A scale map of the solar system, with the moon as a single pixel.
Category Archives: Space Science
Giordano Bruno
Sorry #Cosmos, he may have been a martyr for religious freedom, but for science? Not so much.
But, you know, it has that truthiness thing going for it.
The Speed Of Light
Is it slowing down?
Louise Riofrio’s Kickstarter didn’t hit its goal last time, though it came close. She’s taking another shot at it.
Ceres
…may have more fresh water than on all of earth. Seems in many ways more habitable than Mars.
Mars Or Bust
NPR has a story on various peoples’ plans, including Mars One.
Rosetta
…has woken up:
SIGNAL RECEIVED #AOS European Space Agency has reestablished contact with @ESA_Rosetta 807 million km from Earth #Rosetta
— ESA Operations (@esaoperations) January 20, 2014
Congratulations to ESA. I think people were getting nervous in mission control.
The Peter Principle
Could it explain the Fermi paradox?
A Space-Exploration Program
As I point out in the book, one of the reasons space policy is such a mess is because we don’t have a national consensus on that question.
The Diane Rehm Space Discussion
Marcia Smith has a good summary. This amused me:
Rehm exclaimed that she didn’t understand what Gold meant because the “language you’re using” sounds “proprietary” and one cannot own the Moon. Gold began answering, but apparently the show ran out of time for that segment (music began playing) and he was not able to fully respond. Rehm said it “sounds confusing to me,” and cut him off.
Diane Rehm always strikes me as someone who is easily confused. I’ve never understood her popularity, except that a lot of Beltway denizens share her propensity for confusion.
[Update a while later]
Monumental willful ignorance from Mark Whittington:
The cancellation of the SLS, unlikely in the current political climate, would mean the end of any hope of sending American astronauts beyond low Earth orbit for the foreseeable future.
If you can’t see beyond the next five years, perhaps. It’s the lack of propellant storage and transfer technologies, and landers, that is keeping bound to LEO, not lack of heavy life. Money wasted on SLS is trapping us there.
Expect him to show up shortly with his standard, foolish, “But you provide no alternative,” despite the fact that he’s been shown alternatives many times. We can explain it to you, Mark, but we can’t understand it for you.
The Speed Of Light
Louise Riofrio is raising some money to publish a book and scientific paper on an interesting cosmological theory.