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Okay, so NASA spends $15 billion of our money each year, and the Pentagon spends another $20 billion on satellites and rockets. It costs a billion to launch a shuttle, and there used to be four launches a year, before they started losing things so often. They even canceled development of the X-33, and sold it for scrap metal, after spending 912 million dollars on it.

But we can't afford to spend a measly $4 million to maintain three projects that are still returning useful, interesting data, and haven't disappeared behind Mars or killed anyone?

I guess they have PHBs at NASA too! Maybe it's just about PR...making things look good to the average guy on the street, who thinks going to Mars is way cooler.

(I have to admit, the headline "Interstellar Pioneers Facing Termination" made me wonder the Aliens had finally taked over ISS...)

Here you go... . Damn, she can armwrestle with me as much as she wants ;-))

In her junior year, she founded an engineering club at her school for which her robotics knowledge helped the team win KISS

What was once training ground during her eight-year competitive swimming regimen ....
(bio)

I doubt that she's as much of a wimp as she professes to be.

Ask and ye shall receive...

http://ndeaa.jpl.nasa.gov/nasa-nde/lommas/eap/amer ah/the-human-opponent.htm

Yum yum.

Since the jokes are going to be flying fast and furious over this, I thought I'd ask if anyone has links to other information about this cool research. Googling on polymer muscles brought up this page, but I didn't see anything about their ability to carry semi-fluid weight loads like groceries, tools, etc.

One nice side note (hopefully) - since it's government funded through NASA, does this mean this work won't be patented and re-sold in the market for an even higher price than it will already cost?

Ask and ye shall receive:
Here

Click here. She's not bad looking. ;)

Panna Felson

"I haven't seen a proper white paper since the www took off"...

Try NASA's Technical Report Server. Very handy.

Deke Slayton, one of the Mercury Seven and the longtime head of the astronaut corps (i.e., the guy with the final say on flight crew assignments), pushed hard to use an airliner-style crew system for the shuttle. That is, have a small group of pilots and mission specialists that would fly repeatedly together, with one-off payload specialists handling mission-specific duties. He'd seen how frustrating life was for the later '60s astronaut classes that only saw a few members fly, and sometimes not for decades. And this was back when NASA genuinely believed each shuttle would spend as little as two weeks before launching again.

Instead, we got the worst of both words: A launch schedule in which four shuttles did at most a dozen launches a year together, little likelihood of even that annual figure in the three remaining shuttles' lifetimes, and an astronaut corps that numbers in the hundreds with new inductees coming in every two years. That's just crazy.

That the Rutan flight represents some sort of triumph of capitalism over big, bad, governemnt is laughable. In the first place, Rutan's project relies on 'space age' materials pretty much all of which were invented on the government's nickel. IF Rutan had to fund all of the basic research that culminated in SS-1, he would have been bankrupt in a week. Second of all, SS-1 is capable of putting a few hundred pounds barely into space. The 30 year old shuttle design can put 20 to 30 TONS into low earth orbit. Delta and Titan rockets, developed by NASA, can put several ton objects in geosynchrous orbit. And, of course, NASA has sent men to the moon, and unmaned spacecraft to Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn. Standing on NASA's shoulders, private industry has managed to put 200 pounds 60 miles up for a couple of seconds. Color me unimpressed.

Well they aren't building anything yet. However, they are working with several possible desings for the Crew Exploration Vehicle:

http://exploration.nasa.gov/centennialchallenge/cc _index.html/

As was previously discussed on Slashdot:

http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/11/0 6/1950230&tid=160&tid=103/

Shh, don't give the nuts out there any more ideas: http://www.ufos-aliens.co.uk/cosmicapollo.html At least there's some sane ones out there too: http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2001/ast23feb_2 .htm

Didn't you ever see Apollo 13? Haise pees into a relief tube in one scene and then activates the urine dump, looks out the window and says "The constellation Urion..."

Later in the movie they said that they couldn't make any more waste dumps because even that small vector would serve to push them off course.

