Those nice guys at Space.com have the full story. Private firms are looking into the feasibility of building the mammoth "vertical railroad." It seems the major holdup (superstrong carbon fibers) is only a few years away from being perfected.
If it works, transport missions into orbit would become extremely inexpensive and a lot more commonplace.
From your friend and mine, Anonymous Coward: In a goodwill gesture, many Internet users donate their computer’s spare
CPU time to massively distributed computing projects such as SETI@home or Distributed.Net for the advancement
of science, but how many of us have donated our spare BRAIN power? Two
heads are better than one, and in the case of online, Internet-based
psychology experiments, many thousands of heads can rapidly speed the pace
of science. The American
Psychological Society is currently sponsoring a variety of quick and
easy online
experiments that range from simple and anonymous surveys to interactive, graphical
experiments. Online experiments can provide an entertaining way to
spend a coffee break but can also teach you about the human brain; each
experiment provides a scientific explanation of the study once
completed. Donate your spare brain power today!
NASA has contracted an outside body to make recommendations on its future plans, and that outside body is asking for the opinions of the general public. Now would be a good time to make sure that the general public is the kind of informed public we have in our fine readership. Place your votes here, and your comments below. That’s a secure connection link because they ask some demographic information, but nothing that specifically identifies you. (ie. Age, gender, occupation, and web use stuff.)
Next time someone talks about proposing some sort of global defense system, don’t just brush ’em off. A healthy-sized asteroid just missed us a few days ago, and we had precious little warning.
I know this isn’t sci-fi related, bt it’s good news. Most people who’ve taken University level math classes in recent years have stumbled across MathWorld, an excellent online resource. It disappeared due to legal entanglements, but now it’s back, just in time for me to finish a real analysis assignment…
Every year, the Ig Nobel prizes are awarded to
researchers who do studies that cannot or should
not be repeated. A complete list of winners,
gleaned from this
official page, is reproduced below. You’ll
need to go to the official page for the
hyperlinks to their publications to work. The
winner of the Literature award should be the only
person allowed to advertise on Usenet, IMHO.
Since you won’t hear a peep out of the so-called “mainstream media”, I thought I’d hook y’all up with the info you deserve.
While the rest of us snoozed in our beds, NASA put a whole mess of hardware into space. Atlantis’ mission: Add a much-needed Airlock to the ever-growing station. This will be the first of several assembly missions that will require the new station arm (nicknamed “The Big Arm”) to snatch the payload from the orbiter and assemble itself. The Big Arm had been malfunctioning (thus delaying this launch), but it appears to have corrected itself.
What’s more, they’re in a bit of a hurry. Water lines in the new airlock will freeze if they can’t get it installed withing 10 hours of leaving the shuttle’s cargo bay.
Good luck kids!
In related shuttle news, NASA is apparently considering mothballing Columbia, the first space-worthy shuttle. Due to a projected budget shortfall of about $800 million over the next six years, NASA’s looking for ways to cut costs.
How about that? I’ve written my representatives (House | Senate) in Washington, have you?
As far as can be told, no restaurants are there, but Sloan Digital Sky Survey did just find the two oldest quasars known, created when the universe was a meager 800 million years old. The SDSS press release, complete with astronomical jargon, is here; a more friendly AP version is here.
If it’s good enough for Dennis Tito… director James Cameron reportedly is planning to hop a rocket and spend a few days aboard the International Space Station. He’ll be taking cameras, to document the trip for those of us who don’t have $20 million to spare.