Space Shuttle Atlantis mission STS-129 is set to launch this afternoon around 2:28 p.m. EST.

Broadcast will be live on NASA TV;

http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/nasatv/

For NASA write-up for STS-129, go here;

http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/shuttle/main/index.html

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Big Brother is knocking:

In a case that raises questions about online journalism and privacy rights, the U.S. Department of Justice sent a formal request to an independent news site ordering it to provide details of all reader visits on a certain day.

The grand jury subpoena also required the Philadelphia-based Indymedia.us Web site “not to disclose the existence of this request” unless authorized by the Justice Department, a gag order that presents an unusual quandary for any news organization.

Kristina Clair, a 34-year old Linux administrator living in Philadelphia who provides free server space for Indymedia.us, said she was shocked to receive the Justice Department’s subpoena. (The Independent Media Center is a left-of-center amalgamation of journalists and advocates that – according to their principles of unity and mission statement – work toward “promoting social and economic justice” and “social change.”)

The subpoena (PDF) from U.S. Attorney Tim Morrison in Indianapolis demanded “all IP traffic to and from www.indymedia.us” on June 25, 2008. It instructed Clair to “include IP addresses, times, and any other identifying information,” including e-mail addresses, physical addresses, registered accounts, and Indymedia readers’ Social Security Numbers, bank account numbers, credit card numbers, and so on.

“I didn’t think anything we were doing was worthy of any (federal) attention,” Clair said in a telephone interview with CBSNews.com on Monday. After talking to other Indymedia volunteers, Clair ended up calling the Electronic Frontier Foundation in San Francisco, which represented her at no cost.

Under long-standing Justice Department guidelines, subpoenas to members of the news media are supposed to receive special treatment. One portion of the guidelines, for instance, says that “no subpoena may be issued to any member of the news media” without “the express authorization of the attorney general” – that would be current attorney general Eric Holder – and subpoenas should be “directed at material information regarding a limited subject matter.”

Still unclear is what criminal investigation U.S. Attorney Morrison was pursuing. Last Friday, a spokeswoman initially promised a response, but Morrison sent e-mail on Monday evening saying: “We have no comment.” The Justice Department in Washington, D.C. also declined to respond.

You may not think you are doing anything illegal, but the Patriot Act laws here in the US set the precident that anything and anybody at anytime can be declared illegal if Big Brother claims you are a ‘terrorist’.

No warrants, no nothin’.

Ain’t living in the American Federal Empire just great!

Justice Dept. Requested News Site’s Visitor Lists

Source

Barnstorming was a time-honored, early aviation activity that was linked to the early biplanes of the 1920s. Normally associated with flying stunts in a “flying circus”, barnstorming is credited with being one of the first major forms of aviation, next perhaps with flying airmail contracts.

The people who flew in these planes, which in most cases were still made of wood and cloth, took their lives in their own hands on a daily basis. There were no gauges, no fly-by-wire, hydraulics, computers or any of the modern stuff in aircraft now-a-days. Just a ’stick’ and foot-rudder pedals.

And of course, a ‘dead-eye’ to keep the horizon.

Now as commercial spaceflight is knocking on the door of history, these very same qualities are implemented in the SpaceShipTwo, Virgin Galactic’s premier craft that will take passengers to the edge of the Earth’s atmosphere.

Not only that, the ship requires the pilots who will fly the craft, have the same qualities of those early airplane barnstormers:

…Like its smaller predecessor, the spaceplane will drop from a jet-powered mothership at an altitude of 50,000 feet, where the pilot—this time assisted by a copilot—will fire a hybrid rocket motor and pull back on a stick to pitch up for a 3- to 4-G, Mach 3-plus run out of the atmosphere, and then four or five minutes of weightless flight in space.That’s right, a stick. Like its predecessor, SpaceShipTwo will feature no computer controls, not even a fly-by-wire system. The pilot will have to wrestle the ship through its boost phase and possible off-center thrust (caused by a tendency for the rocket motor’s solid fuel to burn unevenly), using manual controls attached by rods and cables directly to the rudder and elevons. Those control surfaces will become immovable when the ship transitions through supersonic flight, at which point the pilot will have to keep the ship on course with electrically operated trim controls. Even those  will become increasingly ineffective as the air around the ship thins to nothingness, at which point only the reaction control system’s bottles of compressed air will enable the pilot to change the ship’s orientation. “It’s hard to fly,” Melvill said at a 2005 talk of piloting SpaceShipOne. “The airplane does take a little bit of fooling around with to keep it going straight. You’re working rudder pedals, you’re working stick, you’re working trim.” The spaceship’s all-carbon-fiber construction lacks the strength to survive sustained supersonic flight in the atmosphere, making the pitch-up maneuver mandatory. “If you did not make the turn and you kept flying level, it would come apart,” said Melvill. “The dynamic loads on the vehicle would be so high, it would crush like an eggshell.”

To stay on course, the pilot will rely on a screen displaying the ship’s trajectory superimposed on the ideal flight path. “Normally our display works very well, and you just keep the green circle around the red circle,” said Melvill. “But on one of my flights the display went out, and so I had to [resort] to looking out of the windows.” With help from mission control, this was not as difficult as it sounds, said Melvill, “because I was able to see the horizon out of the corners of my eyes through two of the side windows. By keeping these horizons equal, I was able to maintain vertical flight.”

