@NewHorizons2015 using a #NASA mission account to invent your own astronomical definitions and confuse people is a disservice in the extreme — NASA Watch (@NASAWatch) August 31, 2014 Keith’s note: Planets orbit stars. Moons orbit planets. Planets and moons are worlds. Our solar system has lots of worlds and no two are the same – Right? “Planet” and “Moon” define where a world is located – not what it is […]
NASA Outreach on Social Media, This is True “Worse, the word “Mars” isn’t anywhere in the story. Isn’t that the more interesting thing? We’re going to Mars? Cool! What are we going to do there? Yet the story doesn’t mention such a mission. After digging and digging through the Orion home page, going through all 11 pages of press releases, I didn’t find a single story that had the word […]
Letter to NASA Administrator Bolden from House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology Republicans, 27 August 2014 “Will NASA be able to fly the SLS for Exploration Mission-1 in calendar year 2017? If it will not, please explain what has changed since your testimony on April 24, 2013 and whether, during your testimony on March 27, 2014, you were aware that this flight could be delayed beyond calendar year 2017. […]
Marc’s note: Last week I decided to run a poll on who our readers thought would be selected for funding in the next round of NASA’s Commercial Crew Program which many expect to be announced tomorrow. The results were surprising at first. I expected, considering the wide variety of readers we have, to have a very close poll. What I didn’t expect was the blatant padding of the results for […]
Using Jedi Mind Tricks to Sell NASA’s Next Big Rocket, SpaceRef “Among the things being announced by NASA was that the launch date for the first SLS mission was being slipped to late 2018 from its current 2017 date. But NASA did not want to call it a slip and said that everyone was still working according the schedule they had been working on. Of course this would mean that […]
What Happened to NASA’s Valkyrie Robot at the DRC Trials, and What’s Next, IEEE “At the DRC Trials, Valkyrie experienced a “networking issue” that prevented the team from scoring any points. In the garage before the DRC Trials began, everything worked fine. But on the course itself, the JSC Team “could not communicate with the robot at all.” They would later discover the culprit: a network traffic shaping tool that […]
NASA Completes Key Review of World’s Most Powerful Rocket in Support of Journey to Mars “This decision comes after a thorough review known as Key Decision Point C (KDP-C), which provides a development cost baseline for the 70-metric ton version of the SLS of $7.021 billion from February 2014 through the first launch and a launch readiness schedule based on an initial SLS flight no later than November 2018.” NASA […]
NASA Still Won’t Look For Existing Life on Mars (update), earlier post Keith’s 31 July note: I obviously expected Jim Green to answer in the same cautious way that NASA has always answered this question – one I have asked again and again for the nearly 20 years. Instead, Green launched into a detailed description of all the things that the Mars 2020 rover could detect that have a connection […]
SpaceX Update on AsiaSat 6 Mission “What we do want to triple-check is whether even highly improbable corner case scenarios have the optimal fault detection and recovery logic. This has already been reviewed by SpaceX and multiple outside agencies, so the most likely outcome is no change. If any changes are made, we will provide as much detail as is allowed under U.S. law.”
When NASA Moves Its Websites to the Cloud, Everyone Watches, Nextgov “The space agency has more than 1,500 public-facing websites and 2,000 intranets, extranets and applications, and the agency’s data offerings and holdings are huge. “These guys have probably the most expansive list of Web assets,” Ananthanpillai said. “That’s one of the reasons why everyone’s looking at them for lessons learned.”” NASA is Unable (and Unwilling) To Coordinate Its Websites, […]