Free Republic

As the Biden administration prepares to inherit the Space Force, it has a profound choice to make: Is space a commons to share or a territory to defend? Yes, the Biden administration could try to convince Congress to formally change where the Space Force fits into the Pentagon’s organization chart, demoting it from its standing as a branch of the military. But the more meaningful action would be to choose to see space as a commons, breaking with Trump’s orbital policies that treated a war in space as inevitable—and America’s to win.... ...The best way for the Biden administration to...

I have a request for fellow sci-fi buffs. Back in 2015, I checked a book out of the local library, which was apparently the first of a series, begun post-2010, in which an American guy witnesses a UFO crash on a lonely road, ends up amidst a firefight and saves a woman who proves to be the empress of an interstellar empire. Of course, they fall in love and he joins her in space and has to try to protest her as a revolution breaks out. I liked the book a lot, but couldn't find subsequent issues listed. It looked...

Updated 7:45 p.m. Eastern with details from briefing. WASHINGTON — A static-fire test of the Space Launch System core stage ended early Jan. 16 when a hydraulic system for one its four engines hit an “intentionally conservative” limit during the test. In a Jan. 19 statement, NASA said the hydraulic system for Engine 2 on the core stage “exceeded the pre-set test limits that had been established” for the Green Run test. “As they were programmed to do, the flight computers automatically ended the test.” Later the same day, during a call with reporters, NASA officials said that the hydraulic...

The International Space Station bid adieu on Tuesday to 12 bottles of Bordeaux wine and hundreds of snippets of grapevines that spent a year orbiting the world in the name of science. The wine and vines – and thousands of pounds of other gear and research, including mice – will splashdown onboard a SpaceX Dragon capsule on Wednesday night in the Gulf of Mexico off the coast of Tampa. None of the bottles will be opened until the end of February. That’s when Space Cargo Unlimited, the company behind the experiments, will pop open a bottle or two for a...

Federal intelligence on extraterrestrial technology — at your fingertips. By way of the Freedom of Information Act, thousands of the CIA documents on unidentified flying objects (UFOs) — or Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAP), as the government calls them — are now accessible via download at the Black Vault, a website operated by author and podcaster John Greenwald Jr. The CIA claims they have now provided all the information on UAP they have, though there is no way to know that’s true.

People on the NASA transition team of Joe Biden are urging the United States to start what could be the biggest transfer of technology to China. The giveaway could result in Chinese military dominating space and, with it, world affairs. “Trying to exclude them, I think, is a failing strategy,” said Pam Melroy, a former astronaut and potential next administrator of NASA, referring to the Chinese. “It is very important that we engage.” Important to engage? The Chinese space program is military at its core and, to the extent it is civilian, it serves as a conduit to the military....

President Donald Trump’s legacy will go beyond his accomplishments as the 45th Commander-in-Chief who bettered the lives of Americans. The milestones he made in U.S. space exploration will no doubt last light-years after he leaves office. Here are some examples of what Trump has done to advance the U.S. presence in space: • In December, Vice President Mike Pence, at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida on Wednesday, introduced some of the 18 astronauts that the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) has chosen to be on the initial team for the early Artemis missions on and around the Moon....

Scotty, the chief engineer on the fictional U.S.S. Enterprise who was always scrambling to heed the cry, “Beam me up, Scotty!” has been transported himself. The ashes of James Doohan, the actor who portrayed the original “Star Trek” character Montgomery “Scotty” Scott, have been interred for a dozen years on the International Space Station (ISS). And on Monday, the backstory of how they came to be there was revealed in full....

Scientists have been sending spiders into space to see how the spider’s web-making ability changes in the microgravity aboard the ISS. As simple as it sounds on the surface to put a spider in space and see how microgravity affects web making, it was challenging to achieve. On Earth, spiderwebs are asymmetrical, and the center is displaced towards the upper edge. When resting, spiders sit head down because it allows them to move towards freshly caught prey in the direction of gravity. The question was, what would spiders do in the absence of gravity. What was discovered about how spiders...

String theorists are making the case for flipping physics on its head.What if string theorists have been right all along, and black holes are just balls of yarn? These celestial rat kings, scientists say, represent a place where a huge bunch of fundamental strings have tangled together and can’t be extricated. This sounds far out, but we don’t understand a great deal about how black holes work to begin with. Positing a tangled string idea instead doesn’t even require much more of an ideological buy-in. Space.com’s Paul Sutter explains the big mental “tangle” with black holes: “Black holes appear in...

