EXCLUSIVE: Comey Day: ‘First Trump Russia Arrests Possible’ Thursday

I hope this is true!

Patribotics

Two separate sources with links to the intelligence community say that the first arrests in the criminal and counter-intelligence probe will shortly take place, possibly as soon as Thursday, May 11th.

Following the unconstitutional dismissal of FBI Director James Comey, which Donald Trump both explicitly linked to his own investigation for  criminal collusion in Russia’s hacking of the American election, US and State Attorneys General are, intelligence sources say, about to make their move.

Sources confirm the exclusive reporting of Claude Taylor on Twitter that the majority of sealed indictments have been handed down in the Southern District of New York, with four sealed indictments in the Eastern District of Virginia. CNN – while wrongfully claiming an exclusive on both Taylor’s original news breaking and the first mainstream reporter to cover the news, Keith Olbermann – nonetheless confirmed last night, Tuesday, May 9th, that subpoenas were issued from the Eastern…

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Mars And The Mars Generation

Reviews: Mars and The Mars Generation by Jeff Foust Monday, May 8, 2017 Comments (2) Mars Blu-Ray/DVD, 2017 331 minutes The Mars Generation directed by Michael Barnett 97 minutes This week in Washington, Explore Mars hosts its annual Humans To Mars Summit, a conference about, as the name suggests, human exploration of the Red Planet. The conference includes its usual talks by NASA officials, including acting administrator Robert Lightfoot, and technical presentations about various ways to get humans to Mars. “Making Mars” is almost a condensed version of the series itself, with scenes from the shows intermixed with behind-the-scenes elements and the various talking heads, for those without the attention to go through six hours of programming. There will also, though, be some examination of the cultural aspects of Mars exploration. A panel Wednesday afternoon will look at “Media, SciFi, and the Exploration of Mars,” while one Tuesday afternoon will examine the relationship between Mars and Hollywood. That panel will include actors Ben Cotton and Clementine Poidatz, who starred in the National Geographic drama/documentary miniseries Mars last year. That miniseries is now available on DVD and Blu-Ray for those who missed the series when it aired last fall, or who just want to see it again. That series, of course, has been extensively reviewed here (see “Red zeitgeist: popular entertainment and the settlement of Mars (part 3)”, The Space Review, January 16, 2017). If you liked, or didn’t like, the series when it was broadcast, the discs won’t change your minds. The Blu-Ray release includes two discs, each with three episodes from the miniseries, plus a third with about two hours of extras. They include “Making Mars,” a 45-minute show about the making of the series and the science and technology of going to Mars. The Mars exploration aspects include a variety of experts, from Neil deGrasse Tyson to Robert Zubrin to astrobiologist Chris McKay. It is almost, in some respects, a condensed version of the series itself, with scenes from the shows intermixed with behind-the-scenes elements and the various talking heads, for those without the attention to go through six hours of programming. The extras in the Blu-Ray release includes other behind-the-scenes featurettes and interviews. In addition, the extras include “Before Mars,” a half-hour “prequel” about Hana and Joon Seung, the twins from the series, as teenagers in 2016. Also appearing at the conference Tuesday evening is Abigail Harrison, better known as “Astronaut Abby.” She is not an astronaut, despite the nickname, but rather an “aspiring astronaut” currently in college and who founded a nonprofit organization, The Mars Generation, for those young people who see themselves as the generation that will set foot on Mars. The Mars Generation is also the title of a documentary, now available on Netflix, that includes Harrison and other young men and women with similar dreams. The film follows a group of them attending Space Camp in Huntsville, Alabama, as they go through a series of exercises and projects. The group—male and female, but nearly all white—have a shared desire to explore Mars, with some even expressing the willingness to die there. Interspersed with the vignettes of life at Space Camp is a history of NASA’s human spaceflight program, from the beginning of the Space Age through the shuttle program and future plans. The documentary includes interviews with a wide range of people, including science communicators (Tyson, Michio Kaku, Bill Nye), current and former government officials and politicians (former NASA administrator Charles Bolden, former White House science advisor John Holdren, and Sen. Bill Nelson), and current and former astronauts, among others. “People say my generation is the Mars Generation, but we’re not at this rate,” said one teenaged Space Camper. Much of the documentary follows a familiar trajectory, recounting the Apollo program and the missed opportunity immediately thereafter to move on to Mars, setting back the advance of the space frontier by decades. Jeffrey Kluger, the Time magazine journalist who writes frequently about space, argues in the film that, if we had followed Wernher von Braun’s plan from the late 1960s, we could have had people on Mars in the early 1980s. (Never mind that such plans faced technical and fiscal challenges that made them infeasible on anything like that schedule, had the Nixon Administration elected for some reason to pursue them.) If only, some people in the film lament, NASA had a budget more like it did during the Apollo program. Then, after a discussion of NASA’s current plans to build the Space Launch System and Orion as part of plans to go to Mars, the film changes course. “We’re building the SLS, but at the rate we’re going it won’t be done until I’m 40 or 50,” lamented one teenaged Space Camper, injecting a dose of fiscal reality or undue pessimism, depending upon your point of view. “People say my generation is the Mars Generation, but we’re not at this rate.” The last part of the documentary shifts to commercial ventures, in particular SpaceX, as a means of reducing the cost of space access and carrying out Mars plans in cooperation with, or even in place of, NASA. That includes footage from Elon Musk’s unveiling of his Mars mission architecture last year and scenes of Falcon 9 first stage landings (although not the first reuse of a Falcon 9 first stage from March.) It is reminiscent of the first episode of the Mars miniseries, whose documentary segments focused heavily on SpaceX. Those Space Campers with visions today of walking on Mars in 20 years might well be the Mars Generation—but the same could be said of those who attended Space Camp 10, 20, or 30 years ago: Mars has been the long-term destination for human spaceflight for decades, always just a few decades years away. Former astronaut Don Thomas, interviewed near the end of the film, was pleased that kids today had the same interest in spaceflight as he did as a kid watching the early Mercury flights. In other words, the kids are all right. Perhaps that’s the lesson of The Mars Generation: that the teenagers of today—Generation Z, as some have named that age cohort—are still interested in space, like the Millennials, Gen Xers, and Baby Boomers that preceded them, despite decades of broken promises of when we would get to Mars. The passion for Mars remains strong, even as the will and ability for humans to actually go there remains uncertain. Jeff Foust (jeff@thespacereview.com) is the editor and publisher of The Space Review, and a senior staff writer with SpaceNews. He also operates the Spacetoday.net web site. Views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author alone. Follow the discussion Comments (2) Dashboard | Edit profile | Logout Logged in as jacksmars Sort by: Date Rating Last Activity +1 Dwayne Day· 12 hours ago I reviewed the National Geographic series twice: http://www.thespacereview.com/article/3120/1 http://www.thespacereview.com/article/3148/1 I thought that the documentary segments were excellent, and I liked the way that they supported the drama segments. But I thought that the drama segments were generally weak, hindered by poor acting, some bouncy chronology in the early episodes, and some hit-or-miss storytelling. As I noted in one of my reviews, in “The Martian” you immediately liked Matt Damon’s character and you wanted him to live. In “Mars,” you didn’t really care who lived or died, so the stakes were much lower. Report Reply +3 Paul_Scutts74p· 11 hours ago Unfortunately, what really spoilt the “Mars” mini-series for me was the “Hollywood” drama treatment that it received, e.g. critical failure of retro-thrust engine control, lack of power generation redundancy, single “door” leading to outside atmosphere etc., the same way that they spoilt “The Martian” – the perceived need to “dumb it down” for the masses and, in the case of “Mars”, to make it “exciting” by introducing (unnecessary) drama and conflict. Report Reply Post a new comment Posting as jacksmars (Logout) Submit Comment Subscribe to None Replies All new comments Home

