To find out that the outsourced company in charge couldn’t even be bothered to test the product. They just happily pocketed $72 million of taxpayer dollars and laughed all the way to the bank.
Just one day after NASA said it was eyeing a potential March 6 launch date for the Artemis II lunar mission, the space agency said Saturday that complications with the rocket could delay all launch attempts in March from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
(Btw, WordPress, the “quote” field used to have a separate area where you could put a link to the quote’s source. Where did that go? Nothing like helping the spread of unverified fake news…)
It’s been several months since I last posted…too much work and no play!
Until this past Sunday. Whew.
After a morning lecture about ancient Japanese myths and “deliberately forgotten” kings (maybe), I was grateful to be able to take a quick power nap…
…so that the family could go up a nearby mountain and watch the Geminid meteor shower. (By “mountain,” I mean about 640m/2100ft.)
After a brief lecture/quiz by a staff member at our local culture center, we stayed outside, lying flat on the ground, for over an hour. And, yes, it was cold, despite the sleeping bag and thermal underwear. I saw three shooting stars. Not nearly as many as I’d hoped.
After we got home and took evening baths, the kids went out on our second-floor balcony and found out that the night view was even better at home than on top of a mountain! At least they knew what to look for, thanks to the culture center event.
And by “meteor,” I mean the size of grains of rice. Look to the eastern sky, just a bit to the northwest of Orion, to find the Twins (Castor and Pollux in Greco-Roman mythology).
For more on the origins of the Geminids, check out the JAXA mission to Phaeton, the parent body asteroid. It’s DESTINY!
The researchers argue that “if” trees could be planted on Mars…
OK, just stop right there. I’m pretty sure Mars will struggle to support even grass, let alone trees.
And the argument that, due to a lack of oxygen, flammable wooden structures in space would not be in danger strikes me as a bit ludicrous…surely there would be oxygen inside the wooden structures?
And, you know, I do think I’ve seen this before some where…nah…
A contractor for Nasa urged the space agency to conduct more safety checks before the highly-anticipated first launch of its Starliner rocket – which is set to take off as soon as next week – “before something catastrophic happens”.
It was supposed to launch last week, but someone spotted a valve problem — *minutes* before the countdown procedure was about to start.
They’d better check for door plugs while they’re at it.
Boeing does not give a rat’s ass about whoever uses their products. They‘re only interest in paying dividends to stockholders. And of course paying the CEO’s ridiculously high salary.
NASA is trusting the future of space travel to people like Musk and companies like Boeing. Using taxpayer money to reward greed and incompetence.
The South Pole, where power plants are likely to be constructed (without human help…)
“The truth is that nuclear is the only option to power a moonbase,” says Simon Middleburgh from the Nuclear Futures Institute at Bangor University in Wales.
Japanese space company Astroscale Holdings Inc has unveiled what it calls the world’s first publicly released close-up image taken of space debris, hailing it as progress toward understanding the challenges posed by trash orbiting Earth.
It’s also thought that water on Earth is largely (or entirely) the result of comets and asteroids bombarding it (it remains debatable to what degree Earth already had water, but since when it formed the Earth was first molten lava and then dry as a bone, I think it far more likely that water came here from elsewhere, and science tends to agree).
I’ve already blogged about the origins of Bringer of Light, when I (finally) finished the first draft back in early September. In a sense, I’ve been constantly blogging the science behind the story.
But I haven’t discussed the characters at all. And despite what some old-fashioned writers may think (just finished a particularly badly-written snarky “why your books don’t sell” piece of trash that claimed science fiction shouldn’t have any emotions in it…say what? sorry not sorry), if the characters of a story aren’t interesting, there isn’t much point in reading a story.
So for the next couple of weeks, I’ll write a bit about the characters — the crew of the Artemis, the crew of the Sagittarius, the UN flunkies (sorry, career politicos) on Mars and Luna and so forth. There are lots of characters, and their interaction is complicated. Or is it?
I would get into my scifi influences at this point, but long blogs are slogs. So I’ll come back to that tomorrow!
Coffee time. Also to finish up at least one unrelated project and also the hardcover manuscript (which needs to be a different paper size than the paperback for some reason).
M Thomas Apple Author Page 