Final Shuttle Night Launch:

Wow. STS-130 launched this morning carrying cargo to the ISS.

Press Conference with Administrator Bolden:

Asteroids Collide!!!

On January 6, 2010, the LINEAR project spotted this:

When Hubble was turned to get it's all-seeing-eye on this strange, comet-like thing, this is the image that we got:

Apparently, two asteroids collided in what's certainly not a cosmic first, but certainly the first time such a thing has been witnessed. Click for the larger image.

More here from the Bad Astronomer. More here from Hubble.

Meet Your Personal Assistant:

Looks pretty impressive... and the app is free.

Bolden Talks About the Future of NASA:

Zounds! Bill Watterson Speaks...

Bill Watterson, the genius behind Calvin and Hobbes, talks to some reporter here...

NASA is Not Dead:

This ain't your daddy's NASA anymore. It probably hasn't been for a while; I'm just not sure how long. The simple fact of the matter is: the manned space program is NASA's bread and butter; you take that away, and you kill the beast for most of us because we don't know what the hell NASA does, anymore. We know that we don't want Russian rockets. We don't want Korean, Chinese, or Indian aerospace. We don't want money to reach out to schoolchildren (because you know what reaches a schoolchild? Landing on the fucking moon.). We want American initiative, American design, American jobs, and American flags in red sand. We want America to move forward, whatever the hell that means. It's hard to feel like that's what's happening after today's cancellation.

To be fair, the 2004 unfunded mandates by the Bush Administration were by no means the kind of leadership we needed, despite the stated intention of returning astronauts to the moon by 2020. I don't care what anybody says: if we could do it in a decade fifty years ago, we could damn sure do it in fifteen years today. But not if nobody wanted to pay for it. Have we lost anything today? Probably not, given the abysmal state of the Constellation program. Have we been shown something of the truth as it has been for a long, long time today? I think so, it still smarts. Is it that we simply don't have the capacity to do what we did fifty years ago? That's what a lot of people think.

And yet here we are, doing even more. There's some 60-odd ongoing missions listed in my NASA app alone, and no telling how many more. Let me just give you a few examples of NASA today:

1. The Solar Dynamics Observatory is launching in a week. I bet you hadn't heard....

2. The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter brings us images like this:

3. Huygens landed on Titan back in 2005, in what is certainly the single most remarkable thing NASA has been involved with (in partnership with the European Space Agency) in recent memory. Yet few people even know. This is an expensive photo, and worth every dime:

4. LCROSS finds water on the Moon last Fall. Pete Conrad didn't find any goddamned water on the Moon, right? (That's a joke, by the way.)

There's a cloud flying around right now that's hard to see through. This budget is a boon for everybody, says NASA. Listen to the teleconference and hear for yourself. This budget kills NASA, we of the media are wont to say. Constellation was a farce, anyhow, says Aldrin. Apparently, somewhere in there the line between bullshit and boilerplate was crossed. He endorses this budget, by the way.

So where the hell are we? I honestly don't know because I don't know what NASA is anymore. What will this heavy-lift rocket that is supposedly going to be developed be like? Nobody knows, because it doesn't exit! Not even on paper. Where is NASA going? Into space! says NASA. Nevermind how. Entrepreneurs. Commercial rigs. By international collaboration. Too many politics, few straight answers, and we who prize the glory days of the 1960's as a love lost, promised, and lost again are going to be very hard to please for a long time to come. Probably just about as long as it takes to get another American boot in Lunar soil.

**Update**

Get io9's opinion here. I'd just like to note that I'm reading Stephen Baxter's novel Voyage, right now. Ewww, bad timing...

NASA is Dead:

The news of the day is as many expected: the Constellation program has been killed and NASA has no visible mechanism for sustaining it's own manned space program. Perhaps one positive is that the overall budget has gone up (nasawatch.com is the best place for the details) , but most are left wondering what for? No Moon. No Mars. No NASA platform. I suggest you head out to Florida by the year's end; it'll be the last time this agency puts a man in space on the back of an American craft for a long time to come.


- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

This Week in Space: 1/24/2010

Jailbreak that iPhone!

