Note: As of right now (9:00 p.m. Wednesday night) I am less than 100 votes behind Pharyngula! Let’s get ‘im! And now, on to the regularly scheduled blog:

Senator Congressman Sherwood Boehlert (R-NY) was the chairman of the House Science Committee before retiring from Congress this year. Before leaving, he wrote a letter to the Director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) saying NASA funding needs to be increased.

It’s very cool. You should read the whole thing (it’s only one page) but here’s the NASA part:

Last, but not least, NASA needs additional funding if it is to move ahead with both the Vision for Space Exploration and the space science, earth science and aeronautics research required by the NASA Authorization Act of 2005. There is no reason to launch the Orion Crew Exploration Vehicle before 2014, and there is every reason to retire the Space Shuttle in 2010, as planned.

He is definitely right about the funding. I do think there’s a good reason to launch Orion before 2014, though: we’ll have a 4 year gap with no manned access to space. I think that what he may actually mean is that it would be very bad to rush the process. I certainly agree with that!

He continues:

Most important, NASA’s science programs, which are its most successful and beneficial programs, must continue to thrive. The earth science program in particular is in danger of atrophying. At the very, very least, NASA’s Science Mission Directorate must receive at least as much as was projected in the runout in the fiscal 2007 budget. Moreover, the "bread and butter" funding for NASA science, known as Research and Analysis, must be the top priority for funding.

Hurray! He is precisely right in that. However, NASA Administration has been threatening R&A for some time, which is precisely the wrong thing to do (comments made by scientists who took a survey done by the Planetary Science Institute make that clear).

NASA has put a lot of incredibly important work on the chopping block. This is an extraordinarily short-sighted idea. Representative Boehlert nailed it: this is a top priority, and always should be. Always.

NASA Administration needs to understand the balance needed to do exploration and science — and tell me, if you can, the difference between the two. To me, they are two sides of the same coin, and you cannot have one without the other. Yet NASA wants to devastate the latter for the former, which is like the gift of the Magi but with less noble motives. The reason given, of course, is money, but NASA’s funding is very small compared to the budget of any other agency in the government. As Mike Griffin, NASA’s Administrator, himself has pointed out, NASA costs pennies per person per day. And look what it delivers! Search my blog for the word Cassini, or Hubble, or Spitzer and see for yourself.

Pennies per day per person. What we need for NASA is not to decide which vital organ to cut, but how to find those few extra pennies so that we can scientifically explore the Universe, and do it right.

Tip o’ the space helmet to Space Politics for the story on Representative Boehlert.

There’s a big sunspot on the surface of our nearest star right now. These are regions of intense magnetic activity, and can be the source of such explosive events as solar flares (eruptions of material off the surface when magnetic field lines get tangled up together and suddenly snap) and coronal mass ejections (huge eruptions of material from the Sun’s corona).

Well, Sunspot 930 does not disappoint. It had an eruption the other day, but it was pointed away from us. Today, however, it launched a volley right at us. There was a flare and then a CME, so several billion tons of plasma are headed toward us at a million miles per hour. Don’t be scared, though! Our atmosphere protects us. Furthermore, we get a cool auroral display when this happens, so if you live in northern regions (or southern like Africa, Australia, etc.) you may get an aurora soon. Some satellites may have issues, but the astronauts on the Shuttle and space station should be OK.

SpaceWeather.com has details. They also have this cool animated GIF showing the fast particles from the event slamming into the SOHO satellite and leaving a zillion little spots on the detector. I have info about the SOHO satellite and how this all works on my Planet X page.

Also, this spot is being discussed on the Bad Astronomy Universe Today bulletin board, with some nifty pictures being posted too.

Since I’m in a making-fun-of-NASA mood…

The parachute made me laugh out loud.

Tip o’ the heat shield to Larry Klaes.

In case you ever forget that NASA is a government agency, read this essay by a former astronaut who found out that a walk in space is sometimes easier than a stroll at a NASA center.

PZ’s pathetic attempts to one-up me by making "cute" squid banners will fail, of course, but it has prompted me to make a few more for the Good Side that you can use on your blog or site. Just tell people to vote for me and then display the banner!

Of course, if there’s a good side, there must be a Bad Side… and they want me to win as well!

You can’t (or at least shouldn’t) argue with Cthulhu.

If you don’t want to see a squid on your site — and who does? — then there’s always this one:

I expect not everyone will groove on that image, but if, perchance, you do, then go buy a Skepdude calendar! But vote for me first.

On October 30, 2006, the marvelous Cassini spacecraft took this oblique view of Saturn:

Sigh. So pretty.

It made me think: I’m so used to seeing pictures of planets being "face on" — that is, like you’re looking straight at them — that when I see one taken at an angle like this, it really makes it look like a planet, like a place. It’s not just a light in the sky, or some imagined fantasy land. It’s a world, a physical location, with size, and perspective, and depth. Someday we might go there, live there, play there.

Until then, we can be satisfied that our mechanical proxies do it for us, and do it very well.

US East Coasters may get another chance to see a spectacular launch: a powerful rocket is scheduled to lift off from NASA’s Wallops Island (Virginia) facility on Friday December 15 at 7:00 a.m. local time. Space.com has the details.