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I don't watch much television that doesn't involve balls, pucks, and some method of keeping score, but couldn't resist tuning in to about five minutes of the Emmys last night. The only person I recognized in the time I was...

The Utah State Fair website has some flipping sweet ads staring Napoleon Dynamote and his friend Pedro. Do you see any sasquatches? Hat Tip to Lone Prairie....

It turns out many of the horror stories coming out of New Orleans in the wake of Katrina were, well, false. It seems the claims of social breakdown were highly exaggerated. I wait patiently for the media to correct itself....

I caught just a bit of former FEMA head Mike Brown in front of a House committee that is investigating what went wrong with Katrina relief. I must say watching Brownie in front of these jerks is like watching Florida...

How does the old saying go about wherever the beautiful women are, so too is the revolution? If that's the case, we're winning. The exact wording of the phrase escapes me, and after visiting the link I think you'll see...

From NewsMax: Yesterday's anti-war rally in Washington, D.C., is being hailed as the biggest since the halcyon protest days of the Vietnam war - a claim that seems to surface every time the anti-war left gets together en-masse. Leaving the...

I'll be out all day tomorrow, as I'm headed to Gering for some sort of a state Republican Party "strategy session." I personally wasn't invited, but am attending with someone who was. If there's anything of note blog wise, I...

Going Up?...all the way to Geosychronous Orbit

A couple of articles on a concept found in science fiction from Arthur C. Clarke and others: a tethered orbital elevator system! At first glance if one is unfamiliar with the concept it sounds like something from a hallucination - but the physics works, and with recent new developments in materials technology, the means are also now available.

The big advantage: CHEAP cost to orbit, especially compared to rocketry. Check these articles out: one from this weeks Sunday (London) Telegraph, and the other from none other than the big gorilla of the blogosphere hisself: Glenn "Instapundit" Reynolds writing on Tech Central Station.

Click on image to enlarge. (Image from liftport.com)

Stairway to heaven

The race is on to build the first "space elevator' - long dismissed as science fiction - to carry people and materials into orbit along a cable thousands of miles long.

In a significant step, American aviation regulators have just given permission for the opening trials of a prototype, while a competition to be launched next month follows in the wake of the $10 million (£5.6 million) "X Prize'', which led to the first privately developed craft leaving the Earth's atmosphere, briefly, last year.

Folks, this isn't pie in the sky conceptualizing - it's going into the engineering phase - that's about as concrete as it gets!

Space Program: Looking Up

I've written here in the past about NASA's work on space elevators, and on the new leaner, meaner, prize-oriented approach favored by NASA Administrator Mike Griffin. Now there are some signs of real progress on a number of fronts. As I noted earlier, NASA was offering prizes for space elevator research. That's still going on, but there are some new studies suggesting that space elevators may be closer to practicality than previously thought.

Indeed!

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