2.04.2005
Friday Flybys (vol. 3)
And as if to keep up with NASA's well-honed and ever-popular family friendly image, the European Space Agency now weighs in with its own Web site for kids.
But get serious grownups, especially grownup space lawyers, and dip into an archive of The European Centre for Space Law's Newsletter. (all in pdf)
And for free access to space surveillance data from the U.S. Government, troll the same data (with, presumably, the same latency) that has been provided for years by NASA Orbital Information Group's (OIG) site, now on Space-Track.org (where yes, the government says it is watching what you take. See, the warning: "You should have no expectation of privacy. By continuing, you consent to your keystrokes and data content being monitored." Fair enough.)
Now despite those incessant rumors, we still have no merger in the nation's daring young satellite radio industry. Of course, on Dec. 20 the nation's two satellite radio companies, XM and Sirius, earned listing on the NASDAQ 100 Index. Isn't two always better than one?
Indeed. Even Motley Fool is talking its silly hat off about space investing.(Thanks, MC.)
Finally, President Bush made no mention of space in his State of the Union address this week. A shame, because there was more of space to mention, now that NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory has discovered two huge intergalactic clouds of diffuse hot gas that may contain "the long-sought missing matter - about half of the atoms and ions in the Universe." (Not dark matter, just ordinary baryons, mind you.) Which naturally means more places to go and things to see this weekend. Ad astra!