perfidy

Today is my last day of work. Until next Tuesday, anyway. What with wrapping up projects at my soon to be ex-place of employment, I am rather busy. But here are a few spacely tidbits to occupy your mind:

• Zoe Brain has an in-depth and critical look at NASA's Apollo retread, I mean CEV program. I would offer detailed comments, but that would be gilding the lilly, as I agree with everything she says.
• Alan Stern, the big brain responsible for the New Horizons Pluto Mission, has an exceedingly clever idea for supplying our future moon colonists with water. To save money, effort and time, he insists, we need not bother with cumbersome and outmoded concepts like actually decelerating our water when it reaches the moon. Water ice can simply be crashed into the moon like a comet, where it will accomodatingly enough bury itself a few feet under the Lunar regolith, there safe from evaporation but still easy to get to. Apparently, only about 15% of the water will be lost on impact, and as an added bonus, we get to do comet research by studying the impact craters.
• Also from space.com, the Voyager 2 spacecraft is expected to cross the outermost limits of the solar system, the termination shock. Which sounds suspiciously like what happened to me one Friday about two years ago this week. In this case, however, Voyager will hopefully provide some info on why the heliosphere is all funny shaped.
• Rand Simberg on SDLVness, EELVness, and other expensive and ill-thought NASA acronyms.