The OTP ought to cut severely in the hyperbole. There is very little (read: no) "bad news" in all of this. Most of what is brought up is FUD aimed at fooling people to think the North Koreans "failed" again (as crazy commies should). Truth is: this time they didn't.

1) Tumbling does not increase the changes of a collision at all. It is completely irrelevant for the collision danger whether a satellite tumbles or not;

2) Tumbling does not really influence the orbit (only in the final stages of decay it does). Indeed, it is completely unclear what is meant by a "stable orbit" here. ALL satellite orbits decay over time, so NONE of them is "stable". Probably, it is meant to imply that the Korean satellite has no reboosting capability. That is probably part of the design (many simpler satellites have no reboosting capability).

Yes, maybe the Koreans have no control over the attitude of the object. But that doesn't matter much: nothwithstanding Korean claims of it being a "weather satellite" this was probably never meant to be a truely functioning satellite.

The fact is that the North Koreans managed to successfully bring an object into earth orbit this time, and that in itself is an achievement. Whether you like them or not (and I don't like the North Koreans), those are the facts. No amount of spin and hyperbole about "danger" and "bad news" can take away that fact. This is all simply FUD.

With the current rate of decay and solar flux, the A & B object will decay about 2-3 months from now.

They are in completely different orbits: so no.

I don't think this this Korean stuff is much more stupid than 1/3rd of Texans believing Dino's and humans walked this planet together:
http://www.texastribune.org/texas-education/public-education/texans-dinosaurs-humans-walked-the-earth-at-same/

The problem is simply that Amazon and Google servers in the US fall under the US Patriot Act. This means that the US Government ALWAYS has access to the hosted files, if it wants. It is not possible for a company and foreign government to negotiate on this: Amazon and Google are bound by US law.

Of course, as a government you don't want another other government to have complete access to anything you put in the cloud. And in some countries (e.g. the Netherlands where I live) it is explicitly forbidden to host privacy sensitive information (e.g. medic records) on systems that have servers outside of the country in question for exactly this reason.

The telescopes in question are not "surplus": it consists of never finished hardware from the aborted optical component of FIA (Future Imagery Architecture). This optical FIA component, intended to replace the Keyhole system, was scrapped because of massive budget overruns. Part of the hardware was already built by that time, and that is what now has been donated to NASA. It never were complete telescopes, let alone "surplus"telescopes.

The British experimented and used this method already during WWII, to retrieve spies from occupied Europe.

Creating bicycle lanes is a much better way to safety for bicylers, than helmet laws. The Netherlands where I live, one of the most bicycle-intense countries in the world, started to create bicycle lanes in the early '70-ies in order to reduce the number of bicycle casualties. And it worked. And we don't wear helmets here (if you see bicyclers with helmets in the Netherlands, it are either racing bicyclers, or foreigners, seldom average cyclers).

I don't think that it is "pretty obvious it is a crater". Prime evidence is missing or not well enough illustrated.

First:

1) as others here remark too, a circular feature does not equal an impact crater. Karst depressions are circular too and a strong candidate in this area;
2) magnetic particles can be found in any soil. They do not point to impact as such. Show us geochemical tests that show they are of meteoritic composition, and show us that they have an abundance well over the natural accretion rate of cosmic dust for this sedimentary regime

What is needed is:

a) a clear record of a breccia fill;
b) a clear record of overturned rim strata;
c) a clear record of shock-deformed quartz;
d) more convincing examples of shatter cones;
e) more convincing examples of impact melt breccia, including identification of the mineral phases that associate with such rock.

The presence of clear meteoritic components (geochemically shown to be extraterrestrial in composition) in the crater sediments would be a good argument as well, but they are not always preserved in genuine meteor craters. The magnetic particles you present do not count as such, as I already pointed out.

Regarding (d) and (e): the photographs of purported specimens provided are far from convincing. The "shatter cone" actually looks like a shard of rock with a conchoidal fracture on the ventral face, not a 3D shatter cone. And the "melt glass"? Not clear enough from the pictures: it could be anything. The "tortured rock" (purported impact melt) actually looks like a porous carbonate such as you can find in karst features, not like a vesiculated impact melt.

Early studies into Neandertal genetics concerned MtDNA: but the latest studies concern nuclear DNA. By now, there is a complete Neandertal genome (pieced together from genomic fragments of various Neandertals).

Actually, the oldest human DNA is that of the Sclayn Neandertal dating to 90,000 BP.

That, I will grant you. In fact, the second Soviet female astronaut (Svetlana Savitskaya) was specifically launched to capture the distinction of being the first woman to do an EVA, just beating Kathryn Sullivan by a few months

I think Thereskova was mainly choosen because of her parachutist background (the early Russian kosmonauts parachuted out of the capsule just before landing). The other factors certainly played, but as an "additional".

Spacecraft orientation maintenance and orbital control was actually not entirely automated on the Vostok: Thereskova had to do that manually based on info from her onboard instruments and groundcontrol feedback. So you are just being petty here. The Soviet Union launched a woman into space within 2 years of their first manned flight. The US did so only 22 years after their first manned flight.

I filmed the ATV 3 as it passed over Leiden, the Netherlands, in twilight this morning.

The video can be seen here:
http://sattrackcam.blogspot.com/2012/03/footage-of-atv-3-passing-in-morning.html

The spacecraft is quite bright, easily visible naked eye in a bright blue twilight sky.

A problem for Mr Popovkin's blame-game, is that Phobos-Grunt did not pass over Alaska until several hours after it failed.