Another space tourism company, Xcor, has announced its test flight schedule for 2012.
Taxi tests are scheduled to begin in October or November, which will be quickly followed by a short hop and finally a brief first flight by the end of the year.
An iPad, dropped from 100,000 feet, still functioned afterward. With video.
Researchers in California have produced a cheap plastic capable of removing large amounts of carbon dioxide from the air.
The article focuses on how this could save us from global warming. What I see is a possible tool for making the construction of interplanetary spaceships more practical. On any vessel in space, something has to cleanse the air of carbon dioxide. Finding a cheap way to do this makes building those vessels much easier.
NASA administrator Bolden met with former Apollo astronauts today to smooth over his agency’s attempt to prevent their ability to sell artifacts from their missions.
Is there profit in outer space?
A detailed look at Orbital Sciences’ effort to provide cargo to ISS.
Estimates are that ObamaCare will succeed in insuring 32 million otherwise uninsured people. If economic studies are correct, once these folks are insured, they will try to double their consumption of health care. On top of that, ObamaCare does something that Massachusetts did not do. It will force the vast majority of people who already have insurance to switch to more generous coverage. For example, everyone will have to be covered for a long list of preventive care and diagnostic screenings, with no copay and no deductible. Once people have this extra coverage, they will be inclined to take advantage of it.
Get prepared, then, for a huge increase in the demand for care. The result will be growing waiting lines — at the doctors’ offices, at hospital emergency rooms, at the health clinics, etc.
The pattern here has been the same worldwide, in every country that has tried it: Let the government interfere with the “invisible hand” of the market and the market gets distorted in ways that no one predicted that are also counterproductive.
India moves ahead with the construction of its own reusable spaceship.
ArianeSpace will make a profit in 2011, the first time in three years.
Helped by the two Soyuz campaigns, which occurred in October and December, Arianespace in 2011 apparently averted a third consecutive year of losses. Its financial accounts are not finalized until June, but Le Gall said the company expects to report a slight profit on about 985 million euros in revenue.
In other words, it was the addition of the Russian low-cost Soyuz rocket to their fleet that helped avoid another year’s loss. This doesn’t reflect well on the profitability of the Ariane 5 rocket.
On Thursday, December 15, 2011, NASA management announced what seemed at first glance to be a very boring managerial decision. Future contracts with any aerospace company to launch astronauts to and from the International Space Station (ISS) will follow the same contractual arrangements used by NASA and SpaceX and Orbital Sciences for supplying cargo to the space station.
As boring that sounds, this is probably the most important decision NASA managers have made since the 1960s. Not only will this contractual approach lower the cost and accelerate the speed of developing a new generation of manned spaceships, it will transfer control of space exploration from NASA — an overweight and bloated government agency — to the free and competitive open market.
To me, however, the decision illustrates a number of unexpected consequences, none of which have been noted by anyone in the discussions that followed NASA’s announcement back in mid-December.
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Congress has ended the corn ethanol tax subsidy.
That the taxpayer will no longer be shelling out billions to support this industry is a good thing. However, the news isn’t all good for the free market, as the mandates forcing an increase in ethanol use remain in effect.
How to self-destruct your PR company with just a few measly emails.
The reason this story has gone viral is that everyone has had to deal with rude and uninformed customer service people who not only don’t answer questions accurately, often downright lie to get you off the phone. And sadly, they can get away with it because companies allow them to. With this story, however, justice triumphed. Thank you Mike Krahulik of Penny Arcade.
