Details of Space Shuttle Columbia crash exposed.

Columbia crew had no way to survive. This was the headline in Wednesday's, December 31, 2008 St. Petersburg Times newspaper. The 400 page report was issued by NASA after almost 5 years after the disaster that occured on February 1, 2003. In short, Columbia's astronauts were quickly doomed and most likely never knew what was happening. The report stated that if certain safety measures had been taken, the crew could haved lived longer, but ultimately the accident was not survivable, the report concludes.

Why weren't the astronauts instructed to take a space walk around the shuttle when it was docked to the International Sace Station and look for any type of damage to the heat absorbing tiles? Wouldn't that safey measure have been more important than the one stated above? When will NASA put the astronauts safety first, ahead of all the other procedures that they conduct? How many more accidents and lives must happen before NASA realizes what Dr Jonathan Clark, a former NASA flight surgeon stated; "I praise NASA's leadership for the report, even though it says, in some ways, you guys didn't do a great job." Incidently, astronaut Laurel Clark, one of the 7 astronats that lost their lives on the Columbia disaster was Dr. Jonathan Clark's wife.

$3.5 billion in NASA contracts sparks private industry.

In a Florida Today article; NASA has awarded $3.5 billion in cargo contracts to two companies in a continued effort to encourage development of a private-sector commercial space industry cabable of providing the agency rockets that can carry passengers to the International Space Station and, eventually, to the moon. Space Exploration Technologies Corp. of Hawthorne, Calif., and Orbital Sciences Corp. of Dulles, Va., will provde a total of 20 flights to the space station.

Wonderful! NASA has just wasted another $3.5 billion of our taxpayers money along with encouraging two more space agencies to continue expanding the ozone hole beyond the cureent 16 million square miles. When will NASA and the other 45 countries space agencies realize that they are aware of ozone depleation, disastrous climatic weather and global warming? They know what they are doing to this planet, but their greed for money is more important than the conservation of this planet. GREED on their part will be the devastation of this planet if we the people don't put a stop to what they are doing. Comment, and I will tell you what we can do to stop them.

More snow , ice vexes travelers in northern states

More snow and ice fell Wednesday, December 24, 2008 in the midwest, where the National Weather Service said up to 4 inches was possible in Chicago. The Northwest faced more snow and sleet early Wednesday, up to 20 inches in the Cascade range. And more snow and ice spread over the entire Northeast. Hundreds of holiday travlers spent the night in the nation's second busiest airport and others faced delayed or canceled flights and highways chocked by snow and ice as storms kept up the assault on all the northern states from Washington to New England.
On December 23, 2008 there were two rockets launched. #1 was a Long March 3A weather satellite launched from Xichang Spaceport in China. #2 was a Bulava SLBM (Submarine Launched Ballistic Missile) From the Russian Navy, launch area was not disclosed. There is a third launch planned for Christmas, December 25, 2008. The launch is a Russian Proton-M/DM-2 from the Baikonur Cosmodrone in Russia, with 3 navagation satellites being deployed. Be prepared for additional violent snow, ice and wind storms throughout our nation and the rest of the world. Three launches in three days, how much more ozone damage can transpire and emit more solar winds and flares into our planet?

Bitter cold,snow and wins sweep nation.

A cold front with winds, of 70 mph, snow and ice hit the state of Washington on Saturday, December 20, 2008. The front continued east through the midwest and into new England. Weather forecasters have issued a warning that another cold front is directly behind the first one. On Monday, December 15, 2008 China launched a Long March 4B Remote Sensing satellite fromTaiyuan spaceport. On Saturday, December 20, 2008 the European Space Agency launched an Ariane SECA COMSAT (Communications Satellite) from Kourou Sapceport in French Guiana located in Northeast section of South America. With these two additional holes poked through the ozone layer letting in large solar winds driving the jet stream berserk. That is what developed the cold fronts with extreme winds, snow and ice.

Obama team wants NASA to account for spending.

An aricle written in the Los Angeles Times on December 19, 2008 stated: When reporters last month questioned why a normal tool bag "dropped" in space by astronaut Heidemarie Stefanyshyn-Piper should have cost $100,000.00, a NASA spokesman replied simply, "Space flight is expensive." But for the incoming administration, that answer is not enough. On a list of 74 questions submitted to the space agency by president-elect Barack Obama's transition team, more than half dealt with budget and spending issues.

I certainly hope that one of the questions by Obama's transition team was; "Where does the money go from all the experiments conducted for companies in outer space weightlessness at a $1,000,000.00 an experiment"? They conduct from 5 to 15 experiments per flight!

A Gloomy Forcast. By New York Times Syndicate-The Economist.

