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Orbital power! The "500-foot-wide" path of destruction is not a realistic concern regarding microwaves from satellites unless you are playing sim city. From the article, ' "There is a risk element but you can reduce it," said Marzwell. "You can put these small receivers in the desert or in the mountains away from populated areas."'

Or the other option is lasers. Orbital power is the cleanest solution we've come up with yet. The worst damage from an orbital power accident would be nothing compared to chernobal or the clouds of poison coming from coal plants.

I think a gazillion indie bands would leap at the chance to be distributed alongside the entire catalog of digitized music, especially if the site could serve up streaming radio and indies have a prayer of getting some airplay...

What I'm really saying is I'd like to see "the Snapster Studios Records Radio Entertainment Channel Online" and 500 other startups doing the same thing, because ultimately future companies built around this business model are owned by it's shareholders, who are the users.

I'd like the artists to enjoy a larger percentage of that revenue and better contract alternatives than they are currently, under the 75 year old curmudgeon with five heads that's suing potential lifelong customers, and can't imagine why CD sales continue to drop other than file sharing (answer: the economy sucks and so does your record company, two reasons I'm not buying your CDs).

And another thing that bothers me...some record companies have blatantly hired and trained armies of would-be usurpers to take over the International Space Station! Think about it.

Though space.com has good articles, I think http://www.spacer.com (also going by the name spacedaily.com) has some very nice write-ups. Check out the following three articles on the Chinese space ventures -
i. China to shoot for the moon after sending man into orbit - http://www.spacedaily.com/2003/030302075956.spawz6 fq.html
ii. China may launch unmanned moon mission in 2005 - http://www.spacedaily.com/2003/030303030843.54odg9 c7.html
iii. Shenzhou's Changing Face - http://www.spacedaily.com/news/china-03j.html

Suhit

Disbelieving is like /not/ saturating a link. It would take something like this to truly DDoS the great maker.

According to this article there is a spaceport in California that has been launching since the year 2000. Does anyone know anymore about it?

No, it looks like having a large moon may be essential to stabilize the orbit and climate of a planet - check out Not All Habitable Zones Are Created Equal from SpaceDaily

Basically, in 1993 someone looked closer at mars's orbit, and found its axial tilt isn't constant, but varies from 0-60 deg, over a period of 157,000 years!

Needless to say, an axial tilt of 60 degrees is going to royally screw up the climate. Turns out the moon is stabilizing earth's orbit, our axial tilt varies 2.5 degrees every 41,000 years. It has been calculated that without the moon, we would wobble between 0 and 85 deg tilt... lucky eh?
According to the article, Earth is actually at the inner edge of the habitable zone, and the only reason mars is so cold is it is too small to hold an insulating atmosphere.

The unusual property of this new class of materials is essentially its ability to reverse many of the physical properties that govern the behavior of ordinary materials.
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This is because Snell's law, which describes the angle of refraction caused by the change in velocity of light and other waves through lenses, water and other types of ordinary material, is expected to be exactly opposite within this composite.
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Underlying the reversal of the Doppler effect, Snell's law, and Cerenkov radiation (radiation by charged particles moving through a medium) is that this new material exhibits a reversal of one of the "right-hand rules" of physics which describe a relationship between the electric and magnetic fields and the direction of their wave velocity.
The new materials are known by the UCSD team colloquially as "left-handed materials," after a term coined by Veselago, because they reverse this relationship.
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What's unusual about the new class of materials produced by the UCSD team is that it simultaneously has a negative electric permittivity and a negative magnetic permeability, a combination of properties never before seen in a natural or man-made material.

• Sheldon Schultz Quick Bio
• Research Group Page
• UsCD Press Release
• Nature Summary
• Space Daily summary - Excellent!

Check out the Vinny the Vampire comic strip

The best thing I read about the ISRO was this.
I would really love to see some other nation reach the moon, whether it was India or even China. And if some day the Indians colonised the moon, at least you'd be sure of a good curry up there...


Hacker: A criminal who breaks into computer systems

It can carry two to three, perhaps four people, Clark said. "The Chinese are starting with what are 'second generation spacecraft' compared with the Soviets and the United States," he said. You gotta give them credit. Whether or not they benefited from existing technology (the US and Russian Space agencies) or developed this *cough* all on thier own this is a great acheivement for China. China is certainly not aiming low by building a craft for 3-4 people. This design is very workable and will save them the steps of building up to a craft this size vs. the way the us did Mercury and Gemini to build upto Apollo. The article was sparce on details so here are a few links for those interested: Shenzhou
Shenzhou Gallery
An older article on SpaceDaily.com
Shenzhou: A Model Program
China launches second unmanned space test flight Lucky for them the Russian Space program is not as picky about design 'borrowing' as say Apple is because the design is strikingly similar to Soyuz in many ways. It wouldn't surprise me if China becomes a major player in the space game. China has the money and infrastructure to make things happen and is not dependent on the rest of the world. (Personally, I think that is the real message they are sending by building this program.) They are geared towards building thier own space station which indicates some real sense of vision and they have a very cheap labor force (err forced labor?). If they get the program fully up and running it wouldn't be inconceiveable for them to build mass produced versions of thier craft. This design and the launch technology they are using may give them an edge similar to the Russian program: launching at a much lower average cost per kilo of payload than the US.

Helium-3 is an isotope of helium, with two protons and one neutron in the nucleus. It's desirable because it can be used in a fusion reactor at reasonable temperatures and pressures, and won't produce as much secondary radioactivity as things like deuterium or tritium (heavy hydrogen isotopes). There's a lot of it on the moon -- it arrives in the solar wind, and sticks to the surface -- but not much on Earth.

It's one of the good reasons to establish a lunar base.

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Here is a slightly more in-depth article.