This article titled “China’s great leap towards superpower status with space station test launch” was written by Jonathan Watts in Beijing, for The Guardian on Thursday 29th September 2011 20.02 UTC

China marked a new milestone on its road towards superpower status on Thursday night by putting its first research module – called the Heavenly Palace – into orbit.

The unmanned Tiangong 1 laboratory, launched from a remote base in the Gobi desert, is a step towards the construction of a fully-fledged orbiting platform.

This latest demonstration of Beijing’s otherworldly ambitions comes in a year when the US has wound down its space shuttle fleet and its partners have said the International Space Station should be buried at sea in 2020.

China’s 10.5-metre cylinder will ride 220 miles into space on board the Long March 2F rocket that blasted off from the Jiuquan satellite launch centre.

It will remain in orbit for two years and be used by Chinese scientists and astronauts to practise rendezvous and docking techniques needed to construct bigger space structures.

Another vessel, Shenzhou 8, will launch later this year and attempt to link up with the lab.

If this is successful and life support systems within the module remain stable, manned missions will be tried next year and yuhangyuan [astronauts] will spend two weeks inside the lab.

Wu Ping, a spokeswoman, said these missions could include China’s first female astronauts.

Following China’s first manned space flight in 2003, the launch of the Heavenly Palace is the second stage in a 10-year programme to build a manned 60-tonne platform by 2020.

This could give China the largest habitable space platform. That title currently belongs to the International Space Station (ISS), which is supported by the US, Europe, Russia, Japan and Canada.

The 400-tonne ISS’s future is in doubt because of the high cost of ferrying supplies through space and the economic problems faced by its principal funders.

China’s political differences with the US have so far stymied hopes to draw the country into this international programme.

When the current commitments expire in 2020, Russian scientists have proposed that the ISS be left to fall into an ocean.

China attaches great political prestige to its space programme – as evidenced by launch events in Beijing and Jiuquan attended by president Hu Jintao and key politburo members.

At this stage, Beijing claims its programme is cheaper. While Russia and the US initially practised docking by sending up two vessels for each trial, China said it saves money by leaving one in space for an extended time.

“The US is still ahead – they sent a man to the moon 40 years ago,” said Fu Song, a professor at the school of aerospace at Tsinghua University.

“But there is the advantage for latecomers. The cost is less and wrong turns can be avoided. If the Tiangong is successful, it will be a significant symbol for the Chinese space industry.”

Though the hardware is based primarily on Russian technology, China says it has enhanced navigation and other systems.

The launch is part of a wider space strategy which has notched up several notable achievements in recent years.

In 2003, China became only the third country to independently put a man – Yang Liwei – in space.

Four years later, it put a satellite – the Chang-e – into lunar orbit and, more aggressively, proved the effectiveness of a satellite-busting rocket.

In 2013, it will collaborate with Russia to send a probe to Mars. Four years after that, the country’s scientists expect to land a lunar rover as a step towards a manned moon landing.

The Tiangong will provide useful preparation for all future missions, according to Ping.

The forward momentum of China’s programme stands in contrast to that of the old space powers. The US mothballed its space shuttle programme in July, when the Atlantis completed its final mission.

Now that Barack Obama has reversed plans for a new manned lunar mission, China is the only country with realistic plans to land humans on the moon.

Such developments could also add to concerns in Washington that China’s space push may be driven my military motives. This is dismissed by Chinese academics.

Jiao Weixin, professor in the school of earth and space at Peking University, said the spirit of space exploration now was different from the past.

“During the cold war, the Soviet Union and the US competed in a space race. Today, the trend is towards peaceful, international co-operation.

“China is involved for scientific reasons and to gain experience. It has no goal of surpassing other countries.”

Different trajectories

After edging out the Soviets and winning the race to land a human on the moon in 1969, the United States has enjoyed more than four decades unchallenged as the world’s dominant force in space. Today’s(Thursday) The launch on Thursday of the first stage of a new Chinese space station could be seen as the beginnings of a shift in that power.

