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Blizzard Dumps Snow in Midwest, Northeast
Travel was slowed to a crawl at best across wide areas of the Northeast on Sunday as a huge snowstorm whipped up blizzard conditions with wind gusting to 60 mph, making highways treacherous, canceling hundreds of airline flights and slowing trains.
Massachusetts reported 2 feet of snow, with amounts of at least 20 inches in New York’s Catskills and 18 inches in coastal Connecticut and Rhode Island, and the National Weather Service said as much as 3 feet was possible in eastern Massachusetts. The weather system had earlier piled a foot of snow on parts of Wisconsin, Michigan, Indiana and northern Ohio.
The stiff wind caused drifts up to 6 feet high in Massachusetts, poor visibility and scattered power outages. The weather service posted blizzard warnings into the afternoon in parts of New England, eastern New York state and northern New Jersey.
Oddly, I happened across a David Suzuki program on TV yesterday, vintage 1999, where he predicted exactly this kind of thing would happen as a result of anthropogenic global warming from CO2 emissions.
Oh, wait…no…he said that the new century would see higher temperatures, increasing occurrence, duration, and severity of droughts, and unseasonably warm winters as manifestations of global warming. My bad.
Shanghai plans ‘space city’
Shanghai plans to build a major research facility to assist China’s ambitious astronaut program state media said.
The astronaut program includes a space walk within the next few years.
The country’s largest city will invest more than one billion yuan ($158.35 million) in the research facility, the China News Service reported, quoting Yuan Jie, director of the Shanghai Aerospace Bureau.
The project has entered the initial stages and will be completed within three years, Yuan was quoted as saying.
Unfortunately, the article doesn’t give any further information as to what the Shanghai facility is intended to be used for — or indeed whether the research facility is even formally part of the Chinese space program, or just some sort of economic development gimmick designed to capture a share of the “tens of thousands of scientific, manufacturing and planning personnel in more than 3000 factories.”
What’s interesting to note here is the plans for future manned Shenzhou flights. While the Chinese program appears to be leaping forward at a less than glacial pace, each of their planned flights seems to be recapitulating achievements that took the US and Soviet programs many flights to accomplish…each planned flight demonstrating significant new capabilities rather than making cautious, incremental expansions. If all goes as described in the article, by Shenzhou-8 China will have demonstrated the major capabilities developed in the US via the Mercury and Gemini programs — manned orbital spaceflight, extended stays in orbit, spacewalks, and rendezvous and docking. And given other information about the “orbital cabin” portion of the Shenzhou spacecraft, they seem likely to also try their hands at modular space stations, skipping the Skylab/Salyut period and jumping directly to a Mir/ISS approach. It’s easy to dismiss the Chinese program as slow or motivated by a nationalistic “us too!” wannabe-ism, but they may be showing that they have learned the right lessons of how and how not to do space exploration from the US and Soviet/Russian experiences.
NASA TV’s “NASA Update with Sean O’Keefe” is running a short retrospective today on the first year of the Vision for Space Exploration. Robert Zimmerman at UPI offers a glimpse of what the next year holds.
Rand Simberg comments on the anniversary. As he points out, the VSE has not suffered the same indignities as the program laid out by the President’s father, and indeed is being taken seriously by both NASA and the Congress.
Jeff Bezos is planning to make the term “rocket ranch” a literal reality: Bezos offers glimpse into space project
Blue Origin, the secretive space exploration company founded by Amazon.com CEO Jeff Bezos, on Thursday quietly announced plans to build a testing facility on a remote ranch in western Texas.
The facility will be built on land owned by Bezos located north of Van Horn, Texas, a community with a population of 2,400 residents as of 2000. In its first public statement about its ambitions, Blue Origin said it plans to build a suborbital spacecraft that can launch and land vertically with three or more astronauts, according to a report in the local Van Horn Advocate newspaper.
Bezos has already assembled a team of veteran rocket scientists who have worked on various aerospace and missile defense projects. The company will first build basic facilities such as an engine test stand, fuel and water tanks and an office building, and then begin flight testing in six to seven years, the report said.
So far, so good: Possible Shoreline Revealed in First Titan Picture
The world got its first look at the surface of the Saturnian moon Titan on Friday when pictures from the European space probe Huygens showed a possibly rocky surface with “drainage channels” for liquids.
The first picture from a height of about 10 miles, as Huygens descended before landing on the surface, showed what scientists said appeared to be a shoreline. They speculated the channels might feed into canyons on the surface…
The saucer-shaped probe was designed to rotate on its way down, taking high-definition, panoramic images of Titan’s thick, smoggy atmosphere and its landscape.
