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This all happened on April 15 2005. A better write-up here: http://www.space.com/news/060516_dart_mishap_updat e.html. And here's the Wikipedia entry: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DART_(spacecraft)

The satellite it crashed into was defunct. From Wikipedia: "The goal was to develop and demonstrate an automated navigation and rendezvous capability in a NASA spacecraft. Currently, only the Russian Space Agency and JAXA have autonomous space craft navigation.".

Interesting snippet: "NASA has said the official 70-page report will not be publicly released because it contains sensitive material protected by International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR)".

This was planned as a "high-risk*, low-budget" mission and I'm sure they learned a lot. (* I suppose high-risk in terms of likelihood of meeting up with the target, not of collateral damage.)

Helium-3 is a good reason to return to the moon .

It is theorized that there are over 1 million cubic tons,
with oil over $50 a barrel, and helium-3 then being worth
about 8 billion USD a ton, the total worth equalling 8,000 trillion USD .

It could smash the US deficit with 7,991 trillion USD to spare .

http://www.brillig.com/debt_clock/

Also keep in mind most of the "other" moons have this as well .

Here are some photos of the reactor at the University of Wisconsin :

http://fti.neep.wisc.edu/iec/GeneralOpPics.htm

http://fti.neep.wisc.edu/iec/GeneralOpPicsII.htm

25 tons could power the US electrical needs for a year :

http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/helium3_0006 30.html

I don't need to tell anyone that the US is the largest user of electricity on
the planet at present, and slated for massive growth .

The current immmigration bill sets aside for 100 - 200 million new citizens .

Kulcinski adds that, if it sold for $4 billion a metric ton, helium-3 would still be a
good energy value: "That's the equivalent of paying $28 a barrel for oil."

It will be a cold day in hell before we see oil at $28 a barrel again .....

So adjust the math accordingly ...

It becomes more viable with every passing day .

If we can make solar mining robots for the moon to process the soil, and
then use a mass driver to fling a projectile canister into lunar orbit for pick up.
Then a lunar orbit robotic satellite mass driver to fire it into earth geo-sync orbit .

Then have either a new space station, shuttle, or satellite prep it for re-entry
into the ocean for pick up much like the apollo capsules .

The robotic equipment could be tested here on earth prior to deployment on the moon .

It might be possible to make robots that could build it all via remote control, but
most likely we would initially need ppl to go to the moon to build the mass driver
and support facilities .

Building some or all of the support facilities underground would protect it to some
degree versus leaving it exposed on the surface .

At some future point 3HE+3HE fusion will be achieved and it will have zero nuetron emissions
and thus be truly clean as per the following link .

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_fusion#Criter ia_and_candidates_for_terrestrial_reactions

Hope for the future ...

Ex-MislTech

I agree with the other guy.

Here's a deeper, fuller explanation. Basically, our next job is to be able to grow plants in space.

Actually, I think discarding bodies entirely is even better, but nobody will go for that today; We may have to wait 40 years before a society that can defend itself decides that that is not a controversial way to go, and has the technology to do it.

Personally, I think we should go for that as quickly as possible. NASA should study cybernetics, not how to make spaceships with showers and treadmills in them.

Oh, wait- they are..!

> There is no way other than the use of industrial espionage to explain the short amount
> of time China took in developing its space program

Sure there are. To name two obvious ones:

1) Learning from Russian technology
"Are Chinese engineers just copycats, blueprinting the Shenzhou after the Russian Soyuz spacecraft design?" (link)

2) Longer development than you think
"[China]'s first satellite...was launched in 1970" (link)

Helios

somebody read this article.

"The U.S. government wants to develop a ground-based weapon to shoot down enemy satellites in orbit."

They can start their testing by shooting down the hundreds of useless satellites and debris orbiting the earth at this very moment.
http://www.space.com/spacewatch/space_junk.html Space Junk
http://www.space.com/spacewatch/space_junk_list.ht ml Space Junk: The full list
http://www.bbc.co.uk/science/space/solarsystem/ear th/spacejunk.shtml

"The U.S. government wants to develop a ground-based weapon to shoot down enemy satellites in orbit."

They can start their testing by shooting down the hundreds of useless satellites and debris orbiting the earth at this very moment.
http://www.space.com/spacewatch/space_junk.html Space Junk
http://www.space.com/spacewatch/space_junk_list.ht ml Space Junk: The full list
http://www.bbc.co.uk/science/space/solarsystem/ear th/spacejunk.shtml

You may remember hearing the name Starfire in conjunction with this picture.

