Outer Space

On July 24, the Associated Press announced, "A spacewalking astronaut, Clayton C. Anderson, discarded a camera mounting and an ammonia tank weighing more than half a ton at the International Space Station. The outdated equipment ... joined more than 9,000 pieces of orbital debris already being tracked from Earth." Space debris poses a huge problem for our future - a problem that could be made much worse by U.S. plans to introduce weapons into space. A piece of debris in low Earth orbit travels at 17,000 miles per hour.

Ravens linebacker Ray Lewis blew up Dustin Keller in Week 1 as if the Jets tight end was another puny planet in the path of his rocket-powered raven ride through outer space. Lewis' huge hit stood the test of time, as voters on ESPN's SportsNation recently voted it as the best hit of the 2010 NFL season. Lewis' hit on Keller received more than 55 percent of the 2,754 votes. Raiders linebacker Rolando McClain's takedown of Rams wide receiver Danny Amendola was a distant second, and Bears wideout Earl Bennett laying out a punter was third.

In a fascinating follow-up to the Clinton-Yeltsin summit, the White House has ordered NASA to work with Russian scientists in an effort to save the controversial Space Station Freedom from death by cost-overrun.The ambitious project, carrying a price tag in the $30 billion to $40 billion range, plus $100 billion in operating expenses over 30 years, is now going through a painful downsizing redesign. Whether the effort will succeed may, indeed, require tapping into Russia's vaunted space technology.

For a family event that involves baseball, outer space, parades (and is free), head out to Williamsport, Pa., this weekend to watch the 2010 Little League World Series, which has been hosted by the small Pennsylvania town as it has been since 1947. "Carl E. Stotz saw his nephews playing baseball and thought it would be nice if they had a team and a league to play on competitively," said Erin Kriner, a spokeswoman for the event, which begins Friday and continues throughout next week.

WASHINGTON - Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld will propose today a sweeping overhaul of the Pentagon's space programs, sharply elevating the importance of outer space in the nation's military strategy, defense officials said yesterday. The proposal will be the first step toward making outer space a larger focus of Pentagon spending and is intended to emphasize the importance the Bush administration places on developing defensive weapons systems for outer space, defense officials said.

Twelve fourth-graders from Yorkwood Elementary School looked out into space and this is what they saw: a swirling blue and white star, an orange sun, a spaceship surrounded by a zoom trail, brown specks of space dust, an asteroid floating on its own, and the planets looming in the distance.Yesterday, their vision, which they painted onto a 5-foot-by-7-foot mural, was unveiled at the Maryland Science Center in front of parents, teachers and staffers who had packed Boyd Theatre. In their work, they also showed how art can reveal landscapes -- even those unknown to us.Each Tuesday during the school year, while most of their friends headed to the playgrounds or home to watch television or do homework, these students at the Northeast Baltimore school stayed behind for 1 1/2 hours to ask questions, research, sketch and experiment with acrylic paints.

Ravens linebacker Ray Lewis blew up Dustin Keller in Week 1 as if the Jets tight end was another puny planet in the path of his rocket-powered raven ride through outer space. Lewis' huge hit stood the test of time, as voters on ESPN's SportsNation recently voted it as the best hit of the 2010 NFL season. Lewis' hit on Keller received more than 55 percent of the 2,754 votes. Raiders linebacker Rolando McClain's takedown of Rams wide receiver Danny Amendola was a distant second, and Bears wideout Earl Bennett laying out a punter was third.

THE BUSH administration is clearly moving toward putting weapons in outer space. It has spent about $500 million a year in research on those potential weapons in the past few years, according to the Center for Defense Information, although often burying it in categories that make hard accounting extremely difficult. In the research phase are antisatellite weapons, space-based antimissile systems, laser beam weapons and bombardment satellites using kinetic impact, directed energy and possibly nuclear explosions.

In her audaciously titled one-woman show, "Commie Lesbos From Outer Space," performer Ann Beigel tells a story about a little boy she used to see in her New York City neighborhood. The boy's golden retriever was never more than 2 feet away from him.Then one day she saw the boy without the dog. When she came closer, she noticed the dog's lifeless body lying on a pile of trash bags. Suddenly a policeman appeared and screamed at the child, "We have leash laws in this city. You got exactly what you deserved."

BEIJING -- The Chinese government publicly confirmed yesterday that it had conducted a successful test of a new anti-satellite weapon but said it had no intention of participating in a "space race." The confirmation was made at a regular Foreign Ministry news briefing, 12 days after China used a medium-range ballistic missile to destroy one of its own weather satellites 535 miles above Earth. Several countries, including the United States, Japan, Britain and Australia, pressed Beijing to explain the test, apparently the first successful destruction of a satellite in orbit in more than 20 years.