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The Mars New Year

https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-time-reference-for-the-new-year-on-the-planet-Mars/answer/Gerry-Williams-4

Britain’s Incredible Sabre Engine Converts From A Ram Jet To A Real Rocket Engine..Get Ready FOr Orbital Space Planes

A space engine that could make flying into orbit commonplace Britain’s ‘rocketeers’ move closer to turning a near 30-year dream into reality Read next Engine could boost UK’s space ambitions Share on Twitter (opens new window) Share on Facebook (opens new window) Share on LinkedIn (opens new window) Email4 Save YESTERDAY by: Peggy Hollinger, Industry Editor The tiny metal tubes that sit at the heart of the Sabre engine seem too fragile to bear the weight of Britain’s space ambitions. With walls half the thickness of a human hair, they will snap if bent too far.  Laid in sheets of overlapping spirals at the front of the engine they are the conduits of a unique air cooling system that could one day make flying to space and back again as commonplace as taking a flight from London to New York.  On the shop floor of Oxfordshire-based Reaction Engines, Simon Hanks, head of advanced manufacturing, holds up one of the tubes, hardly wider than a piece of string. “What we do with this, to turn it into something like that,” — he points to the pre-cooler that can chill air from 1,000 degrees Celsius to minus 150 degrees in one 100th of a second — ‘that is the magic’.”  Reaction Engines has spent almost 30 years getting that magic to work, developing an engine concept that combines both conventional jet engine technology and rocket propulsion. Founded in 1989 by a group of engineers known as the “three rocketeers”, Alan Bond, Richard Varvill and the late John Scott-Scott gave up their day jobs to pursue their dreams of space travel. This is the year that their dream begins to become reality. The company on Thursday announced plans to invest £10m to build its first proper ground test facility at Westcott, which for 70 years has been the home of British rocket research. This is a milestone development, one that marks the end of the experimental phase and the start of proving the Sabre concept.  “It is a big moment in the programme, says Mark Ford, head of propulsion engineering at the European Space Agency, which is administering some of the UK’s £60m investment in Sabre technology. “The stopwatch has started now. This is where we prove all the principles that Reaction has been saying. When that is done we can say this is very much a new type of engine.”  The Sabre engine was conceived by the Three Rocketeers in tandem with a space plane, Skylon, to take an aircraft from earth to orbit and back again in a single stage, with no parts jettisoned in flight. However, under Mark Thomas, chief executive since 2015, the company will focus on the engine and move towards its ultimate goal of single-stage-to-orbit propulsion in steps. This means developing an intermediate solution to make the first stage of traditional two-stage launches more efficient. 1. Atmospheric air enters the engine and is pre-cooled by passing through a heat exchanger. 2. The resulting energy is transferred into a helium loop that powers engine components, reducing fuel consumption. 3. The cooled air is now compressed without becoming so hot it destroys the engine. 4. Some of this compressed air is burnt with liquid hydrogen in the pre-burner, which adds more heat to the helium loop as it drives the compressor and hydrogen pump. 5. The rest of the air is burnt with the pre-burner exhaust in the thrust chambers. 6. Excess hydrogen not burnt in the main engine is bled to the ramjet burners where it is burnt with excess air to create extra thrust. Reaction has also cut the size of the engine under development by three-quarters and brought in BAE Systems, which injected £20.6m in exchange for a 20 per cent stake. The impetus is a rising demand for lower cost re-usable satellite launch systems. Euroconsult, a global consulting company, estimates that some 9,000 satellites will be launched into orbit in the 10 years to 2025, against fewer than 1,500 in the previous decade.  The advantage of scaling back ambitions in the near term, Mr Thomas says, is that this market can be accessed more quickly and the initial costs of development are significantly lower. Now capable of being used in modular scaleable configurations, the technology can also be applied to a greater range of sectors to help generate revenue earlier. “Single stage to orbit, full re-usable systems are the ideal state, the Holy Grail,” he says from the company’s headquarters at the Culham Science Centre near Abingdon. “But there has to be something between the two. Single stage to orbit is still on the road map. “But we have pushed the horizon out slightly further, partly to enable us to exploit these earlier opportunities that we have seen through dialogue with government and industry.”  1. The centre body moves forward, closing off the air intake and shutting down the compressor. 2. Oxygen is now supplied to the engine from the internal tank rather than externally. 