Potpourri CXXIV

First up from Doc: a little humor involving chemistry. Yes, you read that right. Really. Specifically, fluorine. I heard that back in the 1960s, when the Apollo guys were looking for a high-energy propellant, they looked at fluorine, but determined that one launch of a Saturn V-type booster filled with that stuff would make a good portion of the Florida East Coast a hazardous environment for several years. An explosion would make for a Bad Day for a lot of people.

NASA Administrator insisted to Senators that Mars is the ultimate goal of America's space program, but acknowledged that the technologies needed for such a program (under the Obama plan) would not be available for at least 10 years...never mind the fact that at the end of those 10 years that there wouldn't be a vehicle to put those technologies on. NASA's human exploration program is about to spend a lot period wandering in the wilderness until someone gives them an honest-to-gosh mission that goes somewhere.

SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket will be on the launch pad for tests next week, edging closer to its first flight.

Something off the beaten path for this blog, but it amused me: a blog on the science of Olympic bobsledding and curling.

China seems to be happy that the U.S. is backing off of its lunar plans.