Tag: Science

Phil Plait of Bad Astronomy has a fascinating article in the New York Post about the impending end of the space shuttle program.

It’s fashionable to say the Shuttle program was a failure — too expensive, too limited. But progress is not a steady curve. Not all steps are leaps.

At the time the Shuttles were proposed, small, lean private companies able to build rockets like SpaceX didn’t exist — but these companies owe their existence to the environment NASA helped create.

Things are different now, however, and the era of something like the Shuttle should be behind us. The Shuttle missions were billed as routine, but NASA shouldn’t be doing the routine. The role of our space agency is to innovate, invent, design, push the limits, cross the borders. And once that’s done, once it becomes routine, they should hand it over to others.

Let private companies take over low Earth operations, and let NASA be free to pursue literally loftier goals. What the President and what Congress want isn’t all that different, and we shouldn’t let inaction leave us with no vision. NASA’s future does depend on the decisions made in the next year or two. If nothing is done, then nothing will get done.

Read the whole thing.

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Mathematicians want to dethrone pi. I hate this idea. First they took Pluto, and now they want pi? What’s next? Some half-baked notion that humans and apes come from common ancestors? Suck it, Science!

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This is amazing: a shuttle launch recorded by a camera mounted to the shuttle’s solid-fuel rocket booster. The camera records the entirety of the rocket booster’s voyage, from launch to separation to splashdown. If I’m not mistaken, when the ship is far above the clouds but before the separation, you can see the shadow of the launch thrust contrail on the top of the planet’s cloud cover, trailing off to the left.

I was never a huge fan of the shuttle; it was the only game in town for far too long, and now we’re in the disappointing position of having no game in town because we seem to have collectively decided that space is basically a place for satellites to make communications easier and monitor climate change that most of us annoyingly don’t think is happening anyway and…well, that’s about it.

But it’s still thrilling to see a ship launch for space. I hope this is a momentary interruption in our explorations, and not the start of our abandonment of space.

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xkcd today:

I love this. It’s a perfect rejoinder to something I invariably hear every single time another “Women’s History Month” or “Black History Month” rolls around — the complaint that “Gee, we should get to have a white history month.” So much greatness has gone before us, paving our way, that we don’t even know about. We’re lucky enough to realize that we stand on the shoulders of giants, but we’d do even better to make better effort to understand on whose shoulders we stand in the first place.

Now, if we could just get a zombie Carl Sagan to start enlightening us too….

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Science just continues to astound:

If you grew up thinking there were nine planets and were shocked when Pluto was demoted five years ago, get ready for another surprise. There may be nine after all, and Jupiter may not be the largest.

The hunt is on for a gas giant up to four times the mass of Jupiter thought to be lurking in the outer Oort Cloud, the most remote region of the solar system. The orbit of Tyche (pronounced ty-kee), would be 15,000 times farther from the Sun than the Earth’s, and 375 times farther than Pluto’s, which is why it hasn’t been seen so far.

The idea that there may well be something that big out there that we’ve never known about until now is truly, truly awe-inspiring.

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This is really cool: what other planets would look like in our sky if they orbited Earth at the same distance as the Moon. (Set aside the notion that Jupiter could ever orbit Earth, as opposed to the other way around.)

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Bill O’Reilly talked to an atheist, and came up with this gem of an argument:

O’REILLY: I’ll tell you why [religion’s] not a scam, in my opinion: tide goes in, tide goes out. Never a miscommunication. You can’t explain that. You cannot explain why the tide goes in.

SILVERMAN: Tide goes in, tide goes out?

O’REILLY: See, the water, the tide comes in and it goes out, Mr. Silverman. It always comes in, and always goes out. You can’t explain that.

If that’s the state of scientific literacy on O’Reilly’s side of the aisle, it’s no wonder that we’re pretty much doomed. Wow.

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