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With record heat (and drought) in the west and record cold (wet and snow) in the east, the global warming game-playing continues every day but the climate-gate rhetoric has increased vociferously since we first noted three weeks ago, the data that has been so relied upon to 'prove' global warming's trend was in fact manipulated. What The Telegraph called "the most extraordinary scandal of our times" - that of the "seasonally-adjusted" seasonal raw global temperature data - is about to be investigated by Congress. As Daily Caller reports, California Republican Rep. Dana Rohrbacher exclaimed "expect there to be congressional hearings...

Are government climate agencies tampering with climate data to show warming? Some Republicans think so. California Republican Rep. Dana Rohrabacher says to expect congressional hearings on climate data tampering. @caerbannog666 expect there to be congressional hearings into NASA altering weather station data to falsely indicate warming & sea rise — Dana Rohrabacher (@DanaRohrabacher) February 20, 2015 Rohrabacher serves as the vice chairman of the House Science, Space and Technology Committee, which has jurisdiction over NASA and other agencies that monitor the Earth’s climate. Rohrabacher has long been critical of the theory of man-made global warming. Lately, the California Republican has...

A Saudi cleric is garnering headlines for declaring that the sun revolves around the Earth, a clear rejection of all scientific evidence. {snip} The controversial cleric, Sheikh Bandar al-Khaibari, was caught making the comments in a short video clip posted to YouTube on Monday. In response to a question posed by a student, al-Khaibari says the Earth is “stationary and does not move.” While al-Khaibari’s remarks have been mocked on social networking sites such as Twitter, regional experts say his anti-science stance is embraced and promoted by leading Saudi clerics in charge of the country’s religious authority. “It makes perfect...

Following are excerpts: Bandar Al-Khaybari: Someone is asking whether the Earth moves or whether it is fixed in place. Does it move or remain fixed? The Truth, as described by our scholars Imam Ibn Baz and Sheik Saleh Al-Fawzan, is that the Earth is fixed and does not move. This is in keeping with the Quranic text, and it makes sense as well. [...] There is ample Quranic evidence that it is the sun that revolves around the Earth. As for evidence based on reason... The [Westerners] present all kinds of theories, but we Muslims also have theories and brains....

NASA scientists used tree rings to understand past droughts and climate models incorporating soil moisture data to estimate future drought risk in the 21st century. This video is public domain and can be downloaded at: http://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/goto?11776

After hanging out in storage for over a decade, the Deep Space Climate Observatory is finally being launched to monitor solar storms. The satellite is getting into space on the back of a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, which means we're also counting down to another historic barge landing attempt! Top image: SpaceX's autonomous drone barge has been repaired since the crash on the first attempt, and been decorated with a spiffy new name. Credit: SpaceX The launch is scheduled for 6:10:12 p.m. EST out of Cape Canaveral Complex 40 launch pad in Florida. The weather is looking great with 90%...

Spacex's next launch, and next landing attempt, is today at about 6:00.

NASA has published a video that shows the far side of the moon as never seen before.

The FAA’s Office of the Associate Administrator for Commercial Space Transportation (AST) has given thumbs-up regarding private sector operations on the Moon.

NASA's Curiosity rover has been busy with its drill again, and analysis of the second sample of Martian rock is already turning up some unexpected conditions back when the red planet supported liquid water. Curiosity put its low-percussion-level drill into play for the first time last week, carving a chunk out of a site known as "Mojave 2" at the base of Mount Sharp, and feeding it in powder form into its Chemistry and Mineralogy (CheMin) instrument. Turns out, even though the analysis isn't finished yet, there are already signs of a surprising amount of jarosite, to a degree that...

After Neil Armstrong's death, his widow, Carol, discovered a white cloth bag in a closet, containing what were obviously either flight or space related artifacts. She contacted Allan Needell, curator of the Apollo collection at the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum, and provided photographs of the items. Needell, who immediately realized that the bag—known to the astronauts as the Purse - and its contents could be hardware from the Apollo 11 mission, asked the authors for support in identifying and documenting the flight history and purpose of these artifacts. After some research it became apparent that the purse and...

