Free Republic

A quick trip across the highest point on the U.S. Interstate Highway System, Interstate-70 in Colorado. The Eisenhower-Johnson Tunnel, under the continental divide.

On a remote island hours away from Key West lies the largest masonry structure in the Americas: Fort Jefferson. Built with 16 million bricks, but never finished, the fort served as a prison during Civil War. In 1935, President Franklin D. Roosevelt, upon visiting the island, named it a National Monument, and in 1992 it became part of Dry Tortugas National Park. Besides serving as a safe haven for the most preserved coral reef in the United States, the set of islands that comprise the national park also protect countless marine animals and bird species. However, the true treasure of...

"Cool image time! Yesterday I posted a short gif created by citizen scientist Gerald Eichstädt, using twelve Juno images, that showed some cloud changes over time... Today, I discovered that Eichstädt has created an even more spectacular movie, which I have embedded below the fold, based on images taken during Juno’s tenth close fly-by."

It may seem obvious, but when it comes to big wave surfing, size definitely matters. And at up to one hundred feet, or more than thirty metres, the largest and meanest waves in the world slam into a headland in Portugal called Nazaré. Such is this monster break it often breaks those brave – or crazy – boardriders who attempt to take it on. Just this week, Australian surfer Ross Clarke Jones almost died after being wiped off a Nazaré wave. But the precarious divide between disaster and glory is precisely the reason he and other Aussie big wave legends...

One of the creators of a television science fiction series has produced a highlight video, set to David Bowie's Starman, that shows some new footage of the core stage watery crash.....I have embedded the video below the fold. To me, the best part is the footage of the spectators, including the many children, wonder-struck by the launch. Some of that footage is very reminiscent of footage taken during the Apollo Saturn 5 launches in the late 1960s.....To the next generation: We are going to the Moon -- and beyond. And this time we are going to stay.

Batchelor and Zimmerman discuss Trump & SLS (space launch system) and in part 2; "Jupiter is different than anything else."

Sen. Kamala Harris (D-Calif) vehemently denounced US Attorney General Jeff Sessions' efforts to enforce federal immigration laws, calling them "a grievous and doomed attempt to thwart history. California represents the future toward which America is inexorably marching." "As Gov. Brown so eloquently pointed out, the so-called evils that Sessions claims to be trying to prevent are part of a worldwide evolution toward the more natural way of life being experienced outside of the United States.," Harris maintained. "The notion that Americans can live above the standards that exist in other parts of the world is both selfish and unsustainable. Owning...

Cool image time! In continuing my exploration of this month’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) image release, I found two interesting images of small craters, one as part of that image release, the other found completely by accident...The map on the right, taken from the MRO HiRISE archive page, shows the locations of these two images...Both are located in the lava plains that surround the giant volcano Pavonis Mons, the central volcano of the three volcanoes to the east of Olympus Mons.

At the beginning of a cabinet meeting yesterday Trump spent some time talking about the recent successes in commercial space. Not unusually, Trump gets some details wrong but understands the essentials, much to the terror of the big space contractors of SLS (Boeing) and Orion (Lockheed Martin). SpaceX will charge $90 million for the launch of a reused Falcon Heavy (using three reused first stages). Estimates for the cost of a single SLS launch are difficult to estimate.

In the early 1900s, John Jacob "Jack" Astor IV was thought to be among the richest people in the world, with a net worth of nearly $87 million when he died, equivalent to $2.21 billion in 2017. In April 1912, he was traveling back home to New York after holidaying in Egypt, accompanied by his wife. Naturally, he was the richest passenger on the RMS Titanic. We’ve come a long way since the Titanic, and now the rich travel alone--and in unimaginable style. By Plane Clearly the most efficient way of transport for everyone, wealthy included, is by air. Nowadays,...

