Monday’s fortieth anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing will be a mockery — of us. It will be followed, with the death of the shuttle-to-nowhere program fourteen months from now, by… nothing. As Krauthammer says: "We came, we saw, we retreated."
UPDATE: Tom Wolfe: "One giant leap to nowhere." And, when I say "us" above, I mean Americans. I wouldn’t put it past the Chinese or the Indians to someday land on the moon and stay.
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Posted in Space
Tagged 40th anniversary of Apollo 11, Charles Krauthammer, Space Shuttle, the moon abandoned
‘Tis the season. The luminous blue-white tendrils of cloud spreading across the high sky are back. Although not, probably, as far south as Texas.
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Posted in Science/Engineering, Space, Weather/Climate
It ain’t rocket science. In some ways, it’s harder. And never more so than this year. The August 5 games have come a long way since the tether was held up by a crane-on-wheels. This time it’s to be held up by a helicopter hovering four thousand three hundred feet (one kilometer) above the Mojave Desert at Edwards AFB where the space shuttles land. For that reason alone, we’re likely to see it on television and YouTube and elsewhere. So get your background here and here and here.
They’re stacking this baby down at KSC for what is billed as a test flight "later this year," mainly to see how the first stage works. I’ll believe it when it happens. But I hope it flies eventually, before the Dems have spent all the available money on ACORN and pork. Because this is the rocket that will take us back to the moon to build a base where we will build a ship for Mars. Theoretically. In the space game the way NASA plays it, you should never count your space flights until they’re launched.
Via SlashDot.
You might think, with all the AGW hysteria, and the Dems rushing to double our electric bills, that the whole globe would be saturated in CO2. You would be wrong. Sure, this satellite mapping of the earth’s atmospheric distribution of carbon dioxide is a year old. But it’s also the first one ever made, and was assembled from data collected between ’02 and ’08. The first one ever made. Think about that for a minute. I’m no great hand at graphics, but it sure looks to me like the major culprits are California and China. So how about it Speaker Pelosi? How about starting by doubling your energy bills?
Via Baby Troll.
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Posted in Obamalot, Science/Engineering, Space, Weather/Climate
Tagged AGW, AIRS July 2008 CO2 (ppmv), carbon dioxide mapping, CO2, global warming
This photoshopped image, by a commenter on this pilot’s forum, shows where the jet’s recovered vertical stabilizer apparently tore off–though whether in mid-air or on impact with the ocean is unknown. Meanwhile, previous notions of a superbolt of lightning frying the plane’s electronics apparently have been quashed by this updated meteorological analysis:
"* Lightning — Though in earlier versions of this study I had identified lightning as occurring in this mesoscale convective system, recent evidence from spaceborne and sferic sensors is pointing to the possibility that this system contained no lightning. Soundings do indicate moderate levels of instability, but there are indications in the literature that cumulonimbus clouds in oceanic equatorial regions entrain considerable quantities of drier, cooler air that dampen upward vertical motion in the lower portions of the storm, and in some way this reduces charge separation. In any case it does look fairly likely that we can rule out a lightning strike as being a factor in the A330 crash."
Indicating that turbulence within the storm apparently was the cause of the breakup at altitude unless there was some other factor which only analysis of the debris and/or the voice and data recordings could show.
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Posted in Obituaries, Scribbles, Space, Weather/Climate
Tagged AF 447, Air Franbce, PPRuNe Forums, vertical stabilizer
Sol may be quiet in terms of sunspots, but its solar prominences are cooking right along.
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Posted in Space, Uncategorized
THE TEXAS SCRIBBLER 