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"Two orbiters, Challenger and Discovery , were modified at KSC to enable them to carry the Centaur upper stage in the payload bay. These modifications included extra plumbing to load and vent Centaur's cryogenic (L02/LH2) propellants (other IUS/PAM upper stages use solid propellants), and controls on the aft flight deck for loading and monitoring the Centaur stage. No Centaur flight was ever flown and after the loss of Challenger it was decided that the risk was too great to launch a shuttle with a fueled Centaur upper stage in the payload bay."

I think the modifications have since been removed. We now have no shuttle capable of launching a Centaur upper stage -- the other was destroyed. I have often wondered if this really is all that dangerous, considering the fact that the hydrazine maneuvering fuel used on many satellites the Shuttle launches is hypergolic, meaning it will ignite on contact with its oxidizer, no spark needed. Hydrogen and oxygen, on the other hand, require an ignition system.

http://www.hq.nasa.gov/office/pao/History/SP-4203/ ch14-3.htm

Stafford and Cernan did agree to include a test on Gemini IX to compare optics and radar by performing a rendezvous from above the target vehicle. In this exercise, the Agena would be over the Sahara Desert, which would simulate the lunar surface, and the crew would try to fly down to it, using both radar and optics

Sig: What Happened To The Censorware Project (censorware.org)

The shuttle is designed to be able to bring satellites back. From the link:

The space shuttle is the world's first reusable spacecraft, and the first spacecraft in history that can carry large satellites both to and from orbit.

Now, whether it's more dangerous to bring back a satellite leaking fuel is another matter! I figure that they'd drain it before bringing it back though.

This is the story of the successful rescue of an Intelsat after it failed to seperate from its rocket and got stuck in a low orbit. It took 6 tries over 3 days for the shuttle crew to catch it.

The TDRS satellite has a similar mass to the Intelsat

APOD ran a great picture of Ikeya-Zhang last monday, showing how much it has flaired up since coming into the stronger solar wind. Their links give more info about the comet for those interested in such things.

Oh, yes what a blazing glory that was.

I guess a dim smudge is better than the wonderous display put on by comet Kohoutek

A variation of this principle does indeed work in a vacuum - it was recently tested on NASA's NASA Deep Space 1 spacecraft. It's the same basic principle of accelerating molecules by ionization, except that in the case of Deep Space 1, the molecules in question are supplied from a tank.

Pictures of the stuff.

My recommendation is: those who are uncertain of their HTML coding abiliities should stick to plain-text and simply give the URLs:

• NASA BPP, proposal summaries (not sure if that was the intended link -- but you can search NASA yourself I suppose>)
• LLNL: Condensed Matter, abstract
• AntiGravity Research Conference
• Ning Lees Research (actually "Skeggs & Ning Li on Gravitational Modification")
• Nasa pumps 600k into research and has had tests
• AEI: John Hutchinson's Theories
• Japanese Anti-Gravity Experiment

That's all I have to contribute. Despite all the debate, "build your own UFO" looks like a fun thing to distract myself with some weekend.

My recommendation is: those who are uncertain of their HTML coding abiliities should stick to plain-text and simply give the URLs:

• NASA BPP, proposal summaries (not sure if that was the intended link -- but you can search NASA yourself I suppose>)
• LLNL: Condensed Matter, abstract
• AntiGravity Research Conference
• Ning Lees Research (actually "Skeggs & Ning Li on Gravitational Modification")
• Nasa pumps 600k into research and has had tests
• AEI: John Hutchinson's Theories
• Japanese Anti-Gravity Experiment

That's all I have to contribute. Despite all the debate, "build your own UFO" looks like a fun thing to distract myself with some weekend.

I think there's actually something to both the Biefield-Brown Effect, and to the Podelklenov effect as well. However, there is a lot of fringe "research" in this field, and that just makes it harder for people like Marc Millis to be taken seriously.

All the same, I am really tempted to try and build stuff like this and this!

f. Prospects for Nuclear Electric Propulsion Using Closed Cycle MHD Energy Conversion, Ron Litchford, NASA MSFC [abstract] [presentation]

g. Ultralight Vapor Fueled Cavity Reactors with MHD for Powering Multi- Megawatt NEP Systems , Travis Knight et al., New Era Technologies (NeTech), Inc. [abstract] [presentation .

