Free Republic

When the orbiter Atlantis lands at Kennedy Space Center on Thursday, ending the 30-year-old space shuttle program, NASA will have its sights set on the next big exploration mission: sending astronauts to an asteroid in about 15 years. But the path to that goal remains poorly defined, jeopardized by a bleak budget outlook and a weak political consensus. It has left a deep angst that U.S. leadership in space flight is in rapid decline and the very ability to fly humans off the Earth is at risk. "I'm very disappointed about where we are today," said Robert L. Crippen, who...

Sure it's kid-oriented formulaic and it's no "Up" but it's an entertaining film that adults and children will quite enjoy. It will also make a great DVD gift for Christmas and for future reminiscing viewing. It's "Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs".

President Barack Obama and congressional leaders are struggling to maintain an atmosphere of bipartisanship as the House moves toward a critical first vote next week on an $825 billion economic-stimulus plan that has Republicans increasingly nervous. At a White House meeting Friday, the president and congressional leaders from both parties hashed over the plan, with Mr. Obama showing he wasn't afraid to flex his muscles in an ideological debate. Challenged by one Republican senator about why Congress should accept a certain piece of the package, participants said the new president replied simply, "I won." [snip] It came after Senate Minority...

Frozen capital markets are putting the chill on a fast-growing California solar company, a sign that the economic downturn is being felt even in the state's thriving renewable-energy sector. Hayward-based OptiSolar Inc. confirmed Monday that it dismissed nearly half its 600-member workforce last week, cutting 185 jobs at its Hayward facility and 105 at a plant in Sacramento. The privately owned start-up, which develops utility-scale solar farms, hasn't been able to secure financing to complete a planned expansion of its photovoltaic panel assembly facilities, according to company spokesman Alan Bernheimer. "The equity markets just froze up last fall," he said....

Is global warming making our local weather weirder? Climatologists would like to be able to answer that question. Unfortunately, they can't. When unusual weather hits, it's become de rigueur to wonder: Is the atmosphere sending us another signal? The past few years have given us plenty of weather to wonder about. In 2001-02, San Diego got just 3.02 inches of rain. That was the driest year in the city's rainfall history, which dates to 1850. In 2003, the city set a record for most consecutive days – 181 – without measurable rainfall. The Cedar and Paradise fires began at the...

How Vikings Might Have Navigated on Cloudy Days By Corey Binns Special to LiveScience posted: 02 March 2007 08:33 am ET Vikings navigated the oceans with sundials aboard their Norse ships. But on an overcast day, sundials would have been useless. Many researchers have suggested that the on foggy days, Vikings looked toward the sky through rock crystals called sunstones to give them direction. No one had tested the theory until recently. A team sailed the Arctic Ocean aboard the Swedish icebreaker Oden and found that sunstones could indeed light the way in foggy and cloudy conditions. Would have...

Charlotte AllenAuthor of The Human Christ.Sept. 11, 2001 was the day the Nineties died. Not the decade, of course, but the cultural phenomenon: the tasteful excess, the fretting over whether the baked Alma Ata yak brie really went with the organic spelt toast points, the days when "the president's blow job" meant something other than blasting al Qaeda the hell out of Tora Bora. America sobered up, and it was suddenly all right, even heroic, to be just an ordinary American. Frivolity is so over, so last-decade. That's why witty airheads like Maureen Dowd now come across as op-ed...