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But it's not the last Titan, just the last to launch from Cape Canaveral. According to the article on Florida Today: "This Titan is the last of a family of 168 to be launched from Cape Canaveral. One last flight is scheduled to take off from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California."

Quite the powerhorse. Congrats to all who worked on it over the years for jobs well done.

NASA is not going to launch another shuttle. They're just going to play the "One more thing" game 'till everyone gets bored with it and gives up. Even when the shuttles were working it was nearly impossible to plan a vacation around it: you'd wait on the intercoastal for 5 hours with your scanner listenening to rebroadcast NASA transmission only to have the launch scrubbed when the 2-minute hold goes into the launch window.

The moral is: never plan your trip around a shuttle launch. An atlas or titan launch, that's another story - you can get a bit closer since they're launched from canaveral rather than kennedy - though they delay those as well.

Florida Today has good coverage of spacey things. Scan the pages for upcoming launches. It's too bad you won't be in town on May 11. There's a delta 2 launch.

I think Pizza Hut has some prior art from 1999 on this one unless that Russian was behind the deal.

Interesting note, current ISS commander Michael Foale was onboard Mir when they had the accident with the Progress vehicle. This guy seems to be really unlucky.

Or perhaps it's a case of once-bitten twice-shy. Foale was busy conducting experiments in Spektr when the Progress bounced off it on its little detour past the docking port.

Underneath that cool test-pilot exterior (and a pair of Ray-Bans) is a guy whose eyes are always moving, always watching... ready for that *thump* *crunch* *hissssss* that means IT'S ALL HAPPENING AGAIN!!! OH MY GOD!!! EVAC PROCEDURES, SOYUZ SEPARATION SEQUENCE STA... oh, never mind, just a piece of insulation, sorry.

You know my boss wouldn't find that funny at all. A few years ago he worked on a joint project between the US and the USSR - a satellite named Skipper. Russians didn't believe in testing their flight hardware, only shadow building an identical one to destructively test. Skipper's solar panels were wired reverse of the battery so every rotation of the satellite the voltage would drop significantly and never quite come back up. Within' a minute or two the craft had shorted the batteries to the point the electronics no longer functioned.

He says it remains in its 800km orbit, mocking him every 45 minutes. According to my calculations it should only mock him every 101 minutes.

The NAVSTAR Global Positioning System is managed by the NAVSTAR GPS Joint Program Office at the Space and Missile Systems Center, Los Angeles Air Force Base, Calif.

The main contractor on the entire International Space Station project, Boeing already has built up $1 billion in overruns in other phases of the program on top of its original $8 billion contract with NASA, Williams said.

...

From Huntington Beach, Calif., on Monday, Boeing spokesman Alan Buis acknowledged that the propulsion module project has faced overruns but declined to provide a figure.

...

He added, however, that NASA recently reduced these requirements and Boeing will give NASA a new estimate by June 29 based on the lessened requirements.

Within the aerospace industry, cost overruns of 10 percent on projects are not considered uncommon. But Boeing's overrun on the module is at least 37 percent and at a point where NASA is re-evaluating the contract.

The 20 percent increase is attributable to a range of factors, said NASA's Gretchen McClain, a deputy associate administrator responsible for station planning. Those include (...) a major cost overrun by the Boeing Co., NASA's prime contractor.

One question the task force will need to answer, Pike said, is whether NASA turned over too much control to the prime contractor, Boeing. The overruns have been blamed on unrealistic budgeting by both Boeing and NASA.

Information from the Planetary Society is here Also, the full text (not PDF) is here Also Florida Today has something here There's more, also. Just check Google.

So costly that NASA literally couldn't build a spare, so this is only a one shot deal.

<rant>

It is not particularly uncommon in this program. Was there a backup to the Service module which delayed the program two years? (The ICM could have been, sort-of, but was never built.) This led to the first two modules, Zarya and Unity, exceeding their 500-day lifetime in orbit; what would have happened if they had failed?

And what about the space shuttle? More than thirty shuttle flights are required to build the station; at a 1/450 estimated failure rate, according to the Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel, there is a 7-odd percent chance of another Challenger before it is completed - and the tight schedule surely is not going to help. If that happens, how does the program survive, with the Russians almost too broke to produce enough Soyuz even for the normal operation of the ISS?

That said, who won't be happy to learn that, according to NASA Watch, the Destiny lab's software wasn't even validated before launch? Or that there is a catch-22 with its avionics (computers and stuff need cooling to operate, but they need to be up to start the cooler systems)...

There is another issue: the project also depends on hundreds of hours of EVA (spacewalking), which the US lacks experience at. I don't have a reference handy, but IIRC one of the proposals to replace the space station Freedom program had been dismissed as too risky because it required way too much EVA time, and that was still less than what the ISS needs.

There is always the argument that the space program is indeed risky, but the prize is worth the game. I would agree with this, if the prize was space colonization, or at least common access to space. But this is not what NASA is after; see the jaundiced view they have about the Tito flight to ISS (set up by MirCorp and the Russians). According to the Space Frontier Foundation, " NASA is clueless about how to efficiently and fairly run this facility. They're not interested in anything but their own budget, people and programs." Space science, then? A manned facility is not really adapted to that (life support systems, people bouncing around, degrade the quality of microgravity) except for studying the effect of weightlessness on the astronauts themselves, which has already been done well enough on Mir.