After coasting through an apogee of 360,000 feet, well past the 62-mile Kármán line demarcating space, SpaceShipTwo will reenter the atmosphere. The ship’s hinged tail booms, devised by Rutan to swing upward while in space and to automatically right and slow the ship as it reenters, will leave the pilot with little to do but strain to stay conscious during the 6-G deceleration. After lowering the ship’s tail by pushing forward a lever located between the pilot’s and copilot’s seats, the pilot will glide the spaceship back to a dead stick landing at the airport from which he had taken off some two and a half hours earlier.

(All emphasis is mine)

This sounds amazingly like old-time barmstorming, only with the twist that the passengers will be at the edge of space enjoying zero-g.

Oh yeah, that initial 6-gee descent thing too.

The pilots are required to take high-gee training before being certified to fly Virgin’s spaceship and the passengers also, only not so rigorous.

Will this 62 mile vertical joy-ride be the ticket to bring spaceflight to the masses?

I’ll be eagerly awaiting.

License to Thrill

As the discovery of the number of planets outside of our little Solar System increases (the count is now 400), the possibility of discovering earth-type planets (or moons) increases also.

There’s a theory that 10% of the estimated total of earth-type planets in the whole galaxy could approximately be at least 10 Billion . And of them,  10% could harbor intelligent entities (see Drake Equation calculator).

The implications for the world’s religious communities would be manifold to be sure and there could possibly be chaos, destruction and various social mayhem.

Now the Vatican, the center of the Western Catholic religion, is taking some preemptive action by acknowledging the possibility of discovering intelligent beings on exoplanets:

The Pontifical Academy of Sciences is holding a conference on astrobiology, the study of life beyond Earth, with scientists and religious leaders gathering in Rome this week.

For centuries, theologians have argued over what the existence of life elsewhere in the universe would mean for the Church: at least since Giordano Bruno, an Italian monk, was put to death by the Inquisition in 1600 for claiming that other worlds exist.

Among other things, extremely alien-looking aliens would be hard to fit with the idea that God “made man in his own image”.

Furthermore, Jesus Christ’s role as saviour would be confused: would other worlds have their own, tentacled Christ-figures, or would Earth’s Christ be universal?

However, just as the Church eventually made accommodations after Copernicus and Galileo showed that the Earth was not the centre of the universe, and when it belatedly accepted the truth of Darwin’s theory of evolution, Catholic leaders say that alien life can be aligned with the Bible’s teachings.

Father Jose Funes, a Jesuit astronomer at the Vatican Observatory and one of the organisers of the conference, said: “As a multiplicity of creatures exists on Earth, so there could be other beings, also intelligent, created by God.

“This does not conflict with our faith, because we cannot put limits on the creative freedom of God.”

Not everyone agrees. Paul Davies, a theoretical physicist and author of The Goldilocks Enigma, told The Washington Post that the threat to Christianity is “being downplayed” by Church leaders. He said: “I think the discovery of a second genesis would be of enormous spiritual significance.

“The real threat would come from the discovery of extraterrestrial intelligence, because if there are beings elsewhere in the universe, then Christians, they’re in this horrible bind.

“They believe that God became incarnate in the form of Jesus Christ in order to save humankind, not dolphins or chimpanzees or little green men on other planets.”

The Academy conference will include presentations from scientists – by no means all of them Christians – on the discovery of planets outside our solar system, the geological record of early life on Earth, how life might have started on Earth, and whether “alien” life of a different biochemistry to our own might exist here without our knowing, among many other things.

There has been many rumors in the past the Catholic Church has already been privy to the knowledge of intelligent ETs and have been part of a cover-up to keep a lid on things until the world is ready for such information.

These rumors could be just so much tinfoil, but what if it is true?

It would give much credence to the extraterrestrial theory of UFOs, cattle mutilations and abduction of people against their will.

Although I’m not going to hold my breath any time soon about ‘disclosure’.

The Vatican joins the search for alien life

Aviation history is one of my hobbies and this particular item turned up in my daily search; The Soviet Fighting Nazi UFO Flying Fortress:

During an early voyage of the experimental Kalinin K-7, the aircraft crashed, killing fourteen passengers and forcing Stalin to scrap the project. But an artist has reimagined an alternate history where the Soviet flying fortress takes on Nazi flying saucers.

Aircraft designer KA Kalinin designed the K-7, a massive and extremely expensive prototype plane that briefly carried passengers during 1933. However, the plane crashed in November 1933, causing the project to be scrapped before more prototypes could be built. These images imagine a battle-ready version of a plane similar to Kalinin’s K-7, with enough firepower to take down another non-existent vehicle: the Nazi flying saucer.

The Nazi UFO-Fighting Soviet Mega-Plane That Never Was

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From Futurismic:

Last time we mentioned Detroit here, it was in the less-than-cheerful terms of it becoming a growth region for private security patrols, and the web is full of similar stories charting the Motor City’s decline in lucid hand-wringing detail. But what if they’re ignoring the positives in favour of those apocalyptic headlines and photos?

