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SkyCorp planned to launch PowerMacs into orbit as web servers. Then again, nothing has been heard from them since the announcement...

If anyone's curious, here's a little more info on his old "Life to Mars" project:

MarsNow 1.9 Profile: Elon Musk, Life to Mars Foundation

Someone is putting his money where my mouth has been. Describing permanent settlement of Mars as "a positive, constructive, inspirational goal" capable of uniting humanity at a critical time," dot-com entrepreneur Elon Musk has pledged a substantial portion of his personal fortune to realizing that goal, beginning with a proposed $20 million technology-demonstration Mars lander to be launched perhaps in 2005. Calling his "victory condition" seeing NASA's top priority change to establishing a permanent human presence on Mars, he said in an interview last week that "the path by which I hope to get there is to get the public enthusiastic about the possibility, then translate that into legislative pressure so that Congress hands us a Mars mandate." Musk's plans are invigorating, finally matching for Mars the initiative and boldness recently displayed in Low Earth Orbit by Dennis Tito's flight and the recent MirCorp announcement of a private "MiniMir" orbiting facility. I hope his entrepreneurial directness will bring a new effectiveness to the Mars effort. I hope also that he can avoid being brought down by the Byzantine politics of space: on the Hill, in the scientific community and in the space movement.

NASA wants to know whether there ever was life on Mars. Musk - and I, and many more - want to know if there ever can be.

Musk's "Mars Oasis" project is a small robotic lander intended primarily as a mini-greenhouse, growing samples of food crops in an enclosed chamber filled with treated Martian regolith (soil), to test the feasibility of humans living off the land. Other experiments may include test units for the production of oxygen and rocket fuel from the Martian atmosphere, and radiation sensors. In a radical departure from the missions scheduled by NASA, each experiment would focus on developing data critical to human habitation, rather than on pure planetary science. While the project's centerpiece is essentially the project long advocated by NASA planetary scientist Chris McKay, Musk stated that he had only met McKay in passing and had not discussed the project with him. ...

His goal of moving Congress to declare a human presence on Mars to be a priority implies substantial legislative action, at the very least putting forward a legislative program to be advocated to Congress by citizen supporters.

I think it may be related with a geomagnetic storming from a sun.
read more in news:
The large and dynamic active sunspot region, numbered by NOAA as Region 720, has produced several strong solar events. Five large solar flares produced moderate (R2) to strong (R3) radio blackouts since 15 January. The largest of these solar eruptions, an X3.8 on the GOES-12 x-ray sensor, occurred today at 17/0659 UTC (near local midnight MST). Short-wave radio communications through the sunlit hemisphere of Earth experienced significant signal degradation during these solar flares.
Associated strong geomagnetic and radiation storms are underway. The radiation storm began on 16/0210 UTC (15 January, 7:10 P.M. MST) and is currently at the S3 (strong level). A G3 (strong) geomagnetic storm began early on the 17th (UTC) and remains in progress. The geomagnetic storm is associated with two coronal mass ejections (CMEs) observed on SOHO/LASCO imagery on 15 January.

Solar Terrestrial Activity Report

Before the recovered three month old data
And
Now

Figures explanation at the end of: Fig. 1 and Fig. 2

Before the recovered three month old data
And
Now

Figures explanation at the end of: Fig. 1 and Fig. 2

Before the recovered three month old data
And
Now

Figures explanation at the end of: Fig. 1 and Fig. 2

Before the recovered three month old data
And
Now

Figures explanation at the end of: Fig. 1 and Fig. 2

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

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

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

Due to popular demand there are now two mirror sites for the AGC Replica project files:

NASA Office of Logic Design

SpaceRef.com

Everything I have read on this, admittedly limited to New Scientist and Nature etc, says Precambrian. And they argue the subsequent warming was the trigger for the Cambrian explosion around 550 million + years ago (don't quote me on the exact times). OK here's another link which definitely says 600 - 800 million years ago.

If it happened in Silurian times then the dominant land life would have been wiped out ... reptiles etc, in fact aren't you talking about the time of the Permian? Think about it ... if it happened then there would have been no dinosaurs or proto-mammals etc.

Been a long time since I've studied geology but vague memories tell me you've got something wrong. There is quite a bit of geological evidence for glaciation in the late Precambrian, if you go back the the very early times .. Archaean(?) then there are suggestions but no solid evidence.

Solar Power Satellites, the early-days crystal radios, and RFID-tags are all examples of what you are talking about. Sure, it's not 802.11, but it's still power over the ether.

