Slashdot Mirror

it is not because they had more money Phoenix cost 520 million $ in 2008 dollars. Vikings cost 935 million in 1974 dollars (was nearly $3 billion measured in 1997 dollars, more in 2008 dollars) http://www.nasawatch.com/archives/2008/05/the_actual_cost.html

Given the recent conversation on NASA Watch http://www.nasawatch.com/archives/2008/04/stupid_movie_al.html about the 57+ trillion nuclear warheads (each with 100 megatons of explosive power) needed to nudge the moon toward the earth, I wonder just we would do.

The force is strong with this one.
Yes it is all a hoax.

http://www.nasawatch.com/archives/2008/03/which_one_of_yo.html

But you keep talking out your ass.

http://www.nasawatch.com/archives/2007/03/perpetuating_na.html

Interesting story from NASAwatch: "The planned launch of 50 Juno I model rockets from Cape Canaveral to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Explorer I launch has now been cancelled by the station's wing commander. Although the CCAFS has no quams about launching Deltas, Atlas and other massive rockets, they go into a complete tither when it comes down to launching a 12 inch long model rocket made of balsa wood and paper weighing just under 2 oz. The intended launching was to be used as a fund raiser for the CCAFS Museum with each of the rockets being armed with the smallest engine they can carry, an A8-3. This engine would have propelled each of these 2 oz. Juno I replicas the a computer calculated altitude and or range of only 239 feet and each is recovered with a 12 inch parachute. The Air Force, however, upon discovery of the planned flights felt that these rockets could pose a hazard to the nearby Delta pads- which are made of concrete and steel and are more than 10 times farther from the model's launch site than the rockets can fly. With that as their reason, the Air Force started the red tape machine. Soon the USAF Jags got involved and wanted a held harmless form signed by everyone near the launch site. Next, a USAF person of non-importance decided to contact NASA and tell them that the rockets would be firing from the actual Explorer I launch site, which was on their property. Now enters the NASA red tape machine, which demanded a full safety review (keep in mind that kids have been flying such rockets since before NASA was even created). With this red tape storm in full swing, the CCAFS wing commander's office had heard enough and scrubbed all 50 launches. Thus, all over America on January 31, 2008 school kids and adults will celebrate the the day that the US Army launched Explorer I into space by launching model rockets. In spite of the winter conditions, the launches will take place in parks and school yards and back yards all over the United States- every place EXCEPT for Cape Canaveral. In 1958, the US Army restored the nation's pride following Sputnik, but it seems that in 2008, the Air Force and NASA cannot even get out of their own red taped way to launch a simple rocket made of balsa wood and paper.

Kudos to everyone who has worked so hard to keep the rovers roving.

I just want to draw attention to the submitter's link:

        http://www.hspd12jpl.org/

There's a situation brewing where JPL employees (who are employed by Caltech, not the federal government) will be fired if they do not submit to unprecedented invasions of their privacy. Some other relevant links:

        http://www.nasawatch.com/archives/2007/08/hspd12_c oncerns.html
        http://www.nasawatch.com/archives/2007/05/nasa_jpl _hspd12.html
        http://www.editthis.info/jpl_rebadging/Main_Page

Kudos to everyone who has worked so hard to keep the rovers roving.

I just want to draw attention to the submitter's link:

        http://www.hspd12jpl.org/

There's a situation brewing where JPL employees (who are employed by Caltech, not the federal government) will be fired if they do not submit to unprecedented invasions of their privacy. Some other relevant links:

        http://www.nasawatch.com/archives/2007/08/hspd12_c oncerns.html
        http://www.nasawatch.com/archives/2007/05/nasa_jpl _hspd12.html
        http://www.editthis.info/jpl_rebadging/Main_Page

I don't want to hear that. Don't misunderstand; I don't begrudge a single dime spent on it. I take it on faith that those who know best are building something incredible. Analysis of the early universe is crucial to cosmology. I get it.