I'm a little surprised that people are upset about this technology now. It was developed in the late 80's. I know /. dotes on old news but isn't this over the top for old news?

Curiously, and despite a lot of success in many domains, NASA never fully mastered automated orbital rendez-vous, which is almost routine for USSR and then Russia space agencies, since almost 30 years (and is very important for keeping the International Space Station fridges and tanks full). Here for example we can read :

"The Soviet Union performed the first automated rendezvous in 1967 and since then, Russia has used fully automated systems to dock Soyuz and Progress spacecraft to its space stations."

"please tell us what the difference was"

http://www.space.com/reference/venus/overview.html

Rotation period: 243 days, retrograde (this is the length of Venus' "day," the time it takes to spin on its axis). Venus' day is longer than its year, and its rotation is retrograde, meaning it spins on its axis in a direction opposite its orbit around the sun.

Water that sits in the sun for over 2,800 continuous hours tends to evaporate.

THE book on Venus: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0816518300/qid=11 45071373

http://www.heartland.org/Article.cfm?artId=17977

was the easiest example to find of reporting on the nasa report.

I'm not familiar with heartland.org so here is another...

http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/solarsystem/ mars_snow_011206-2.html
From the article:
Global warming on Mars? ...
The odd shapes -- circular pits, ridges and mounds -- were first photographed in 1999. Since then, the features have eroded away by up to 50 percent.

The pits are growing, the ridges between them shrinking...

The newly observed melting, if it is part of a trend, could pump enough carbon dioxide ...

---
Listen- I voted against Bush both times. I think we are in a global warming cycle. I do -not- agree that humans are the main cause of this global warming cycle.

You heard it from me first on slashdot.....they are looking for Helium-3. They must have found something on the last meteor we smashed hoping to find "water" and pixie dust. The government/military wants in on this cashcow Helium-3. Our natural resources is going fast and that's a fact. So lets literally "shoot the moon" hoping that the earth's gravity will not be affected, but that a risk we are willng to take. If you can sell a few grains of this stuff for millions would you shoot the moon? http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/helium3_0006 30.html/

Space.com has the following photo of the Aiken Crater on the South Pole. Pretty colors.

One might also argue that since they so grossly exceeded their life expectancy then they were overdesigned and cost too much.

But I agree. Great job.

Build more and recover the economies of scale!

Yes! Yes! Yes! I can't understand why they insist on going back to the drawing board every time. I've read about the next generation rovers. They're very different in many ways including the way they'll land on Mars.

I just don't understand why, with the success that Spirt and Opportunity have had, they don't build these as a platform. Surely if the research was put into new instruments that could be attached to the current design, rather than redesigning from scratch, that would be a better use of the money.

I'm sure (or hope) NASA has thought this through, right?

-S

Hope this is +Informative : http://www.cnn.com/2006/TECH/space/04/06/rings.of. uranus.ap/index.html http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060406/ap_on_sc/rings _of_uranus http://www.space.com/060406_uranus_blue.html

For those who prefer to get their news from industry-specific sources rather than general media, or for those who are boycotting the Microsoft-owned MSNBC, this space.com article might help.

http://www.space.com/missionlaunches/060407_x37_dr op.html

According to this http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/gravity_spee d_030107.html Gravity travels at light speed.

However, it was immediately attacked http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/gravity_spee d_030116.html

Contrary to some of the other posts there is no current reason to exclude the idea that gravity is faster than the speed of light. Some experiments have shown that it is possible. ( http://physics.about.com/cs/gravity/a/speedofgravi ty_2.htm ) We do not know what gravity is, exactly, so its impossible to simple compare it to your average particle physics and the like.

As I said there is equal amounts of arguments against these experiments and there conclusions so we simply dont know for sure. It is very likely that it does travel at exactly the same speed as light (Just as Einstein predicted) but you should never rule out other possibilities until you are sure.

According to this http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/gravity_spee d_030107.html Gravity travels at light speed.

However, it was immediately attacked http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/gravity_spee d_030116.html

Contrary to some of the other posts there is no current reason to exclude the idea that gravity is faster than the speed of light. Some experiments have shown that it is possible. ( http://physics.about.com/cs/gravity/a/speedofgravi ty_2.htm ) We do not know what gravity is, exactly, so its impossible to simple compare it to your average particle physics and the like.

