October 10, 2009, 22:35 Seems a bit speculative to restart Buran when both the ESA (Europe) and JAXA (Japan) have already sent unmanned cargo carriers to the ISS recently, both which might carry crew and return from orbit it's been stated. At one time the Shuttle program or "Orbiter" as it was known on the early personal computer games, which was considered very accurate, was to be a split civilian (NASA, Cape Canaveral) and military (US Air Force, Vandenberg) program, which due to costs and objections to the militarization of space was reduced to the five shuttles for NASA mostly or, as I remember it, the whole program was going to go down in the flames of argument. The "Orbiter" simulation, though not implemented, had laser weapons aboard. Much of the arguments went on as objections to the American participation in the International Space Station were worked out. Still, it would be good to find someway to control and service all that stuff out there in orbit.

RT Russia Today:  Soviet space shuttle could bail out NASA

Back in Professor Hogan's "Planetary Atmospheres" and Tobias Owen, planetary geologist was at Earth and Space Sciences at Stony Brook University, we had some of the info from the Viking mission (Carl Sagan's "baby") as it arrived, I think. How about a return to there to re-sample what didn't or was inconclusively tested? Then go like a "bat-out-of-hell" to somewhere nearby of interest. However, not entirely a sentimental journey, scientific: "‘Doveryai no proveryai’ – ‘trust but verify’ – that’s the phrase Reagan learned to say in Russian." Mikhail Gorbachev

August 22, 2009 10:34 PM

June 23rd, 2009 12:40 pm ET
Your comment is awaiting moderation.

Imho, I think it needs something like “Einstein’s refrigerator” to work or UPS’s “package dream” will be undeliverable.

Will hypersonic flight take off? – SciTechBlog - CNN.com Blogs

Differential geological thermal heating of a long ago buried impact crater? Reason I thought was Panther Mountain in the New York Catskills was recently discovered to have been one. (Wikipedia) Perhaps the two of them are like "Panther Mountain - Meteor Impact Crater" as seen in profile here [tinyurl.com]

io9 - The Mysterious Ice Circles of Siberia - Ice circles - shimmer

When Neil Armstrong visited the Soviet Union after his historic flight, he collected a handful of soil from outside Kondratyuk's house in Novosibirsk to acknowledge his contribution to spaceflight.

Karl Ferdinand Braun: "During the development of radio, he also worked on wireless telegraphy. Around 1898, he invented a crystal diode rectifier or Cat's whisker diode. Guglielmo Marconi used Braun's patents (among others). Braun's British patent on tuning was used by Marconi in many of his tuning patents. Marconi would later admit to Braun himself that he had "borrowed" portions of Braun's work. In 1909 Braun shared the Nobel Prize for physics with Marconi for "contributions to the development of wireless telegraphy." -Wikipedia

Marconi was also nearby on Long Island: "Guglielmo Marconi had a radio station built to communicate with inbound and outbound ships on Fire Island Ave in Babylon. There is a picture of the radio shack in Babylon Historical Museum, Montauk Hwy, Babylon. The original site is marked with a plaque at Fire Island Ave and Virginia Avenue in the town of Babylon." Marconiville  [First Guided Missile 1917-1918]

For many years I recall it was "Peerless Photos" why it became contaminated. Nearby they built the "safest nuclear power plant in the world" at Shoreham, NY though a number of events conspired to stop that, i.e., the California built backup generator's crankshaft cracked on a test run, Westinghouse renegotiated the price of ore per ton, through the proverbial roof, and other costs. I was associated with the Suffolk County Archaeology Association, one person said they just bulldozed the nuke site without a proper archaeology survey, picking up pieces afterward. One of the members was asked about the Tesla tunnels, her husband had perished in a lab accident at the nearby Brookhaven National Laboratory, then run by DOE the Dept of Energy, now by a consortium led by nearby Stony Brook University. She said they were brick lined but not large enough for a person to get through and had had cables in them or proposed. I at the time had no idea what was there, still in the NIKE missile mentality of nearby Rocky Point, and rumored WWII sub-hunter shore sites, so you often stayed off those topics. It seems a shame that the science museum proposed for one of our world's famous scientist would not get built. He also had a lab in NYC down off Houston street. Some of his ideas are actively pursued and shown on YouTube for example and were very ingenious, i.e, water viscosity turbine, demonstrated out of cdroms, using a low flow of water, produce very high r.p.m.

Stanford White lived not too far away in the Nissequogue, Head-of-the-Harbor, Smithtown, NY area (as did one author of the Japanese and Philippine constitutions at the end of WWII) and designed many structures, including the West Wing of the White House with McKim, Mead and White to the local "shingle style" church in Stony Brook, NY. Their farm/estate had a well-seen landmark, a very tall windmill with large vanes, that could be seen from many places along the Long Island Sound, perhaps the tallest in the world at the time, 125' ? It pumped water up to a reservoir near the "squash courts" and was also "shingle-style" with stanchions cast in Baltimore, MD. It burned down in the early 1960s made mostly of wood, as diagrammed in "Scientific American". Guy I worked for replaced the many small joined window panes in the sculpture studio with a patio door in the roof, got too hot in there sometimes, simply open up 1/2 of it.

I recall, there's a tidal power plant in "Downeast" Maine that was started during the FDR administration that the Passamaquoddy natives run. A huge tidal power plant was once proposed in Nova Scotia. The Bay of Fundy has some if not the highest tides in the world and it was thought to design one that could provide a lot of energy, which I see one in China does. "Scientific American" published an article which showed that it could have the unintended consequence of changing the tides along the coast as much as half a foot in the Boston, MA harbor quite a distance away. Perhaps some mathematical model might be developed to counteract both as a benefit. About Climate Change Read the Article at HuffingtonPost/

• The Identification of the Two "Missing" Romanov Children Using DNA Analysis

New Astrometrics!

CfA Press Release Images

It's also the International Year of Astronomy (links to US node)

Nuclear Ninety North

Eclipse of the Midnight Sun

August 1st, 2008

Magnetic-Shield Cracks Found; Big Solar Storms Expected in 2012 - National Geographic

Vital Signs Project: Waverley Mansion

Passive Cooling: Past and Present

West Point, Mississippi

Visiting the Cape in spring of 1971, I recall getting up next to and looking inside the what I thought was called the "Vehicle Assembly Building" which could hold in volume I think 3 1/2 Empire State Buildings. I just saw the one in India that launched the current research satellite in successful orbit around the Moon, partly for NASA. I've also seen the HDTV of the Earth "rising" over the lunar horizon, recorded by the Japanese research satellite, and the Chinese spacewalk in Earth orbit. I think Saturn V certainly inspired, hopefully it will also bring more international cooperation and not a new Babel 17. Retromodo: Happy Birthday Saturn V, Still The Biggest Rocket of All

The Eagle has also crashed as far as I know, where? Nobody knows. The other Grumman Lunar Excursion Modules were crashed for seismic recordings of the geology of the Moon which has gravitational anomalies. I was reading in retrospect the Eagle was also landed off its mark due to the boulder fields and it was quite a feat, in the days before serious hand calculators to rendezvous back with the orbiting Apollo capsule. Maybe someday humankind will recover the "Eagle".

They also left a small wooden piece from the Wright Brothers plane that first flew at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina according to a small exhibit I saw at the National Museum of the US Air Force in Dayton, Ohio, once there in an archaeological clearance of Shaker burials in their Watervliet, Ohio community turned into a research park.

Frankenstein Day

Today, October 7, 2008, is Frankenstein Day at the prestigious Bodleian Library of Oxford University, England.