A Great View from Virgin Galactic's SpaceShipTwo

This is a great shot from SpaceShipTwo. It would be so cool to actually be able to be on a flight, wouldn't it?

A good first step for asteroid mining

It was just a short while ago that Planetary Resources was in the news for it's crowdfunded telescope project. Now astronomers have identified a dozen asteroids that would make good targets for the company's goal of moving asteroids into an orbit that would make it easily accessible from Earth.

How NASA brought the monstrous F-1 “moon rocket” engine back to life

Ars Technica has a great story about NASA engineers "reverse engineering" an F-1 engine so that the plans could be put into modern systems for design and computer modelling purposes. Starting from the outside everything was imaged and in one case a custom torque wrench was recreated. The original work was done in ways that wouldn't be used now and basically resulted in an engine where every one built was unique in some way and built largely by hand. It's a really fascinating story.

Nat Geo fact checks some science conspiracy theories

National Geographic does rational people bombarded with misleading claims about several issues in science a favor with their article Fact Checking 6 Persistent Science Conspiracy Theories. Back in 2009 Scientific American had a piece about why people believe in conspiracy theories.

In the age of internet research being so easy it would also help if people would ask themselves if an idea really passes the smell test, do some research on it and not accept one source as being authoritative and consider the reputation of every source they find while doing their research.

We do learn more and more. It's called science.

In the realm of very vaguely related news stories, 8 days before we are due for a cosmic close shave so close that it could whack an orbiting satellite or two, we read that there is even more evidence that the massive impact that produced the Chicxulub crater was in fact if not the sole cause almost certainly a contributor to the massive extinction event whose most famous victims were the dinosaurs. Gotta love it. This is the way science works when dealing with questions about real world events that can't be answered in repeatable laboratory experiments though some don't seem to appreciate it. Scientists have to not only ask not only the questions concerning the event they are researching but what kind of traces are there to help them find those answers. This is what climatologists do in order to try and find the answers concerning climate change. In spite of what some whose fashion sense should include tinfoil hats claim, they are not involved in a massive hoax or conspiracy. They ask questions and go where the evidence takes them. As they should.