There are two things happening here: The first is that the angular resolution of a telescope depends on the wavelegth. The longer the wavelength, the lower the resolution. JWST is about four times larger than Hubble but it is optimized for a wavelength that is 4 times longer so it replaces Hubble in resolution at 2 microns. Secondly, for ten meter telescopes on the ground, their 10 micron resolution is not as good as the best seeing, so since the resolution and seeing basically add in quadrature (sqrt(resolution^2+seeing^2)), you can get pretty close to the actual resolution of the Keck at 10 microns. So, since the Keck is larger that JWST, it can do better on resolution. It can't, by a long way, do better on sensitivity. Hubble beats ground based telescopes on resolution because the seeing on the ground is larger than the actual resolution of telescopes of the same size or even larger.

The high-resolution "pretty pictures" aspect of Hubble means a lot. Perhaps more that is appreciated in academia. If all the money and drama of NASA produced nothing but Hubble it has been worth it. NASA is billing JWST as Hubble's replacement. Is it? Really? Honestly?

I think that it more than replaces Hubble in the sense that it has the same resolution, but since the universe was smaller early on, less of it is spread out over the same amount of sky so that the physical scales are magnified optically. Beyond the epoch of reionization, you can't see anything in the visible because the universe is opaque, but at 2 microns, you'll have improved resolution compares to what Hubble observes when the universe was half to a quarter of its present age. Because of this magnification, it quite important to have the deepest possible and highest quality Hubble images, especially at Z band where the Hubble ACS is actually fully sampled so that we can really know that new sources observed with JWST are not present in Hubble images. The magnifiaction means that you have to work harder because photons are sread out over more pixels in the camera. Hopefully the ACS can be repaired in the next servicing mission.

Personally, the most thrilling aspect of contemporary astronomy is extrasolar planets. The ESA is detecting Earth size objects from the ground. Will JWST be able to contribute to this? I can't help but wonder what sort of space-based planet finding/resolving capability could be had for $4.5G.

This is getting more specialized as a field. I think the Terrestrial Planet Finder mission http://www.nasa.gov/vision/universe/newworlds/tpf- 20070411.html is going to make this search more systematic. JWST may be able to do followup on discovered planets though as Spitzer has done: http://www.nasawatch.com/archives/2005/03/upcoming _extras.html

Note all the question marks. I'm not making an argument. I just haven't got a frig'n clue what to think about JWST as a "Hubble replacement." Convince me. I want to hear that this machine will carry on producing the sort of output that inspires the public to keep NASA funded because, one way or another, Hubble is going down and this is what we're going to be left with, if we're fortunate.

Public support of Hubble has been crucial to keeping NASA focused on ways to avoid not discarding this great asset. My second favorite boss once related to me something that was said during the debate about funding the Superconducting Super Collider (SSC). The question was why should we fund this when we have all these other priorites and

Well, he could, but he likes to do things slowly so that most people won't notice.

Like what? Attempted kidnapping and assault? Only if you are an astronaut.

There's a rumor that NASA will announce the discovery of liquid water at or near Mars' surface.

God I hope that's true.

And I hope the aquifer is substantial.

Second, a glance at the official purpose of NASA (as described in the amended act that established NASA) reveals that NASA oversees nonmilitary US activity in space, that it should "seek and encourage, to the maximum extent possible, the fullest commercial use of space", and then as the first of the activities that NASA should engage (which follow these previous declarations) "The expansion of human knowledge of the Earth and of phenomena in the atmosphere and space."

In other words, science isn't the main priority at NASA nor IMHO should it be. So claiming that NASA is "stealing from science" and is a "feeder for the aerospace business' policy" ignores that encouraging "commercial use" of space is a higher priority and that the recent moves can be rationalized as doing just that. I'm not saying they actually are fulfilling their purpose, just that it's not enough to criticize a NASA move by saying that it takes away from space science.

IMHO, the current manned missions do little to support NASA primary purposes. It's just salt in the wounds that they are funded with money taken from the space science budget. Nor is NASA addressing significant problems with the proposed missions. For example, we have no idea what the health consequences are to extended living in Martian and Lunar gravity (0.4 and 0.16 gees respectively). Assuming the Ares launch vehicles remain unchanged, we don't have backup vehicles in case these fail. If the Ares V vehicle is grounded for a couple of years of NASA soul-searching (ie, NASA conducts an accident investigation), then all programs that depend on this launcher are halted for a similar length of time. This will generate huge expenses each time it happens. We aren't studying the Moon very well given the ambition to colonize the Moon.

