Smallest Exo-Planet So Far Discovered

Wired Magazine reports:

The smallest exoplanet ever seen is less than twice the size of Earth, and orbits a star similar to our sun 390 light years away. Astronomers recently spotted this world, the most Earth-like planet yet discovered, with the COROT satellite.

"For the first time, we have unambiguously detected a planet that is 'rocky' in the same sense as our own Earth,” said Malcolm Fridlund, ESA COROT project scientist.

For all its similarity to our own globe, though, it is still a far cry away from a habitable Earth-twin. For one thing, it is so hot — between 1,830 and 2,730 degrees Fahrenheit — that scientists think it might be covered in lava. It orbits extremely close to its sun and whips around the star once every 20 hours.

Nonetheless, the discovery takes us one step closer to finding another world that could host life. The newly found planet, dubbed COROT-Exo-7b, is distinct from most of the roughly 330 exoplanets so far discovered, which are by and large gas giants like Jupiter. This planet, however, is a terrestrial world like Earth, and seems to have a density similar to that of our own planet.

Attitudes Toward Israel

Denis MacEoin in the Jerusalem Post writes in an opinion piece Marching for Hamas:

In a bizarre reversal of all their commitment to human rights and the struggle of men and women for independence and self-determination, the European Left has chosen again and again to side with the bullies and to condemn a small nation struggling to survive in a hostile neighborhood. It is all self-contradictory: The Left supports gay rights, yet attacks the only country in the Middle East where gay rights are enshrined in law. Hamas makes death the punishment for being gay, but "we are all Hamas now." Iran hangs gays, but it is praised as an agent of anti-imperialism, and allowed to get on with its job of stoning women and executing dissidents and members of religious minorities. If UK Premier Gordon Brown swore to wipe France from the face of the earth, he would become a pariah among nations. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad threatens to do that to Israel and is invited to speak to the UN General Assembly

Israel guarantees civil liberties to all its citizens, Jew or Arab alike, but it is dubbed "an apartheid state"; Hamas, ever the bully, kills its opponents and denies the rest the most basic rights, but we march on behalf of Hamas. The Left prefers the bully because the bully represents a finger in the face of the establishment? Almost no one on the Left has any understanding of militant Islam. Their politics is a politics of gesture, where wearing a keffiyeh is cool but understanding its symbolism is too much effort even for intellectuals.

I'd recommend you read the entire article. Denis MacEoin is the incoming editor of the international journal Middle East Quarterly and the author of a blog entitled A Liberal Defence of Israel.

Author Quote of the Day

Writing is the only profession where no one considers you ridiculous if you earn no money.

- Jules Renard

Third Year Anniversary of the Launch of New Horizons

Three years ago, on January 19, 2006, New Horizons left Earth aboard an Atlas V launch vehicle bound for Pluto. Since then, the space probe has flown more than 1.2 billion miles. It is currently between the orbits of Saturn and Uranus and traveling outward at more than 38,800 miles per hour (more than 10 and a half miles per second).

It will not reach Pluto until 2015.

The distances between the planets of our solar system are not small.

Author Quote for the Day

I love being a writer. What I can't stand is the paperwork.

- Peter De Vries

It's Puzzling

I've run across letter writers and commentators regarding the current war against Hamas who make comments like "war accomplishes nothing. Killing doesn’t change anything except perhaps to engender more anger and hatred on both sides."

I suppose those who write or say such things imagine they are being profound, but I simply find myself puzzled. Do they mean to tell me that the Allies who attacked and defeated Germany in World War II accomplished nothing--that World War II accomplished nothing? Killing Nazis only "engendered more anger and hatred on both sides?"

How exactly was the world supposed to respond to the Nazis?

I'm sorry, but such words from those who criticize Israel who try to make Israel and Hamas morally equivalent strike me as nonsense or worse.

Likewise those who say, "look the Israelis have killed a thousand but only 13 of their people died from the rockets that Hamas shot at them." As if that means something. Imperial Japan only killed 2402 Americans and wounded 1282 at Pearl Harbor in 1941. So after the United States had killed and wounded that many Japanese the war should have ended? The fact that the United States went on pounding on the Empire of Japan until it was totally defeated was a "disproportionate" response and a crime against humanity, huh?

I just don't understand what is going on in the minds of a lot of people.

What Hate Sounds Like

Examples of Anti-Semitism by way of MEMRI and YouTube:

Quote for the Day

I can't understand why a person will take a year to write a novel when he can easily buy one for a few dollars.

--Fred Allen, US radio comedian (1894 - 1956)

Thoughts on Hamas, Palestine, and Anti-Semistism

I don’t think most people are willing to believe just how bad the anti-Semitism in the Moslem world is. There is no moral equivalency between Israel and Hamas. That would be like trying to equate England and Germany in World War II. And yes, I do mean that Hamas is Nazi-like. If you don’t believe me, just take a look at the Hamas charter:


http://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/hamas.asp

Notice article 13:

Initiatives, and so-called peaceful solutions and international conferences, are in contradiction to the principles of the Islamic Resistance Movement. Abusing any part of Palestine is abuse directed against part of religion. Nationalism of the Islamic Resistance Movement is part of its religion. Its members have been fed on that. For the sake of hoisting the banner of Allah over their homeland they fight. “Allah will be prominent, but most people do not know.”

Now and then the call goes out for the convening of an international conference to look for ways of solving the (Palestinian) question. Some accept, others reject the idea, for this or other reason, with one stipulation or more for consent to convening the conference and participating in it. Knowing the parties constituting the conference, their past and present attitudes towards Moslem problems, the Islamic Resistance Movement does not consider these conferences capable of realising the demands, restoring the rights or doing justice to the oppressed. These conferences are only ways of setting the infidels in the land of the Moslems as arbitraters. When did the infidels do justice to the believers?

“But the Jews will not be pleased with thee, neither the Christians, until thou follow their religion; say, The direction of Allah is the true direction. And verily if thou follow their desires, after the knowledge which hath been given thee, thou shalt find no patron or protector against Allah.” (The Cow - verse 120).
There is no solution for the Palestinian question except through Jihad. Initiatives, proposals and international conferences are all a waste of time and vain endeavors. The Palestinian people know better than to consent to having their future, rights and fate toyed with. As in said in the honourable Hadith:

“The people of Syria are Allah’s lash in His land. He wreaks His vengeance through them against whomsoever He wishes among His slaves It is unthinkable that those who are double-faced among them should prosper over the faithful. They will certainly die out of grief and desperation.”

Or maybe just watch a bit of Moslem TV with English subtitles. Memri.org has plenty of their own words available to watch or read. Or just go to their own websites if you happen to know Arabic.

The reality is this: if Hamas laid down their weapons tomorrow, there would be peace. If Israel laid down their weapons, they would all die.

It takes two to make peace. Hamas does not want peace. They just want the Jews to die. That is a very ugly truth that a lot of people simply are unwilling to face. It's not the first time people have been unwilling to face such ugly truths, of course. We'd prefer to imagine that they don't really mean what they say. That there's some other thing that is really behind it all, like Western imperialism, or economic deprivation, or something else that is more appealing to our sensibilities.

Unfortunately, sometimes the bad guys really are just bad. Sometimes they really are just Nazis.

Remember something: Israel gave back the Sinai to Egypt in exchange for peace. Israel wants peace more than anything. They are like us. They just want to be left alone to live their lives.

And Hamas really is evil and they really do want to kill Jews more than anything.

And also remember this. The original UN partition for Palestine divided it into a Jewish and a Palestinian Arab state. The Jews accepted that. The Arabs rejected it and went to war. Between 1948 and 1967 Egypt held the Gaza and Jordan the West Bank. Why was there no call for a Palestinian state for them then, when the Arabs controlled that territory? Why was the PLO formed in 1964, before the 6 Day War? And why did the PLO attack Israel then rather than Egypt or Jordan?

The Palestinian "cause" is an excuse; it is propaganda. The tyranical Moslem governments of the Middle East really don't care about the Palestinians. It is simply useful to them in their war against the Jewish people, which serves as a way of distracting their oppressed people from who their real oppressors are.

