One Man's Trash is Another Man's Trash

Space News
The crew of the space station had to take shelter in the emergency Soyuz TMA-13 lifeboat spacecraft to duck from a piece of trash. The piece, as big around as your baby finger was part of a spent motor used to send satellites into a higher geosynchronous orbit. It's only going to get worse as old space junk and new junk from the recent satellite collision spreads all around.

Virgin Galactic has been making test flights of their WhiteKnightTwo mothership, which will take SpaceShipTwo to a high altitude, where they will separate and SpaceShipTwo will go even higher to a suborbital altitude. There are so many people wanting to go into space that if they could only turn an economy flight into a garbage collection run. Imagine paying to ride the back of the garbage truck.

Discovery
The Discovery space shuttle was delayed again, new date of launch is set for March 15. The shuttle has a badly needed part for the station urine recycler which keeps breaking. You don't suppose that one of the crew members is sabotaging it on purpose. A future French astronaut was quoted as saying, "I bring my own Perrier.” I am reminded of the movie 'Dark Star' where all the recycled food started tasting like chicken salad sandwich.

Obama Fiddles, Rome Burns

Nero plays with his health care system while Rome burns. Is health care going to pull us out of this bad economy? It’s only going to pull us further down. Why doesn’t Obama go on another vacation everything does much better when he's on one? Old mother Hubbord has health care, but no cupboard to even put a bone in. And the required senior citizen center she is made to live in won’t allow dogs.
Meanwhile, back in space, the launch windows are getting smaller because of satellite space junk. Launching into space is like carrying an open can of tuna fish down a flight of stairs in a house full of cats.
The space shuttle Discovery and Glory (a solar radiation and airborne particles satellite, which measures reflected and trapped sunlight) were delayed not only for space junk, but also because of the Carbon-waste-of-money satellite crashing. What kind of carbon footprint did that make?
Archeology magazine March/April 2009 had copious quantities of articles about the bad effects of global warming on archeology sites. Since when are archeologists weather scientists? One article in particular really eroded my epidermis, was one called ‘World Roundup’ by Samir S. Patel. It stated that man had created the Little Ice Age by bringing smallpox to the new world and killing the inhabitants, thus allowing forest growth to encroach on cultivated land, sucking the carbon out of the air. The Little Ice Age started earlier than Sam’s time period (1550-1750), it was about 1315-1850. In all honesty does he really think man caused the Little Ice Age? On the protective mailing cover of the magazine it said ‘This is your Last Issue’, well, I certainly hope so.
Global warming isn’t here and never happened, get over it.

The Sky is Falling

Space junk is colliding over our heads. Two satellites smashed into each other, a Russian (Kosmos-2251) and an Iridium communications satellite. They broke into thousands of pieces, only 600 pieces are trackable. The debris field is spreading and may have a cascade affect on other satellites including the Hubble telescope. I’m waiting with stooped shoulders for the impact on the ground, “Please, not my head.”
Conspiracy
Suppose the Russians were conducting a test to determine if an old satellite could be used to knock out another satellite, or maybe wipe out communications to a certain area in order to perform some covert ops. Not only am I afraid of space junk, but evil ex-KGB spies. The satellite Iridium-33, is also used as backbone communications by big banks and other financial institutions. Bailout coincidence? It could be as simple as the satellite driver was merely texting.
Quark
There was a TV series back in 1977 called ‘Quark’, where the job of the astronauts was to collect space garbage in a large ‘United Galaxy Sanitation Patrol’ spacecraft. It was canceled after the first season. Maybe we should bring it back in reality. Send a garbage collector astronaut up with two beautiful double mint twins, Betty 1 and Betty 2 (clones). Where they could be driving around in orbit, picking up the trash and fighting the evil Gorgons.