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NASA's Skylab $400 Littering Fine Paid By DJ
astroengine writes "Space Disco speaks with a Californian radio DJ about his role in raising, and paying, NASA's 30-year old littering fine levied by a Western Australian town. Skylab parts fell on Esperance in 1979, but the space agency's refusal to pay $400 has resulted in an entertaining annual grudge. Now the Barstow radio DJ is guest of honor at this weekend's 30th anniversary celebrations in Oz and the two small towns at opposite ends of the Pacific will be twinned... all because Skylab had a messy re-entry..."
Where I come from, E-class (emergency-class) wrecker license tags, the ones that allow you to legally respond to car wrecks, are highly prized, being considered virtually a license to print money. Because of that, the wrecker drivers are perfectly willing to shoulder the extra burden of post-wreck cleanup. To keep your E-tag, you have to clean up the miscellaneous parts littering the road after a wreck. Generally, the last step in towing away a wrecked car involves the wrecker driver using a large pushbroom to clean off the roadway.
Being from Fresno, CA, I completely agree. Also, Barstow isn't in the central valley. Central valley ends out near Bakersfield, and Barstow is a bit more southeast from there towards Vegas.
Boosting it out of Earth orbit is much more expensive than doing a retro-burn to allow it to fall back to Earth. Do leave orbit, you have to give it enough energy to reach escape velocity. To have it fall back to Earth, just a "small" nudge to slow down and come back down.
The ISS doesn't have the power budget to get out of earth orbit. De-orbit will definitely mean controlled re-rentry. It really won't be that hard, since they'll surely be able to do it in pieces.
The ringing of the division bell has begun... -PF
They do this in the UK too.
Whats more, they now add a £15 surcharge to speeding fines etc. to fund "compensation for the victims of crime". http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/5225133/Fined-motorists-to-be-hit-with-15-victims-surcharge.html
This comes as they are rolling out a huge expansion of speed cameras, including "ANPR" (Automatic Number Plate Recognition) which time your car point-to-point, over many miles, and handily also record your (and everybody else's) vehicle movements for 5 years at police central command.
This is a substitute for a clever sig that fits within the maximum number of characters.
Foreign governments don't pay their parking tics in NYC or Washington either mainly because they don't have to. Diplomatic immunity bars local gov from messing with them. Also It would be interesting to send a FOIA request to NASA to see if the town ever went through proper diplomatic channels to make a claim against the US gov.
"If you want to know what happens to you when you die, go look at some dead stuff."
So I started to read the article and immediately thought "oh yeah, I remember when that came down". Then I read the part about the 30yr Anniversary. Damn I am getting old.
Flexible bare-metal recovery for Linux/UNIX
You mean like this example from NASA's own site? I found that in 15 seconds on google.
Where do you think they would send the ISS? A Lagrange point? Please.
It is going to be thrown away just after it is complete. I think it is sick, but they have been talking about this ever since the 1990's. I remember reading about this planned destruction at age 12 in Popular Science--even before they had launched the first component. I was very disgusted with our "progress" in space exploration, then as now.
Not so much that, but making new laws just so you can fine people and increase the governmental revenue stream seems to be the way to go here. In the Melbourne CBD, there are around 500 parking inspectors wandering around the city from 6am till 1am, and if your car is parked somewhere for more than 3 minutes after it's allocated time, $110 fine. Even at 12:45am... in a 1 hr parking spot that I'd parked in at 11:50pm, I got fined - the onus fell on me to prove that I had been there less than one hour and I had no way of doing so. I remember this thing called presumption of innocence being taught in school... seems that it's the complete opposite in reality.
not that i ever paid that fine... arseholes!
... wait, what?
Read this as an example. The fine was a joke. Jimmy Carter called the local roadhouse to apologise. They probably had the whole population of Balladonia around the phone.