Anti-Semitism

In today's Wall Street Journal, an Opinion article by Daniel Schwammenthal: Europe Reimports Jew Hatred: The mythical Arab Street now reaches deep into Paris, London, Berlin and Madrid.

The depth of anti-Semitic propaganda in Palestinian and other Muslim societies is one of the most underreported facts about the Middle East. It is this anti-Semitism that predisposes Muslims in Europe to attack Jews and fuels the Mideast conflict. The hatred predates Israel's creation. To illustrate this point: The Palestinian leader during World War II, Hajj Amin al Husseini, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, conspired with Hitler to bring the Holocaust to Palestine. Luckily, the British stopped the German troops in Africa. The Mufti spent the war years in Berlin and was later indicted for war crimes but with the help of the Muslim Brotherhood escaped to Egypt. Hamas is the Palestinian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood.

Hamas and other Islamists continue what the Mufti had helped to start: a blend of European anti-Semitism and Islam-inspired Jew hatred. The rejection of Israel's right to exist is what drives their attacks. The media, though, largely ignores Hamas's ideology and its crimes of hiding its leaders and weapons among its own civilian population, and demonizes Israel's attempt to protect its citizens.

You might want to read the entire article.

Author Quote of the Day

You can't wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club.

- Jack London

First Falcon 9 Raised to Vertical at the Cape

According to the SpaceX website, their first Falcon 9 has now been raised into a vertical position at the Kennedy Space Center in preparation for its first launch attempt later in 2009.



To watch a time lapse of the Falcon 9 being raised, visit Spacex.com. There are also more photographs there of the Falcon 9.

Remember the USSR

On the Volokh Conspiracy website, David Bernstein writes:

One thing I find interesting in reading various authors who discuss the history of the Arab-Israeli or Israeli-Palestinian conflict is how the role of the USSR in exacerbating the conflict, and the role of its demise in providing an opportunity for a potential settlement of the conflict, is generally completely, or almost completely, ignored. [A few sentences only tangentially on point deleted, perhaps a subject for a separate post.]

Consider, first, that Israel could have bought itself quite a bit of security if the U.S. had allowed it, France, and the UK to triumph in the Sinai War in 1956. But Eisenhower and Dulles were afraid this would drive Arab public opinion into the pro-Soviet camp.

Then consider that the East bloc secret services recruited, trained, and financed Yasser Arafat to create the violent Palestinian nationalist movement that became the PLO, starting around 1964.

After Israel emerged victorious beyond its wildest dreams in 1967, the influence of the USSR was apparent in several ways. First, the Soviet bloc led an international campaign of boycott and defamation, larded with anti-Semitism, against Israel, creating a siege mentality that has stayed with Israel ever since, and made it that much more difficult to persuade Israel, already traumatized by the Holocaust and the expulsion of Jews from Arab lands, that the "international community" is to be trusted.

Second, Israel's performance against Soviet-supplied enemies Syria and Egypt persuaded the U.S. that Israel was a regional superpower that needed to be engaged, both to further U.S. interests, and to try to keep the (nuclear-armed) country stable and secure so that it didn't inadvertantly start WWIII.

And finally, while religious fanatics were among the most zealous settlers of the West Bank, a certain level of settlment was supported virtually across Zionist party lines, due to the perceived threat of a renewed Soviet-backed war of destruction against Israel. (In part, this was due to Lyndon Johnson reneging in 1967 on American security guarantees provided by Eisenhower in 1956--Israel saw that the U.S. could not be trusted to guarantee its security.) Israeli military and political leaders believed that holding at least some parts of the West Bank gave Israel the strategic depth to ward off, or even entirely discourage, an attack from the West, which proved prescient when Jordan declined to involve itself in the Yom Kippur War.

In 1973, by the end of the Yom Kippur War, Israel had crossed the Suez canal, had a huge segment of the Egyptian military surrounded, and was prepared, if necessary, to march on Cairo (Juan Cole, displaying his usual penchant for accuracy, calls this a "draw-to-slight victory" for Egypt). Damascus was also within range. The U.S. insisted on a cease-fire, because the Soviets threatened to intervene on behalf of Egypt and Syria.

In 1977, Anwar Sadat had tired of the Soviets and had thrown them out of Egypt. When Jimmy Carter naively sought to invite the Soviets to a regional "peace conference," Sadat hastily decided to make his famous visit to Jerusalem. While Sadat and Menachem Begin had little in common, they did by this point share a loathing of the USSR--Begin had been deported from Poland and imprisoned in the Gulag by the Soviets during WWII.

Read the whole thing: The USSR's Role in the Middle East Goes Down the Memory Hole

Evangelizing an Atheist

I found this by way of a Google Alert, pointing me to this blog:
revitalizeyourchurch.blogspot.com

Falcon 9 Integrated at the Cape

According to the SpaceX website:

Tuesday, December 30th, 2008

Falcon 9 is now fully integrated at the Cape! Today we mated the 5.2 m payload fairing to the Falcon 9 first stage (see above photo). This was the final step in the integration process—one day ahead of schedule.

With Falcon 9 integrated, our focus shifts to the big launch mount and erector. All the pieces have been delivered, and the coming days will see a tremendous amount of welding to join them all together.

The long hours put in by the SpaceX team over the last several weeks, particularly the folks on the ground at the Cape, are certainly paying off. Once the launch mount and erector are complete, we'll transfer Falcon 9 on to the erector and raise it to vertical early in 2009. Happy New Year!

Details of the Falcon 9 (also from the SpaceX website):

Like Falcon 1, Falcon 9 is a two stage, liquid oxygen and rocket grade kerosene (RP-1) powered launch vehicle. It uses the same engines, structural architecture (with a wider diameter), avionics and launch system.

Length: 54.9 m (180 ft)
Width: 3.6 m (12 ft)
Mass (LEO, 5.2m fairing): 333,400 kg (735,000 lb)
Mass (GTO, 5.2m fairing): 332,800 kg (733,800 lb)
Thrust (vacuum): 5.56 MN (1.25 M lb)

The Falcon 9 is a human rated rocket, designed to carry the seven passenger Dragon spaceship to the ISS by 2010. The Dragon spaceship can also carry cargo and in fact its first trips to the ISS will be to ferry cargo rather than people.

The first launch of the Falcon 9 (of the very vehicle in the photo above) is scheduled for early 2009.
See SpaceX for more details.

Merry Christmas from Hamas

According to columnist Caroline Glick at the Jerusalem Post:

On Tuesday, Hamas legislators marked the Christmas season by passing a Shari'a criminal code for the Palestinian Authority. Among other things, it legalizes crucifixion.

Hamas's endorsement of nailing enemies of Islam to crosses came at the same time it renewed its jihad. Here, too, Hamas wanted to make sure that Christians didn't feel neglected as its fighters launched missiles at Jewish day care centers and schools. So on Wednesday, Hamas lobbed a mortar shell at the Erez crossing point into Israel just as a group of Gazan Christians were standing on line waiting to travel to Bethlehem for Christmas.

Read the whole article, Column One: The 'realist' fantasy. It is disturbing.

Israel and the Palestinians

There are people protesting against the Israeli assault on Gaza. Odd. I don't recall any protests being staged during all the weeks before when Hamas was shooting hundreds of rockets and morters at Israel. I don't recall any hurried meetings at the UN.

It takes two to make peace. If the Palestinians would lay down their arms, there would be peace. If the Israelis laid down their arms, the Palestinians would simply kill them all.

That's why there is no peace in the Middle East. When the Palestinians decide they want peace, they can have it.

In 1948 the UN partitioned Palestine into a Jewish State and an Arab state. The Jews accepted the agreement, the Arabs rejected it and attacked. Between 1948 and 1967 Jordan and Egypt had control of the West Bank and Gaza. The Palestinians did not attack Jordan and Egypt or demand they establish a Palestinian state. Instead they formed the PLO in 1964 and began terrorist attacks against the Israelis. If a Palestinian state is really so important to the Palestinians and the Arab nations, why didn't it happen druing the two decades they controlled those territories?

