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Well, it's winning awards anyways...
http://www.space.com/sciencefiction/movies/uranus_ experiment_000516.html

The 1st zero-G porno is gonna rake it in.

No need to use future tense...
http://www.space.com/sciencefiction/movies/uranus_ experiment_000516.html (safe for work link)

First of all, they have plenty of other issues to worry about when designing the exterior of a satellite, like reflective material for thermal management, or solar cells for generating power.

It is non-trivial to create what amounts to an invisible satellite.

It has and continues to be done not only by the US, but by other countries as well.

Techniques are continuously developed and refined to see such "invisible" satellites. It's just another arms race.

Secondly, I would imagine that the trajectories of all satellites are available to all agencies that launch stuff into space.

There are certain satellites that are not tracked except by the agencies that use them, and by anyone else who happens to notice it. There are public lists of all known satellites.

From http://www.space.com/businesstechnology/technology /mystery_monday_050103.html :
But within weeks after MISTY's shuttle deployment, both U.S. and Soviet sources reported that the satellite malfunctioned. Richelson explained that a spacecraft explosion "may have been a tactic to deceive those monitoring the satellite or may have been the result of the jettisoning of operational debris."

Whatever the case -- and to the chagrin of spysat operators -- a network of civilian space sleuths had been monitoring a set of MISTY maneuvers and the explosion, ostensibly part of a "disappearing act" meant to disguise its true whereabouts.

So check it out yourself. My understanding is that amateur satellite trackers have found and verified numerous unpublished satellites. They feel they are doing a service - "If I can see and track it with my limited resources, you can bet China, etc know about it years ago."

Imaging a soyuz crashing into one of those massive spy satellites with a relative velocity of several kilometers per second...

Check out Big Sky Theory. You'll find that the amount of 3-D space is so large in volume that even satellites meant to hit each other (for various tests) are extraordinarily difficult to target. When satellites start to accidently crash - it is greater then 99.9% certain it was not random or accidental, statistically speaking.

I just can't see how the US could not have spy satellites that are difficult to see and unpublished. The article mentions well-known satellites (keyhole). It will be news (well, actually no one will know publicly) when the chinese test their laser against all our unpublished satellites.

Like others have said, this is likely a story to get greater funding (Congress is going to start dealing with budget soon) for the various agencies. It looks like it may have been done well - a single statement in a long report, and no official statements other than that. Congresspersons, start your engines! China's going to attack Tiawan, and before we find out it'll all be over! Better throw a few more protected satellites up! China's hindering the Iran peace process to keep us occupied in other parts of the world! That might destroy Walmart's business model and we'll lose 1000's of jobs in our state! etc, etc, etc.

-Adam

Tell me this thing doesn't put you in mind of a big cartoon dog.

Space ships for a few high-flying thrill seeking, rich tourists, from the man who just pledged 3 Billion $ to reduce jet emissions and fight global warming? How much more junk will these rockets put in the atmosphere? Maybe he's just following up his good karma with the balancing karma?

Actually, they do seem to have stealth satellites, developed under the MISTY program. Here's an interesting snippet from an article a couple years ago:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A561 71-2004Dec10.html

The United States is building a new generation of spy satellites designed to orbit undetected, in a highly classified program that has provoked opposition in closed congressional sessions where lawmakers have questioned its necessity and rapidly escalating price, according to U.S. officials.

The previously undisclosed effort has almost doubled in projected cost -- from $5 billion to nearly $9.5 billion, officials said. The National Reconnaissance Office, which manages spy satellite programs, has already spent hundreds of millions of dollars on the program, officials said. The satellite in question would be the third and final version in a series of spacecraft funded under a classified program once known as Misty, officials said....

Here's an article with some more info:

http://www.space.com/businesstechnology/technology /mystery_monday_050103.html

Examining the long query string in the above URL, I realized how much fun could be had with the clever captioning space.com allows: like this. (Scroll down to the caption below the image)

My first thought, too.

