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The answer is "it depends". First, it depends on what you mean by "just beyond the earth's atmosphere". Second it depends on what you mean by "temperature". The standard definition of the boundary between the Earth's atmosphere and outer space is the "Kármán line" (wikipedia article here), or 100 km above the surface of the Earth. There is still some air up there, very very thin air, but air. This chart shows the temperature of the molecules/ions that form the upper reaches of the atmosphere. Note that the temperature starts climbs from 300K to over 1200K as altitude increases. The Earth's atmosphere effectively ends at around 10,000 km above the Earth. This is still not empty space. The heliosphere (diagram here) extends from the surface of the Sun to the 60 to 150 AU from the Sun. The heliosphere is even hotter than the Earth's upper atmosphere. What's outside the heliosphere? The solar system appear to be in a "cool" bubble (~ 7000 K) embedded in very hot bubble (millions of kelvins) of space (reference here). So space (at least local space) is "hot". I earlier said the answer depends on what you mean by temperature. I answered with the temperature of the plasma that forms the Earth's upper atmosphere, the heliosphere, and the local interstellar medium. Those temperatures are more than a bit misleading. A spaceship will not get nearly as hot as the surrounding medium because that medium is so incredibly thin. If the spacecraft is shielded from sunlight, it will cool to around 2.7 kelvins. There is very, very little heat transfer from the thin exoatmosphere to the spacecraft. There is even less heat transfer from the interplanetary or interstellar medium. In this sense, space is very, very cold.

How has Ron Paul helped keep property taxes low? He is a US Congressmen, not a Texas Senator or Representative. The Federal government doesn't have property taxes. That is a state and local source of revenue.

http://www.spacepolitics.com/2008/02/24/ron-pauls-other-race/ While Ron Paul is continuing his presidential campaign—a decision many may consider quixotic given John McCain’s virtual lock on the Republican nomination at this point—he does have a separate election looming: the Republican nomination for the 14th Congressional District in Texas, a seat Paul has held for over a decade. Paul is facing a strong challenger in the form of Chris Peden, and with no Democrat on the ballot, the March 4 primary could effectively be the general election for that seat. If a campaign sign count is any indicator, Ron Paul is in for a fight to maintain his seat in Congress. I have seen *no* signs for Ron Paul except a few big ones he has paid for. All of the signs in people's yards I have seen are for Chris Peden. This is a big district, so things might be different elsewhere. I, for one, will be voting against Ron Paul on March 4. Good riddance, I hope.

Proof (absolute proof) is the realm of mathematics and logic. A mathematical theorem proven true two thousand years ago remains true today, and for all time. That is not the case for a scientific theory. The "proof" in a scientific theory is more along the lines of proof in a legal trial ("proof beyond a reasonable doubt") than proof in a mathematical theorem. Scientific theories are not "proven". All it takes is one counterexample to disprove a theory.

Nobody has claimed that Dictionary.dom is a non-credible source. The problem is that it is a lay source. Scientists do not use the term "theory" in the lay sense of "6. contemplation or speculation" or "7. guess or conjecture". They use the words conjecture, hypothesis, or guess instead. Definition #1 describes scientific theories such as relativity and evolution: A very detailed and well-confirmed explanation of the observed world. Unfortunately, even scientists are prone to abuse of terminology, and hence things like "string theory" (definition 2). Utter abuse of terminology is something scientists leave to the non-scientific world. As this is a scientific forum, we should avoid using definitions 6 and 7 at all costs. This is particular so since we have perfectly adequate words for such things, such as the four alternative words listed in definitions 6 and 7.

I for one have a difficulty seeing science as philosophy. We have also made distinctions between astronomy and astrology, chemistry and alchemistry, psychology and phrenology, and so on. Astronomy and astrology were originally the same field of endeavor, as were chemistry and alchemistry. We have thrown out astrology, alchemistry, and phrenology as useless pseudoscientific endeavors. Science is not philosophy. Feynman said it best: "Philosophers say a great deal about what is absolutely necessary for science, and it is always, so far as one can see, rather naive, and probably wrong." =============== My two bits on science: Science is some field that has a base set of knowledge comprising "proven" theories and unproven but well-reasoned assumptions, uses deductive and inductive reasoning to form new hypotheses from the base, and builds on the base by means of experimentation and abductive reasoning. Falsification is a bit overrated as an underlying paradigm. Falsifiability is one key characteristic of a scientific hypothesis. However, just because some scientific model has been shown to be false does not necessarily mean that that model is no longer a valid scientific theory. We still teach and use Newton's laws of motion, for example. We do not use general relativity or quantum mechanics as the basis for building a bridge.

From http://www.pbs.org/newshour/indepth_coverage/law/corruption/history.html: The Keating Five scandal from 1989 implicated five senators in another corruption probe. Democrats Dennis DeConcini of Arizona, Donald Riegle of Michigan, John Glenn of Ohio and Alan Cranston of California, and Republican John McCain of Arizona, were accused of strong-arming federal officials to back off their investigation of Charles Keating, former chairman of the Lincoln Savings and Loan association. In exchange, the senators reportedly received close to $1.3 million in campaign contributions. The Senate Ethics Committee concluded that Glenn and McCain's involvement in the scheme was minimal and dropped the charges against them. In August 1991, the committee ruled that the other three senators had a]cted improperly in interfering with the Federal Home Loan Banking Board's investigation. From http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=17137136: The Ethics committee ultimately decided that McCain was guilty of nothing more than poor judgment in meeting with the regulators. But the incident was a body blow to McCain, according to biographer Robert Timberg. "He said, 'You know, this is the worst thing, the absolute worst thing that ever happened to me,' and I said it can't be the worst thing. I'm sort of amazed that he uses the superlative, considering what had come before that, and he said, 'No, this is worse.' That's how bad it was for him," Timberg said. Probably the most lasting effect of McCain's involvement with the Keating Five is the legislation that he co-authored with Wisconsin Democrat Russ Feingold. The McCain-Feingold law overhauled the way campaigns are funded. McCain denies that the legislation stems directly from that incident, but Timberg isn't so sure. Bringing up the Keating 5 is mud that won't stick. Bringing up an 8-9 year old story with minimal corroborating evidence is mud that won't stick. What next, that McCain sent birthday wishes to a mob boss who retired in Arizona?