A report on global warming paints a grim picture for some Latin American countries. More destructive hurricanes, shrinking forests, melting glaciers, disappearing animals: the prospective damage to Latin America and the Caribbean from climate change makes for grim reading. A new World Bank report, timed to coincide with a United Nations conference in Poland, tries to put numbers to the potential economic cost. ("Low Carbon, High Growth: Latin American Responses to Climate Change" by Augusto de la Torre, Pablo Fajnzylber and John Nash.) By taking the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's predictions for what the planet might feel like in 2100 and then overlaying data from several thousand farms situated in regions of varing heat and dryness, it is possible to make some informed guesses about what the effect on crop yields, and therefore on GDP, would be if temperatures rose and rainful fell. Some places in the southern cone of Latin America would gain from such a change. But more would lose out: The authors reckon that left unchecked, climate change might cause a fall of 15-20 percent in far revenues by the end of the century. According to another study, this could mean an annual cut in GDP of 0.23 to 0.56 percent. This would worsen rural poverty. It would also entail the shrinking of a number of habitats, whose eventual disappearance would in turn speed up the process of global warming. Four are in the front line: Mexico's Gulf Coast wetlands; the Andean glaciers; parts of the Amazon; and Caribbean coral reefs (they expel tiny algae when sea temperatures rise, which eventually kills them). An increase in malaria in rural areas and dengue fever in cities completes a gloomy picture.

The simple solution to stop all of the above problems from transpiring. Stop or reduce by a significant number the space launchings by NASA, Russia, the European Space Agency an the other 43 countries launching staellites. As I suggested in my book, if all 46 space agencies stopped launches for one year, the ozone hole would close from 10 to 25 pecent. This would reverse the global warming effect.

Ice melting across globe at accelerating rate, NASA says.

Melting across globe at accelerating rate, NASA says
Story Highlights. About 2 trillion tons of ice have melted in Greenland, Antarctica, Alaska since 2003 Lost amount of water could fill up Chesapeake Bay 21 times, NASA scientist says
Most came from Greenland, where losses raised global sea levels .5 mm annually
Scientist says sea levels rising 50 percent faster than 15 years ago
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By Emanuella GrinbergCNN
(CNN) -- Between 1.5 trillion and 2 trillion tons of ice in Greenland, Antarctica and Alaska have melted at an accelerating rate since 2003, according to NASA scientists, in the latest signs of what they say is global warming.
Using new satellite technology that measures changes in mass in mountain glaciers and ice sheets, NASA geophysicist Scott Luthcke concluded that the losses amounted to enough water to fill the Chesapeake Bay 21 times.
"The ice tells us in a very real way how the climate is changing," said Luthcke, who will present his findings this week at the American Geophysical Union conference in San Francisco, California.
NASA's Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment, or GRACE, mission uses two orbiting satellites to measure the "mass balance" of a glacier, or the net annual difference between ice accumulation and ice loss.
"A few degrees of change [in temperature] can increase the amount of mass loss, and that contributes to sea level rise and changes in ocean current," Luthcke said.
The data reflects findings from NASA colleague Jay Zwally, who uses different satellite technology to observe changing ice volume in Greenland, the Arctic and Antarctica.
In the past five years, Greenland has lost between 150 gigatons and 160 gigatons each year, (one gigaton equals one billion tons) or enough to raise global sea levels about .5 mm per year, said Zwally, who will also present his findings at the conference this week.
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GRACE measured that mountain glaciers in the Gulf of Alaska lost about 84 gigatons each year, about five times the average annual flow of the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon, according to NASA.
"Every few extra inches of sea level have very significant economic impacts, because they change the sea level, increase flooding and storm damage," said, Zwally, ICESat Project Scientist. "It's a warning sign."
Melting ice, especially in Greenland and the Arctic, is also thought to contribute to global warming, Zwally said. When the vast ice sheets and glaciers melt, they lose their reflective power, and instead, oceans and land absorb the heat, causing the Arctic waters and the atmosphere to warm faster.
"We're seeing the impacts of global warming in many areas of our own lives, like agriculture," Zwally said.
As an example, he cited the pine beetle infestation of this summer in the forests of Colorado and western Canada.
"They were believed to be spreading because the winter was not cold enough to kill them, and that's destroying forests," he said.
In the 1990s, Greenland took in as much snow and water as it let out, Zwally said. But now, about 15 years later, sea levels are rising about 50 percent faster, making the global climate situation even more unpredictable.
"The best estimates are that sea levels will rise about 18 to 36 inches by the end of the century, but because of what's going on and how fast things are changing, there's a lot of uncertainty," he said.

Just think of what we have to look forward to in the near future. Notice that NASA or any of the other 45 space agencies that are depleating the ozone layer, causing global warming and the melting ice mention why the pace is accelerating. Could it possibly be that they (All 46 agencies) are averaging a launch every 3.7 days? You better believe it.