Resources: space-related magazines

In this article, Dwayne Day provides an overview of the major space-related hardcopy publications, from Space News and (my favorite) Quest to Novosti Kosmonavtiki (Spaceflight News) which he describes as the best space magazine in the world - IF you can read Russian.

Why China tested antisatellite weapon

A veteran military space analyst, Joan Johnson-Freese of the U.S. Naval War College, thinks China screwed up in their recent ASAT test, and has now realized it. Essentially, the testing program got ahead of the diplomatic thinking, and the nation was surprised at the hostile reaction to its test. "I think they now are now recognizing that the international condemnation due them was actually moderated," she said.
COMMENT: If this article reports her testimony correctly, Johnson-Freeze said this is the outcome of a Chinese program started in response to the sole U.S. ASAT weapon live shot, which came way back during the Reagan Administration. That seems to me to be connecting two events so separated in time and in political/military context that the case for a causal connection is weak to nonexistant.

Johnson-Freese made a good point about the ballyhoo surrounding China's manned space accomplishments - they are important, but not significant enough to put China in a race with the U.S. She said, "Personally I hate to see the U.S. and China's space programs characterized as competitive. They fly two manned space flights over a five-year period and are perceived as beating the U.S. space program. That's just wrong."

SpaceX hopes third time is a charm

The third launch attempt for SpaceX's small Falcon 1 orbital launcher is now set for late June. SpaceX founder Elon Musk disavows a "stupid comment" (his words) he made three years ago, when he said that three failures might be it. He told reporters on May 14, ""I was asked, 'how many failures can you withstand?' I said, 'well, if we had three failures in a row, then I suspect we would not get any customers, and then it wouldn't make sense to continue.' I was partially quoted thereafter saying, 'three failures and we're out.' That's actually not the full statement. The full statement was if our customers abandon us, then we are out." He added, "We are in this for the long term. SpaceX will never give up. I will never give up. Never."
SpaceX has an order book of 12 payloads awaiting launch.
COMMENT: SpaceX has two things other small entrepreneurial launch efforts did not have: solid customer commitments and significant internal funding. I know these folks and understand their technical approach. The failures were disheartening (and I thought not making orbit on the second attempt was surprising), but I think they will make it work.

God and Science: the latest debate

This article encapsulates the debate at an American Enterprise Institute-sponsored forum that focused around publication of a new collection of essays collecting all points of view. Much of the discussion consists of long-argued points, but a couple of things struck me as worth mentioning. Arch-skeptic Michael Shermer made the interesting argument (a variation on Arthur C. Clarke) that we might not recognize God - that the universe may hold civilizations so advanced that, if we met them, we could not distinguish between the natural and supernatural. Philosopher Mary Midgely drew a distinction between science - a widely accepted way of understanding the physical universe - and scientism, which she describes as the view that science has a universal claim on truth and nothing outside it can exist. Nobel laureate William D. Phillips, a physicist, commented, "From what I know about physics, it's not impossible to imagine a world in which God acts but we never can prove it." Now that's kind of a frustrating thought.... For a copy of the published results, go to www.templeton.org.

True flying - without a plane

Yves Rossy goes by the nickname "Fusion Man," although "Bird-Man" would be more accurate. He dives from an airplane and ignites four small jets on the wings strapped to his back. The result, demonstrated in dazzling acrobatics high above the Swiss Alps, is the closest any human has gotten to bird-like freedom in the air. It took five years for Rossy to develop the wings and train himself to control them.

The VULCAN Mach 4 project

Speaking of DARPA, the agency now wants to get serious about a two-stage (turbojet+high speed system) propulsion option, dubbed Vulcan, which would allow a plan to leave a runways and accelerate to Mach 4, approximately one Mach number above what the storied SR-71 could do.

COMMENT: The USAF has wanted this kind of ability for a long time, and has seriously pursued it off and on (as budgets and changing priorities dictated). It's not as easy as it sounds to jump from a Mach 3 to a Mach 4 engine: every gain in those speed regimes takes hard work. And a propulsion system which can go from runway to Mach 4 is more of challenge, since, as DARPA points out, it's not going to be a single engine - it has to be some sort of two-stage device like the turbo/PDE option mentioned in the announcement. For a single engine, the high-speed end is outside what turbojets and their derivatives can do and the low-speed requirement means it can't be a relatively simple ramjet or a cutting-edge scramjet (which has a lot more development ahead of it and really only makes since for a much higher speed regime). I've known quite experienced USAF people to express the opinion that transatmospheric (long-range, zero to Mach 12 - 18) aircraft should not be too hard to develop, which made me want to quote Engineer Scott: "I can't change the laws of physics!"