If Israel were not willing to do just about anything for peace, then why did they hand back the Sinai to Egypt (along with the only oil wells they ever had)in exchange for a peace treaty?

The Palestinians do not want peace. They simply hate the Jews and want to kill them. They are anti-Semitic thugs, and so are those protesting Israel's attempts to defend themselves.

Zechariah 4:10

Zechariah 4:10 reads:

Who despises the day of small things? Men will rejoice when they see the plumb line in the hand of Zerubbabel.

The "day of small things" refers to times when little progress is apparent for God’s people. In context, the author was speaking about the rebuilding of the Temple following the Babylonian captivity. But most of life is a matter of small things, of incremental steps. The writing of a novel does not happen in a day. Instead, it is like building a wall, brick by brick, or like eating a cow, something all of us have done, but its been one hamburger at a time. If you write one page a day, in a year you have a book.

Whatever it is that God has you doing, just keep at it. Perseverance over time is the key. Don't despise the day of small things. When Jesus was born in Bethlehem, he was just one more tiny infant born to unwed parents, a speck in the vast teaming mass that made up the Roman Empire. But in the fullness of time, he was the Savior of the world.

SpaceX Falcon 9 Selected by NASA for ISS Supply

Another SpaceX press release:

F9/Dragon Will Replace the Cargo Transport Function of the Space Shuttle after 2010

Hawthorne, CA – December 23, 2008 – NASA today announced its selection of the SpaceX Falcon 9 launch vehicle and Dragon spacecraft for the International Space Station (ISS) Cargo Resupply Services (CRS) contract award. The contract is for a guaranteed minimum of 20,000 kg to be carried to the International Space Station. The firm contracted value is $1.6 billion and NASA may elect to order additional missions for a cumulative total contract value of up to $3.1 billion.

"The SpaceX team is honored to have been selected by NASA as the winner of the Cargo Resupply Services contract," said Elon Musk, CEO and CTO, SpaceX. "This is a tremendous responsibility, given the swiftly approaching retirement of the Space Shuttle and the significant future needs of the Space Station. This also demonstrates the success of the NASA COTS program, which has opened a new era for NASA in US Commercial spaceflight."

Under the CRS contract, SpaceX will deliver pressurized and unpressurized cargo to the ISS, and return cargo back to Earth. Cargo may include both NASA and NASA-sponsored payloads requiring a pressurized or unpressurized environment. SpaceX will provide the necessary services, test hardware and software, and mission-specific elements to integrate cargo with the Dragon delivery capsule.

In 2006, SpaceX was named a winner under NASA's Commercial Orbital Transportation Services (COTS) competition. Under the existing COTS agreement, SpaceX will conduct the first flight of its Falcon 9 launch vehicle and Dragon spacecraft in 2009. The final flight, currently scheduled for 2010, will demonstrate Dragon's ability to berth with the ISS.

Falcon 9 flight hardware has already started to arrive at the SpaceX launch site, Space Launch Complex 40 (SLC-40) at Cape Canaveral, in preparation for Falcon 9 going vertical on the pad within a few weeks. Construction of the SLC-40 launch site is proceeding ahead of schedule and is estimated to be completed in early 2009.

SpaceX Falcon 9 at the Cape

From a SpaceX Press Release:

Monday, December 22nd, 2008

Yesterday we lifted the first stage off the shipping truck and lowered it onto the integration assemblies. With all of the F9 hardware currently at or on its way to the Cape, we are on track for a fully integrated launch vehicle by year's end.

Barring any unforeseen delays, the second stage and fairing are expected to arrive at the Cape by December 28th and will be mated on December 31st, just in time for the New Year.

The erector is also on track towards operational status in early January, with the base assembly to be aligned and tacked by December 26th and welding to be complete early in the New Year. Hold down assemblies are expected to arrive shortly after the New Year and with our ground control system at SLC-40 currently operational, it's just a matter of days before F9 is vertical at the Cape.

40th Anniversary of Apollo 8

Forty years ago this week three men became the first human beings to travel to the moon. The astronauts of Apollo 8, James Lovell, Frank Borman, and Bill Anders, did not land on the moon: they merely orbited it ten times. But they were the first people to ever leave Earth orbit, the first people to see the Earth as a full sphere hanging in the blackness of space, the first to watch the Earth rise above the moon, and the first to find themselves completely isolated and cut off from the rest of the human race on the back side of the moon, unable to see the Earth at all, and unable to receive or send any radio communications. They were also the first human beings to celebrate Christmas in space. On Christmas Eve, 1968, they did a live television broadcast from orbit, reading the first ten verses of Genesis.

Apollo 8 was launched on the morning of December 21, 1968. It entered lunar orbit at 4:59 AM Eastern Time on Christmas Eve and left lunar orbit at 1:10 AM Christmas morning. It splashed down into the Pacific Ocean on the morning of December 27, 1968.

WhiteKnightTwo Mothership Makes Maiden Flight

MSNBC reports:

A carrier aircraft designed to be the first stage of a commercial spaceline system made its maiden test flight Sunday at the Mojave Air and Space Port in California.

Designed by Scaled Composites, the huge and unique White Knight Two mothership rolled down the runway and muscled itself into the air using four Pratt and Whitney PW308A turbofan engines. The White Knight Two flew for about an hour, departing the runway at roughly 8:17 a.m. PT, safely touching down at the Mojave airport at approximately 9:17 a.m. PT.

SpaceX Update

From a SpaceX press release that I got today. It looks as if they are on track for the first demonstration flight of a Falcon 9 early in the new year:

Hawthorne, CA – December 18, 2008 – Space Exploration Technologies Corp (SpaceX) announces the arrival of the Falcon 9 first stage flight tank at SpaceX's newest launch site, Space Launch Complex 40 (SLC-40), in Cape Canaveral, Florida. Arriving as scheduled, delivery of the Falcon 9 first stage fulfills SpaceX's commitment to having Falcon 9 hardware at the Cape by year-end.

"Christmas has arrived a few days early for our team at the Cape," said Brian Mosdell, Director of Florida Launch Operations for SpaceX. "The packages measure extra large this year, and they will keep everyone busy in the coming weeks."
In preparation for the launch vehicle's maiden flight in 2009, all Falcon 9 elements and ground support hardware have departed SpaceX's manufacturing facility in Hawthorne, California. The hardware is currently making its way across the United States on a dozen big rigs which will converge at the launch site over the next two weeks.

Separated into sections for travel, the major parts of the 180 foot long, 12 foot diameter rocket included nine Merlin 1C engines mounted on a massive engine mount structure; a thrust skirt that transfers the force of the engines into the first stage propellant tank; a carbon composite interstage; a new Merlin Vacuum upper stage engine fitted to the second stage propellant tank; and the two halves of a 17 foot diameter payload fairing—large enough to enclose a school bus.

The prelaunch fitting will include a mix of both flight ready and qualification hardware which will undergo final integration at the launch site in a horizontal position, and then be raised to vertical on the custom built erector.

Arrival of Falcon 9 hardware at the Cape represents yet another critical milestone in a year of significant accomplishments for SpaceX. On November 22nd, the company successfully conducted a full mission-length firing of the Falcon 9, validating SpaceX's design which uses nine engines on the first stage.

In addition, SpaceX has been rapidly upgrading SLC-40 into a state-of-the-art launch facility which will serve as a gateway to a new era in commercial space operations. Located on the Florida space coast, just south of NASA's launch site for all Apollo moon missions and Space Shuttle flights, SLC-40 is a world class heavy lift launch facility, capable of supporting Falcon 9 and future Falcon 9 Heavy missions, as well as cargo and crew carrying missions using the SpaceX Dragon spacecraft.

"2008 has been a year of rapid progress for SpaceX," said Elon Musk, CEO and CTO of SpaceX. "The delivery of the Falcon 9 to the Cape is a major milestone in designing and deploying the most reliable, cost-efficient fleet of launch vehicles in the world. I applaud our SpaceX team who has worked 24/7 to make this happen."

