Shuttle made what was likely its last night launch earlier. It looks like all went well. Can't wait to see the views out of the Cupola, and would love to see them in person...

The Terra Satellite got an early view of the snow that hit the DC area over the weekend. Landsat 5 will fly overhead today, and I'll post a link if it's clear.

Rand Simberg has a post on an article from early January about the Chinese Space Program and their plans to get to the moon. The plan uses their new Long March 5 rockets for four launches, sending their lunar module to lunar orbit, then sending a crewed vehicle to join it a couple weeks later. The plan is clever in that it avoids storing cryogenic propellants for long periods of time in orbit. I made a comment, however, pointing out how Chinese Space Program timelines for future missions are usually radically faster than their track record would indicate.

I'm home with the family, locked in while the East Coast gets dumped on. Late to the party, I'm sure, but I'm in the process of reading The Challenger Launch Decision. Diane Vaughan really captures day-to-day life of an engineer. She meticulously reconstructs the incidents that built upon each other leading to that fateful day in January 1986.

• NPOESS, the US Government's attempt to combine military and civilian weather satellites has been split into military and civilian projects. The messy divorce is to play out over the coming months.
• Spirit is staying stuck in the sand trap where it's been for months. From there, they hope to answer questions about Mars' core.
• Apparently, two asteroids collided in the asteroid belt, and Hubble imaged the aftermath.
• Speaking of Hubble, the 'scope returned new images of Pluto.

The blog's been mostly silent for a long time. Since I don't have an RSS feed, it's possible that people won't even notice that I posted this. If anything should get me posting again, it would be the President's Budget that hit the streets on Monday. I'm actually more hopeful than most on it, but know that the future will have to be run very well (not a strength in the NASA/NASA Centers/Congress Triangle) to accomplish anything. I want to write more about it, but may not have the time to devote to doing it right. We'll see.

During the Cold War, one reason listed for the Fermi Paradox was nuclear annihilation. It stands to reason that in this day of concerns over global climate change, someone would pose it as a solution for the same paradox.

Another possibility is that they fell for the "We have to fix everything on our planet before we move outward" fallacy.

I wish everyone the best of their particular religious festival timed to nearly coincide with the Winter Solstice.

Looks like a website is drawing some traffic by reposting the Earth as Art collection. Whatever draws the clicks!

(I know, it's been while since I posted. I'll use the typical "Really busy" excuse)

Ed Lu has a piece where he solidifies his position as a former astronaut by telling NASA how to improve their launch capability. Basically, he says they need launch much more. I agree completely.

The latter part of my Air Force active duty career partially dealt with the trainwreck of bringing missileers into Space Command. That era comes to an end on December 1st, as Global Strike Command takes control of the intercontinental ballistic missile force. At least all the people I worked with who kept shrines to Curtis LeMay in their cubicles won't feel like they wasted their time...

A group of cameras in Australia, used to capture images of meteors. The team triangulates the position of the fall and then conducts a 'poor man's sample return.' Very cool.

...bowshocks are cool.

Fans of the old show will love the opening two scenes of this week's Castle.

I was looking around for some Dark Skies in my neighborhood and surrounding states. I came across The Cherry Springs Star Party in Northern PA, and it sounds pretty spectacular. Their next party is June 10-13. I was curious what the moon phase would be at the time, and found this moon phase calculator. Of course, those clever astronomers used something similar to pick their date...new moon on the 10th.

The report is out, the readers and other readers are discussing it, the Congress is preparing to fight it, but in the end, what will happen? I'm going to go out on a limb and say that a speech will happen. That's all I'll stand by for now.

Two events happened twenty years ago. The Loma Prieta Earthquake (on Oct 17th) and the launch of the Galileo Probe to Jupiter (on Oct 18th). Why are these items related? Because the Galileo probe was pushed out of Earth orbit using an Inertial Upper Stage, and that stage was controlled from Sunnyvale, CA near the epicenter of the quake. The people who were to control the IUS evacuated the facility during the quake, then returned the next morning, held their breath, and turned the computers back on. All was OK, so the launch was a go.