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I love my Murdoch Block plugin. Here's a non-Fox News source, which includes a back-link to their recent accident history.

Well, you could always try RT:

http://rt.com/search/?q=Soyuz&filter=news

(for those who don't get the joke -- RT is Russia Today, an English language news program which tends to bash the U.S. in general, and be borderline Russian propoganda. ... and right now, they don't have anything on this incident, but they'd probably have an interesting spin if/when they put it up.)

Of course, anyone who really cared about other coverage can just put 'Soyuz' into Google News:

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&gl=us&tbm=nws&q=Soyuz

Unless you're boycotting Google, and then you can just go to space.com:

http://www.space.com/14381-russian-soyuz-spacecraft-cracks-march-launch.html

funding runs out November 2012. The cost is $20 million per additional year, and NASA would like four more years to have 7.5 year mission, that will allow them to get more transits from earth sized worlds that are hiding in noise currently (stars are more variable on average than was thought, a discovery in itself) http://www.space.com/13857-nasa-kepler-mission-extension-alien-planets.html

Excellent idea - the tiles cost NASA around $1,000 a piece, and since an iPad is more than twice as big as an average tile, it would have been a nice cost savings. And everyone knows an iPad in an appropriate protective case can handle 2000+ degree reentry temperatures.

I bet Apple would have donated the iPads for free if they could put the Apple logo on the tail of the shuttle, *and* NASA could light up the iPads and play Goodyear Blimp style advertising for even more revenue. The advertising alone could have made the Shuttle revenue positive.

If only the iPad existed back when the shuttle was designed, it might still be flying.

"China always adheres to the use of outer space for peaceful purposes, and opposes weaponization or any arms race in outer space," Thursday's white paper states.

And yet, ppl will ignore the fact that this SAME PEACEFUL SPACE PROGRAM shot a sat out of the sky.

But even this article missed some interesting points by China. The Chinese government on Thursday (Dec. 29) issued a broad statement on its five-year space program, saying top priorities include developing three new launch vehicles — including a rapid-response launch system —
Basically, they want their civilian launch system to be able to launch on short notice. The west's DOD units want that as well. But none of the civilians systems make that a priority.

It's a COPV, see here or page 11 here. The wrapping has probably shielded it enough during the atmospheric re-entry and then ripped away, or it could be from lower altitude flight. In fact NASA and ESA have already studied this object, and most responsible news outlets have explained it along with the newsreport. The only real question is which mission or ship it is from, but unfortunately that might never be found out.

Everything you've said is completely correct. But I'd like to point out an additional, often underappreciated problem with the shuttle. The US military insisted that the shuttle be able to take off from a variety of other locations including Vandenberg http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vandenberg_AFB_Space_Launch_Complex_6. They wanted it to be able to launch into a near polar orbit, send out a satellite and land all in a single orbit of the Earth. This was so that if things ever got hot with the USSR we could launch additional spy satellites faster than the Soviets could shoot them down. This article http://www.space.com/1438-chapter-opens-space-shuttle-born-compromise.html discusses this in detail. There are also other requirements that the military had but it seems that the details remain classified. So we should add to the list:

4) You don't use a single vehicle that you try to design to do every possible orbit on the off chance that it might be useful.

The problem is not landing on the comet, the problem is that the comet's gravity is so weak that conventional sampling techniques will tend to push the spacecraft away, and it is not clear that you will be able to anchor the spacecraft firmly enough to avoid this. Similar problems exist with tether based sample return (where a long tether is used to match velocities with a target, and there are only a few seconds available to collect a sample).

There are various proposed solutions for this "touch and go" sampling problem. The recent Decadal Survey provides an overview. Hayabusa tried to fire pellets into Itokawa, to kick up some material for sampling. Other proposed solutions include cores and scoops, "sticky pads," brush wheel samplers. A reasonable approach would probably be to try several attempts, if possible.

The Voyager computers are awesome too. How many other 18-bit word systems are actively maintained today?

I'd love to see the source code, though I'm sure it's terribly boring.

That has been discounted. It was most likely biological contamination when the Surveyor cameras were brought back to Earth.

http://www.space.com/11536-moon-microbe-mystery-solved-apollo-12.html

The landing strategy is quite spectacular, though unfortunately no-one's going to be there to observe it.