Finally, given the importance of space science missions to future US commercial activity in space, it's not clear to me why these missions have been scaled back or delayed. It will ultimately just add to the cost of the missions and thwart one of the prime objectives of NASA.

The action was issued during a budget presentation by Richard Fox during which Suffredini was told that the ISS program has a $100 million shortfall for FY 2007. One of the impacts of shutting all science down for FY07 is that it will take as long as 3 years (FY08 - 10) to restore the capability to operate payloads aboard ISS. If implemented, the shut down would close the Payload Operations Integration Center (POIC) at MSFC, lay off both the contractor flight controller and facility support staff, as well as contractor staff at both JSC and KSC who support payload integration.

2006: Inserts foot in mouth and rotates vigorously: http://www.nasawatch.com/archives/2006/05/peter_di amandis.html Yes, he apologized. Let's hope he doesn't do a repeat or the Heinlein Prize will be even more tarnished.

Obviously you don't read http://www.nasawatch.com/. Sure, Congress doles out specific amounts of money to specific groups. A little internal reorganization on the part of the powers-that-be at NASA, however, completely negates this "line-item" ability you speak of. I've seen it first-hand. Sure, there's some representative interest that pushes some projects better than others, but that makes very little difference. Instead, almost all of NASA's science efforts are being slaughtered because they get grouped as "exploration initiatives" rather than "science initiatives." Then, all the money for exploration gets siphoned from the transplanted science projects.

It's sick.

Hooray for the "Post Anonymously" checkbox.

this guy is a hack and defintly has an agenda

more info on this guy here

http://www.nasawatch.com/archives/2006/02/george_d eutsch.html

Throwing money at problems doesn't work. It just turns it into a more expensive problem,like the space station, which by my reckoning has cost at least $60 billion dollars (arguably more like $80 billion) and does diddly-squat. In the case in question, the problem is internal NASA politics and culture, which is highly resistant to change, often self-righteously so. This is why most of what NASA really gets done is executed by non-NASA entitites: JPL (run by Cal Tech), APL (run by Johns Hopkins), and various university groups, non-profits and consortia.

The other problem with NASA is a problem everywhere: pork barrel politics. Once money starts going down a hole, it keeps going down there because the congress critters need it to. Here's a summary of my idea to get rid of it:

1. At least triple Congressional salaries and beef up the pension to make the job attractive to a wider talent base. You can't keep two homes, one of them in D.C., for any less than $350,000/year, and current slary for most is $162,100/yr. This small investment would pay off in spades - Ithink we should value our legislators at least as miuch as our college basketball coaches.
2. Let each state determine that state's method of electing or appointing and unseating senators. I think the ideal would be a lifetime appointment by the governor with legislative approval and with recall by a 2/3 vote of the legislature.
3. Representatives still elected directly, but limited to a single 6 year term. Stagger the elections so discontent with a particular party's policies can be felt every two years.
4. Require each congressperson to sign their earmarks.

Because the guy in charge of the project, Professor Pillinger, was too busy bragging about how his probe was so superior to NASA designs.

Actually, this shouldn't be labeled as flamebait.

Prof Pillinger has been bagging on NASA and the NASA probes for some time (esp about cost).

This announcement may in fact be about really finding Beagle 2. It might also be a desperate attempt to regain some sort of credibility. Pillinger was damned pretty thoroughly by that ESA report on the Beagle 2 mission.

NASA has a way of bowing to pressure where they will say, "Oh, sure, we'll open it up to ____" and then making sure it won't happen behind the scenes.

Indeed. For some recent examples of this, just check out this posting from NASA Watch.

One example: NASA Selects ATK to be Prime Contractor for First Stage of Next Generation Crew Launch Vehicle. Reader note from the page: "What is even more interesting is this was released during Thanksgiving week, with a due date of Dec. 2. How is anyone supposed to do the research required for even a minimal response in 7 working days? Somehow this doesn't seem fair or realistic." (It should also be mentioned that the solicitation was pretty much tailored so that only ATK could qualify.)