3. Heat from the rocket pre-burner exhaust drives the fuel pumps and thrust is created in the same way by . . . 4. . . . burning liquid oxygen and pre-burner exhaust products in the thrust chambers. Industry experts say Reaction’s strategy make sense — especially for a concept as ambitious as the Sabre engine. Reaction “is the only one in town doing this type of engine”, says Phil Smith of US-based Bryce Space and Technology consultants. “This iterative process is a very wise way to go. It demonstrates a maturity in the industry that didn’t exist before.” Rather than focusing on a goal that might fall victim to funding constraints, Reaction is seeking to demonstrate the utility of its innovation in more immediate ways, he says.  Meanwhile, the Westcott facility is only the first of several milestones this year. While the foundations are being laid, Reaction will start building its first demonstrator engine to be fired up in the new test centre in 2020. Later this year the pre-cooler will be tested under the same intense temperature conditions that it will experience in hypersonic flight.  To gain access to a hypersonic wind tunnel capable of generating the necessary airflows of five times the speed of sound or more, Reaction is talking to the US government, which is interested in the technology for military use and for its space programmes. The US Air Force Research Lab has validated the concept and told the Financial Times that it was “keeping an eye on [the] Sabre ground-testing progress”.  A US partnership will bring new funding to a programme likely to cost billions before it is actually flown on the wing of an aircraft — a milestone at least a decade away. It could also open up a vast new market to Britain’s most promising space start-up.  Engine could boost UK’s space ambitions Play video “US government interest and funding . . . could be, strategically, very important for us and for the UK,” says Mr Thomas. “We see it as a strategic objective.”  Yet, working with the US government may also raise concerns that the UK is giving away cutting edge technology for others to exploit.  Mr Thomas insists, however, that Reaction is fully aware of the need to protect the benefits of its innovation for the UK. “We have to assure ourselves that we are not going to leak technology or know-how through that activity,” he says.  In the meantime, Reaction is hoping its pre-cooling technology will draw interest from sectors such as commercial aerospace, power generation or automotive. It could launch a new product as early as next year, says Tom Scrope, finance director. “Some of the institutional investors have expressed an interest that if we come up with a proposition to spin out technology on a non-competing basis they would look to fund that on a standalone basis,” says Mr Scrope. “We are looking to monetise this technology in the nearer term.”  The ‘Three Rocketeers’: The brains behind the technology that could revolutionise flying into space – Alan Bond, left, Richard Varvill and the late John Scott-Scott in a photograph taken at the start of their journey The challenge for Reaction will be to do that while maintaining its focus on the longer term goal of single stage to orbit, which promises to put Britain at the forefront of a space industry that could be worth some £400bn by 2030. The surviving Rocketeers are confident that the new strategy will not jeopardise their original dream. “The size we are looking to demonstrate is right in the sweet spot of a number of applications,” says Mr Varvill, today Reaction’s chief engineer. “If we think of [Sabre] as a module then we are still on the road to Skylon.” Sabre: the ‘Holy Grail’ in space technology Researchers have spent decades trying to crack the problem of how to fly from earth to space and back again, writes Peggy Hollinger. But it took a combination of rocket and nuclear science to make the breakthrough that is now drawing interest from around the world in Reaction Engines’ Sabre technology. “It was pretty clear that the rocket needed a bit of a leg up and the only place to get that was from the Earth’s atmosphere,” says Alan Bond, one of Reaction Engines’ three founders. “But the [speed] you get out of conventional jet engines isn’t enough. Somewhere in 1982 . . . I realised that a bit of theory I had used on nuclear engines 10 years before could actually help. So the hybrid air-breathing rocket engine came into existence.” The engine combines jet and rocket technologies thanks to its unique pre-cooler, which extracts heat from air flowing in at high speeds of up to Mach 5 — several times the speed of sound. This enables it to be used by the engine, which then uses the heat energy to power a turbocompressor. When at the edge of the atmosphere, the engine switches into rocket mode, using liquid oxygen to break through into orbit. Unlike partially re-usable launchers being developed by the likes of SpaceX of the US, Sabre does not need to carry large quantities of liquid oxygen, and will not have to discard stages of the craft during flight. It could be what the industry describes as the “Holy Grail” — a single stage to orbit system.

