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Shell’s ambitious plans to finally return to the Arctic face yet another hurdle, one that could delay drilling once again. Shell is using the port of Seattle as its base for some of its vessels that it will use in the Arctic. Seattle has been a launching point for Shell in the past (and has hosted Alaskan drilling equipment for decades), but a new greener municipal government is taking a harder look at Shell’s operations. Spurred on by Shell’s error-ridden 2012 campaign in the Arctic that culminated in the grounding of the Kulluk, environmental groups have mustered up some political...

Nasa has selected a variety of companies to work on projects to create advanced space technologies, including faster methods of propulsion. Other projects to be worked on include improved habitats for humans, and small satellites to explore deep space. And one of the companies in the 12 Next Space Technologies for Exploration Partnerships (NextStep) says they have an engine that could get humans to Mars in just 39 days.

Today in History: 1932 First Stratosphere Measurement The Swiss physicist Auguste Piccard and his assistant, Max Cosyns, climbed to an altitude of 16,203 metres with the help of a pressurised cabin attached to a balloon. During the flight through the stratosphere they gathered information about the strength of the cosmic beams and photographed the regions they flew over. Temperature measurements showed outside temperatures to a minimum of minus 60° Celsius. From 1947 Piccard, who was inspired by the Jules Vernes novels, started deep-sea investigations. In 1953 he reached a depth of 3,150 metres with his son in the deep sea...

Opening the Eastern Seaboard to offshore oil exploration for the first time in decades, the Obama administration on Friday approved the use of sonic cannons to discover deposits under the ocean floor by shooting sound waves 100 times louder than a jet engine through waters shared by endangered whales and turtles. The U.S. Bureau of Ocean Energy Management's approval of this technology is the first step toward identifying new oil and gas deposits in federal waters from Florida to Delaware

A Democratic member of Congress is using the government shutdown to pressure the Department of the Interior to prohibit oil and gas exploration on federal land. Energy companies should not be able to use federal lands if those lands are closed to hikers and campers, according to Rep. Raul Grijalva (D., Ariz.), the co-chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus. Grijalva started an online petition to demand that Interior Secretary Sally Jewell and Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack “stop mining [on] public lands while visitors are locked out.” “Fossil fuel and logging companies shouldn’t have special access to our federal lands while...

America won’t be repeating that historic one small step anytime soon -- not according to NASA chief Charlie Bolden, anyway. “NASA is not going to the Moon with a human as a primary project probably in my lifetime,” Bolden told a joint meeting of the Space Studies Board and the Aeronautics and Space Engineering Board in Washington last week, according to Jeff Foust of SpacePolitics.com. “And the reason is, we can only do so many things.”

Welcome to the Carnival of Space 296. This week there is coverage of astronomy of Galaxies, trips to Mars, space technology and more. 1. Andrew Fraknoi highlights a remarkable image by Robert Gendler, a physician and amateur astronomer, assembled from Hubble and other data, that shows a galaxy like our own, but 50 million lightyears away. 2. In the wake of Dennis Tito's Inspiration Mars announcement, Cheap Astronomy delivers a podcast on some of the practicalities of really doing a manned Mars mission. 3. NExtbigfuture covered the work of John Slough and his team who have calculating the potential for...

During Tuesday night’s presidential debate, President Obama claimed, “Very little of what Governor Romney just said is true. We’ve opened up public lands. We’re actually drilling more on public lands than in the previous administration and the previous president was an oil man.” But here are the facts, according to the Interior Department’s Bureau of Land management. In 2008 under President Bush, there were a total of 55,085 oil and gas leases in effect on federal land. In 2011 under Obama, there were just 49,174, a decrease of 11 percent. In 2008 under Bush, there were 47.2 million acres of...

A Dutch firm wants to build a colony on Mars and fund it with an international reality TV show. Historically the Dutch financed exploration of the new world established business colonies in New York and Australia. Sounds like a good idea.

Swedish scientists plan to explore a mystery ripped straight from the “The X-Files.” Rather than Mulder and Scully, this adventure features Swedish researchers Peter Lindberg and Dennis Asberg. They too know the truth is out there -- and in mere days plan to visit what they call the “Baltic Anomaly.” Last summer, while on a treasure hunt between Sweden and Finland, the pair and their research associates made headlines worldwide with the discovery of a 200-foot wide unidentified object at the bottom of the Baltic Sea. Now a team of oceanographers, engineers and deep sea divers will return to the...

