“Dead On Arrival” ought to be the title of Andrew Thomas’sВ Law & Order styled 10-minute homemade film which premiered at the NASA leadership retreat last month. Thomas, a NASA astronaut who participated in several Mir Space Station flights through the late 1990s, wanted to show his co-workers at the agency that, despite policy changes after the 2003 Columbia disaster, barriers to innovation and inclusion still dominate the culture at NASA.

Still from the NASA innovation video.

A hybrid ofВ The Office and a live-action Dilbert cartoon,В the film features a young engineer’s demoralizing experience as she tangles with an impersonal bureaucracy intent on following administrative protocols. We follow her along as her ideas and enthusiasm for her work are killed off in a slow death of defeating encounters with managers and directors obsessed with process and conformity.

“The point about the video is it’s not fiction,” Thomas toldВ SPACE.com. “I think it is something that does need to be addressed because we don’t want to have another accident,” said Thomas, whose last spaceflight was NASA’s first shuttle flight following the Columbia tragedy. “And in our business, that’s what happens when you have that kind of culture.”

NASA’s response to the video was surprisingly broadminded. “I found it extraordinarily funny and not at all funny,” NASA’s former shuttle program manager Wayne Hale wrote in a NASA blog entry last week. Hale posted the video to his YouTube account where it’s caught the attention of viewers well outside the NASA culture.

The video, which was first posted on Jan. 27 (the day after the extraordinary Aquarian annular solar eclipse) has been seen over 30,000 times.

“It has really been resonating with people,” Thomas said. “I’m enormously surprised.”

On Tuesday, Feb. 10, and for the first time, two intact satellites collided in orbit. The wreck created a “massive” debris field 491 miles over Siberia and 270 miles over the NASA international space station.

An Iridium commercial communications satellite, launched in 1997 and weighing 1,235 pounds, collided with a one-ton 1993 Russian Kosmos 2251 military satellite which appeared to be out of control.

NASA believes it will take several weeks before they have a full assessment of the damage.

“We knew this was going to happen eventually,” said Mark Matney, an orbital debris scientist at Johnson Space Center in Houston,В in an interview with the Associate Press.

Litter in orbit is now a greater hazard to space shuttle flights than lift-off or re-entry. В According to Nicholas Johnson, though, we should probably worry more about the Hubble Telescope. Johnson, an orbital debris expert at the Houston space center, said the risk of damage from the collision is greater for the Hubble Space Telescope and Earth-observing satellites, which are in higher orbit and nearer the debris field.

NASA estimates that of the 6,000 satellites launched since 1957, approximately half remain in operation. In addition, about 18,000 pieces of man-made objects orbit the earth as space litter. Most are the result of old satellites breaking up, long after they ceased to function.

And who is counting these floating bits? The military, saysВ The Washington Post:

The military can track space debris as small as a baseball. The U.S. Strategic Command monitors 18,000 distinct pieces of debris, according to Reggie Winchester, spokeswoman for the command. That number will jump by at least 600, the preliminary estimate for the number of pieces from Tuesday’s collision.В 

Even a very small object packs tremendous kinetic energy at orbital velocities, which are on the order of 17,500 mph. Humphries said the space station has “bumpers” designed to shatter an object into tiny pieces before it can penetrate the pressurized interior.В 

Said Humphries: “It gets down to probabilities. Space being very big, these pieces of debris being very small, the odds are very high that they’re not going to collide.”

The Onion has spoken up on the banking crisis. Without stepping on the joke too much, this ain’t how it is. There would appear to be six or so different standards for loaning money, and one of them is not that your local banker cares about you. Actual loan policy includes: your credit rating is high (which says about as much about you as the SAT measures intelligence), or you are on the list of the kinds of people that the bank’s predatory practices are aimed to go after that week. Or, you have so much money that you don’t need it. In any event, here is a visit to The Onion‘s paracosm; their fantasy world where bank officers has to call his mother because the loan applicant’s plan to open a stationery shop is so touching. Were it so.