Would Humans Born On Mars Be Taller Than Earthlings?

Would Humans Born On Mars Grow Taller Than Earthlings? :   If we ever manage to overcome the fertility and sex troubles of space , we’ll probably be popping out little humanoid children on other planets. But our little tykes might not stay little for very long. On Earth we experience the steady hand of gravity at 1 g force constantly throughout our lifetimes. On other planets in our solar system, that’s just not possible. Researchers are working on ways to make artificial gravity possible in order to make long flights easier on human bodies. According to NASA, most astronauts grow about 2 inches while they’re in space because the reduced gravity causes the fluid between vertebrae to expand. They lose the height within 10 days of returning to Earth’s crushing gravity. Because of the growth, NASA uses space suits that have extra room to accommodate the additional height. (You also grow taller when you sleep : As you lie in bed, gravity pushes you down and elongates your spine enough so that when you wake up you’re usually about half an inch taller than the previous night.) Grab those Martians for your basketball team Mars settlement-proponent Robert Zubrin has theorized that children born on other planets with lower gravity, like Mars, which has just one-third of Earth’s gravitational pull would in fact grow taller by a few inches than they would have on Earth. While genes inherited from their parents wouldn’t change, the spine could elongate more than on Earth. Fortunately, Martian kids born in a low-g environment wouldn’t suffer from the muscle mass and bone problems that long-flight astronauts do. Unfortunately, the biggest possible problem with your Galactic Globetrotters may surface if low-gravity-born humans tried to return to Earth. They’d experience three times their home gravity and could suffer serious bone problems. For example, one NASA scientist, Al Globus, gives an example of someone who weighs 160 pounds. If I went to a 3g planet, the equivalent of moving from Mars to Earth, I would weigh almost 500 pounds and would have great difficulty getting out of bed, Globus said. For children raised on the moon or Mars, attending college on Earth will be out of the question. Click here to Reply or Forward 22.62 GB (22%) of 101 GB used Manage Terms – Privacy Last account activity: 0 minutes ago Details