Very brief descriptions, with appropriate links, of current or recent news items.
The uncertainty of science: Hesperia Planum, a giant basin on Mars, assumed for decades to have been formed by volcanic activity, now appears to have instead been formed by water.
Dream Chaser, Sierra Nevada’s space plane, is to get its first test flight this coming summer.
For the unmanned test flight, it will be carried into the skies by WhiteKnightTwo, the carrier aircraft for the commercial suborbital passenger ship SpaceShipTwo, backed by Virgin Galactic, a U.S. company owned by Richard Branson’s London-based Virgin Group.
A UN report this week says that nearly one billion people are hungry, partly because of biofuels such as ethanol from corn.
The findings are echoed in a report published today by the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), based in Washington DC. Maximo Torero, one of the report’s authors, says policymakers must “curtail biofuels subsidies” and “discourage the use of food crops in biofuel production” to limit food price volatility.
Just another indication of how politically weak Obama is: The Democratic Senate has rejected Obama’s jobs plan.
Gilad Shalit freed: Israel agrees to swap a thousand Palestinian prisoners for him.
I wonder how many of those Palestinian prisoners, many imprisoned for terrorist acts, will come back to do more harm.
An update, with pictures, from Orbital Sciences on the launchpad and assembly work leading to the first test flight of the Taurus 2 rocket.
The tolerance of Islam: Jews banned at Jewish holy site in Egypt.
London to Tokyo in ninety minutes, via space.
As much as I want every space tourism company to succeed, I’ll believe this story only when I see it.
I find this quote interesting:
When the status of the city was designated [after the fall of the Soviet Union], the leased Baikonur was monitored by two Interior Ministries, two prosecutors’ offices and two state security organs. But social problems have not disappeared. Engineers and astronauts are not the only ones who live in the city. Baikonur hosts a great deal of people who have local residence papers, including the indigenous Kazakhs. They cannot work on Baikonur objects because mostly Russians are hired to work there. If the Kazakhs are lucky enough to be hired, they are paid far less than the Russians.
In June of this year mass uprisings occurred in Baikonur. A crowd of youths pelted a police patrol car with stones and bottles.
Want to ask climategate scientist Michael Mann some questions? He will be presenting a paper today during a session on extreme weather and how it links to climate change at a geology conference in Minnesota.
The strange rubbing boulders of Chile.
Then, on another trip to the Atacama, Quade was standing on one of these boulders, pondering their histories when a 5.3 magnitude earthquake struck. The whole landscape started moving and the sound of the grinding of rocks was loud and clear.
“It was this tremendous sound, like the chattering of thousands of little hammers,” Quade said. He’d probably have made a lot more observations about the minute-long event, except he was a bit preoccupied by the boulder he was standing on, which he had to ride like a surfboard. “The one I was on rolled like a top and bounced off another boulder. I was afraid I would fall off and get crushed.”
The abstract is here.
Got $50,000 for the good faith deposit? Then you can bid on remaining assets of Rocketplane Kistler, to be auctioned off on November 11.
The abuse of power: A Louisiana man has won a $1.7 million lawsuit from the EPA for malicious prosecution.
The judge wrote that [government prosecutor Keith] Phillips, “set out with intent and reckless and callous disregard for anyone’s rights other than his own, and reckless disregard for the processes and power which had been bestowed on him, to effectively destroy another man’s life.” Furthermore, Judge Doherty railed against the complete absence of evidence against Mr. Vidrine and ordered the U.S. government to pay Mr. Vidrine $127,000 in defense fees, $50,000 in lost income, and $900,000 in loss of earning capacity.
The uncertainty of science: Great Britain faces a “mini-ice age.”
Getting to the right orbit, the hard way.
A new report has found that Big Ben in London is leaning, just under a half a meter off the perpendicular.
Video: How to build a Soyuz rocket.
Eco-friendly festival closes down due to lack of attendance.
Reminds me of a local news piece here in Maryland last week, where a team from the University of Maryland in College Park won a Department of Energy competition for the best built solar powered house. The problem is that the house cost $330,000 to build, is only 920 square feet in size, and the best price they hope to get for it is $250,000, if that.
In other words, it appears that these ecological projects have little to do with the real world, where creating something that customers will want to buy is the only way to succeed. All else is fantasy.
For the third year in a row — all Obama years — the federal government ran a deficit exceeding $1.3 trillion.
Left wing civility: Obama supporters crashed a St. Louis Tea Party protest Tuesday, calling a black Congressional candidate “ni**er” and “Uncle Tom” while cursing in front of children.
Surprise, surprise! Internal NASA documents portray a dysfunctional, political agency.
More Russian space industry news: Russia puts off building a space lab while announcing that it will use its Soyuz 2 rocket to launch manned missions from its new spaceport in the Vostochny spaceport in Amur, to be opened in 2015.
Anik F2 communications satellite is back in operation.
Five truths about climate change. I like #2:
Regardless of whether it’s getting hotter or colder—or both—we are going to need to produce a lot more energy in order to remain productive and comfortable.
Fighting forest fires, with water balloons.
If all goes well, 2012 will be a busy year at ISS for both Dragon and Cygnus.
The article outlines the preliminary cargo schedule for both ferries next year, assuming their initial test flights succeed (a big assumption).
Russia has dropped its plans to build a replacement for its Soyuz rocket.
This is not the first time that the Russians have abandoned plans to come up with a new rocket, which suggests once again that — as successful as their space effort has been — they lack the ability to come up with new product. This in turn makes vulnerable the Russians’ market share in commercial space.
There’s gold in them hills! Actually, it’s titanium, and it’s on the Moon.
The highest titanium abundances on Earth are around 1 percent or less. The new map shows that in the [Moon’s] mare, titanium abundances range from about one percent to a little more than ten percent. In the highlands, everywhere TiO2 is less than one percent. The new titanium values match those measured in the ground samples to about one percent.
Some honest and blunt thoughts from Pat Condell:
