Media company to consolidate worldwide software development in Geneva and Singapore.

That's continues steady growth. A reasonable person might be tempted to conclude that Tax cuts work.

Yes, you read that right. Hyperventilation has not yet been linked to global warming, however it's link to a diffuse sense of worldwide catastrophe is undeniable.

Richard Branson and Burt Rutan create company to design and build a new sub-orbital passenger spacecraft and it's carrier airplane.

From the press release:

The launch customer for this new joint venture between Virgin Group and Scaled Composites will be Virgin Galactic, Sir Richard Branson's commercial space tourism venture. Virgin Galactic has placed orders for five SS2's and two WK2's, with options on further systems, thus securing the exclusive use of the systems for the initial 18 months of commercial passenger operations.

The Spaceship Company plans to make spaceflight affordable for the masses and to demonstrate the commercial viability of manned space exploration. We are dedicated to reaching that goal with the first generation of spaceship systems developed for routine, scheduled flight operations. Those systems will be environmentally friendly and will include new solutions to optimize both safety and the passenger experience. We expect that as the flight hardware matures, and is operated by competing spaceline companies, many thousands of people will experience the wonder of leaving the earth's atmosphere each year.

Did the EPA bring the Shuttle down? From NASA's application to the EPA for a waiver from the CFC ban:

A reduction in compressive and tensile strengths was also realized due to the change from CFC 11 blown foam." "The new foams were also more susceptible to a phenomenon known as "popcorning", sporadic loss of small pieces of foam at low heating rates, leading to ET Intertank foam loss that ultimately resulted in Orbiter TPS tile damage.

Dem senators want confidential Roberts papers. The Wall Street Journal thinks it's a mistake to give them the papers:

At about the time the first batch of documents was being delivered to Capitol Hill Tuesday afternoon, the eight Democrats on the Judiciary Committee sent a thank you letter to President Bush that began with the words, "We are disappointed," and went on to label as "ill-advised" the Administration's decision not to release Judge Robert's papers from his years as Deputy Solicitor General under the first President Bush.

This paragraph from a letter Delta CEO sent to employees, might just say it all:

The overlap with low-cost carriers in our markets is greater than any other network airline. Therefore, Delta is more susceptible to LCC pricing pressures. We currently cannot capture as much revenue per passenger, especially on the East Coast, as legacy carriers with a different LCC market-presence mix are able to do.

During a visit of Secretary of State Rumsfeld to Iraq, General George Casey said:

"If the political process continues to go positively, if the developments with the [Iraqi] security forces continue to go as it is going, I do believe we will still be able to make fairly substantial reductions after these elections - in the spring and summer of next year,"

Note to all of you "get out of Iraq now" folks: there's a big "if" right up front there. Think about it for a while before going out to see Jane Fonda's bus tour. (Link ironically to China's People's Daily. You can't make this stuff up.)

Rumsfeld listed several areas where Iraq needed to step up, including doing more to secure its borders with Syria and Iran, making sure the August 15th timetable for a new constitution is met, and taking a larger role in handling detainees within Iraq.

Kansas City's WDAF-TV reports that after the current Shuttle flight ends, the spacecraft will again be grounded due to external tank insulating foam which again broke off during launch of Discovery.

NASA will go back to the drawing board again.

Remember way back, early in the Shuttle program, the external tanks were all painted white? After a few launches, they decided they didn't need to paint them any more, in order to save weight.

I'm not saying that painting the tanks again would fix the problem, I'm just saying it's something to think about.

On the way off of Pad 39B, STS-114's external fuel tank hit a bird, a little over two seconds into the launch.

Launch video here (bird strike not visible, unfortunately). NASA TV did however show a still photo just before the unfortunate demise of the bird in a briefing this afternoon. If they post anything more on Shuttle-bird-gate, I'll link to it.