Hundreds of bison skulls washed onshore below Oahe Dam when the Missouri River flooded in 2011. The river refused to yield an item of great historic interest, though: an anchor that has lain at the bottom of the river for more than two centuries. The anchor came to rest in the silt of the Missouri River the night of Sept. 27, 1804, after being cut from the keelboat used in the Lewis and Clark Expedition. The Corps of Discovery, as the scientific expedition was called, consisted of 45 men traveling in a keelboat and two flat-bottomed boats called pirogues when...

Those lucky enough to still be here to look back at history post Barack Obama will recognize the last sight-piggyback funeral dirge of the once noble Space Shuttle as the Obama Regime’s defining moment. Were an artist to paint a picture of a small boy looking at up at his flying kite as the space shuttle passed over Manhattan yesterday, no portrait of the story of America’s deliberate ruin at the hands of a single politician could ever come closer to the truth. [BIG Snip of text] Few will remember that it was on the fullest moon of the year...

WASHINGTON — Diving to the deepest part of the ocean, filmmaker James Cameron says the last frontier on Earth looks an awful lot like another planet: desolate and foreboding. Cameron on Monday described his three hours on the bottom of the Marianas Trench, nearly 7 miles down in a dark freezing and alien place. He is the only person to dive there solo, using a sub he helped design. He is the first person to reach that depth, 35,576 feet, since it was initially explored in 1960. Cameron says he worried about being too busy with exploration duties to take...

[BIG snip] Santorum's ad and his Op-Ed, meant to mock Gingrich, in reality can only distinctly not help Santorum's struggling campaign. Gingrich will surely make the inevitable -- and correct -- connection between Santorum's ad and a serious attack on the Reagan space legacy -- and the dreams of America itself. "We'll continue our quest in space…. Nothing ends here; our hopes and our journeys continue," said President Reagan that tragic January night. Well, no they won't. Not if Rick Santorum and Mitt Romney have anything to say about it. "I promise," says Santorum. Worse, whether Santorum's staff understands it...

OSLO, Norway — Norway’s prime minister, polar adventurers and scientists have gathered at the bottom of the world to mark the 100th anniversary of explorer Roald Amundsen becoming the first to reach the South Pole. Under a crystal blue sky and temperatures of -40 F (-40 C), the group on Wednesday remembered Amundsen’s feat on the spot where he placed his flag on Dec. 14, 1911.

Word has leaked out that in its new budget, the Obama administration intends to terminate NASA’s planetary exploration program. The Mars Science Lab Curiosity, being readied on the pad, will be launched, as will the nearly completed small MAVEN orbiter scheduled for 2013, but that will be it. No further missions to anywhere are planned. After 2013, America’s amazing career of planetary exploration, which ran from the Mariner probes in the 1960s through the great Pioneer, Viking, Voyager, Pathfinder, MarsGlobalSurveyor, MarsOdyssey, Spirit, Opportunity, MarsReconnaissanceOrbiter, Galileo and Cassini missions, will simply end. Furthermore, the plan from the Office of Management and...

Canadian explorers have drawn a blank in the latest hunt for the remains of Captain Sir John Franklin's fatal expedition, 160 years after he took his crew of 129 men deep into the Arctic.In 1845, Capt Franklin, an officer in the British Royal Navy, took two ships and 129 men towards the Northwest Territories in an attempt to map the Northwest Passage, a route that would allow sailors to travel from the Atlantic to the Pacific via the icy Arctic circle. Stocked with provisions that could last for seven years, and outfitted with the latest technology and experienced men, the...

Astronomers have discovered a whole new class of alien planet: a vast population of Jupiter-mass worlds that float through space without any discernible host star, a new study finds. While some of these exoplanets could potentially be orbiting a star from very far away, the majority of them most likely have no parent star at all, scientists say. And these strange worlds aren't mere statistical anomalies. They likely outnumber "normal" alien planets with obvious parent stars by at least 50 percent, and they're nearly twice as common in our galaxy as main-sequence stars, according to the new study. Astronomers have...

US SAYS NO ISSUES WITH NEW OIL PIPELINE 20 Apr 2011-US say no isues with new oil pipeline proposed $7 billion 1900 mile pipieline would carry oil from Canada to Texas...