Aaron M Renn at New Geography makes the point that the city’s administration seems unwilling to face up to the extent of the problem, but also highlights the pioneering atmosphere that Detroit’s “urban prairie” is nurturing. The withering of local government leaves spaces of opportunity for innovative approaches to low-budget living to take root… and while the living ain’t easy, the make-do attitude of the American pioneer spirit seems to be making a return [via Warren Ellis].

Urban agriculture projects are gathering pace; out-of-town artists are moving in, attracted by the low housing prices and the blank-canvas vibe of a city that’s been all but abandoned by consumerism. [image by jessicareeder]

In most cities, municipal government can’t stop drug dealing and violence, but it can keep people with creative ideas out. Not in Detroit. In Detroit, if you want to do something, you just go do it. Maybe someone will eventually get around to shutting you down, or maybe not. It’s a sort of anarchy in a good way as well as a bad one. Perhaps that overstates the case. You can’t do anything, but it is certainly easier to make things happen there than in most places because the hand of government weighs less heavily.

What’s more, the fact that government is so weak has provoked some amazing reactions from the people who live there. In Chicago, every day there is some protest at City Hall by a group from some area of the city demanding something. Not in Detroit. The people in Detroit know that they are on their own, and if they want something done they have to do it themselves. Nobody from the city is coming to help them. And they’ve found some very creative ways to deal with the challenges that result.

Imagine for a moment that this trend continues – might Detroit become some sort of independent city-state, a mildly anarchic rough-and-ready town where the price of freedom is a willingness to work hard for yourself and with your neighbours? How many more cities in the Western world might go the same way as manufacturing becomes increasingly outsourced overseas and/or roboticised? How will national governments react to these places – will they abandon them to the whims of their new residents, or struggle to control them in the face of diminishing tax revenues and the spiralling costs of law enforcement?

I’m not naive enough to imagine Detroit becoming some sort of hippie utopia, but I think it has the potential to become a new type of post-industrial city – but that will depend on a lot of different factors. Should the government be involving itself more closely in these early stages, or will a hands-off wait-and-see approach prove more effective?

It sounds like Detroit is already post-apocalyptic in scope, not only in the inner-city, but in the old ‘burbs too.

I wonder if that’s where the burgeoning biotech industry in Detroit will get their ‘feed-stock’?

Detroit: The New Frontier?

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I would like to wish my fellow Marines (vets like me and current) a special Happy 234th Birthday and one day perhaps there will be no need for a Marine Corps.

But until that day, SEMPER FI my brothers and fight the good fight.

No matter what the fight.

SETI didn’t have it’s start in 1960 with the venerable Frank Drake with his Project Ozma.

Apparently, a version was tried in 1924 that corresponded with a close approach to Mars:

“Here’s a 1924 telegram from then Chief of U.S. Naval Operations, Edward W. Eberle, instructing all Naval stations to monitor the airwaves for any unusual transmissions due to anticipated contact from Martians. August 22nd of that year was witness to the closest Mars opposition since 1804 (a mere 55,777,566 km), and as such provided desirable conditions in which to receive radio signals from the Red Planet. The man tasked with clearing the airwaves – a Professor David Todd – somehow managed to persuade both the Army and Navy to report any findings for a three day period, but failed to silence the country’s private radio broadcasters for even two days. Needless to say, the three day exercise produced nothing but static.”

 

There was still a concensus then that Mars still harbored intelligent life.

And folks say there still is.

Us.

And others.

Government-sponsored SETI — In The 1920’s

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From the recent Space Exposition in South Korea, some photo concepts from Virgin Galactic’s potential micro-satellite launcher and the future Chinese Spacelab and cargo module:

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Branson got a huge influx of cash from the Saudis to alter the WK2 to carry the launcher:

http://www.virgin.com/press-release/aabar-investments-and-virgin-group-agree-equity-investment-partnership-in-virgin-galactic

I wonder what kind of satellites they want Branson to launch from his ship?

And the Chinese, they say they want to put together their space-station by 2020. Just in time for ISS de-orbit maybe?

http://www.flightglobal.com/blogs/hyperbola/

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Private space advocate Dennis Wingo posted an article yesterday about how the “not shuttle-c” concept of a NASA side-mounted heavy-lift launch vehicle (SD-HLLV to the space cadets like me) and space entrepreneurs together can make the Moon a very profitable enterprise:

Dennis Wingo: In August of this year I wrote a missive concerning what happens after the Augustine report is released. Well, now that has happened, so what is next? The overall impression is that they did a good job technically in coming up with options and laying out the rational for the options. The concern is not there, the question is does this report provide to the president and NASA a viable path forward? In a curious move, the commission took a big risk and basically rejected one of the central directives from the White House (3d in the Scope and Objectives) which was:

Fitting within the current budget profile for NASA exploration activities.