Which doesn't really support your original claim that Soyuz is 'much safer'. At best it shows it is might be slightly safer, but the sample size is small enough that is statistically pretty meaningless. Especially if you start to look at the other close calls Soyuz has had: Soyuz 5 the first attempt of Soyuz 18 the first attempt at Soyuz t-10 The first 2 of those were only non-fatal by a large amount of luck.

Nor is recent history flawless:
- Loss of cabin pressure on TMA-6 landing http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/9888881/
- Thruster malfunction on TMA-5 http://www.russianspaceweb.com/iss_soyuztma5.html
- battery problems on TMA-5 http://www.nasawatch.com/archives/2005/04/soyuz_ba ttery_p.html
- Pyro accident and H2O2 tank problems in TMA-5 prelaunch processing. http://www.spaceflightnow.com/station/exp10/status .html
- Fuel pressurization problem on TMA-3 http://www.space.com/missionlaunches/exp8_soyuz_04 0428.html
- Flight computer failure/ballistic landing on TMA-1 http://www.russianspaceweb.com/iss_soyuztma1.html

The above obviously aren't in the same league as the early incidents, but do show a system that is encountering a significant loss of redundancy on nearly every flight. If you go back over the Mir era flights, you will find plenty more, although the Russians were even less inclined to talk about them.

I'm not trying to bash Soyuz... if you offered me a seat today, I'd jump on it. I'm just pointing out that the commonly held assumption that it is a whole lot safer than the shuttle doesn't really add up.

I'd like to put in my 2c.

First of all, I'm affected by this because our company experienced some pretty hefty layoffs due to some science cuts at Ames. We had two projects cut prematurely: one that was probably near 90% complete and another just over 50% complete.

Here's my problem with what NASA did: Say what you want about whether NASA should have built the ISS. It was their decision. The issue arises when NASA makes the decision to build the ISS, then years later in the middle of the build, simply quits. Make a decision and stick with it, NASA. Had you completed the ISS, all that money would not have been lost. Had you never started the ISS, all that money would not have been lost. In your current situation, you have royally screwed yourselves.

Go Space Privatization!

didn't we just read that nasa is laying off 300 at JPL because priorities are shifting to manned missions? Thats a pretty shabby reward for such a fantastic engineering team.

Wrong. I work for JPL and am very familiar with these layoffs and the overall NASA situation. No NASA Centers are hiring. Some have more work to do than they have civil service employees. This work is being offered to those NASA Centers with "uncovered workforce". For the purposes of this workload management among the Centers, NASA is excluding JPL, that is, unstaffed work at other NASA Centers is not being offered to JPL. As a reminder, JPL is a federally funded research and development center (FFRDC) managed by Caltech (all staff at JPL are employees of Caltech). The NASA exercise appears to be limited to Civil Service staff only. See http://www.nasawatch.com/ for more information on the situation at JPL and other NASA Centers.

Well JPL is in Pasadena, but Ames is hit too and it's of course in Mountain View next to Google...

If we believe the nasawatch site, it seems that this RIF might be structured as a buyout (the carrot), with a later layoff (the stick). Although ususally intended to convince the high-priced old-timers to leave (to avoid the inevitable layoff), this strategy often has the unintended consequence of scaring the good people who can find better situations into taking the money and finding a better situation.

So yes, I think there's a good chance that quite a few people among those leaving were among the best and the brightest, since they are the ones with the best prospects at finding a new position and might be brave enough to take the money and take a chance at google (if they want them).

There's more on this in Nasawatch's Personnel News Archive.

Hm... I went through three rounds of rejected submission attempts earlier trying to submit this story, several hours before this version was posted. In any case, here's my version of the submission, which has many more links:

NASA Watch, New Scientist, and Space Ref report that Dr. Michael D. Griffin has been nominated as the next administrator of NASA, to replace Sean O'Keefe. As NASA head, Griffin will be tasked with implementing the Vision for Space Exploration. Griffin is currently head of the Space Department at the Applied Physics Laboratory at JHU, is president-elect of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, and has a doctorate in aerospace engineering. He's noted for being passionate about space exploration and having strong management experience. His nomination has been praised by a number of groups, including the Planetary Society, the National Space Society, and House Science Committee Democrats and Republicans. In the past, Mike Griffin has testified to Congress on the future of human spaceflight, the vision for space exploration, and the danger of asteroid impacts. He was also rebuked in the early 90s for pointing out problems with the space station's review process.