That China has joined the US and Russia as the third nation with the capability of a permanent crewed presence in space is not, in itself, a significant challenge to American supremacy. Nasa launched its first habitable research laboratory, Skylab, in 1973, and even if China’s Tiangong-1 remains safely into orbit after its arrival, it is still likely to be at least another year before its astronauts are able to make any kind of extended-duration stay.

The wider concern of those who follow the US space programme is the converse trajectories the two nations appear to be taking in support of their ambitions in space. China, which has invested millions of dollars in recent years into a burgeoning space programme, now has a flagship piece of hardware already off the launchpad. Nasa currently has no manned launch capability of its own for crewed vehicles followingafter the retirement of the space shuttle fleet this summer. It is a situation that rankles with prominent figures in the US space community, among them Neil Armstrong, the first man on the moon, who last week lambasted the American programme as an embarrassment”embarrassing” that could soon be eclipsed by the achievements of other nations.

“For a country that did so much for so long to achieve a leadership position in space exploration and exploitation, this is viewed by many as lamentably embarrassing and unacceptable,” he told a congressional hearing on the future of space flight. “Nasa leaders enthusiastically assured the American people that the agency was embarking on a new age of discovery. But the termination of the shuttle, the cancellation of existing rocket and spacecraft programmes, the lay-off of thousands of aerospace workers [and] the outlook for American space activity through the next decade is difficult to reconcile with agency assertions.”

Nasa did, earlier this month, announce its vision of a future spacecraft, the Space Launch System, which will be the most powerful rocket ever built and is designed to carry astronauts farther into space than ever before. Its cost, estimated in leaked Nasa calculations at more than $62bn over the next 15 years, could yet prove a barrier and the first unmanned test flights are not scheduled until 2017.

In the shorter term, Nasa is contracting out work that was previously its lifeblood. Cargo, and eventually crew, transportation to the international space station is being tendered to commercial enterprises such as SpaceX and Blue Origin, established respectively by internet entrepreneurs Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos. SpaceX plans its first cargo transfer launch in November. Until commercial spacecraft are deemed safe enough, US astronauts must hitch rides aboard Russia’s Soviet-era Soyuz spacecraft, at a cost of up to $63m per seat.

But the Russian programme is embroiled in its own turmoil after an unmanned Soyuz failed on its way to the international space station last month, and the next manned mission was delayed until November. China’s progress, and uncertainty elsewhere, have led to renewed calls for greater partnership between the world’s space-faring nations, although US co-operation with the Chinese is specifically prohibited by an act of Congress.

“China has the technology but doesn’t have the spaceflight experience that we do,” said Leroy Chiao, a former ISS commander and shuttle astronaut, and advocate for closer ties. “Co-operation is the way forward. You can argue that Nasa and Russia did all this before but China started its programme in 2003 and in eight years has demonstrated more ambitious flights. It has a modern vehicle with sophisticated technology, so this isn’t just a copy of Skylab. It leaves China on the verge of a major step forward.”Copy ends

Richard Luscombe in Miami

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This article titled “Russian satellite missing within hours of takeoff” was written by Tom Parfitt in Moscow, for The Guardian on Thursday 18th August 2011 18.35 UTC

A Russian communications satellite, the biggest to be built in Europe, went missing hours after takeoff on Thursday.

The £146m satellite was sent into orbit by a Proton rocket from the Baikonur cosmodrome in Kazakhstan and disappeared just as flight controllers began to celebrate the launch.

If the Express-A4M satellite is irretrievable it will be a bruising failure for Russia; three navigational satellites for the Glonass global positioning system crashed into the Pacific, off Hawaii, shortly after blasting off in December.

Roscosmos, Russia’s space agency, said the satellite’s Briz-M unit, the engine block responsible for positioning it correctly in high orbit, had fired correctly over four stages but contact was lost before the final firing.

The agency said it had established the location of the engine block but the whereabouts of the satellite remained unknown. “The radio systems are not detecting the satellite in its fixed orbit. There are no signals from the satellite,” a source told Interfax news agency.

The satellite weighed 5.8 tonnes and was fitted with 63 transponders and 10 antennae. It was designed to provide digital television, telephone and internet services across the former Soviet Union.