SpaceX currently has four Falcon 9 flights on the manifest for 2009, two of which are demonstration flights with the Dragon spacecraft as part of the NASA Commercial Orbital Transportation Services (COTS) competition. Under this agreement, SpaceX will conduct a total of three flights of its Falcon 9/Dragon system to demonstrate cargo delivery capabilities to the International Space Station (ISS). At the option of NASA, the agreement can be extended to include demonstrating transport of crew to and from the ISS. The Falcon 9 will be the first vehicle since the Saturn V and Saturn 1 to have the ability to lose any engine/motor and still be able to complete its mission without loss of crew or spacecraft.

A video tour of SpaceX launch facilities at SLC-40, Cape Canaveral AFS, led by Elon Musk, can be found at the SpaceX website: www.spacex.com.

About SpaceX

SpaceX is revolutionizing access to space by developing a family of launch vehicles and spacecraft intended to increase the reliability and reduce the cost of both manned and unmanned space transportation, ultimately by a factor of ten. With its Falcon line of launch vehicles, powered by internally-developed Merlin engines, SpaceX offers light, medium and heavy lift capabilities to deliver spacecraft into any altitude and inclination, from low-Earth to geosynchronous orbit to planetary missions. On September 28, 2008, Falcon 1, designed and manufactured from the ground up by SpaceX, became the first privately developed liquid fuel rocket to orbit the Earth.

As a winner of the NASA Commercial Orbital Transportation Services competition (COTS), SpaceX is in a position to help fill the gap in American spaceflight to the International Space Station (ISS) when the Space Shuttle retires in 2010. Under the existing Agreement, SpaceX will conduct three flights of its Falcon 9 launch vehicle and Dragon spacecraft for NASA, culminating in Dragon berthing with the ISS. SpaceX is the only COTS contender with the capability to return cargo and crew to Earth. NASA also has an option to demonstrate crew services to the ISS using the Falcon 9 / Dragon system.

Founded in 2002, the SpaceX team now numbers more than 620, located primarily in Hawthorne, California, with additional locations, including SpaceX's Texas Test Facility in McGregor near Waco; offices in Washington DC; and launch facilities at Cape Canaveral, Florida, and the Marshall Islands in the Central Pacific.

Go to the SpaceX website, SpaceX.com, to see photos and other information.

Happy Beethoven's Birthday

The composer Ludwig van Beethoven was born December 16, 1770 in Bonn, Germany and moved to Austria in his 20s.

MKV: Multiple Kill Vehicle Test

Interesting video of the test at Edwards, AFB. Science fiction made real:

"A Day That Will Live in Infamy..."

Quote for the Day:

...December 7, 1941 — a date which will live in infamy — the United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan. The United States was at peace with that nation, and, at the solicitation of Japan, was still in conversation with its government and its Emperor looking toward the maintenance of peace in the Pacific.

Pretend to Be a Time Traveler Day

Last year, Pretend to be a Time Traveler Day was on Saturday, December 8, as reported in Wired Magazine:

The whole idea is to pretend for the day that you are a traveler from a different time - except that, of course, you can't actually *tell* people you're a time traveler, because they'll think you're crazy. There are, of course, options as to how a traveler from a certain other time might act:

1) Utopian/cliché Future - "If the Future did a documentary of the last fifty years, this is how badly the reenactors would dress." Think Star Trek: TNG or the Time Travelers from Hob. Ever see how the society in Futurama sees the 20th century? Run with it. Your job is to dress with moderately anachronistic clothing and speak in slang from varying decades. Here are some good starters:

- Greet people by referring to things that don't yet exist or haven't existed for a long time. Example: "Have you penetrated the atmosphere lately?" "What spectrum will today's broadcast be in?" and "Your king must be a kindly soul!"

- Show extreme ignorance in operating regular technology. Pay phones should be a complete mystery (try placing the receiver in odd places). Chuckle knowingly at cell phones.

2) Dystopian Future - This one offers a little more flexibility. It can be any kind of future from Terminator to Freejack. The important thing to remember is dress like a crazy person with armor. Black spray painted football pads, high tech visors, torn up trenchcoats and maybe even some dirt here or there. Remember, dystopian future travelers are very startled that they've gone back in time. Some starters:

- If you go the "prisoner who's escaped the future" try shaving your head and putting a barcode on the back of your neck. Then stagger around and stare at the sky, as if you've never seen it before.

- Walk up to random people and say "WHAT YEAR IS THIS?" and when they tell you, get quiet and then say "Then there's still time!" and run off.

- Stand in front of a statue (any statue, really), fall to your knees, and yell "NOOOOOOOOO"

- Stare at newspaper headlines and look astonished.

- Take some trinket with you (it can be anything really), hand it to some stranger, along with a phone number and say "In thirty years dial this number. You'll know what to do after that." Then slip away.

3) The Past - This one is more for beginners. Basically dress in period clothing (preferably Victorian era) and stagger around amazed at everything. Since the culture's set in place already, you have more of a template to work off of. Some pointers:

- Airplanes are terrifying. Also, carry on conversations with televisions for a while.

- Discover and become obsessed with one trivial aspect of technology, like automatic grocery doors. Stay there for hours playing with it.

- Be generally terrified of people who are dressed immodestly compared to your era. Tattoos and shorts on women are especially scary.

This year December 8 is on Monday. Have fun!

One of the Most Important Advances in Spaceflight Ever

STS-126 mission specialist Don Pettit used some of his off-duty time on Saturday to improvise a new coffee cup for use in space. No more drinking coffee through a straw!



Coffee lovers will name a planet after him someday.

Video of SpaceX Falcon 9 First Stage Test Firing

From the press release:

At full power, the rocket generated 855,000 pounds of force at sea level. In vacuum, the thrust increases to approximately one million pounds or four times the maximum thrust of a 747 aircraft. The test consumed over half a million pounds of propellant. All nine engines fired for 160 seconds, then two engines were shut down to limit the acceleration and the remaining seven engines continued firing for 18 more seconds, as would occur in a typical climb to orbit.

The Falcon 1 that launched into orbit in September used 1 of the Merlin 1C engines in its first stage. The Falcon 9, a heavy lift human rated launch vehicle, will use 9 of the Merlin 1C engines in its first stage. This was a test fire of that first stage.

Significant Milestone Achieved as SpaceX Prepares to Demonstrate U.S. Transport to the International Space Station

Press release from SpaceX today:

Hawthorne, CA - November 23, 2008 – Space Exploration Technologies Corp. (SpaceX) successfully conducted a full mission-length firing of its Falcon 9 launch vehicle's first stage at its McGregor Test Facility in Texas, on November 22. For the static test firing, the first stage remains firmly secured to the massive vertical test stand, where it fired for 178 seconds or nearly three minutes – simulating the climb of the giant rocket from the surface of the Earth towards orbit.

At full power, the rocket generated 855,000 pounds of force at sea level. In vacuum, the thrust increases to approximately one million pounds or four times the maximum thrust of a 747 aircraft. The test consumed over half a million pounds of propellant. All nine engines fired for 160 seconds, then two engines were shut down to limit the acceleration and the remaining seven engines continued firing for 18 more seconds, as would occur in a typical climb to orbit.

The test firing validated the design of SpaceX's use of nine engines on the first stage, as well as the ability to shut down engines without affecting the functioning of the remaining engines. This demonstrates the ability of Falcon 9 to lose engines in flight and still complete its mission successfully, much as a commercial airliner is designed to be safe in the event of an engine loss. Like an airliner, the Falcon 9 engines are enclosed in a protective sheath that ensures a fire or destructive loss of an engine doesn't affect the rest of the vehicle.

The Falcon 9 will be the first vehicle since the Saturn V and Saturn 1 to have the ability to lose any engine/motor and still be able to complete its mission without loss of crew or spacecraft. Engine out reliability proved crucial to mission success on two of the Saturn V flights.

"In the past month, we performed significant upgrades to the test stand and flame trench in preparation for this test," said Tom Mueller, Vice President of Propulsion for SpaceX. "We added the flight base heat shields around the engines to protect the bottom of the rocket from the prolonged blast of heat and vibration."

