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MarkWhittington writes:
The Houston Chronicle reported that NextGen Space LLC has released the results of a study that suggests that if the United States were to choose to do space in some new and creative ways, American moon boots could be on the lunar surface by 2021. The cost from the authorization to the first crewed lunar landing would be just $10 billion. The study was partly funded by NASA and was reviewed by the space agency and commercial space experts.
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MarkWhittington writes:
It’s not every day that over $5 trillion passes by, just of reach. But that is exactly what happened Sunday night, according to Forbes. An asteroid with the innocuous name of 2011 UW158 passed the Earth at a distance of 1.5 million miles before moving back out into deep space. The reason the rock is so valuable is that it has a 90 million ton core of platinum group metals. If someone had managed to divert it into a safe orbit around the Earth and had started to mine it, that person would have become the richest in human history, with access to wealth greater than most nations.
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MarkWhittington writes:
The quest for cheap access to space, to make space travel as inexpensive as air travel, has eluded engineers, government policy makers, and business entrepreneurs from before the beginning of the space age. It has become axiomatic, almost to the point of being a cliché, that the true space age will not begin until launch costs come down significantly. Forbes reported about a company called Escape Dynamics that has a unique approach to the problem. The company proposes to launch payloads into low Earth orbit on beams of microwaves.
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MarkWhittington writes:
40 years ago on Friday, an American Apollo spacecraft and a Soviet Soyuz spacecraft docked in low Earth orbit in the climax of the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project mission. The mission was conceived as a symbol of the détente policy enacted by President Richard Nixon as well as a test of a common docking mechanism between the two spacecraft. The famous handshake between Soviet cosmonauts and American astronauts was considered by some to be an amicable end to the Cold War era space race. The anniversary inspired Iranian-American businesswoman and space advocate Anousheh Ansari to tweet Friday, “Hey may be there will be a US Iran space mission in the future!”
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MarkWhittington writes:
One of the science breakthroughs that truly suggest that we are in the 21st Century is the development of seaweed that is healthier than kale and yet, when fried, tastes like bacon, according to a story in Gizmag. Thus, modern science seems to have combined two trendy foods, one that is healthy but is at best an acquired taste and the other that is delicious beyond the dreams of gluttony but is also a cardiologist’s dream.
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MarkWhittington writes:
Forget about Apollo moon landing hoax theories. That is so 20th Century. Gizmodo reported that the “Pluto Truthers” have followed the astonishing images being sent back by NASA’s New Horizons probe and have come to the conclusion that they are faked. After all, if the space agency could fake the entire moon landing, it would be child’s play to fake a robotic probe to the edge of the Solar System.
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MarkWhittington writes:
The New Horizons Twitter feed announced early Tuesday that the NASA space probe has passed by its closest approach of Pluto, the dwarf planet at the edge of the solar system, at a distance of 7,800 miles. The historic event happened at 7:50 a.m. Eastern time. However, as Wired noted, the event is not the end but the beginning of what will be a steady stream of data and images from New Horizons. The probe spent the close encounter with Pluto with its instruments fully focused on the dwarf planet. Tuesday evening it will send back telemetry to Earth indicating whether all is well. Scientific data will stream back, according to Wired, at an agonizingly slow rate of two kilobytes per second, taking four hours to get to Earth. Data and images will stream in for the next 19 months. Scientists will be analyzing the data for many years.
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MarkWhittington writes:
New Horizons has already discovered much of what was previously unknown about Pluto, the dwarf planet that is the former ninth planet from the sun. NASA reported that the space probe has also uncovered some of the secrets of Pluto’s largest moon, Charon. It has found indications of impact craters on the moon’s gray surface as well as a chasm that seems to be bigger than the Grand Canyon on Earth. Charon has a diameter of just 1440 miles. Bu contrast, Earth has a diameter of 7918 miles.
