Free Republic

Corona beer isn’t making any changes to its advertising despite the name’s unfortunate similarity to the deadly coronavirus. Constellation Brands, which brews several variations of the popular lager, said in a statement that its customers “understand there is no link between the virus and our business.” “Sales of Corona remain very strong and we appreciate the continued support from our fans,” Constellation Brands spokesperson Stephanie McGuane told CNN Business. “Our advertising with Corona is consistent with the campaign we have been running for the last 30 years and is based off strong consumer sentiment.” Constellation said Corona Extra sales grew...

The drama surrounding funding for NASA’s Commercial Crew program has started up once again. In the wake of the Senate Appropriations Committee’s cutting funding for the program by over $300 million, supporters have fallen back on familiar patterns of futile complaining. NASA Administrator Charles Bolden claimed that the funding shortfall would delay the restoration of American spaceflight capability by as much as two years. Bolden was mild compared to some of Commercial Crew’s supporters on the Internet.

Senator Hutchison cool to SpaceX's Falcon 9 launch; concerns remain about Obama NASA policy June 5, 8:25 AMHouston Space News ExaminerMark Whittington Falcon 9 Courtesy NASA The near universal acclaim that SpaceX has acquired for the successful launch of the first Falcon 9 is not shared within the United States Congress, which is still skeptical of many aspects of the Obama space plan, which includes reliance on companies like SpaceX for Earth to Low Earth Orbit transportation. The reaction illustrates for all the technical triumph that SpaceX has accomplished with the Falcon 9 launch, it still faces political problems. Typical...

One morning when Salinas' Billy Harvey was a boy of 5 and still asleep, his parents arose. Quietly as they could, they tiptoed to the front door and left the house. "I never saw them again," Harvey said. Billy Harvey's parents had put him and his two brothers in the care of an aunt. Then, they'd flown off to Lake Tahoe on what was supposed to be a fun-flight getaway, a day-long casino excursion. They planned to return home that night. Only they, and many others, died in an airplane crash.

The famed aircraft carrier USS Constellation set forth on its last voyage Friday, but this time towed by the ocean-going tugboat Corbin Foss. The 1,008-foot Constellation’s 16,000-mile journey from Bremerton will take the carrier around the southern tip of South America to Brownsville, Texas, where it is set to be scrapped.

Yet another decommissioned “supercarrier” is coming to the Port of Brownsville for scrapping, and it’s the biggest one yet. In fact, the dismantling of the former aircraft carrier USS Constellation by International Shipbreaking Ltd. will be the largest ship-recycling job to take place in the United States. Until the Constellation contract, the former USS Forrestal and the former USS Saratoga were the largest ships slated for salvaging by a U.S. ship breaker. The Forrestal arrived in Brownsville to much fanfare in February after being towed from Philadelphia, and is now being dismantled by All Star Metals. The Saratoga, decommissioned in...

The Navy announced Friday that a $3 million contract has been awarded to International Shipbreaking Limited for the towing, dismantling and recycling of the USS Constellation, a ship first used in the Vietnam War, and last deployed during Operation Iraqi Freedom. The ship, nicknamed “Connie” by its crew, is part of the Navy’s five-year scrapping plan that also sent the USS Forrestal and the USS Saratoga to Brownsville for dismantling.

By 1997, with the word out that NASA planned to land on Mars, bin Laden called for all Americans and Jews, including children, to be killed. That summer three of his operatives living in Yemen launched a little known threat against NASA, via the judicial system. They warn both NASA and the USA that the Yemeni people (of which bin Laden is a member and believes he can trace his blood line back to the time of Queen Sheba) own Mars and they have 3,000-year-old (Sumerian?) tablets to prove it. On July 24th of 1997 the Al-Thawn weekly newspaper reported...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=Zl12dXYcUTo

WASHINGTON — Congress has again failed to rid a temporary spending bill of language forcing NASA to waste $1.4 million a day on its defunct Constellation moon program. Though Congress passed a new stopgap spending bill last week, the measure retained a leftover provision from the 2010 budget that bars the agency from shutting down Constellation, which Congress and the White House agreed to cancel last October. This so-called "Shelby provision" — named for U.S. Sen. Richard Shelby, R-Alabama, who inserted it into the 2010 budget — is expected to cost NASA roughly $29 million during the three-week budget extension...

