Free Republic

If the first-in-a-quarter-century meeting last week of the National Space Council was indeed President Trump’s effort to ramp up our national space program and provide benefits for all, then good.But if it is as some perceived – a gauzy send-up to resume the practice of shoveling taxpayer dollars to Washington’s official Friends of the Industry – then we should have no part of it.David von Drehle of the Washington Post took the low road because the Trump administration is involved, calling the commercial prospects for humans “a distraction” and “all pie in the sky.”But in addition to hundreds of thousands...

One of the techniques currently under development that it is following is NMN, a compound expected to enter clinical trials after it was shown to rejuvenate elderly mice in laboratory tests. It is also considering making more advanced tweaks or alterations to the DNA of its astronauts, although the moral implications of such a radical step will need to be addressed. This includes epigenetic modifications, which alter the way genes are read by the body without making changes to the underlying DNA code. Using such a technique would allow Nasa's scientists to turn up the volume on one genetic instruction...

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NASA will coordinate with observatories around the world to try and get an exact trajectory for the asteroid in the days leading up to the flyby.... "This is the perfect target for such an exercise because while we know the orbit of 2012 TC4 well enough to be absolutely certain it will not impact Earth, we haven't established its exact path just yet," says Paul Chodas, manager of NASA's Center for Near Earth Object Studies. This experiment will test how well NASA can determine the orbit of a newly detected asteroid that might pose a danger to us. If the...

NASA's Wallops Flight Facility at Wallops Island, Virginia at 6:45 a.m. EDT (1045 GMT). You can watch it live online at NASA's Wallops Ustream site here, beginning at 6:15 a.m. EDT (1015 GMT). The suborbital rocket will carry the Advanced Supersonic Parachute Inflation Research Experiment (ASPIRE), designed by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, Calif. JPL engineers developed the parachute system to withstand the high speeds and thin atmosphere spacecraft encounter during the decent to the Martian surface. Wednesday's launch aims to test the system in the low density of Earth's upper atmosphere. ... NASA will use a 58-foot...

The spacecraft will have to survive temperatures as high as 2,500 Fahrenheit (1,371 Celsius) NASA Scientists have unveiled the Parker Solar Probe at a laboratory in Laurel, Maryland, on Monday (September 25). This latest spacecraft is being prepared to make an unprecedented plunge into the sun's atmosphere. "We're going to go into the corona, which is the home to many mysteries that have baffled scientists for decades and decades," explained project scientist Nicky Fox at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Lab. The spacecraft will have to survive temperatures as high as 2,500 Fahrenheit (1,371 Celsius), impacts by supersonic particles...

Climate Change. Officials from the former Obama White House are starting to speak out against the corrupt administration now that it is safe to come forward. It’s about time! The most recent official to come forward is Steven Koonin, the former Undersecretary of the Department of Energy. He is accusing President Obama of fabricating scientific evidence proving “climate change”. “What you saw coming out of the press releases about climate data, climate analysis, was, I’d say, misleading, sometimes just wrong,” Koonin told the Wall Street Journal. According to Koonin, multiple departments responsible for environmental science either misrepresented data or completely...

The crew of four men and two women were quarantined on a vast plain below the summit of the world’s largest active volcano in January. All of their communications with the outside world were subjected to a 20-minute delay — the time it takes for signals to get from Mars to Earth. They are part of a study designed to better understand the psychological impacts that a long-term manned mission to space would have on astronauts. The data they gathered will help NASA better pick crews that have certain traits and a better chance of doing well during a two-to-three...

Amid a summertime swarm of hundreds of earthquakes underneath Yellowstone National Park, NASA is developing a plan to tame a “supervolcano” that some experts believe is well overdue for a catastrophic eruption. The scientists’ plan: cool down the volcano. Volcanoes erupt when a certain heat threshold is built up within the magma, meaning that if enough heat can be let out of the volcano, it will never erupt. NASA’s idea is to pump water into the volcano after opening up a path via drilling. In theory, the plan would extract heat from the volcano and could even provide a new...

By WND. Amid a summertime swarm of hundreds of earthquakes underneath Yellowstone National Park, NASA is developing a plan to tame a “super-volcano” that some experts believe is well overdue for a catastrophic eruption. The scientists’ plan: cool down the volcano . . . Brian Wilcox of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory at the California Institute of Technology told the BBC an attempt to drill from the top of the magma chamber could accidentally cause the very thing the drilling was designed to prevent. To avoid that risk, he suggested drilling from outside the borders of Yellowstone and coming into the...