Shot with my Canon G7. Colour enhancement with iPhoto. I've seen the Obelisk on Killiney Hill a million times. Man and boy. Today I saw it differently. It looked as crisp and clean as the Artic wind blowing relentless across the bows of my camera lens.The man on the bike was fortuitous. I don't think the shot would have worked as well without him. Photo by Sean Hayes.

To see more from contributing photographer Sean Hayes, click here.

Editor’s Note: Some readers may be aware that Steve Bergstein, one of my oldest and dearest friends in the world, is an attorney who writes a civil rights diary that we publish, called Psychsound. We will be posting more of his work from that project on this page. Here, he comments about one of the most important issues in consitutional law, what police can and cannot use as evidence. You may not think this applies to you because after all, why would the cops be gathering evidence in your house? But by the time you or someone you love needs this kind of information, it’s too late. Your best option is to stay informed, and know the issues as they develop. –efc

By STEVE BERGSTEIN | Psychsound from Planet Waves

A seismic shift is slowly taking place in American constitutional law. The modern Supreme Court, stacked with Republican appointees, is little by little doing away with a time-honored principle that was intended to keep the police honest: the exclusionary rule.

Police hard at work, protecting your civil rights.

The Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution protects against unreasonable searches and seizures, and it also requires that the police obtain a warrant before they can search your home or other private spaces. The question is how do we enforce the Fourth Amendment? Of course, you can train the police to respect the Fourth Amendment, but what if they get their hands of evidence that can be used against you in court, and the evidence was obtained without a warrant? Then what?

It was this scenario which gave rise to the exclusionary rule, which holds that evidence which the police had no right to obtain cannot be used against you in court. Even if the evidence would give the police a slam-dunk case in court. The exclusionary rule ensures that the police will get it right before evidence goes before a jury. If the evidence was obtained illegally, i.e., without a warrant, the judge throws it out before trial. That means there may not be a trial, without the evidence. For decades, the courts decided that it was better that guilty people go free rather than allow the police to get used to scheming to find evidence without probable cause, which is necessary to secure a warrant. The benefits of the exclusionary rule include the understanding that the police will not rummage through your stuff or invade your privacy without good reason. Ask anyone who had an unpleasant encounter with the police without doing anything wrong how important it is to ensure that the police have probable cause and a warrant before poking through your stuff.

The Court’s Chief Justice is John Roberts, who as a young lawyer in the 1980′s suggested doing away with the exclusionary rule. According to the New York Times, a recent Supreme Court case, Herring v. United States, is another step in the slow process of erasing the exclusionary rule. In that case, the Court said that evidence obtained as a result of the police’s erroneous belief that someone had an outstanding warrant against them did not have to be thrown out pursuant to the exclusionary rule. The outdated warrant was still in a police computer. Someone screwed up. The Times reported a few weeks ago:

Taking aim at one of the towering legacies of the Warren Court, its landmark 1961 decision applying the exclusionary rule to the states, the chief justice’s majority opinion established for the first time that unlawful police conduct should not require the suppression of evidence if all that was involved was isolated carelessness. That was a significant step in itself. More important yet, it suggested that the exclusionary rule itself might be at risk.

The Supreme Court is moving in the direction that would allow the police to get away with obtaining evidence in violation of the rules so long as the police misconduct is not too serious. Minor errors — such as computer screw-ups — are not enough to invoke the exclusionary rule.

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A bursting display of x-rays and gamma-rays have been spotted by NASA’s Swift satellite and Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope. Loredana Vetere, who oversees the Swift observations in Penn State, explains, “At times, this remarkable object has erupted with more than 100 flares in as little as 20 minutes.”В  In other words, a lot of very intense activity.