Space industry sources suggested Russia would turn to Norad, the US-Canadian aerospace defence command, and the Toulouse space centre in France for help in locating the satellite.

The incident is especially embarrassing for Roscosmos after Vladimir Popovkin, head of the agency, said on Wednesday that the organisation would be moving resources away from manned spaceflight.

Popovkin said the satellite launch represented “a change of priorities”. “For us the main thing is becoming the satisfaction of Russia’s demands for satellite information, including communications services and broadcasting.”

The agency said on Thursday it was setting up a commission to investigate the failed launch.

The satellite was jointly built by the Khrunichev centre in Moscow – named after a Soviet-era aviation minister, Mikhail Khrunichev – and Astrium, a Paris-based aerospace company. It was commissioned by the Russian ministry of communications.

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This article titled “US military to launch fastest-ever plane” was written by Alok Jha, science correspondent, for The Guardian on Wednesday 10th August 2011 18.53 UTC

By the time you finish reading this sentence, the Falcon HTV-2, the fastest plane ever built, could have flown 18 miles. It would get from London to Sydney in less than an hour, while withstanding temperatures of almost 2,000C, hotter than the melting point of steel.

At 3pm BST on Thursday , the US Defence Advance Research Projects Agency will launch the Falcon Hypersonic Technology Vehicle 2 on the back of a rocket from the Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. If all goes to plan, engineers will launch the Falcon HTV-2 to the edge of space, before detaching the plane and guiding it on a hypersonic flight that will reach speeds of 13,000mph (about 20 times the speed of sound) on its return to Earth.

The Falcon started life in 2003, part of a US military research project to build a plane that could reach (and potentially deliver bombs to) any part of the world in less than an hour.

The plane has been tested in computer models and wind tunnels, but they can only simulate speeds up to Mach 15 (11,400mph). A real test is the only way to determine if the plane will remain flying at high speeds.

Thursday’s flight will also test the carbon composite materials designed to withstand the extreme temperatures the plane will experience on its skin and also the navigation systems that will control its trajectory as it moves at almost four miles per second.

The design and flight pattern of the plane has been tweaked since an aborted test flight in April last year. Nine minutes into that mission, which succeeded in flying for 139 seconds at Mach 22 (16,700mph), the onboard computer detected an anomaly and ordered the plane to ditch into the ocean for safety reasons.

Unlike most other rocket launches, this one will not be shown live online, though it will be possible to follow the plane’s progress via tweets from @DARPA_News.

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This article titled “Nuclear scare grows with an orange flash and a violent blast” was written by Ian Sample, science correspondent, for The Guardian on Tuesday 15th March 2011 00.44 UTC

Japanese engineers fought to save three reactors from meltdown at the stricken Fukushima 1 power station as they battled another explosion and a series of frustrating setbacks that saw workers yesterday struggle to pump seawater into the reactors in a desperate attempt to cool the overheating nuclear cores and make them safe.

Tuesday began with a fresh explosion which damaged the roof above its overheating reactor 2 and left steam rising from the complex, Jiji news agency said. Early reports suggested that there might have been some damage to the containment vessel after pressure dropped, but there was no immediate word of any damage to the reactor itself, the country’s nuclear safety agency said.

The latest explosion came after a violent blast that destroyed most of the containment building around reactor 3 on Monday, causing debris to fall back inside and on to the structure housing the reactor. The blast was caused by a build up of hydrogen that was produced when superheated steam in the core reacted with zirconium alloy cladding that surrounds the reactor’s fuel rods.

Tepco, the company that operates the power station, said 11 people were injured in the accident, one seriously. A similar explosion blew the top off the reactor 1 building on Saturday morning.

Despite earlier assertions from Tepco that the steel containment vessels surrounding the reactors were undamaged in either of the two earlier explosions, Naoki Kumagai, an official at Japan’s Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency (Nisa), said: “It’s impossible to say whether there has or has not been damage.”

At one point on Sunday emergency cooling at two reactors was suspended because the pools of seawater being pumped in ran dry. Later in the day, a backup pump to a third reactor ran out of fuel, causing water levels to fall so low that the fuel rods were fully exposed.