DARPA at 50: Success, Failure, and Promise

THe agency which originated the Internet turns 50 this year. As this article describes, DARPA has had its share of failures and abandoned programs. However, it's one of the few Federal agencies where a reasonable degree of failure is understood to be acceptable. This article chronicles DARPA's pioneering work, from satellite navigation to stealth aircraft, and its less-remembered projects, like the idea of a "mechanical elephant" to transport troops through the jungles of Vietnam. Also covered are idea in development and testing, from autonomous vehicles to synthetic versions of gecko feet that would let soldiers climb walls.

Protecting the Polar Bear

Here is an interesting a CNN column I used as a reference just to point out that I used the term Sci/Tech Blog first (I'm not claiming any infringement, since I never trademarked it, but I just want everyone to know I thought of it first. So there.)
Anyway, CNN's Peter Dykstra ponders the recent decision to list polar bears as a threatened species. There's been a lot of debate on whether this is justified, since it's not firmly documented that the species is declining, and hunting has been limited to a level that doesn't pose a threat. However, fear of the effects of climate change has prompted wildlife organizations and now the U.S. government to insist the bears have to be protected as much as possible.
COMMENT: While I think this is the right call, it does stretch the official definition of a "threatened" species. Whoever the next President is, Senators Obama, Clinton, and McCain all have strong pro-environment stands, and we may see a significant expansion of the government's powers and its activity under the Endangered Species Act.

Watch Mars landing live

The Science Channel (which, darn it, I don't get!) will broadcast live on May 25 from 7-9 PM (ET) [4-6 PM (PT)] to cover the descent of NASA's Mars Phoenix lander. Don't miss it!

Aliens, science, and faith

With all the talk of a "war" between science and religion, it's easy to forget that religious scientists, from the monk Gregor Mendel to the century-old Vatican Observatory, have made important contributions to science.
The Rev. Jose Gabriel Funes, the current director of the Vatican Observatory, told an interviewer that religion has nothing to fear from science, and vice-versa. He also has no problem with the idea of other intelligences in the cosmos. "How can we rule out that life may have developed elsewhere?" Funes asked. He explained that such a stance puts a limit on God's freedom to create, which in Christian doctrine is, by definition, unlimited.
Funes takes an increasingly common Christian view that the Big Bang happened as described by modern physics, but that it's still true "God is the creator of the universe and that we are not the result of chance."

A terrific read: Extreme Expeditions

Extreme Expeditions: Travel Adventures Stalking the World's Mystery Animals, by Adam Davies,is not your average cryptozoology book.
Davies spends a minimum of time rehashing old evidence and instead tells a rollicking first-person adventure tale. Davies, like the late Scott T. Norman, is one of those supremely dedicated amateurs who spends all available time and money poking around in remote, often supremely uncomfortable locations. He found little at the traditional monster haunts of Lake Tele and Loch Ness, believes he saw a large unknown animal in Lake Seljord, and made a significant contribution to research on one of the most probable animals in the cryptozoo, the bipedal Sumatran primate known as orang-pendek. Davies collected hair and a footprint cast for which some well-qualified "mainstream" scientists had no better explanation than "unknown primate."
The book is a jaunty, sometimes profane tale of colorful but basically sane people making a sincere, sometimes dangerous effort to solve zoological mysteries. Whether they turn out to have found new species is almost beside the point. I look forward to a sequel, if Davies survives his future expeditions long enough to write it.

Unique photos: rare whale giving birth

The world's rarest large whale, the Northern right whale Eubalaena glacialis, has been photographed for the first time in the act of giving birth. Actually, Monica Zani of the New England Aquarium got the aerial photos in a lucky encounter in 2005 off the Georgia-Florida coastal area of the Atlantic. The pictures were closely held until Zani and other researchers could prepare and publish academic documentation of what was learned from the enoucnter.
The birth was good news in itself. There may be only 300 of these whales in the Atlantic and another 100 in the Pacific. They've rebounded very slowly from the days of near-extinction caused by whaling. Whalers called them the "right whale" to hunt - they were slow, produced plenty of whale oil along with baleen, and floated when dead. The species remains critically endangered.

