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How solar farms took over the California desert: ‘An oasis has become a dead sea’ Residents feel trapped and choked by dust, while experts warn environmental damage is ‘solving one problem by creating others’ eep in the Mojave desert, about halfway between Los Angeles and Phoenix, a sparkling blue sea shimmers on the horizon. Visible from the I-10 highway, amid the parched plains and sun-baked mountains, it is an improbable sight: a deep blue slick stretching for miles across the Chuckwalla Valley, forming an endless glistening mirror. But something’s not quite right. Closer up, the water’s edge appears blocky and...

The company that flew the first privately funded manned rocket into space has been cited in connection with an explosion last summer that killed three workers, the state said today. California occupational safety inspectors said in a report that Scaled Composites LLC failed to properly train workers about the dangers of nitrous oxide that was used during a test in July. The state levied three citations against Scaled, including two that were considered "serious," and fined the spaceship builder $25,870. The company has 15 days to pay or appeal. Three workers died and three were seriously injured in the explosion...

... He said: "We would love to finish what we started some years ago and I think pretty well all our astronauts would love us to finish and would love to go into space. "I think millions of people in the world would one day love the chance to go to space and this is the start of a long programme."

CALIFORNIA HIGHWAY PATROL SAYS ONE PERSON KILLED, ONE INJURED IN CRASH OF VIRGIN GALACTIC SPACECRAFT IN MOJAVE DESERT -CNN, CNBC This is a breaking news story. Please check back for further updates. CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla., Oct 31 (Reuters) - A suborbital passenger spaceship being developed by Richard Branson's Virgin Galactic crashed during a test flight on Friday at the Mojave Air and Space Port in California, officials said. Two pilots were aboard the spaceship, which was undergoing its first powered test flight since January. It was not immediately known if they were able to parachute to safety. More than 800...

MOJAVE, Calif. — Two people were killed and four others injured Thursday by an explosion at a Mojave Desert airport that is home to pioneering civilian rocket programs, authorities said. Wreckage of equipment and vehicles could be seen in an overhead view of the site broadcast by a KCAL-TV news helicopter. A sign on a truck behind a bunker had the name Scaled. Scaled Composites is the Mojave-based builder of SpaceShipOne, the first private manned rocket to reach space. "Reports are two fatalities and at least four critical injuries," said Kern County fire Capt. Doug Johnston, who was not at...

MYSTERY surrounds a UFO-like aircraft that was seen being towed into a top-secret US military base. According to reports, it was spotted at Lockheed Martin’s secretive Helendale radar-cross section (RCS) measurement facility in the Mojave Desert, California. The mystery craft was spotted being towed into a top-secret base in a California base The mystery craft was spotted being towed into a top-secret base in a California base A short video of the unidentified aircraft first emerged on TikTok and then the location was tracked down by internet sleuth Ruben Hofs. The footage shows what looks like an inverted stealth aircraft...

The study, published in the Bulletin of the Seismological Society of America on Monday, says there is now a 2.3% chance of an earthquake of magnitude 7.5 or greater in the next 12 months on a section of the 160-mile-long Garlock fault, which runs along the northern edge of the Mojave Desert. That increased likelihood, in turn, would cause there to be a 1.15% chance of a large earthquake on the San Andreas fault in the next year.

In the modern historical record, the 160-mile-long Garlock fault on the northern edge of the Mojave Desert has never been observed to produce either a strong earthquake or to even creep — the slow movement between earthquakes that causes a visible scar on the ground surface. But new satellite radar images now show that the fault has started to move, causing a bulging of land that can be viewed from space. “This is surprising, because we’ve never seen the Garlock fault do anything. Here, all of a sudden, it changed its behavior,” said the lead author of the study, Zachary...

The San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Office says 69-year-old Barbara Thomas, of Bullhead City, was last seen Friday wearing a black bikini, a red baseball cap and tan hiking boots with black socks. The office says Thomas and her husband were hiking in the Mojave Desert approximately 20 miles (32 kilometers) north of the I-40 freeway when they got separated.

Calico: A 200,000-year old site in the Americas? New World archaeological sites inferred to be even slightly older than the 11.5 ka Clovis complexes have been controversial; so claims for a 200 ka site in North America have heretofore been treated with substantial disdain. But the acceptance of Monte Verde and Diring may soon change that. The classic "ancient site" in the New World is "Calico," located in the Central Mojave Desert of California (Shlemon and Budinger, 1990). Two issues have dogged acceptance of Calico by mainstream archaeologists: (1) the authenticity of the artifacts; are they truly the product of ...

