Category Archive 'NASA'
21 Oct 2020

NASA Sampling an Asteroid

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This is the most interesting thing NASA has done since the Apollo program landed on the moon.

HT: Vanderleun.

11 Jan 2020

Yale Admissions Office, Call This Kid!

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Yahoo admires the high school student who discovered a new planet just three days into his NASA internship.

A New York high school student can put “planet discovery” on his resume after finding a new world during his NASA internship.

Wolf Cukier was working at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland last summer when he uncovered TOI 1338 b — a planet orbiting two stars instead of one — while examining information captured by the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), according to a release from the space agency.

“I was looking through the data for everything the volunteers had flagged as an eclipsing binary, a system where two stars circle around each other and from our view eclipse each other every orbit,” Cukier, 17, said in a statement. “About three days into my internship, I saw a signal from a system called TOI 1338.”

He continued, “At first I thought it was a stellar eclipse, but the timing was wrong. It turned out to be a planet.”

RTWT

21 Jul 2019

Liberals and the Space Program

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The New York Times’ derisive response to the 50th Anniversary of America’s triumphant landing on the Moon made the blood of many people boil, but really wasn’t anything new.

The liberalism of the American Establishment moved significantly in the direction of the rancid radical Left in the six years between the death of JFK and the Apollo space crew’s moon landing. Even as far back in 1969, as Steven Hayward notes, the liberals were turning against the Space Program.

[W]e shouldn’t underestimate how dramatically liberals turned against the Apollo project at the moment of its triumph—a sign of the larger collapse of liberalism in the 1960s. The moon landing had been set out as a lofty goal by the liberals’ hero, John F. Kennedy, and the moon landing was an occasion of national pride and celebration for most Americans. Here, amidst the rubble and gloom of the 1960s, was something that had gone splendidly right. Many leading liberals, however, could only sniff that while the moon landing was undeniably impressive, the money for the moon landing would have been better spent on social problems on Earth. The popular cliché of the time went: “Any nation that can land a man on the moon can [fill in the blank].” (The total cost of the decade-long moon landing project was less than three months’ worth of federal spending for social programs in 1969.)

Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield said that “The needs of the people on earth, and especially in this country, should have priority. When we solve these problems, we can consider space efforts.” Even the brother of the man who issued the call to go to the moon, Sen. Ted Kennedy, expressed weariness with the space program: “I think after [the moon landing] the space program ought to fit into our other national priorities.”

This may have been the moment when liberalism certified that it had become a crabbed and negative force in American life. It has never recovered.

RTWT

21 Dec 2016

Revive the Space Program

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Liberals love pouring money in federal program, except for the worthwhile ones. Douglas MacKinnon calls on Donald Trump to reverse Barack Obama’s retreat from Space.

[John] Kennedy [said]: “…We mean to be a part of it — we mean to lead it. For the eyes of the world now look into space, to the moon and to the planets beyond … Our leadership in science and in industry, our hopes for peace and security, our obligations to ourselves as well as others, all require us … to become the world’s leading space-faring nation.”

Well, look at us now. The United States of America has no manned space program, and we are reduced to paying the Russians more than $70 million per seat — and sometimes begging them behind closed doors — to transport our astronauts to a space station built primarily with American tax dollars.

Both the first man (and American) to walk on the moon and the last man (and American) to walk on the moon heavily criticized the shortsightedness of Obama.

Said the late Neil Armstrong in part: “… For the United States, the leading space-faring nation for nearly half a century, to be without carriage to low Earth orbit and with no human exploration capability to go beyond Earth orbit for an indeterminate time into the future, destines our nation to become one of second- or even third-rate stature.”

Gene Cernan, the last man to walk on the moon, wrote in an Orlando Sentinel guest column in 2012, regarding Obama’s “abdication of leadership”: “…[O]ver the past four years, Obama has resorted to leading from behind and asks Americans to settle for a new normal that diminishes our position in the world. Not only is he willing to sacrifice the United States’ pre-eminence in space exploration, but he seems unconcerned that our economic and national security might falter as well.”

As we close out 2016, the leaders of the People’s Republic of China and Russia — with both nations announcing plans to establish manned bases on the moon — know that no nation on Earth is more dependent upon their satellites in low and geosynchronous orbit for their national and economic security, than the United States. And that is why both of those nations continually war-game how to destroy the very satellites that ensure our safety.

Talk of spending well more than $100 billion in American tax dollars to send astronauts to Mars to plant a flag may sound worthwhile, or even romantic to some, but it’s wasted talk and certainly wasted money for now.

Job one has to be to restart an American manned space program and then to protect our interests from low Earth orbit to the surface of the moon.

To do otherwise would not be in the best interest of the national security of our nation.

Read the whole thing.

08 Jun 2015

Relief Maps of Europe

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Europe1

Europe2

Relief maps created by Anton Balazh with elements supplied by NASA.

Via Ratak Monodosico.

05 Feb 2015

Good Prank

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22 Aug 2014

Not For 42 Years

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MoonFlightSatire

Hat tip to Jose Guardia.

15 Oct 2012

Moment of Reflection

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29 Dec 2010

Ten Best NASA Photos of 2010

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Mars’ moon, Phobos

20 Jul 2010

Privatizing Space Exploration

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NASA is busy trying to improve the self-esteem of Saracens, but take heart, space exploration enthusiasts. As Bill Whittle explains in a 13:15 PJM video, private enterprise is stepping up to take on the challenge that government is in the process of abandoning.

“This wave of exploration is not dependent on the whims of Congress and whichever president happens to be in office. This wave is being launched by free and successful and visionary businessmen, pilots, designers, and engineers, not by committees of detached bureaucrats and clueless politicians.”

Hat tip to Glenn Reynolds.

01 Feb 2010

Obama’s Budget

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Barack Obama promised earlier to cut the deficit in half. His new budget slightly reduces last year’s deficit, largely as an artifact of an end to Bush-era tax cuts. The new budget also includes the abandonment of plans to return to the Moon and possibly go on to Mars.

ABC News:

President Obama will send a $3.834 trillion budget to Congress today for Fiscal Year 2011.

By way of comparison, the FY2010 budget was $3.721 trillion; the FY2009 budget, presented by President George W. Bush, was $3.518 trillion.

The 2011 budget includes $1.415 trillion in discretionary spending and a $1.267 trillion budget deficit representing 8.3 percent of the gross domestic product.

A daunting number, the deficit represents a slight improvement from the FY 2010 budget when it was $1.556 trillion, representing 10.6 percent of GDP.

One reason for the slightly smaller projected deficit include the decision to let the Bush tax cuts of 2001 and 2003 expire for individuals making more than $200,000 a year and families making more than $250,000 a year. This tax increase, which will occur automatically, will bring in a projected $678 billion over the next decade, the administration says. The tax cuts are due to expire at the end of the 2010 calendar year.

The Obama administration will ask for the Bush 2001 and 2003 tax cuts to made permanent for individuals who make under $200,000 and families who make under $250,000. …

Goodnight Moon: NASA will also experience some cuts, including a cancellation of the NASA Constellation program to develop spacecraft to replace the Space Shuttle with the goal of sending astronauts to the Moon and perhaps even Mars.

22 Dec 2009

No Global Warming Around Here

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NASA photo of snow covering the Eastern United States. We live on top of the first mountain, just below the Potomac.

Hat tip to Karen L. Myers.

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