Steven Sven Wevodau

Space hotel says it’s on schedule to open in 2012

Steve9982 — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 00:03:52 +0000

POSTED BY STEVEN WEVODAU

By Stuart McDill Stuart Mcdill Mon Nov 2, 4:32 pm ET

BARCELONA (Reuters) – A company behind plans to open the first hotel in space says it is on target to accept its first paying guests in 2012 despite critics questioning the investment and time frame for the multi-billion dollar project.

The Barcelona-based architects of The Galactic Suite Space Resort say it will cost 3 million euro ($4.4 million) for a three-night stay at the hotel, with this price including an eight-week training course on a tropical island.

During their stay, guests would see the sun rise 15 times a day and travel around the world every 80 minutes. They would wear velcro suits so they can crawl around their pod rooms by sticking themselves to the walls like Spiderman.

Galactic Suite Ltd’s CEO Xavier Claramunt, a former aerospace engineer, said the project will put his company (http://www.galacticsuite.com) at the forefront of an infant industry with a huge future ahead of it, and forecast space travel will become common in the future.

“It’s very normal to think that your children, possibly within 15 years, could spend a weekend in space,” he told Reuters Television.

A nascent space tourism industry is beginning to take shape with construction underway in New Mexico of Spaceport America, the world’s first facility built specifically for space-bound commercial customers and fee-paying passengers.

British tycoon Richard Branson’s space tours firm, Virgin Galactic, will use the facility to propel tourists into suborbital space at a cost of $200,000 a ride.

Galactic Suite Ltd, set up in 2007, hopes to start its project with a single pod in orbit 450 km (280 miles) above the earth, traveling at 30,000 km per hour, with the capacity to hold four guests and two astronaut-pilots.

It will take a day and a half to reach the pod - which Claramunt compared to a mountain retreat, with no staff to greet the traveler.

“When the passengers arrive in the rocket, they will join it for 3 days, rocket and capsule. With this we create in the tourist a confidence that he hasn’t been abandoned. After 3 days the passenger returns to the transport rocket and returns to earth,” he said.

More than 200 people have expressed an interest in traveling to the space hotel and at least 43 people have already reserved.

The numbers are similar for Virgin Galactic with 300 people already paid or signed up for the trip but unlike Branson, Galactic Suite say they will use Russian rockets to transport their guests into space from a spaceport to be built on an island in the Caribbean.

But critics have questioned the project, saying the time frame is unreasonable and also where the money is coming from to finance the project.

Claramunt said an anonymous billionaire space enthusiast has granted $3 billion to finance the project.

(Writing by Stuart McDill; Editing by Belinda Goldsmith and Miral Fahmy)

Giant Crack in Africa Will Create a New Ocean - posted by STEVEN WEVODAU

Steve9982 — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 00:02:19 +0000

LiveScience Staff

LiveScience.com livescience Staff

livescience.com – Mon Nov 2, 5:43 pm ET

A 35-mile rift in the desert of Ethiopia will likely become a new ocean eventually, researchers now confirm.

The crack, 20 feet wide in spots, opened in 2005 and some geologists believed then that it would spawn a new ocean. But that view was controversial, and the rift had not been well studied.

A new study involving an international team of scientists and reported in the journal Geophysical Research Letters finds the processes creating the rift are nearly identical to what goes on at the bottom of oceans, further indication a sea is in the region’s future.

The same rift activity is slowly parting the Red Sea, too.

Using newly gathered seismic data from 2005, researchers reconstructed the event to show the rift tore open along its entire 35-mile length in just days. Dabbahu, a volcano at the northern end of the rift, erupted first, then magma pushed up through the middle of the rift area and began “unzipping” the rift in both directions, the researchers explained in a statement today.

“We know that seafloor ridges are created by a similar intrusion of magma into a rift, but we never knew that a huge length of the ridge could break open at once like this,” said Cindy Ebinger, professor of earth and environmental sciences at the University of Rochester and co-author of the study.

The result shows that highly active volcanic boundaries along the edges of tectonic ocean plates may suddenly break apart in large sections, instead of in bits, as the leading theory held. And such sudden large-scale events on land pose a much more serious hazard to populations living near the rift than would several smaller events, Ebinger said.

“The whole point of this study is to learn whether what is happening in Ethiopia is like what is happening at the bottom of the ocean where it’s almost impossible for us to go,” says Ebinger. “We knew that if we could establish that, then Ethiopia would essentially be a unique and superb ocean-ridge laboratory for us. Because of the unprecedented cross-border collaboration behind this research, we now know that the answer is yes, it is analogous.”

The African and Arabian plates meet in the remote Afar desert of Northern Ethiopia and have been spreading apart in a rifting process - at a speed of less than 1 inch per year - for the past 30 million years. This rifting formed the 186-mile Afar depression and the Red Sea. The thinking is that the Red Sea will eventually pour into the new sea in a million years or so. The new ocean would connect to the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden, an arm of the Arabian Sea between Yemen on the Arabian Peninsula and Somalia in eastern Africa.

Atalay Ayele, professor at the Addis Ababa University in Ethiopia, led the investigation, gathering seismic data with help from neighboring Eritrea and Ghebrebrhan Ogubazghi, professor at the Eritrea Institute of Technology, and from Yemen with the help of Jamal Sholan of the National Yemen Seismological Observatory Center.

Original Story: Giant Crack in Africa Will Create a New Ocean

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posted by STEVEN WEVODAU

Pa. woman, daughter hold signs admitting theft

Steve9982 — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 23:59:36 +0000

Posted by STEVEN WEVODAU

BEDFORD, Pa. – In exchange for no jail time, a woman and her adult daughter have agreed to stand outside a Pennsylvania courthouse holding signs saying they stole a gift card from a 9-year-old girl on her birthday.

Fifty-six-year-old Evelyn Border and 35-year-old Tina Griekspoor stood outside the court for 4 1/2 hours Tuesday. They held signs that read: “I stole from a 9-year-old girl on her birthday! Don’t steal or this could happen to you!”

Because the women agreed to hold the signs, Bedford County District Attorney Bill Higgins says he’ll ask for probation instead of jail when they plead guilty to the theft.

Higgins says they swiped a gift card that the girl set on a shelf while a Walmart employee helped her.

The girl’s mother planned to drive by the courthouse to teach her daughter the importance of obeying the law.

Steven Wevodau - Women with emotional intelligence have better sex lives

steve2970 — Thu, 14 May 2009 16:12:18 +0000

Beauty may bag you a man - but brains will bring you more fun in the bedroom. Women blessed with “emotional intelligence” - the ability to express their feelings and read those of others - have better sex lives, research shows.

Steven Sven Wevodau

Space hotel says it’s on schedule to open in 2012

Giant Crack in Africa Will Create a New Ocean - posted by STEVEN WEVODAU

Pa. woman, daughter hold signs admitting theft

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