Officials at Tepco said it believed all three nuclear reactors are likely to have suffered partial meltdowns, though this could mean just one fuel rod or nearly all of them melting within the cores. The reactors are at risk of going into meltdown because although they had shut down, the fuel rods continue to give off heat. Primary and backup power to the cooling systems was knocked out during the massive earthquake and tsunami that struck on Friday.

Ryohei Shiomi, a Nisa official, said reactors 1 and 3 appeared stable for the time being, but that reactor 2, where fuel rods were most exposed, was still a concern.

Water has to cover completely the radioactive fuel rods in the nuclear cores to prevent overheating, but on Monday afternoon water levels dropped substantially in all three reactors, and at one point fully exposed the fuel rods in reactor 2. A spokesman for Tepco said it could not rule out a meltdown at the reactor.

Speaking about the situation at reactor 2, chief cabinet secretary, Yukio Edano, said: “The pump ran out of fuel, and the process of inserting water took longer than expected, so the fuel rods were exposed from the water for a while.”

The decision to pump salty, untreated seawater into the reactors – along with boric acid to dampen down radioactivity – is a vastly expensive last resort that effectively writes-off the nuclear reactors for good. The plants are usually cooled by highly-purified de-ionised water that does not damage delicate components inside. The risk of total meltdown at the plant will fall dramatically over the next few days if engineers can continue to flood the reactors with seawater. The fuel rods will already have lost around 90% of their heat and without further setbacks, the reactors could be cold and rendered safe within a week to 10 days.

But engineers at the power plant face a delicate balancing act because sea water being pumped into the reactors is boiling immediately into steam, which raises the pressure inside them. This has to be vented off before more water can be pumped in, but doing so releases small amounts of radioactive material into the air.

Nisa has already confirmed that caesium-137 and iodine-131 have been released into the atmosphere. These radioactive substances are produced in the core and can contaminate cooling water if fuel rods get hot enough to melt the cladding that surrounds them.

The release of radioactivity has raised health concerns and wider fears of environmental contamination. Monitoring posts to the north-west of the power station recorded radiation levels at 680 microSieverts per hour on Monday, a dose roughly equivalent to four months of natural background radiation. An American warship, the USS Ronald Reagan, detected low levels of radiation at a distance of 100 miles from the Fukushima plant.

Radiation levels have increased in the vicinity of the power station and nearby areas. Those caught in the evacuation zone around Fukushima were given potassium iodide pills to protect against thyroid cancer. Radioactive iodine is easily absorbed by the thyroid, where it can cause tumours, but the pills saturate the gland and obstruct the radioactive form’s absorption. Edano said the release of large amounts of radiation was unlikely.

Under normal conditions, the nuclear reactors produce electricity by using heat from fission reactions in the fuel rods to turn water into steam and drive turbines. Reactors 1 and 2 operate with uranium fuel rods, but reactor 3 uses a mixed oxide fuel, or Mox, which contains plutonium, a highly toxic substance that if released, can linger in the environment for thousands of years. The half life of plutonium is 24,000 years, meaning it takes that long for its radioactivity to drop by half.

Nuclear experts emphasised there are significant differences between the unfolding nuclear crisis at Fukushima and the events leading up to the Chernobyl disaster in 1986. The Chernobyl reactor exploded during a power surge while it was in operation and released a major cloud of radiation because the reactor had no containment structure around it.

At Fukushima, each reactor has shut down and is inside a 20cm-thick steel pressure vessel that is designed to contain a meltdown. The pressure vessels themselves are surrounded by steel-lined, reinforced concrete shells.

“While the material is enclosed in the reactor vessel it is safe, in that it is the same radioactivity that was there in the fuel rods. The issue would come if there is a continued problem to cool down the fuel rods,” said Paddy Regan, a nuclear physicist at Surrey University.

He said the worst case scenario would be “that some of the fission fragments and fuel could be widely dispersed if the vessel was to explode. This seems unlikely at present, so the next worst would likely be ongoing venting of the steam which has built up in the reactors.”