For example, if Bill Gates finishes designing his reactor then we could build one on the Moon, and use the uranium there to fuel it. The reactor would power the station and also generate enriched plutonium in the process, wich then could be shot down to Earth using mass driver system to shoot it back to Earth, thus having no need for fuel. Current railguns can already reach the lunar escape velocity, so that shouldn't be a problem.

The problem here as I see it is that the US did the Ben Franklin trade. They exchanged freedom for perceived security. This didn't just happen with actual security (such as the TSA mess) or social security (such as the vast amounts spent on social entitlements). It also happened with the way the US used to do business and research and development.

We're seeing the use of regulation to attempt to protect businesses from competition and labor from economic downturns. Many attempts have been made to inflate the value of certain assets such as residences. But I have a special rant for the way R&D is done today in the US (and pretty much, the rest of the developed world).

Prior to the Second World War, most scientific research was privately funded in the US. Now it's mostly funded by government. While lots of money is being spent, we're seeing a lack of a crucial form of research, namely, research paid for by the parties interested in the research. We still have Google, for example, but most of the great business research labs have died or dwindled greatly.

Researchers and businesses have become dependent on government funds. This is revealed in the spectacle of the MIT president whining about the lost of US innovation while simultaneously, begging for more public funds to continue the destructive cycle.

Finally, I'm sure that somewhere in this discussion we shall see someone invoke "basic research" in an attempt, deliberate or not, to conflate indiscriminate squandering of public funds with research on basic or fundamental scientific endeavors. A brief perusal of the history of science shows that most basic research had concrete, near future application.

The invention of the telescope gave a trade advantage to the Italian merchant who could identify incoming ships sooner than the competition. The discovery of the laws of gravity allowed one to begin to calculate the trajectory of cannon balls (along with the concurrent invention of calculus). Exploration into the phenomena of electricity and magnetism led to the invention of lightning rods and a better understanding of how the magnetic compass worked (and didn't work!). Number theory would have application to cryptology, and to probability and combinatorics. Probability, combinatorics, and statistics would have application to making profitable gambling games.

The point is that it is rare to find research in the past that didn't have near future application. So when people advocate such today, they are doing so contrary to thousands of years of human history. As I see it, the chief effect is to introduce an intangible benefit that can't be questioned rationally. Spending a few billion on a fancy particle collider without near future application is ok because there will be some nebulous future gain which we can handwave to, which will justify the expenditure.

My experience however is that when private sources actually do research, they do so for vastly less cost than publicly funded sources. For example, a couple weeks back, I helped launch an airship to 95k feet. That beats the old world record by about 30k feet. And it was done for almost three orders of magnitude less cost than the previous attempt, which was publicly funded (the cost of the effort was $30k plus the time of about a dozen volunteers while the previous effort was, so I gather, almost $200 million including launch costs and construction of the vehicle).

Actually no, the statute of limitations applies to regular citizens also.

It can be ignored when convenient.

Looking at that image, the two main features look like symmetric interference patterns, fairly simple ones. Why not do the Fourier (or other) analysis to recompose the original light signals?

You might be right, but I think it is possible those are jets being emitted from the black hole... they say they were able to measure the temp across parts of it, the hottest parts blasting out of it could be those bright points on the image. It would be quite interesting if that was ever confirmed.

http://www.space.com/5285-powerful-black-hole-jet-explained.html

Rockets are easy to refuel. Here's a nice example of plans (well under way, lots of stuff already flying) to make a modern re-usable, re-fuelable rockets:

http://www.space.com/13139-space-fully-reusable-rockets-works.html

Thing is, he said "do the math" but he hardly did any math.

Plus he seems to assume that colonizing space is the same thing as going to Mars. You don't have to go to Mars to colonize space. And in my opinion going to Mars is a stupid idea as the "next step".

In fact what NASA should do instead of being so obsessed with Mars is to learn how to build practical space stations with artificial gravity - possible methods are spinning space stations using tethers and counterweights (which don't have to be deadweight); and radiation shielding - this could be done with lots of water (you'd probably want to bring lots of water anyway). It costs a lot to send tons of water up, but the space shuttle has cost many billions. For a billion USD you can send up 100 tons of stuff.