"The full mission-length test firing clears the highest hurdle for the Falcon 9 first stage before launch," said Elon Musk, CEO and CTO of SpaceX. "In the next few months, we will have the first Falcon 9 flight vehicle on its launch pad at Cape Canaveral, preparing for lift-off in 2009."

Tenth Anniversary of ISS

Ten years ago today (July 20, 1998) the first piece of the International Space Station was launched into orbit, the Zarya module (built by Russia, financed by the US). It was lofted by a Russian Proton K booster from the Russian launch complex, the Baikonur Cosmodrome, located in Khazakstan. Two weeks later the first American piece, the Unity node, was launched aboard a Space Shuttle from Florida.

The ISS has been continuously inhabited since July, 2000, usually with a three person crew which is scheduled to increase to six in the first half of 2009.

Animation of the construction of the ISS.

What you get from Google and Amazon

If it weren't for Google and Amazon and my own self-absorbtion, there's all sorts of things I'd have never learned. For instance, that there is a village in Holland called Nettelhorst. I assume that's where my ancestors came from, especially since my family's last name was originally von Nettelhorst.

Or that there's an elementary school in Chicago named after a relative of mine, Louis Nettelhorst.

I also found out that I've been quoted on occasion. In fact, most commentaries on Matthew or Luke since about 1990 have mentioned my theory for reconciling the genealogies of Jesus that I proposed in an article that appeared in 1988 in the Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society (JETS). For instance, Raymond Brown footnoted that article in his book, The Birth of the Messiah. Last Saturday, as I was googling and trying to discover which translations of my book have appeared in print (at least 10 out of the 13 projected), I stumbled upon the fact (via Google, which has been digitizing every book in the world) that Josh McDowell actually quotes a full paragraph from the same article Raymond Brown only footnoted. It appears in his book, New Evidence That Demands a Verdict. So far Google has only scanned in the Spanish edition of that book, but you can see it here:

New Evidence That Demands a Verdict (Spanish)

UPDATE (Saturday November 22)

I picked up a copy of the English language version of New Evidence That Demands a Verdict at Barnes and Noble today. The quotation is of two paragraphs from the article and it appears on pages 297-298; I'm also listed in the index and the bibliography. The book was published back in 1999. I didn't find out I was in it until last Saturday.

New Star Trek Movie Trailer

The latest trailer for the upcoming Star Trek movie (May 8, 2009) was released this morning. You can watch it here, at the official website:

StarTrekMovie.com

NASA Video of Future Trip to Moon

Video created by NASA of the Ares V and Ares I going to the moon circa 2020.

German Translation of My Book

The German translation is available for sale here:

Die 100 Bekanntesten Gestalten der Bibel

The German edition looks about the same as the English, French, Danish, Norwegian, Dutch, Slovak, Swedish, Hungarian, Estonian and Romanian editions, except for the words. The title looks as if it translates from German as "The Hundred Best-known Figures of the Bible" which differs considerably from the title Reader's Digest gave it in English: The Bible's Most Fascinating People.

Swedish Edition of My Book

The Swedish translation is available for sale here:

Apostlar och profeter

The Swedish edition looks about the same as the English, French, Danish, Norwegian, Dutch, Slovak, German, Hungarian, Estonian and Romanian editions, except for the words. The title looks as if it translates from Swedish as "Apostles and Prophets" which differs considerably from the title Reader's Digest gave it in English: The Bible's Most Fascinating People.

A Swedish blog has reviewed the Swedish edition of my book (the following links to a machine translated version of the blog):

Gurgin: Last Book Read

Romanian Translation of My Book

The Romanian translation is available for sale here:

Cele mai fascinante personaje din Biblie

The Romanian edition looks about the same as the English, French, Danish, Norwegian, Dutch, Slovak, German, Hungarian, Estonian and Swedish editions, except for the words. The title looks as if it translates from Romanian as "The Most Fascinating People of the Bible" which is the same title Reader's Digest gave it in English The Bible's Most Fascinating People.

Norwegian Translation of My Book

The Norwegian translation is available for sale here:
100 skikkelser fra bibelen

The Norwegian edition looks about the same as the English, French, Danish, Dutch, Slovak, German, Hungarian, Estonian and Swedish editions, except for the words. The title translates from Norwegian as "100 Characters from the Bible" which was essentially its working title before Reader's Digest changed it to The Bible's Most Fascinating People.

Danish Translation of My Book

You can see the Danish edition for sale here:

Portrætter fra Bibelens galleri

The Danish edition looks about the same as the English, French, Dutch, Slovak, German, Hungarian, Estonian and Swedish editions, except for the words. The title translates from Danish as "100 Characters from the Bible" which was essentially its working title before Reader's Digest changed it to The Bible's Most Fascinating People.

French Edition of My Book

The French version can be seen for sale here:

100 Personnages clés de la Bible

The French edition looks about the same as the English, Dutch, Slovak, German, Hungarian, Estonian and Swedish editions, except for the words. The title translates from French as "100 Characters from the Bible" which was essentially its working title before Reader's Digest changed it to The Bible's Most Fascinating People.

Estonian Edition of My Book

The Estonian version can be seen for sale here:

100 tegelaskuju piiblist

The Estonian edition looks the same as the English, Dutch, Slovak, German, Hungarian and Swedish editions, except for the words. The title translates from Estonian as "100 Characters from the Bible" which was essentially its working title before Reader's Digest changed it to The Bible's Most Fascinating People.

Hungarian Edition of My Book

The Hungarian version can be seen for sale here:

A BIBLIA 100 ALAKJA

The Hungarian edition looks the same as the English, Dutch, Slovak, German and Swedish editions, except for the words. The title translates from Hungarian as "100 Characters from the Bible" which was essentially its working title before Reader's Digest changed it to The Bible's Most Fascinating People.

Dutch Edition of My Book

You can see it here (machine translated by Google):

100 bijbelse figuren

The Dutch edition looks the same as the English and Slovak and German and Swedish editions, except for the words. The title translates from Dutch as "100 Biblical Figures" which was essentially its working title before Reader's Digest changed it to The Bible's Most Fascinating People.

Slovak Version of My Book

See it for sale, here: Sto postav z bible

Looks the same, except for the words. It was released on November 11, 2008. The title translates from Slovak as "100 Characters From the Bible," which was its working title before Reader's Digest changed it to The Bible's Most Fascinating People.

Shuttle Launches On Time

The Space Shuttle Endeavour launched on time at 4:55 PM PST and reached orbit safely about 9 minutes later.

Space Shuttle Scheduled to Launch Today

MSNBC reports:

A cold front is on its way to Florida but NASA officials say there's about a 70 percent chance the weather will cooperate enough to go ahead with the 7:55 p.m. EST launch. About a fourth of all shuttle missions start at night.

Endeavour and its seven-person crew will spend 15 days in orbit, including Thanksgiving. Its payload bay is filled with thousands of pounds of home remodeling supplies for the space station. That will allow NASA to double the size of the space station's crew by June.

Extrasolar Planets

MSNBC reports "First-ever images taken of extrasolar planets":

Astronomers have taken what they say are the first-ever direct images of planets outside of our solar system, including a visible-light snapshot of a single-planet system and an infrared picture of a multiple-planet system.

Read the linked article for more details and to see the photos.

Quote for the Day

The truth is incontrovertible. Panic may resent it, ignorance may deride it, malice may distort it, but there it is.

Winston Churchill

Joke for the Day

Jack and Max are walking home from church. Jack wonders whether it would be all right to smoke while praying.

Max replies, “Why don’t you ask the pastor?”

So Jack goes up to the pastor and asks, “Pastor, may I smoke while I pray?”

The pastor replies, “No, you may not! That shows utter disrespect for God.”

Jack goes back to his friend and tells him what the good pastor told him.

Max says, “I’m not surprised. You asked the wrong question. Let me try.”

And so Max goes up to the pastor and asks, “Pastor, may I pray while I smoke?”

To which the pastor eagerly replies, “By all means, my son. By all means. You can always pray whenever you want to.”

