NASA has announced they are looking for a company to lease Launch Complex 39A at Cape Canaveral. I wonder how much they are asking?
Launch Complex 39A with Endeavour being readied for launch.
If I had the money and a rocket ship, I would rent it and give tours in between going to my secret Lunar Base.
From Thomas Sowell’s Column this morning in the Washington Examiner:
Imagine a government agency with only two tasks: (1) building statues of Benedict Arnold and (2) providing life-saving medications to children. If this agency’s budget were cut, what would it do?
This has got to be the best question ever posed. The answer under the fold… Continue reading
The Iter project has been proceeding under the radar for years. I remember hearing about it when I was a kid and periodically since then. Now this is a project worth spending money on. Fusion has the potential to fundamentally change power generation in way that no other alternative energy method can. It is not as sexy as windmills and solar panels though. That is the only reason I can think of that environmental groups don’t advocate for it as much as they do other non-fossil fuel energy generation methods. I hope that i am still alive when Iter goes online and I fervently hope the project is successful.
Human mission to Mars is no longer just a sci-fi dream.
Image Courtesy: Mars One
According to NASA they want to go within the next 2 decades. Of course NASA also said they wanted to have a follow on to the Shuttle before it retired and here we are buying seats on Russian rockets like they are bus tickets because NASA, at $17 billion a year is too expensive and our politicians lack the vision to support space exploration. Our politicians would rather pour hundreds of billions down the rabbit hole called welfare and “green” technology than pay for technology we know works. I will believe NASA is going to Mars when they actually launch a mission. I fully expect SpaceX, MarsOne, or some other private group to get there first because the US government is no longer serious about space exploration and hasn’t been since the mid-90s. It is about time that the US gets serious about space agin but I don;t expect it to happen any time soon. My best advice, keep watching for SpaceX to go public and try and get in on the ground floor. The future of US space travel is in the commercial sector, not NASA.
Image Courtesy: Mars One
Artist impression of the space garbage in orbit.
Image Courtesy: Wikimedia Commons
Space debris problem now urgent – scientists. At some point people will start to get serious about dealing with space debris. That point will probably be reached when enough damage is done to cause notable disruption of satellite delivered services such as TV, and telephone. People get upset if they can’t watch their sports anymore. Lots of debris will also pose a serious navigational hazard when manned spaceflight has a resurgence which it shows every sign of doing under the many private ventures currently having success.
“NASA is not going to the Moon with a human as a primary project probably in my lifetime,” so says NASA administrator Charles Bolden. What a crying shame that America can not come up with the vision to pursue space development. It is now left to private companies. When are they going to start selling Spacex stock anyway?
It is a great time to be alive as we watch stuff that Sci-Fi has predicted start to become reality. The latest are the first baby steps towards true organ regeneration. This should make those who drink like a fish as well as people prone to injury feel better. Not only will they shortly be able to regrow you a liver for those that drink like fish, they might even be able to replace that lung that got shot out by a gangbanger in Chicagoland.
A possible vision of a Regen Tank
Image by Sinnerman and gleefully used. Original available here.
NASA Curiosity Rover: new evidence that life may have existed on Mars
The suspect rock
Image: NASA
NASA just keeps piling up evidence that not only was Mars once a much warmer and wetter place than it is today, it might also have harbored conditions suitable for life. We now know that conditions were apparently right at some point in the past, what we don’t know is if given those conditions life of some did in fact appear. With Curiosity just soldiering on the way it is long past it’s design life and that it is apparently in a geological mother lode area for finding the kind of evidence it has perhaps it will find the silver bullet we are lacking to confirm evidence of life. One thing I am not certain of is if the instruments are the rover are still in good enough shape to detect fossil evidence of microbial life. Hell, you never know, it may crack open a rock one day and discover live bacteria. Wouldn’t that be cool.
The best part about these continual revelations is they help NASA make the case for continued missions of exploration and in my mind at least, strengthen the case to send people there as people have something robots lack, ingenuity and intuition. Let’s all hope that something compelling is found soon enough to keep NASA alive and the commercial space sector attractive to investors.
I saw this today and just had to throw it out there. Feel free to berate me in the comments if you dislike it.
The text of this post was written for a classroom assignment for Digital Media Delivery.