Once you've built a space station where humans can survive as long as you keep sending them supplies, rather than till their bones, muscles and other stuff rot away ( http://www.spacedaily.com/reports/Astronauts_reporting_vision_problems_999.html ), then going to Mars (but not landing there) just becomes a matter of time, supplies and not too bad luck. Without the artificial gravity the people in space will rot away pretty quickly.

Once you have a decent space station, it will be more hospitable than Mars. The asteroid belt would be a more practical destination than Mars - you don't have to fight gravity as much to get resources. What you need for the next step are space stations which can convert stuff like asteroids and sunlight into resources you can use.

Once you have practical space factories, mining systems and power supplies (in addition to the first bit - artificial gravity and shielding), you can have a sustainable space colony. You don't have to keep sending them water - there are asteroids with lots of water ( http://www.space.com/1526-largest-asteroid-fresh-water-earth.html ).

Yes there are lots of other details to get right and it will cost a lot of money. But for perspective the Federal Reserve has created more than 9 trillion US dollars since 2008.

Which several analyses of the cosmic microwave background suggest may in fact not be valid assumptions.

With regards to this I really like this new theory. It has the advantage of also doing away with dark energy.

Knowledge and technology are all well and good, except when used for evil or to sell advertising, I guess...

A Solar Storm Strikes Earthâ"and Provides a Warning for the Future

New Forecast: Sun's 'Superstorms' Could Doom Satellites

Could The Sun Set Off The Next Big Natural Disaster?

PS: The sun will go supernova in the near future. Please panic accordingly. :-)

I get a little frustrated every time I see people confidently asserting this. The assumption seems to be that because there was no market in the past this will be true forever...after all, if it were possible wouldn't somebody already be doing it? This same argument could have been used prior to the advent of the transcontinental railroad or the internet. In each case it was difficult to see more than a marginal business case before it happened and took off. The same is true with space. That being said, there are a lot of smart people whose job it is to look closely and try to see a pathway to a genuine market, who think it can happen. There are a lot of Newspace players I could cite, but since they are easy to dismiss as dreamers, lets look at Boeing instead.

Boeing is a conservative company and I think if they are going to do the CST-100 they are going to want a fairly fault tolerant business case to help mitigate the risk of fielding it. I think they are willing to give it a shot (in competition with 3 other players) only because there is a mixture of different market possibilities which provide redundancy if any single market does not work out for them.

-NASA ISS servicing
-Future non-ISS NASA missions (if Orion never flies)
-Sovereign Clients to Bigelow stations
-Tourism to Bigelow stations
-Private research to Bigelow stations

This last one is something which I think is often overlooked and which could be bigger than people think because I think many people ask "How many companies would have both the big $$$ and the research needs to rent a module and fly their own astronaut?". I think this question makes some fundamental assumptions that are probably wrong and consequently leads to the answer (not very many) which causes this type of demand to be sidelined in the discussion.

The more likely scenario is the rise of some companies that act as middleman human tended in space lab operators. These companies are the ones holding the leases with Bigelow and flying the astronauts, and then they turn around and provide a turnkey, low hassle, cost effective, user friendly way for companies and universities to get their research projects flown. Because the projects are paying for only what they need and not having to personally manage astronaut staffing & station leasing, the market is open to a much broader set of users than might otherwise be possible.

Because of the commercial nature of things, I am sure Bigelow and these middleman companies will be happy to keep CCDev craft flight rates and station facility sizing in line with the demand from the market so there won't be long waits in line for research projects to fly like you've seen with ISS and other options which have been available historically. Potientially this could cause what has historically been a fairly minor market to bloom into a much larger one.

Don't believe it'll work out? Have a look at the success of Nanoracks on ISS:
http://www.thespaceshow.com/detail.asp?q=1591

Beyond that, history does seem to give us a high degree of confidence that there will be at least a minor tourist market of a couple people per year based on flights of anousheh ansari, charles simonyi, dennis tito, eric anderson, greg olsen, guy laliberte, mark shuttleworth, etc. particularly since Bigelow would be cheaper than a Soyuz/ISS trip. Beyond that, there even seems to be a market for beyond earth tourism: http://www.thespacereview.com/article/1855/1

Even if tourism is a relatively modest business, it adds to the cumulative business case provided by the research market.

