NASA continues to stall on heavy-lift rocket

10:41 am

It ain’t ever happening: NASA continues to stall on their final design for Congress’s mandated heavy-lift rocket.

No one should be surprised by this. Obama has never wanted NASA to build this rocket, when it was Constellation and now when it is the program-formerly-called-Constellation. Moreover, Congress hasn’t given NASA enough money or time to do it anyway. Better the program die and the money is used for something else, or cut entirely in order to reduce the crushing federal debt.

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Genesis cover

On Christmas Eve 1968 three Americans became the first humans to visit another world. What they did to celebrate was unexpected and profound, and will be remembered throughout all human history. Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8, Robert Zimmerman's classic history of humanity's first journey to another world, tells that story, and it is now available as both an ebook and an audiobook, both with a foreword by Valerie Anders and a new introduction by Robert Zimmerman.

 

The print edition can be purchased at Amazon or any other book seller. If you want an autographed copy the price is $60 for the hardback and $45 for the paperback, plus $8 shipping for each. Go here for purchasing details. The ebook is available everywhere for $5.99 (before discount) at amazon, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit you don't support the big tech companies and the author gets a bigger cut much sooner.


The audiobook is also available at all these vendors, and is also free with a 30-day trial membership to Audible.
 

"Not simply about one mission, [Genesis] is also the history of America's quest for the moon... Zimmerman has done a masterful job of tying disparate events together into a solid account of one of America's greatest human triumphs."--San Antonio Express-News

Conscious Choice cover

Now available in hardback and paperback as well as ebook!

 

From the press release: In this ground-breaking new history of early America, historian Robert Zimmerman not only exposes the lie behind The New York Times 1619 Project that falsely claims slavery is central to the history of the United States, he also provides profound lessons about the nature of human societies, lessons important for Americans today as well as for all future settlers on Mars and elsewhere in space.

 
Conscious Choice: The origins of slavery in America and why it matters today and for our future in outer space, is a riveting page-turning story that documents how slavery slowly became pervasive in the southern British colonies of North America, colonies founded by a people and culture that not only did not allow slavery but in every way were hostile to the practice.  
Conscious Choice does more however. In telling the tragic history of the Virginia colony and the rise of slavery there, Zimmerman lays out the proper path for creating healthy societies in places like the Moon and Mars.

 

“Zimmerman’s ground-breaking history provides every future generation the basic framework for establishing new societies on other worlds. We would be wise to heed what he says.” —Robert Zubrin, founder of the Mars Society.

 

All editions are available at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and all book vendors, with the ebook priced at $5.99 before discount. All editions can also be purchased direct from the ebook publisher, ebookit, in which case you don't support the big tech companies and the author gets a bigger cut much sooner.

 

Autographed printed copies are also available at discount directly from the author (hardback $29.95; paperback $14.95; Shipping cost for either: $6.00). Just send an email to zimmerman @ nasw dot org.

Leaving Earth cover

Leaving Earth: Space Stations, Rival Superpowers, and the Quest for Interplanetary Travel, can be purchased as an ebook everywhere for only $3.99 (before discount) at amazon, Barnes & Noble, all ebook vendors, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit.

 

If you buy it from ebookit you don't support the big oppressive tech companies and I get a bigger cut much sooner.

 

Winner of the 2003 Eugene M. Emme Award of the American Astronautical Society.

 
"Leaving Earth is one of the best and certainly the most comprehensive summary of our drive into space that I have ever read. It will be invaluable to future scholars because it will tell them how the next chapter of human history opened." -- Arthur C. Clarke

Where to find life in the Milky Way galaxy

11:05 am

A paper published today on the Los Alamos astro-ph preprint website has attempted to model the habitable zones within the Milky Way galaxy. From the abstract:

We predict that ~1.2% of all stars host a planet that may have been capable of supporting complex life at some point in the history of the Galaxy. Of those stars with a habitable planet, ~75% of planets are predicted to be in a tidally locked configuration with their host star. The majority of these planets that may support complex life are found towards the inner Galaxy, distributed within, and significantly above and below, the Galactic midplane.[emphasis mine]

They took into consideration the hazard of supernovae for killing off planetary life, as well as other factors such as the where the necessary heavier elements would be available for producing planets.

You can download the paper here [pdf].

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Highest Water in a Decade Expected at Lake Powell

3:04 am

The highest water level in a decade is expected at Lake Powell by August.

Lake Powell’s rising water level is a result of the long and wet winter this year. An above-average snowpack, with late snows and unseasonably cold weather has lead to a slower melt than usual. As of May, the snowpack that feeds Lake Powell was 30 percent higher than average, with only 50 percent of the accumulated snowpack melted. [emphasis mine]

I thought Al Gore told us this wasn’t going to happen anymore.