Thanks to Kris Winkler for pointing me to this item.

New spider gets named for rocker

Jason Bond, a biologist at East Carolina University, named a new trapdoor spider Myrmekiaphila neilyoungi. "With regards to Neil Young, I really enjoy his music and have had a great appreciation of him as an activist for peace and justice."

Neanderthals and Homo sapiens: close, but not that close

Neanderthals have been bounced around quite a bit over the modern era of anthropology. Were they our ancestors? Our failed cousins? Or were they just a little divergent, a sister race to the rest of us?
While the current majority opinion is that they were a subspecies of our own species, Homo sapiens, a new study argues for the contrary view that they formed a species in their own right. The paper by Argentinean anthropologists, based on 3D computer modeling used to study long-term changes in hominid skull shapes, suggests that Neanderthals were "chronological variants inside a single biological heritage," a fancy way of saying another species derived from the same Homo habilis root stock. By this model, H. sapiens appeared about 200,000 years ago, while Neanderthals arose fairly close to the same time but vanished 28,000 years ago.
It's going to be very interesting to see how the resulting debate comes out.

Climate change: Lesser of evils

I don't cover global warming much because, frankly, I get tired of the dogmatically opposite positions and the venomous rhetoric. But this item points up an important lesson: this business is complicated. Recent studies indicate some actions proposed to repair the Antarctic ozone "hole" would exacerbate global warming, and vice versa.
COMMENT: Memo to Al Gore: I respect your efforts, but put away the simplistic approach of blaming of everything (such as the Myanmar cyclone) on human-caused global warming and start educating people about how this is a very complex field and we have a lot of research to do in pursuit of a complete understanding.

The platypus: even stranger than we thought

It's a creature so strange the first scientists to receive specimens thought it was a work of a taxidermist rather than the Creator. The species' ancestors departed from our own around the time of the very first mammals, ca. 160 MYA. The platypus retained some of the reptilian features of the ancestors that scurried beneath the feet of the dinosaurs. Its genome has now been decoded to reveal a mix of ancient mammal, reptile, and even birdlike genes, along with some unique material developed over the eons. This genetic chop suey results in a host of odd habits, from egg-laying to electric-field sensing to the unique method of lactation: pups suck milk directly from the abdominal skin of the mother.
COMMENT: Nature, as Haldane famously said of the universe, is not only stranger than we imagine, but stranger than we can imagine.

Another clue to the first Americans

A scientific team has dated seaweed and other food remains at Chile's Monte Verde archaeological site to more than 14,000 years ago. It's another bullet in the surprisingly resilient corpse (not to editorialize or anything) of the paradigm holding that the first Americans, the pre-Clovis people, didn't set foot on the continent until about 12,000 years ago. A rise in sea levels since that era may have inundated most of the evidence of a people who moved by sea down the west coast of the Americas, leaving the sotry to be pieced together at scattered sites such as Monte Verde, 500 miles south of Santiago.

Changing the VSE calendar

Most of the news concerning the Vision for Space Exploration and its implementation through Project Constellation has concerned technical problems and schedule slips. However, a coalition of American space companies (and a flock of hired lobbyists) is fighting the uphill (or up-Hill) battle to get Congress to add some $2B to NASA's budget over the next few years to accelerate the Constellation program. One major rationale, as voiced by a spokesman for the United Space Alliance: "The less time we are relying on the Russians for human access to space the better it will be for our program and our country." NASA expects to buy at least 16 Soyuz rides beginning in 2009.
COMMENT: There is a limit to how much you can speed up such a complex program, regardless of funding increases. However, I hope this uphill fight gets won: a decent budget would do a lot to prevent further slips, if nothing else, while helping to keep the NASA workforce intact after Space Shuttle retirement.

Orbcomm: the next generation

Orbcomm's constellation of 34 37-kg microsatellites handling data transmissions, such as tracking vehicle locations, is aging out. The company has now picked a contractor for the next generation. Sierra Nevada Corporation, owner of MicroSat Systems, created a team including MicroSat, Boeing Intelligence and Security Systems, and ITT Space Systems to build the new constellation. There will be 18 satellites in the new constellation, with 12 times the data capacity of the groundbreaking original system. The contract is valued at $117M.

