North Korea warns that military forces will respond if UN condemns it for ship sinking

It appears to me that North Korea is doing everything possible to threaten war with South Korea and the United States. They must be under the assumption that the closer they can get us to an "act of war" declaration, then the American people will cry uncle and submit to whatever demands the little weasel Kim Jung il thinks up for the moment. Maybe, but I don't think that the USA will walk away from the North's declarations and I am pretty sure that this country and Iran need to be met head on in the coming months or years. ... lakotahope

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AP

June 15: South Korean Marines work along the fence on Baengnyeong Island, South Korea, near the border with North Korea.

UNITED NATIONS

UNITED NATIONS (AP) — North Korea is warning that its military forces will respond if the U.N. Security Council questions or condemns the country over the sinking of a South Korean navy ship — an act it vehemently denies.

North Korea's U.N. Ambassador Sin Son Ho told a news conference Tuesday there is "a touch-and-go situation that war may break out at any time" because of South Korean accusations that the North torpedoed the ship and killed 46 sailors.

Sin accused South Korea and the United States of cooking up the accusation against the North and demanded that a military investigation team from Pyongyang be permitted to go to the site of the sinking, which the South has refused to allow.

Oil Shale in Abundance, BUT!

800 Billion Barrels of Oil? Awesome, but the techniques to recover oil from this shale need to be examined as it would really destroy much of this land and leave it looking like the moon. If the companies that get their hands on this acreage would rehabilitate the land after they destroy the top layers, then I would be more than willing to consider such a proposal as shale oil recovery.

We need to do something such as developing hydrogen technology as a major supplier of our countries fuel use. 30% to 55% of our total usage should be alternative fuels, which will double in cost, but eventually, it would enable the U.S. to have unlimited fuel that is already in production for the time that will certainly come, when oil is finished as a power source for the world....lakotahope

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From Consumerenergyreport.com posting

Posted by JAguilar on Thursday, April 29, 2010

Oil locked in shales situated on Federal lands in the Rocky Mountains are not likely to be tapped any time soon.

“I don’t know when we’ll see commercial development on public lands,” Steve Black, counsel for Interior Secretary announced at the Unconventional Fuels Conference. “It’s an industry that is not ready for prime time.”

The Green River Formation in the Rockies reportedly holds the largest bed of shale oil in the world.

A 2005 study by the Rand Corporation estimated that sedimentary rock in the corner where Utah borders Colorado and Wyoming called the Green River Formation contains an untapped 800 billion barrels. That’s three times the size of Saudi Arabia’s oil reserves.

World-renowned geologist Walter Youngquist called the oil beneath the Green River Formation, “a national treasure.”

Nevertheless, in February 2009, Salazar scrapped land leases designed to enable oil developers to tap oil from 1.9 million acres of the range, saying “I am withdrawing that Jan. 14 solicitation because in my view it was a midnight decision, and it was flawed.”

Fuel developers allege that the Obama administration has blocked progress of drilling in the potentially kerogen-rich shale. They believe that the White House is reluctant to endorse drilling for oil generally, and that the Green River Formation shales in particular have been blacklisted.

Yesterday, Black denied that Salazar and President Obama are red-lighting all oil projects. “This administration supports responsible development of all energy resources in the right place and at the right time,” said Black.

“He has never said privately or publicly that his intention is to kill oil shale,” Black added. “We’re not trying to pick winners or losers.”

Obama Administration May Cancel Ares I-X Project

The following small paragraph is the most heinous of actions to be undertaken by NASA and the Obama Administration. Following the grounding of the shuttle fleet, there is quite a bit of talk and pushing towards abandoning the Ares I-X in favor of commercial start up companies. Allowing the commercial companies to be the sole lifter of materials and 'maybe' humans, without the accompanying NASA main launch capacity is close to being treason. .... lakotahope

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Once the shuttles stop flying, NASA intends to buy rides for its astronauts on Russian Soyuz vehicles until a new service — either commercial or government — materializes.

NASA, courtesy of Scott Andrews

A bow shock forms around the Ares I-X test rocket traveling at supersonic speed during its Oct. 28, 2009 launch from the Kennedy Space Center, Fla.

If this project is canceled, America will probably be last to develop any program to land a settlement on the Moon or putting men on Mars. ... lakotahope

WASHINGTON — As the administration of U.S. President Barack Obama prepares to propose changes to NASA's human spaceflight program in the president's 2011 budget request to lawmakers Feb. 1, an independent NASA safety advisory panel is warning the space agency against abandoning its current plans.