Then there are the soveriegn clients: http://www.space.com/9358-bigelow-aerospace-soars-private-space-station-deals.html

It is unclear at this point how large this market is, but it looks real enough to at least

I'll answer your question - It's called "bias."

Once someone has seen something and developed their opinion on it, almost everything they see from that point on is driven in the direction they wish it to be. Note: read past this next statement BEFORE you develop an opinion, readers. I suspect (but don't have scientific evidence) that it's related to loss of time and ego - i.e. one spends three months studying something deeply, with revelations, then is suddenly hit with information that discredits it wholly. Said person is not likely to change their opinion simply because it (subconsciously) renders the last three months' worth of time worthless and lowers their intelligent ego factor. Example: See the article here. It represents the finding that solar flares don't specifically come from a single area of the sun; they can simultaneously come from multiple areas - new discovery. Scientists have to expand their minds. Let's see how many do and how many try to prove it's BS.

What I'm saying is that I'm not FOR or AGAINST global warming being a fact. I'm saying that there is evidence for it AND against it, and those who have chosen their path stick with it.

Open-mindedness and reverse of thought have always been and (probably) always will be a "bad" in politics and science. Everyone is supposed to have evidence of their opinion and stick with it or they are devalued. No one wants to be devalued, so they play the social game as it stands.

End statement: it isn't that no one cares; it's that the ones who care either have their mind set on the + or the -. The ones who don't and are looking for new evidence to help lead them one way or another are always disappointed in the end because of the bickering of the above + or - groups.

I'm going to be marked as flamebait or troll is modded because a fact of psychology is that people don't like psychological projection and often engage in displacement as a result. I said I don't have an opinion and am helping to provide insight as to why things aren't progressing, but since people do not see me as being "FOR their opinion", it's automagically converted to hate in their mind. I've studied psychology, so I'm with ya on the whole "I know a lot but...", eldavojohn.

About a minute into this video, after all the fair-use Star Wars guff, there's an animation which will make it pretty clear to you. Put very simply, the smaller star goes around the bigger one (or rather they both revolve around their barycentre) and the planet describes a larger ellipse around both.

Obviously the moon had something to do with this:
http://www.space.com/12981-nasa-photo-shows-moon-soyuz-space-capsule-landing.html

Yep. TFA puts the odds at about 1:3200, actually.

If this were a healthcare study, like the chances of having a heart attack if you eat more than 5 cheese-doodles per day, they would give that 1:3200 figure as the odds of you personally having a heart attack. They would say you have a 0.031% increased risk of having a heart attack when really it's only a 0.0000000000048% increased risk for you personally to experience a heart attack due to cheese-doodle abuse.

In the first link in the summary, there are two images of the satellite--one against a backdrop of Earth and attached to a Space Shuttle manipulation boom. The next image is labeled as being the same thing except against a backdrop of deep space.

If so, then why are there clearly a wall, window and door in the darkened background of the second image? It appears to be a mock-up, or even possibly a scale-model, held in the air by the boom.

Mislabeled image, or is this a "Capricorn One" moment?

Image:
http://i.space.com/images/i/11938/i02/uars-satellite-deployment.jpg?1315422763

Yep. TFA puts it at 1:3200, actually.

Yep. TFA puts the odds at about 1:3200, actually.

A small fleet of net-flinging spacecraft could clear every big piece of space junk out of low-Earth orbit within a dozen years, according to a researcher working on the concept. Each spacecraft, known as an ElectroDynamic Debris Eliminator (EDDE), would capture orbital debris in a net, then drag the junk down out of harm's way. The EDDEs would draw their power from the sun and from Earth's magnetic field rather than rely on costly chemical propellants, helping keep costs down, said Jerome Pearson, president of Star Technology and Research, Inc.

Iran has been accused of jamming satellite connections in the past, as has Libya. The US apparently has the capability.

As for how it's possible, Wikipedia has a brief description of the process. Because of the satellite's distance, it's signal is relatively weak when it reaches the ground (you're familiar with the inverse-square law, right?). A terrestrial broadcast will be much stronger and can drown out the signal from the satellite.

(reposting this because I forgot to login. whoops)

Iran has been accused of jamming satellite connections in the past, as has Libya. The US apparently has the capability.