Apparently these power sources could be built for a couple of billion dollars, this is where the military dark budget of $30bn comes into play (see the New York Times quoted in the story).

f. Prospects for Nuclear Electric Propulsion Using Closed Cycle MHD Energy Conversion, Ron Litchford, NASA MSFC [abstract] [presentation]

g. Ultralight Vapor Fueled Cavity Reactors with MHD for Powering Multi- Megawatt NEP Systems , Travis Knight et al., New Era Technologies (NeTech), Inc. [abstract] [presentation .

Apparently these power sources could be built for a couple of billion dollars, this is where the military dark budget of $30bn comes into play (see the New York Times quoted in the story).

f. Prospects for Nuclear Electric Propulsion Using Closed Cycle MHD Energy Conversion, Ron Litchford, NASA MSFC [abstract] [presentation]

g. Ultralight Vapor Fueled Cavity Reactors with MHD for Powering Multi- Megawatt NEP Systems , Travis Knight et al., New Era Technologies (NeTech), Inc. [abstract] [presentation .

Apparently these power sources could be built for a couple of billion dollars, this is where the military dark budget of $30bn comes into play (see the New York Times quoted in the story).

f. Prospects for Nuclear Electric Propulsion Using Closed Cycle MHD Energy Conversion, Ron Litchford, NASA MSFC [abstract] [presentation]

g. Ultralight Vapor Fueled Cavity Reactors with MHD for Powering Multi- Megawatt NEP Systems , Travis Knight et al., New Era Technologies (NeTech), Inc. [abstract] [presentation .

Apparently these power sources could be built for a couple of billion dollars, this is where the military dark budget of $30bn comes into play (see the New York Times quoted in the story).

NASA actually commercialises this technology. See Technology Opportunity

What a marketing strategy for Hollywood - get the Federal Government to start pushing their products. Wow. Does anyone still think Congress isn't for sale?

What if Congress was this interested in promoting education and science instead of movies? You would be better off.

The interval is highly non-regular. According to this article from NASA, the interval varies between 5 thousand and 50 million years. So all of the different numbers posted would be reasonable guesses for an interval (the last was about 740,000 years ago according to the same article).

Wow - how astute of you to come up with such commentary!

Oh, btw; the greatest single achievement of mankind - man landing on the moon - was fueled and driven by political motivation. It also gave us the technology to produce Integrated Circuits, Fuel Cells that will (eventually) replace the Internal Combustion Engine for cars (and have water as it's only major byproduct), and the "Space Race" also was a major part of the further development of ARPANet.

Soviet missiles, ever since the Vostok launchers, have always used multiple rocket motors/engines of smaller size to provide the needed thrust versus the F-1 engines used in the Saturn V. The images that you see on the BBC site show (1) the tail-end of the N1, which housed the 30 smaller engines, and the 2nd image is also just the tail-end housing of the N1 and not the exhaust nozzles. The nozzles for the N1 engines ranged from about 3 feet to 1 foot in diameter. The overall diameter of the tail-end of the N1 is greater than the Saturn V, because they had to fit 30 of the smaller, less-efficient engines instead of the 5 vastly more efficient F-1 engines used in the Saturn V.

Some links to some photos and illustrations:

Line-up Illustration of size differences of engines used for the Apollo missions (The RL-10's were used in the Descent and Acsent engines of the LEM, the H-1 served the Command & Service Modules, the J-2 for the 3rd Stage (single engine) and for the 2nd Stage (5-engine cluster), and the F-1 for the 1st Stage of the Saturn V stack))

The N1 Story - Part 1

At the time that the N1 was in the planning stages, the most powerful rocket engines produced only 40 tons of thrust, and the N1 required engines that produced (at most) 150 tons of thrust each, in comparison to the massive F-1 engines used in the Saturn V, which produced ~680 tons of thrust each. The lack of sophistication in Soviet designs called for many more engines in the N1 than in the Saturn V, proving to be a systems-management nightmare (the more engines/systems you have, the larger the "point-of-failure" boundaries, which negates any kind of planned redundancy.). Engines to equal the F-1 were almost impossible for them to build, due to the technology gap between the USSR and the USA.

