More bad news for Russia: Kazakhstan is considering cancelling the lease that allows Russia to use the launch facilities in Baikonur.
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.
"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
The uncertainty of science: A look at some modern animals, drawn with the same limited fossil record we have for the dinosaurs.
In other words, almost everything we assume about the dinosaurs is probably wrong.
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.
“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.
Bad news for Russia: During a launch yesterday the upper stage of a Proton rocket failed to put the satellite into its proper orbit.
With this, the third failure in the past 16 months for the Briz-M upper stage, I expect that the Proton’s customers will continue to flee, as has Echostar.
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.
"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
An evening pause: On this anniversary of the attack on Pearl Harbor, I give thanks to the past generation that gave me freedom.
I wish you’d lived to see
All you gave to me
Your shining dream of hope and love
Life and libertyWe are all one great band of brothers
And one day you’ll see – we can live together
When all the world is free.
It now appears that the next launch of the X-37B is set for Tuesday, December 11.
This would mean that the engine problems that occurred on a Delta 4 rocket launch in October have been resolved.
The competition heats up: If you and a friend happen to have $1.4 billion, the new private company Golden Spike wants to take you to the Moon.
Golden Spike’s news release said the venture would make use of existing rockets as well as commercial spacecraft that are currently under development to send expeditions to the lunar surface, with the estimated cost of a two-person lunar surface mission starting at $1.4 billion.
There will be a lot of press stories about this. And it is good, as it illustrates again the increasing shift from government-run space missions to a robust private industry. The idea of a private company doing this is no longer considered absurd but perfectly reasonable.
Whether Golden Spike itself will do it, however, is another thing entirely. Please forgive me if I reserve the right to be a little skeptical at this point.
A new National Research Council report released yesterday says that NASA lacks focus nor can it complete the missions it has with the resources available.
» Read more
O goody: The GAO is concerned about the future budget and schedule of the James Webb Space Telescope.
This is very bad news if true for NASA’s astronomy program. Webb was originally budgeted at $1 billion and scheduled to launch in 2011. Its budget is now $8.8 billion and its launch is now set for October 2018. And until it launches there is little money to build any other space telescope.
An evening pause: I think the trucks in this video are a perfect metaphor for the American public’s attitude towards the federal debt. So what there are yellow flashing warning signs! Charge on!
A federal appeals court today expressed strong doubts about Obama’s non-recess recess appointments in January.
How dare they question our savior and lord Obama? What does it matter he wasn’t following the Constitution when he made his appointments when the Senate was not in recess? He has to get things done, no matter what the law is.
But no one … at this point seems to have grasped that [nothing will be solved] unless the avoidance of the fiscal cliff includes measures that radically cut the deficit and end the unspeakable fraud of 70 percent of the country’s $1 to $1.5 trillion federal deficit being covered by phony notes cyber-clicked into existence from the Treasury’s 100 percent subsidiary, the Federal Reserve. No test of psychological confidence will be passed by this charade, nor any test of Grade 3 arithmetic either. The administration swaddles itself in a few weeks of a record-breaking rise in economic-growth and tax-collection rates. But this is only three weeks, and applies to a built-in annual budget deficit of $1.5 trillion on top of an accumulated national debt that took 232 years to get to $10 trillion in 2008 and made it to $16 trillion this year. (And there are still 5 million fewer people working in the U.S. than there were four years ago.) [emphasis mine]
This fake political term, “The fiscal cliff”, is an unmitigated lie, created by politicians to disguise their failure to actually deal with the debt. They are using it to avoid even cutting spending levels back to 2008 numbers, a reduction in spending that would hardly be noticed in the bloated, overweight, and increasingly oppressive federal bureaucracy.
The competition heats up: The Pentagon has decided to buy its launch services from more than just Boeing and Lockheed Martin.
Under the new plan, the Air Force can buy as many as 14 launches over the next five years from possible bidders such as Space Exploration Technologies Corp, or SpaceX, and Orbital Sciences Corp . The service may also buy as many as 36 launches from United Launch Alliance, the Lockheed-Boeing venture, with an option to purchase the other 14 launches if the competitors haven’t been certified to launch military and spy satellites that can cost up to $1 billion each.
Originally the military planned to purchase all of its launches from Boeing and Lockheed. Political pressure from SpaceX has now forced them to widen the competition, or at least, make noises that they are doing so. If you read the above paragraph closely the plan still favors the original two companies and is strongly stacked to hand all the launches over to them anyway.
Update: My pessimism above was premature. SpaceX has been awarded a contract for two launches under this new policy.
NASA announced yesterday plans to launch by 2020 a twin rover of Curiosity to Mars.
Though it makes sense to use the same designs again, saving money, I must admit a personal lack of excitement about this announcement. First, I have doubts it will fly because of the federal government’s budget woes. Second, it is kind of a replacement for the much more challenging and exciting missions to Titan and Europa that the Obama administration killed when they slashed the planetary budget last year.
The newly launched Andromeda Project will use people power to examine thousands of Hubble Space Telescope images of the galaxy to identify star clusters that hold clues to the evolution of galaxies. Anyone can take part by going to The Andromeda Project.
An evening pause: As they say on the youtube webpage, “I can never help but wonder if there’s anyone on the planet who thinks that we were remotely serious in this bit?”
The big news is out. Today the eagerly awaited press conference at the American Geophysical Society meeting in San Francisco on the recent results from the Mars rover Curiosity was finally held. The announced results had been hyped like crazy when rumors began to spread a few weeks ago that Curiosity had discovered something truly spectacular.
Well, here are some of the headlines heralding the results.
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New data suggests that the icy crust of Titan is twice as thick as previously estimated.
“The picture of Titan that we get has an icy, rocky core with a radius of a little over 2,000 kilometers, an ocean somewhere in the range of 225 to 300 kilometers thick and an ice layer that is 200 kilometers thick,” [said Howard Zebker of Stanford University]. Previous models of Titan’s structure estimated the icy crust to be approximately 100 kilometers thick.
This means that the methane lakes and rivers of Titan are flowing across a bedrock of ice, which at the cold temperatures there would be as solid as rock is here on Earth.
NOAA’S latest monthly update of the Sun’s ongoing ramp up to solar maximum has just been published and, as I do every month, I have posted the latest graph, with annotation, below the fold.
As the Sun had been somewhat active in November, I had expected the graph line to rise. It has, but not by very much.
» Read more
We’re here to help you: The head of the Interior Department has ordered the shutdown of a century-old California oyster company.
Two key quotes from the article illustrate the foolishness and oppressive nature of this decision:
» Read more
Finding out what’s in it: Walmart, the nation’s largest private employer, will be eliminating healthcare coverage to its part time employees due to Obamacare.
Essentially, the company is trying to avoid the high costs imposed by Obamacare by dropping coverage for anyone working 30 hours or less, and then moving more employees into that category when possible. As I noted before, this idiotic law is forcing us to be a nation of part time workers.