Is it really "intensely curious", or is it the fact that it's just not that interesting an area? Hasn't it been analyzed to death already? Does it even look like a face if you don't squint your eyes and believe?

Here's a few links about it anyway:
http://www.esa.int/SPECIALS/Mars_Express/SEM09F8LU RE_0.html http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/09/2 2/0634233 http://www.badastronomy.com/bad/misc/hoagland/face .html http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/solarsystem/ mars_face_010525-1.html http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Face_on_Mars

Fact #1: The biggest influence on global climate is a big semi stable fusion reactor that has only been studied in detail for a fairly short period of time but is already known to vary its output on multiple cycles measured in years. Several studies indicate solar output is currently increasing.

Fact #2: More and more evidence points to Earth getting warmer.


Fact #3: Fact #1 isn't exactly hard fact.

Fact #4: The physics behind greenhouse gases like CO2 are well-established. Arrhenius figured it out over a century ago.

Fact #5: What's more uncertain is the impact of all the positive and negative feedback cycles. That's where it gets messy.

I concede that the historical pattern of solar intensity isn't as well documented as we would like it to be, due to the difficulty of measurement. But to present the solar intensity argument while ignoring the hard science behind greenhouse gases is preposterous.

Also, one of the dudes who found an increasing solar trend said "that does not mean industrial pollution has not been a significant factor, Willson cautioned."

Could this be an effect of gravity of surrounding galaxies lensing the light from a 'normal' large star in our direction and just appearing brighter?

Ryan Fenton

Maybe we should get outta the test tube already?

For those of you curious about such things, the X Prize (which Anousheh Ansari funded) is hosting an official Anousheh Ansari Space Blog. Before her launch, Anousheh posted some descriptions of her pre-launch training and her thoughts on going to space. There's also some commentary from Peter Diamandis, the founder of the X Prize.

Some other interesting bits of info:

* She's carrying a small carbon-fiber piece of Burt Rutan's SpaceShipOne up with her into orbit.

* According to an interview with MSNBC's Alan Boyle, she had initially planned on bringing some science projects up with her, but this was scratched when the launch date was suddently bumped from being 1-2 years to being a few months away. However, she's purchased some datalink time in order to do live communications with groups at MIT and Google.

* Her company Prodea is working with the Russian space agency and Space Adventures to build a suborbital spacecraft which will launch out of spaceports in the UAE and Singapore.

* She rathes dislikes the term "space tourist." From an interview with space.com:

SPACE.com: You don't like the term "space tourist" and call it an "over simplistic label to a complicated process." Can you further explain that?

AA: Absolutely. In a way I take offense when they call me a tourist because it brings that image of someone with a camera around their neck and a ticket in their hand walking to the airport to go on a trip somewhere and coming back to show their pictures. But I think spaceflight is much more than that.

I've been training for it for six months. I think if it is to be compared to an experiment or an experience on Earth it probably is closer to expeditions like people who go to Antarctica or people who climb Mount Everest. I mean that requires a lot more preparation, thinking, and studying or appreciation of the environment. So I would probably compare it more to an expedition than I would to a touristy trip to another city.

Don't you remember that episode of Futurama?

Guenther: "Eureka! The hat goes on the head. It's all so logical now!"

Believe it or not, NASA would very much like this to happen. The Commercial Orbital Transportation Services contract is providing $500 million to Rocketplane/Kistler and SpaceX to try to develop a low earth orbit launch/resupply system that NASA could later buy. There's more details here: http://www.space.com/adastra/adastra_cots_wingo_06 0827.html

they don't make tubes long enough to reach into space.

Weeelll, then again, maybe they will!

I imagine much of the shuttle supplies, and support arrives by road and rail. Aha! Here is some proof.

Unfortunately the article is a day old... Countdown is continuuing for a launch this morning (Friday morning).

Can't go to Mars. It's warming too.

Yet within the realm of science, we didn't have to advance much to get from one to the other. We needed an understanding of rocketry, some knowledge of life support, some advances in various engineering disciplines.

