House Hearing on NASA Budget:

This is very interesting to watch...

This Week in Space:

This Week in Space:

Former NASA administrator Mike Griffin has some interesting things to say.

Want: Martin Jetpack

Specs, details, and purchasing information ('cause you're gonna buy one, right?) here.

Pyspread:

I've just come across the next great thing: Pyspread.  It allows you to have the functionality of a spreadsheet and the power of Python functions in one nice interface.  Here's a little tutorial to get you started.  As you can see, the truly great thing you get out of all this (in my opinion) is a straightforward mechanism for organizing and operating on data using R functions and graphs.  I've never cared for the R frontends, so I generally just access the functions via IDLE with the RPy module.  Since Pyspread gives *full* (although it's still in the alpha stage) integration with Python functions, it's a logical place for manipulating and analyzing large amounts of data without resorting to more esoteric mechanisms.

We'll be keeping an eye on this one.

SDO Meets Sundog:

This Week in Space:

A Brief History of Nearly Everything:

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.


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