New mission for a microsat

The Near Earth Object Surveillance Satellite will have a mass of only 60kg, but this Canadian project will result in "the first space-based asteroid-searching telescope."

Cloud Rat found after 112 years

From Mt. Pulag National Park in the Philippines comes the dramatic rediscovery of a species missing for 112 years. That's actually not a record for the time between finding specimens of an animal - that honor goes to the Bermuda petrel, or cahow, which vanished for three centuries - but the return of the dwarf cloud rat (Carpomys melanurus) is a still a rare good news story for mammologists.
The rediscovery was accomplished by a team led by the Field Museum's Lawrence Heaney. He said, "This beautiful little animal was seen by biologists only once previously — by a British researcher in 1896 who was given several specimens by local people, so he knew almost nothing about the ecology of the species. Since then, the species has been a mystery, in part because there is virtually no forest left on Mt. Data, where it was first found."

Shuttles, tanks, and telescopes

The next Space Shuttle mission is on track for a May 31 launch. (I asked them to speed it up a day so it would celebrate my daughter's 12th birthday, but you know how the government is.) This mission will take the Japanese Kibo lab to the ISS.
After that, the schedule gets fuzzier. The last mission which will service and upgrade the Hubble telescope, set for August 28, will have to be postponed 4-5 weeks due to the need to process two External Tanks for the shuttle and a standby rescue mission, required on this flight because the shuttle can't reach the ISS as a "safe haven" from the Hubble orbit.

COMMENT: There's something here I'm missing. We've been flying shuttles for over a quarter of a century. NASA should know by now how long it takes to do everything and how much "fudge time" needs to be built into schedules. The need for a major postponement because of ET preparation baffles me. Has NASA still not learned the art of realistic scheduling?

New species of dolphin identified

Freshwater dolphins are, on the whole, a rare and interesting group, having abandoned the seas dolphins have adapted to so well in favor of inland waters. Now there's a new one. The Bolivian river dolphin (Inia boliviensis) has been identified as a species of its own, rather than a population of the Amazon pink river dolphin, or boto (Inia geoffrensis). In Bolivia, the Prefecture of the Department of Beni, in the northeastern region of the country, celebrated by declaring the animal "a Natural Heritage."
All rivber dolphins are of concern to conservationists, and the baiji or Yangtze River dolphin (Lipotes vexillifer) is likely extinct. Fernando Trujillo of the Whale and Dolphin Conservation Society (WDCS) warns: "River dolphins are amongst the most endangered of all whale and dolphin species. The pressures on them are immense, as was highlighted by the recent news of the extinction of the baiji in Asia. Urgent action is needed if we are to prevent Amazon River dolphins from suffering the same fate."

A bake sale to build a rocket

In Belleville, Missouri, Gary Streeter and his friends plan to lower the cost of access to orbit by building the entire launch vehicle and satellite themselves. "In terms of a group putting together and launching a rocket and getting into orbit, I'd say it's pretty rare, actually," FAA spokesman Hank Price said. Actually, it's never been done, and Streeter admits he needs some new funding sources. Local donations and other methods, including bake sales, aren't getting him off the ground.
COMMENT: OK, Streeter and friends are basically trying to eat an elephant with chopsticks. But I salute them for the effort. And I hope that, somehow, they pull it off.

A haul of new species

An expedition comprising scientists from Conservation International (CI) and Brazilian universities has completed a survey in one of South America's important and endangered biological "hot spots," the Cerrado region of Brazil. The results: 14 new species, including a very small woodpecker to go with eight fish, three reptiles, one amphibian, and one mammal.
COMMENT: These surveys by CI find new species everywhere they go - no exceptions. That's important to keep in mind.

What color is a brown bear?

The title question is not at all simple. The range of coat colors among bears studied in Alaska and the nearby regions is amazing. We have black bears (Ursus americanus) which are brown and brown bears (Ursus arctos) which are black, just for starters. Then there are the blue-gray black bears and the white black bears. There are dark brown bears with striking blond cubs. There's even a black bear running around with a streak of reddish-brown hair running down the middle of its back, like a punker with a Mohawk haircut. The moral of the story: Genes are like cards. A deck will produce a lot of familiar hands, but also some pretty unusual ones.

Thanks to Meredith Fowke for this item.

Anchorage and the three dozen bears

OK, the official metropolitan area of Anchorage, Alaska, is a big place, and not all heavily populated. And everyone knew brown bears wandred through the outskirts. But a new study showing that Anchorage overlapped with the ranges of some three dozen bears was a stunner to state officials.