As for my own thoughts, I think Griffin is an excellent pick. I'm amazed that they were able to find somebody with as much technical expertise as him who also has such a large amount of experience with managing large organizations. According to the space.com article, Griffin can be expected to make maximum use of the emerging commercial spaceflight industry.

In the past he's also said the following, which I approve of highly: "What is needed is to retire the Shuttle Orbiter, and its expensive support infrastructure," Griffin wrote. "It simply does not serve the needs of exploration and it is too expensive, to logistically fragile, and insufficiently safe for continued use as a low Earth orbit transport vehicle."

In the past he's been highly in favor of the government constructing a new heavy-lift launch vehicle, which I somewhat disagree with. Such an endeavor could easily end up being a bottomless money pit. Hopefully SpaceX's low-cost launches in the coming months will help raise awareness of frequently-launched smaller vehicles.

Hm... I went through three rounds of rejected submission attempts earlier trying to submit this story, several hours before this version was posted. In any case, here's my version of the submission, which has many more links:

NASA Watch, New Scientist, and Space Ref report that Dr. Michael D. Griffin has been nominated as the next administrator of NASA, to replace Sean O'Keefe. As NASA head, Griffin will be tasked with implementing the Vision for Space Exploration. Griffin is currently head of the Space Department at the Applied Physics Laboratory at JHU, is president-elect of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, and has a doctorate in aerospace engineering. He's noted for being passionate about space exploration and having strong management experience. His nomination has been praised by a number of groups, including the Planetary Society, the National Space Society, and House Science Committee Democrats and Republicans. In the past, Mike Griffin has testified to Congress on the future of human spaceflight, the vision for space exploration, and the danger of asteroid impacts. He was also rebuked in the early 90s for pointing out problems with the space station's review process.

As for my own thoughts, I think Griffin is an excellent pick. I'm amazed that they were able to find somebody with as much technical expertise as him who also has such a large amount of experience with managing large organizations. According to the space.com article, Griffin can be expected to make maximum use of the emerging commercial spaceflight industry.

In the past he's also said the following, which I approve of highly: "What is needed is to retire the Shuttle Orbiter, and its expensive support infrastructure," Griffin wrote. "It simply does not serve the needs of exploration and it is too expensive, to logistically fragile, and insufficiently safe for continued use as a low Earth orbit transport vehicle."

In the past he's been highly in favor of the government constructing a new heavy-lift launch vehicle, which I somewhat disagree with. Such an endeavor could easily end up being a bottomless money pit. Hopefully SpaceX's low-cost launches in the coming months will help raise awareness of frequently-launched smaller vehicles.

Nasawatch has great coverage of the nomination with some interesting quotes.

In synopsis, Griffin has been willing eschew political expediency and stand on principle.

I enjoy some blogs, although I have to admit that the signal-to-noise ratio is pretty bad. Here's a few which I personally find interesting and read regularly. I'm a neuro, space, and robotics geek, so the list is biased as such.

* Reusable Launch Vehicle (RLV) News: The most thorough spaceflight blog around, focusing on reusable systems.
* NASA Watch: A well-known site with regular critiques of NASA.
* Free Republic: Like slashdot, but for ultra-conservatives. I sometimes like to go there to get a better understanding of what goes through the heads of people who think differently from me.
* Alan Boyle's Cosmic Log: "Quantum fluctuations in space, science, and exploration"
* Democratic Underground: The extreme left's version of Free Republic.
* Instapundit: The slashdot-equivalent of political weblogging, with a somewhat libertarian slant. Known for causing "Instalanches" on innocent web servers, analogous to "Slashdottings."
* Daily Kos: Probably the most influential liberal blog.
* Transterrestrial Musings: a libertarian space analyst who helped me understand why it's possible to be intelligent and support the war in Iraq at the same time. He sometimes posts some fantastic satires.
* theferrett's livejournal: sometimes writes some very insightful and well-composed essays
* spacexploration livejournal community: Space-related miscellany and discussion.
* politicsforum livejournal community: Sometimes has some pretty intelligent political discussion.
* robots.net: Robotics news
* Space Politics: "Because sometimes the most important orbit is the Beltway"
* Rocket Man Blog: Rarely updated, but has very insightful and informed analysis of spaceflight and rocketry.
* Howard Lovy's NanoBot: Nanotechnology news and commentary

Looks like we will need to develop some sort of (funded) international contingency plan to deal with dangers from space, even if it is eventually determined this particular rock will miss us.