Alright, so I previously mentioned having gotten an iPhone and all the wicked shit I could do with it despite not paying any of the outlandish fees my wife and the rest of the world does for service. Then, I proceeded to make an ass of myself for having clearly never heard of an iPod Touch. Well, I'm back to say the hell with an iPod Touch, we're still doing iPhones. More stuff (like a camera) and potential features (all the associated phone stuff) says if you're gonna spend the money, you may as well plan ahead for the day you bite the bullet on the service plan. Fair enough?

Now, say I refuse to pay for the service plan today, so what can I do with my iPhone? The answer is the same as the last post: basically everything anyone else can as long as you're in a wifi hotspot. For me, that's pretty much all the time (home and work). Now I want to talk about Skype.

Skype service is VERY reasonably priced, and the call quality is better than my old phone ever was. You can get your own phone number, call other people's cell phones, get voicemail service, etc. Trouble is, the backgrounding limitations of the iPhone prevent Skype from really being all it could be. Sure, you can call any time you want (with wifi) but receiving calls is another matter. Basically, the service doesn't work unless you're signed in to the app, which means unless you leave the thing open all the time and never lock your phone, you'll never know if someone's trying to call you until you open up the app again. Sucks. You end up with a lot of voicemail and frustration. So how do you fix this?

How do you fix most of the stupid, irritating shit that prevents you from doing whatever you need to do with an Apple (or any other) product? You hack the thing. Right now, I've got root access to my phone, which is pretty much the definition of when ownership of this piece of hardware transfers from Steve Jobs to yours truly. This is the famous "jailbreaking" process that you hear about (note that that's different from "unlocking", although you can get there too via the process I'm about to describe). So how do you do it? Is it hard? Is it dangerous?

Note: I cannot tell you that the same method I used will work for you. It worked for me, which is all I can guarantee. I did this on a Windows 7 machine with the latest iTunes software.

• Go here and download this executable. It's called "blackra1n" and, yes, it does all the work for you. So the answer to "Is it hard?" is "It's not supposed to be."
• Get the latest iTunes.
• Plug in your iPhone.
• Back it up via iTunes just in case something happens. Just right-click on your phone in the menu on the left of the iTunes screen and select "Back up".
• Make sure you are using the latest iPhone firmware (3.1.2). If you don't know, you can find out by going to your iPhone and ->Settings->General->About... and it will tell you what you're running.
• Find where you downloaded blackra1n and run it, but RUN IT AS ADMINISTRATOR!!! Right-click on the thing and select "Run as administrator," otherwise you may have problems. Again, don't just double-click it. I've seen lots of "how-tos" for jailbreaking the iPhone, and lots of them forget to mention this little tip.
• Just sit and wait. It takes only a couple of minutes to finish and, once it reboots, you've got a jailbroken iPhone.

Here's a video that seems to more or less follow the steps I used:

Now that you've done that, you'll notice that there's a new app on your phone called "blackra1n". Open it up and install Cydia. This is your third party app store, and will allow you to take advantage of the iPhone development community. Note: there's also an option in blackra1n to install something called "Snow" which will unlock your iPhone for non-AT&T service providers. I haven't played with that, but it's there if you want it.

Finally, to get back to Skype, the key to getting the most out of the service is to install two apps through Cydia: 1.) backgrounder; 2.) insomnia. Backgrounder allows you to send any app to a background process just by holding down the home key for a second or so (if you just push the home key, the app will close like normal). Insomnia keeps the wifi from shutting off when the phone is locked. I used this as a reference. Boom! Eternal Skype service is at your fingertips.

There are other cool things you can get to customize, play, and take advantage of your newfound hardware access. Just to name a few, how about a NES emulator? Fuck, how about a Playstation 1 emulator?

Yes, it's slow, but that's not really the point, now is it? Note that the 3GS iPhone offers significant improvements over the performance of a 3G iPhone on things like this.

To give an example of what your newfound hardware access does for you, check out an app called "Cycorder". You may want a 3GS for the better hardware, but you don't need one to take videos. Cycorder allows you to do it with a 3G.

Want to customize the look of your iPhone? Try an app called "Winterboard".

As always, there's more. Right now, that's where I am save for the addition of a Terminal app. By the way, you need to change the root and user passwords after you jailbreak. It's easy to do, and keeps everyone from knowing your password is "alpine".

More to come. Stay tooned.