Yukiya Amano, director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), said it was “unlikely that the accident would develop” like Chernobyl. “The Japanese authorities are working as hard as they can, under extremely difficult circumstances, to stabilise the nuclear power plants and ensure safety.”

• The following correction was printed in the Guardian’s Corrections and clarifications column, Thursday 31 March 2011. This aricle said readings at the plant had reached “8,217 microsieverts per hour – described by broadcaster NHK as equivalent to eight times the radiation a person would usually experience in a year” and in a second story in the same issue – 15 March – we said that monitoring posts near the power station had “recorded radiation levels at 680 microsieverts per hour yesterday, a dose roughly equivalent to four months of natural background radiation”. In both cases we compared a rate of dose with an amount of dose, which one reader suggested is not a like-for-like comparison and therefore meaningless. To clarify (we hope): NHK meant that a person who spends one hour in an area where the radiation level is 8,217 microsieverts per hour receives eight times the dose they would usually experience in a year. Our figure of 680 microsieverts over an hour is the dose a person might roughly be expected to receive at the end of four months due to natural background radiation.

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This article titled “George Clooney and Google launch satellite plan to avert Sudan violence” was written by Chris McGreal in Washington, for The Guardian on Wednesday 29th December 2010 20.58 UTC

Google has joined the UN, Harvard University and a pressure group founded by George Clooney to use satellites to scour Sudan for evidence of state-organised violence before next month’s referendum that could see the country split in two.

Clooney said that he had launched the Satellite Sentinel Project to “stop a war before it starts” by warning the government in Khartoum that it would not be able to hide war crimes from the rest of the world, as it did for so long in Darfur, if there is violence in southern Sudan, which is likely to vote on 9 January to secede.

The project plans to reduce the waiting time for satellite images from more than a fortnight to less than 36 hours. The images will be scrutinised by the UN for evidence of mass movements of people, destruction of villages and other indicators of organised violence. The Harvard Humanitarian Initiative will also study the pictures.

The images will immediately be made public. If there is evidence of war crimes, appeals for action will be led in part by the Enough Project, an anti-genocide organisation led by the author and activist John Prendergast.

Clooney and Prendergast said today in a statement that there was a serious threat of violence.

“The government in Khartoum has armed militias in contested bordering regions, the government air force has bombed border areas, and both sides have massed military units and equipment along the hottest border spots,” they said. “These areas have witnessed some of the most deadly conflict in the world since world war two. The former director of national intelligence says that southern Sudan is the place in the world most likely to experience genocide.

“We were late to Rwanda. We were late to the Congo. We were late to Darfur. There is no time to wait.”

The referendum is the result of a 2005 peace deal to end more than two decades of civil war that cost more than two million lives. Sudan’s president, Omar al-Bashir, has committed himself to respecting the result of the oil-rich south’s vote. But there has already been violence amid accusations that the government is funding armed groups opposed to independence. Last week, the US vice president, Joe Biden, called Sudan’s second vice president, Ali Osman Mohmed Taha, to express Washington’s concern about potential violence.

Jonathan Hutson of the Enough Project said that advances in technology had given humanitarian organisations an advantage that should help not only expose violence but prevent it. “This project is leveraging Google map makers open source platform to wage peace. Unlike previous satellite imagery gathering projects which were after-the-fact documentation exercises, this project aims to stop a war before it starts,” he said. “War criminals thrive in the dark. They behave differently when you shine a media spotlight on them, when you give them notice that satellite imagery can be quickly shared with the world. This is an open source public platform for waging peace and this transforms anti-war efforts from now on.”

“Passing over Sudan at any given time are perhaps a dozen commercial satellites that have high resolution images available for purchase. The cost barrier has been the key factor that has limited the effective use of satellite imagery analysis in the human rights field,” Hutson added.

The Sudan initiative is being funded for six months by Not On Our Watch, an organisation co-founded by Clooney and other film stars such as Matt Damon and Brad Pitt. “We want to let potential perpetrators of genocide and other war crimes know that we’re watching, the world is watching,” said Clooney.

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I’m surprised that the HuffPo is so stunned by this. The fact that so many scientists keep flogging the dead horse that is “Climate Change” throws all science in to question for me. Actual science has given way to a belief in left wing orthodoxy.

