Recently in Space Category

It's the 40th anniversary of Apollo 11's historic mission to the moon. With all that going on it's easy to miss the 5th anniversary of the Mars Exploration Rover Mission.

Spirit and Opportunity were expected to last a couple months and travel a kilometer from their landing site. Instead, they keep going and going and going...

Kudos to the smart folks at JPL and NASA! And thanks to our brave astronauts and their families for risking their lives to explore an amazing part of God's creation.

Via the Naval War College's blog (bold added):

The National Academy of Sciences report, "America's Future in Space: Aligning the Civil Space Program with National Needs" was released on July 7, 2009. NSDM Chair Dr. Joan Johnson-Freese served on the Committee on the Rationale and Goals of the U.S. Civil Space Program of the National Research Council that was responsible for the report.

U.S. Space Program Should Align With Broader National Goals

 WASHINGTON -- The U.S. civil space program should be aligned with widely acknowledged national challenges, says a new report from the National Research Council. Aligning the program with pressing issues – environmental, economic, and strategic – is a national imperative, and will continue to grow in importance. Coordination across federal agencies, combined with a competent technical work force, effective infrastructure, and investment in technology and innovation, would lay the foundation for a purposeful, strategic U.S. space program that would serve national interests.

 

In aligning civil space activities with national objectives, several priorities are clear, the report says. Earth stewardship should be an important focus of future space activities, with NASA and NOAA leading the formation of an international satellite-observing system to monitor global climate change. In addition, NASA should cooperate with other agencies and international partners to continue scientific exploration in space, seeking knowledge of the universe and searching for life beyond Earth. The report also recommends revitalizing NASA's advanced technology development program by establishing a DARPA-like organization within NASA to support priority civil and commercial space programs, and development of "dual-use" space technologies, with both civil and defense applications.

Rome operates a telescope in Arizona. Who knew? (h/t)

The Roman Catholic Church’s interest in the stars began with purely practical concerns when in the 16th century Pope Gregory XIII called on astronomy to correct for the fact that the Julian calendar had fallen out of sync with the sky. In 1789, the Vatican opened an observatory in the Tower of the Winds, which it later relocated to a hill behind St. Peter’s Dome. In the 1930s, church astronomers moved to Castel Gandolfo, the pope’s summer residence. As Rome’s illumination, the electrical kind, spread to the countryside, the church began looking for a mountaintop in a dark corner of Arizona.

Building on Mount Graham was a struggle. Apaches said the observatory was an affront to the mountain spirits. Environmentalists said it was a menace to a subspecies of red squirrel. There were protests and threats of sabotage. It wasn’t until 1995, three years after the edict of Inquisition was lifted against Galileo, that the Vatican’s new telescope made its first scientific observations.  

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NASA TV has live coverage of our great Americans out there sprucing up the Hubble Telescope.

UPDATE: Instapundit suggests the risk is still fairly low, despite the we're-trashing-our-space-ecosystem meme running through the media this week. 

Rand Simberg:

WASHINGTON (Routers) With his historic speech today, most analysts agreed that the Obama administration made huge inroads in rebuilding America’s relations with the rest of the solar system, reversing anti-terrestrial hostility that had understandably built up in the wake of years of Bush administration arrogance and interplanetary war mongering...

Heh.