So you are telling me that the leap from canvas winged powered kites to putting men on the moon wasn't much of an advance?

Moreso in space since you've got to take into account the limitations imposed by automation, or else deal with the problems associated with long term space habitation and life support, and you've got to get from Earth orbit to wherever it is in the asteroid belt you're planning to mine/build

What limitations? I wasn't proposing an AI to drive them, more like remote piloting with certain systems semi autonomous. With that in mind there are no limitations on automation. And its a whole lot easier to get from earth orbit to wherever than it is to get from the earth's surface to wherever.

Have you checked the price of putting something in even LEO lately? We need to make serious improvements to our launch technology first if we're going to do anything like building stuff in the belt.

Heyyy, wow did you ask the wrong man. Here's an older post I made....

With all the talk lately about a space elevator, I got to thinking after a recent slashdot discussion, just what advantages would a space elevator offer over a tower launch? I contacted the man responsible for a similar idea, the skyramp (warning: hideous javascript menu may break firefox), Carlton Meyer, and had a dialogue in which he pointed me to a tower launch archive.

The ideas I see bandied about there are similar to what I had in mind, which would be essentially an 11km tall tower (think pylons rather than skyscrapers, based at sea), with evacuated airless launch tubes, using nuclear reactors to power a maglev or pulley system to accelerate vessels to escape velocity. These would then emerge above the end of the troposphere, with it's associated weather and air pressure, and have little to no fuel needed to escape the earth's gravity, meaning you could do a lot more while you were up there. At normal launch accelerations you can get to LEO with very little external propulsion.

Not only would this enable multiple launches daily, it is, unlike the space elevator, readily achievable with today's technology, and financially viable as well. Given NASA had an annual budget of $16.2 billion for 2005, and a nuclear power plant costs a cool billion to build, give or take, we could have this up and running in a few years.

Space has got vast, essentially unlimited resources. One recent story pointed out the trillion dollar iron asteroid up there. The thing has about 5 tons of steel for every man, woman and child on earth. And thats just one of god knows how many... billions more?

Once we leap the cost to escape hurdle (as I think I have managed), we can proceed to use these resources. There are several obstacles in the way of this, first of which is zero gee mining, we have no idea how to do it. We can either mine the ore out there, or bring the asteroid back into orbit and slice it up there. Or slice it up and send it back to orbit. I would be opposed to moving it back into orbit for processing, purely for the debris issue. Perhaps a lunar base would have some merit there.

So we set up a mining and processing operation either on the moon or in deep orbit, and start cutting and processing one of those bad boys. Whats the first thing we build? A bigger processing and mining operation. Space exploration, much like the internet, has to be a largely incestuous affair at first, existing solely for its own benef

The title of this story is wrong -- Lockheed Martin just won the contract for the Orion Crew & Service Module (CSM). The CSM is the party which will transport astronauts around in space, and land them back on Earth. The actual lunar lander, the Lunar Surface Access Module (LSAM), hasn't had its contract awarded yet, to say nothing of a "Mars Lander."

Of course, all this is rather confusing. I follow space news more closely than most, and I often get confused myself. Fortunately, Wikipedia's article on Project Constellation (the overall architecture) has a nice overview of what all the pieces are and how they fit together.

That said, I really wish that NASA would spend this money on the Commercial Orbital Transportation Systems program instead, accomplishing the same objectives in a more cost-effective manner. With COTS, companies only get paid if they succeed. NASA will instead be spending $3.9 billion (assuming there aren't cost overruns) just to get a capsule, while giving a total of $500 million (split between 2 companies) to COTS in order to get both rockets and capsules. To top it off, the COTS vehicles are scheduled to be completed years before the Lockheed Martin capsule is ready.

The Space Frontier Foundation has an interesting whitepaper arguing for why COTS should get they money instead of the Orion program.

