A Horrible Day For Space Flight

If you’ve been watching my shiny new RSS feeds down in the left sidebar, you know that Dr. BA has covered the first three spaceflight disasters today, but hasn’t mentioned the latest yet.

[UPDATE: Here's his post about the latest.]

Drunk astronauts? What?

According to an article in Aviation Week, on at least two occasions astronauts who were intoxicated — drunk — were allowed to fly

NASA finds apparent sabotage of computers for ISS

This is the most bizarre news day for NASA ever.

CNN is reporting that NASA has found cut wires on computers slated to go onboard the International Space Station, and it may be sabotage.

NASA Trifecta Now Complete

I can’t comment on this. I just can’t.

A NASA employee embezzled more than $150,000.

And now just when you thought the day would finally end without anything else going wrong, this:

(Head below the fold to read the rest.)

Via CNN:

LOS ANGELES, California (CNN) — An explosion at an airport home to Scaled Composites — the builder of the first private manned rocket to reach space — killed two people and left four seriously hurt Thursday, a Kern County Fire Department official says.

It happened at the Mojave Air and Space Port during a test of a new rocket motor for SpaceShipTwo — a spaceship being built for Virgin Galactic, Richard Branson’s space tourism company, a source said. The motor uses nitrous oxide, the source said.

A spokeswoman for the spaceport, about 80 miles north of Los Angeles, said the blast was on a remote pad.

Read the rest of the CNN article here.

Geez Louise, could human spaceflight have a more prolific day of disasters?

Because we’re not entirely comfortable that we’ve gotten the spam trojan eliminated from the laptop, we’ve held off requesting deletion from the blacklists and still can’t comment there, but we’ve sent him an email, and if he’s still not aware of what’s going on, a trackback from this post should give him the heads up.

EDIT – Um, if you’re reading this, Dr. BA please accept our humble apologies. We sent out ONE deliberate trackback… The other SEVEN EIGHT were apparently Automattic. (heh, a pun.)

(Is BadAstronomy dragging really badly for anyone else, btw? I’ve never had it load this slowly before, but since shortly after the revamp of his blog, it’s crawling for us!)

Just so y’know.

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