Anecdote that may be true:
Actual conversation between Anchorage airport tower and pilot of taxiing plane:
TOWER: Bear left at the taxiway.
PILOT: We see him.

A busload of satellites from India

India's Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle (PSLV) put up 10 satellites in a so-far flawless mission launched yesterday. It was the 13th flight of the PSLV, whose main payload was an Indian remote sensing satellite, the 690-kilogram Cartosat-2A. Accompanying the main payload were an 83-kilogram Indian mini-satellite and an international flotilla of eight nanosatellites, with masses from three to 16 kg, provided by institutions in Japan, Canada, and Europe. The 10 satellites add up to a record for a successful launch.

LockMart takes a shot at ORS

Lockheed Martin has announced it's filed a slew of proposals with the USAF's Operationally Responsive Space (ORS) office at Kirtland AFB, NM, in response to three Broad Agency Announcements (BAAs) asking for new ideas. As Lockheed Martin described it, "These include responsive spacecraft bus and payloads technologies; a multi-mission low earth orbit modular space vehicle; and responsive launch, range and system architecture and modeling technologies. Lockheed Martin responded to each of these BAAs with innovation and end-to-end solutions." ORS is expected to award contracts later this year.
Further quoting the press release,
"The need to design, build and deploy responsive space systems that provide timely data to the warfighter is a top priority for our customer," said Phil Bowen, director of Surveillance and Intelligence Systems at Lockheed Martin Space Systems Company. "Our responsive space capabilities combine Lockheed Martin's proven experience and leading edge technologies in providing affordable and responsive solutions and we look forward to collaborating with the ORS office and our industry teammates on this important initiative."
The release says LM has " designed, built, and launched over 150 small satellites, demonstrating its ability to field highly innovative capabilities rapidly at very low cost." Hmm. I don't doubt the number, although to get that many "small satellites" they must be using a definition for "small" along the lines of "anything that didn't require a Titan IV class launcher." The definition of "very low cost" is likewise a bit suspect. LM has not, understandably, shared the details of their ideas yet. There's no question they have some top engineering talent, and hopefully there's some really innovative stuff in that batch.

Suiting up a penguin

Pierre the penguin, kept at the California Academy of Sciences, had been losing his feathers and was reluctant to go in the water. His keepers had a novel idea: fit him with a wetsuit. Even the colors match (at least on the back - he's now the only penguin with a black belly. Maybe he can just say he's wearing a cummerbund with his tuxedo). Things are now going just swimmingly for Pierre. (I'd put in much worse penguin puns if I could think of any.)

Thanks to Kris Winkler for this item.

Thawing a Colossal Squid

Want to see an 11-meter colossal squid thawed out and dissected? You can tune in via the Web. Scientists in New Zealand will start thawing Monday to have the rare specimen of Mesonychoteuthis hamiltoni ready for a dissection on Wednesday. The animal was caught off Antarctica over a year ago.

NASA Ames has new partner for microspacecraft

This marks another step by NASA Ames to explore the potential of microspacecraft and cooperative multi-spacecraft networks. I'll just reprint the NASA release in full here. There's an obvious synergy with DARPA and the Air Force and their fractionated spacecraft (F6) work I blogged on earlier.

RELEASE : 08-107

NASA Ames Partners With M2MI For Small Satellite Development

MOFFETT FIELD, Calif. -- NASA's Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, Calif., and m2mi Corp., Moffett Field, Calif., announced Thursday they are taking a revolutionary step forward in improving telecommunications and networking from space.
Under the terms of a cooperative research and development agreement, only the third in NASA's history, NASA Ames and m2mi will work together to develop very small satellites, called nanosats, for the commercialization of space.
"NASA wants to work with companies to develop a new economy in space," said NASA Ames Center Director S. Pete Worden. "m2mi has great technology that fits excellently with our goals, while enhancing the commercial use of NASA-developed technologies."
Nanosatellites are small satellites weighing between 11 and 110 pounds. A large number of these satellites, called a constellation, will be placed in low Earth orbit for the new telecommunications and networking system.
"The constellation will provide a robust, global, space-based, high-speed network for communication, data storage and Earth observations," said m2mi Chief Executive Officer Geoff Brown. "Nanosatellites take advantage of the significant technological advances in microelectronics and will be produced using low-cost, mass-production techniques."
Under the agreement, NASA and m2mi will cooperate to develop a fifth generation telecommunications and networking system for Internet protocol-based and related services. The cooperative effort will combine NASA's expertise in nanosensors, wireless networks and nanosatellite technologies with m2mi's unique capabilities in software technology, sensors, global system awareness, adaptive control and commercialization capabilities. Fifth Generation, or 5G, incorporates Voice Over Internet Protocol, video, data, wireless, and an integrated machine-to-machine intelligence layer, or m2mi, for seamless information exchange and use.
"This initiative shows great promise in revolutionizing mobile communications critical in meeting future needs," said Badri Younes, NASA deputy associate administrator for Space Communications and Navigation. "This project also will leverage m2mi's capabilities in software expertise to automate global system awareness and provide intelligent adaptive control."