As I said there is equal amounts of arguments against these experiments and there conclusions so we simply dont know for sure. It is very likely that it does travel at exactly the same speed as light (Just as Einstein predicted) but you should never rule out other possibilities until you are sure.

Not every element greater than Fe was created in a supernova explosion. Much might of been created by the collision of Neutron Stars.

http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/mars_ice-age _031208.html

http://www.blog.speculist.com/archives/000145.html

[I]f they hadn't contracted the shuttle out to the lowest bidder in the first place, we might have better craft.

The Space Shuttle was designed for a lifespan of 5-10 years (one week in orbit, two weeks to prep for the next stint aloft; 100 missions), and started flying in the early 80s. Do the math. True, the shuttle fleet hasn't performed half the missions it was 'supposed' to fly, but any mechanic can tell you, age can take as much of a toll on systems as mileage does. The Space Shuttle should have been phased out in the early 90s, but guess what... Instead, we have 1970s designs crawling out to launch pads on 4 decade old hardware...

"...However, Russell Kerschmann never forgot. He is a pathologist at NASA Ames studying the effects of mineral dust on human health. Both the Moon and Mars are extremely dusty worlds, and inhaling their dust could be bad for astronauts, says Kerschmann.

"The real problem is the lungs," he ex-plains. "In some ways, lunar dust resembles the silica dust on Earth that causes silicosis, a serious disease." Formerly known as "stone-grinder's disease," silicosis first came to idespread public attention during the Great Depression when hundreds of miners drilling the Hawk's Nest Tunnel through Gauley Mountain in West Virginia died within five years of breathing the fine quartz dust kicked into the air by dry drilling--even though they had been ex-posed for only a few months. "It was one of the biggest occupational health disasters in U.S. history," Kerschmann says...."

"...Quartz, the main cause of silicosis, is not chemically poisonous. "You could eat it and not get sick," he continues. "But when quartz is freshly ground into dust particles smaller than 10 m (for comparison, a human hair is 50+ m wide) and breathed into the lungs, they can embed themselves deeply into the tiny alveolar sacs and ducts where oxygen and carbon dioxide gases are exchanged." There, the lungs cannot clear out the dust via mucus or coughing. Moreover, the immune system's white blood cells commit suicide when they try to engulf the sharp-edged particles to carry them away in the blood-stream. In the acute form of silicosis, the lungs can fill with proteins from the blood. He adds that it is as if the victim slowly suffocates from a pneumonia-like condition.

Lunar dust, which like quartz is a compound of silicon, is (to our current knowledge) also not poisonous. But like the quartz dust in the Hawk's Nest Tunnel, it is extremely fine and abrasive, almost like powdered glass. Astronauts on several Apollo missions found that it clung to everything and was almost impossible to remove. Once it was tracked inside the lunar module, some of the dust easily became airborne, irritating lungs and eyes...."

http://www.space.com/adastra/adastra_moondust_0602 23.html

I would like to ask your opinion of an idea I have... With all the talk lately about a space elevator, I got to thinking after a not so 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 reach GEO, meaning you could do a lot more while you were up there. I originally estimated reaching escape velocity with this system, but it turns out I got the numbers wrong and that would only be suitable for electronics and things that could withstand insane G-forces.

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. Consider the big dig in Boston has cost about 12 billion so far... 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.

That would have been mentioned and linked at the bottom of the article;

http://www.space.com/searchforlife/optical_seti_01 0724.html

That's a tough bug. The temperature isn't such a big deal and time isn't either, as there are bacteria found in Antarctica which were left over from when it was more temperate. Tough bugs, sure, but traveling through space also means withstanding the full bore radation of Mr. Sun, with no atmosphere to protect you. I'm not sure I want to meet one of these in a dark alley. From the article: "'I thought the Titan result was really surprising - how many would get there and how slowly they'd land,' Treiman told New Scientist. 'The thing I don't know about is if there are any bugs on Earth that would be happy living on Titan.' Titan's surface temperature is a very cold -179C and its chemistry is very different from Earth's."

Ok, I'll bite, how do they know they came from Earth rather than, say were asteroids? A lot of asteroids look like they broke away from something as they're irregular in shape, perhaps there's other likely origins. But this has gone from 'could have' to did without convincing me. After all, we see supposed martian rock on earth. Who's really to say that those martian rocks broke from Mars, rather than are the stuff Mars is made up of and some of it landed on Earth, or some other theory.