Dare I say it? "All your cancer are belong to us" :)

But there's certainly visionairies with money out there, and I suspect they'll be doing great things in the near future. For example, before he was "distracted" by starting up SpaceX, PayPal founder Elon Musk was engaged in plans to launch an experimental greenhouse to place on the surface of Mars. I suspect he'll get back to that later on, once companies like SpaceX succeed in dramatically lowering launch costs.

Here's what I'd submitted --

"NASA successfully launched its Swift Satellite today at 12:16 PM EST, after weeks of delays due to hurricanes and rocket trouble. The Swift satellite hopes to explore the origin of Gamma ray bursts, long believed to be related to the birth of Black Holes. The Swift project is a joint undertaking between the American, British and Italian space agencies. Kennedy Space Center has a video stream of the launch. "

Back in September, NASA selected 11 companies to conduct preliminary concept studies for human lunar exploration and the development of the NASA's Crew Exploration Vehicle. Many of these are your typical aerospace dinosaurs, but a notable exception is t/Space, a new company which includes people like Burt Rutan (of Scaled Composites and SpaceShipOne), Elon Musk (of SpaceX), Red Whittaker (of the Red Team, which constructed an autonomous vehicle which competed in DARPA's Grand Challenge), and several of the new companies in the budding private space industry.

According to their page: Our core mission requirement is to enable prompt, affordable, safe and sustainable lunar exploration and development by the largest possible number of Americans, both in person and via telepresence.

Under our approach, government incentives focus exclusively on top-level goals, with technology and operational choices left to the private sector. The government incentives will be matched to specific top-level needs, but the "invisible hand" of market forces will shape choices as they flow down multiple supplier chains. Incentives will be structured so that several companies in each major area have an opportunity to win this support. With this competitive industrial base, two major processes become possible:

* Market forces will continually launch new products that replace established goods and services (the "creative destruction" that Joseph Schumpeter [Austrian economist 1883-1950] identified as the key element of capitalism). Poorly performing systems will be killed off quickly via competition rather than via burdensome NASA reviews or Congressional intervention.
* Capability gap analyses will be performed by dozens and ultimately hundreds of companies on a continuous basis. As happens now in all competitive industries, the successful companies will be those who listen closely to their customers and accurately predict their future needs - in other words, capability gap analysis by multiple independent profit-seekers.

Commercial firms will create and own infrastructure that offers services that overlap in many cases. The overlaps found in a competitive private space economy will provide the resiliency now lacking in single-string solutions such as the Space Shuttle and Space Station, for which there are no ready alternatives. While functional overlaps are viewed as inefficiencies in centrally-planned systems, in a market-based system they drive costs lower (by reducing monopoly power and spurring innovation) and accelerate schedules (by eliminating single-point bottlenecks among suppliers and spurring competition).

If I understand correctly, tSpace's plan is to design an overall space architecture, and have companies compete for different components, whether they be launch vehicles, space station life support modules, or lunar landers. Many of these components will also be available commercially, keeping the price down and the reliability high. I suspect it's going to be difficult to keep from being eaten alive by the huge aerospace companies (Boeing, Lockheed, etc.), but I have a hope that they'll somehow end up getting the contract and end up completely reforming our approach to space.

I highly recommend reading through their presentation. The things they discuss are quite insightful, and they have some incredible ideas. Here's a few of their points:

Safety results from design choices, not oversight
* Attempting to produce safety by inspection, quality control,

Let's go!

This article from 2000 is about Pentium 166 laptops on the Shuttle. So, no, they are not stuck with 486's because of cosmic radiation.

After seeing this, wouldn't you say the same?

That makes alot of sense actually.

I'm picturing it taking a year before NASA stops screaming long enough to actually hear the answer. Did I say stop? I meant pause.

Of course, when you hire Laurel and Hardy to move the stuff around...
http://images.spaceref.com/news/2003/9.6.2003_01.l rg.jpg

http://images.spaceref.com/news/2003/9.6.2003_01.l rg.jpg
This time we are pretty sure it was the guy on the left. What do you think he's got behind his back?

Note: Images are hosted through nyud.net to avoid funding spam

A cloud filled with simple molecules of sugar has been found 26,000 light-years away from us, near the middle of our Milky Way Galaxy. The 8-atom sugar molecules exist in a gas cloud named Sagittarius B2 at a temperature of only 8 degrees above absolute zero. Too far and too cold to bake your next cake! However, even if chemistry reactions on Earth and in this frigid sugar cloud are very different, astronomers think this "discovery suggests how the molecular building blocks necessary for the creation of life could first form in interstellar space." I'm not qualified to say if their claims are funded, but don't hesitate to tell me if they're right or wrong.