In an annual report issued Jan. 15, the Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel cautioned the United States against halting work on NASA's Ares I rocket to fund unproven commercial alternatives.

"To abandon Ares I as a baseline vehicle for an alternative without demonstrated capability nor proven superiority (or even equivalence) is unwise and probably not cost-effective," the report states.

SLIDESHOW: Ares I-X: The Next Generation of American Space Flight

Designed to launch the Orion Crew Exploration Vehicle into low Earth orbit, Ares I is a key element of Constellation, NASA's five-year-old effort to replace the space shuttle with rockets and spacecraft optimized for the Moon.

The Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel report praises Ares I as a vehicle "designed from the beginning with a clear emphasis on safety" and notes approvingly "that Time magazine cited the Ares rocket as the 'best invention of 2009.'"

The future of Ares I, however, came into question last year when a White House-appointed committee led by former Lockheed Martin chief Norm Augustine urged Obama to consider dropping Ares I in favor of paying commercial firms to transport astronauts to the international space station.

NASA awarded a pair of contracts totaling $3.5 billion in December 2008 to Dulles, Va.-based Orbital Sciences Corp. and Hawthorne, Calif.-based Space Exploration Technologies (SpaceX) to haul cargo to the space station aboard unmanned vehicles the companies say could evolve to carry people.

SpaceX, in particular, has been urging NASA to commit billions of dollars to fostering development of commercial crew launch services through the expansion of the Commercial Orbital Transportation Services (COTS) the agency created in 2006 to subsidize development of new cargo delivery systems. SpaceX and Orbital stand to receive a combined $450 million under the COTS program for their competing unmanned systems by the time the two complete demonstration cargo flights.

While the Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel report notes satisfication with the COTS program's evolution, progress and demo-first approach, the panel expressed concerns about NASA expanding COTS in the absence of a clear human-rating process for commercial vehicles.

Specifically, it says NASA's current procedures "were not specifically intended to establish requirements for vehicles produced by entities external to NASA, such as COTS firms or international programs."

The panel recommends NASA accelerate its efforts to develop a human-rating process for would-be commercial providers.

"It is the Panel's position that no COTS manufacturer is currently [human-rating-requirements] qualified, despite some claims and beliefs to the contrary," the report states. "Questions that must be answered are: What is the process for certifying that potential COTS vehicles are airworthy and capable of carrying astronauts into space safely? [and] How is compliance assured over the life of the activity?"

The panel also took issue with the Augustine committee's decision to embrace the outsourcing of human spaceflight without having conducted a safety analysis of the commercial concepts SpaceX and others presented to the committee last summer.

"In making this recommendation, the [Augustine] committee also noted that while human safety never can be absolutely assured, safety was assumed to be a 'given,'" the report says. "The Panel believes that this assumption is premature and oversimplifies a complex and challenging problem because there is not a 'cookie-cutter approach' to safety in space."

The report points to the Ares I program as an example of the right way to go about ensuring astronaut safety.

"Its architecture was selected by NASA's Exploration System Architecture Study (ESAS) team because of its potential to deliver at least 10 times the level of crew safety as the current shuttle," the report says. "The launch vehicle configuration has been developed to provide the best possible allowances for crew escape in the event of a launch failure. The independent launch escape system pulls the capsule clear of the launch pad and any attendant explosion or fire. The demonstrated high reliability of the solid rocket booster (SRB) suggests a low likelihood of first stage failure on ascent, but the launch escape system would cover even this low probability of failure."

The panelists warn that switching from a "well-designed, safety optimized" system to commercially-developed vehicles based on "nothing more than unsubstantiated claims would seem a poor choice," according to the report. "Before any change is made to another architecture, the inherent safety of that approach must be assessed to ensure that it offers a level of safety equal to or greater than the program of record."

The report also warned against extending the life of NASA's fleet of aging space shuttle orbiters "significantly" beyond their planned September 2010 retirement absent a thorough vehicle recertification effort.

"With sufficient money, manpower, and recertification efforts, it is possible that the Shuttle could be extended," the report states. "While we are aware of no major systems that are 'on the knee of the curve' of wear out, the funds needed to allow full recertification are substantial, and the probability of finding things that demand even more resources during recertification is very real."

NASA plans to launch five more shuttle missions by October, shut down the program and transfer the three orbiters to museums and science centers.

Once the shuttles stop flying, NASA intends to buy rides for its astronauts on Russian Soyuz vehicles until a new service — either commercial or government — materializes. Space.com