Boy, that one’s going to piss off the TSA…
It shows a woman TSAer faking a wanding at the security line to steal a passenger’s soft drink.
Boy, that one’s going to piss off the TSA…
It shows a woman TSAer faking a wanding at the security line to steal a passenger’s soft drink.
Clark Lindsey has some more perspective on what a waste of money the Shuttle program is currently, given that we aren’t even flying it (and perhaps even if we were):
* Elon Musk has spent about $100M so far on developing the line of SpaceX Falcon launchers. The first Falcon 9 launch is scheduled for 2007. He hasn’t said how much more money it will take to reach that launch but I doubt it could be more than another $100M.
* Kistler says it needs a few hundred million dollars to finish its fully reusable two stage K-1 vehicle.
* T/Space said it can build a CEV system capable of taking crews and cargo to the ISS for around $500M.
* LockMart once promised to build the VentureStar for $6B. If they had a 100% overrun that would still be less than $13B.
I came home on a red eye last night, slept in, and awoke to a lovely thunderstorm about noon.
More later.
Western Union sent its last telegram last week.
All this lunacy is understood only in a larger surreal landscape. Tibet is swallowed by China. Much of Greek Cyprus is gobbled up by Turkish forces. Germany is 10-percent smaller today than in 1945. Yet only in the Middle East is there even a term “occupied land,” one that derived from the military defeat of an aggressive power.
Over a half-million Jews were forcibly cleansed from Baghdad, Damascus, Cairo, and other Arab cities after the 1967 war; but only on the West Bank are there still refugees who lost their homes. Over a million people were butchered in Rwanda; thousands die each month in Darfur. The world snoozes. Yet less than 60 are killed in a running battle in Jenin, and suddenly the 1.5 million lost in Stalingrad and Leningrad are evoked as the moral objects of comparison, as the globe is lectured about “Jeningrad.”
Now the Islamic world is organizing boycotts of Denmark because one of its newspapers chose to run a cartoon supposedly lampooning the prophet Mohammed. We are supposed to forget that it is de rigueur in raucous Scandinavian popular culture to attack Christianity with impunity. Much less are we to remember that Hamas terrorists occupied and desecrated the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem in a globally televised charade.
Instead, Danish officials are threatened, boycotts organized, ambassadors recalled
On NPR, coming up at noon Pacific.
Joe Katzman say they’re part of the Air Force’s future. With civilian applications. I’d love to see dirigibles come back, with modern materials, as aerial cruiseships. I think there’d be a big market for them.
Clark Lindsey writes that next week’s inaugural launch of the Falcon 1 is still on, and that this time it will be webcast. So there was some benefit (to those interested) in the delay.
I’m still swamped at work, but Clark Lindsey has updated his commercial space timeline. I personally continue to find it quite encouraging, though 2005 wasn’t nearly as groundbreaking and eventful as 2004 was.
SpaceToday.net has a good summary of the recently discovered extra solar planet massing only five times as much as ours.
My recommendation for the planet finders is to start looking for wobbles on the wobbles of the super massive planet orbits to see if they can find smaller planets or Moons. Or wobbles on cold binary stars that circle near the hab zone of hotter primaries that may also turn up lower mass planets.
Even if we never directly detect low mass planets, big hab zone planets may be like Jupiter or Saturn and have lots of moons, some of which have comfortable gravity and an atmosphere.