California regulators may force a massive solar thermal power plant in the Mojave Desert to shut down after years of under-producing electricity — not to mention the plant was blinding pilots flying over the area and incinerating birds. The Ivanpah solar plant could be shut down if state regulators don’t give it more time to meet electricity production promises it made as part of its power purchase agreements with utilities, according to The Wall Street Journal. Ivanpah, which got a $1.6 billion loan guarantee from the Obama administration, only produced a fraction of the power state regulators expected it would....

Three months after Breitbart News and others outed Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) 's backdoor effort to freeze development on over one million acres of California dessert by having President Obama declare the area subject to the Antiquities Act of 1906, her efforts are going down in flames as Congressional Republicans are moving to ban the Antiquities designation. Feinstein's seven-year quest to convince "ongress to sequester over 1560 square miles of the Mojave Desert into three new national monuments under her proposed 'Desert Conservation and Recreation Act" has gone nowhere. Feinstein has argued that the area she wants designated as 'Mojave...

The Volcano House, a flying-saucer shaped home atop a 150-foot cinder cone in the Mojave Desert donated to Chapman University, has hit the market for $650,000. Huell Howser , the producer and host of the TV show "California's Gold," gave the iconic home to the university in 2012. Howser died a year later.

There is growing evidence that birds flying in the vicinity of a solar thermal power project in California’s Mojave Desert are being injured and even killed either by the solar heat that’s focused with mirrors on its three energy-collecting towers, or by colliding with the mirrors themselves. Yet a task force set up to investigate the problem at the Ivanpah Solar Electric Generating System (ISEGS) has brushed aside several recommendations by the forensics laboratory of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS), according to the minutes of a meeting on the subject obtained by the Los Angeles public television station...

Thousands of birds are flying into a new solar "mega-trap" in the middle of California's Mojave Desert, killing the avian lot at a rate of up to one bird every two minutes, according to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS). The state-of-the-art Ivanpah Solar Electric Generating System (ISEGS), which opened in February, is the world's largest solar plant to utilize "power towers," skyscraping structures that receive beams of focused solar rays to generate electricity. At Ivanpah, the sun's ray's are redirected from a sea of more than 300,000 mirrors on the desert surface below to hit water filled boilers...

Environmentalists are torn over the high cost of breaking reliance on fossil fuels. Industrial-scale solar development is well underway in California, Nevada, Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado and Utah. The federal government has furnished more public property to this cause than it has for oil and gas exploration over the last decade — 21 million acres. In the fight against climate change, the Mojave Desert is about to take one for the team. "I have spent my entire career thinking of myself as an advocate on behalf of public lands and acting for their protection," said Johanna Wald, a veteran environmental...

(CNN) -- The bodies of two ATV enthusiasts missing since Sunday in California's Mojave Desert were found Thursday after a massive search, authorities said. Kern County, California, sheriff's Lt. Steve Hansen said the bodies of Daniel Preddy Carbonaro, 27, and Chris Wayne Rice, 29, were found and the search was ended. He had no additional details. Carbonaro and Rice, both of Santa Barbara, California, had traveled to a remote corner of the desert with their girlfriends, hoping to test out Rice's new 2011 Polaris ATV, family members said. The area is popular with "off-roaders," campers and recreational enthusiasts. "I am...

The Supreme Court joined in a fight between the ACLU and the federal government over a World War I memorial in the shape of a cross. While neither legal team hit the ball over the fence, the majority seems inclined to save this cross in what will be the first religious liberty case of the new Court. On Oct. 7, the Supreme Court heard arguments in Salazar v. Buono. This case is a decade-long fight over the so-called Mojave cross, pitting Obama Solicitor General Elena Kagan against the ACLU’s Peter Eliasberg. (This doesn’t mean Barack Obama necessarily wants to protect...

Soldiers fight for desert cross By Bill Hess Published/Last Modified on Sunday SIERRA VISTA — “On a hill far away stood an old rugged cross,” goes the opening of an old hymn. But for Sgt. Zachary Thomson, a cross on a hill in California’s Mojave Desert has a different meaning. It’s not a religious symbol to the 26-year-old Sierra Vista resident, who is serving with a Military Police unit at Fort Polk, La. It’s a war memorial, put up in 1934 by veterans of World War I, to honor Americans who died in that conflict. But now the memorial is...

A proposed solar energy project in the California desert that caused intense friction between environmentalists and the developers of renewable energy has been shelved. BrightSource Energy Inc. had planned a 5,130-acre solar power farm in a remote part of the Mojave Desert, on land previously intended for conservation. The company, based in Oakland, Calif., said Thursday that it was instead seeking an alternative site for the project. The Wildlands Conservancy, a California environmental group, had tried to block the solar development, as had Senator Dianne Feinstein, Democrat of California, who proposed that the area become a national monument. The land...