Of course, it's a movie... ... but NASA transcripts sort of bear that out as well.

parent suggested waiting until hubble falls enough to be relatively close to ISS's orbit. (by relatively i mean close enough to transfer to ISS orbit and dock with ISS in the event of trouble)

I don't think this is possible even if they were at the same level orbit.
Hubble's inclination is about as low as you can get (launching from kennedy that is), about 28.5 degrees. ISS's orbit was optimized for revinue (passing over as many countries as possible so as to get funding) and is about 51.6 degrees.

http://www.spacetelescope.org/about/general/orbit. html
http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2000/ast01dec_1 .htm

The delta-V required for an inclination change is much greater than that required for a transfer (from high low orbit).

Most libertarians I know don't think NASA is somehow inherently bad -- there are far worse examples of federal money being wastefully expended. As for myself, I really like a lot of the things NASA has done, especially with the Mars Rovers and Cassini.

The problem many libertarians have with NASA is that they've completely destroyed the spaceflight market, so it isn't like anything remotely resembling a thriving free market. When NASA needs to get a person into space, they don't do it by simply buying a ticket from a rocket launch company which offers the best combination of reliability, quality, and cost. Such a solution would be highly favored by libertarians, as it would operate within the market and would help ensure a steady decrease in launch costs and an increase in reliability.

Rather, what NASA does is give a cost-plus contract to one of the aerospace giants (Boeing, Lockheed, etc.) to develop a launch vehicle. With a cost-plus contract the aerospace giant has absolutely no incentive to decrease launch costs or exercise any sort of fiscal restraint; it's actually quite the opposite, as the more money the contractor uses up the more money pads their pockets. The fact that the launch market has been so distorted by contracts like this prevents private spaceflight companies from effectively competing and keeps launch costs absurdly high.

The only reason a private space market is starting to emerge nowadays is because NASA has pretty much no interest or influence on the suborbital tourism market. This will allow market forces to actually come into effect.

Personally, what I'd like to see is for NASA to stop with cost-plus contracts and act as more of a customer within the market. Things like the Centennial Challenges are great, where companies are paid a flat amount based on results, rather than however much they say they need to develop a solution.

Try the James Webb telescope

"On September 27, 1999, the operations navigation team consulted with the spacecraft engineers to discuss navigation discrepancies regarding velocity change (V) modeling issues. On September 29, 1999, it was discovered that the small forces V's reported by the spacecraft engineers for use in orbit determination solutions was low by a factor of 4.45 (1 pound force=4.45 Newtons) because the impulse bit data contained in the AMD file was delivered in lb-sec instead of the specified and expected units of Newton-sec."

OMG, your right,
Nasa have just released a View of the cluster in operation from space.

OH, and by the way, the graph you think is a joke is actually quote similar to that one that can be found in NASA, wich, in my opinion, is not an obscure site.

Here:

http://www.giss.nasa.gov/research/features/methane /

Or, if you just want the graph:
http://www.giss.nasa.gov/research/features/methane /core2.gif

Do you really think NASA's joking ?

OH, and by the way, the graph you think is a joke is actually quote similar to that one that can be found in NASA, wich, in my opinion, is not an obscure site.

Here:

http://www.giss.nasa.gov/research/features/methane /

Or, if you just want the graph:
http://www.giss.nasa.gov/research/features/methane /core2.gif

Do you really think NASA's joking ?

Yuri Gagarin didn't fly Vostok 1 around the world...

In 1961 it was still Soviet Russia... Vostok 1 flew him!

(sorry - couldn't help myself...)

Seriously, though - another good reason (#7) would be that Yuri didn't actually land in Vostok 1. He ejected and landed via parachute.

From here:

Once in orbit, Yuri Gagarin had no control over his spacecraft. Vostok's reentry was controlled by a computer program sending radio commands to the space capsule. Although the controls were locked, a key had been placed in a sealed envelope in case an emergency situation made it necessary for Gagarin to take control. As was planned, Cosmonaut Gagarin ejected after reentry into Earth's atmosphere and landed by parachute.

I don't know if they received orders of magnitude more hits to the website than expected, but man they did not handle it well. Performance was spotty at best, ranging from completely unresponsive to partly responsive, at least from the two high-speed ISPs I regularly use.

The lack of performance of their website reduces the accomplishment of flying, at least in my mind. This is where the Mars Rover folks got things right. It's easy for folks to feel like a part of the accomplishment there, IMHO partly because the website is accessable, responsive, and on "my" browser when it's wanted. Not so for the global flyer.