Hi, everyone. I wrote one of the original news releases about this planet discovery, so I'm very interested in the discussion of whether the "super-Earth" is exciting news or not. When I first found out about the planet (I work at Ohio State University; one of our astronomers heads the team that identified it) I knew I had to write a news release (I mean, this is a new planet!) but I also had to wonder how much of a splash the story would make in the media.

Some 170 extrasolar planets have been discovered in the last decade, so there's already been a lot of news coverage. But it's easy to forget that before a decade ago, scientists had no real evidence of what other solar systems are like. This planet is unusual in that it's terrestrial, and its solar system doesn't seem to have any giant gas planets like Jupiter. So the find expands our ideas about what kinds of solar systems are out there, and it also suggests that we're getting closer to our goal of finding other Earth-mass planets.

There's more information in the Ohio State news release, and the one written by my colleagues at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. There are also lots of other news stories out there right now, most notably by New Scientist, National Geographic, and Space.com.

Pam Gorder

Well...something which sounds very similar has been under development for some time: http://www.space.com/businesstechnology/technology /laser_propulsion_000705.html

It originally appeared on Space.com where it occupies only one page.

Its not FTL but baby will it get the ball rolling. I'll just run this by everyone here... With all the talk lately about a space elevator, I got to thinking after a sort of 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 1m/s acceleration, you would be at escape velocity when you exit the top of the tower.

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. And once we are up there...

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 benefit.

Once we have that mastered, we can move to algae pods in orbit for food production, oxygen refining, and fuel production (biodiesel or chemical engines), all of which can be powered by the immense energy of the sun, and use the raw materials abundantly available in space. Whether you ship that stuff back to earth or use it for further colonisation, its a vital step.

The production of automated scouts is also a high priority; a vast amount of surveyor and prospector drones to sweep and map every square inch of every rock and gas in the system, out to the Oort cloud, and figure out what they are made of. I'd err on the side of quantity rather than quality, still no reason not to have either. This could be combined with deep space observatories that would make hubble look like the end of a coke bottle.

So now we have a manufacturing bridgehead, a good idea of what's interesting out there, and a cheap means to launch to orbit. Actual manned system ships would come next, to either colonise or investigate the system. The rest, as they say, is (future) history.

A lot of this would require automatio

Original article:
http://www.space.com/businesstechnology/060308_exo tic_drive.html

http://space.com/scienceastronomy/060309_cassini_w ater.html has a article on it

Hmmmm... Let me see... There's this...
"the desire to explore and understand is part of our character," President Bush Wednesday unveiled an ambitious plan to return Americans to the moon by 2020 and use the mission as a steppingstone for future manned trips to Mars and beyond.
AND
President Bush's Jan. 14 speech painted broad brushstrokes of his plan to put humans back on the Moon and send them to Mars.

Oh but that was back in 2004, right, trying to get more "techies" to vote for him...

And NOW, as most of us have always know is TRUE color...

Disgruntled members of a congressional oversight committee objected Wednesday to a White House budget plan that threatens to cripple NASA's unmanned space programs and Earth and aeronautics research, President Bush's plan instead emphasizes sending American explorers back to the moon by 2018.

Budget cuts for 2002

Elsewhere there is talk of a 1% increase in NASA's budget for 2k7 but this is NOTHING compared to the slash to the budget that Bush dealt NASA when he first took office because he "needed" that money for the military we would later use to attach the middle east...

Hmmmm... Nice Logic! Instead of looking FORWARD back then... and looking into alternative fuels, the future, and Space ... We (he) was in it for his Oil buddies. Now that he is a LAME DUCK president he can virtually spout off about whatever...

But that's ok, it's obvious at this point that most Americans have a short attention span and don't really delve deeply. At least the "red" ones.

Dang... I just saw this on slashdot a few minutes after I submitted it myself. For the curious, here's my version of the submission, which includes some different info and a link to a SpaceRef story which has more pictures of the capsule:

SpaceX has revealed that for the past few years they've been secretly developing the Dragon space capsule, which will be the first privately-built manned orbital spacecraft. The company has already built a full-scale working prototype and thoroughly tested its life support system, with the capsule development using 'only a small part of the $100 million [CEO/founder Elon Musk] has invested in SpaceX to-date building the Falcon 1 [orbital rocket] and getting started on the larger and more powerful Falcon 9.' According to Musk, 'I feel very confident about being able to offer NASA an ISS-servicing capability by 2009 and am prepared to back that up with my own funding.' It's believed that Musk will also compete for crew/cargo delivery contracts to private space station modules built by Bigelow Aerospace.