Googling Oneself

Occasionally I Google myself. Recently, I found this on a Swedish blog (the following links to a machine translated version of the blog):

Gurgin: Last Book Read

My book, The Bible's Most Fascinating People, came out in a Swedish edition just last month.

Quote for the Day

How does one determine whether a law is just or unjust? A just law is a man-made code that squares with the moral law or the law of God. An unjust law is a code that is out of harmony with the moral law. To put it in terms of St. Thomas Aquinas: An unjust law is a human law that is not rooted in eternal law and natural law. Any law that uplifts the human personality is just. Any law that degrades human personality is unjust. All segregation statutes are unjust because segregation distorts the soul and damages the personality. It gives the segregator a false sense of superiority and the segregated a false sense of inferiority....

An unjust law is a code that a majority inflicts on a minority that is not binding on itself. This is difference made legal. On the other hand a just law is a code that a majority compels a minority to follow that it is willing to follow itself. This is sameness made legal.

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Letter From a Birmingham Jail (1963)

Quote for the Day

No one can understand history without continually relating the long periods which are constantly mentioned to the experiences of our own short lives. Five years is a lot. Twenty years is the horizon to most people. Fifty years is antiquity. To understand how the impact of destiny fell upon any generation of men one must first imagine their position and then apply the time-scale of our own lives.

Winston Churchill, A History of the English Speaking Peoples, Vol. 1

Quote for the Day

If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.

George Orwell, Preface to Animal Farm

A Poem for the Day

The wayfarer,
Perceiving the pathway to truth,
Was struck with astonishment.
It was thickly grown with weeds.
"Ha," he said,
"I see that none has passed here
In a long time."
Later he saw that each weed
Was a singular knife.
"Well," he mumbled at last,
"Doubtless there are other roads."

Stephen Crane, from War is Kind

Quote for the Day

For a country to have a great writer is like having a second government. That is why no regime has ever loved great writers, only minor ones.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Quote for the day

It is not because the truth is too difficult to see that we make mistakes. It may even lie on the surface; but we make mistakes because the easiest and most comfortable course for us is to seek insight where it accords with our emotions — especially selfish ones.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Armadillo Aerospace Wins Level 1 Lunar Lander Challenge

Wikipedia:

The Northrop Grumman Lunar Lander Challenge is a competition funded by NASA's Centennial Challenges program. The competition offers a series of prizes for teams that launch a vertical takeoff/vertical landing (VTVL) rocket that achieves the total delta-v needed for a vehicle to move between the surface of the Moon and its orbit. The multi-level competition is conducted by the X PRIZE Foundation, with sponsorship from the Northrop Grumman Corporation who run the competition. The prize purses are paid by NASA. It has been held annually at the X PRIZE Cup, making its debut at the 2006 Wirefly X PRIZE Cup in October, 2006.

The competition is divided into two levels. Both levels require teams to demonstrate control of their vehicle by flying to an altitude of more than 50 meters (160 ft), flying laterally for 100 m (330 ft), and landing on a pad. For level 1, this pad is a simple 10 m (33 ft) diameter circle; for level 2, it is a simulated lunar surface, complete with craters and boulders. After completing this first flight, the vehicle can then be refueled, and must then fly a second leg back to the original starting point. Each flight must meet a required minimum flight time of 90 seconds for level 1 and 180 seconds for level 2. For each level, the two flights along with any necessary preparation must be accomplished within a short 150-minute time period.

Each Level offers a first- and second-place prize. Level 1 features a first place prize purse of $350,000 and a $150,000 purse for second place. The more difficult level 2 offers a first place prize of $1 million and a $500,000 second place prize.

This afternoon, Armadillo Aerospace was able to win the Level 1 prize. They will try for the Level 2 Prize on Saturday, October 25, 2008. This was the third year that Armadillo had competed.

Armadillo Aerospace is an aerospace startup company based in Mesquite, Texas founded by John D. Carmack, best known as the owner of Id Software and the developer of the game, Doom. Its initial goal is to build a manned suborbital spacecraft capable of space tourism, but it has stated long-term ambitions of orbital spaceflight. The company was founded in the year 2000, and was incorporated on January 1, 2001.

Video is of the second, prize winning flight:

Quote for the Day

"Describe worrying," he went on.
"What!?"
"Pretend I'm someone who has never worried. I'm mystified. It don't get it. Tell me how to worry."
"Well...I guess the first step is to envision a sequence of events as they might play out in the future."
"But I do that all the time. And yet I don't worry."
"It is a sequence of events with a bad end."
"So, you're worried that a pink dragon will fly over the concent and fart nerve gas on us?"

Neal Stephenson, Anathem

Quote for the Day

Normal is getting dressed in clothes that you buy for work and driving through traffic in a car that you are still paying for - in order to get to the job you need to pay for the clothes and the car, and the house you leave vacant all day so you can afford to live in it.

Ellen Goodman

1000 Days From Earth

The New Horizons space probe was launched on January 19, 2006 bound for Pluto, traveling faster than any space craft in history. It passed the orbit of the moon in barely 8 hours (it took Apollo astronauts 3 days to cover that same distance). Today is the 1000th day since that launch. It is only 1/3 of the way there, at about 32 Astronomical Units out, putting it past the orbit of Saturn. An Astronomical Unit is the distance from the Sun to the Earth: 93 million miles. New Horizons will not reach Pluto until July 14, 2015.

Israel

Commentary Magazine has an interesting article, 1948, Israel, and the Palestinians: Annotated Text:

Sixty years after its establishment by an internationally recognized act of self-determination, Israel remains the only state in the world that is subjected to a constant outpouring of the most outlandish conspiracy theories and blood libels; whose policies and actions are obsessively condemned by the international community; and whose right to exist is constantly debated and challenged not only by its Arab enemies but by segments of advanced opinion in the West.

During the past decade or so, the actual elimination of the Jewish state has become a cause célèbre among many of these educated Westerners. The “one-state solution,” as it is called, is a euphemistic formula proposing the replacement of Israel by a state, theoretically comprising the whole of historic Palestine, in which Jews will be reduced to the status of a permanent minority. Only this, it is said, can expiate the “original sin” of Israel’s founding, an act built (in the words of one critic) “on the ruins of Arab Palestine” and achieved through the deliberate and aggressive dispossession of its native population.

This claim of premeditated dispossession and the consequent creation of the longstanding Palestinian “refugee problem” forms, indeed, the central plank in the bill of particulars pressed by Israel’s alleged victims and their Western supporters. It is a charge that has hardly gone undisputed. As early as the mid-1950’s, the eminent American historian J.C. Hurewitz undertook a systematic refutation,[1] and his findings were abundantly confirmed by later generations of scholars and writers. Even Benny Morris, the most influential of Israel’s revisionist “new historians,” and one who went out of his way to establish the case for Israel’s “original sin,” grudgingly stipulated that there was no “design” to displace the Palestinian Arabs.[2]

The recent declassification of millions of documents from the period of the British Mandate (1920-1948) and Israel’s early days, documents untapped by earlier generations of writers and ignored or distorted by the “new historians,” paint a much more definitive picture of the historical record. They reveal that the claim of dispossession is not only completely unfounded but the inverse of the truth. What follows is based on fresh research into these documents, which contain many facts and data hitherto unreported.

Take a look at the whole thing.

Soyuz TMA-13 Safely in Orbit

The latest Soyuz launched to the International Space Station tonight, carrying two Americans and one Russian. It took off on time on Sunady, October 12, 2008 at 12:02 AM PDT. One of the Americans is a space tourist. His name is Richard Garriott. His father, Owen Garriott was a NASA astronaut who flew aboard America's first space station, Skylab. Richard Garriot paid about 30 million dollars to go into space tonight. He made his fortune making the Ultima series of computer games as well as the currently available online game, Tabula Rasa (a MMORPG).

Quote of the Day

There are 10¹¹ stars in the galaxy. That used to be a huge number. But it's only a hundred billion. It's less than the national deficit! We used to call them astronomical numbers. Now we should call them economical numbers.

Richard Feynman

Possible way of Testing if the Many Worlds Hypothesis is True?