Check out this congressional statement by former Brigadier General Simon "Pete" Worden on the topic of detecting and mitigating the threat of Near Earth Objects. Coincidentally, he's also in the running to become the next NASA Administrator, although he's been somewhat critical of NASA and the large aerospace contractors in the past.

Essentially, international cooperation would be great for the actual detection of asteroids -- you want all the eyes you can get. However, when it comes to actually diverting an asteroid, an effort by a single large country would probably be better than trying to cobble together some sort of International Coalition to Divert the Asteroid. The actual financial cost probably wouldn't be too great, although it'd probably make use of some weapons tech which a country wouldn't want to share with others.

FYI, there's been some interesting activity over on NASAWatch about the APS report. Basically, Keith Cowing (who runs NASAWatch) criticized the APS's report and said they had a long history of opposing human spaceflight, and the APS threatened to sue for slander.

http://www.nasawatch.com/archives/000323.html#more Read that for the official response from NASA.

To follow the space election political discussion including the fate of the shuttle from both sides, read this thread on NASA Watch.

Do the Russians even have the money to do this?

NASA Watch only had a short quip that funding was a fantasy.

While the Russian economy is growing, it still seems less than likely that they'll be able to afford this. They have a PPP GDP smaller than France, Italy, or Brazil right now.

Now, I suppose that some of these sites are either flying under the corporate radar or are operating under some sort of trademark/copyright exception but I really don't know.

In this particular case, I have to question UC's wisdom in going after this site. I don't see any indication in the "nastygram" (classy nomenclature) that there was offensive material of some sort and I don't expect the students running the site were making a ton of cash on it. It seems like much ado about nothing...unless UC thinks that any student using those initials dilutes their "brand." Does that mean, too, that if University of Chicago puts a U in front of the C on their football team's helmets, they're going to get sued?

And here is a Linky for the keyboard-challenged people.

After seeing the way they did software development--no formal testing, no design reviews, some groups didn't even use configuration management! This was on the system that stored and distributed the Shuttle telemetry. I actually worked up the nerve to take advantage of an opportunity to speak with a top level manager about my concerns.

Now, maybe I'm not the most persuasive speaker. I was just a guy in the trenches with some experience from the "real world" that new how to do some things better. It took all the gumption I had to pursue the issues for as long as I did, speaking with various people in all of the levels of management. Since no one else saw things as I did, I was just the guy "crying wolf".

Most people don't realize that most of the people working in the Shuttle program are not NASA employees, but contractors--most working for USA. So it's more than just a NASA culture issue, it's also the NASA contractors and their management.

Here's a question on a related topic: How many times has NASA tried and failed to replaced the launch control system and failed. (Hint: the last one was called CLCS!). Here's some info

Answer: 2 (that I know of)

Keith Cowing of NasaWatch weblog is one of the Americans doing research at 'Mars Summer Camp' on Devon Island. Illustrated journals are available for last year and for the season just starting: [example and links]

As a longtime fan of NasaWatch (which is a weblog), I'd loooove to see a real ISS weblog, which would be updated continually with all the tidbits passing thru the crewman's interest, and addressed to his peers.

But what Lu is doing isn't even a Web journal-- he's writing long essays on set topics that are targeted for a popular audience by 'talking down'.

The links are just abbreviations, so you have to explore to discover what they mean, but the advantage to this is that I can cite the abbreviation easily each time I link a story found via that source.

The idea of putting them in rows at the top is so that frequent visitors to my blog can jump to other sources if they don't find anything new/interesting at mine. (I call them 'jumpbars'.) Lately I've started adding little asterisks for sources that have recently done especially noteworthy updates.

