Opinion: Time to prepare for a lunar land rush.

With China, India, Japan and the U.S. all planning to send astronauts to the moon by 2020, the lunar landscape could see something of a traffic jam, says author Michio Kaku in a Wall Street Journal op-ed. "WE could get a bottleneck on the moon, he writes, "with manned and unmanned probes from several countries whizzing around it from different directions." With the Outer Space Treaty now more than 40 years old, Kaku says now is the time to rethink limits and protocols, "before national rivalries and tensions heat up as we approach 2020."
NOTE! Notice that the Russian Space Industry was not mentioned as a country planning to send their cosmonauts to the moon. The reason was that back in 1960's when NASA said they had landed on the moon, the Russian's said they would not attempt to send their spaceship & cosmonauts to the moon for fear of the radiation destruction when crossing through the Van Allen Radiation belts. To all of the countries mentioned above that want to explore the moon. Take care of this planet that we can all live on rather than launch more spacecrafts to explore the moon (where no one can live), those launches will enlarge the Ozone hole, devastate crops, increase melanoma cases and eventually destroy this beautiful planet.

Experts warn of growing collision threat in space

Defense News article on June 10, 2009 stated "Trackers of Orbiting Junk", There are 19,000 pieces of debris larger than a softball orbiting the Earth. They travel at about 17,000 miles per hour, fast enough for a relatively small piece of junk to destroy a satellite or even the Space Shuttle. There are 300,000 pieces of debris the size of a marble or larger according to Paul Graziani, CEO of Analytical Graphics, Exton, PA. With 2,200 additional satellite launches scheduled over the next five years, Graziani says he expects to see at least 10 more major collisions in space.
Note that nothing was mentioned about one of these pieces of space junk hitting the International Space Station, there would go $10 billion down to Earth, plus the lives of the astronauts within. They also did not mention that the 2,200 launches over a period of five years (60 months) would average out to a launch every day of the year, the current launches now average one every 2.7 days. What will be the size of the Ozone hole be after that 5 year period, 22 million square miles? We are at 17 million square miles currently. Why increase Global Warming, Climatic Weather Disasters and Ozone Depletion to a faster pace? The World's Space Agencies need to realize the damage they are doing rather than the money thay will make with these 2,200 launches. STOP all these launches and SAVE this planet.

Harris Corp. wins $736 million data center contract for weather satellites.

An article in the Orlando Sentinel newspaper on 5/27/09 stated that Harris Corp. could earn as much as $ 736 million under a National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) contract to build data processing systems for advanced weather satellites. The Lockheed Martin-built satellites, scheduled to launch beginning in 2015, will use advanced sensor technology to provide meteorologists with up to 20 times more weather data."NOAA's satellites are a crucial tool for weather forecasters and scientists, saving lives and property and helping us understand our changing climate," said Commerce Secretary Gary Locke. "This award will ensure NOAA remains on the cutting edge in satellite technology."

More weather satellite launchings will create additional ozone depletion as well as more space junk orbiting our planet. Edward O'Lenic, Chief, Operations Branch NOAA-NWS-Climate Prediction Center recently stated "Meteorolsists can predict the weather accurately for 1-2 days, any predictions after that would be inaccurate." With all the thousands of weather satellites currently orbiting the earth, meteorologists can not predict the weather any better today than they could 40 years ago, before all the weather satellite launchings. Why waste an additional $736 million?
The reason why is for companies like Harris Corp. and Lockheed Martin to make more money, back to the word, GREED!