News December 7, 2021 Space junk is an ongoing problem that is getting worse every launch. Just think about the damage a metal screw which is traveling over 17,000 miles per hour can do when it hits something. Things are so bad space stations have to move out of the way at times because they are in orbit around the earth where the junk is. Scientists think they may have come up with an efficient way to get rid of a lot of it using magnets. Amazingly these powerful magnets are said to be able to also clean up non-metallic junk. The idea is to spin them closer to earth so they fall into the atmosphere and burn up. This was demonstrated when the scientists and engineers were able to manipulate a copper ball floating in a plastic raft in a tank of water. An interesting article came out quoting a NASA insider saying he believes NASA is ignoring the SpaceX Starship. I know one thing, the SpaceX Starship is a thorn in NASA’s side. The reason for this is all the trouble and expense with the Artemis Moon mission. Just substituting the SpaceX Starship would save an incredible amount of money. The article states if one were to send a kilo into space using the Starship it would cost fifty dollars. On the other hand, it claims that same kilo sent up using the Artemis would cost one million dollars. This is mind blowing if true. One last point I would like to make is the Starship is reusable making everything about the flight cheaper. The Great Lakes in the United States are said to be the resting place of many hundreds of ship wrecks. The deeper the ships sank the better chance of preservation. There are also wrecks which people claim are haunted. One of these ships is the Emperor, a large ship used to carry ore. It sank in 1947. Some divers report seeing strange events when they dived on the wreck. Ghost ships have also been reported from time to time. Scientists are very happy with a new procedure they have developed. They have created a photocatalyst which allows them to produce ammonia at room temperature from nitrogen and no fossil fuel is used. The advantage of this over conventional ways of producing ammonia is the conventional method releases a lot of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. It is estimated creating ammonia uses a total of two percent of all the world’s energy. Ammonia can be used as a fuel in many instances. When ammonia is burned as a fuel it is much cleaner than fossil fuels. We could be on the verge of using quantum entanglement for communication and many other endeavors such as those to do with optics and others. I say this because the bandwidth of the frequencies of photons has been increased by use of a new material. Quantum entanglement is the instant changing of one particle because another was changed no matter how distant they are. In other words, you could have instant communication across the galaxy or even further. We have yet to discover all the uses for this phenomena. If you are like me, that is a person without a good sense of direction, you were extremely happy when navigation aids came out for cars. I know I would be lost without it. These aids depend on satellites to find your position on the planet. A new device is coming out which does away with the need for these satellites to find your position. It is a metal box of sorts which contains a cloud made of atoms which allows for navigational measurements. Quantum mechanics is used for sensors which do the measuring and it is said to outperform traditional means of navigation. This was created to prevent jamming of the navigation satellites. Quantum computers are very much on the mind of the Chinese. Two teams in China have made a claim which is they have reached primacy with a quantum computer. This means they can perform calculations on their quantum computers which cannot be performed on classic computers. Some scientists are skeptical about this claim and wonder if the algorithm was the best choice. Sometimes you can know how an article about UFOs is going to go just by the first sentence. Take the one I have just been reading. It starts out saying a conspiracy theorist and not a UFO investigator so I think we all know it is going to be what I call a Put Down article. I am no fan of this particular UFO investigator but I can’t help but think reporters should just report the news and not make the articles vehicles for their feelings. An unknown tomb was discovered in Egypt in the Saqqara necropolis. It is amazing to me how they just keep finding more of these types of things after all these years of digging. Anyway, this was the tomb of a very important man. The tomb belonged to Ptahemwia who was an official under Ramses II back some 3,300 years. He was the royal scribe, head of the treasury, chief overseer of the cattle and also in charge of divine offerings at the temple of Ramses II in Thebes. It seems to me that was a lot of offices for one man to be in charge of. He must have been very well respected and completely trusted by Ramses. NASA has been mulling over the idea of replacing the space station. It is starting to get long in the tooth. As of the writing of this article the first module was the Russian Zarya power and propulsion module and that went up about 24 years ago. While NASA is thinking about replacing it in the near future so are some private companies. It could very well turn out NASA might go out of the space station business as long as they have access to space stations that suit their needs. Rumors state the latest date to replace the station might be 2030. It is beginning to look like the idea of keeping war out of space is failing. Does this also mean the no nukes in space is doomed? When the Chinese flew their nuke capable hypersonic missile into orbit and around the earth, the message was clear, they will have no problem putting nukes into space. They have to know we will do the same thing even if it takes us a little longer. What benefit is there to having nukes in space if countries and their adversaries both do it? It is just as effective to not do it if all agree.
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