My favorite part is how Orbital's launch vehicle is using an engine based on the N-1's on their launch vehicle.

Your supposition that the Apollo missions were faked based on the Van Allen belts is interesting considering that we know that they do not pose a threat to human health, particularly considering the extremely small amount of time a manned space craft leaving LEO spends in them.

I think f(x)'s new EP sounds a lot stronger than the new GG material. Though I will always respect the cabaret quality that GG brings to their performances.

All this did was remind me that it's been too long since I watched Cowboy Bebop. Every time I start to think maybe it wasn't the single best animated series ever I need to get a little shot of Bebop and every thing comes back into focus.

I was so excited for this to come out after becoming a Persona convert from P3P, I pre-ordered the JPN release (woo almost here!).

In the case of a micro-singularity it would have no impact since the mass is the same. For the same reason it wouldn't be able to suck up the Earth since it's gravity wouldn't have changed from the originating material, it only becomes more dense.

My first thought on seeing mention of the ISS was that its orbit around the Sun would be dramatically changed. Ultimately it would probably end up in an elliptical orbit around the Sun, I don't think the moon would have enough pull to capture at that distance. And the moon will be shot off in a random direction as…

Seems like the real problem with even approaching the concept of attacking a reanimated skeletal construct is the mechanics by which is is reanimated.

A little bad guy hookup in progress it seems...

The new ICCM industry - Inter-Continental Cargo Missle.

Phil Plait (The Bad Astronomer) began his online writing career picking apart the bad science in films. He wrote an article titled "How I Stopped Worrying (About Science Accuracy) and Learned to Love the Story" available on Science & Entertainment Exchange:

That general glow you're seeing from Earth is actually a naturally occurring phenomenon called "airglow". Airglow is unrelated to human activity, and is the result of excitement of atoms in the atmosphere, leading to light emission. Airglow is responsible for a large majority of the nighttime light (moonless night)…

Shirts don't drape in micro-gravity the way they do in gravity. They always kind of billow out. They also have to tuck them in like "nerds" cause if they didn't resonance waves would cause their shirt hems to ride up and down their chests the whole time.

This is actually Don playing around in his free time for your entertainment and some mild investigation into neat water-tension behavior in micro-gravity. He's a total goofball.

"Belief" isn't a part of science. Currently all the data that we're collecting, experiments, and research supports the Big Bang as the most fitting explanation for the origin of the Universe.

Linguistic arugments could be made at this point to justify omission of the apostrophe in modal + not contraction statements since there is no competing construction that requires disambiguation and the vocal construction of /-nt/ is becoming more and more morphologically independent from the source verb "not".

Update from the NSF guys indicates that the hardware appears to be late 1990s/2000 so not KH-11 but something more modern, so probably a canceled project. There was some talk that it was maybe related to FIA but nobody can get anything official it seems.

The prevailing opinion among folks that would know is that these are probably first block KH-11 parts.

Shuttle used monomethylhydrazine and dinitrogen tetraoxide for RCS, and the APUs use hydrazine as well (couldn't source the specific flavor though).

On a side note, China's Long March rockets actually are using UDMH (unsymmetrical dimethylhydrazine) as their main fuel.