The Big Think

Spacewalking Astronauts Seen With a Backyard Telescope: “”

Friend Josh ‘Danger’ Ward posts this on his wall for all the Central Texas folks: BRIGHT ISS (space station) pass tonight. In Waco/Austin look to the south at 8:10p. It’ll reach max elevation above the horizon around 8:15p towards the southeast and it’ll set in the northeast around 8:19p.

If you can manage it, don’t miss this. It’s really cool.

More on the Space-X announcement:

But the most important thing about this vehicle for the taxpayer (and the space enthusiast) is that it shows how absurd the Congress’s demands on NASA are. There will be rear-guard actions by lobbyists from ATK, the manufacturer of the solid motors, but continuing events like this will make it difficult, if not impossible, to continue to fund the existing space-industrial complex, the iron triangle of NASA, Congress and its cost-plus contractors. The unaffordable era of Apollo will finally be over, and a new era of cost-effective spaceflight is beginning.

So glad to see the $1000/lb mark met. Hopefully we’ll get another order of magnitude in the next 20 or so years.

With a 177,000lb payload capacity (the biggest since the Saturn V), Falcon Heavy looks like it’s going to change things. Excellent! Go SpaceX.

Apollo 17 Landing Site.

As seen from lunar orbit.

Hey conspiracy theorists: up yours!

Great video of last week’s launch of Space Shuttle Discovery as seen from a passing airliner. You can really see the trajectory develop.

Cool Flash animation of the ISS as it comes together.

22 reasons to go to space.

Wow, NASA announces a new life form. Based not on phosphorus, but arsenic, of all things.

All life on Earth is made of six components: carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorus and sulfur. Every being, from the smallest amoeba to the largest whale, share the same life stream. Our DNA blocks are all the same.

But not this one. This one is completely different. We knew that there were bacteria that processed arsenic, but this bacteria—discovered in the poisonous Mono Lake, California—is actually made of arsenic. The phosphorus is absent from its DNA. The implications of this discovery are enormous to our understanding of life itself and the possibility of finding beings in other planets that don’t have to be like planet Earth.

via Gizmodo

Pretty cool news that opens up the possibility of finding life Out There.

US spaceship factory set to begin.:

Life aboard the International Space Station: “”

Don’t miss the great views.

SpaceShipTwo flies free for the first time today.

The final rollout of the final Shuttle flight. This beautiful bird flies one last time in a few weeks, and after that, our country will have to depend on other nations for access to space. There are several potential replacements in the wings, but at this point they are five to ten years away, and that’s if Congress decides to boost funding to NASA. Once STS133 returns America will no longer be able to call itself a leading power in manned space flight.

If we’re ever going to get into space for realz, it’ll be up to the likes of people like this to get us there. Hurry up, folks. Seeing the Earth from space is on my Life List (no kidding) and I’m not getting any younger.

Something is adding methane to Mars’s atmosphere:

Scientists and the public get excited about extraterrestrial methane because it’s usually produced one or two ways — through volcanic eruptions and biological processes. It is prevalent in the atmospheres of Jupiter, Saturn, Neptune and Uranus, and more recently, scientists figured out it also exists (with some interesting variation) on Saturn’s moon Titan.

Chemical processes could also produce methane, such as carbon dioxide combining with melted water beneath the surface.

Though detection of methane is not a smoking gun for life, changes in the presence of methane are intriguing. Methane breaks down in ultraviolet radiation from the sun, which means something on Mars is replenishing it.

Wow, pretty cool. I wonder what’s going on?