Frank J. Tipler, best known for his books, The Physics of Immortality and The Physics of Christianity, has published a paper entitled, Testing Many-Worlds Quantum Theory By Measuring Pattern Convergence Rates.

Up until now, no one has been able to come up with an experiment that would distinguish between the various possible interpretations of quantum physics. Whether Tipler's proposed experiment will actually do what he hopes is the big question, of course.

NASA's 50th Anniversary

The legislation authorizing the creation of NASA was signed on July 29, 1958 but the funding to actually create it wasn’t available until the beginning of the next government fiscal year, which always starts at the beginning of October. So today, October 1, is the actual start date for NASA.

Successful Launch of Falcon 1

The fourth launch attempt of SpaceX Falcon 1 was successful. Launching at 4:15 PM, the vehicle reached orbit about 9 minutes later. Falcon 1 has made history as the first privately developed liquid fueled launch vehicle to achieve earth orbit!

UPDATE 5:14 PM

MSNBC.com now has an article by Alan Boyle giving details of the launch.

UPDATE 7:06 PM

Video of the launch:

Falcon 1 Launch Scheduled for This Afternoon

According to SpaceX, their Falcon 1 is scheduled to launch between 4 PM and 9 PM Pacific Time on Sunday, September 28, 2008:

The Flight 4 Webcast will provide live coverage of launch activities. The webcast will be accessible via a link on the SpaceX home page at www.SpaceX.com. The launch window runs from 4 PM to 9 PM (Pacific time) each day. The Falcon 1 launch facilities are situated on Omelek Island, part of the Ronald Reagan Ballistic Missile Defense Test Site (RTS) at United States Army Kwajalein Atoll (USAKA).

The Falcon 1 Flight 4 vehicle carries a payload mass simulator of approximately 165 kg (364 lbs), designed and built by SpaceX specifically for this mission. Flight 3, which took place on August 2nd, executed a picture perfect first stage flight, ultimately reaching an altitude of 217 km, but encountered a problem just after stage separation that prevented the second stage from reaching orbit. The origin of the problem arose due to the longer thrust decay transient of our new Merlin 1C regeneratively cooled engine. Unlike the ablative engine used previously by SpaceX in Flights 1 and 2, the regenerative engine had unburned fuel in the cooling channels and manifold that combined with a small amount of residual oxygen to produce a small thrust that was just enough to overcome the stage separation pusher impulse.

SpaceX was aware of and had allowed for a thrust transient, but did not expect it to last that long. As it turned out, a very small increase in the time between commanding main engine shutdown and stage separation would have been enough to save the mission. The fix was also very simple, requiring one line of code to be changed.

We made the fix and immediately began work on Flight 4. Less than two months later, Falcon 1 Flight 4 is now on the pad at Kwajalein, ready for flight.

Chinese Perform Their First Space Walk

According to Wikipedia, "as of February 15, 2008, there have been a total of 104 spacewalks devoted to assembly and maintenance of the International Space Station. A total time of 653 hours, 43 minutes has been spent in EVA activities. 75 of these EVAs have been from the station, totaling 458 hours, 25 minutes. 28 assembly EVAs have been performed from a shuttle, 53 from the Quest Joint Airlock, and 22 from the Pirs docking compartment."

The Russians and Americans made their first space walks in 1965. The first Russian space walk by Alexey Leonov lasted about twelve minutes, on March 18, 1965. The first American space walk, by Edward White lasted about 22 minutes, on June 3, 1965. This Chinese space walk by Zhai Zhigang lasted slightly less than fifteen minutes, on September 27, 2008.

Space X Update

Space X did a static fire of their Falcon 1 on Saturday, September 20 as scheduled. The launch window for the fourth launch attempt of a Falcon 1 is now set for some time between September 28 and October 1, according to the Space X website:

Flight Four Launch Update

Dark Flow

As if the mysteries of dark matter and dark energy weren't vexing enough, another baffling cosmic puzzle has been discovered.

Patches of matter in the universe seem to be moving at very high speeds and in a uniform direction that can't be explained by any of the known gravitational forces in the observable universe. Astronomers are calling the phenomenon "dark flow."

The stuff that's pulling this matter must be outside the observable universe, researchers conclude.

Read the whole article, Mysterious 'dark flow' discovered in space:
Stuff pulling on matter believed to be outside the observable universe

Flight Four of Falcon 1 Has Been Scheduled

According to a press release I just received from Elon Musk of SpaceX, the next launch attempt of the Falcon 1 will probably occur between September 23 and 25:

As mentioned in my update last month, we do expect to conduct a launch countdown in late September – as scheduled.

Having said that, it is still possible that we encounter an issue that needs to be investigated, which would delay launch until the next available window in late October. If preparations go smoothly, we will conduct a static fire on Saturday and launch sometime between Tuesday and Thursday (California time).

The SpaceX team worked hard to make this launch window, but we also took the time to review data from Flight 3 in detail. In addition to us reviewing the data, we had several outside experts check the data and conclusions. No flight critical problems were found apart from the thrust transient issue.

Flight 5 production is well underway with an expected January completion date, Flight 6 parts are on order and Flight 7 production will begin early next year. We are now in steady state production of Falcon 1 at a rate of one vehicle every four months, which we will probably step up to one vehicle every two to three months in 2010.

International Talk Like a Pirate Day

Every September 19th is International Talk Like A Pirate Day. Visit the official website and learn how to do it.

Quote for the Day

It is error only, and not truth, that shrinks from inquiry.

— Thomas Paine

Mystery Object

Scientists using the Hubble have found something odd, unlike anything they've ever seen before. They simply don't know what it is. Sky and Telescope reports:

Don't get the idea that we've found every kind of astronomical object there is in the universe. In a paper to appear in the Astrophysical Journal, astronomers working on the Supernova Cosmology Project report finding a new kind of something that they cannot make any sense of.

Read the whole article (with a photo) from the link above.

Borg cube going to warp?

Image of Possible Planet Around a Sun-like Star

MSNBC reports:

Astronomers have taken what may the first picture of a planet orbiting a star similar to the sun.

This distant world is giant (about eight times the mass of Jupiter) and lies far out from its star (about 330 times the Earth-Sun distance). But for all the planet's strangeness, its star is quite like our own sun.

Previously, the only photographed extrasolar planets have belonged to tiny, dim stars known as brown dwarfs. And while hundreds of exoplanets have been detected by noting their gravitational tug on their parent stars, it is rare to find one large enough to image directly.

For the picture and more details, read the full article by Clara Moskowitz.

Musical Road

Not far from Quartz Hill Community Church and Quartz Hill School of Theology, Honda created a musical road for one of their commercials; I've heard that the only other places in the world that have a road like this are in Japan and Switzerland:

Reason and Faith

Jerry Pournelle, the science fiction author, wrote today on his blog:

This was in a recent Wall Street Journal article on social conservatism:

St. Thomas Aquinas taught that "we do not offend God except by doing something contrary to our own good." If Thomas is right, then rather than claim that a debased practice offends God, politicians can—and, I would add, should—explain to the public what aspect of some immoral behavior is contrary to our own good, especially the common good—and why a just and decent society shouldn't accept it.

This is of a piece with the doctrine that Reason and Faith are not in conflict, and if they appear to be, we have misunderstood something. (It used to be that we had more confidence in our interpretation of revelation than in the findings of science. Actually, that was good reason; science, until the development of scientific method, was not reliable. Those were the days when Astrology and Alchemy were considered good science, and illusionists posed as scientists. Today we have enough experience with the results of applying real scientific method -- that is, framing falsifiable hypotheses and testing them by experiment, and yes, I know that's a reductionism that ignores a number of important implications -- we have enough experience with the results of scientific method to have confidence that scientific truth is important, and if science conflicts with revelation then we have probably misinterpreted revelation.

Read the whole thing here.

Quote for the Day

Far better it is to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs, even though checkered by failure, than to rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy much nor suffer much, because they live in that grey twilight that knows neither victory nor defeat.

Theodore Roosevelt

Quote for the Day

Autobiography is only to be trusted when it reveals something disgraceful. A man who gives a good account of himself is probably lying, since any life when viewed from the inside is simply a series of defeats.