T. rex: a new link to birds

Analysis of proteins in the soft tissues of an amazingly well preserved specimen of Tyrannosaurus rex indicates the animal's closest living relatives are not reptiles, but birds. The evidence comes from a femur discovered in 2003 in the famous Hell Creek Formation in the north-central United States. The analysis was led by John Asara of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and Harvard Medical School, who reports, "We determined that T. rex, in fact, grouped with birds – ostrich and chicken – better than any other organism that we studied. We also show that it groups better with birds than modern reptiles, such as alligators and green anole lizards."

Space policy under the new President

As this article by Rand Simberg lays it out, we now know enough about the space-related thinking of the three remaining major U.S. Presidential candidates to project their impact upon NASA, and especially on NASA's human spaceflight program.
The signs are troubling.

Senator Barack Obama is sounding like a supporter, but in vague terms that don't reassure anyone given his stated plan to delay the Constellation/VSE programs by five years and divert the money to education. His more recent statements indicate he's realized that would result in a "brain drain" and make it much more difficult to ever execute the VSE, but he has yet to address his contradictory plans and spell out specifics.

Senator Hilary Clinton has endorsed a continued robust human spaceflight program and left open at least the possibility of a meaningful budget increase for NASA. She has, however, not mentioned the Moon and Mars as destinations. Her advisor Lori Garver's speech to the AAS last November (which I blogged - see the archives) came closer to endorsing a continuation of the Bush VSE, but the candidate appears to have backed away from that. Pessimists fear we may see a repeat of Clinton 1 - a plus-up for Earth observation work, but a crippling of efforts to extend a human presence beyond LEO.

Senator John McCain has been explicit in endorsing the continuing drive for a human presence on the Moon and eventually Mars. The question in his case is funding. He's not committed to an increase for NASA, and his his plans for a budget freeze for all except military and veterans' programs might mean NASA must hobble along much as it does now, doing its best with assigned missions that are beyond its assigned funding.

Movie bear kills trainer

"Rocky," the 320-kg brown (or grizzly) bear (Ursus arctos) which wrestled a human in the Will Farrell film "Semi-Pro," was in a routine training session when he killed his trainer with a single bit to the neck. The bear had no previous record of aggressive behavior, and the training facility had operated without incident since its founding in 1992. As Roy Horn (of Siegfried and Roy) found out in 2003, even the best trained of carnivores still has instincts the most conscientious trainers don't always understand. I've read of a hand-raised cougar which broke away from its handler to attack a stuffed deer (an animal the cougar had never even seen alive) in a diorama at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science.
Authorities have not decided whether Rocky must be put down.

Flores Hobbits had big feet

Big, flat, feet, to be specific, with a short big toe more reminiscent of australopithecines than of other humans. A reconstruction of the almost-complete left foot of the main specimen, LB1, shows the foot was abnormally long (by modern human standards) compared to the creature's height, which would have required a deeper knee bend and resulted in a walk people today would find "funny looking." Researchers from the State University of New York who worked on this analysis thought that a foot so different from that of a modern human was another point for the "separate species" side of this debate.

Soyuz: not a smooth trip

NASA officials admitted to some concern, but played down any threat to the safety of astronauts, after a Soyuz capsule with American, Russian, and South Korean occupants came down over 400 kilometers off target and subjected the occupants to a sustained load over over eight Gs. This is the second time a Soyuz had a similar problem after entering the atmosphere at the wrong attitude courtesy of a problem in separating the service module from the crew capsule. The comments of NASA associate administrator for space operations William H. Gerstenmaier at a news teleconference betray some ambiguity:
"I don't see this as a major problem, but it's clearly something that should not have occurred."
"We may have missed the probable cause" (after the first incident, blamed on a frayed wire)
"I have complete confidence in what the Russians are doing. They were very concerned about this. They treated this with the same diligence as we would in the United States."