All in all, I'm very excited about this announcement. I'm sure SpaceX wishes that they could have gotten their Falcon I rocket off the ground before announcing the capsule, but the deadline for NASA's Commercial Orbital Transportation Systems (COTS) program was a few days ago. The COTS program is the means by which NASA hopes to award competitive contracts to delivery crew and cargo to the International Space Station, in order to reduce reliance on the Russians and promote the development of private spaceflight. Since the capsule is a critical part of their COTS proposal, SpaceX pretty much had to let the secret out.

Coincidentally, this news about the USAF's secret vehicle comes out on the same day as news that SpaceX has spent some of their money during the past few years secretly developing the first private manned orbital spacecraft. There's coverage on both SpaceRef and Space.com. The capsule will be reusable and is targetted at NASA's recently-announced COTS program for commercial deliveries of crew and cargo to the International Space Station. It's also likely that they'll be using the capsule to compete for Bigelow Aerospace's prize for a privately-built manned vehicle capable of docking with their private space station modules.

A quote from the Space.com article:

Musk said he thinks Dragon can be ready to enter service in 2009 - a full year before the shuttle is expected to conduct its last flight.

"I feel very confident about being able to offer NASA an ISS-servicing capability by 2009 and am prepared to back that up with my own funding," Musk said.

Dragon's initial test flights would be conducted from SpaceX's island launch facility in the Kwajalein Atoll, Musk said, with operational flights to be conducted from Cape Canaveral, Fla.

Musk said SpaceX proposed several different configurations of Dragon in order to meet NASA's needs to deliver both pressurized and unpressurized cargo loads to the station and bring some materials back. He also proposed a crewed version capable of carrying up to seven astronauts to and from the station.


From the SpaceRef article:

Visitors to SpaceX's El Segundo facility over the past several years have noticed an area which is roped off - one they cannot get close to - with some large hardware covered up. Underneath those covers are a variety of Dragon protoypes and developmental items produced over the past several years.

Initial designs for Dragon were somewhat similar to a blunt nose version of the DC-X - complete with landing legs. Driven by additional thinking - and the emerging demands of a cargo and human transport business for the ISS - the design of Dragon has been modified and the crew capsule portion of the spacecraft now sports a more conventional blunt conical, capsule-like design with a 15-degree slope angle.

Yep Hottest year ever.

Cause now we can have vineyards in England again, right?

Or there is a massive food surplus out of an unfrozen North?

Yes it is warmer than we are used to but it's not unreasonably hot in comparison with human history. We've had warmer.

Now what I want is a series of concrete measures to solve it. If you are going to complain don't just do fear. Come up with a way to solve it with out asking for us to live in communes.

Oh and our Sun is a G2 sequence that over time will heat up and have small spectral shifts in it's output. We don't have that many years of data of good spectra data for it. Nor has an exhaustive study been done on effects of nonlinear optics in the low UV region with common earth elements.

http://science.nasa.gov/ssl/pad/solar/sunspots.htm

The sun spot number has have a recorded correlation with temperatures. UV and X-ray emissions are affected and another possible effect as they may be absorbed far more readily than normal.

Which would explain why mars is warming too. http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/mars_ice-age _031208.html

But what about the fact that the sun, which drives all the earth's weather, has been steadily getting warmer since at least the late 70s, if not earlier? Heck, I doubt any sane person could blame that on the usual idustrialization, America, SUV driver, or whatever the scapegoat du jour is.

I believe that we need to reduce pollution as much as we possibly can. That said, I am tired of people on the right and the left trying to scare people into believing their argument.

Strong regulations against pollution will not destroy America. On the other hand, the apparent warming of the Earth will not incinerate us all.

There are many people invested in the idea that we alone are to blame for this "crisis." Respected scientists publish graph after graph showing that the temperature is rising with the rise of CO2 levels. These same people ignore that Mars appears to be warming too. Maybe, just maybe, we stumbled upon a coincidence. It is time to put some focus on the Sun's luminosity.