The next head of NASA is likely to be an ex-Navy fighter pilot turned Republican congressman who believes strongly in space exploration but is skeptical about man-made climate change. What’s not to like about about Trump’s nomination of Rep. Jim Bridenstine (R-Oklahoma) for the job of NASA’s administrator? Everything, if you’re a liberal. According to New York Daily News columnist Linda Stasi, Trump just blew the perfect chance to change his “presidency from the chaotic mess of threats, bitterness and bilious paranoia to one of rationality and reasonableness.” Apparently, the job should have gone to a fully-fledged climate alarmist.

Dear Donald, Hurricane Harvey could be your defining moment; the moment that changes your presidency from the chaotic mess of threats, bitterness and bilious paranoia to one of rationality and reasonableness. You, sir, could be the President that saves the planet. There is no denying that our weather is getting more severe, that the oceans are rising, the Arctic ice is melting and hurricanes are wreaking ever-more havoc each time one pummels another part of the country. Harvey has officially brought the most destructive rainfall in our nation’s history — more than 51 inches in some areas of Houston. As...

The InSight project, NASA’s first mission to study the Red Planet’s deep interior, is on track for a 2018 liftoff after needing to be delayed two years due to a technical issue. Scientists hope that it will help explain the formation of rocky planets, including our own. ... InSight is expected to launch sometime in the five weeks following May 8, 2018, with a course charted for its arrival shortly after Thanksgiving. Lockheed Martin Space Systems has constructed the mission’s spacecraft — a stationary lander that will be positioned near the Martian equator — and is currently testing it at...

Look closely at this photo of the great North American solar eclipse. You'll notice the sun and the moon's rounded bite taken out of the side. Most of the dark specks are sunspots. But there's something else notable. A larger speck near the curve of the moon's shadow is the International Space Station. The International Space Station Twitter account shared the photo on Monday with the message "It's the moon, sunspots AND the station in front of the sun. @NASA photographer captures station transiting sun during #Eclipse2017." The ISS looks different from the sunspots. You can even make out the...

Solar Eclipse 2017 On August 21, 2017, all of North America will be treated to an eclipse of the sun. Viewers around the world will be provided a wealth of images captured before, during, and after the eclipse by 11 spacecraft, at least three NASA aircraft, more than 50 high-altitude balloons, and the astronauts aboard the International Space Station – each offering a unique vantage point for the celestial event.

Beneath Yellowstone National Park is a giant volcano. The heat from this volcano powers all of the park's famous geysers and hot springs, so most tourists probably don't worry about having tons of hot magma under their feet. But perhaps they should: The Yellowstone supervolcano is a disaster waiting to happen. The supervolcano erupts about every 600,000 years, and it's been about that long since the last eruption. That means the volcano could erupt any day now, and if it does it'll send enough dust and ash into the sky to blot out the sun for years, along with blowing...

A THREE MILE wide asteroid is set to graze past Earth on Sept. 1 - and NASA says it's the largest to come this close since they began keeping track ... [ full ] This is the closest an object this large has come ... since 1890. A massive asteroid estimated to be 2.7 miles wide is set to make a ‘relatively close encounter’ with Earth on September 1. ... The asteroid, named for Florence Nightingale, was first spotted in 1981, and the flyby in September will be the closest it’s come to Earth since 1890. ... According to NASA,...

On September 11, the spacecraft will awaken for its 16 month journey to MU69, an ancient object which is thought to be one of the early building blocks of the Solar System. The space rock had not even been discovered when the craft launched in 2006 and the flyby will be the most distant in the history of space exploration, a billion miles beyond Pluto, and four billion miles from Earth. Recent observations of MU69 from the Hubble Space Telescope show it is probably two ‘binary’ objects or a pair of space rocks ‘stuck-together’ bodies which are each around 12...

For most viewers, the Aug. 21, 2017, total solar eclipse will last less than two and half minutes. But for one team of NASA-funded scientists, the eclipse will last over seven minutes. Their secret? Following the shadow of the Moon in two retrofitted WB-57F jet planes. Amir Caspi of the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado, and his team will use two of NASA’s WB-57F research jets to chase the darkness across America on Aug. 21. Taking observations from twin telescopes mounted on the noses of the planes, Caspi will ­­­­­capture the clearest images of the Sun’s outer atmosphere —...

German company Part Time Scientists, which originally competed for the Google Lunar X Prize race to the moon, plans to send a lander with a rover in late 2018 to visit the landing site of Apollo 17. (Launched in 1972, this was NASA's final Apollo mission to the moon.) Instead of using a complex dedicated telecommunication system to relay data from the rover to the Earth, the company will rely on LTE technology — the same system used on Earth for mobile phone communications. "We are cooperating with Vodafone in order to provide LTE base stations on the moon," Karsten...