Space News Briefs

Although adherents of stone-age religions and ideologies want humans to remain on earth until a stray comet or asteroid finishes us off, more intelligent and future oriented people continue to study ways of moving at least some of our eggs out of this planetary basket.

At the recent Space 2006 conference the old debate between orbiting space colonies and distant planetary settlements was reignited. Wired News gives a good, if short, overview.

This Spacedaily newsreport reveals more about the Lockheed-Bigelow discussions on converting the Atlas 5 rocket for manned launches to access the Bigelow space hotels, habitats, and space stations.

The Space Review looks at some of the social aspects of space flight that were discussed at the recent conference "Societal Impact of Spaceflight". Since the future of humans in space largely depends upon the support of the average citizen, this aspect of space cannot be ignored.

Are the Japanese rethinking Kyoto? Perhaps so, since they recently launched a spacecraft to study solar activity more closely. It is the sun that heats the earth, after all.

Climate models are at an infantile stage of development, and are a fragile instrument upon which to base public policy at this time. GCMs cannot account for the cooling of the oceans, they cannot account for solar variation, and they cannot account for the discrepancy between surface temperature trends and tropospheric temperature trends.