An evening pause: Broadcast on December 7, 1963 by the BBC, this excerpt from the 30 minute television show before 2,500 members of The Beatles’ Northern Area Fan Club gives us a glimpse into the craziness that heralded the Beatles arrival on the world scene. The clip includes the last third of the show.
Why do these teenage girls remind me of modern voters attending rallies for Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders?
Hat tip Rocco.
The competition heats up: A ULA Atlas 5 rocket tonight successfully placed an Orbital ATK Cygnus freighter into orbit to resupply ISS.
This was the second time an Atlas 5 put Cygnus into orbit. The next Cygnus flight will mark the return of Orbital’s Antares rocket.
This Cygnus capsule contains probably one of the more interesting engineering experiments flown by NASA in years. When it leaves ISS in about two months they will ignite a fire inside it to study the way fires spread and burn in weightlessness.
An evening pause: Eddi Reader is one of my favorite singers. This song mixes Celtic, English, Irish, Italian, and even some Greek folk styles.
As soon as we are here, we disappear, like a dragonfly.
The competition heats up: Dress rehearsals have begun for the first Soyuz rocket launch at Russia’s new spaceport Vostochny, scheduled sometime this spring.
They have not announced an official launch date yet.
If all tests go as scheduled, the launch vehicle will be removed from the launch pad on March 25 and returned to its processing facility for the final assembly with its payloads, including Lomonosov, Aist-2D and Kontakt-Nanosputnik satellites, which will be delivered into orbit during the first mission from Vostochny. The State Commission overseeing the launch will be making decision on the date of the first liftoff based on the results of the tests, the readiness of the launch facilities and the completion of safety measures for the launch personnel, Roskosmos said.
Boom! A new aviation company thinks it can develop a new supersonic passenger plane with ticket prices far less than the Concorde’s.
If you’re ever stuck on a plane pining for the glory days of air travel, hop on YouTube and search for “the Concorde.” Among the results are a bunch of firsthand accounts of people sipping Champagne and scarfing down caviar on one of the bygone supersonic jets while they travel at 1,300 miles an hour. Try to appreciate the joy on their faces, or at least remember that they paid as much as $20,000 round trip, while you’re crammed into a middle seat with nothing but a dollop of hummus and a few overpriced crackers to get you through the next few hours.
Or perhaps find some solace in this: A Denver startup called Boom Technology plans to bring supersonic passenger travel back, and to bring it to the masses … ish. While the finished product is years away, on March 23, Boom will unveil its design for a 40-seat plane that can fly 1,451 mph (Mach 2.2). At that speed, a New York-to-London flight would take about 3 hours and 24 minutes. Blake Scholl, Boom’s founder and chief executive officer, says round-trip tickets will cost $5,000. “The idea is for a plane that goes faster than any other passenger plane built before, but for the same price as business class,” he says.
The project is barely past the PowerPoint stage, so color me skeptical. Nonetheless, I also believe it is possible, especially when I noticed in reading the article the similarities between between this company’s founder and that of SpaceX’s.
An evening pause: The work week begins! Here’s another interesting and different way to make a living. Hat tip Rocco.
The competition heats up: Orbital ATK is expanding its operations in Gilbert, Arizona.
At the same time, things so far look good for their next Cygnus launch to ISS, scheduled for Tuesday, 11:05 pm (eastern).
The competition heats up: SpaceX has scheduled April 8 for the next Falcon 9 launch, set to carry its first Dragon capsule since the launch failure last year.
Though this is the most important news contained by the article, its focus is instead on the various preparations that SpaceX is doing at its Texas test facility to prepare for this launch as well as the increased launch rate required for the company to catch up on its schedule.
Note that the Dragon launch will also be significant in that it will be carrying Bigelow’s inflatable test module for ISS, built for only $17 million in less than 2 years. NASA, ESA, or JAXA would have required at least half a billion and several years to have accomplished the same.
An evening pause: From one of the best dramatic series ever produced of the 1960s space race, From the Earth to the Moon (1998), this is the Apollo 12 launch scene.
