Free Republic

* SEC says ex-CEO, ex-board member fabricated documents * Two charged with scheming to defraud a firm of $20 mln (Reuters) - A former chief executive of Calpers, the biggest U.S. public pension fund, and a former board member were charged by federal regulators on Monday with scheming to defraud Apollo Global Management, a private equity firm, of more than $20 million in placement fees. The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission said that Federico Buenrostro, a former chief executive of the California Public Employees' Retirement system, and Alfred Villalobos, a friend and former board member who became a placement agent,...

Apollo 16, the penultimate lunar landing mission, began on April 16, 1972, 40 years ago this month. The second of the “J” missions, Apollo 16, like Apollo 15 before it, carried an uprated lunar module, a SIM bay in the CM/SM, and an electric-powered lunar rover. Gemini and Apollo veteran John Young commanded this historic mission. Lunar geologists were anxious to target an Apollo mission for the lunar highlands. You can easily see them if you look at the moon when it is in a phase from waxing or waning gibbous to full. The brighter surface areas are the “highlands”...

Amazon.com's billionaire founder, Jeff Bezos, says he's funded a successful effort to locate the mammoth rocket engines that sent the Apollo 11 mission on the first leg of its mission to the moon — and now he's planning to bring them up from the Atlantic Ocean floor.... The five F-1 rocket engines were on the first stage of Apollo 11's Saturn 5 rocket, which dropped into the Atlantic just minutes after liftoff in 1969. In an online statement, Bezos acknowledges that the undersea artifacts, like other hardware associated with the space effort, still belongs to NASA — and he imagines...

MIAMI — NASA is questioning whether Apollo 13 commander James Lovell has the right to sell a 70-page checklist from the flight that includes his handwritten calculations that were crucial in guiding the damaged spacecraft back to Earth. The document was sold by Heritage Auctions in November for more than $388,000, some 15 times its initial list price. The checklist gained great fame as part of a key dramatic scene in the 1995 film "Apollo 13" in which actor Tom Hanks plays Lovell making the calculations. After the sale, NASA contacted Heritage

Explanation: If you drop a hammer and a feather together, which reaches the ground first? On the Earth, it's the hammer, but is the reason only because of air resistance? Scientists even before Galileo have pondered and tested this simple experiment and felt that without air resistance, all objects would fall the same way. Galileo tested this principle himself and noted that two heavy balls of different masses reached the ground simultaneously, although many historians are skeptical that he did this experiment from Italy's Leaning Tower of Pisa as folklore suggests. A good place free of air resistance to test...

Apollo Image Atlas AS15-P-9625 Image Collection: Panoramic Mission: 15 Magazine: P Revolution: 38 Latitude / Longitude: 19° S / 117.5° E Lens Focal Length: 24 inch Camera Look: Forward Camera Altitude: 117 km Sun Elevation: 27° Stereo Pair: AS15-P-9630 Film Type: 3414 Film Width: 5 inch Image Width: 45.24 inch Image Height: 4.5 inch Film Color: black & white Index Map: http://www.lpi.usra.edu/resources/mapcatalog/apolloindex/apollo15/as15indexmap01/ Feature(s): DELPORTE, SOUTHWEST OF IZSAK, NORTH OF

A long-lost, highly valuable Moon rock brought back from the Apollo 17 mission has turned up in the files of Bill Clinton. The rock was one of 50 presented to each state, and was given to Arkansas while the ex-president was governor. The rock, worth millions of dollars, had been missing since at least 1980 until an archivist found it in old gubernatorial papers. Bobby Roberts, director of the Central Arkansas Library System, told Reuters the archivist opened a box previously archived as "Arkansas flag plaque." The rock and a state flag were originally affixed to the plaque, but the...

A team of astronomers are planning an epic quest to track down the 42-year-old lunar module that's adrift in the solar system. It's not often I read about a new project that leaves me undecided whether it's totally crazy or a stroke of genius. I was recently sent a press release of such a project and, having read it over a few times, I think I'm leaning toward the latter. The idea is the brain child of British amateur astronomer Nick Howes who not only has a passion for hunting for asteroids, but also for the Space Race -- in...

NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) captured the sharpest images ever taken from space of the Apollo 12, 14 and 17 landing sites. Images show the twists and turns of the paths made when the astronauts explored the lunar surface. This interactive shows two LRO images of the Apollo 17 landing site. Click and drag on the white slider bar to wipe from one to the other. The left image was released today; the right image is a zoom-in on an LRO image released in 2009. LRO was moved into a lower orbit to capture the new image. The images do...

Wounded by the CalPERS bribery scandal and other problems, a New Jersey pharmaceutical-benefits company is being sold. Medco Health Solutions Inc., one of the giants of the drug-benefit industry, on Thursday agreed to a $29.1 billion takeover by rival Express Scripts Inc. Such a deal would have been unthinkable a few months ago, when Medco was flying high. But the New Jersey company ran into a series of problems that began with its entanglement in the CalPERS bribery case. "This year has been a head-spinner for this (Medco) management team, starting out with the CalPERS issues," said investment analyst Arthur...