Please read the original article for more astronomical details or just enjoy the illustrations below describing how prebiotic chemistry -- the formation of the molecular building blocks necessary for the creation of life -- occurs in interstellar clouds.

The above acronyms in the credits for the illustrations refer respectively to the National Radio Astronomy Observatory , the Associated Universities, Inc. (AUI) and the National Science Foundation (NSF) .

Sources: SpaceRef.com, September 20, 2004; and various websites

"Loose sand fragments were transported by wind, and impacted on the bedrock, slowly removing parts of the surface, like a sand-blaster. If the winds blow in the same direction for a long enough period, 'wind-lanes', as shown in the picture, can occur."

It's so easy, researchers have actually done it by robot.

Well, this article is pretty fascinating, and not only for its content - None of the other space exploration sites I visit regularly seem to have this information - At most, they talk about Opportunity's discovery of the Razorback feature, but no discussion of analysis. Has NewScientist scooped everyone on this discovery, or was this publicized prematurely?

No tinfoil required, really, just an observation.

Oil fields and microbes come from a theory held by a maverick scientist by the name of Thomas Gold. The gist of his argument ran as follows: "The presence of organic molecules in all petroleum deposits has long been taken as evidence for the biological origin of petroleum. Gold argued instead in his 1999 book The Deep Hot Biosphere that the organic molecules come from subterranean microbes that feed on petroleum deep in the Earth's crust. Gold's vision of a supply of oil and gas that is essentially inexhaustible drew intense criticism from petroleum geologists."

Interestingly enough, Peter Bentley's group results on car racing would not be considered human competitive, unless the results obtained in the simulation will be tried in the real world, or if the simulator is something experts actually use to shave of seconds. In any case, it seems the Evolutionary Computation world is starting to obtain very strong results, for a part due to Moore's law. It's possible that this is caused by the fact that the field simply tries to solve things, instead of first proving that it works (AI/ML), or proving that it doesn't work (Operations Research).

You don't need to go into a national park to look for Atlantis. It's safe and sound.

In fact, one of the CAIB members wrote a follow up piece called Beyond the Widget: Columbia Accident Lessons Affirmed which, in part, says:

NASA allowed the shuttle to effectively transition from a research and development system to operational status, despite the fact that prior to the Columbia tragedy there had only been 111 successful shuttle flights. In contrast, the Air Force's F/A-22 is programmed for 2,500 flights, nearly 4,600 test hours, before being deemed operational. Although the space shuttle should be considered experimental because of the nature of its mission profiles, it was, due to its commitments and ISS obligations, processed and operated as an operational vehicle. Senior leaders must ensure that a vehicle or program still in the R&D stage is not treated as operational and fielded - an experimental vehicle or program must be treated as such. Although the loss of Columbia cannot be directly tied to the confusion between R&D and operational, it did influence certain decisions that may have changed the fate of the crew; a decision not to pursue imagery eliminated the consideration of an on-orbit repair or rescue mission."

So that makes it ~$1,000 per ton to LEO. That's still WAY cheaper than current rates.

Still, rockets are like UPS Same Day shipping, and just as reliable ;)

since Mars hasn't proved all that exciting

'scuse me? Within the last 3 months Mars Express resp. the MERs have found on Mars:

a) water ice in the south polar cap, previously thought to be dry ice only;
b) traces of methane (!) in the atmosphere;
c) conclusive evidence for a standing body of liquid water in the past.

All of which is raising the possibility of at least microbial life on Mars, fossil and/or present, which I find plenty exciting. I know it's not much by the entertainment standards of the MTV generation, but what did you expect - little green men taking us to their leader?

I for one find it remarkable that documents such as the Mars Express status report now routinely refer to "biological processes" as candidate explanation for observations without batting as much as an eyelash. And Mars Express hasn't even commenced its official science mission yet! Plenty to look forward to.

Totally agree.

1. The press has become so lopsided, so Democrat, that they are so eager to demean the current administration that they can't even bother to check the validity of the images of "Soldiers killed in Iraqi combat".

2. And the current administration is the strongest proponent of lifting those restrictions on gun control.

3. The counter-party is blocking the appointment of new judges to replace retiring officials. Sounds like being against speedy trials to me.

4. Thank you Clinton for using executive orders to confiscate land and turn it into federal parks.

You're right, we need to clean out half of congress... but we will argue about which half needs to go.