Darwin's archives posted to the Internet

For those who want to understand more about what Charles Darwin actually thought and said, this new site contains a treasure trove of material. To quote:

"This site contains Darwin's complete publications, thousands of handwritten manuscripts and the largest Darwin bibliography and manuscript catalogue ever published: also hundreds of supplementary works: biographies, obituaries, reviews, reference works and more.
Almost all is online only here: such as 1st editions of Voyage of the Beagle, Zoology, Descent of Man, all editions of Origin of Species (1st, 2d, 3d, 4th, 5th & 6th); important manuscripts: Beagle Diary & field notebooks, Journal, transmutation notebooks and Autobiography.
Forthcoming: more editions, translations, introductions & manuscripts."

More microsat notes: UK and China

In last week's edition of Space News, the founder of Surrey Satellite Technology Ltd., Sir Martin Sweeting, has blessed the sale to EADS Astrium. He says he approved it after Astrium guaranteed SSTL will retain its own identity. I have enormous respect for Sir Martin, and I hope my earlier gloom-and-doom post on this subject proves unfounded.

In another interesting bit, an article translated from the Chinese news service Xinhua says the Shenzhou VII human spaceflight mission, to be launched this October, will include the release of a small satellite. According to Gu Yidong, one of the Shenzou system designers, "Apart from conducting environmental surveys in space and basic scientific experiments, the small satellite can also link-up with the space lab. It can therefore effectively extend the function of the space lab. This is tantamount to extending the premise of the space lab from several hundred meters to dozens of kilometres."
This is pretty intriguing. It implies the smallsat will be able to dock and undock, or move several hundred km away (to test communications and control, perhaps?)

Thanks to Bart Hendrix for passing this item along.

Bergman's strange bear

I'm writing today to correct an error in my own books and to note how a mystery about the brown bear (Ursus arctos) has been with us for 72 years now.

In 1936, Swedish zoologist Sten Bergman published in the Journal of Mammology his notes on the bears of Kamchatka. In addition to his observations of living bears, he was shown the skin of a colossal, short-furred, solid black bear. He wrote that local hunters told him the very largest bears always looked like this. He recounted how another scientist had photographed an exceptionally large bear skull from the same region and described a pawprint 25cm across (18cm is a very large bear).

Several writers on the topic, myself included, have said Sten Bergman (not, incidentally, to be confused with Christian Bergmann, author of Bergmann's Rule), proposed the name Ursus piscator, later realigned as Ursus arctos piscator by other authorities, to describe a possible new species or subspecies of these huge, black, short-furred bears.

Looking now at the source material, I find that's not so. Bergman wrote of the possibility these bears were a separate species or subspecies from the brown bear, but he referred in his article only to an already-established scientific name, Ursus piscator (first used in 1865) used for all Kamchatkan brown bears.
Some sources still use U. a. piscator for Kamchatkan brown bears in general, although brown bear taxonomy remains inconsistent. So the lesson there is always to look at original sources (thanks to the two people who wrote me on how to get the 1936 article) and not just repeat another secondary source, even a respected source.

The mystery of Bergman's bear remains unsolved to this day.

Launch vehicles for ORS

In other news from Orbital Sciences, the USAF's Space and Missile Systems Center (SMC) has ordered three more Minotaur launch vehicles based on surplus ballistic missiles in support of the Pentagon's Operationally Responsive Space (ORS) office. The $40M contract covers one Minotaur I (based on the Minuteman ICBM) and two Minotaur IVs (based on the larger Peacekeeper ICBM). Payloads are not yet assigned.

C/NOFS is Aloft

The latest U.S. military smallsat, the Communication/Navigation Outage Forecasting System (C/NOFS) satellite, was launched successfully by an Orbital Sciences Pegasus rocket over the Reagan Test Site in the Kwajalein Atoll. The satellite, with a "wet" launch mass of 395 kg, will study ionospheric changes and help forecast likely outages in communications satellite capabilities. The satellite builder is General Dynamics (of which I spoke a bit too harshly in an earlier post, although I still think the absorption of Spectrum Astro into a megacompany was not a good thing for the smallsat world).