Of course there's always the problem of the Sun increasing its radiation output. I wonder if that has any effect.......and if so, how much? http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/sun_output_0 30320.html

And in related news, scientists say Mars is emerging from an Ice Age. http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/mars_ice-age _031208.html I blame George Bush.

"It was certainly not a hit to the vehicle, I want to make that perfectly clear," said NASA launch director Michael Leinbach of the strike. "But you can get an induced voltage field around the lightning strike, and that's what we're looking at now."

After reviewing data from the lighting strike, engineers detected a small spike in the voltage readings from one of the three electrical buses that supply power to certain systems aboard Atlantis, Cain said. The spike - in a unit known as Essential Bus 1 BC - spanned just 80 milliseconds, but was enough to begin checks to ensure none of the shuttle's systems were compromised during the lightning strike.

There is a small image of the lightning strike on the space.com article..

http://space.com/missionlaunches/060826_sts115_scr ub.html

"One good thing is, maybe, I will generate some positive media about the Middle East with everything going on," said Ansari, who was born in Iran. "I've gotten so many calls and e-mails and mail, especially from women in Iran, and other Middle Eastern countries that are excited that someone from [there] gets to go up...and a woman!"

But you're right, the sexist spin of the article is both disgusting and archaic -- but easily explained. "Nth space tourist" doesn't get a headline; "First female space tourist" does.

Indeed. I actually tried submitting this story to slashdot a few days ago, but I didn't emphasize the "first female space tourist" angle. This was rejected, along with a later variant. For the curious, here's the text of my submissions. The submissions also include links to some better articles, and Anousheh Ansari's official site. For those of you who are curious, the links also contain photos of Ansari:

X Prize Donor to Visit ISS

The BBC reports that engineer-entrepreneur (and Iranian-American) Anousheh Ansari will be the next self-funded visitor to the International Space Station. Anousheh Ansari is known for her multi-million dollar donation to the Ansari X Prize and her company's funding of plans to build private spaceports in Singapore and the UAE. She will launch to the ISS on a Russian rocket next month.

The BBC reports that engineer-entrepreneur Anousheh Ansari will be the next self-funded visitor to the International Space Station. Known for her multi-million dollar donation to the Ansari X Prize, she will launch to the ISS on a Russian rocket next month, fulfilling her lifelong dream of becoming an astronaut. Ansari recently discussed her hopes for Bigelow Aerospace -- which successfully launched their private space station prototype this summer -- to provide a better-suited destination for an increased number of commercial astronauts in the future.

The Russian Space Agency already has a hard time completing crucial supply spacecraft for the International Space Station. Now it has committed to build spacecraft for China and help train Chinese astronauts, possibly leaving the space station grasping for seconds.

If the ISS were doing something novel (construction techniques are somewhat novel, but the ISS doesn't do enough of that)

Actually that's the majority of what they've done to date.

if it weren't taking money that could be better spent on unmanned space probes, funding some coherent plan to develope a competitive launch industry in the US, or even just returned to the taxpayer. This is the sort of failure that doesn't aid science.

That's simply not true. The only way you could consider it a failure is as a waste of resources, and while it may not be the most efficient use of resources, that doesn't mean it's not useful. Furthermore, 100% efficiency (i.e., making the correct projection as to the best use of resources) is a pipe dream. The fact is that any new work toward the population of LEO contributes to our knowledge and expertise, even if that specific effort is ultimately unsuccessful. Maybe it turned out that the ISS wasn't the best way to progress, but unless you take it to extremes (oops, you mean we were supposed to launch this thing pointed UP?!?), that's rarely the most important factor.

Nor does it aid commercial activity in space, while is a higher priority of NASA.

More nonsense. The ISS is directly contributing to the commercialization of space. It's been the destination for the first two space tourists, and it's to be the destination for the next one as well.

It's believed to be due to an upcoming polar switch (North and South switch polarities). It's nothing new, it's happened many times in the past.
National Geographic
NG#2
CNN
Space.com
New Scientist

Oh yeah, magnetic north (and probable south as well) is moving at an accelerating rate. The Magnetic North Pole is leaving Canada on it's way to Siberia.
CNN

Enough sources for ya?

