Category Archives: Space

Dry dock in orbit

Posted on September 21, 2009 | Comments Off on Dry dock in orbit

fic_startrek_Star_Trek_in_Earth_Orbit_1__fungun.jpg

Okay, Star Trek fans, here’s one for ya. I don’t know if this will ever make sense, but it’s pretty to look at.

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Up, in Luna city

Posted on September 18, 2009 | Comments Off on Up, in Luna city

lunar_base.jpg

Presume this is a railgun or a mass driver for flinging spacecraft into orbit. Bet it would be awfully cold on your bottom sitting on luna’s rock and dust like these folks are doing. They probably live underground to escape Sol’s radiation. Still, it would be fun to go. It is, actually, in the imagination.

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Armadillo claims X Prize

Posted on September 13, 2009 | Comments Off on Armadillo claims X Prize

The rain cleared off long enough earlier this evening, at Caddo Mills northeast of Dallas, for Armadillo Aerospace to claim the X Prize Foundation’s million dollar award for a private rocket capable of taking off, flying for a hundred eighty seconds and landing precisely on a simulated lunar surface. Two videos here show the vertical takeoff and vertical landing rocket doing the trick.

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Posted in Science/Engineering, Space, Texana

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Obamalot in space

Posted on September 9, 2009 | Comments Off on Obamalot in space

No JFK moment this time. We’re not going back to the moon. We’re not going to Mars. In fact, we’re not boldly (or even cautiously) going anywhere. The only good part is the idea of encouraging private space enterprises like the government pushed aviation in the 1920s by paying for air mail deliveries. Only something tells me that Barry won’t be putting enough money into that to do much of anything with it, either. Hope and change! Only for earthworms.

Via Instapundit.

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Maunder Minimum here we come?

Posted on September 4, 2009 | Comments Off on Maunder Minimum here we come?

This will give the global warmists something to chew on. The ones who are still scientists, at least, not anti-technology pilgrims to a holy environmentalist shrine. The latter will accuse the researchers at the link of trying to change the subject.

But the longer the face of the sun stays clear of magnetic sunspot blemishes, or no better than sunspecks, as it now has pretty much for more than two years, the more it looks like the return of the Maunder Minimum. That was a cooling time, from about the Seventeenth to the mid-Nineteenth centuries. For instance, New York harbor froze over in the winter of 1780.

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Posted in Space, Weather/Climate

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Solar energy from the black

Posted on September 2, 2009 | Comments Off on Solar energy from the black

It’s a been a topic of debate for many years and, so far, all we’ve done is talk about it. The Japanese appear to be ready to put $21 billion where their mouth is when it comes to collecting solar energy in space and beaming it down to the surface. They say they’ll be able to power 249,000 homes. Makes a lot more sense than ruining a desert ecology with solar collectors. What do you want to bet the UN calls it too dangerous and tries to stop them?

Via Slashdot.

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Hubble’s Ultra Deep Field

Posted on August 29, 2009 | Comments Off on Hubble’s Ultra Deep Field

Get out your 3D glasses for a stirring, and a bit humbling, animation of about ten thousand of the other hundred billion galaxies out there in the black. More here.

Via Millard Fillmore’s Bathtub.

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Posted in Blogosphere, Science/Engineering, Space

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