Americans will go to asteroids, to Mars, and maybe beyond–and all in this lifetime, stated President Obama at Cape Canaveral this afternoon as he reassured Americans that space exploration will continue. Speaking at the Kennedy Space Center, where America launched its moon mission decades ago, Obama said he was “100 percent committed to the mission of NASA and its future.”
Obama’s proposed space policy (pdf) would increase NASA’s budget by $6 billion over the next 5 years, which he says will create 2,500 additional jobs at the Kennedy Space Center by 2012. Acknowledging criticism for some of his changes to NASA’s missions, Obama stated that the country must “leap into the future” and not “continue on the same path as before,” saying: “The bottom line is: Nobody is more committed to manned space flight, the human exploration of space, than I am. But we’ve got to do it in a smart way; we can’t keep doing the same old things as before” [The New York Times].
In his speech, the President declared that by 2025 the nation would have a new spacecraft designed to carry humans “beyond the moon into deep space.” He added that by the mid-2030′s America would also be able to send humans to orbit Mars and return them safely to Earth, adding “a landing on Mars will soon follow.” President Obama stated: “Space exploration is not a luxury, not an afterthought in America’s brighter future…. It is an essential part of that quest” [The New York Times].
For more details on Obama’s new space policy and what it means for NASA and the future of space exploration, head over to Bad Astronomy for Phil Plait’s post, “Obama lays out bold and visionary revised space policy.”
This week marks the anniversaries of both stunning success and nearly catastrophic failures in human spaceflight—it’s been 49 years since Yuri Gugarin became the first man in space, and 40 years since the life-threatening drama on board Apollo 13. So perhaps it’s fitting that this is the week the fight over the future of NASA comes to a head. Tomorrow, President Obama will defend his new plans for manned spaceflight, which he has changed somewhat after his proposal to cancel the Constellation program was met with a flood of criticism.
When the President announced his budget in January, which came without funding for Constellation and its plans to go back to the moon and beyond, members of Congress had a fit (especially those who represent areas with jobs connected to Constellation).
Former astronauts came out of the woodwork, too, and that list of critics now includes Neil Armstrong. The first moon-walker typically shies away from media controversies, but this week issued an open letter to the President. He writes: “The availability of a commercial transport to orbit as envisioned in the President’s proposal cannot be predicted with any certainty, but is likely to take substantially longer and be more expensive than we would hope. It appears that we will have wasted our current $10-plus billion investment in Constellation” [The Times]. Armstrong also writes that if the United States finds itself without spacecraft that can travel to the Earth’s orbit and beyond, our nation will be destined “to become one of second or even third rate stature.”
Offshore oil and gas drilling is coming to much of the east coast. Today President Obama announced plans for energy exploration through 2017 that would open up drilling in coastal areas off the southeastern United States, and potentially some areas near Alaska.
Under the proposal, 167 million new acres in the Atlantic Ocean from Delaware to Florida, as well as new swaths in the Gulf of Mexico, would be opened to energy development. Parts of the Chukchi Sea and Beaufort Sea, both of which are north of Alaska in the Arctic Ocean, could see drilling after 2013 if viability studies give them the go-ahead. But not all areas that energy companies would like to explore are available in the plan.
No areas off the west coast would be made available. Obama also said proposed leases in Alaska’s Bristol Bay would be canceled. He would also limit any oil and gas drilling off the coast of Florida to no closer than 125 miles from the shore [USA Today]. Bristol Bay has been off-limits since the Exxon Valdez incident in 1989, when the tanker spilled at least 10 million gallons of crude oil into the ocean. President George W. Bush’s energy plan, which Obama overturned upon taking office, would have opened the bay to drilling.
After months of party wrangling that culminated in a Sunday night political spectacle, President Obama has finally managed to push through far-reaching reform to the country’s health care system. The House voted 219-212 for final approval of the legislation, and on Tuesday the President will sign the bill into law.
The new law would require most Americans to have health insurance, would add 16 million people to the Medicaid rolls and would subsidize private coverage for low- and middle-income people, at a cost to the government of $938 billion over 10 years, the Congressional Budget Office said [The New York Times].