L eadership in Outer Space and on Earth For the first time, a U.S. president has canceled the main future human spaceflight program, leaving NASA without a direction, soon without a vehicle to fly people in space, and with its role as world space leader in doubt. How did we get into this predicament, and is there a path toward regaining the kind of space eminence Americans have taken for granted? As an unapologetic space cadet, I'm appalled by Washington's chaotic leadership and judgment over several decades.

THURSDAY RIFFTRAX LIVE: "PLAN 9 FROM OUTER SPACE": Mystery Science Theater 3000's stars (Michael J. Nelson, Kevin Murphy and Bill Corbett) sound off on what has been called the worst movie ever made, Ed Wood's 1959 sci-fi "Plan 9 From Outer Space." The event is broadcast live at 8 p.m. from Nashville, Tenn., to one of four area theaters: AMC Owings Mills 17, Bel Air Cinema 14, AMC Columbia Mall 14 and Snowden Square. Tickets are $12.50. Go to ncm.com/Fathom. ANNUAL ANNAPOLIS ART WALK: See what contributions Annapolis is making to the visual arts world as you explore several galleries and watch demonstrations.

Looking for an out-of-this-world conversation starter for your den? A hefty chunk of space debris made a brief stop in Owings Mills yesterday on its way to New York to be auctioned to the highest bidder. Professional meteorite hunter Steve Arnold brought his 1,400-pound find to Direct Dimensions, an Owings Mills-based 3-D imaging company, to gather precise measurements of its mottled exterior. The meteorite - a chunk of interplanetary debris that falls to the earth's surface - is an "oriented pallasite," composed of iron and olivine, a semiprecious gemstone known as peridot.

On July 24, the Associated Press announced, "A spacewalking astronaut, Clayton C. Anderson, discarded a camera mounting and an ammonia tank weighing more than half a ton at the International Space Station. The outdated equipment ... joined more than 9,000 pieces of orbital debris already being tracked from Earth." Space debris poses a huge problem for our future - a problem that could be made much worse by U.S. plans to introduce weapons into space. A piece of debris in low Earth orbit travels at 17,000 miles per hour.

BEIJING -- The Chinese government publicly confirmed yesterday that it had conducted a successful test of a new anti-satellite weapon but said it had no intention of participating in a "space race." The confirmation was made at a regular Foreign Ministry news briefing, 12 days after China used a medium-range ballistic missile to destroy one of its own weather satellites 535 miles above Earth. Several countries, including the United States, Japan, Britain and Australia, pressed Beijing to explain the test, apparently the first successful destruction of a satellite in orbit in more than 20 years.

The walls in Robert Fischell's home office in Howard County are filled with framed patents from home and abroad, a testament to a man whose mind is up and running in the wee-morning hours conceiving lifesaving medical devices. The 76-year-old inventor opens a briefcase atop his desk and displays some of his latest handiwork, devices he says will do more for modern medicine than his previous breakthroughs. Yet what could be greater than the first implantable insulin pump, the rechargeable pacemaker and flexible stents for coronary arteries?

4Kids: Featured Site of the Month: A WINDOW INTO SPACE Make a hyperspace jump to Windows to the Universe at www.windows.ucar.edu. This enormous and exciting Web site has everything you want to know about outer space and the universe. You'll find info on all the planets and the sun. The Kids' Space section includes Ask a Scientist, Fun and Games, Virtual Postcard, a cool Space Art Museum and much more. There are sections on missions to outer space, famous scientists, mythology from most civilizations about the solar system, art about the universe and some fantastic image archives.

There's plenty of gray hair on the heads of scientists leading NASA's New Horizons mission to Pluto. But they all vow they'll still be on the job when their unmanned spacecraft reaches the farthest planet from the sun - in July 2015. "Yes, we'll all be there," said a confident Glen Fountain, 63, the mission's project manager at the Johns Hopkins University's Applied Physics Laboratory near Laurel, where New Horizons was planned and built. The team's pledge to stick with the job could become even tougher to fulfill than they'd like.

Gaze at the sky on a stormy summer night and consider this: The lightning bolts streaking from the clouds may actually have gotten their start in outer space. That's one theory, anyway. It turns out that more than 250 years after Benjamin Franklin lofted his kite, scientists are still struggling to understand the basic physics behind this dazzling -- and occasionally deadly -- electrical display. "We know more about how a star explodes across the universe than we do about how lightning works," says Joseph Dwyer, who studies the phenomenon at the Florida Institute of Technology.