Basically the Augustine Commission has thrown down the gauntlet in challenging the Obama administration and congress to put up $3 billion dollars in “real purchasing power” (which according to their graph is considerably more than a simple $3 billion increase) or without this you can basically forget exploration. While this conclusion may be debatable, it is commendable in its boldness. Will this strategy work? With a president and congress preoccupied with much larger and more contentious debates, no one knows. The president has indicated strong support technology in general and reasonable support for NASA in particular. In his instructions to Charles Bolden, the new administrator to “give us a space program to make the nation proud”, there may be the support from the Whitehouse for such an increase. Even if they get that, will the options presented by the Augustine commission lead to such a program?

There is much to be commended in this risky strategy if the goal is truly worthy. An indication of this is embodied in the statement of the ultimate goal of American space exploration that is outlined in the Executive Summary first page:

The Committee concludes that the ultimate goal of human exploration is to chart a path for human expansion into the solar system.

Now this is something worth working toward!

It is amazing to me as a long time space advocate that for over three decades we seemed to have forgotten this, substituting in its stead vague and uninspiring goals related to science and “inspiration”. In the 1960’s and 70’s it was simply assumed that we were on a course to make this happen. Many movies and television programs of the era all had this as either as an underlying theme or as an aside even in teen love flicks. When Gerard K. O’Neil came out with his NASA study and the book “High Frontier”, it spawned a public movement for opening the space frontier for all mankind that was the seedling for today’s “New Space” movement for commercial human space exploration. The fact that this has returned as a theme in a mainstream report to the president is a good omen that should be latched upon by NASA in going forward to “make the nation proud” in the words of the president.

How to get there is of course the question.

The Augustine Report Findings

In the end, what the Augustine report boils down to in regards to future exploration architectures, is a choice between what the report calls the Ares V Lite (which in reality is the original ESAS Ares V), and the JSC proposed Shuttle Side Mount vehicle. The current “Program of Record” as it is referred to in the report is not considered a viable path forward due to the extremely high costs involved in its development phase, something that many knowledgeable people pointed out as far back as when it was originally unveiled.

As it pertains to destinations or outcomes, the choice is really between what the Augustine Report calls “Moon First” or “Flexible Path”. Mars is out of the picture due to the extreme expense of any viable Martian exploration architecture. The Moon First architecture is further subdivided into three variants. There is the lunar base, the lunar global (extended sorties to a limited number of sites), and sorties. The committee focused on the Lunar Global and Lunar Base scenarios and curiously stated that both variants would cost about the same. Which is only true if you limit the scope of activities at the base.

The Flexible Path is an interesting concept, though some wags call it “look but don’t touch”, that has multiple destinations, including free space locations such as the Earth/Sun libration points.
The committee in developing their options for the launch architecture rightly focused on lifecycle costs in differentiating between the Ares V light and the Shuttle Side Mount launcher. A very interesting and more than likely true observation made by the committee is that no matter which launch vehicle is chosen, the current NASA human spaceflight fixed cost structure will be the same. The committee found that the development costs for the Shuttle Side Mount would be less, which many of us have noted, due to the fact that the Solid Rocket Motors, External Tank, and even the Space Shuttle Main Engine (SSME) boat tail (where the engines are mounted) would be essentially identical to the current shuttle. It would be quicker to field as well. However, they also found that the recurring costs would be higher due to the extremely high cost of the SSME. On the Ares V side, it was found that while the development costs would be higher, the overall lifecycle costs would be lower due to the lower recurring cost of the vehicle. However, there are assumptions built into these findings that could change going forward.

Launch Vehicle Lifecycle Costs Vs Architecture Life Cycle Costs, the Key to Success

With the commission zeroing in on lifecycle costs, one is driven to understand what they mean when applying that term to each architecture as well as each launch vehicle choice. It should be granted, that for some of the missions chosen, that the committee’s findings related to the lower costs of the Ares V lite vs the Shuttle Side Mount are correct. Missions to a libration point, a NEO, Lunar Orbit or Mars orbit or even Lunar Surface Sorties would all be cheaper using the Ares V as there is little that can be done to more efficiently carry out those missions. However, this does not apply to the Moon First lunar base.

The reasoning is as follows: The Shuttle Side Mount Moon First scenario in 5C has two crewed (3 Shuttle Side Mount (SSME’s) per crew) and two heavy lift cargo flights. But why dos there have to be heavy lift cargo flights? The key finding was that for the Shuttle Side Mount that SSME cost dominate the recurring costs, to wit:

With two crew and two cargo missions per year, this would require eight to ten launches of the Shuttle-derived launcher, each with three or four SSMEs or derivatives, for a total of24 to 40 of the Shuttle engines being used, with a resulting high recurring cost. (page 93 of the report)

If you can cut the number of cargo flights from heavy lift to zero and take a page from the Flexible Path’s call for a lighter lunar lander a radical shift occurs. If you had a lunar base, you could actually use a much lighter lander just to ferry crew from lunar orbit to the surface and back. If you were able to do this, the lunar mission itself could possibly be dropped to two Shuttle Side Mounts per crew and four vehicles per year. This would be further enabled by In Situ Resource Utilization (ISRU), which could proceed from private enterprise to enable the government to explore further and more cost effectively.

