Weekend Links

• Good television story about the Bamberger Ranch Preserve.
• Fuel for deep space exploration running low.
• U.S. Announces Review of Human Spaceflight Plans…
• …meanwhile, SpaceX moves at a remarkable pace to the first launch of their Falcon 9 later this year, and the first launch of the Falcon 9 with the Dragon capsule (crew capacity: 7), also later this year. I'd say SpaceX was making NASA look ridiculous, but NASA's Ares 1/Orion teams were tasked with creating a set of vehicles not only suitable for ferrying crews to and from the International Space Station (as the Falon 9/Dragon combination will do), but suitable for lunar flights, too. I have no idea how much the union of all those requirements complicates matters. [Also, Orion's design (crew capacity: 6 to ISS; 4 on lunar missions) includes a toilet, something I'm pretty sure that Dragon lacks, and that's gotta be worth something.] Anyway, good luck to all.
• Hubble to Receive High-Tech James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) Technology – Upgrading Hubble with parts from the telescope that will, in effect, replace it.
• ESA's Herschel and Planck space telescopes launched – Launching both telescopes at the same time, Europe has placed in orbit the largest space telescope, yet. Congratulations to all involved. (Now for a thought experiment: If we'd used the money spent on Hubble servicing missions to build new space telescopes, instead, how many more space telescopes would the US have flown by now? Given that each Shuttle flight is worth around $500 million, even before the mission specific stuff is added in, I'd say that each Hubble servicing mission has cost us at least one space telescope.)
• Telescopes poised to spot air-breathing aliens.
• How to catch a black hole before it eats the world.