Any bets on whether or not Bigelow Aerospace's private space station(s) will be completed before the ISS is finished? Granted, part of the reason Bigelow Aerospace has been able to get so much done so quickly is because they bootstrapped on the TransHab technology abandoned by NASA.

I am looking to the diagram at http://www.space.com/php/multimedia/imagedisplay/i mg_display.php?pic=060818_kistler_nasa_02.jpg&cap= Where+is+the+heat+shield? and wondering how do they manage a atmospheric braking and re-entry maneuver.

Any ideas?

Wow, that is packed. Still looks like more space than the Apollo command module which had IIRC times when the astronauts were all packed in there for three days at a stretch. So it's possible that the passengers are expected to stay in there for two days.

Hardly established fact, but currently the best and most widely accepted theory.

See: http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/solarsystem/ moon_making_010815-1.html

This actually makes the binary planet definition more reasonable, since it means the earth and moon are mostly the same stuff, as the material ripped away to form the moon came from the earth anyway.

What's not clear to me is where the "mars-sized object" that hit the earth-moon protoplanet like an oversized billiard cue ended up. Is it still in our solar system or did it end up somewhere else?

Prague is getting pretty crazy here: Pluto likely to become that demoted pluton. Poor, poor Pluto! http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/060818_plane t_newprop.html

http://www.space.com/spacewatch/060817_meteor_show er.html

Due to the use of the thrusters, any acceleration that could be due to the pioneer anomaly is buried in the noise and essentially unmeasurable with the voyager spacecraft. This is mentioned e.g. here or here.

I hope that the Canadian government doesn't present too many miles of red tape. Won't there be negative impact to launching from a high latitude? I know that other spaceports boast about how close to the equator they are.

The biggest difference between this facility and other proposals is the larger scope of this project. Instead of $20mil a shot tourists, the Canadians are playing catch up with the Americans, Russians, Europeans, etc. to have a real non-commercial space program. From TFA:

Earlier this year, the pair began negotiations with the province and other players in the aerospace industry to build a facility and spacecraft they hope will eventually shuttle astronauts and supplies to the international space station.

Let's see the good side of things, maybe Ceres with its new status will gain some more interest, *maybe* even enough for it to have the honour to be probed by us. Would surprise me a bit tho.

Edit : seems that there's already a probe destinated to Ceres (among others) nammed Dawn

Edit #2 : yeah I know, you can't actually edit your posts

I hope there isn't life on 2003UB313 (which is very highly unlikely) because then we would have to talk about the 2003UB313ians and that would just be annoying.

As I concurrently submitted this I had to put in my 2 cents... By the article here If you use the new definition proposed... there would be up to 53 known planets in this Star System... Quite a lot of them to remember. Also by the definition since Charon would be a planet... wouldn't the moon need to be its own planet? And the 9580723409875 moons of Staurn/Jupiter etc? I think this will go back to the drawing board eventually.

Thank you and I just read through the preprint, yours was a helpful summary.

I'd still be pretty skeptical about this observation disproving the hypothesis that "Dark Matter" is just a fudge of innacuracies in current gravitational theories, gravitational theories which we know are at best incomplete without a well tested unified theory.

I'd say a better bet to get some good gravitational data would be to try and explain the Pioneer anomoly with a purposefully designed deep space probe.

When I first saw your post, it was being moderated "insightful", not "funny". There clearly were people who weren't getting the joke, including moderators. History has repeatedly shown that on Slashdot there is a significant percentage of people who will believe just about any foolish idea about the United States or the current administration if it portrays them in a bad light, even when it is plainly contrary to evidence, common sense, and other people taking responsibility for it. You only have to look that the appalling nonsense over the 9/11 conspiracy, blaming it on the US government, to get a taste of it. Clinton Derangement Syndrome was bad enough, Bush Derangement Syndrome is ever worse.