There is an article from the Economist about the "waste of space" the ISS is.

</rant>

And yet, I crave for more coverage of the ISS operation, more pictures of the beautiful thing they are building up there... I was at my window a few minutes ago as the ISS was passing overhead (cloudy sky, didn't see anything but I tried), and I'm following the EVA thanks to the Spaceflight now live coverage. I can't help dreaming about that 2001 double wheel giant station, and what moved me most in recent years was reading old newspapers from around july20th, 1969. Go figure...

Ozone only contributes a small amount to the greenhouse effect. Other gases, such as carbon dioxide and methane, play a much more significant role in the greenhouse effect. I am aware of this, which is why I said "largely unrelated..."

Again, I note evidence suggesting that the ozone hole is now closing. If global warming and the ozone hole were really closely related, you'd think that that would shut people up about global warming.

I just got over reading Billions and Billions by Carl Sagan and in it he talks in great depth about global warming. [snip]

2) If at sea level, wholly intact, the ozone layer is about 3 mm thick or just slightly thicker than one's finger nail.

Oh, not this again... Global warming and ozone depletion are two separate, largely unrelated problems. I hope it was just you and not Carl Sagan who got confused. Furthermore, the ozone hole has shown signs of closing.

1) Even if we stopped production and useage of all greenhouse-effect causing gases, these gases would remain in the upper atmosphere doing harm for a little over a century.

Let me point out that the only way to completely stop producing greenhouse gases is to kill yourself (remember, you breathe out carbon dioxide and fart methane), and, even then, your rotting carcass would release more greenhouse gases.

The amount of confusion between global warming and the ozone hole is really disheartening. If nobody even knows what they're talking about, how can we possibly expect to get anywhere?

I think this was a US Air Force project caleld "Project Manhigh." They pioniered the droug chute that slows the diver down so the force of the main chute opening doesn't kill the diver. They also used a mixed gass atmosphere enviroment instead of the pure oxygen that NASA was using and later changes after they lost two astronauts on the pad. See: http://www.flatoday.com/space/explore/stories/1998 b/081998a.htm

Finally a space article that didn't come from cnn...

Kudo's

To bad Space Elevators are the Super Dense Optical Storage Devices of Space Industry. A Red Herring.

suggested Space News Site's spaceflightnow
SpaceDaily
NasaWatch
SpaceWeather
Nasa
It's ashame that SpaceOnline bit the dust and was absorbed by space.com, along with SpaceViews

If you want some real action become a Nasa click worker at http://clickworkers.arc.nasa.gov/top
Maybe Slashdot will even do a story on it...

I wait with herring baited breath

I always wondered if it would be possible to create some sort of mini-VLA with a bunch of Primestar dishes. I know this wouldn't be the easiest of tasks, but harder stuff has been done right? I mean, according to THIS article there were 2.3 million Primestar subscribers when DirecTV decided to buy them out. That means that there are about 2.3 million Primestar satellite dishes sitting around being useless.. there's gotta be something cool to use them for. Spiffy new high-speed file-sharing network? A VLA rival (I don't actually know if this would be possible because I'm not an astronomer)? Bah, the possibilities are endless.

Here are links to this story around the Internet:

Hubble and Chandra imaged the comet in early July and saw a house sized chunk come off the comet:
NASA Press Release

A British telescope imaged the comet in late July as it completely vapourized:
Isaac Newton Group of Telescopes Press Release

Finally, here are links to the CNN article, and everywhere else on the Internet I could find:
Astronomy Now
CNN Space
Space Online

And, of course, my own coverage on Universe Today.

Fraser Cain

http://www.flatoday.com/space/today/i ndex.htm

They're the only site I've seen with updates posted minutes after important developments or press conferences.

Very nice.

Also, for high bandwidth video (300kbps) of NASA TV see:

http://www.broadcast.com/events/nasa

NASA's decade-long program to explore Mars likely suffered a major setback today with the loss of the Climate Orbiter spacecraft dispatched to understand the Red Planet's weather. Space agency officials just announced at a news conference that the satellite may have plunged into the Martian atmosphere due to a catastrophic navigation error. Ground controllers had expected the craft to pass 140 or 150 km above the planet's surface during the closest approach as MCO entered orbit around Mars this morning. However, for some reason not yet known, MCO appears to have made the closest approach at 60 km. NASA says it suspects 85 km to be the minimum altitude that the satellite could have survived. Given that fact, optimism that MCO is still alive and orbiting about Mars is now rather low. But further attempts will be made to contact the satellite until it becomes completely clear MCO did indeed crash.

A "Tiger Team" has been formed to determine how the navigation error occurred, whether it was spacecraft, software, human error or some other factor that caused the mishap.

"There is no surer way to ruin a good discussion than to contaminate it with the facts."

Moderators please! Don't give unfounded news items such a high score. The AC didn't even give a link to his news source!

...by the pricking of my thumbs,

...by the pricking of my thumbs,

That satellite isn't much of a "spy" satelite....
If you take a look at this article, the images have 1 meter resolution (i.e 1 pixel = 1 meter om the ground.) Very nice for civilian use, but nothing compared to what's already up there in military satellites, AFAIK. It's been a while since I learned a bit about Remote Sensing at college, but I guess 1 meter resolution was common in military satellites 20 years ago or so...