NASA Invitation for Public Nominations of U.S. Citizens for Potential Service on the National Space Council Users’ Advisory Group “NASA announces an invitation for public nominations of U.S. citizens to serve as potential members of the National Space Council Users’ Advisory Group (UAG). The UAG is a new Federal advisory committee under the Federal Advisory Committee Act (FACA) being established pursuant to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration Authorization Act, […]

Falcon Heavy at the Cape pic.twitter.com/hizfDVsU7X — Elon Musk (@elonmusk) December 20, 2017

Why The International Space Station Is The Single Best Thing We Did, Wired: “The International Space Station is one of the few nonstellar things up there that we can see from down here without instruments. It’s a prefab home the size of a football field, 462 tons and more than $100 billion worth of pressurized roomlike modules and gleaming solar arrays, orbiting 250 miles above the surface of the Earth. Its flight path is available online, and you can find out when it will make a nighttime pass over your backyard. Right on schedule, you’ll spot an unblinking white light that’s moving at 17,500 miles an hour. It will cross your field of view, on a line straight enough to have been drawn with a ruler, in only a few seconds. A few minutes more and the men and women inside that light will be over Greece. A few minutes more, Mongolia. There have been 53 expeditions to the ISS; 53 long-duration crews have called it home since Expedition 1 floated aboard in 2000. They’ve been mostly from America and Russia, the two principal and unlikely partners in one of the most expensive and challenging construction projects ever completed. (The ISS rose out of the ashes of two previous space stations: Russia’s Mir, last occupied in 1999 before it fell out of the sky in 2001, and Ronald Reagan’s proposed Freedom, which never got past the blueprints.) Its first few residents came and went largely without incident, conducting scientific experiments in everything from fluid dynamics to zero-G botany while studying what month after weightless month can do to the human body.”

Glowing Auras and ‘Black Money’: The Pentagon’s Mysterious U.F.O. Program, New York Times “Contracts obtained by The Times show a congressional appropriation of just under $22 million beginning in late 2008 through 2011. The money was used for management of the program, research and assessments of the threat posed by the objects. The funding went to Mr. Bigelow’s company, Bigelow Aerospace, which hired subcontractors and solicited research for the program. […]

CDC gets list of forbidden words: fetus, transgender, diversity, Washington Post “The Trump administration is prohibiting officials at the nation’s top public health agency from using a list of seven words or phrases – including “fetus” and “transgender” – in any official documents being prepared for next year’s budget. Policy analysts at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta were told of the list of forbidden words at […]

Thinking Of Sir Arthur C. Clarke On His 100th Birthday “Today would have been Sir Arthur C. Clarke’s 100th birthday. Arthur C. Clarke has had more influence on me as a writer than just about anyone else has – and it started at a very early age. … In the early 1990s I was a NASA employee and served as Payload Accommodations Manager for the 2.5 meter Centrifuge Facility that […]

Keith’s note: Last week President Trump signed the H.R.2810 – National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2018 into law. Included in this legislation is a provision that calls for a memorial to the crew of Apollo 1 at Arlington National Cemetery: “SEC. 1087. CONSTRUCTION OF MEMORIAL TO THE CREW OF THE APOLLO I LAUNCH TEST ACCIDENT AT ARLINGTON NATIONAL CEMETERY. Subject to applicable requirements of section 2409(b)(2)(E) of title […]

Keith’s note: After spending decades and tens of billions of dollars NASA still cannot implement a strategic plan for the use of the ISS or explain how it plans to transition from the ISS to future facilities. If NASA cannot get it right in low Earth orbit, how can they expect to build even more complex facilities near the Moon or at Mars? Did NASA Deliver The ISS Transition Plan […]

Former NASA Flight Director Says A Return To The Moon Is Necessary Before Heading To Mars “But what about plans for a return to the moon? “”First, you go to the moon before you go to Mars,” George W.S. Abbey, a former director of NASA’s Johnson Space Center said in an interview with the International Business Times. Abbey, is currently the Baker Botts Senior Fellow in Space Policy at Rice […]

Artificial Intelligence Used to Discover Eighth Planet Circling Distant Star “The discovery came about after researchers Christopher Shallue and Andrew Vanderburg and trained a computer to learn how to identify exoplanets in the light readings recorded by Kepler – the miniscule change in brightness captured when a planet passed in front of, or transited, a star. Inspired by the way neurons connect in the human brain, this artificial “neural network” […]