Tomorrow morning, approximately 30,000 runners are expected to participate in the 8th annual Jerusalem Winner Marathon, which will take place in the nation’s capital, according to the event’s website. The event will include several tracks – marathon (42.2 km), half-marathon (21.1 km), 10 km race, 5 km race, family 1.7km race and an 800 m community race. This is one of Israel’s largest marathons, with 30,000 participants of which hundreds are elite runners and runners from abroad. The various tracks pass by fascinating historical sites that illuminate 3,000 years of the history of Jerusalem, Israel’s capital. In addition to the...

Cool image time! Yesterday the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter team released 460 images taken by the spacecraft’s high resolution camera, HiRISE, as part of their normal and routine image release program. As I am want to do, I like to scan through these new images to see if there is anything interesting hidden there that will show up eventually in a press release...Sometimes however I find images that might never get a press release but probably deserve it....

".... NASA has decided to forgo construction of a second mobile launcher for its Space Launch System (SLS). Instead, they will modify the one they have....The first mobile launcher was built and modified for an estimated $300 to $500 million. NASA obviously has decided that the politics & cost is too great, as would be the political embarrassment of admitting they spent about a half a billion for a launcher they will only use once...What this does however is push back the first manned SLS/Orion launch. At present, the first unmanned mission is likely to go in June 2020... If...

Much of the world’s political troubles are centered on the question of Israel in the middle of the Middle East....I have just returned from spending two weeks in Israel, a trip I do somewhat regularly to see family. Each of these visits has given me an on-the-ground close-up look at the situation there, something that is difficult to get from the typically shallow media coverage of the region. And from each of these visits comes at least one essay, something I think is required because of Israel’s significance in much of the world’s political turmoil.... This year, we took a...

SLS continues to be this ever receding but very expensive fantasy, scheduled for a future that never arrives, while spending enormous amounts of money that would be far better spent in other ways. The first launch, should it happen in 2020, would be three years later than originally planned, nine years after the initiation of the SLS project, and sixteen years after George Bush first proposed it. For this single unmanned test mission NASA will have spent about $25 billion.

This week the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals voted 9-4 to overturn President Trump's anti-terrorist travel ban from eight countries on the grounds that "it violates the First Amendment's guarantee of religious freedom. The President's assumption that the Muslim call for jihad from its adherents empowers him to block the immigration of practitioners of this religion into this country is mistaken. The protection of the First Amendment is absolute. It allows no exception for religious practices that entail violence. To single out one religion merely because it commands the coercion or murder of unbelievers is, therefore, unconstitutional." Chief Judge...

A new analysis of the data obtained when the interstellar object Oumuamua flew through the solar system in October 2016 suggests that it is tumbling in a chaotic manner, and that the surface is spotty....Dr Fraser explains: “Our modelling of this body suggests the tumbling will last for many billions of years to hundreds of billions of years before internal stresses cause it to rotate normally again."

Cool image time! The image on the right, cropped to post here, comes from a Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter image that shows a massive relatively recent and dark slope streak that emanates out from a single point on the surface.

First, 2016 was the worst year for the Russian rocket industry in decades...Second, China has been aggressively ramping up its launch rate, and in 2016 moved clearly into the top tier of space-faring nations...Third, the United States is clearly transitioning away from a government owned and operated rocket industry to one owned and operated by the private sector. Since the retirement of the Space Shuttle, the federal government has not launched a single rocket that it designed, built, and owns. Instead, every payload put in space by the U.S. has been put there by a private sector rocket.

In Maryland, Salvador Gomez-Lopez, a native of El Salvador in the United States illegally will go on trial for stabbing a man waiting at a bus stop. The attack sprang from the victim’s objection to Gomez urinating in front of fellow bus passengers. Arresting police described Gomez as “drunk and belligerent.” In the US House of Representatives, Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif) gave an eight hour speech blaming Trump’s “anti-immigrant policies for this tragedy. The hostility of the President toward immigrants seeking a better life in America is the primary cause for this incident. If Mr. Gomez didn’t have to...