As for how it's possible, Wikipedia has a brief description of the process. Because of the satellite's distance, it's signal is relatively weak when it reaches the ground (you're familiar with the inverse-square law, right?). A terrestrial broadcast will be much stronger and can drown out the signal from the satellite.

The Apollo conspiracy theorists don't even acknowledge the pictures of the stuff the various Apollo crews left on the moon taken by just about everyone with the necessary equipment here on Earth

Correct me if I'm wrong - but wouldn't they have good reason to be skeptical of such claims?

I don't remember any photos of the moon landing site as taken from Earth. In fact, it was my understanding that resolving power of just about any optical system in existence on Earth is inadequate?

I know photos were taken from an orbiting satellite a few years ago, the LRO. Even in those pictures the landing site is a mere few pixels;
http://www.space.com/6997-photos-reveal-apollo-11-moon-landing-site.html

This is you typical self loathing dribble that has been stock and trade of the self absorbe elitists since the start of time. I am sure that Zug made a very in depth study on how cave man culture had declined since they started farming instead of going out on mammoth hunts. There is nothing wrong with studying the past the problem is when we worship it.
You want some big ideas http://www.space.com/11200-nasa-100-year-starship-interstellar-travel.html.
Not to mention that we have learned so much about what can work and not. We are sending space probes to Pluto. We have been sending rovers to mars. I wonder when we will send rovers to the moons of Jupiter and Saturn, We are search for and have found planets around other stars. It is easy to dismiss what happens in ones own life time. I had a friend who's grandmother was born in 1900. She went from no airplanes to men landing on the moon and to see the shuttle. When I was young I thought that I would never seen such wonders. In the year that I have been born men had even landed a probe on the moon. Now we have sent probes to most of the solar system. When I was in college people lost touch with old friends because they went to other colleges. You couldn't just call them and most of them didn't have email. Those that did often where on a fido net BBS and it could take a day or so for email to get there. Compuserve was expensive and by the hour. Today we can send messages to friends and make voice calls for next to nothing. When I was a kid cars used leaded gas and no emissions controls to speak of, rivers in the US caught on fire, lake Erie was considered dead, and everyone was sure that the Bison would be extinct in just a few years. Lake Erie isn't pristine and still has problems but it isn't dead and is better than it was. We still have Bison, our cars pollute less, and our water is cleaner. Thing have actually gotten better. Yes we live in an age of wonders and big dreams the only problem we have today is the same one we had yesterday and that seems to be that knowledge seems to come easier than wisdom. Thing is that those before tended to have less of both.
 

Here is another article.

I agree with reading about it on the Internet. I like RSS, but I've found it homogenizes my content so that things don't jump out at me and the really interesting stories get buried with all the mediocre ones. So I keep the following list of bookmarks to check on a weekly basis:

ABC (Australia) Science, ABC (US) Science, Air & Space Magazine, ARKive, Ars Technica, BBC SciTech News, CBS Sci-Tech News, Chet Raymo, Cosmos News, Current: Science, Discover, Discovery News, Edge, Economist Science, EurekAlert!, Flyp media, Futurity, h+, Inkling Magazine, LiveScience, Massimo Pigliucci, Mother Jones Environment, MSNBC Science News, National Geographic News, National Public Radio (US), Natural History Magazine, New Scientist, New York Times Science, New Yorker Science, Newsweek Science, Orion, PhysOrg, Popular Mechanics, Popular Science, R&D Magazine, Ripley's Believe It or Not!, Science Daily, Scientific American, Seed Magazine, Science Cheerleader, Science News, Schrodinger's Kitten, Slashdot Science, Smithsonian, Space.com, The Technium, Time Magazine Science, USA Today Science, US News & World Report Science, Wired News, World Changing

It's possible for monopolies to exist without government intervention.

- without gov't intervention no monopoly can exist, and if there is some dominant business, it's domination is totally temporary.

. Perhaps the business in question is a risky endeavor that no one but a select few wish to take up.