Several days ago, Steven Jones of Dow Jones Newswires – a News Corporation company – broke what may be the story of the Millennium, literally. According to 69 recent SEC filings that have now “vanished”, a Texan by the name of Johnny Earl Satterwhite claims to hold over $8 trillion in public companies like Microsoft, Exxon Mobil and City National Bank, among others. Jones also obtained documents that show Satterwhite falsely warranting his ownership of almost one trillion shares in Microsoft. This is 100% impossible, as Jones brilliantly notes... that's more than the 8.4 billion shares Microsoft has issued in...

In a letter dated August 9, 1971, Caltech Professor of Geology and Geophysics Dr. Gerald Wasserburg wrote to NASA administrator Robert R. Gilruth extending his congratulations for “one of the most brilliant missions in space science ever flown”. He was referring to the Apollo 15 mission, which began 40 years ago this month. The flight of Apollo 15 marked the true beginning of lunar exploration from a scientific viewpoint. Lunar science was the primary focus of this mission, whereas engineering and geopolitical considerations had dominated the preceding lunar landings. Apollo 15 would make use of uprated equipment to enhance the...

NEW YORK (Reuters) - The U.S. government has sued a former NASA astronaut to recover a camera used to explore the moon's surface during the 1971 Apollo 14 mission after seeing it slated for sale in a New York auction. The lawsuit, filed in Miami federal court on Wednesday, accuses Edgar Mitchell of illegally possessing the camera and attempting to sell it for profit. In March, NASA learned that the British auction house Bonhams was planning to sell the camera at an upcoming Space History Sale, according to the suit. The item was labeled "Movie Camera from the Lunar Surface"...

BOSTON – After setting a soaring vision to land a man on the moon, President John F. Kennedy struggled with how to sell the public on a costly space program he worried had "lost its glamour" and had scant political benefits, according to a newly released White House tape. Kennedy and NASA Administrator James Webb hashed out how to strengthen public backing for the mission, such as by highlighting its technological benefits and military uses. And in a scenario that echoes today, the two worried about preserving funding amid what Webb calls a "driving desire to cut the budget," according...

California woman trying to hawk moon rock for $1.7M to undercover NASA agent detained in stingBy Robert Jablon, The Associated Press | The Canadian Press 1 hour 3 minutes ago LOS ANGELES, Calif. - She promised the moon, for a sky-high price. He wasn't buying. A woman who tried to sell what she said was a rare piece of moon rock for $1.7 million was detained when her would-be buyer turned out to be an undercover NASA agent, officials said Friday. The grey rocks, which are considered national treasures and are illegal to sell, were given to each U.S. state...

There has been a long-lived bit of Apollo moon landing folklore that now appears to be a dead-end affair: microbes on the moon. The lunar mystery swirls around the Apollo 12 moon landing and the return to Earth by moonwalkers of a camera that was part of an early NASA robotic lander – the Surveyor 3 probe. On Nov. 19, 1969, Apollo 12 astronauts Pete Conrad and Alan Bean made a precision landing on the lunar surface in Oceanus Procellarum, Latin for the Ocean of Storms. Their touchdown point was a mere 535 feet (163 meters) from the Surveyor 3...

NASA: Instead of awarding our retired space fleet to museums, we should be awarding contracts to go to Mars and beyond. Once we triumphed over the vacuum of space. Now we face a vacuum of leadership. A nation whose world leadership was unquestioned once held its breath as an American spacecraft placed American astronauts on the surface of the moon. It was a triumph of exceptionalism that was officially laid to rest this week as a nation held its breath to see which museums our space shuttle fleet would be awarded to. In these difficult economic times and with a...

Apollo 14 -- the safely numbered one after that, um, other one -- splashed down 40 years ago today. Since there were no dancing-on-the-edge death-defying dramatic escapes on this one, the mission is largely lost to history. It did get NASA back on track, of course, and paved the way for as many additional moon landings as the budget could afford (three). But there were some oddities attached to Apollo 14. Here are six: 6. The astronauts got lost on the moon. 4. Astronaut Ed Mitchell became a raving UFO loon. 2. Shepard: Least-liked Apollo astronaut? Shepard was a Machiavellian,...

Rosemary Roosa, the daughter of Stuart Roosa, stand’s beside the moon tree planted at Stennis Space Center. It was 1971. She was 7. And he was Stuart Roosa, the astronaut who would fly the command module and orbit the moon while Alan Shepard and Ed Mitchell spent 33 hours on the surface. Apollo 14 was America’s third trip to put men on the moon. It followed the ill-fated Apollo 13 and recaptured the heart of the nation as Shepard and Mitchell successfully gathered 93 pounds of moon rocks, took a four-hour hike and whacked two golf balls with a...

After the near-disaster of Apollo 13 some ten months earlier, NASA and the Apollo program badly needed a successful mission. Apollo 14 delivered this more than adequately, although at times it was a close call. The landing site for this mission was the Fra Mauro Formation at the edge of the Imbrium Basin, re-targeted from the ill-fated Apollo 13 flight. Apollo 14 is significant as the first lunar mission to make landfall in a region other than the flat mare topography of the earlier landings. It features a hilly, hummocky, ridge-like topography, and was thought likely to contain ejecta from...