According to a new Gallup poll cited in the HuffPo piece, only 16% of Americans believe humans evolved with no divine guidance (secular evolution).

But here’s the part of the poll that coastal elites absolutely love. It’s the one piece of raw data that justifies everything they believe about themselves. It’s what separates them from the great unwashed masses. It’s what makes them different from those ignorant, racist, redneck, hillbilly Tea Baggers (cue Glenn Beck with his pipe talking like a Harvard man).

The poll also revealed that beliefs in creationism and evolution are strongly related to levels of education attained. When results are narrowed to those with college degrees, only 37 percent of respondents maintain beliefs in creationism. Meanwhile, the belief in evolution without the aid of God rises to 21 percent.

I have an idea! Maybe liberals should make an Ivy League education mandatory for all Americans. Then nobody will believe in that God junk anymore.

By the way, I’m outraged! That picture is racist. Where’s Al Sharpton? Just kidding.

A medical journal is reporting that an HIV-positive man may have been cured after receiving a stem cell transplant in 2007.

Timothy Ray Brown, an HIV-positive American living in Germany, had leukemia and was undergoing chemotherapy, when he received a transplant of stem cells from a donor carrying a rare, inherited gene mutation that seems to make carriers virtually immune to HIV infection.

Predictably, there’s a caveat to the good news:

…Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institutes of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, who has been studying HIV/AIDS for almost 30 years, said while this is an interesting proof of concept, it’s absurdly impractical.

Read the rest of the story at FoxNews.com.

The UK’s Daily Mail has a great piece today about Global Warming, or rather the lack of it. What we initially read about in the ClimateGate emails has only been confirmed by the latest scientific data. The earth stopped warming about 15 years ago. Scientists know it, but only until recently have begun to admit it.

This inconvenient fact only makes the recent “Climate Change” summit in Cancun, Mexico all the more farcical. Of course, this entire thing was never about the climate to begin with. “Climate Change” is merely the latest vehicle by which to force the distribution of wealth from rich countries to poor countries.

Last week, halfway through yet another giant, 15,000delegate UN climate jamboree, being held this time in the tropical splendour of Cancun in Mexico, the Met Office was at it again.

Never mind that Britain, just as it was last winter and the winter before, was deep in the grip of a cold snap, which has seen some temperatures plummet to minus 20C, and that here 2010 has been the coolest year since 1996.

Globally, it insisted, 2010 was still on course to be the warmest or second warmest year since current records began.

But buried amid the details of those two Met Office statements 12 months apart lies a remarkable climbdown that has huge implications – not just for the Met Office, but for debate over climate change as a whole.

Read carefully with other official data, they conceal a truth that for some, to paraphrase former US VicePresident Al Gore, is really inconvenient: for the past 15 years, global warming has stopped.

I bet Al Gore is glad he made money on this scam while he could. He’s earned more than $100 million preaching a lie since leaving politics.

With every passing week the global warming propaganda machine known as the IPCC is forced to retract another one of their phony Climate Change predictions.

The latest retractions have to do with rising sea levels and the possibility that the movie “The Day After Tomorrow” might come true (seriously).

Alarming predictions that global warming could cause sea levels to rise 6ft in the next century are wrong, it has emerged.

The forecast made by the influential 2007 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which would have seen cities around the world submerged by water, now looks ‘unlikely’.

A Met Office study also rules out the shutdown of the Atlantic Ocean’s conveyor belt, which would trigger Arctic winters in Britain like those seen in the film The Day After Tomorrow.

The new revised bogus numbers are:

the report says the IPCC was right to warn of a sea level rise of up to 2ft by 2100, and that a 3ft rise could happen.

…The new Government funded study, says the worst case scenario is now a one metre (3.3 ft) rise.

This makes me want to sit inside my idling SUV and laugh maniacally. Or you could do what Sen. James Inhoffe did last March.

(image via Hyscience)

This video is creating quite the buzz on the web today. Daredevil climber Drew Bristol descended into a live volcano further than any other human. An ocean of lava rages beneath him as a waves to the camera.