If the government chose to locate a base at a lunar pole (preferably the north to enable the maximum amount of surface exploration), and explore outward from there, caches of food, fuel, and other consumables could be staged. There are definite driving paths from the north polar region Peary Crater permanently lit zones down to Mare Frigoris, which then liberates a ground expedition to easily traverse the entire nearside Mare region. Much of the lunar farside terrain in the north is less onerous than in the south as well. Supplies could be emplaced by commercial landers who would use precision guidance to land their payloads, or the supplies could be carried overland by groups paid to do so. How much would the science value be raised and value given to the government by extending their scientific exploration potential. The government could incentivise this market in the same manner as COTS.

This is the beauty of the Moon, it is now within the possible grasp of private enterprise. Instead of launch opportunities once every two years, there is one available every two weeks. Today we have the Delta IV, Atlas V, the upcoming Falcon 9 as well as our international partners who could provide supplies, crews, and other hardware to extend the value of lunar exploration. There is even a plan to uprate the Ariane V to as much as 20 tons to trans lunar injection orbit. There are all kinds of deals that can be struck that would completely swing the cost benefit ratio to this type of architecture. This is something that the flexible path, no matter how scientifically interesting it might be, can provide. Though some of the first product from lunar oxygen production should be to enable a robust NEO mission.

As far as cargo’s go, there are not really that many cargo’s that require the full capability of any of the heavy lifters. For those that do, they could be split between EELV heavy launchers. If a heavy reliance on ISRU were implemented, the number of large Earth integrated payloads would be dramatically reduced.

Augustine and The Issue of In Situ Resources

Anyone who has read the Augustine report is struck is struck by the fact that ISRU, while mentioned, is left out of the near term technology opportunities. Some of this is due to the inertia of only choosing “proven” technologies. This is one thing that we do that is not like we did in the Apollo era, but that we can fix easily. On the earth we have thousands of years worth of experience in mining and processing minerals, making oxygen and metals from lunar rock is but an extension of this. I was very pleased at the ingenuity of the winning team from the lunar regolith challenge at Moffett field in October of this year.

The winner’s robot moved over 500 kilograms (1100 pounds) of simulated regolith in 30 minutes. On the Moon, digging regolith, moving it, processing it, storing the products are all part of what must be learned but the centennial prize actually brought several teams worth of developers into thinking about the problem who built hardware and tested it under the pressure of competition. This machine in some evolved form, will be input side of the ISRU process and even one metric ton per hour of materials processed would lead to amazing results, especially if the output included metals such as iron, aluminum, magnesium, and silicon.

The bottom line is that with very little monetary incentive from NASA in the form of the prizes, some teams have developed quite a bank of human capital and operational experience in these areas. In NASA’s technology roadmap, if ISRU is made a centerpiece of the reason for the lunar base, then it can be applied soon and possibly from private entrants. Larger prizes for larger aspects of exploration could achieve similar results. These prizes, if large enough, could be a significant economic stimulator. The prize for processing a ton of lunar regolith into usable propellant and metallic products must be high enough to encourage participants but should also be enough under the government’s cost to make it cost beneficial to the taxpayers. This could help accelerate the development of this technology to bring it to a much higher technology readiness level, faster than other methods as it widens the pool of interested parties beyond the aerospace companies that normally get larger development contracts. A billion dollars? Two billion? That would be an amazingly cheap price to pay to crash through this exploration debilitating barrier.

Even a layman like me can see the good in his plan, but I have to disagree with his opinion in that this plan might be accomplished within the current budget (unless I mis-read his statement).

So I don’t really see his idea happening any time soon.

Beyond Augustine II

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Gene Steinberg and David Biedny celebrate the life of Fortean/science-fiction writer Mac Tonnies on the November 1st, 2009 Paracast with guests Greg Bishop, Patrick Huyghe, Paul Kimball and Nick Redfern, people who were close friends or worked with Tonnies on various projects.

A very touching send-off for Tonnies.

Somehow, I have to think that in the many Universes of the Multi-verse, Mac got up that Monday morning as normal and went to work as if nothing happened, still thinking about publishing his book.

http://www.podtrac.com/pts/redirect.mp3/media.blubrry.com/paranormal/www.theparacast.com/podcasts/paracast_091101.mp3

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Western militaries have been searching for a technological edge against whatever enemy-of-the-decade we happen to be fighting against for the past sixty-five years. Power supplies happen to be part of that equation since if western militaries can lower the incidences of refueling airborn and ground fighting machines, that means they can spend more time fighting the ‘enemy.’

Enter Project Kugelblitz.

The announcement came in May 2006 that – after decades of secretly investigating UFOs – the Ministry of Defence had come to the conclusion that aliens were not visiting Britain. The MoD’s claims were revealed within the pages of a formerly classified document – entitled Unidentified Aerial Phenomena in the UK Air Defence Region, and code-named Project Condign – that had been comm­issioned in 1996 and was completed in February 2000.

Released under the terms of the Freedom of Information Act thanks specifically to the work of FT contributor Dr David Clarke and UFO researcher Gary Anthony, the 465-page document demonstrated how air defence experts had concluded that UFO sightings were probably the result of “natural, but relatively rare phenomena” such as ball lightning and atmospheric plasmas. UFOs, wrote the still-unknown author of the MoD’s report, were “of no defence significance”.