Better sources for space related stuff:
spaceref.com
space.com
spaceflightnow.com
spacedaily.com
the rovers' homepage
and just for fascinating pics and educative descriptions: Astronomy Picture of the Day

They often carry the same stories, but usually one of them will have the scoop. There are more sites, but these ones are definately worthy of a daily visit, and some have plenty links to other interesting sites. Have fun :D

Apollo astronaut Harrison Schmitt had a wonderful editorial in Aviation Week and Space Technology a couple of weeks ago, which is similar to this testimony before Congress. In it he laid out an arguably sound economic case for mounting a large-scale mission to the moon to mine Helium 3.

Helium 3 is present in abundance on the moon, and on a per-pound basis could be one of the most valuable substances there is. Assuming that one really could catalyze nuclear fusion in power reactors using Helium 3, it could have profound implications -- allowing us to move beyond hydrocarbon fossil fuels (although, ironically, you'd still need those fuels to power the rockets to the moon.)

I'd seen pie-eyed schemes for going to the moon for the Helium 3 before, but Schmitt really tries to nail it down, and answer most obvious criticisms. It's definitely worth a read.

Thad Beier

Io?
It's highly unlikely that there's any life on Io. It appears to be too extreme for extremophiles. Perhaps you are thinking of Europa. Europa's the icy moon. Io's the volcanic one covered in sulfur.

If you've read the Red Mars trilogy, you know about the hypothetical conflict between Mars preservationists "the Reds" and terraformists "the Greens". While these books are set in the future, within the Mars-nerd community people are already starting to form similar ranks. From scientists who condemn manned missions as contaminating a virgin planet to people already doing research on what greenhouse gas mixture to use to heat up the place. There is a NASA debate on this that got some press recently.

... "Mars was once a warm place and is now cold and dry". May be Venus would be the next earth? ...

This is an interesting idea, and it was a popular concept for a while ago. Writers as diverse as Burroughs and C.S. Lewis wrote stories around these concepts. It could be called "dying Mars, high noon Earth, and promising Venus" hypothesis or something. I suppose this has lot to do with Percival Lowell's writings about ancient martians still trying to fight against their planet's inevitable destiny as a dry and dead place (with canals he claimed to have found). Add to this the fact that before 1960's we had no way of knowing how it's like in the surface of Venus, so it was easy for scifi writers to place there nice tropical forests just waiting for future civilizations to appear. After all, who could've guessed that right now Venus has temperatures around 480 Celsius and about the worst greenhouse effect you can imagine.

However, it's not getting cooler. Quite the opposite. Everyone doesn't agree about the exact timelines but the general consensus seems to be that we only have about billion years til Earth becomes too hot for living. That's simply because the Sun is getting hotter as it gets older.

One cannot underestimate the power of popular culture that has painted us the image of dying Mars. However it's important to see why the red planet once was better place for life and held vast amounts of liquid water, and why it isn't anymore. Of course we can't be sure about everything yet, but we can make good guesses. Most probable reason is that Mars, being smaller, has so low gravity compared to Earth or Venus. This has led it gradually losing most of its atmosphere, lowering both the pressure and temperature on surface. This in turn made conditions unfit for liquid water, so the seas then disappeared, making it very hard for any possible life there. Question now is, where is the water? If it's anywhere to be found anymore, it just might've vaporized to space. And obviously we're interested in any possible marks of life.

So apparently the Sun, and thus the whole solar system is getting increasingly hotter, but still we cannot reliably say what happens in any individual planet. I'm not sure anyone has complete theory explaining what causes Venus's ultra-thick atmosphere and what that planet would be like if something thinned the atmosphere to more Earth-like levels...

Oh come on! They're on mission patches for the Rover missions and were at the same press conference. Sheesh!

I can say without hesitation that traveling to space to upgrade the instruments and ensure the future of the Hubble Space Telescope was worth the potential risk to my life.

(And we see no problem in sending hundreds of thousands of other people to a far-away land to face death for reasons that are yet to be explained satisfactorily.)

Funny, but nowhere near as cool as when Taco Bell planted the Mir target in the south pacific.

I wonder how the lander is going to stay on the comet once the comet gets closer to the sun and starts ejecting mass.

The lander will fire a harpoon into the comet to ensure it doesn't bounce off again.

C'mon, that's crazy. It's like suggesting we should've brought Mir down in pieces in a shuttle or something. Hubble's an old space telescope, and we've thrown many old space telescopes away.

I was very let down that there was no mention of the Lunar Solar Power / LSP project, proposed by David Criswell (and I think recently reviewed by NASA). This project could not only "lift our national spirit", but prove the best long-term investment our or any country could make for global stability and prosperity. The Mars mission sends the wrong (militaristic) message to the world when too many nations hasten to blame others for their problems (which is what causes wars). The prospect of being able to power the world's population affordably, sustainably and extensibly by 2050, or even 2100, could carry a profound message of hope. Why not actually solve a real long term problem rather than leaving it to our grandchildren?

