Ugh, I'm sorry you had the migraine get you up too, Perkins.

Thanks. I hope yours is better too.

A blog: Hot Chicks With Stormtroopers

eta: Johny Depp Pirate Storm Trooper: [link]

eta: Ballerina Stormtrooper: [link]

NASA's plans to return astronauts to the moon are dead. So are the rockets being designed to take them there — that is, if President Barack Obama gets his way.

When the White House releases his budget proposal Monday, there will be no money for the Constellation program that was supposed to return humans to the moon by 2020. The troubled and expensive Ares I rocket that was to replace the space shuttle to ferry humans to space will be gone, along with money for its bigger brother, the Ares V cargo rocket that was to launch the fuel and supplies needed to take humans back to the moon.

There will be no lunar landers, no moon bases, no Constellation program at all.

In their place, according to White House insiders, agency officials, industry executives and congressional sources familiar with Obama's long-awaited plans for the space agency, NASA will look at developing a new "heavy-lift" rocket that one day will take humans and robots to explore beyond low Earth orbit. But that day will be years — possibly even a decade or more — away.

AAAAAAARRRRRRRRGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHH!!!! Constellation was *already* looking at a decade + to get us back to the Moon and beyond LEO! Fuck! Fucking short-sighted shit-brained Earth-bound limited thinking fucking fucker fucks!

The first thing Obama's done that truly just disappointed the living shit out of me.

I hope yours is better too.

It's so not. I will be in ER in the wee hours of tomorrow morning, I fear.

I assumed it was a takeoff of the Bengals' "Who Dey?"

Nope. (thieving Cincinnatians, we hates them, precious)

Well, we have a beer called Hudy (short for Hudepohl, the brewery) Delight (which is not so much a delight), so I assumed "Who Dey" was an illiterate takeoff of Hudy.

"WhoDat's gonna beat dem Saints?"

Lord, that's worse than "Who Dey." (To my wordnerd ears. I'm sure football fans of both teams adore their respective versions.)

I have to stop typing "Dey," because it hurts my brain.

I am clearly no kind of a sports fan at all.

ION, Getting closer to practicable fusion.

Construction will also be underway this year the fusion reactor ITER in France. If it is successful, the engineering knowledge will used for the follow-up DEMO reactor that will be a prototype commercial reactor putting power on the grid. The estimated date to have DEMO producing energy is 2040. There are a lot of ifs in there, but there are plans to have commercial reactors in the latter part of the century.

The Lawrence Livermore effort is a different approach than ITER and DEMO, so we got two shots at fusion power coming up.

The moon cancellation was a long time coming. For various reasons, it really looked like a boondoggle.

moon cancellation

This prhase by itself made me do a double-take. Like, are we talking Chairface Chippendale, or Death Star at full capacity?

(KaBOOM.)

Hah. Oops, left out a word there...

Heh. Maybe "moon cancellation" means we'll stop making payments on the moon, resulting in it being repossessed.