Additionally, You'd be suprised at how many botched launches of various launch vehicles happened at Cape Canaveral/Kenedy; the "Mercury Seven" were about ready to voluntarily drop-out of the Mercury program when they learned that the proposed launch vehicle was the Atlas - one of the most disaster-plagued launch vehicles the USA ever had - hence, the "Spam in a can" comments from the Astronauts to illustrate what would happen to them if the Atlas malfunctioned. Several different designs of the Saturn launch vehicle blew-up or were ordered to self-destruct when early guidance system designs failed and caused the rocket stack to "end-over" several times.

Rocket Science IS "Rocket Science"

Also remember that the technological state of the Soviet Union was about 10 years behind the USA - but they made up for it by pouring huge financial backing from the Soviet government into producing quantity and not quality - which partially led to the financial collapse of the Soviet Union and it's enevitable disintegration.

So much for your ignorant comments. Learn something instead of parroting some obscure Liberalist doctrine. If you didn't have "...political motivation behind scientific achievement...", we wouldn't have the Internet and we'd all still be chatting and swapping files on BBS systems.

ScottKin - who was a NASA-junkie at the ripe, old age of 7.

In my view, the main problem with solar/wind/tide/wave power generation is that we can't guarantee a steady flow of energy. Excess energy can't be stored for use when we need it. Solar energy is good as a supplementary source of energy for areas with high AC usage because when usually it's hot, the sun is out. But the problem still remains that we can't rely on any of these environmental energies for a constant flow of energy, which is what we need (Having lived in CA during the energy "shortage" recently, I know of what I speak).

I think we should be spending more time/energy (hah) researching methods to store large amounts of energy. Flywheels seem to me to hold good promise of extremely high energy density, efficiency and simplicity compared to schemes involving batterie or water <-> H2+0 schemes. Just don't put any on geologically unstable areas... Any other good energy storage devices in our future?

Oh yeah, I consider fusion research (hot/cold, laser pellet/toroidal plasma etc.) a huge waste of money and resources. We've already got a fusion reactor, damnit!

Wow...that's impressive! I thought we only had pics of Venus from satellites. You would have been nice to give a link :-)
Google is your friend, so here is one :-)

Wow, you make it sound as though USSR had no successfull lunar missions at all. Here is a link to the NASA web page with details on the USSR lunar missions: http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/planetary/lunar/lunarus sr.html

My favorites are the Lunokhod missions:

http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/nmc/tmp/1970-095A.html
http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/nmc/tmp/1973-001A.html

And a few other cool looking unmanned landers:

http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/nmc/tmp/1976-081A.html
http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/nmc/tmp/1970-072A.html
http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/nmc/tmp/1966-006A.html

Wow, you make it sound as though USSR had no successfull lunar missions at all. Here is a link to the NASA web page with details on the USSR lunar missions: http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/planetary/lunar/lunarus sr.html

My favorites are the Lunokhod missions:

http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/nmc/tmp/1970-095A.html
http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/nmc/tmp/1973-001A.html

And a few other cool looking unmanned landers:

http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/nmc/tmp/1976-081A.html
http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/nmc/tmp/1970-072A.html
http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/nmc/tmp/1966-006A.html

Wow, you make it sound as though USSR had no successfull lunar missions at all. Here is a link to the NASA web page with details on the USSR lunar missions: http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/planetary/lunar/lunarus sr.html

My favorites are the Lunokhod missions:

http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/nmc/tmp/1970-095A.html
http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/nmc/tmp/1973-001A.html

And a few other cool looking unmanned landers:

http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/nmc/tmp/1976-081A.html
http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/nmc/tmp/1970-072A.html
http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/nmc/tmp/1966-006A.html

Wow, you make it sound as though USSR had no successfull lunar missions at all. Here is a link to the NASA web page with details on the USSR lunar missions: http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/planetary/lunar/lunarus sr.html

My favorites are the Lunokhod missions:

http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/nmc/tmp/1970-095A.html
http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/nmc/tmp/1973-001A.html

And a few other cool looking unmanned landers:

http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/nmc/tmp/1976-081A.html
http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/nmc/tmp/1970-072A.html
http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/nmc/tmp/1966-006A.html

Wow, you make it sound as though USSR had no successfull lunar missions at all. Here is a link to the NASA web page with details on the USSR lunar missions: http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/planetary/lunar/lunarus sr.html

My favorites are the Lunokhod missions:

http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/nmc/tmp/1970-095A.html
http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/nmc/tmp/1973-001A.html