Here’s a primer on what some of the biggest changes will be in the current health care system. While some changes won’t come into effect till 2014, there are some things that will affect your insurance this year.
You can’t cancel an enormous federal program without hitting pushback, and President Obama is hitting plenty of it over his proposal to end NASA’s Constellation program. In January his budget proposal put forth no funding for Constellation, the space shuttle successor program that included the Ares rockets, Orion crew capsule, and plans to send astronauts back to the moon by 2020. Instead, NASA would become more reliant on private companies to ferry its astronauts to the space station, and would explore new ideas for visiting Mars or nearby asteroids. But the proposal has already ruffled lots of feathers, prompting the President to say he will hold a conference to further outline his plan.
First, many high-profile space experts balked at the proposal. Former astronaut Tom Jones said Obama was surrendering human spaceflight, and Apollo 17 astronaut Harrison Schmitt, one of the last men to walk on the moon, was equally displeased. “It’s bad for the country,” Schmitt said. “This administration really does not believe in American exceptionalism” [Washington Post]. Dissent wasn’t universal; DISCOVER blogger Phil Plait, for one, praised the possibilities for commercial space-faring.
Are these the first steps to a nuclear renaissance? Yesterday the White House said it would give more than $8 billion in loan guarantees to make sure that construction of two new nuclear power plants gets under way in Georgia. If these plants go ahead, they would be the first new nuclear plants built in the country in more than three decades.
The loan guarantee is conditional. It hinges on the utility, the Southern Co., receiving a license from the US Nuclear Regulatory Agency to build and operate the new reactors. Based on the current timeline, the utility expects to receive its license during the second half of 2011, says David Ratcliffe, its chairman and chief executive officer [Christian Science Monitor]. The two reactors would each produce more than 1,000 megawatts, and would work with two existing reactors at a site near Waynesboro, Georgia.
The loan guarantees will allow Southern Co. to get massive construction loans from its bankers without assuming the risk; if the power plants aren’t profitable and if the company defaults on its loans, the federal government will pay back the money to the banks instead. Despite the government support, the new Georgia reactors are far from a done deal: their design has not yet been fully approved by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, whose staff has raised questions about whether changes made to harden the plant against aircraft attack had made it more vulnerable to earthquakes [The New York Times].
Success! The video below shows a test the military ran off the California coast last week, in which a modified Boeing 747 carrying a laser used it to shoot down a test missile; it was the first time a laser weapon has destroyed a missile in its booster stage. DISCOVER covered the first flight tests of this system back in 2008.
The liquid-fueled rocket – thought to be a Scud-B, similar to those being developed by Iran and North Korea – was fired from a ship off the coast California on 11 February [New Scientist]. The plane locked in its tracking lasers, and then unleashed a chemical laser that burned a hole in the side of the missile to blow it up. The Missile Defense Agency ran three total tests, two of which were successful.
Asian carp—the giant invasive fish that have been moving up the Mississippi River for the better part of a decade–are getting close to the Great Lakes, and in fact some may have already crossed the barrier. For the lakes’ protectors, this is a near-doomsday scenario: Many fear that the ravenous carp could destroy the ecosystem by gobbling up the food that native fish depend on. This week the White House proposed a plan that would devote nearly $80 million to stopping the fish’s advance, but it’s not pleasing many people around the issue.
On one side, many environmentalists, as well as people who rely on Great Lakes fishing for their livelihood, have called on the federal government to shut down locks that connect the river to Lake Michigan. Michigan Governor Jennifer Granholm says, “The economic damage from these carp coming into the Great Lakes system would be irreparable…. They should shut the locks down until they get these other measures in place, and permanently have a solution to separating these two water systems” [Detroit News]. Granholm and other governors from the region met recently to try to craft another solution after the Supreme Court ruled that Illinois didn’t have to close the locks to stop the carp if it didn’t choose to.