NASA :-/

Please inform yourself about Robert Goddard.

Yes, von Braun was the real force behind American rocketry after WWII, but guess who provided the foundations for his work?

How does a satelite see atoms? Could you give a cite?

Some satellite-based ozone monitoring instruments:

TOMS (Total Ozone Mapping Spectrometer) - NASA

ILAS, ILAS-II (Improved Limb Atmospheric Spectrometer) - NASDA Japan

MLS (Microwave Limb Sounder) - NASA

TOVS (TIROS Operational Vertical Sounder) - NOAA

SBUV, SBUV2 (Solar Backscatter Ultraviolet Radiometer) - NOAA

GOME (Global Ozone Monitoring Experiment) - ESA

As others have pointed out, other methods of sampling exist, including aircraft, "ozonesondes" and other sorts of ballons, rocket probes, and ground-based instruments such as spectrophotometers or LIDAR.

How does a satelite see atoms? Could you give a cite?

Some satellite-based ozone monitoring instruments:

TOMS (Total Ozone Mapping Spectrometer) - NASA

ILAS, ILAS-II (Improved Limb Atmospheric Spectrometer) - NASDA Japan

MLS (Microwave Limb Sounder) - NASA

TOVS (TIROS Operational Vertical Sounder) - NOAA

SBUV, SBUV2 (Solar Backscatter Ultraviolet Radiometer) - NOAA

GOME (Global Ozone Monitoring Experiment) - ESA

As others have pointed out, other methods of sampling exist, including aircraft, "ozonesondes" and other sorts of ballons, rocket probes, and ground-based instruments such as spectrophotometers or LIDAR.

Exactly what are you claiming is incorrect? Need a paper on the subject of the interlinks? How about one on the tensile strength tests? (not the same study that I saw before - they got even lower numbers, but were testing on small ropes instead of individual tubes)

In short: What exactly are you challenging?

Anyone remember the Voyager message?

For those, like me, that didn't really know what all was on the golden record...

http://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/spacecraft/goldenrec.h tml

FYI, check the ozone over Switzerland. It doesn't show the extreme cuts of the spring ozone holes, but it ought to show you that depletion is not just a polar phenomenon either. (There's a more general mid-latitude graph down near the bottom of this page.)

Now when you try to load the cockpit image using Firefox or IE, you get back the following URL and image

http://www09.ksc.nasa.gov/projects/globalflyer/liv e.jpg

It used to be just plain www. But when I load (and reload, and reload) that URL above in a browser, it refreshes fine (current image). Using WebcamWatcher, with the exact same URL, it won't load the image at all. I have confirmed that other images from other sites load fine in that software, so it's not the network or the webcam software.

Well, looking again, it looks like http://science.ksc.nasa.gov/projects/globalflyer/l ive.jpg is getting updated anyways. I can't open the RM "mixed feed".

The space shuttle has a propellant mass fraction of about 82% and circles the earth many times each trip. Most of that mass is oxygen, which the plane will extract from the air. So for comparison, the plane effectively requires significantly more than its mass in fuel for the trip. Further the space shuttle orbits the earth in a great circle every time.

This is actually exciting. At first look it would seem to indicate the feasability of space planes for long distnaces.

http://www.grc.nasa.gov/WWW/K-12/TRC/Rockets/pract ical_rocketry.html

faster

No that moon's already been discovered. It's called Mimas

Yeah, the link on the bottom of the page wasn't very reassuring either..

Tomorrow's picture: dark chasm

I'm starting to see astronomers in a whole new light. Or should I say, a hole new dark.

Ok, ok.. I'll stop being an astronomyhole.

Perhaps the most amazing find is the bacteria staying in a dormant state inside liquid inclusions in salt crystals for 250 million years (BBC story).

In fact, that finding by Vreeland and Rosenzweig is apparently not the first one of bacteria that are alive after hundreds of millions of years in a dormant state, but it has caught the attention of other researchers because they seem to have been particularly careful to avoid contamination.

Nevertheless, until those findings are more widely accepted, they will need to get replicated a lot more by many more groups, and the sequence data will have to be examined very carefully.

