"NASA's orbiting Lunar Gateway is either essential for a moon landing or a boondoggle in the making," writes IEEE Spectrum.

the_newsbeagle writes: NASA is under pressure to put humans back on the moon by 2024... NASA's plan for meeting that ambitious target relies on building a space station in lunar orbit, called the Gateway. NASA says it will use its (over budget and behind schedule) SLS rocket and Orion crew capsule to dock at this (yet unbuilt) Gateway, then send down a lunar lander. Critics say this is a stupid and over-complicated plan.

This article by veteran space reporter Jeff Foust explains how NASA got itself into this situation.
From the article: Critics of the Gateway argue that NASA shouldn't just scale back the space station -- it should cancel the project altogether. If you want to go to the surface of the moon, the refrain goes, go there directly, as the Apollo missions did a half century ago. Building an outpost in lunar orbit adds expense, delay, and complications to a task that is already hard enough....

Critics say that technological alternatives are emerging in the commercial space sector. They look to Blue Origin, the space company founded by Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos and based near Seattle. Blue Origin is building both a reusable heavy-lift rocket, called New Glenn, and a lunar lander known as Blue Moon. Another contender is Elon Musk's SpaceX, based in Hawthorne, Calif., which is also working on a fully reusable rocket. It will carry an upper stage called Starship, which the company says could land directly on the moon and carry heavy cargo. "Having that vehicle on the moon can basically serve as the core of a pretty significant lunar outpost, growing with time," said Paul Wooster, principal Mars development engineer at SpaceX.
The article ends by presenting two possibilities.

• "If NASA, heedful of sunk costs and political realities, continues to march toward the Gateway, we may indeed witness a triumphant return of NASA astronauts to the moon's surface in 2024..."
• "The determined billionaires behind SpaceX and Blue Origin might not wait around for NASA, and the next moon boots in the regolith might stamp a corporate logo in the dust."

__roo writes "In a bizarre case of life imitates the Simpsons, New York City officials introduced a population of opossums into Brooklyn parks and under the boardwalk at Coney Island, apparently convinced that the opossums would eat all of the rats in the borough and then conveniently die of starvation. Several years later, the opossums have not only failed to eliminate the rat epidemic from New York City, but they have thrived, turning into a sharp-toothed, foul-odored epidemic of their own."

Lanxon writes "Music lovers can now be immortalized when they die by having their ashes baked into vinyl records to leave behind for loved ones, reports Wired. A UK company called And Vinyly is offering people the chance to press their ashes in a vinyl recording of their own voice, their favorite tunes or their last will and testament. Minimalist audiophiles might want to go for the simple option of having no tunes or voiceover, and simply pressing the ashes into the vinyl to result in pops and crackles."

Germans who go out in the woods today are sure of a big surprise, radioactive boars. A portion of the wild boar population in Germany was irradiated after the Chernobyl nuclear meltdown, and the boars are thriving. In the last two years government payments to compensate hunters for radioactive boar have quadrupled. From the article: "According to the Environment Ministry in Berlin, almost €425,000 ($555,000) was paid out to hunters in 2009 in compensation for wild boar meat that was too contaminated by radiation to be sold for consumption. That total is more than four times higher than compensation payments made in 2007." I think the Germans are overlooking just how much money there is to be made from regenerating bacon.

ChrisPaget writes "I'm planning a pretty significant demonstration of GSM insecurity at Defcon next week, where I'll intercept and record cellular calls made by my attendees, live on-stage, no user-input required. As you can imagine, intercepting cellphones is a Very Big Deal in the eyes of the law; this blog post is an attempt to reassure everyone that their privacy is being taken seriously despite the nature of the demo. I'm not just making it up either — the EFF have helped significantly with the details."

Usually there is nothing funny about a missing pet, but the tale of Missy the lost cat is hilarious. It serves as an example of just how clueless your fellow employees can be, and why you should never ask the designers to drop what they're doing, and help with a personal matter.

An anonymous reader writes "In my job all of our multifunction copiers scan to PDF but many of our users want and expect those PDFs to be text searchable. I looked around for software that would create text searchable pdfs but most are very expensive and I couldn't find any that were open source (free). I did find some open source packages like CuneiForm and Exactimage that could in theory do the job, but they were hard to install and difficult to set up and use over a network. Then I stumbled upon WatchOCR. This is a Live CD distro that can easily create a server on your network that provides an OCR service using watched folders. Now all my scanners scan to a watched folder, WatchOCR picks up those files and OCRs them, and then spits them out into another folder. It uses CuneiForm and ExactImage but it is all configured and ready to deploy. It can even be remotely managed via the Web interface. Hope this proves helpful to someone else who has this same situation."

rmaureira writes "An awesome 33-foot-tall, 6 ton Optimus Prime replica is being shown at Beijing's Olympic Park. Made from junked car parts and scrap metal parts, it is impressive."

lukehashj writes "The openSUSE Project is pleased to announce the release of the latest incarnation of openSUSE, with support for 32-bit and 64-bit systems. OpenSUSE 11.3 is packed with new features and updates including SpiderOak to sync your files across the Internet for free, Rosegarden for free editing of your audio files, improved indexing with Tracker, and updates to Mozilla Firefox, and Thunderbird."

There seems to be a problem with the contrast button.