Along with its six scientific instruments that measure the components of Titan’s atmosphere, Huygens carries a sound recorder and a lamp to look for signs of surface liquid.
The White House has issued a new Space Transportation Policy, replacing several Clinton-era directives and realigning national policy with the Vision for Space Exploration and the emerging private space industry.
What is particularly interesting about the new policy is that it takes seriously the development of a commercial space transportation industry, including not just the usual platitudes about “encouraging development” and “facilitating technology transfer” and the like, but directing federal departments to provide a “timely and responsive regulatory environment” and to refrain from activities which compete with or undermine commercial activities. While the policy specifically mentions “stable and predictable access” to government-owned space facilities and strictly limits the use of excess ballistic missiles as orbital launch vehicles, one wonders how this noncompete clause might affect things like LRO if strictly applied.
Speaking of being too optimistic about entrepreneurial white knights:
El Segundo start-up fights Northrop
In an exchange of lawsuits, Northrop alleged that SpaceX had stolen trade secrets for an obscure rocket part. SpaceX alleged that Northrop “abused” its government-advisory role to obtain proprietary information. Both companies deny any wrongdoing.
Huh…imagine that.
SpaceX says costly litigation could cause the company to fail.
Well, at least they have an “out” if they decide to pull a Beal and bail on the whole undertaking.
Contractors playing such advisory roles are required by the Pentagon to ensure that their employees with access to another company’s proprietary information are walled off from other employees working on rival projects.
I should think the Pentagon, if anyone, should have been cognizant of the fact that some rocket companies take proprietary information protection seriously, while others just take proprietary information.
At a design review in January, SpaceX executives became concerned that Northrop wasn’t abiding by those restrictions. Gwynne Shotwell, head of business development at SpaceX, interrupted the meeting to ask Northrop participants whether any of them were involved in competing rocket programs. As many as five of the eight Northrop staffers raised their hands, she says.
Oh, to have been a fly on the wall in that meeting…
SpaceX alleged that as far back as March 2003, Northrop engaged in a “surreptitious” effort to spy on SpaceX to gain a competitive advantage.
Hmm…
Partly because of the dispute, the Air Force hasn’t given the green light for SpaceX’s first launch, which has been rescheduled for sometime next year.
Well, that helps to explain the continuing delay (though SpaceX spokespersons offer other reasons here, with no mention of an Air Force hold on the launch).
And if the cost of litigation isn’t enough, the allegedly purloined technology itself may offer another “out”:
Musk says he now regrets choosing the pintle technology — but not because of the legal problems it spawned. Contrary to Northrop’s claim that trade secrets enabled SpaceX to develop an engine in mere months, SpaceX hasn’t achieved the performance it seeks. “We will get to our objectives, in spite of the bloody pintle,” says Musk, who is already looking to scrap the part for another engine technology.
How about a hybrid?
Mark Wade looks back on 2004, and sees little to be happy about: The Year in Review – 2004
The year 2004 saw the continued decline in the exploration and utilisation of space. The number of launches to orbit reached the lowest level since 1961. Given competition by terrestrial technology, the commercial communications satellite industry seemed unlikely to ever expand beyond replenishment of its current constellations.
The number of satellites continued its even more spectacular decline, and also reached the lowest level since 1961. Navigation, civilian and military surveillance, earth monitoring, and other applications satellites seemed unlikely to expand the size of their constellations in the future either. Unmanned planetary exploration was being funded at a level beneath the notice of national budget officials. Despite rhetoric about new space initiatives and budget increases, NASA and the Department of Defence seemed only to have perfected the art of spending billions on studies and bureaucracy without producing any hardware.
But it wasn’t all bad:
A few bright spots did exist. The winning of the X-Prize by SpaceShipOne demonstrated the first (however limited) manned commercial spacecraft. By year’s end the launch was imminent of the Falcon I, one of several new purportedly lower-cost commercial launch vehicles.
Except, Falcon I still has not launched, and probably won’t until at least March from the looks of it.
The article is a wet blanket over the optimism engendered this past year by Rutan’s successful X-Prize flights and the announcement of the VSE, but perhaps that’s a good thing…a dose of reality as antidote to too much enthusiasm. After all, how many entrepreneurial white knights (pardon the pun) and Great Visionary Programs have come and gone in the past thirty years?
[via Victor Atkins]
Phil Bowermaster of The Speculist has been reporting on the tsunami disaster from Malaysia.
Andrews Space has won a contract for the development and flight test of a subscale hypersonic ballute as part of Constellation.
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