The Obama administration’s new budget may come in at a hulking $3.8 trillion, but one thing it doesn’t include is continued funding for the Constellation program. The program, which was intended to continue the work of the aging space shuttles, will get the ax if Congress approves the President’s plan. This also means that NASA would abandon its goal of returning to the moon by 2020.
Obama’s budget ends work on the shuttle follow-on vehicle, known as Orion, as well as a pair of rockets developed to fly astronauts to the space station, the moon and other destinations in the solar system. “We are proposing canceling the program, not delaying it,” Peter Orszag, director of the Office of Management and Budget, told reporters [Reuters]. The announcement had been some time in coming: The Augustine panel that Obama convened last year to review human spaceflight concluded that Constellation couldn’t succeed without $3 billion in additional annual funding, and rumors broke out last week that the President’s budget would kill the program for good.
In place of the Constellation program’s Ares rockets and Orion crew capsule, Obama’s plan calls for funneling money to private companies that are jockeying for NASA contracts. The Washington Postreports that the plan would funnel $6 billion to support private space companies developing a vehicle to ferry astronauts back and forth from the International Space Station. Companies expected to seek the new space taxi business include United Launch Alliance, a partnership between Boeing and Lockheed Martin that launches rockets for theUnited States Air Force, and Space Exploration Technologies, a start-up company led by Elon Musk, who founded PayPal [ The New York Times]. The plan would also extend the life of the space station until 2020.
Commercial Spaceflight Federation president Bretton Alexander was understandably giddy at the prospect of private companies taking center stage. “At a time when job creation is the top priority for our nation, a commercial crew programme will create more jobs per dollar because it leverages millions in private investment and taps the potential of systems that serve both government and private customers,” he said [BBC News].
The Christmas Day airplane bombing attempt has renewed the debate over full body scanners at airports. The Transportation Security Administration in recent years has tried out a series of “whole-body imagers” to look for threats that typical metal detectors can’t find. These systems are the only way that smuggled explosives, like the one officials say was brought on the Christmas flight, can be reliably found [Wired.com].
Privacy advocates are calling the full body scanners a “digital strip search” (take a look at this TSA image of a full body scan and you’ll get the idea). But some security advocates say that either patting down every passenger or taking full body scans are the only options to ensure certain dangerous items are kept off airplanes.
Things are getting a tad testy in Denmark as the Copenhagen climate summit lurches toward its conclusion tomorrow. Contrary to rumors that he would skip the event because of the growing pessimism about reaching an agreement, President Barack Obama says today that he’s on his way for the conference’s decisive day.
Yesterday was protest day, as 4,000 people marched around the Bella center and police arrested 260. Activists tried a variety of methods to enter the conference centre, approaching in large groups from several directions and, at one point, sending several hundred people running with seven giant lilos [air mattresses] to bridge a moat next to the centre [The Guardian].
After hacked e-mails, angry Copenhagen sex workers, and months of lead-up time with which to question whether the leaders of the world will actually do anything to slow down global warming, the big meeting is finally here. Today marks day one of the U.N. climate summit held in Denmark’s capital, in which diplomats from 192 nations, including more than 100 heads of state, will try to iron out some kind of agreement that would be the successor to the Kyoto protocols.
The conference opened with videos about the consequences of climate change; the big decisions won’t come for a few days. President Barack Obama‘s decision to attend the end of the conference, not the middle, was taken as a signal that an agreement was getting closer…. The first week of the conference will focus on refining the complex text of a draft treaty. But major decisions will await the arrival next week of environment ministers and the heads of state in the final days of the conference, which ends Dec. 18 [AP].
President Obama followed through yesterday on his plan to ease restrictions on stem cell use in research funded by taxpayer money. National Institutes of Health leader Francis Collins announced that the organization has approved 13 new lines of embryonic stem cells for research, and will consider 96 more lines for approval.
In March, Obama lifted President Bush’s restrictions on federally-funded research on embryonic stem cells, which limited research to a handful of lines created before August 2001. Obama could not on his own reverse the Congressional ruling that forbids scientists from using taxpayer money to create new stem cell lines from embryos, but the ruling allows researchers to use cell lines created by others in an ethical fashion. The NIH set up a panel to decide which stem cell lines met strict ethical restrictions. The cells, for instance, have to have been made using an embryo donated from leftovers at fertility clinics, and parents must have signed detailed consent forms [Reuters].