My local startpage duplicates the jumpbars, and adds less-frequent sources like monthlies. When I started blogging I made a serious effort to learn the update schedules of every online periodical, and I created a generic startpage that summarised these. (It's badly out of date now.) The idea was to encourage people to copy this page and customise it to their interests. But knowing when zines usually update makes it easy to prioritize my surfing-schedule. (I wish all periodicals spelled this info out on their front page, eg The Onion comes out late Tuesday.)

I think NewsHub still isn't appreciated for its headline-aggregation pages. I'd use NewsLinx too except that most all the tech zines have decided to use obnoxiously junky html-design, so I stick with Slashdot and the Register for tech news.

My politics are lefty, and Sam Smith's Progressive Review gives a very deep daily summary with links, while Common Dreams reprints full articles from many major sources. A newcomer is Memory Hole that specializes in stories the mainstream media tries to suppress/ignore.

For space news, NasaWatch is tops. I've mostly given up on Drudge and Salon, and am having doubts about the BBC science page.

Other daily faves include the AstroPic of the Day, two poem-of-the-day sites, Zippy the Pinhead, and various blogs. A weekly that I think is underappreciated is Dean Baker's Economic Reporting Review that gives a very dry weekly critique of economics-propaganda in the NY Times and Washington Post. (They very systematically distort the facts with the obvious goal of redistributing the wealth upwards.)

Also, I don't know the technical details of Israel's telecom infrastructure, but I can tell you that Bezeq makes any US phone co look like saints in the customer service realm.

Not that you care, though.

...Doesn't work. Ask NASA .

Funny thing is ...

Atlas V (and Delta 4) was funded through the DOD's eelv program to give it assured access to space.

If you check nasawatch they have an article about the military taking the X-34 bird back from NASA.

Now if they would only expand the HomeLand defense program to include targeting of spammers ...

well, it seems that in the same vein. I tried to submit this earlier, but I presume that this article is the reason that it was rejected. :D

I found this while I was reading NASA Watch (a slashdot like site with space as it's main focus). It seems that they are Ebay auctioning off a trip to the International Space Station. Last I checked it was at $19 mil and hadn't quite met the reserve. Sounds like a market to me...

I draw slashdot's attention to the fact that the story was originally broken by Keith Cowing's excellent NASA Watch web page. I expect that they will get the bird to GEO, although Space Command doesn't seem to have issued any new orbital data for it in several days.

Sorry, that link should be http://www.nasawatch.com

http://www.nasawatch.com

'nuff said...

I highly recommend the NASA Watch website, which has a highly informed (and often highly critical) view of NASA and especially Goldin.

He wrote an editorial a couple weeks ago saying that he didn't think Goldin would be replaced any time soon. Well obviously that prediction turned out to be wrong, but I am eagerly awaiting his comments on Goldin's departure.

I think Goldin was seen by a lot of people as a bureaucrat, as someone who was holding NASA back, not advocating for them strongly enough in Congress, and not setting his sights high. The ISS has become a monstrosity that has gobbled up dozens of other scientific missions, and now it looks like barely any science will be possible due to massive cost-overruns and then the slashing of key portions of the station.

My personal hope, at this point almost prayer, is that the new director has the vision and balls to put humans on Mars within the next 20 years. Right now it seems almost impossible that that could happen, but it should have happened already, and I for one am sick of waiting.

I highly recommend the NASA Watch website, which has a highly informed (and often highly critical) view of NASA and especially Goldin.

He wrote an editorial a couple weeks ago saying that he didn't think Goldin would be replaced any time soon. Well obviously that prediction turned out to be wrong, but I am eagerly awaiting his comments on Goldin's departure.

I think Goldin was seen by a lot of people as a bureaucrat, as someone who was holding NASA back, not advocating for them strongly enough in Congress, and not setting his sights high. The ISS has become a monstrosity that has gobbled up dozens of other scientific missions, and now it looks like barely any science will be possible due to massive cost-overruns and then the slashing of key portions of the station.

My personal hope, at this point almost prayer, is that the new director has the vision and balls to put humans on Mars within the next 20 years. Right now it seems almost impossible that that could happen, but it should have happened already, and I for one am sick of waiting.