And a few other cool looking unmanned landers:

http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/nmc/tmp/1976-081A.html
http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/nmc/tmp/1970-072A.html
http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/nmc/tmp/1966-006A.html

Wow, you make it sound as though USSR had no successfull lunar missions at all. Here is a link to the NASA web page with details on the USSR lunar missions: http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/planetary/lunar/lunarus sr.html

My favorites are the Lunokhod missions:

http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/nmc/tmp/1970-095A.html
http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/nmc/tmp/1973-001A.html

And a few other cool looking unmanned landers:

http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/nmc/tmp/1976-081A.html
http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/nmc/tmp/1970-072A.html
http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/nmc/tmp/1966-006A.html

In short, it was a tortoise and hare race. In terms of the space race, the US took a nap after WWII and the USSR got to work. Once the hare woke up it was just a question of how much of a head start the hare had. For the moon race, it wasn't enough of a head start.

Still, don't think I'm disrepecting the USSR space effort. They did great things and I hope Russians today are proud when they think of the Soviet space program.

-Miko

Well, he may be a bit trollish, but I think you misunderstand. He was pointing out that the N1 was not the only moon project that USSR had.

Here is a link to the NASA web page that describes all of USSR lunar missions:

http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/planetary/lunar/lunarus sr.html

Although they lost interest in landing on the moon after Apollo 11, along with the N-1 failure, but they still managed to land the first automated rovers I saw a backup Lunokhod 2 rover last weekend. it looked like a tractor, but was still pretty impressive for early 1970's technology.

Nooo, the first stage of the Saturn V used Kerosene and LOX too. Despite the higher power offered by liquid hydrogen, Koelle's studies indicated that little would be gained by using it in the first stage also, where it would have needed disproportionately large tanks. (Liquid hydrogen is only one twelfth as dense as kerosene, so a much larger tank volume would have been required.)

after WWII the US got the better German V2 rocket scientists like Wernher Von Braun, instead of the USSR? Certainly the US didn't have the will to fully use their experience and talents, however, untill after Sputnik.

However, it is interesting to note that during that during the reversal process, the Earth's magnetic field collapses in on itself and, for a brief time, stops. It then starts again and expands, only with a reversed polarity. The Earth's magnetic field, the magnetosphere, is responsible for protecting us from harmful cosmic radiation, particularly the Sun's Solar Wind. During the time that the magnetosphere is down, two main things will be affected: communication and navigation. How affected may depend on the effectiveness of Global Positioning System Sats and radio / telecommunication equipment during the period.

I'm a geology major, so the information that I have in referrance to Pole Reversal is relative to tracking continental drift, plate tectonics, etc. I haven't really read any studies on the possible environmental effects of solar wind and other cosmic radiation on an unprotected biosphere. If anybody has this info, I'd be interested.

Cheers,
cfeagans

Earth's average global temperature has risen 0.5C over the last 100 years.

There has only been a five degree change in average temperature since the coldest part of the ice age some 20,000 years ago.

I guess it depends on your definition of the word 'significant'. 5.0C hotter & the rise in sea levels will be closer to 200ft.

But as to the question of whether us humans have the right to (try to) control the global weather system..

The best possible outcome would be that the moon would shatter into a billion pieces and Earth would get a ring system like Saturn! Saturn's rings are apparently only about a hundred million years old, and probably created out of a collision between two moons.

Also we would get pretty much constant meteor showers for the next few hundred years... I really can't see a down-side! [fx: whispers from offstage] Oh yeah, millions of people will probably be killed by falling pieces of moon, with tsunamis, fireballs, massive explosions etc. but that's okay, we regenerate millions of people every few months. It'd be worth it for the light show.

Wolf wrote:
There's absolutely no way that Earth can turn into Venus. For one thing there isn't enough carbon to make the carbon dioxide to push up the greenhouse effect to that degree. For another Venus is simply closer to the Sun.
And further, the amount of carbon dioxide that is produced by man is dwarfed by the amount produced by volcanoes; by more than ten times. Even if we deliberately tried we can't influence the environment that much. Some, but nothing like you are implying.

Whoever wrote this obviously is too young to have been in a classroom where they used... chalk. Ever looked around you? The earth is layered in calcium carbonate and other retentive materials (wood, coal, oil, coral, krill) that extract carbon from the atmosphere and keep it locked up. Yes, volcanoes and other factors churn it out, but our biosphere has evolved processes for packing it away again... processes that we are increasingly interfering with.