- what does that even mean? Every business is a risky endeavor that only very few are willing to take up. Case in point is private space launches, what can be more risky and time/resource consuming that that? Well, there are things, but this is definitely one of them:

http://www.space.com/11298-spacex-rocket-private-spaceflight-falcon9.html

http://copenhagensuborbitals.com/

http://www.virgingalactic.com/

http://www.armadilloaerospace.com/n.x/Armadillo/Home

Perhaps very few people have the money to provide competition towards an already established business

- this wasn't a problem in the beginning of 20th century, before the Fed started printing all that money and IRS started taking people's incomes away, so there were hundreds, even thousands of competitors in phone business, dozens in electrical power generation AND transmission. Of-course this happened before some businesses in those industries started colluding with the government to get monopoly statuses. Same with pharma and medical profession, which always were private enterprises but eventually became monopolies due to government involvement.

Perhaps the majority help create a monopoly themselves by not shopping elsewhere enough

- that's called demand, if one company provides a solution that is so cost effective and provides so much value, that most people do not bother looking for alternatives, then for a while this business will dominate, but the competition arises anyway, just like with the phone and electrical companies that I mentioned. Those are tough businesses, especially due to name recognition, and still the monopolies there only formed after government intervention.

And without regulation, how would anyone stop companies that cooperate with one another (which could happen if they would receive more money by doing so)?

- nobody wants to share their pie with somebody else, who may or may not succeed being a competitor.

If you have a business and I come over and tell you: I am going to take over your market share because I am going to build a business better than yours. So you think you'd just start paying me money only so that I wouldn't do it? How many people would you be willing to support this way, because that's what this amounts to. No no, what you do is you laugh me out of your office and tell me to go do it if I can, and then you concentrate more on your market share because I promised to take it away.

Cartels do not work, it's clear with oil cartels - they don't work. It's because there is no upside for you to keep your promise to only meet your quota at some preset price and not to sell more and not to sell more at lower price, because clearly, if you have to collude with others in your cartel, then the prices are artificially set, and in reality (IRL) you make more money by having more customers who buy more of your product, not by setting artificial barriers to your customers by raising prices too high.

Businesses know that it's better to have as much market penetration as possible, you do this by providing product as cheaply and at highest quality that can, that way you get the most market penetration. The only time cartels work is when government is standing there with a gun - just like in case of big pharma and FDA.

Eris might not be that big after all. The first estimation of its size were made according to its mass, but it seems that this dwarf planet could have a higher density than Pluto.

It *should* be slipping into orbit at about 10pm Pacific time on Friday, July 15th -- i.e. in a few hours. But we won't actually know if it did until Sunday morning, when they stop thrusting with the ion engine and point the antenna towards Earth (the antenna doesn't pivot, so they have to choose between either communicating or using the engine). There's a pretty good "question and answer" at space.com with this and other tidbits. One of the coolest things is the way that even if they miss the insertion into orbit, they'll have plenty of time to try again -- unlike the usual high-acceleration orbital insertion burn for a non-ion-engine, where if you miss the orbital insertion you might have to go back around the Sun and try again. The two orbits (Vesta's and Dawn's) are already so close that Dawn is gently drifting into capture by Vesta.

NASA has, over time, become more and more dominated by the people who want to spend money on stuff, as opposed to the people who want to do stuff.

Perhaps true of the manned space program, but missions like the Webb are the real deal and have widespread support in the scientific community.

What's worse to me is that, if it is funded and launched, it will probably be late, and will die well before any replacement, thus causing huge gaps in our ability to observe from above the atmosphere.

I think that end-of-lifing of the Hubble ST is a major strategic blunder by NASA

HST was a wonderful instrument, but it is simply not capable of doing the science that needs doing next, for example constraining the properties of Dark Energy or exploring the end of the cosmic "dark ages" at redshifts of 5-10. And repairing HST was never cost-effective: the repair missions cost roughly as much as building a new telescope.

Awesome, awesome pic, taken from a Shuttle Training Aircraft:
http://i.space.com/images/i/10816/original/atlantis-launch-view-above.jpg

#3 in the series at http://www.space.com/12208-nasa-final-space-shuttle-launch-photos.html . #11 is also cool.

Awesome, awesome pic, taken from a Shuttle Training Aircraft:
http://i.space.com/images/i/10816/original/atlantis-launch-view-above.jpg

#3 in the series at http://www.space.com/12208-nasa-final-space-shuttle-launch-photos.html . #11 is also cool.