George Orwell

Quote for the Day

The Unexpected always comes at the most awkward times.

Larry Niven

Quote for the Day

Go to the edge of the cliff and jump off. Build your wings on the way down.

Ray Bradbury

Quote for the Day

Lack of originality, everywhere, all over the world, from time immemorial, has always been considered the foremost quality and the recommendation of the active, efficient and practical man...

Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Idiot

Choice

An interesting opinion page piece by Crispin Sartwell in today's LA Times, A Righteous Refusal is Everyone's Right:

I am a pro-choice atheist. But I support a regulation, recently promulgated by the Bush administration, that would cut federal funding to nearly 600,000 hospitals, clinics, health plans, doctors' offices and other entities if they do not allow their employees to opt out of providing certain types of care -- including abortion services -- on grounds of conscience and personal belief.

Ask yourself: What are some of the bad things that have happened because people refused, on conscientious grounds, to do what the institutions in which they were embedded demanded? Now ask yourself: What are some of the bad things that have happened because people overcame serious qualms and did what they were ordered to do?

The idea that we must respect individual conscience as a moral arbiter is a fundamental insight of the Protestant Reformation and of the American individualism of such figures as Emerson and Thoreau. It is at the core of our traditions and our freedoms. This idea means nothing if we respect it when we agree with its results and not when we don't.

He does a good job, I think, of pointing out the importance of respecting individual conscience. I'd recommend reading the entire article.

Mojave Air and Space Port Promotional Video

Mojave Air and Space Port promotional video; it gives a nice overview of some of what's going on at the world's first commercial space port:

Not Everything is Made in China

Sometimes the U.S. builds things and sells them to the Chinese:

GE Transportation has announced that the first China Mainline Locomotive (CML) will be delivered around Aug. 30, 2008, to the Tianjin Port in Tianjin, China. After being transferred to the Tanggu Depot for inspection, the locomotive will make its way to China's capital Beijing.

Locomotive "CML 50001" is the first of three hundred 6,000-horsepower Evolution Series China Mainline Locomotives being delivered to the Ministry of Railways P.R. China (MOR). The contract was signed in October 2005 and valued at $450 million.

The full locomotives and locomotive kits are being built in Erie, Pennsylvania. The kits will then be assembled in China.

Full article: First Of 300 GE China Mainline Locomotives To Arrive In China

Warp Drive?

arXiv.org has a paper in PDF on the potential for creating a working warp drive (how to get from point A to point B faster than light). It was submitted July 12, 2008 (and revised July 15) by Richard K. Obousy and Gerald Cleaver, both at Baylor University. The researchers said their theory is based on the Alcubierre drive (proposed in a paper in 1994). The physic paper's summary states:

Over the last decade, there has been a respectable level of scientific interest regarding the concept of a warp drive. This is a hypothetical propulsion device that could theoretically circumvent the traditional limitations of special relativity which restricts spacecraft to sub-light velocities. Any breakthrough in this field would revolutionize space exploration and open the doorway to interstellar travel. This article discusses a novel approach to generating the warp bubble necessary for such propulsion; the mathematical details of this theory are discussed in an article published in the Journal of the British Interpanetary Society. The theory is based on some of the exciting predictions coming out of string theory and it is the aim of this article to introduce the warp drive idea from a non-mathematical perspective that should be accessible to a wide range of readers.

The full paper may be accessed from the link below:

Putting the "Warp" into Warp Drive

Video of Failed Third Launch of Falcon 1

At the end you can see what went wrong:

Space X Update

Another press release from Space X:

Timing is Everything

On August 2nd, Falcon 1 executed a picture perfect first stage flight, ultimately reaching an altitude of 217 km, but encountered a problem just after stage separation that prevented the second stage from reaching orbit. At this point, we are certain as to the origin of the problem. Four methods of analysis – vehicle inertial measurement, chamber pressure, onboard video and a simple physics free body calculation – all give the same answer.

The problem arose due to the longer thrust decay transient of our new Merlin 1C regeneratively cooled engine, as compared to the prior flight that used our old Merlin 1A ablatively cooled engine. Unlike the ablative engine, the regen engine had unburned fuel in the cooling channels and manifold that combined with a small amount of residual oxygen to produce a small thrust that was just enough to overcome the stage separation pusher impulse.

We were aware of and had allowed for a thrust transient, but did not expect it to last that long. As it turned out, a very small increase in the time between commanding main engine shutdown and stage separation would have been enough to save the mission.

The question then is why didn't we catch this issue? Unfortunately, the engine chamber pressure is so low for this transient thrust -- only about 10 psi -- that it barely registered on our ground test stand in Texas where ambient pressure is 14.5 psi. However, in vacuum that 10 psi chamber pressure produced enough thrust to cause the first stage to recontact the second stage.

It looks like we may have flight four on the launch pad as soon as next month. The long gap between flight two and three was mainly due to the Merlin 1C regen engine development, but there are no technology upgrades between flight three and four.



Good Things About This Flight

Merlin 1C and overall first stage performance was excellent
The stage separation system worked properly, in that all bolts fired and the pneumatic pushers delivered the correct impulse
Second stage ignited and achieved nominal chamber pressure
Fairing separated correctly
We discovered this transient problem on Falcon 1 rather than Falcon 9
Rocket stages were integrated, rolled out and launched in seven days
Neither the near miss potential failures of flight two nor any new ones were present
The only untested portion of flight is whether or not we have solved the main problem of flight two, where the control system coupled with the slosh modes of the liquid oxygen tank. Given the addition of slosh baffles and significant improvements to the control logic, I feel confident that this will not be an issue for the upcoming flight four.



Elon

Third Launch of Falcon 1 Fails to Reach Orbit

From the press release from Space X:

Plan Going Forward

It was obviously a big disappointment not to reach orbit on this flight [Falcon 1, Flight 3]. On the plus side, the flight of our first stage, with the new Merlin 1C engine that will be used in Falcon 9, was picture perfect. Unfortunately, a problem occurred with stage separation, causing the stages to be held together. This is under investigation and I will send out a note as soon as we understand exactly what happened.

The most important message I’d like to send right now is that SpaceX will not skip a beat in execution going forward. We have flight four of Falcon 1 almost ready for flight and flight five right behind that. I have also given the go ahead to begin fabrication of flight six. Falcon 9 development will also continue unabated, taking into account the lessons learned with Falcon 1. We have made great progress this past week with the successful nine engine firing.

As a precautionary measure to guard against the possibility of flight 3 not reaching orbit, SpaceX recently accepted a significant investment. Combined with our existing cash reserves, that ensures we will have more than sufficient funding on hand to continue launching Falcon 1 and develop Falcon 9 and Dragon. There should be absolutely zero question that SpaceX will prevail in reaching orbit and demonstrating reliable space transport. For my part, I will never give up and I mean never.

Thanks for your hard work and now on to flight four.

--Elon--

(In a message to Employees, August 2, 2008)

Space X Plans a Launch of their Falcon 1 Today

Space X has announced a 4:00 PM PDT launch attempt of their Falcon 1 rocket. This will be their third attempt to launch a Falcon 1. The first attempt exploded shortly after takeoff. The second attempt had problems with its second stage and just failed to make orbit.

They are broadcasting the lauch attempt live on the web, beginning at 3:30 PM PDT:

Live Webcast of Falcon 1 Launch

Space X conducts Falcon 9 Engine Test

On July 30 Space X test fired, for the first time, the full 9 Merlin engine complement of their Falcon 9 first stage. The nine engines firing together generated about 850,000 pounds of thrust.

For more information and a video of the test firing, go to Spaceref.com

Virgin Galactic Unveils WhiteKnightTwo in Mojave

WhiteKnightTwo is the carrier aircraft that will be be used to help carry SpaceShipTwo, the commercial upgraded version of SpaceShipOne. An article with several pictures of this morning's rollout at the Mojave Air and Space Port can be seen on Wired.com:

One Giant Step For Virgin Galactic

For more photos and information, see Wired's Science Blog.

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