JPL lawyers want to limit media access and reporting during ‘intelligent design’ trial.
This suggests strongly to me that JPL did fire this guy because of his religious beliefs.
Good news for commercial space: SpaceX has gotten another launch contract, this time to put up four satellites for an Asian/Central American communications partnership.
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
Research on ISS has found that prolonged spaceflight causes vision problems and might even damage the human eye.
There had been hints of this discovery in an earlier report, but today’s paper is the first published science on the subject.
The results are not only important for finding out the medical challenges of weightlessness. They illustrate once again the need to do long extended flights on ISS. Without that research we are never going to be able to fly humans to other planets.
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.
The blistering hot exoplanet where it snows.
These results have led to a suggestion that [HD 189733b] could continually experience silicate snow. In the lower atmosphere of [the exoplanet], magnesium silicate sublimates, that is, it passes directly from a solid into a gas. But we know there are small silicate particulates in the upper atmosphere. Formation of these particulates requires that the temperature be lowered, and so must have been formed at a temperature inversion in the atmosphere. The generally windy conditions would help some of the tiny particulates grow into respectable snow crystals.
Venus Express was blinded for four days last week after being hit by a coronal mass ejection from the Sun.
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
No longer is it good enough to disagree with conservatives. They must be fired from their jobs, separated from their advertisers, booted from the airwaves, buried under a prehistoric rock. The tactics attributed to Joe McCarthy tied to the polemical rigor associated with Jenny McCarthy.
Lord Monckton tries to educate a college professor and his students about the science of climate change.
This is why:
“We shall lose the West unless we can restore the use of reason to pre-eminence in our institutions of what was once learning. It was the age of reason that built the West and made it prosperous and free. The age of reason gave you your great Constitution of liberty. It is the power of reason, the second of the three great powers of the soul in Christian theology, that marks our species out from the rest of the visible creation, and makes us closest to the image and likeness of our Creator. I cannot stand by and let the forces of darkness drive us unprotesting into a new Dark Age.”
Was an evangelical Christian fired from his job at JPL because of his religious beliefs? A court case beginning Monday might tell us.
The robot rules: Dextre has successfully completed its first round of operations in its satellite refueling demonstration on ISS.
Late last week NOAA’s Space Weather Prediction Center released its monthly update of the ongoing solar cycle sunspot activity, covering February 2012. Though I am slightly late in posting it, as I do every month, you can now see the full graph below the fold. I have also created a close-up of the graph’s relevant area, shown on the left, because it is hard to decipher what is happening on the full graph.
Since the Sun began it ramp up to solar maximum back in 2009, the pattern has been consistent, two steps forward, one step back. First there are several months in a row in which the number of sunspots show a steep rise, followed immediately by several months in which the sunspot numbers decline just as steeply, though by not as much. All told, since 2009 we have seen this pattern repeat four times.
February’s numbers have continued that pattern.
» Read more
On March 6, film director and deep water diver James Cameron grabbed the record for the deepest solo dive ever, 26791 feet or more than five miles.
Moreover, this dive was only practice for an even deeper dive to come.
An evening pause: From the late 1950s, Alastair Cooke introduces Les Paul and Mary Ford, who then demonstrate some advanced music technology (and some smokin’ music) that would only become commonplace in the coming decades.
The director of Russia’s manned program told the press today that the Russians do not have that a signed contract with NASA to fly astronauts to ISS after 2015, despite NASA’s announcement that such an agreement exists.
If true, NASA’s management has committed a very serious error which will cost the U.S. a great deal of money in the coming years, especially if there are significant delays in getting the new commercial companies online to provide the U.S. an American capability for ferrying humans to orbit.
» Read more
One year ago today Japan was hit with one of the most powerful earthquakes in recorded history, followed almost immediately by one of the most powerful tsunamis in recorded history. Since then, that nation and its people have done an incredible job recovering from that disaster, proving once again that there really is no limit to what humans can do.
The video below is their thank you to the rest of the world for the help and support brought to Japan by people everywhere. As they say, “Arigato.”
I say, bless you all for never giving up.
Want a job building spaceships? The spaceship companies in Mohave are hiring.
There are several hundred open positions in Mojave as companies such as the Spaceship Company, XCOR and Scaled Composites begin to ramp up operations. “It’s ironic that we’re having a recruitment problem in Mojave,” said Stu Witt, CEO and general manager of the Mojave Air and Space Port. He added that this is a good problem to have.
A new bill in Congress would clarify the rights of 1960s astronauts to the space-flown artifacts they took home after their flight.
What I don’t like about this is that it is so specific, only protecting the rights of the astronauts from the 1960s. Why not extend these rights to all those who fly on NASA missions?
“Western nations appear to have fallen out of love with free speech.”
Actually, it ain’t the west that has rejected free speech, but a large percentage of the modern intellectual community, often liberal, that has decided that speech is only free if it doesn’t offend anyone. Which of course means that, under that definition, there is no such thing.
What does this tell us? In the Oklahoma primary last week Barack Obama only garnered 57% of the vote, and actually lost in 15 counties, 12 to a pro-life activist and 3 to a state’s Democratic senate candidate from 2010.
What it tells me is that there is a much stronger upwelling of hostility to Obama than anyone in the political world right now imagines. Granted, this is Oklahoma, a very conservative state. Nonetheless, for a sitting President to do this poorly among voters in his own party does not bode well for that President — or his party — come November.
Good for them: Two Democratic senators have introduced legislation that would repeal the indefinite detention of Americans authorized by the National Defense Authorization Act of 2012 that was passed in November.
My only complaint is this: Why did these same two senators, along with 81 other senators and 283 House members vote for this unconstitutional obscenity in the first place?
We’ve only just begun: Ave Maria University has now sued the Obama administration over the government’s mandate that the university provide contraceptives at no charge to its employees.
The Senate’s tea party caucus yesterday proposed a budget plan aimed at balancing the federal budget by 2017.
The news article gives a broad outline of the plan, including some basic changes to several entitlement programs, a freezing of government spending at 2008 levels, and the elimination of four government agencies and the privatization of the TSA. A detailed look will probably find that some of these proposals are poorly thought out or impractical. However, at least these senators are proposing something, unlike the Democrats, who in the Senate have not even introduced a budget for more than three years.
Rather than bow to political correctness, the Houston Astros have decided to use their original Colt uniform — with revolver — on the uniforms the team will wear in celebrating its fifieth anniversary this April.