Inevitably, many UFO investigators claimed that the MoD’s report was merely a ruse to hide its secret know­ledge of alien encounters, crashed UFOs, and high-level X-Files-type conspiracies. And although the Government firmly denied such claims, the report did reveal a number of significant conclus­ions of a genuinely intriguing nature.

The atmospheric plasmas which were believed to be the cause of so many UFO reports were “still barely understood”, said the MoD, and the magnetic and electric fields that eman­ated from plasmas could adversely affect the human nervous system. And that was not all. Clarke and Anthony revealed that “Volume 3 of the report refers to research and studies carried out in a number of foreign nations into UAPs [Unidentified Aerial Phenomena], atmospheric plasmas, and their potent­ial military applications.”

That such research was of interest to the MoD is demonstrated in a Loose Minute of 4 December 2000 called Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAP) – DI55 Report, which reveals: “DG(R&T) [Director-General, Research & Tech­nology] will be interested in those phen­omena associated with plasma form­ations, which have potential applic­ations to novel weapon technology.”

This was further borne out in an article on Condign written by James Randerson and published in the Guardian on 22 February 2007 (“Could we have hitched a ride on UFOs?”). It stated in part: “According to a former MoD intelligence analyst who asked not be named, the MoD was paranoid in the late 1980s that the Soviet Union had developed technology that went beyond western knowledge of physics. ‘For many years we were very concerned that in some areas the Russians had a handle on physics that we hadn’t at all. We just basically didn’t know the basics they were working from,’ he said. ‘We did encourage our scientists not to think that we in the West knew everything there was to be known.’”

And it wasn’t just the British Ministry of Defence and the Russians who recog­nised the potential military spin-offs that both plasmas and ball lightning offered – if they could be understood and harnessed, of course. Official documentation that has surfaced in the United States reveals that only two years after pilot Kenneth Arnold’s now-historic UFO encounter over the Cascade Mountains, Washington State, on 24 June 1947, the US military secretly began looking at ways to exploit such phenomena.

While the US Air Force was busying itself trying to determine whether UFOs were alien spacecraft, Soviet inventions, or even the work of an ultra-secret domestic project, the US Department of Commerce was taking a distinctly different approach. In its search for answers to the UFO puzzle, the DoC was focusing much of its attention on one of the most mystifying and controversial of all fortean phenomena: ball lightning.

A technical report, Project Grudge, published in 1949 by the Air Force’s UFO investigative unit detailed the findings of the DoC’s Weather Bureau with respect to ball lightning, which it believed was connected to normal lightning and electrical discharge. The phenomenon, said the DoC, was “spherical, roughly globular, egg-shaped, or pear-shaped; many times with projecting streamers; or flame-like irregular ‘masses of light’. Luminous in appearance, described in individual cases by different colours but mostly reported as deep red and often as glaring white.”

The Weather Bureau’s study added: “Some of the cases of ‘ball lightning’ observed have displayed excrescences of the appearance of little flames emanating from the main body of the luminous mass, or luminous streamers have developed from it and propagated slant-wise toward the ground… In rare instances, it has been reported that the luminous body may break up into a number of smaller balls which may appear to fall towards the earth like a rain of sparks. It has even been reported that the ball has suddenly ejected a whole bundle of many luminous, radiating streamers toward the earth, and then disapp­eared. There have been reports by observers of ‘ball lightning’ to the effect that the phenomenon appeared to float through a room or other space for a brief interval of time without making contact with or being attracted by objects.”

Possibly unknown outside of official circles – until I made the discovery at the US National Archives, Maryland, two years ago – is the fact that a complete copy of the Air Force’s Project Grudge document was, somewhat surprisingly, shared with US Army personnel at the Edgewood Arsenal, Maryland, in early 1950.

Even more surprising is a curiously-worded entry contained in the covering letter from the Air Force to Edgewood staff that accompanied the Grudge report: “You are aware we have already discussed with Mr Clapp the theor­etical incendiary applications of Ball-Lightening [sic] that might be useful to the several German projects at Kirtland. Useful data should be routed to Mr Clapp through this office.”

Precisely who the mysterious Mr Clapp was, I have thus far been unable to determine; however, the fact that he is described as ‘Mr’ is a strong indication that he was not a member of the military. ‘Kirtland’ can only be a reference to Kirtland Air Force Base, New Mexico. Named in 1942 after Roy C Kirtland – the oldest military pilot in the Air Corps – the base is located in the southeast quadrant of Albuquerque, New Mexico, adjacent to the Albuquerque International Sunport airport, and employs over 23,000 people. Moreover, Kirtland AFB has been the site of numerous mystifying UFO incidents since the late 1940s.

As for the reference to “the several German projects” apparently in place at Kirtland at the time, this is almost certainly related to the US Government’s controversial Operation Paperclip which, in the post-World War II era, saw countless German scientists – some of whom were Nazis, and many of whom were engaged in advanced aerospace research – secretly offered employment in the US, and particularly at military install­ations in New Mexico, such as the White Sands Proving Ground.