SpaceX's recent attempt to land the first stage of its Falcon 9 rocket on an ocean platform in Florida was unsuccessful, but there were no visuals to tell the full story — until now. The company CEO Elon Musk shared four images from the failed landing on Twitter, in a response to Oculus VR CTO and game developer legend John Carmack. SEE ALSO: SpaceX comes close, but fails to land rocket on ocean platform While the image quality is far from perfect, Musk's descriptions help explain what happened to the rocket during landing. Before impact, the rocket's fins ran out...

BREVARD COUNTY, Fla. —Never mind rocket launches -- the first rocket landing in Space Coast history is a couple of weeks away, if things work out. SpaceX is expected to announce this week that the company is bringing in a revolutionary ocean-going landing pad for its next launch. Looking down the side of the SpaceX rocket, there are landing legs sticking out, and a set of fins – that look a little like tennis racquets – pop out. They’ll guide the rocket as it flies backwards – down, not up – to a perfectly placed landing at the test site....

Elon Musk spoke at the MIT Aeronautics and Astronautics Department's 2014 Centennial celebration. The October 22-24 Centennial Symposium featuring some of the most illustrious names in aerospace reflecting on past achievement, celebrating today’s innovative research and education, and offering their perspectives on what lies ahead. SpaceX CEO Elon Musk said his company will make a first attempt to land the booster stage of its Falcon 9 rocket on a floating platform during the upcoming ISS resupply mission. If the attempt is successful, the company plans to refurbish and reuse the booster stage, making spaceflight history and paving the way for...

Mario Anzuoni/Reuters Elon Musk, CEO of SpaceX and Tesla. While it's certainly impressive that Elon Musk has bachelor's degrees in physics and economics from the University of Pennsylvania, it's an absurd understatement to say that prepared him to run SpaceX, his spacecraft company. Jim Cantrell, who was an aerospace consultant at the time, became SpaceX's first VP of business development and Musk's industry mentor when the company launched in 2002. He says that Musk literally taught himself rocket science by reading textbooks and talking to industry heavyweights.

SpaceX released video today of another successful soft landing of its Falcon 9 rocket, this time in the Atlantic Ocean. The test confirms that the Falcon 9 booster is able to consistently reenter from space at hypersonic velocity, restart main engines twice, deploy landing legs and touch down at near zero velocity. After landing, the vehicle tipped sideways as planned to its final water safing state in a nearly horizontal position. The water impact caused loss of hull integrity, but SpaceX received all the necessary data to achieve a successful landing on a future flight. The company says it is...

SpaceX is counting down to liftoff Saturday of a Falcon 9 rocket with a commercial cargo craft heading for the International Space Station after engineers replaced a component in an upper stage steering system that grounded the launcher Tuesday. Launch of the 208-foot-tall Falcon 9 rocket is scheduled for 4:47:07 a.m. EST (0947:07 GMT). The mission has just one second to blast off Saturday or else wait for another opportunity to fly Tuesday. The tight launch windows are required for SpaceX’s Dragon supply ship to reach the International Space Station with more than 2.5 tons of supplies and experiments. A...

SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket was lifted upright on Cape Canaveral’s Complex 40 launch pad Monday after workers loaded time-sensitive supplies and research specimens into the Dragon cargo craft’s pressurized cabin. More than 3,700 pounds of gear will be delivered to the International Space Station on the mission. The 208-foot-tall rocket is set for liftoff Tuesday at 6:20 a.m. EST (1120 GMT).

6 days ago At 9:21am ET, Dragon is fully attached to the ISS, its home for the next four weeks. Astronauts will now prepare to open Dragon's hatch to unload cargo, including materials to support more than 255 science experiments.

It was a surreal moment, listening to the founder and chief designer of SpaceX talk about flying to Mars from Boca Chica beach, but talk about it he did at the Sept. 22 official groundbreaking for the world’s first commercial orbital rocket launch site. From the stage, under a tent set up for the occasion near the actual site where the launch pad will be built, Elon Musk fielded questions from reporters, who couldn’t have been blamed for not quite believing what they were hearing at certain junctures. “I’d like to fly to Mars,” Musk said. “But I think the...