You mean, "maybe now the Chinese will stop blowing up their own satellites as a show of strength"?

the debris cloud of Fengyun 1-C was only 17% of the trackable debris in Aug 2007 :)

Yeah, fat chance - it's not like China has any space station that might be at risk.

You are aware that China is building it's own station? And that in 2007 the country tried to become a partner of the ISS (with positive reactions from Russia and the ESA) but was not invited?

Though obviously not ideal, the images do say something about intensity: you can calculate what the surface black body flux in the covered wavelength region should be. Since the images show the surface as relatively dark (since the surface BB emission should be fairly homogeneous and isotropic you can take the darkest pixel regions inside the disk as being an upper bound thereof), it is easy to see (under any kind of reasonable coloring-intensity-increases-with-photon-flux scale choice that may have been made) that in the covered wavelength region of the EUV and X-Ray spectrum, the emissions from the corona are a sizable multiple of the surface black body spectrum. And yes, the flux is not that high anymore in the X-ray region. The point is, tough, that it is extremely variable there, and highly variable over long (solar cycle) time periods in the not-that-narrow 26-34 nm band of the EUV.

In any case, considerable effects of this short wavelength flux on the earth's atmosphere have been observed. Unwelcome observations, so for political correctness some ludicrous CO2 spin had to be put on that too. Realize that about half of the radiative emissions of the thermosphere go towards the earth's surface and as such affect surface temperatures.

Yes, space is really big - but we've already had collisions. It's a little like the turn-of-the-century automobile crash in Kansas City - which only had two cars registered therein.

Then there's the Kessler Syndrome, in which case a single collision's fragment could cause additional collisions, and on and on in a chain reaction that leaves us unable to pass a belt of grinding metal bits.

OK, that may be a bit hyperbolic, but still. It's not too early to start thinking about this.

My personal suggestion is a solar-powered moon-based laser that hits anything that comes between it and earth. Small things it might vaporize, larger things will be nudged by reaction to expanding gas into a lower orbit, eventually to fall to Earth.

The accident you refer to happened four years ago. A little over a year later Scaled Composites released their findings into the cause of the accident and shared everything they learned in how to more safely handle the materials they were using with the industry.

Since then I haven't heard of any accidents. So please inform us what other accidents have occured at Scaled Composites relating to the rocket motors.

Furthermore, I've love to hear about your sources that characterize the current state of Scaled Composites' rocket motor development as being "problematic".

I think your information is four years old. Scaled Composites already has a schedule in place that includes, later this year, firing the rocket motor in flight, possibly even putting SpaceShipTwo into space by the end of this year (but that will probably happen in early 2012). And by the end of 2012 we'll probably see the first paid flights.

The engines are fine.

http://www.npl.washington.edu/AV/altvw94.html -- reference (not the one I was looking for, but it is mentioned)

Some other ideas about different boundary conditions at t=0 may be found at these pages:
http://www.npl.washington.edu/npl/int_rep/dtime/node4.html [conventional view]
http://www.space.com/4019-glimpse-time-big-bang.html
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/7440217.stm
http://www.universetoday.com/15051/thinking-about-time-before-the-big-bang/

Here is a link that shows the actual PCBs rather than, say, a cracker... http://www.space.com/11508-shuttle-launch-satellite-chips-endeavour.html

First they found the flight recorder of Air France 447 on the bottom of the freaking ocean, and then they found Osama bin Laden. Are the planets in the solar system aligned or something? Now if only I could find my car keys...

actually the planets are aligned pretty well.

I'm a major fan of the Voyager project and remember vividly the pictures of Saturn when I was in high school. The engineering involved is impressive, in any context. I'd just like to point out that depending on the definition of space, solar system or which of the two Voyagers we are talking about, this event has occurred quite a few times now in the press. A quick Google search of news reveals at least this many announcements about reaching the "edge of space."

2008: http://www.space.com/5586-voyager-spacecraft-reveals-solar-system-edge.html

2009: http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/80beats/2009/12/29/near-the-edge-of-the-solar-system-voyager-2-finds-magnetic-fluff/

2010: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/space/8201280/Voyager-1-reaches-edge-of-solar-system.html

A: At least one is.

Salmonella in Space Get Even Nastier
http://www.space.com/6481-salmonella-space-nastier.html

Today is the day NASA is expected to announce who will receive the retired space shuttles.