HARNESS-CAVALIER
So, can we assume from the hints contained in this letter that by early 1950 some sort of combined Army-Air Force project, or at the very least, an exchange of information, was underway at Edgewood Arsenal – possibly working in tandem with a similar project at Kirtland Air Force Base – to try to understand and harness the power of ball lightning?

The answer would appear to be yes. Documentation has disclosed the identity of a project nicknamed Harness-Cavalier, the purpose of which was indeed to understand and capitalise on the true nature of ball lightning, and which, from 1950 to at least the mid-1960s utilised the skills of per­sonnel from Edgewood Arsenal, Kirtland Air Force Base, and also Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, Dayton, Ohio.

Via the Freedom of Information Act, a whole host of documents from the files of Harness-Cavalier – now numbering more than 120 – have surfaced, demonstrating that those attached to the project were kept well-informed of any and all developments in the field of ball lightning, and part­icularly how it might be exploited militarily.

Such documentation includes: “Theory of the Lightning Ball and its Application to the Atmospheric Phenomenon Called ‘Flying Saucers”, written by Carl Benadicks in 1954; “Ball Lightning: A Survey”, prepared by one JR McNally for the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Tennessee (year unknown); DV Ritchie’s “Reds May Use Lightning as a Weapon”, which appeared in Missiles and Rockets in August 1959; and “An Experimental and Theoretical Program to Investigate the Feasibility of Confining Plasma in Free Space by Radar Beams”, which was written by CM Haaland in 1960 for the Armour Research Foundation, Illinois Institute of Technology.

The strongest evidence that confirms Edgewood Arsenal’s deep interest in the potential use of ball lightning on the battle­field can be found in a December 1965 document entitled “Survey of Kugelblitz Theories for Electromagnetic Incendiaries”. Written by WB Lyttle and CE Wilson, the document was prepared under contract for the US Army’s New Concepts Division/ Special Projects at Edgewood.

This is totally fascinating in that this explains quite a bit of why the US military kept the stories of ‘UFOs’ alive and were able to keep the prying eyes of the public away from their various research projects.

Exploring ‘ball-lightning’ and the use thereof would solve quite a lot of the problems of refueling fighters and other esoteric weaponry DARPA could dream up to kill people.

Tesla  invented the concept himself one hundred years ago when he imagined transferring artificial electrical ‘ball lightning’ from transfer station to transfer station around the world (spawning a theory about the 1908 Tunguska, Siberia explosion).

No wires or cables required. A completely ‘wireless’ network world-wide.

For free.

We don’t know for sure if the Pentagon has this ability and we only have people like Andrew D. Basiago’s claims they do, but imagine the implications!

Project Kugelblitz: Evidence that the US military planned to harness the power of ball lightning

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Can microscopic Earth-life survive on Mars?

A recent experiment certainly shows that it’s possible:

Multiple missions have been sent to Mars with the hopes of testing the surface of the planet for life – or the conditions that could create life – on the Red Planet. The question of whether life in the form of bacteria (or something even more exotic!) exists on Mars is hotly debated, and still requires a resolute yes or no. Experiments done right here on Earth that simulate the conditions on Mars and their effects on terrestrial bacteria show that it is entirely possible for certain strains of bacteria to weather the harsh environment of Mars.

A team led by Giuseppe Galletta of the Department of Astronomy at the University of Padova simulated the conditions present on Mars, and then introduced several strains of bacteria into the simulator to record their survival rate. The simulator – named LISA (Laboratorio Italiano Simulazione Ambienti) – reproduced surface conditions on Mars, with temperatures ranging from +23 to -80 degrees Celsius (73 to -112 Fahrenheit), a 95% CO2 atmosphere at low pressures of 6 to 9 millibars, and very strong ultraviolet radiation. The results – some of the strains of bacteria were shown to survive up to 28 hours under these conditions, an amazing feat given that there is nowhere on the surface of the Earth where the temperatures get this low or the ultraviolet radiation is as strong as on Mars.

Two of the strains of bacteria tested – Bacillus pumilus and Bacillus Nealsonii – are both commonly used in laboratory tests of extreme environmental factors and their effects on bacteria because of their ability to produce endospores when stressed. Endospores are internal structures of the bacteria that encapsulate the DNA and part of the cytoplasm in a thick wall, to prevent the DNA from being damaged.

Galletta’s team found that the vegetative cells of the bacteria died after only a few minutes, due to the low water content and high UV radiation. The endospores, however, were able to survive between 4 and 28 hours, even when exposed directly to the UV light. The researchers simulated the dusty surface of Mars by blowing volcanic ash or dust of red iron oxide on the samples. When covered with the dust, the samples showed an even higher percentage of survival, meaning that it’s possible for a hardy bacterial strain to survive underneath the surface of the soil for very long periods of time. The deeper underneath the soil an organism is, the more hospitable the conditions become; water content increases, and the UV radiation is absorbed from the soil above.

Given these findings, and all of the rich data that came in last year from the Phoenix lander – especially the discovery of perchlorates -  continuing the search for life on Mars still seems a plausible endeavor.