Does this mean that we should lower emmission standards? Of course not. There are many other good reasons to ensure our air, water, and soil are clean. However, I'm tired of being told half-truths and lies. The claims of this Professor are complete nonsense and only give opponents of responsible environmentalists ammunition.

No, the last Soyuz capsule related deaths were in 2002.

Unmanned Soyuz craft keep failing (and Soyuz has killed a *lot* of ground crew). It's been luck that the manned missions have been the ones that didn't blow up. The manned craft have had many very close calls as well - nearly rolling off a cliff, breaking through a frozen lake, etc.

Overall, Soyuz and Shuttle have similar crew safety levels. Non-crew death totals, shuttle has a far better record. Soyuz is much cheaper.

"1) Note every mission is labeled 'under review'.

Well, yah. They're not sure when they'll get the Shuttle back up and running. Thus, the date (y'know, that little header at the top) is under review.

"2) The ISS is not going to be completed. It costs too much for too little science."

Disagree. There's plenty of microgravity experiments which have been waiting for room on the space shuttle.

"ISS costs are not sustainable. Its going to be abandoned."

First, are you talking about building costs or support costs? There are many components of ISS which have already been built and are merely waiting for the Shuttle to return to flight. There's no real gain for abandoning those components already built.

Support costs will probably be considerably less once you're not depending on the Shuttle for supplies. Right now, the Shuttle is mainly being used to transport ISS components and extra people to install them. Don't get me wrong, I agree that the Shuttle is an incredible waste of money to supply ISS. Some Senator remarked that the Shuttle is like an SUV. Yes, it can do anything. But it's pretty wasteful to use it to haul groceries.

"3) Even if they wanted to complete the ISS, the payloads could be delivered with rockets."

Sure they could. But who's gonna attach them?

Keep in mind, when the Shuttle brings some big part up to ISS, who do you think actually installs the thing? Astronauts who have actually trained in simulators to do the job! So you'd also have to send up a few people to do the work. Or do you want to trust your multi-million dollar orbital habitat will be correctly installed by two guys who read the instruction manual?

"On the other hand, for some reason, garbage disposal seems to be a big deal, and the only thing the garbage scow Endeavor and Intrepid seem to be important for the ISS."

NASA likes to see the garbage in order to study it. For example, part of "garbage" of a Shuttle mission are parts that have failed. NASA tries to figure out why this happened so that they can make better parts. I suppose they can also test the garbage for radiation and other environmental factors and compare that with what the instruments told them. Remember that ISS is still new hardware under construction and NASA wants all the data it can get from wherever it can get it.

So, yes, when the Shuttle comes back to Earth, it carries trash for study. By the way, the Shuttle is the only vehicle that can return garbage for study. You can't fit a hell of a lot in a Soyuz.

There've been more than a few times, though, that the astronauts dump the trash into a Progress drone and burn it up in the atmosphere.

"[...] I'm surprised the ISS partners aren't designing payload delivery systems to move the garbage back to Earth."

You seem to be fixated on the garbage. Again, it's only NASA that cares about the garbage. And I'm sure they'll come up with something if they continue to really care about this after the ISS is complete.

Meanwhile, Russia has the Soyuz for manned missions and Progress for supplying the station and dumping trash. Japan's NASDA is developing the HTV for supplying the station and dumping trash. And ESA is developing the ATV for supplying the station and dumping trash. So I think the trash problem is pretty well solved.

And, of course, NASA's CEV will be able to carry astronauts to the station starting in 2014. In fact, supporting ISS is one of the goals for Stage 1 of the CEV. We tend to lose track of that.

So, if anything, Russia gets a four year exclusive for carrying people to ISS. I'm sure they'll be pretty psyched. Maybe they'll have their CEV operating by then.

By the way, to wander back on ta

Yeah, we're getting a spaceport in New Mexico too. Seems some people really must think this whole space tourism thing is really going to take off... http://www.space.com/missionlaunches/060216_spacep ort_update.html

Space.com has a writeup on an antigravity propulsion system that claims transporting humans an other fragile cargos at more than half the speed of light can be done without crushing them. It would be awesome if space exploration extended past our nearest neighbours.

Here's one article I found on that subject. http://uplink.space.com/printthread.php?Cat=&Board =humanbio&main=428309&type=post There were bunches more on google about the subject of dinosaurs to bird hypothesis. I agree that we should keep digging. There's no reason not to study the fossils of extinct animals. Plus it's interesting to see all the cool creatures that once inhabited the earth.

