As a kid who loved astronomy and as an adult who still does, it truly is a sickening sight to see what has happened to the once-proud American space program. To borrow a phrase from John Facenda and NFL Films, “One Last Moment for the Master.”

From Space.com via Doug Powers:

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. – NASA has cleared the space shuttle Atlantis for its final planned launch on Friday afternoon as the U.S. space agency prepares to retire its aging three-shuttle fleet later this year.

Atlantis and a crew of six astronauts are poised to launch toward the International Space Station in what will be the 25-year-old shuttle’s 32nd and last planned spaceflight. Liftoff is set for Friday at 2:20 p.m. EDT (1820 GMT) from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center here.

This will be the first of three swan song launches for the Shuttle fleet:

Atlantis’ upcoming flight is the first of three final space shuttle missions – one for each of NASA’s remaining orbiters – scheduled before the reusable space plane fleet is retired. The shuttles Discovery and Endeavour are slated to make their final flights in September and November, respectively.

With the Obama administration more interested in pushing for amnesty for illegal aliens, as opposed to searching for any that might be out in space, Powers puts the wholly irresponsible decision to shutdown all manned flights for the foreseeable future in perspective:

The president, as you know, announced that he’d be dramatically retooling the space program in order to focus on achieving the Obama administration’s ultimate goal of putting a man on Elena Kagan.

Talk about Where No Man Has Gone Before.

• 

• Tweet

Here is something I had not heard of until today. Then again, I paid little attention to the Hopenhagen conference, as it was just another example of ideological masturbation for the Left and their hippy and Enviromarxist concubines.

However, with this exchange as reported by WELT, a German publication, it seems that Obama threw the kind of temper tantrum that is normally reserved for a 5 year old at the candy counter or an ACORN rep being denied their daily bottle of Wild Turkey.

(Hat Tips to Pajamas Media, Small Dead Animals and FC which first alerted me to this)

From WELT: (Google Translation)

The US president BO had hardly arrived when he let it be known, “the time for talk is over.” From now on, he would take over the leadership of the negotiations.

Together with German Chancellor Merkel, the heads of Russia, Brazil, Japan, the EU and other prominent countries, Obama went to work. But things didn’t go like the Nobel prize winner had imagined. Only German Environment minister Norber Roettgen remained optimistic. Despite the tough negotiation, he opined, there could be a resulting compromise. “Today we throw the dice.”

Instead, it turned into a fiasco. [...]

According to rumors from the Bella Center, President BO is said to have asked for a conversation with Wen jibao to bring up the matters. But O had to wait. Wen, according to the rumors, almost never left his hotel room and could not be found. Finally the US Delegation succeeded in finding the chinese premier in a conference room. An obviously angry Obama is said to have stormed into the room. “Are you ready yet to talk with me Mr Premier?” he is said to have shouted. “Are you ready now? Mr Prmier, are you ready to talk with me?” What a stage entrance for a US President.

However, Wen was not alone in the room, as Obama literally burst in, according to members of the congress. The Chinese (premier) was in the middle of talks with India’s head of state Mammohan Singh and the South African president Jacob Zuma. Suddenly the group found itself forced into a conversation with the US president.

(updated translation courtesy Tom Paine)

A complete and total embarrassment.

• 

• Tweet

A most fascinating event and something that only has come to light in recent years as the existence of planets, especially Earth-like planets, has finally been proven by astronomers.

There is something oddly beautiful in the sad and sorrowful artist’s rendition of the collision shown below. Could this be us in the future? Or was it us many millenia ago? It is the unknown factors like those that make space and astronomy so puzzling, fascinating and eventually leads one to think long and hard about existence itself and our place in the universe.

From ScienceDaily.com:

Two Planets Suffer Violent Collision

ScienceDaily (Sep. 24, 2008) — Two terrestrial planets orbiting a mature sun-like star some 300 light-years from Earth recently suffered a violent collision, astronomers at UCLA, Tennessee State University and the California Institute of Technology will report in a December issue of the Astrophysical Journal.

“It’s as if Earth and Venus collided with each other,” said Benjamin Zuckerman, UCLA professor of physics and astronomy and a co-author on the paper. “Astronomers have never seen anything like this before. Apparently, major catastrophic collisions can take place in a fully mature planetary system.”

“If any life was present on either planet, the massive collision would have wiped out everything in a matter of minutes — the ultimate extinction event,” said co-author Gregory Henry, an astronomer at Tennessee State University (TSU). “A massive disk of infrared-emitting dust circling the star provides silent testimony to this sad fate.”

• 

• Tweet

To take a break from the election campaign which I know has exhausted everybody, is a very cool discovery of massive amounts of dinosaur tracks along the Arizona-Utah state line. I am sucker for such stories as I have always had a deep interest in dinosaurs since I received my first dinosaur book at age 8.

I just hope they did not do the Macarena!

From iol.co.za:

Dinosaurs may have danced to their own tune
October 21 2008 at 12:51PM

Salt Lake City – Geologists say they have discovered prehistoric animal tracks so densely packed on a 3 000-square-metre site that they’re calling it a “dinosaur dance floor”.

The site along the Arizona-Utah state line offers a rich new set of clues about the lives of dinosaurs 190-million years ago.

Back then, large stretches of the West were a Sahara-like desert. More than 1 000 tracks were found in what would have been a watery oasis nestled among towering, wind-whipped sand dunes.

The footprints could provide fodder for researchers trying to understand dinosaurs that survived in what many considered a “vast, dry, uninhabitable desert”, said Marjorie Chan, professor of geology at the University of Utah and one of the authors of a new study of the site.

‘It’s an exciting site and deserving of a lot more work’
“Maybe it really wasn’t as lifeless as we think,” Chan said on Monday.

The discovery adds yet another site to the region’s long list of dinosaur hot spots. The difference, though, is sheer numbers. Scientists estimate there are more than 1 000 tracks at the site, which is in a protected area of Vermilion Cliffs National Monument.

In some places, there are a dozen footprints in a square metre.

“It was a place that attracted a crowd, kind of like a dance floor,” Chan said.

Researchers identified four different kinds of tracks in the rock but haven’t determined the specific species that left them behind.

‘Maybe it really wasn’t as lifeless as we think’
Some of the footprints – once thought to be potholes formed by erosion – measure 40cm across and have three toes and a heel. Others are smaller and more circular.

• 

• Tweet