Constellation Energy has pulled out of negotiations on a $7.5 billion federal loan guarantee to build a nuclear reactor in Maryland with its French partner Electricite de France (EDF). In an Oct. 8 letter to Dan Poneman, deputy secretary of the U.S. Department of Energy, Constellation Energy said the “significant and ongoing uncertainty created by the Office of Management and Budget’s inability to address significant problems with its methodology for determining the projects credit subsidy cost and the unreasonable burdensome conditions a loan guarantee would require” is why Constellation Energy does not see a “timely path” to reach a set...

Charles Bolden, Nasa administrator, in conversation with Al Jazeera's Imran Garda, about Obama's reach to the Muslim world, international contribution to the space mission, the constellation project...

NASA is pushing ahead with work on its new Orion space capsule and Ares rockets despite their ambiguous status as lawmakers discuss the agency's 2011 budget request.  Orion and Ares are part of Constellation, a NASA program designed to take astronauts back to the moon. Under his 2011 budget proposal, President Barack Obama called for canceling Constellation and urged NASA to work toward sending humans to an asteroid and then on to Mars. The outlook for Constellation's fledgling rocket and capsule spacecraft is not clear. Obama did recommend continuing development of Orion -- but only as an escape ship that...

One thing everyone can agree on with respect to the Obama Administration’s intention to cancel the Constellation program: it has triggered a vigorous debate about the future of NASA and the role that organization will play in humanity’s next steps into the solar system. Numerous articles posted in The Space Review have illuminated the scope of this debate, from its fundamental assumptions about the value of space exploration for the United States and its people, to the variety of ways in which a post-shuttle program of human exploration beyond LEO might be carried out.

Return to the Moon, Lost and Redeemed? When will the next Moon Landing take place, and how will it be undertaken? Up until last February, the answer would have been sometime in 2019, and aboard space craft being developed by Project Constellation, started by President George W. Bush. But President Obama lobbed a hand grenade into Constellation, proposing its cancellation.

This is a truly remarkable video found at Powerline of NASA administrator Charles Bolden telling al-Jazeera that NASA is now tasked "to find a way to reach out to the Muslim world and engage much more with predominantly Muslim nations to help them feel good about their historic contribution to science, math, and engineering." The agency that sent a man to the moon has been enlisted to improve the self-esteem of Muslims.

Congressional backers of NASA's existing space program are about to find out whether they have enough support on Capitol Hill to overturn President Obama's plan to abandon a return to the moon. Two milestones in the protracted congressional budget process are expected to provide NASA supporters their first concrete evidence next week that lawmakers from states without major NASA facilities are willing to defy the president and support the campaign to salvage parts of the $108 billion back-to-the-moon program. After four months of word wars, news conferences and letter writing challenging Obama's new direction for the space agency, lawmakers will...

Any surprise that Obama's mediocrity rears its ugly head once again. This time by moving to kill the Constellation program, the program to get man on the moon...permanently, and then to mars.....how does he do it? As his Chicago upbringing has taught him Constellation aimed to build upon what was arguably America’s greatest technological achievement, the first lunar landing of 1969, by launching new expeditions to the Moon and to Mars and worlds beyond. Mr Obama proposed in February that it should be scrapped because it was “over budget, behind schedule and lacking in innovation”, but he has met opposition...

This memo was just received by NASA Houston space workers, from the center director, ex-astronaut Mike Coats, who is now in Russia. It underscores the grim realities of near-term major layoffs, as described in my advisory earlier today. "Replanning" is the new NASA jargon for "slash to the bone", it seems. _____________________________________________ From: Coats, Michael {Jsc-Center-Director}(JSC-AA111) Sent: Thursday, June 10, 2010 1:45 PM To: JSC-DL-JSC-Civil-Servants; JSC-DL-JSC-Contractors Subject: Constellation Program FY2010 Replanning Update I am writing from Russia, awaiting the next ISS crew launch from Baikonur, Kazakhstan, which is currently scheduled next Tuesday. Yesterday, NASA management directed Constellation Program management to...

The Obama administration may have found a back door way to kill the Constellation space exploration program, even while Congress is mulling over ways to continue it. The move to kill Constellation involves the 120-year-old Anti-Deficiency Act.