Hat tip Edward Thelen.
In reaction to the recent Go victory by a computer program over a human, the government of South Korea has quickly accelerated its plans to back research into the field of artificial intelligence with a commitment of $863 million and the establishment of public/private institute.
Scrambling to respond to the success of Google DeepMind’s world-beating Go program AlphaGo, South Korea announced on 17 March that it would invest $863 million (1 trillion won) in artificial-intelligence (AI) research over the next five years. It is not immediately clear whether the cash represents new funding, or had been previously allocated to AI efforts. But it does include the founding of a high-profile, public–private research centre with participation from several Korean conglomerates, including Samsung, LG Electronics and Hyundai Motor, as well as the technology firm Naver, based near Seoul.
The timing of the announcement indicates the impact in South Korea of AlphaGo, which two days earlier wrapped up a 4–1 victory over grandmaster Lee Sedol in an exhibition match in Seoul. The feat was hailed as a milestone for AI research. But it also shocked the Korean public, stoking widespread concern over the capabilities of AI, as well as a spate of newspaper headlines worrying that South Korea was falling behind in a crucial growth industry.
South Korean President Park Geun-hye has also announced the formation of a council that will provide recommendations to overhaul the nation’s research and development process to enhance productivity. In her 17 March speech, she emphasized that “artificial intelligence can be a blessing for human society” and called it “the fourth industrial revolution”. She added, “Above all, Korean society is ironically lucky, that thanks to the ‘AlphaGo shock’, we have learned the importance of AI before it is too late.”
Not surprisingly, some academics are complaining that the money is going to industry rather than the universities. For myself, I wonder if this crony capitalistic approach will produce any real development, or whether it will instead end up to be a pork-laden jobs program for South Korean politicians.
At a congressional hearing on Wednesday the head of NOAA expressed serious doubts about the ability of private companies to provide worthwhile weather data.
At a hearing of the environment subcommittee of the House Science Committee on NOAA’s fiscal year 2017 budget request, NOAA Administrator Kathryn Sullivan said it was still too soon to determine if commercial sources of weather data, most notably GPS radio occultation systems, could augment or replace existing data sources. “In the weather domain, we believe it is a promising but still quite nascent prospect to actually have data flows from private sector satellites,” Sullivan said. “There have been a number of claims, there’s some hardware in orbit from at least one company that I’m aware of, but really nothing proven to the level that we require for ingesting something into the National Weather Service.”
This so much reminds me of past NASA administrators who repeatedly told us that private companies really couldn’t do the job of supplying ISS or launching humans into space, and that we really needed to leave that job to the government, which really knew better.
As it turns out, those past NASA administrators were wrong. Not only has private space done a very effective job at supplying ISS, they made it happen fast for relatively little money. And they are about to do the same in launching humans into space as well. NASA meanwhile has been twiddling its thumbs for decades in its efforts to replace the space shuttle while spending ungodly amounts of money and accomplishing little with it.
I have no doubt the same will be true with the weather. Allow private companies to compete for profits in providing the world with good weather data, and they will quickly do a far better job than NOAA. And the data will likely not be tampered with for political ends by global warming advocates in the government!
How’s that consolidation working out for ya? The Russian government announced today that it will have to cut the budget for its space program by 30 percent over the next ten years due to the country’s deepening economic problems.
In line with its reduced funding, the space agency has agreed to delay a manned flight to the moon by five years – to 2035 from 2030 – and scrap plans to develop a reusable rocket, a potentially valuable cost-saving technology. A Roscosmos spokesman previously said the agency would reassess its plans after 2025.
Essentially, the consolidation of Russia’s entire aerospace industry into a single corporation run by the Russian government has produced a very expensive government program unable to accomplish much of anything for a budget of 1.4 trillion rubles ($20.4 billion) from 2016 to 2025. Sounds kind of like NASA, doesn’t it?
Give me competition over a centralized program any day, and see great things happen. Go with a centralized government program, and watch as the life ebbs from the creativity of everyone.