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MarkWhittington writes:
Boeing has had a patent approved for an aircraft engine that uses laser generated nuclear fusion as a power source, according to a story in Business Insider. The idea is already generating a great deal of controversy, according to the website Counter Punch. The patent has generated fears of what might happen if an aircraft containing radioactive material as fuel were to crash, spreading such fuel across the crash site.
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MarkWhittington writes:
According to a story in the Huffington Post, former Florida governor and current presidential candidate Jeb Bush suggested that if he were elected president he would increase funding for NASA, pronouncing himself a “space guy.” Bush made this statement at a meeting with the New Hampshire Union Leader’s editorial board. This makes Bush the second presidential candidate, after Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas, to express an opinion about the space program.
Bush did not expand on this singular statement. Questions concerning NASA’s support for commercial space and where astronauts should go beyond low-Earth orbit, the moon, Mars, and/or Earth approaching asteroids, were left unanswered for the time being
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MarkWhittington writes:
The Wall Street Journal reported that Google has started testing its self-driving car in Austin, Texas. These cars, equipped with a suite of sensors and GPS transponders, have started rolling around an area northeast and north of downtown Austin. The purpose of the test drives is to see if the car’s software works in driving conditions outside of California and to develop a detailed map of Austin city streets. Each self-driving car has two human drivers ready to assume manual control if something goes wrong.
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MarkWhittington writes:
A story in Popular Science suggested that NASA is mulling a plan to “terraform” part of the moon. The term is more than a little misleading, as it implies making a portion of the moon livable for humans. The actual plan, being funded by the space agency as part of NASA's Innovative Advanced Concepts (NIAC) Program is exciting nevertheless.
The idea is to deploy reflectors around the rim of the Shackleton Crater, a region at the moon’s South Pole where ice is thought to exist in permanent shadows. The reflectors would focus light onto select areas to provide power for robotic explorers. In this manner, the robots would not have to be equipped with protection against the cold inside the crater and would not have to be powered by plutonium-fueled RTGs. Temperatures inside the shadowed regions of Shackleton plunge to minus 280 degrees Fahrenheit.
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MarkWhittington writes:
In the wake of the massacre at the Emanuel AME Church, America seems to be bent on eradicating even the hint of any symbol regarding the Confederacy, from removing the Confederate battle flag from public spaces to even deleting Civil War computer games. Serious people have proposed banning “Gone With the Wind” and sanitizing “The Dukes of Hazzard.” Others have advocated blowing up the Jefferson Memorial and other monuments to famous Southerners whether they had anything to do with the Civil War or not.
However, if America is serious about expunging any hint of the Confederacy, it must even ferret out cultural artifacts that cloak it in allegory and symbolism. So, it is time to follow a modest proposal that the old, cult science fiction TV series “Firefly” be banned from the airwaves and DVDs and video downloads of the series be abolished. And other manifestations of the series, such as online games, must be deleted.
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MarkWhittington writes:
Space visionaries dream of a time when human beings will not only settle Mars, but will terraform the Red Planet into something more Earth-like, with a breathable atmosphere, running water, and a functioning biosphere. Evidence exists that Mars was more or less Earth-like billions of years ago before the atmosphere leached away into space and the water became frozen under the ground and at the poles. Terraforming Mars is decades away from the beginning and probably centuries away from the end. But DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, is already genetically engineering organisms that will help turn the Red Planet blue, according to a story in Motherboard.
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MarkWhittington writes:
Gizmodo, as part of a series of stories about space, ran a piece called ‘What is Stopping Us from Building Cities in Space? No, it’s not Tech.” The article attempts to examine some of the political impediments that have stymied the settlement of the high frontier. Unfortunately, the piece would have been more convincing had it not been for one rather glaring error.
The piece suggested that the United States attempted to claim the moon as sovereign territory when Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin planted the American flag at Tranquility Base on July 20, 1969. “So much of what seems to motivate any space exploration is the concept of flag planting, which the US pretty much invented: I HEREBY CLAIM THIS MOON FOR AMERICA.” Nothing, in fact, could be further from the truth
