mars probe, Phobos-Grunt, is likely aimed at Earth.

We are looking at an uncontrolled toxic reentry scenario. Phobos-Grunt . . . is fully-laden with unsymmetrical dimethylhydrazine and nitrogen tetroxide; that’s ten tons of fuel and oxidizer. The probe itself weighs-in at only three tons. . . . Phobos-Grunt’s batteries are draining and its orbit is degrading. It looks as if the probe will reenter later this month/early December. NORAD is putting a Nov. 26 reentry date on Phobos-Grunt.

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Supercommittee to the rescue

12:08 pm

The Supercommittee to the rescue!

They’re the new superhero group of Superfriends from the Supercongress who are going to save America from plummeting over the cliff and into the multitrillion-dollar abyss. There’s Spender Woman (Patty Murray), Incumbent Boy (Max Baucus), Kept Man (John Kerry) and many other warriors for truth, justice and the American way of debt. The Supercommittee is supposed to report back by the day before Thanksgiving on how to carve out $1.2 trillion dollars of deficit reduction and thereby save the republic.

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It looks bad for Phobos-Grunt

8:57 am

It looks bad for Phobos-Grunt.

“Overnight, several attempts were made to obtain telemetric information from the probe. They all ended with zero result,” Interfax quoted a source in the Russian space sector as saying. “The probability of saving the probe is very, very small,” added the source, who was not identified.

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Man shot and killed “near” Occupy Oakland camp

8:28 pm

Peace and love: A man was shot and killed at the Occupy Oakland camp today. Plus, an immediate effort by the protesters to squelch the press:

Reporter Aimee Allison of the Chronicle says she was attacked when she tried to take a cell phone photo. And she wasn’t the only one: “A few feet away a TV cameraman was shooting footage and a crowd of twenty or so men attacked and punched him, forcing him over the railing of the 14th Street BART Station.” Which means, even in the best-case scenario, there was an unconnected murder right next to the camp and a mob of protesters decided to do “damage control” by beating the hell out of journalists who were trying to report on it. That’s where we’re at here.

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