Gamma-ray flares from SGR J1550-5418 may arise when the magnetar’s surface suddenly cracks, releasing energy stored in its powerful magnetic field. Image courtesy of NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center Conceptual Image Lab.

The object is called a gamma ray repeater, which is a type of magnetar — a neutron star with the most powerful magnetic field in the universe. They are fairly uncommon; thus far, only six have been discovered.

According to galactic astrology specialist Philip Sedgwick, this particular SGR object is located at 8+ Sagittarius, and it’s clustered with several other similar points in Sagittarius and Capricorn.

The soft-gamma-ray repeater, given the catchy name “SGR J1550-5418,” is about 30,000 light-years from Earth. It appears to originate from the constellation Norma, which lies in the path of the Milky Way. The first bursts from SGR J1550-5418 were noted on Oct. 3, 2008. After a quiet patch, the soft-gamma-ray repeater sprung back into action on Jan. 22.

Just over four years ago, on Dec. 27, 2004, the most powerful burst from a soft-gamma-repeater was recorded, which was 50,000 light years away and emitted a burst strong enough to ionize Earth’s upper atmosphere. “Previously, SGR emanations have disrupted satellite and cell phone service,” Sedgwick said.

How and why gamma-ray-repeaters occur is still in the theory stages. What is known is that the observed curved and twisted flares occur due to levels of high magnetic fields. On the Sun, for example, events like solar flares and coronal loops — when the flare forms an arch instead of shooting directly outwards — occur around strong magnetic fields. The gamma-ray and x-ray flares around SGR J1550-5418 behave similarly due to the magnetic activity.

Today Mercury echo phase ends, as Mercury crosses the 8th degree of Aquarius and ventures into new territory for the first time in two months. As I referenced yesterday, Mercury retrograde has three major phases — the echo before the retrograde, the retrograde itself and the echo after the retrograde. This would be easier with a diagram, but it’s about Mercury crossing and recrossing the same degrees of the zodiac, then entering new degrees after the whole circus is over — which it is today. It is kind of like one last new thing about the New Year, which no longer feels so novel. I am sure you have not written “2008″ on a check in weeks.

Photo by Sean Hayes.

This was a Mercury retrograde combined with two eclipses and an ongoing, extremely unusual pileup of planets in Aquarius. It was a real scrambler, shake out the truth, get to the bottom of it, mess with everyone’s mind and glad that we made it through kind of phase. I have heard some very weird stories of things that happened to people. A couple of entirely new things happened to me.

If you have concentrations of energy in Leo and Aquarius, or angles there, it was likely even more significant for you.

As we all know, there’s been news of many changes in our lives in these weeks since Dec. 26. Actually it has seemed more nonstop than usual, which is saying a lot. Nothing stays the same for very long, particularly when Mercury is shaking the tree of the mind like it has been. One friend pointed out weeks ago that for her, this particular retrograde was about letting go of her old language in exchange for new ways to describe things. You would be surprised what happens when you take hold of your language consciously. A lot of emotion and psychology is bound up in the words and phrases we use.

Yesterday’s public notice that we should be expecting another wave of bank failures the week our nation committed to nearly $800 in economic “stimulus” (nearly half of which was tax cuts, which only affect people who pay taxes, i.e., not the poor or even the working poor). Banks do matter, but we matter more. I maintain that there is an issue of what is real and what is not in this crisis. We have heard, for example, that there is an extreme credit crisis. Yesterday, news was going around — I heard it three places, through three different kinds of sources, that Bank of America was insolvent and could be cut apart this very weekend. We do some of our banking there, and yesterday Chelsea, our business manager, walked into her local branch to do some transactions, and they offered her a credit card.

Chelsea has better credit than the Virgin Mary (though besides that, not so much in common), so she would have been a good investment; she told them to bugger off. This is precisely an example of the predatory practices that got us into this mess, and of bank employees (and marketing departments) scraping ice for their drinks off the iceberg that struck the Titanic.

Till tomorrow,