A tale of a hobbit's tooth?

From Australian professor of anthropology Maciej Henneberg comes the most bizarre claim in all the bizarre history of the "hobbit," aka Flores man: that a tooth believed to be 18,000 years old shows evidence of having had a cavity filled, and therefore must be much younger. The claim brought a response from Flores co-discoverer Peter Brown that The Australian describes as, in part, "unprintable." Henneberg is part of a collection of scientists terming themselves the Pathology Group, which has advanced the notion the Flores fossils are from one or more pathological modern humans. He describes some of the attacks by the "pro-species" side as "scratches on a toilet wall." The Flores case provides a window into just how vigorous (and sometimes ungentlemanly) scientifc debate can be. (See the April 2, 2008 item, below, on women in science: this battle is an example of the idea discussed there.)

News of Vietnam's giant turtle

Hoan Kiem Lake in Hanoi harbors a strange inhabitant for a tiny, polluted body of water - a gigantic turtle. While it's been suggested this is a new species, scientists according to this news item have identified it as one of the world's few living specimens of Swinhoe's soft-shell turtle (Rafetus swinhoei), a species thought extinct in nature.
Well, almost extinct. The wild population outside of this lake is now known to number at least one, since biologist Nguyen Xuan Thuan has photographed a specimen in a lake west of Hanoi. That still makes a total of only four living turtles known from this species, which may measure a meter long and weigh over 140kg. (The remaining two are in zoos in China.) Biologists have now turned their attention to nearby waterways in the hope there are a few more of the huge reptiles lurking and the Swinhoe's turtle might yet be pulled back from the edge of extinction.

Oldest living thing on Earth

The title above is usually given to "Methuselah," a bristlecone pine in California which is 4,500 to 5,000 years old. Swedish researchers, though, have a new entry that blows that record away. A cluster of Norway spruce trees in Sweden, they have announced, was living 8,000 years ago. The trunk of a spruce can last only about 600 years, but these trees, clustered on a mountain slope exposed to harsh weather, have maintained a continuous existence by replacing each trunk with a new one. In the coldest times, the plants grew only about a half-meter tall, but warmer times in recent decades have encouraged them to reach higher - which is why they were eventually noticed.

Earthrise

Start your morning with a beautiful video, courtesy of Japan's lunar orbiter Kaguya, of a full Earthrise over the lunar horizon.

Space programs across the pond

The United Kingdom is not generally thought of as a major space player today, but it's been a constant source of ideas on the subject and has developed a number of programs over the last half-century. Britain is recognized today mostly for Surrey's innovative microsatellites, but orbital launch vehicles, spaceplanes, and other advanced projects have percolated up many times (usually to be canceled for want of funding.) This website gives a good overview of the major programs.

Interview: Director Worden of NASA Ames

Former USAF general Simon "Pete" Worden is enjoying his role as director of NASA Ames, where he pushes hard for innovative spacecraft and innovative ways of operating and financing NASA research. In this interview, he riffs on everything from Yuri Gagarin to Google.

Salute to Yuri

And we have come to another April 12, and it is time to raise the vodka glass for a toast to Yuri Gagarin, the first human being in space. Gagarin was selected as one of the first class of 20 cosmonauts chosen under the guidance of Chief Designer Sergei Korolev, who called the men his "little eagles." "Little" was true in another sense: the Vostok capsule was even more cramped than its American rival, Mercury, and Gagarin's height of 157 cm came in handy. Gagarin's 108-minute flight on this date in 1961 covered less than one orbit, but he was nonetheless first. Gagarin never returned to space, in part because the USSR would not risk a national hero. It's a little-known fact that cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova once told an audience in Cuba that Gagarin would command a crew on the first lunar flight (with that crew including Tereshkova), but this seems to have been strictly propaganda. Gagarin died in a crash on a training flight in 1968. (The exact cause remains in dispute, and likely always will.) Among the many monuments the Soviets raised to him is one that I can't help but think he would be embarrassed by: a statue of the cosmonaut, looking more like some stylized superhero, placed atop a pillar in Moscow and towering 40 meters above Gagarin Square.

NASA's lunar robot

It's still an unproven concept, and perhaps a far-out one. But JPL engineers are playing with prototypes of a six-legged rob