Is space worth it?

Another year, another whirl of astronautical triumphs and failures, all at the taxpayer’s expense. With environmental problems already testing us to our limits, do we really need to go in search of the mysteries of the universe?

Not Worth It

Space eats money. The technical challenges of space exploration, particularly the manned variety, are such that any extraterrestrial venture is fabulously expensive. NASA’s 2007 budget? $16 billion. Accompanying this massive outlay is the failure rate. Space is the most hostile environment we know of – yet we’re launching super-expensive machinery …

Tags: environment , government , NASA , science , solar energy , space , technology

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Aviation and space exploration suck – fossil fuel that is. Not to mention clean air, and quiet habitat. Can these industries, so essential to global scientific and economic progress, go green? The race is definitely on.

Offering hope, inspiring blog posts and tweets-a-plenty over the past two weeks were the test flight of Boeing’s 787 Dreamliner, which burns 20% less fuel than other passenger planes of its approximate size, and the unveiling of the world’s first, commercial passenger space craft, the SpaceShipTwo (SS2) by Virgin Galactic and Scaled Composites. …

Tags: 787 , 787 Dreamliner , air travel , Airline , Airplane , airport , Aurora Flight Sciences , aviation , Boeing , Burt Rutan , commerical space travel , EcoMeme , flying , fuel efficiency , greenhouse gas , innovation , jet fuel , John Parrish , NASA , noise pollution , Richard Branson , Scaled Composites , space , Space travel , Spaceship , Virgin Galactic

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NASA is about to commit an eco-sin on a galactic scale.

On October 8th, in search of water, NASA is going to bomb the Moon.

Water on the Moon, you ask? Yes, scientists think there might be evidence of moisture found in the debris plume (which will, by the way, be visible from Earth). I admit, this irks me; I find it strikingly arrogant. Exploration is one thing, but the Moon doesn’t belong to the United States for benefit and exploitation.

Even if water is found, shuttling it back …

Tags: astronomy , bomb , moon , NASA , science , water

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Can Algae + Sewage = Biofuel?

NASA thinks so.

The agency is using their space technology here on earth with an experiment that has a dual mission – producing algae-based fuel and cleansing wastewater.

Here’s how it works. Sewage and algae is combined in NASA created OMEGA (Offshore Membrane Enclosures for Growing Algae) bags and floated in the sea. The versatile OMEGA bags, originally created by NASA to recycle astronaut’s wastewater on long space missions, let the freshwater out and stop the seawater from getting in.

Meanwhile, the algae feed off the nutrients in …

Tags: algae and sewage into biofuel , algae-based fuel , NASA , OMEGA bags

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