The carbon cycle. Look it up. If you're some sort of computer weenie with no chemistry skills think of it as a finely balanced recursive algorithm with hundreds of inputs and outputs that somehow maintains environmental homeostasis. Knock this out of whack and you've got hell to pay. You can easily get Venus, or Mars (Snowball Earth).

Your supposition about Venus is also plain wrong. The incident stellar energy per square metre on the upper atmosphere of Venus is only incrementally higher than Earth's. If the Earth as currently constituted was at .72 AU (ie, Venus), there would be higher temperatures but not runaway greenhouse. -- at least not until the CO2 levels reached critical and the hydroxyls started boiling away into space. Keep CO2 levels low and you're okay.

Alone of all the planets the earth does not exist in physical equilibrium. It's the only planet so far discovered with a strong biosphere that resists change and maintains temperature and humidity levels. Dismissing that unique gift is dangerous and absurd. Have you heard of chicken little?

Try this on for size.

Environmentalism is something more central and vastly more important. Its essence has been defined by science in the following way. Earth, unlike the other solar planets, is not in physical equilibrium. It depends on its living shell to create the special conditions on which life is sustainable. The soil, water, and atmosphere of its surface have evolved over hundreds of millions of years to their present condition by the activity of the biosphere, a stupendously complex layer of living creatures whose activities are locked together in precise but tenuous global cycles of energy and transformed organic matter. The biosphere creates our special world anew every day, every minute, and holds it in a unique, shimmering physical disequilibrium. On that disequilibrium the human species is in total thrall. When we alter the biosphere in any direction, we move the environment away from the delicate dance of biology. When we destroy ecosystems and extinguish species, we degrade the greatest heritage this planet has to offer and thereby threaten our own existence.

The relative indifference to the environment springs, I believe, from deep within human nature. The human brain evidently evolved to commit itself emotionally only to a small piece of geography, a limited band of kinsmen, and two or three generations into the future. To look neither far ahead nor far afield is elemental in a Darwinian sense. We are innately inclined to ignore any distant possibility not yet requiring examination. It is, people say, just good common sense.

The rating goes from zero (the object is certain to miss the Earth) to ten (the nasty asteroid thingy is definitely going to "cause a global climatic catastrophe"). Read it, it's very unsettling...

Does anyone know what Torino rating this most recent near-miss was?

The rating goes from zero (the object is certain to miss the Earth) to ten (the nasty asteroid thingy is definitely going to "cause a global climatic catastrophe"). Read it, it's very unsettling...

Does anyone know what Torino rating this most recent near-miss was?

. . near-earth Tracking Page here has a few pictures and information about Near Earth Objects.

When you consider that NEAT has less funding and fewer people than it takes to run a modest size McDonald's for a year.

http://www.gsfc.nasa.gov/gsfc/earth/environ/ice/ic e.htm"

I'll take your city-centered parking lot surface temperature charts and raise you a lowered stratospheric temperature chart.

Given that we are constantly learning about various cycles in global climate, some of which seem to span over thousands of years ( E.g. NASA: The Sun-Weather connection), you can't possibly claim for certain that any temperature fluctuations over the past 10, 20 or 50 years are due exlusively to our behaviour.

I'm not against cleaning up the earth, I just think that global warming isn't a good argument.

Given that we are constantly learning about various cycles in global climate, some of which seem to span over thousands of years ( E.g. NASA: The Sun-Weather connection), you can't possibly claim for certain that any temperature fluctuations over the past 10, 20 or 50 years are due exlusively to our behaviour.

I'm not against cleaning up the earth, I just think that global warming isn't a good argument.

Actually not, they hoped acting in the name of the College de France would give them this immunity ;-), but their name mostly sound Italian and Anglo-Saxon to me (the team)

Enforce password conventions the way NASA does... Epasswd

on the insecurity of 802.11b

Try hacking your own gateway with airsnort

GPS can be accurate to around 10cm when using differential GPS (http://gipsy.jpl.nasa.gov/igdg/.

No they are not. Microwaves can be dangerous to pacemakers. X-ray wavelength is shorter than the visible spectrum, while Microwaves are longer wavelength.

See here.

let's all live on Mars where it's lush, there exists eternal peace, and natural disasters are unheard of...