It is true that we do not know what caused the MWP, nor do we know what caused the Carboniferous Ice Age. Clearly, in the latter case the Earth had an Ice Age in spite of CO2 levels (whereas CO2 levels dropped in all other very long ice age periods). Clearly, an ice age happened in spite of carbon dioxide levels. However, the greenhouse effect is reproduceable in a lab and is based on solid physics. We know that atmospheric carbon dioxide contributes to the warming of a planet. Just look at Venus if you doubt that.

The theoretical warming of Mars is disturbing, but it's supposition. The problem that leads some scientists to believe that Mars might be coming out of an ice age is that there is too much water ice in the lower latitudes. One theory is that this is ice that hasn't melted yet, but we don't know. We don't have temperature trends for Mars, and we don't know if it's warming as fast, faster, or slower than the Earth or if it's even warming at all. More research is needed.

We may have uncovered evidence of a seperate contributing factor to the warming of the Earth (and perhaps a more significant one on a geological time scale based on previous patterns of warming and cooling), but it does not invalidate the effect of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gasses on the atmosphere nor their ability to rapidly affect climate.

I'd also like to point out that I never said that a climate model proves anything except whether or not a mathematical model can predict what happens to the Earth. All mathematical models of the world are subject to Einstein's "closed watch" dilemma.

Lastly, I think your accusation of McCarthyism is grossly unfair. The comment that I replied to hardly counted as "reasoned discourse." All he was saying was in effect, "Ha! Something you said (when completely misconstrued) could contradict your point (if we ignore that the point is about rate of change and not maximum temperature). Thus, you're all crackpots."

Has the sun gotten brighter suddenly? Has it gotten closer suddenly? There is no evidence of that.

Now the NASA has gotten into 'competition' maybe they could review some older 'decisions'.
Big Dumb Boosters over the shuttle?
EELV's over the shuttle?
EELV's over the CLV?

So we're spending billions of dollars to preserve old spaceships, when things like SpaceShipOne only cost tens or hundreds of millions for test flights?

This is kind of like my father's insistence on maintaining his 1972 Cadillac (at a ridiculous annual cost) instead of purchasing a newer vehicle (say, a Honda) that gets three times the mileage and has much lower support costs. Of course, it just isn't as big or masculine... that's probably what this is all about.

This might be a troll, but oh well..

Look at it another way: Try finding a small car on Earth from the Moon using telescopes. It isn't going to happen. For reference, try looking at this picture.

And we can't see planets a "brazilian light years away", we can detect them when they pass in front of their parent star because that star will dim just a little bit.

It should be noted, however, that the Clementine satellite (orbited the Moon for a little bit) did image the Apollo 15 landing site at Hadley Rille. More about that here.

You have a funny definition of the word 'finally'.

"Congress voted Saturday to give NASA all of the $16.2 billion it sought for 2005"

"Congress on Wednesday approved a $16.5 billion budget for NASA, fully funding the administration's moon-Mars exploration initiative for a second consecutive year."

A couple quick points.

The blaming Bush thing I know is cool and fun, but the United States Senate told the Clinton Administration 99-0 that Kyoto wasn't doable in the United States because of the economic costs, so really any CO2 emissions control system that will cost tax revenue, jobs and votes is dead in the Senate. People like to say W is sticking his head in the sand, but the political reality is that in the United States 100 Senators have to vote on this, 1/3rd of them are up for election every two years and they don't want to stick thier necks out on the line for Kyoto or Global Warming.

If we are only looking at the last 100,000 years for a clue as to climatic change then we aren't looking at the entire climatic history of the Planet, we are looking at 1/2520th of the climatic history of the Earth since the PT event. Do we know what happened during the other 251,900,000 years? Do we know what the Sun did? Nope.

Why are some of the other planets in the Solar System under observation also warming at the similar rates as the Earth?

http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/mars_ice-age _031208.html
http://www.berkeley.edu/news/media/releases/2004/0 4/21_jupiter.shtml

Either planets under go cyclical actions which we don't understand yet, with the Earth and Mars warming while the equitorial region of Jupiter warming while the poles cool, or something is effecting the planets at the same time (Solar) or it's all a crazy coincidence.

Personally, I think it's Solar activity, likely a long term variability in the Sun we don't understand yet. Or pirates and the FSM.