Adjusting the flight manifest to ISS
Pete Harding at NasaSpaceflight.com has written a very thorough review of the changes to the flight manifest to ISS expected due to the August 24 failure of the Soyuz-U rocket.
Very brief descriptions, with appropriate links, of current or recent news items.
Pete Harding at NasaSpaceflight.com has written a very thorough review of the changes to the flight manifest to ISS expected due to the August 24 failure of the Soyuz-U rocket.
The space shuttle program officially ended on Wednesday. Note however:
Closeout of the shuttle program is an enormous effort expected to take two years. The program occupied 640 facilities and used more than 900,000 pieces of equipment with a value exceeding $12 billion, according to NASA. Much of the work will take place at Kennedy Space Center, where orbiters have been maintained and prepared for launch. NASA requested $89 million for shuttle transition and retirement work in the 2012 fiscal year that begins Oct. 1, but Congress has not yet approved a budget.
Orbital Sciences has gotten its launch license from the FAA for the first test launch of the Taurus 2 rocket, scheduled for later this year.
This rocket is Orbital’s version of the Falcon 9. It is a new rocket, never before flown, yet after this test it is scheduled to fly the Cygnus capsule on its first flight only two months later. Talk about cutting things close!
Uh-oh! The Russians are considering reducing their participation in ISS. Their government might also take over entirely the private portion of their space industry.
We’re here to help you! The federal government, under the Endangered Species Act, is prosecuting a man for shooting a bear to protect his family.
The day of reckoning looms: Twenty-five signs that the financial world is about to hit the big red panic button.
Juno, on its way to Jupiter, took a look back and snapped this picture of the Earth/Moon double planet.
The image was taken by the spacecraft’s camera, JunoCam, on Aug. 26 when the spacecraft was about 6 million miles (9.66 million kilometers) away.
Gives us a glimpse at what our home planet will really look like to future spacefarers, either on they way out or on their way home.
NASA has named an astrophysics fellowship in honor of Nancy Roman, who helped design and build the Hubble Space Telescope.
More details on why the rocket carrying the Progress freighter to ISS failed last week.
Ground controllers successfully replaced a failed circuit box on ISS this weekend, using the two-armed Dextre robot.
Up to now, exchanging the boxes was done by spacewalkers, which always carries a certain level of risk. Dextre was designed to reduce the need for astronauts to conduct spacewalks for routine maintenance, therefore freeing up the crew’s time for more important activities, like conducting science.
Fire them! Police confiscate a woman’s legal guns, then refuse to return them despite admitting they are legally owned.
Her cache [of weapons] somehow caught the attention of Lakewood Police, who paid a visit last September. When they found Rice wasn’t home, they asked an obliging employee of the complex to open up the apartment without her consent. Once inside, they raided the gun rack, making off with 13 firearms worth around $15,000. The only problem: They had no apparent reason to. [emphasis mine]
Not only did the police essentially steal her property, they entered her apartment illegally.
New San Francisco Bay Bridge nears completion.
More possible consequences if ISS becomes unmanned: the first test of Dragon will be delayed.
An unmanned ISS will also delay the first launch in February of Orbital Sciences Cyngus cargo vehicle, as this vehicle is like Dragon in that it requires astronauts on board ISS to control the robot arm that grabs and berths the spacecraft.
Obama’s National Labor Relations Board has now told a Catholic university it is not religious enough to be exempt from union organizing, even though the Supreme Court has ruled the board has no right to do any such thing.
Competition wins: A new Indiana school vouchers program has prompted thousands to flee public schools.
Good news: The Russians have pinned down a preliminary cause for the Progress launch failure last week.
Solving this quickly appears essential, as the space station was not really designed to fly unmanned.
Past NASA risk assessments show there is a one in 10 chance of losing the station within six months if astronauts and cosmonauts are not onboard to deal with any critical systems failures. The probability soars to a frightening one in two chance — a 50-percent probability — if the station is left without a crew for a year.
It’s now official: The Russians will postpone the launch of the next crew to ISS, as well as delaying the return of one crew presently on board.
We’re here to help you! New EPA regulations threaten to shut down 8 percent of all U.S. power generation capability.
Nor should this be a surprise. During the campaign Obama admitted, but few reported, how he wanted to bankrupt any power plants that used coal to generate power.
Clark Lindsey has written a very nice and short summary of the present political battles over NASA’s budget and its future manned space rockets.
Update: Power finally returned at about 11:50 pm Sunday.
Power is still out here in DC (as of 11:43 pm Sunday), so my posting must remain light.
Why it takes Pepco so long to restore power to our area, and why this seems to happen ever time there is a storm of any kind, remains a very annoying mystery to me.
Al Gore calls climate skepticism the same as racism and calls for treating skeptics the same.
“There came a time when friends or people you work with or people you were in clubs with — you’re much younger than me so you didn’t have to go through this personally — but there came a time when racist comments would come up in the course of the conversation and in years past they were just natural. Then there came a time when people would say, ‘Hey, man why do you talk that way, I mean that is wrong. I don’t go for that so don’t talk that way around me. I just don’t believe that.’ That happened in millions of conversations and slowly the conversation was won. We have to win the conversation on climate.”
In other words, no expression of skepticism is to be permitted, in any conversation.
I’ll have more to say about this later today or tomorrow.
The space station could be abandoned in November if the Russians haven’t solved their rocket problems by then.
It appears that payback by the Obama administration against its political opponents is the main reason the Justice Department raided the Gibson guitar company. Its CEO donates to Republicans, while Gibson’s main competitor – never raided – donates to Democrats.
A citizen rebellion overturns a township’s plan to build a $1.5 million headquarters for itself.
The sun, cosmic rays, and the politics of climate change.
The government’s war on freedom and children: Police in Massachusetts shutdown a twelve-year-old’s green tea stand.
Archeologists may have found King Arthur’s round table in Scotland.
The new survey — funded by Historic Scotland and Stirling City Heritage Trust — used the latest scientific techniques to showing lost structures and features up to a metre below the ground. It also revealed a series of ditches south of the main mound, as well as remains of buildings, and more recent structures, including modern drains which appear at the northern end of the gardens.
Mr Harrison, who has studied the King’s Knot for 20 years, said: “It is a mystery which the documents cannot solve, but geophysics has given us new insights. “Of course, we cannot say that King Arthur was there, but the feature which surrounds the core of the Knot could explain the stories and beliefs that people held.”
Both the FAA and European regulators have certified Boeing’s new 787 airplane for its first commercial flight
Get out those binoculars! Two comets, Elenin and Garradd, are now showing in the night sky.