As to my point, it was that the "science hostile" Bush administration (that has a plan for space flight to Mars) is in fact monitoring and testing for the dangerous strains of bird flu, and that they aren't being so stupid as to deny mutation/evolution of it.

Kudos on a +5 funny though.

See, for example - http://www.space.com/news/spacehistory/saturn_five _000313.html There are most likely microfiche archives in a number of locations (NASA, National Archives are probable starting points for hunting them up) but they are of limited utility unless you want to machine up the entire support structure required to make all of those parts again. I think most of the "the government destroyed the Saturn V blueprints" comments trace back to some claims made by John Lewis in "Mining the Sky" in 1996 - I haven't seen too many others making that claim that sound authorative.

That said, it would be one heck of a project to get ahold of them, as being buried in government archives is sometimes very much like sticking a needle in a haystack (insofar as the public is concerned, at least.) I would very much like to see the full blueprints to all parts and aspects of the Saturn rockets made available, modernized, and released to the world. In many respects the Saturn V represents a social and technological milestone the likes of which we probably still don't fully appreciate - it is an achievement unique to mankind, a tremendous triumpth of science, technology, and exploration. I think the full details of how this was achieved should be stored online and made available as widely as possible. I don't know what it takes to convert microfiche to svg or some other modern vector graphics/blueprint ready files (I'm sure it's nothing trivial) but why not make it a community project online? Scan the buggers, and gradually make them into modern blueprints. Then we can publish them far and wide, which is always the best way to preserve knowledge over long historical timespans.

They seem to be the only ones able to get anything into space with any reliability, normally with old rocket types.

Bigelow had to use a Ukrainian rocket to get into space as well. http://www.space.com/missionlaunches/060721_bigelo w_genesis-1.html

NASA's going to end up just a very expensive federal regulatory agency protecting it's monopoly by preventing all space launches from the US except by their own craft.

Science and religion are not incompatible. Long ago I attended a California state university, the dean of the chemistry department was a Roman Catholic priest. A local parish priest as a matter of fact. There are extremists on both sides, the notion that hard science and religion are incompatible is just propoganda. Many of the most famous scientists in history were also religious.

To prove there is no God we must prove a negative, which math and science itself says cannot be done. Where science and religion collide is in the acceptance of theories, evolution for example. Evolution is a theory, a widely accepted and highly plausible one, but still a theory. Even if evolution is historically accurate science cannot prove God was not a guiding factor in its direction, i.e. evolution being God's mechanism of creation. A "day" in genesis not being the 24-hour period we know and love. God was after all communicating with primitive sheep herders when Genesis was written, he would probably use different words when communicating with a modern biologist. When one says science and religion are incomaptible, one is exercising a leap of faith just like the most fundamentalist literal interpreter of the bible. I think neither extreme has it right. Of course I have no proof. ;-)

From the Vatican Observatory:

"Analyzing the space rocks, or training the Vatican Observatory's $3 million Arizona telescope on a distant galaxy, are both ways of gaining 'a closer appreciation of the personality of the creator', he said in an interview."

http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/astronomy/va tican_observe_000716.html

JD, you need to provide a citation for that "Informative" comment of yours.

I suspect you're mistakenly referring to this study of deuterium near the galactic core, which says that the D-H ratio they found is consistent with other researchers' measurements that imply large amounts of dark matter.

one proposal suggests using a long conductive tether orbiting in the radiation belt. The charged particles in the belt would interact with the electric charge on the tether, altering their orbit in a way that would remove them from the belt.

Yes, this is a spaced based solution. But even though it has to be launched, it still could be simpler and cheaper than making a huge VLF transmitter on the ground.

Here you go.

As an advocate of cranial faraday protection (three independent studies find that cellular telephones cause brain cancer), I can assure you that people did in fact walk on the moon.

The actual purpose of the destruction of the principal historical record of mankind's greatest achievment was not to cover up a falsification, but to conceal an inconvenient truth, as Buzz Aldrin and Gordon Cooper have reported.

Maybe another universe.