Perhaps we should get our priorities straight. While here on earth humans argue and quibble about all manner of things, the universe will fling a couple rather large boulders in our general direction by tomorrow morning, and most of us won’t have any clue we were this close to getting clipped.

Commercial space takes off

First off, a much belated congratulations to Elon Musk and the folks at SpaceX for last month’s successful test launch of the Falcon 9 vehicle. The video is as spectacular as the story of a company, that for pennies on the dollar, hbas shown a path to reducing launch costs by a whole order of magnitude. A month on, and SpaceX’s work is already paying off:

Space Exploration Technologies has signed a $492 million deal to carry Iridium Communications’ mobile telecommunications satellites into space starting in 2015.
Space Exploration, better known as SpaceX, said Wednesday that the deal represents “the largest single commercial launch deal ever signed.” Iridium provides mobile voice and data services around the globe.

In spite of Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour’s initial happy talk (Oil? What Oil? Press Should Stop Scaring Tourists), BP Oil finally and inevitably hits his state’s coastline. Now guess who’s crying for help?

I know that post might be drowned out by the death of Sen. Byrd (R.I.P Senator, your service will be remembered for a long time) and the start of confirmation hearings for Elana Kagan (Release the Kagan!) but given the intense pressure that short-sighted politicians are putting on the administration for the resumption of deep water drilling I thought it is worth looking at what we might be able to do to decrease the chance of another of these accidents.

BP and the other oil companies rated the chance of a major blow out as statistically zero. This was a huge mistake in and of itself. The odds of picking all six numbers in a 42 number lotto drawing are 184 million to one. You have a better chance of being mauled by a polar bear and a regular bear in the same day than doing picking those numbers. Yet they are picked all the time. On average there is a jackpot won every 4 weeks. 184 million to one are effectively and statistically the same thing as zero chance, but as the example shows zero does not mean no chance.

"Originally posted at Squarestate.net"

There is also a difference between reliability and safety that seem to have slipped away in our discussion of what is appropriate for off-shore and deep water drilling. When we are talking about reliability what we are looking at is the chance of occurrence. This is what BP and its engineers were really talking about. They said the drilling plan was safe because it gave a low chance of occurrence of a blow out. This means it had a high reliability but that is not the right measure when we are talking about safety.

Dr. Levinstein JPL Pasadena CA. says MIT student accidently spotted object during a deep space scan using the Hubble space Telescope. NASA has been told not to panic public. Oject to hit the earth or moon sometime late in 2012.

No, this isn’t from “The Onion”. It’s real. Todd Arkin has embarrassed himself and all of Missouri by claiming that an Obama policy leaves us at the mercy of “the Soviet Union”.

Despite all of the comments in (it seems) every blog post out there (except for this lovely community), more data keep coming in showing that the earth is indeed heating up. According to Science Now, NASA will be releasing data tomorrow (Friday) that will show that 2009 was the hottest year ever in the southern hemisphere.

More info below…

During the campaign last year, when people were wringing their hands over how racist America is, I noted that we’d had 13 black astronauts in space, including 3 female, and 2 as mission commanders…. So yesterday, a few days from the 40th anniversary of Neil’s moondance, Bolden was named head of NASA.

The US Senate on Wednesday confirmed former astronaut Charlie Bolden as NASA’s administrator, and Lori Garver as deputy administrator.