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A new image of Vesta from Dawn

2:36 am

Dawn continues to approach the large asteroid Vesta. Below is an image taken July 1st from about 62,000 miles. The image has a resolution of 5.8 miles per pixel.

Despite Vesta’s large size, 330 miles in diameter, it is nonspherical. This fact, combined with data that says it is differentiated with a core and mantle, suggests that it is the remains of a larger object that subsequently broke up.

Vesta from 62,000 miles

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The painful transition to private space

3:16 pm

It appears that U.S. aerospace layoffs more than tripled in the first half of 2011.

The downsizing, prompted by cutbacks in defense and government contracts, jumped from 6,121 in the first six months of 2010 to 20,851 this year, based on planned layoffs announced by major employers.

Though I have always favored shutting down the government space agency and replacing it with privately-built rockets and spaceships, the manner in which this is being done now is disgraceful. George Bush declared the retirement of the shuttle seven years ago. Since then Congress, Bush, and Obama have all done an abominable job preparing the nation for that retirement.
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More stupidity from the Center for Biological Diversity

9:14 pm

The Center for Biological Diversity (CBD) today sued the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) in Colorado for allowing caving to take place at the annual convention of the National Speleological Society.

The CBD claims that human activity can spread white nose syndrome, the mysterious ailment that has been killing millions of bats across the eastern United States. To quote:

It is well documented that the fungus believed to cause white-nose syndrome, aptly named Geomyces destructans, can be spread on the clothes and gear of people visiting caves. Scientists strongly suspect that the disease is a recent import from Europe, likely transported by someone who visited a cave there and then came to North America.

To be blunt, this statement is an outright lie.
» Read more

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Why some space junk is impossible to track

7:32 pm

This ISS status update, dated June 28, explains why the piece of space junk that flew past the station that day was such a surprise. (Hat tip to NASA engineer James Fincannon for pointing this out to me.)

Last night at ~6:00pm EDT, NASA Houston FTC (Flight Control Team) received notification of an upcoming “red threshold” conjunction of the ISS with a piece of orbital debris (Object 82618, UNKNOWN), with a TCA (Time of Closest Approach) this morning at 8:08am EDT, – which was too late to begin planning for a DAM (Debris Avoidance Maneuver). Therefore, FTC and crew made preparations for crew sheltering in Soyuz 26S & 27S. PC (Probability of Collision) at last tracking fix (7:20am) remained in the Red box, at ~0.003, with a miss distance of 0.25 km radial, 0.375 km downtrack, 0.570 m crosstrack. The necessary reconfiguration procedures (USOS hatches closed, etc.) began 1.5 hrs before TCA (6:38am EDT), and the six crewmembers ingressed their Soyuz vehicles. At 8:08am the object cleared the ISS with no impact, and shortly thereafter the crew was given the Go for returning to the ISS. [The late notification occurred because of the high air resistance (drag) of the object (~175 times higher than ISS) which made its trajectory very sensitive to small errors in atmospheric density predictions at the current solar flux. Due to the high drag, there is no chance of a recurrence of Object 82618).] [emphasis mine]

In other words, the piece of junk was probably something like a piece of insulation, very light but with a large area, much like a sail. Thus, as it flies through the thin atmosphere at 200 to 400 miles altitude its velocity and direction can easily change, making it difficult, if not impossible, to predict its future trajectory.

The good news is that these same conditions mean that the orbit of the object will quickly decay (“due to high drag”) so that it poses no future threat to the station.

Unfortunately, there are many other objects like this in orbit, and they all pose a threat, mostly because of the difficulty of reliably predicting their orbits.

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Another Iceland volcano appears about to erupt

4:41 pm

Another Iceland volcano, Hekla, is showing signs that it is about to erupt.

The volcano, dubbed by Icelanders in the Middle Ages as the “Gateway to Hell,” is one of Iceland’s most active, having erupted some 20 times over the past millennium, most recently on Feb. 26, 2000. It measures 4,891-feet (1,491-meters) and is located about 70 miles (110 kilometers) east of Reykjavik, not far from Eyjafjoell.

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House proposes to drop NASA’s budget to 2008 levels, eliminate Webb Telescope

4:25 pm

The House today proposed cutting NASA’s budget back to 2008 levels while eliminating all funds for the James Webb Space Telescope.

As much as I’d hate to see the Webb telescope die, it has cost far more than planned, is way behind schedule, and carries a gigantic risk of failure. However, if I had a choice, I’d rather they cut the $1.95 billion for Congress’s homemade heavy-lift rocket, the program-formerly-called-Constellation. There is a much better chance that Webb will get completed, launched, and work, than there is for this improvised and impossibly costly Congressionally conceived rocket.

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