MEMORANDUM FOR THE VICE PRESIDENT THE SECRETARY OF STATE THE SECRETARY OF DEFENSE THE ATTORNEY GENERAL THE SECRETARY OF THE INTERIOR THE SECRETARY OF COMMERCE THE SECRETARY OF TRANSPORTATION THE SECRETARY OF ENERGY THE SECRETARY OF HOMELAND SECURITY THE DIRECTOR OF THE OFFICE OF MANAGEMENT AND BUDGET THE DIRECTOR OF NATIONAL INTELLIGENCE THE ASSISTANT TO THE PRESIDENT FOR NATIONAL SECURITY AFFAIRS THE ADMINISTRATOR OF THE NATIONAL AERONAUTICS AND SPACE ADMINISTRATION THE DIRECTOR OF THE OFFICE OF SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY POLICY THE CHAIRMAN OF THE JOINT CHIEFS OF STAFFSUBJECT: The National Space PolicySection 1. References. This directive supersedes Presidential Policy Directive...

A startup near Tokyo has recently begun accepting orders for a service beginning next spring to fly customer items high into the stratosphere by balloon and capture images of them against the backdrop of Earth and outer space. Space Balloon Inc. based in Mito, northeast of Tokyo, will launch a balloon carrying remote-controlled cameras and objects of a customer's choice that will travel to an altitude of around 25,000 meters above sea level to capture images giving the impression that the items are floating in space. The balloon, inflated with helium gas and measuring about 2 meters in diameter, will...

A Chinese space probe on Wednesday began drilling on the surface of the Moon hours after landing, in an ambitious attempt to bring back the first lunar samples in four decades. Beijing has poured billions into its military-run space programme, with hopes of having a crewed space station by 2022 and of eventually sending humans to the Moon. The Chang'e-5 spacecraft -- named for the mythical Chinese moon goddess -- touched down on the near side of the Moon on Tuesday, and is now gathering samples from the surface, the China National Space Administration said. Chang'e-5's goal is to collect...

No, really. It has signed a contract to make this happen in 2025The European Space Agency has formalised its plan to dispose of space junk by using an orbiting claw to grab an old bit of rocket before dragging both the claw and the junk to a fiery doom.The agency announced the plan in late 2019 when it revealed it had asked Swiss startup ClearSpace to fully scope the mission.The paperwork was due in March and found favour with ESA's Ministerial Council, which has approved funding for an €86 million contract to fund the mission.The goal remains the same: fly...

The bull market in hot urban retail and commercial real estate markets lasted for pretty much the entire post-crisis recovery period. But COVID has turned things around, and as people flee to the suburbs, it's worth taking a look at how valuations have declined.While urban real-estate markets have taken a hit as people flee to the suburbs and more space, it's worth taking a look at how much space costs in different cities around the world. While foreign cities are of course cheaper than the top American metropolises, the numbers in some cases might surprise you.Why $300K? On the one...

Tamara Wilhite: You said that you interviewed people who worked on the Apollo program, both from NASA and Northrup Grumman. How were you able to meet with them? And how many are left? Steve Taranovich: My journey began with the intent to write an article for publication on the 50th anniversary of the Moon landing. After numerous phone calls, I traveled to Long Island, NY where I had lived for most of my life, and contacted the Grumman retirees group and the Cradle of Aviation Museum at which most of the Grumman retirees worked as docents. This was the first...

[M]icrobes are currently used on Earth to extract materials of value from rock. Human miners crush the rocks and add liquid — usually water — to activate microbes dormant in the ore. The microbes then use chemical processes to break down rocks — essentially digesting them — to access nutrients like phosphorus and nitrogen. Valuable metals and minerals can be a bacterial waste product. On Earth, mining companies use bacteria to extract about 20 per cent of the world's copper and five per cent of our planet's gold. Mining experiment aboard the ISS. The basalt rock they used in the...

About 26 minutes away, I think.

The "EmDrive" claims to make the impossible possible: a method of pushing spacecraft around without the need for — well, pushing. No propulsion. No exhaust. But the EmDrive doesn't just violate our fundamental understanding of the universe; the experiments that claim to measure an effect haven't been replicated. [A]ll forms of rocketry (and indeed, all forms of motion across the entire universe) require conservation of momentum. In order to set yourself in motion, you have to push off of something. Your feet push off of the ground, airplanes push themselves off of the air, and rockets push parts of themselves...

If you thought living on Earth in 2020 was comparable to hell, planet K2-141b is here to prove you wrong. On the scorching hot planet, hundreds of light-years away, oceans are made of molten lava, winds reach supersonic speeds and rain is made of rocks. Scientists have referred to the bizarre, hellish exoplanet as one of the most "extreme" ever discovered. According to a new study published in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, scientists from McGill University, York University and the Indian Institute of Science Education have uncovered details of one of the newest "lava planets" — a...