Russian Stealth Fighter

Well, it appears like Russia has finally developed a Steath fighter jet - something equivalent to the F-22 used by the U.S. Now that this has happened, U.S. policymakers and other assorted bureaucrats are worried that Russia may sell the plane to Venezuela, Iran, Syria, and other unfriendly countries. This topless woman may know the solution to that problem but so do I. Why not develop stealth missiles capable of knocking down stealth fighters?

Solar powered plane

Well, well - someone thought about building a plane powered by sunlight. Solar Impulse is a Swiss company which has just finished its prototype of a plane that will make its maiden voyage in the Spring of 2010. It is built to also fly at night. Figure that one out. Being the very first one, it will be able to carry a single person only - the pilot. It remnds me of the Wright brothers' first test flight. It weighs about 3,500 pounds but its wing span equals that of a big jet plane. I suspect it will glide much of the time. A round-the-world trip is planned for 2012. Now all they have to figure out is how to get it to carry 300 passengers. This topless woman would probably be brave enough to get on it.

Not possible

From a news story on the internet: “CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. – Thunderstorms once again forced NASA to call off the launch of space shuttle Endeavour on Monday, the fifth delay for the space station construction mission. NASA said it would try again Wednesday, after taking a one-day break. In a scene nearly identical to Sunday, launch managers halted the countdown just minutes before Endeavour and seven astronauts were supposed to blast off in the early evening. This time, storms packed with lightning popped up on opposite sides of the launching site, one after the other, close enough to violate NASA's safety rules. Endeavour has been grounded for an entire month now, first by leaks, then stormy weather. This was the third day in a row that thunderstorms prevented Endeavour from blasting off with the final piece of Japan's space station lab.”
Ok, now…. If mankind is to go into outer space some day, he must solve little problems like inconvenient thunderstorms. Even Ann Coulter would agree with me. Please.

Dangerous neighborhood

From a Yahoo! News story: “WASHINGTON – Space shuttle Atlantis is now in a rough orbital neighborhood — a place littered with thousands of pieces of space junk zipping around the Earth at nearly 20,000 mph. There are more pieces of shattered satellites and used-up rockets in this region than astronauts have ever encountered. As soon as the job is complete, the shuttle will scamper to safety - all those tiny projectiles raise the constant threat of a potentially fatal collision. NASA now puts the risk for a catastrophic collision with junk during the mission at 1 in 229 — greater than typical flights to the space station but lower than the agency's initial estimates. The Air Force is tracking more than 19,000 objects in all sorts of orbits — most of it junk. The dirtiest spots are at 525 miles up where a Chinese satellite was destroyed and 490 miles, where an Russian-American satellite collision occurred. And the higher the space junk orbits, the longer it stays aloft because there's even less drag from the ultra-thin atmosphere pulling stuff down. For example, a 4-inch object 490 miles up will stay in orbit for more than a century, Johnson said. Objects between one-tenth of an inch and 4 inches are dangerous enough to cause major and even fatal damage, but cannot be specifically tracked.” So, why are all the green revolution people not saying anything about this? And, we want to travel to Mars? What for? To pollute it? Please.

The end

This is from another story in Yahoo! News: "There is a high probability that the collapse of the United States will occur by 2010," Panarin told dozens of students, professors and diplomats Tuesday at the Diplomatic Academy. Panarin didn't give many specifics on what underlies his analysis, mostly citing newspapers, magazines and other open sources. He also noted he had been predicting the demise of the world's wealthiest country for more than a decade now. But he said the recent economic turmoil in the U.S. and other "social and cultural phenomena" led him to nail down a specific timeframe for "The End" — when the United States will break up into six autonomous regions and Alaska will revert to Russian control. Panarin argued that Americans are in moral decline, saying their great psychological stress is evident from school shootings, the size of the prison population and the number of gay men. Turning to economic woes, he cited the slide in major stock indexes, the decline in U.S. gross domestic product and Washington's bailout of banking giant Citigroup as evidence that American dominance of global markets has collapsed. "I was there recently and things are far from good," he said. "What's happened is the collapse of the American dream." Panarin insisted he didn't wish for a U.S. collapse, but he predicted Russia and China would emerge from the economic turmoil stronger and said the two nations should work together, even to create a new currency to replace the U.S. dollar.” What to do??? Who is Panarin anyway???

Predictions

You probably read this in a Yahoo! News story: PASADENA, Calif. – “An asteroid about the size of one that blasted Siberia a century ago just buzzed by Earth. NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory reported that the asteroid zoomed past Monday morning. The asteroid named 2009 DD45 was about 48,800 miles from Earth. That is just twice the height of some telecommunications satellites and about a fifth of the distance to the Moon. The space ball measured between 69 feet and 154 feet in diameter. The Planetary Society said that made it the same size as an asteroid that exploded over Siberia in 1908 and leveled more than 800 square miles of forest…. The asteroid was only spotted two days ago and at its closest point passed over the Pacific Ocean near Tahiti.” All that damage from an asteroid smaller than my backyard. This is pretty scary, especially if nobody saw it coming until two days before it flew by. What to do???