Researchers are making the case that a person’s political views cause them to see with a tinted perspective.
Scientists showed undergraduate students a series of digitally darkened or lightened photos of President Barack Obama last fall, and asked them which photos best represented him as a person. The results were striking: while self-described liberals tended to pick the digitally lightened photos of the president, self-described conservative students more frequently picked the darkened images. The more one agrees with a politician, in other words, the lighter his skin tone seems; the less you agree, the darker it becomes [Newsweek]. The study will be published in theProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
The creaky old electrical grid that carries power around the United States is inefficient, outmoded, and perilously prone to failures. To make a start at remedying the situation, President Obama will announce today the 100 utility projects that will share $3.4 billion in federal stimulus funding to speed deployment of advanced technology designed to cut energy use and make the electric-power grid more robust. When combined with funds from utility customers, the program is expected to inject more than $8 billion into grid modernization efforts nationally, administration officials said. “We have a very antiquated system that we need to upgrade,” said Carol Browner, energy coordinator for the Obama administration [The Wall Street Journal].
The projects include the installation of “smart meters,” which are more advanced than typical electricity meters. They use digital technology to deliver detailed usage data both to the customer and the utility, as well as adding displays in homes that tell customers about their electricity use [The New York Times]. This allows for real-time monitoring of electricity use so that customers can adjust their usage, for example by turning off devices during peak hours when electricity is most expensive.
Federal stimulus money will also go to projects that improve the efficiency of power lines and electric substations, and for next-generation transformers that can wirelessly communicate their condition, so that power plant operators get a warning before a part fails. Other projects will set the stage for the smooth introduction of large amounts of electricity from wind or solar sources into the transmission system [AP].
80beats is DISCOVER's news aggregator, weaving together the choicest tidbits from the best articles on the day's most compelling topics.
80beats is written by Veronique Greenwood and Valerie Ross. This team darts through each day's science news faster than the ruby-throated hummingbird that beats its wings 80 times per second. Send ideas, tips, suggestions, and complaints to [azeeberg at discovermagazine dot com].
Americans will go to asteroids, to Mars, and maybe beyond–and all in this lifetime, stated President Obama at Cape Canaveral this afternoon as he reassured Americans that space exploration will continue. Speaking at the Kennedy Space Center, where America launched its moon mission decades ago, Obama said he was “100 percent committed to the mission of NASA and its future.”
This week 
Offshore 
After months of party wrangling that culminated in a Sunday night political spectacle, President Obama has finally managed to push through far-reaching reform to the country’s health care system. The House voted 219-212 for final approval of the legislation, and on Tuesday the President will sign the bill into law.
You can’t cancel an enormous federal program without hitting pushback, and 
Are these the first steps to a nuclear renaissance? Yesterday the White House said it would give more than $8 billion in loan guarantees to make sure that construction of two new 
Asian carp—the giant invasive fish that have been 
The Obama administration’s new budget may come in at a hulking $3.8 trillion, but one thing it doesn’t include is continued funding for the Constellation program. The program, which was intended to continue the work of the aging space shuttles, will get the ax if Congress approves the President’s plan. This also means that NASA would abandon its goal of returning to the moon by 2020.
The Christmas Day 
Things are getting a tad testy in Denmark as the Copenhagen climate summit lurches toward its conclusion tomorrow. Contrary to rumors that he would skip the event because of the growing pessimism about reaching an agreement, 
After hacked e-mails, 
President Obama followed through yesterday on his plan to ease restrictions on stem cell use in research funded by taxpayer money. National Institutes of Health leader Francis Collins announced that the organization has 
Researchers are making the case that a person’s 
The creaky old electrical grid that carries power around the United States is inefficient, outmoded, and perilously prone to failures. To make a start at remedying the situation, President Obama will announce today the 