However, between all these findings, it seems pretty much clear that bacteria can stay dormant for a long, long time. One implication of that is panspermia, namely that life didn't evolve on earth but arrived here from space in the form of microbes, perhaps even traveling interstellar distances.

I wonder though, which Star Trek and other series sort of gloss over, is that if Martian bacteria did develop, seperate from ourselves, we would probablly lack any auto immune response to be able to combat them. We are the product a millions and billions of years of fighting other life forms for our existence. It would be naive of us to assume that other lifeforms out there would fundementally eat us for lunch, and the reverse being true.

On the other hand, maybe the right of universe is made up of right handed Amino Acids and we will be safe...

Well we can't mention the APOD without including the goatse nebula:

http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap021102.html

There's some information from the public WMAP webpage here. You might also look at Wayne Hu's excellent webpages here. Start with the intructory materials and move up from there. It has only been in the last couple of years that we've been finally confident about the values of the cosmological parameters and that the universal geometry is flat. The dark matter and dark energy both are still confusing, to be sure, but the picture of the fundamental nature (age, curvature, etc.) of the universe is pretty solid at this point.

That's right. Observations of our own Milky Way galaxy, which we have good limits on the normal baryonic dark matter, is dominated gravitationally by something more exotic, and a lot of it. The best limits on the amount of baryonic matter and non-baryonic matter in the universe come from WMAP. There's about six times as much non-baryonic dark matter out there as there is normal stuff. These results are well supported by many other observatoins (e.g., light element abundances, galactic rotation curves, cluster mass estimates, etc.).

Still seeing only "clusters" of stars? Check out this view from our old friend Hubble!

This image and the TERAbytes of data like it that have been collected over such a short time are testimony to why losing Hubble is going to be such a tragedy -- whether or not we understand or accept the reasons it's going to happen.

Or goatse nebulae.

> ... I submit that it be named the "Goatse Galaxy".

Nope, Goatse Galaxies have Goatse Stars

The only change here is that (a) they get to know who's accessing the data, and (b) those who access the data can't restribute it. This doesn't keep them from distributing the result of calculations based on the data, however.

Heavens-above.com has data regarding when satellites are visible from a given location on the earth's surface. I'm not sure if this gives any data on classified satellites. This site does currently still show orbital elements on the "orbit" page of each satellite's detail list - these are probably coming from non-Airforce tracking radars.

JTrack 3D is a great little java applet (warning, the applet loads in a separate window) that shows you a real-time view of near-earth space. You can even pull up description pages for each of the satellites shown. The "Launch/Orbital information" link on the detail page is broken, and seems to be the only part of this service affected. Again this is unlikely to ever have shown classified satellites.

Conspiracy theorists, take note. Every spacefaring nation on the planet knows where everything is in space including the orbital elements mentioned, to make sure thier expensive new pr0nosat won't crash into that random chunk of "damaged hardware that can't be de-orbited, oops" that's taking pictures of Osama's outhouse. This just keeps people from anonymously having the US Air Force do their orbit tracking for them.

Does anyone know if "surveillance data" also includes digital photography from other government satellites and the Blue Marble/Earth Observatory?

Are there any plans to extend this ban to cover these categories?

1. Canadian tax dollars stay in Canada. Californian tax dollars leave the state; like all states, it's in a constant battle with Washington over who gets to have how much of a citizen's paycheck, and the feds weigh more. I'd wager that Canadian provinces have a better chance fighting Ottawa in that reguard than US states fighting Washington.
2. You're not giving credit to how heterogeneous the Canadian population is. Yes, they all live within a few hundred km of the 49th, but even then they're in clumps. We call those clumps "Toronto," "Vancouver," "Montreal," "Calgary" and the like. While California doesn't have as smooth a distribution as the US east of the Mississippi, it can be really hard to tell where the Los Angeles area ends and the San Francisco area begins. See for yourself.

If Mars had water 5 million years ago on the surface then it may had a atmosphere then also

It has an atmosphere now!
http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/facts/

We've seen microbes on ancient mars rocks

They saw structures inside the rocks that resembled bacteria, but they haven't found "microbes." They don't know for sure what they are.
http://www.unmuseum.org/marsrock.htm

http://science.nasa.gov/newhome/headlines/essd26ma y99_1.htm