Funny how the rover got stuck

http://images.spaceref.com/news/2004/rover.armspin .mov

It's a Quicktime ".mov" file format. If you are deficient and still using Windows can probably play it in WMV or Real Player too, Linux users use Xine or MPlayer, if not go get the Penguin Liberation Front codecs (PLF).

Someone mirrior this quick before it's slashdotted!

Yes, I too pine for the days of leaded gasoline, lead pipes, CCA-treated lumber and asbestos!

And really, boiling down the two shuttle failures to material replacements? Perhaps a more important factor is its design.

> I'm sure that all kinds of good science are being done
> as manpower and air leaks permit

A common misconception among non-scientists.

The ISS project has not been useful for significant scientific research.
Unmanned craft, on the other hand, have.

See the Senate testimony
of Robert Park for corroboration.

They didn't. If the ET insulation had impacted the tiles, there would have been only minor damage (a weeks worth of repair time before the next flight was estimated).

The insulation didn't hit the tiles, it hit the RCC panels at the front of the wing. These are entirely different. They are big, tough, heavy elements which turn out to be unexpectedly brittle.

Here is an article about a private company that wants to save the Hubble with a "space tug". I say if NASA is going to let it burn anyway, they should let private industry bid for the project. There are a lot of reasons that the Hubble is still relevant. NEO (near earth objects) anyone? The Hubble has made some amazing discoveries and I don't think it has outlived its usefulness yet.

These guys have a cool desktop, if you can call it that.

Riccardo Giacconi was using a fairly ordinary CDE on Solaris desktop on a beautiful 24 inch wide-screen monitor the last time I saw it, with some very cool galaxy images from the Chandra Deep Field.

Steven Squyres probably also has an interesting desktop, and I think I saw it on ABC News last week, before they switched to talking about the problems with the rover.

You can see Asia Carrera's desktop in the background, but it's not safe from work. Looks mundane.

I wonder if Pheobe has a cool desktop. Not Alyssa Milano, but her character.

Speaking of fiction, I wonder whether David Kay uses Windows or Mac?

While I like innovators, I'm more interested in users. They at least try to do useful things. That was the problem with Alan Kay. He always has interesting desktops. He showed squeak at a conference a few years ago that just stunned people, but none of us could figure out what we would actually do with it.

The MOC image of the Spirit lander and its landing site was acquired using a new technique that was pioneered by the MGS project in 2003. Called "cPROTO" (for Pitch and Roll Only Targeted Observation with planetary motion compensation), the approach allows MOC, which normally takes pictures 1.5 meters (5 feet) per pixel to 12 meters (40 feet) per pixel, to acquire images with a higher resolution. By pitching the MGS spacecraft at a rate faster than it orbits around Mars, and moving it in a way that compensates for the rotation of the planet, MOC is able to obtain images with a down-track resolution of about 50 cm/pixel (~20 inches/pixel), although the cross-track resolution remains ~1.5 m/pixel (5 ft/pixel). These images have a better signal-to-noise ratio than typical 1.5 m/pixel MOC images, as well. This technique allows the lander and other details not normally visible in a full-resolution MOC image to be seen.

Argh! I thought I added the link (Preview is for whmips!)

From a Congressional report:

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) conducts the most visible space activities. NASA's FY2004 budget request is $15.5 billion. NASA requested $15.0 billion for FY2003; Congress approved $15.3 billion (adjusted for the 0.65% across-the-board rescission, from which the shuttle program was exempted). The loss of the space shuttle Columbia on February 1, 2003, is dominating debate over NASA's future. The space shuttle's primary mission for the foreseeable future is taking crews and cargo to and from the International Space Station (ISS). The two programs are inextricably linked, and Congress and the Administration face many issues, both near-term and long-term, about the shuttle and ISS.

The Department of Defense (DOD) has a less visible but equally substantial space program. Tracking the DOD space budget is extremely difficult since space is not identified as a separate line item in the budget. DOD sometimes releases only partial information (omitting funding for classified programs) or will suddenly release without explanation new figures for prior years that are quite different from what was previously reported. The most recent figures from DOD show a total (classified and unclassified) space budget of $15.7 billion for FY2002, $18.4 billion for FY2003, and a FY2004 request of $20.4 billion. DOD space issues include management of programs to develop new early warning and missile tracking satellites, and management of military and intelligence space activities generally.