Free Republic

Five hundred cots have been set up and ready for use at a cavernous warehouse at John F. Kennedy International Airport in Queens as Mayor Eric Adams’ administration awaits federal approval to convert the space into a migrant shelter. New York City is bursting at the seams to house 45,800 asylum seekers in the 170 emergency sites that have been set up across the five boroughs. An additional 4,800 asylum seekers arrived at city shelters over the last two weeks alone, said mayoral spokesperson Kate Smart this week. The beds at JFK’s Building 197 and multiple trailers outfitted with showers...

The National Guardsmen providing security in the U.S. Capitol ahead of the inauguration are soon getting cots, after images went viral last week of troops sleeping on the floor in the halls of Congress, according to four people familiar with the decision....Many officials believe the cots are unnecessary, but the photos of Guardsmen resting on the floor of the Capitol quickly became a “PR issue,”...

Billionaire Elon Musk’s private space company SpaceX is, it seems, no more immune to mission delays than our former space ferry captain, NASA. Early yesterday, Musk announced on Twitter a week-long delay of the scheduled launch of the Dragon spacecraft (atop the company’s Falcon rocket) while Musk’s team debugged the Dragon’s docking code. When Mashable spoke to Musk a few weeks ago, he actually joked about how that part of the first private mission to the International Space Station would go: “The thing that’s interesting and slightly scary is that Dragon is a robotic spaceship, automatically navigating itself to the...

KENNEDY SPACE CENTER, FL--Pending the completion of last-minute work and a final review, a commercial cargo ship making its maiden voyage to the International Space Station should be ready for launch April 30, officials said Monday. The long-awaited test flight is intended to clear the way for routine resupply missions starting later this year. Launch from complex 40 at the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station is targeted for 12:22:26 p.m. EDT (GMT-4) on April 30, roughly the moment Earth's rotation carries the launch pad into the plane of the space station's orbit. If the weather or technical problems force a...

CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida (Reuters) - NASA on Monday cleared a cargo ship owned by Space Exploration Technologies for a test flight to the International Space Station that is scheduled to launch on April 30, NASA officials said. The Dragon mission would be the first time a privately owned and operated vessel visits the space station, a $100 billion research laboratory owned by the United States, Russia, Europe, Japan and Canada that orbits about 240 miles above Earth. NASA is counting on Space Exploration Technologies, also known as SpaceX, and a second company, Orbital Sciences Corp., to keep the space station...

The U.S. House Subcommittee on Space and Aeronautics held a hearing today entitled “NASA’s Commercial Cargo Providers: Are They Ready to Supply the Space Station in the Post-Shuttle Era?” Here is a link to the charter that was prepared for the committee by Ken Monroe. Mr. Monroe is one of the main staffers who serves the Space and Aeronautics subcommittee in the house. This is the same Ken Monroe who said NASA was run by a bunch of idiots. We all have opinions about NASA, congress, the president, and our bosses; however, how many would actually tweet something like that?...

Congressmen Break Out the Cots to Bunk in the OfficePosted by Stephanie Condon January 7, 2011 10:31 AM After getting elected to the 112th Congress as Washington "outsiders," several new lawmakers are stressing that they're simply visitors here in the nation's capitol, working on behalf of their constituents -- and that means avoiding putting down roots. At least 40 or 50 congressmen, including as many as a dozen freshmen, are opting to sleep in their offices instead of renting or buying apartments, the New York Times reports. While both Democrats and Republicans are choosing to bunk their offices, the Times...

Rocketplane Kistler, on the verge of losing NASA backing for the rocket it had hoped to use to carry supplies to the international space station, accepted the resignation of its president just days after he sent a lengthy missive to the U.S. space agency blaming it for the company's financial woes. The Oklahoma City-based company confirmed Oct. 4 that Randy Brinkley had stepped down and been replaced by William Byrd, a member of Rocketplane's board of directors. Byrd, 54, is the director of the Iowa Space Grant Consortium, a position he has held since leaving NASA in 1994 after more...

NASA expects progress, or the lack of it, next year for the agency's Commercial Orbital Transportation Services (COTS) programme to determine whether the COTS rockets can deliver cargo to the International Space Station from 2010. Because NASA's Space Shuttle fleet is to be retired in 2010, NASA needs an alternate cargo delivery system to maintain the ISS by providing around 54,500kg (120,000lb) of food, water, equipment and spares it is obligated to deliver until its de-orbit, planned for 2016. The agency's associate administrator for the space operations mission directorate William Gerstenmaier told Congress that it would know next year if...

The FBI's failure to roll out an expanded computer system that would help agents investigate criminals and terrorists is the latest in a series of costly technology blunders by government over more than a decade. Experts blame poor planning, rapid industry advances and the massive scope of some complex projects whose price tags can run into billions of dollars at U.S. agencies with tens of thousands of employees. "There are very few success stories," said Paul Brubaker, former deputy chief information officer at the Pentagon. "Failures are very common, and they've been common for a long time." The FBI said...

Paul Weyrich of the Free Congress Foundation (freecongress.org) noted recently that since the mid-1970s, the Senate has not had a real filibuster, the kind that has Senators sleeping on cots, with possible cloture votes in the middle of the night. Since then the Senate has had only "Cadillac" filibusters. The Family Research Council (frc.org) offers this background: The Senate requires 60 votes to cut off debate, that is, to override a senator's control of the floor. So long as a senator is speaking on a bill -- filibustering -- no vote can be held unless 60 senators agree to end...