Habemus plus vis computatoris quam Deus

C|Net mentions, in their coverage of the final Shuttle mission:

The so-called "flexible path" approach calls for the near-term development of private-sector spaceships to ferry astronauts to and from the space station on a for-profit basis while NASA focuses on designing new, more affordable rockets and spacecraft for eventual voyages to nearby asteroids, the moons of Mars, or even the red planet itself.

You know what the first thing is that NASA should do if they really want to foster development of private-sector orbital launch capability?

NASA should open-source the SSME.

Ad Astra test-fired their VASIMR engine at full power on October 2.  Ad Astra announcement page here, video here.  At full power, VASIMR consumes 200kW of power, generates magnetic fields of 2 Tesla in its core, produces about a pound of thrust ... and looks stunning.  A pound of thrust doesn't sound like much, but it'll take a two-ton payload from Earth orbit to Jupiter in 19 months.

"Buildings shook in Texas.  Columbia was coming home."

And no, sorry, no cut here.  Thanks to Master Sergeant wcg for the reminder and the Bill Whittle pointer.  Because we should never forget.

What Bill Whittle says is true:  Those astronauts knew the risks, and they flew anyway.

Also true is that NASA worked wonders making the Shuttle fly, somehow, on a budget not nearly enough to do it right.

But they shouldn't have had to.  We should have done it right.  We owed it to the men and women who were going to risk their lives riding it.

And now we're talking about going to Mars.  Will we do it right this time?

We owe that to the memory of the men and women who flew the Shuttle, in full knowledge of the risks, and didn't make it home.

These days, the announcement of a new extrasolar planet is not that exciting.  We've got your jovians, your superjovians, your "hot Jupiters", your iceballs ... but some of these planets are a heck of a long way off, and none of them have been even remotely habitable (gas giants twelve times the size of Jupiter with temperatures of 900K?  Not much of a vacation destination).

Until now.

As james_nicoll reported last night, a more-or-less Earthlike planet of about five Earth masses has been detected in the habitable zone surrounding the red dwarf Gliese 581, 20.4 light years away in the direction of the constellation Libra.  The planet's exact composition is unknown; if it formed in situ, it is likely to be a very Earthlike iron/silicate rocky world, but it is also possible that if it formed beyond the snowline and migrated in, it may be a water-world with a hugely deep world-spanning ocean (possibly possessing more than an Earth mass of water).  In short, it is "not beyond the bounds of possibility" that it could be a habitable world.

Earth-evolved vegetation wouldn't do well under a red dwarf sun.  However, the size and mass of Gliese 581 c suggest a surface gravity of around 1.6G (heavy, but manageable), and 20 light years puts it within reach of an automated probe if we can figure out a way to get one up to an appreciable fraction of lightspeed.  If we can somehow get a ship up to relativistic speeds, it's within reach of a manned expedition.

(Those are big if's, of course.)

The linked article lists six possible orbital fits for the Gliese 581 system with both currently-known planets (the five-Earth-mass 581 c in its 12.9-day orbit, and a previously-detected Neptune-size planet, designated Gliese 581 b, in a 5.366-day orbit.)  I can't help wonder what it's like when the two planets pass by each other.

Yup, NASA's Stardust probe is home.  And now NASA wants volunteers to visually scan for interstellar dust impacts in the Stardust Interstellar Dust Collector's aerogel collection medium.  They estimate that the SIDC aerogel, about a tenth of a square meter in size, should have captured around 45 interstellar dust grains; but they also estimate it would take twenty years of continuous scanning to locate them all themselves.  Find a particle, and you get your name as co-author on any paper from Stardust@Home announcing the discovery of that particle.

The first image data is expected to be available for scanning March 1.

After seven years and three billion miles, the Stardust probe successfully returned to Earth and soft-landed a sample of dust from Comet Wild 2 to the Utah desert at 1012Z today.  As well as the first cometary dust samples ever returned to earth and the first samples of anything ever returned to Earth from beyond the Moon, this marks the furthest any probe has ever travelled from Earth and successfully returned to date, and the fastest re-entry of any man-made probe (at around 29,000mph).

Good job, NASA!

NASA just got real.

The space shuttle and International Space Station — nearly the whole of the U.S. manned space program for the past three decades — were mistakes, NASA chief Michael Griffin said Tuesday.

In a meeting with USA TODAY's editorial board, Griffin said NASA lost its way in the 1970s, when the agency ended the Apollo moon missions in favor of developing the shuttle and space station, which can only orbit Earth.

"It is now commonly accepted that was not the right path," Griffin said.  "We are now trying to change the path while doing as little damage as we can."