Strangely Perfect

It Was 50 Years Ago, Today …when mankind left the gravitational confines of our Earth. A poor boy from the steppes, Yuri Gagarin, simultaneously became the first man in space and the first man to leave Earth and orbit it completely.  (This is something that took NASA several steps before John Glenn finally emulated the [...]

Arnold Stang Dies The voice of Top Cat, the excellent cartoon series of my childhood has died at a good old age. He’s also in one of my favourite bits from the film “It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World.”  About half-way through the clip below he’s one of the two gas station attendants who [...]

Introduction You may not have noticed the co-incidence yesterday, but an Iranian aircraft crashed and the US Space Shuttle took off.  the co-incidence was in  the strange reporting that envelops such events. Iranian Crash This, as air crashes go, was pretty ordinary – something went wrong, it crashed, everyone died.  You’d expect some reasoned discussion, [...]

In this stark summary from a meeting of 2.5k scientists from across the globe, we find that not only is anthropomorphic climate change real, not only is it getting worse, but also, within the error margins for the ‘hockey stick‘ predictions of only a few years back, recent measurements put the actual effects at the [...]

Fizzy Oceans Spell Doom As an almost instananeous follow up (the interconnectedness of all things?) to my recent disappointment about the launch failure of the OCO satellite, the BBC, Guardian, Telegraph etc  have all been reporting some recent climate work from Plymouth. An Italian Bay There’s now so much CO2 being absorbed by the oceans [...]

Two rockets have been sent up recently by NASA. The first, a mission to monitor and greater understand how CO2 affects climate, failed. The second, a mission to search for new Earth-like worlds got up okay, will soon start searching. I’m all for expanding human knowledge and can understand the reasons for the missions.  In [...]

OCO Satellite Fails Of course, the title could be applied to anything.  But today’s disappointing news that a space rocket didn’t make it into orbit,I think, may turn out to be something that will be very greatly missed over the coming years. Failure hits NASA’s ‘CO2 hunter’ The failure of the OCO satellite to make [...]

40th Anniversary of the Earthrise Picture This is the original colour photo taken by Anders (Borman’s b&w was the first).  This is how Anders framed it in the zero gravity environment – north is at the top and the craft is whizzing towards the Earth at this point in it’s lunar orbit. I think NOW [...]

Problem -  a Time Bomb. Unfortunately, it’s not “the bomb” that’s the problem. Today’s news that mammals are going extinct at a faster rate than…er…well ever, actually, would hopefully make people sit up and pay attention. Mammals facing extinction threat The last time I looked (warm blood, nipples, live birth) I was a mammal and [...]

I said in a post 5 days ago, that because the Space Shuttle is old and due to be retired, the USA was intending the Russians to take up the slack for 5 years of maintaining flights to the ISS (International Space Station) until the new rocket is ready. I also said that in light [...]

NASA Discovers Computer Virus Aboard the International Space Station SpaceRef, the space news website has revealed that a laptop on the ISS has a worm!  It’s called – W32.Gammima.AG worm, and it sucks up logon and other typed details before sending the info on to base. I find it bizarre that with all the computing [...]

This news from late yesterday, is the story of a Nordic vandal of an Easter Island statue. He lopped an ear off one of the famous statues and has been fined $17,000. The BBC say the statues are up to 1000 years old. Whether the statues have any intrinsic value is debatable as the value [...]

Showing how the excuse to shoot down a spy satellite is a cover story for bravado and secrecy. This is proved by reference to the two, very public, Shuttle disasters, comparing at a simple science level the logic behind certain statements.