Well, if we depend on NASA confirming life on Mars or not, we’ll be waiting for another 100 years. It just ain’t gonna happen.

It’ll be a consortium of nations, private industry or world governments coming clean that someone has advanced technology and humans are already there that decides the issue!

Bacteria Could Survive in Martian Soil

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The Lunar X Prize Goes To Masten!

Caption: Masten Space Systems rocket, Xoie preparing to launch from the Mojave Air and Space Port in the 2009 Northrop Grumman Lunar Lander X PRIZE Challenge

The race for the $2 million Northrop Grumman Lunar Lander X PRIZE Challenge (NGLLXPC) incentivized prize purse, funded by NASA and presented by the X PRIZE Foundation, has come to an exciting finish. Masten Space Systems, led by David Masten, will be awarded the top $1 million prize on Nov. 5 in Washington D.C. at the Rayburn House Office Building. This is the largest incentivized prize awarded by the X PRIZE Foundation since the 2004 Ansari X PRIZE competition.

The NGLLXPC rocket race literally came down to the wire. Masten Space Systems, along with other competing teams descended upon the Mojave Desert last week in a head-to-head showdown. The Masten team set out to chase down Armadillo Aerospace for the Level 2, first-place prize of $1 million. On Oct. 30, in their final attempt, Masten Space Systems successfully launched their ‘Xoie’ vehicle and achieved an average landing accuracy of 19 cm to beat Armadillo Aerospace’s previous accuracy mark of 87 cm. According to competition officials the Masten team achieved accurate landings and won the first-place prize for Level 2 of the NGLLXPC. Armadillo Aerospace, led by id Software founder John Carmack will take home the second place prize of $500,000.

“We are all very excited to have David Masten and John Carmack take the top prizes in the 2009 Northrop Grumman Lunar Lander X PRIZE Challenge. It is an honor to award these teams $2 million in prize money,” said Dr. Peter H. Diamandis, chairman and CEO of the X PRIZE Foundation. “This space race was exciting to watch and experience, as these dedicated teams raced to advance space technology. It is clear that the emerging space industry will continue to benefit from the Northrop Grumman Lunar Lander X PRIZE Challenge.”

The criterion for the Level 2 NGLLXPC requires the rocket to simulate a full lunar lander mission. The flight profile must closely simulate the task of descending from lunar orbit to the lunar surface, refueling and returning to lunar orbit. To match the performance of such a mission here on Earth, the vehicle must fly along a proscribed mission profiled designed to show both control and power, ascending to a height of 50 meters, translating horizontally to a landing pad 50 meters away, landing safely on a rocky lunar-replica surface after at least 180 seconds of flight time. The flight profile must be repeated, with the rocket demonstrating repeat-use capability by returning to the original launch site.

Since the NGLLXPC competition launched in 2006, one dozen teams have worked to design rockets capable of being used as part of Moon 2.0, a new era of international and sustainable lunar exploration that draws on both government and private involvement. These rocket designs have already found additional missions, with competing teams already carrying out important development work for NASA, the US Department of Defense, and a variety of private and academic customers. Throughout the competition NASA put up $2 million in prize money as part of their Centennial Challenges program. The NGLLXPC was comprised of two levels; each level included both first and second place prizes. The $350,000 first-place prize for Level 1 went to Armadillo Aerospace at last year’s competition. Masten Space Systems will take home the second-place prize of $150,000 in the Level 1 portion of the challenge.

The NGLLXPC was operated by the X PRIZE Foundation at no cost to NASA. This was made possible by the generous support of Northrop Grumman Corporation, which built the original Apollo Lunar Modules used to safely carry crew down to the lunar surface in the 1960s and 1970s. Northrop Grumman supported the competition throughout the four years in which it was offered.

The ultimate goal of the NGLLXPC is to inspire entrepreneurs who can enable a new era of commercial exploration. These milestone events within the privately funded space sector continue to demonstrate the value of prizes and how they stimulate innovation. The successful flights from all of the private space companies continue to underscore the report to President Obama by the Augustine Commission, which called for increased commercial sector participation both in orbital operations and NASA’s efforts to reach the Moon by 2020. Now, more than ever, the time is right for private industry to supply NASA with hardware and services to enable suborbital, orbital, and lunar exploration.

Caption: The Armadillo rocket, Scorpius launches from the pad in the Northrop Grumman Lunar Lander X PRIZE Challenge

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I kept track of this challenge the whole time and the vids were great!

Both teams were quick on the turn-around-time and I couldn’t believe how close these people got to those vehicles before they even cooled off!

Quite a lot of folks look down on the ‘nuspace’ enterprises because they have an unproven track record yet and, of course, the lack of billions of dollars to do their research and development on.

But the technology is 65 years old, so it doesn’t necessarily require all that big money to build something reliable, reusable.

And profitable.

Just a little intelligence, time and elbow grease as Masten, Armadillo and even though they didn’t win anything, Unreasonable Rocket has proven, is required.

Okay, sure, a couple million bucks as incentive didn’t hurt either!

Lunar Lander Competition Awards $2 Million in Prizes

*It should be noted that there are several parts to the Lunar X Prize, the lander competition is just one part.

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