NASA did do those calculations. The hydrazine was frozen solid in a spherical titanium fuel tank. It takes a lot of force to break a spherical titanium fuel tank. The fuel tank has to be very strong because of the huge pressure difference between the near vacuum of space and the operational contents of the tank. Because of the inherent strength and the spherical shape of the tank, the fuel tank was very likely to have survived the re-entry intact. Moreover, the frozen block of hydrazine in the tank would have added a lot of structural integrity to the tank. The hydrazine was frozen solid. It would have taken a lot of heat to raise the frozen block to the melting point and then over more heat (a lot of heat) to melt that much hydrazine. If the vehicle stayed intact through a significant part of the reentry, not enough of the frictional heating would have reached the tank to even come close to melting all that hydrazine. The tank was not only very likely to have survived the re-entry intact, it would have done so loaded with slushy hydrazine. The fuel lines most likely would have been severed. Some hydrazine would have escaped during entry, but by sublimation rather than evaporation. On the ground, we would have had a tank with openings full of hydrazine slush. The tank would have eventually heated up, releasing that hydrazine at ground level. In short, the hydrazine-based rationale for breaking up the satellite with a missile was a plausible one. Whether that or having a chance to play with their fancy ASAT toys was the real reason, I don't know.

The Mythbusters recently floated a lead balloon. .

Musharraf was not voted out in the recent general election. The February 2008 election selected the members of the Pakistani Assembly, not the Presidency. The Assembly can replace the Prime Minister at any time. The national and provincial assemblies collectively elect the President at fixed intervals. Note well: The people of Pakistan do not get to vote directly for either the Prime Minister or the President. Musharraf was reelected as President in October, 2007. While that Presidential election was controversial (google it), it is over. The next Presidential election won't be until 2012.

It is late, very late, so I'm going to keep this short. What you are describing is an electric dipole, not a magnet. Magnetism results only from moving electrical charges, not stationary ones. There is no electrical imbalance between the north and south pole of a permanent magnet (the kind of magnet people use to hold notes on their refrigerator doors). The wikipedia articles on magnets, electromagnetism, and ferromagnetism (that's the kind of magnet people use to hold notes on a refrigerator door) are fairly well written. I suggest you read them. Math warning: Because magnetism only results from moving electrical charges, getting a good understanding of magnetism is quite a bit more difficult than getting a good understanding of electricity. The mathematics and physics that describe magnetism get very complicated very quickly.

Per the 1967 UN Space Treaty, countries that launch satellites are required to pay for damages done to aircraft or the Earth by falling satellites. Note that I said countries, not companies. This is already an issue with private satellite ventures: What country takes on the liability when a multinational company performs the launch and another multinat owns and operates the satellite? This will become an even bigger issue when/if commercialized space efforts take off. Countries are also supposed to (but not required to) "play nice" in space. Part of playing nice is carrying enough fuel on a LEO satellite to make it ends its life with a controlled re-entry -- i.e., in the middle of some ocean. Most LEO satellites do carry that suicidal dose of fuel. However, bad things sometimes happen, as is the case with the vehicle to be "shot down" on Thursday. Playing nice in geosynchronous orbit means carrying enough extra fuel to move a GEO satellite to a graveyard orbit at the end of its life. Most GEO satellites do not carry their dose of suicide fuel. Using every bit of fuel for orbit maintenance extends the life of the vehicle by months or years. Only about a third of GEO satellites "play nice". GEO now has quite a bit of uncontrolled junk flying through it. When a GEO satellite runs out of fuel without moving to a graveyard orbit, it does not remain perfectly geostationary. Solar radiation pressure, Earth's non-spherical gravity field, and third body effects (Moon and Sun primarily) change the orbit slightly. This makes dead GEO satellites a hazard to every functional vehicle up there. I won't be surprised if someday soon we lose a big chunk of TV broadcasts because of a collision in GEO. This Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology note is a bit dated, but is well-written and provides some very nice charts and tables on amount of stuff in orbit, orbit lifetimes, Earth impacts, and the Space Treaty.

I objected to the use of the word "theory". This is a scientific forum, so we should use scientific terminology. Why so picky? Because abusing the word theory is exactly one of the techniques creationists use to prey on a gullible public. They conflate the scientific meaning of "theory" in "Theory of Evolution" with one of the lay meaning of the word, "wild-ass guess". The argument is something along the lines of "It's the 'Theory of Evolution'; we shouldn't be teaching evolution as if it were a fact. It's only a theory, after all. Schools should teach our theory as well."

Tachyons are just a conjecture. They are not a "theory" for the very reason that "their existence has yet to be confirmed!". Nothing theoretical here, move along. ======================= As a double aside, if you follow the wiki link to the article on "bradyons" you will find yet another coined term, "luxon".

The last bit of the article is telling: Hall said he's worried that some Democrats who feel like the primary didn't work well could look elsewhere on the ballot in November, a concern he has passed along to party leaders at the state and national levels. "They're going to mess around and let a Republican win Michigan. And then everyone will be sitting around and saying `I told you so,'" he said. State Sen. Tupac Hunter [ ... ] worries about souring Democratic voters if Michigan's delegates. "You have a situation where people could become disaffected and discouraged," he said. "And if that happens, we don't win in November." I doubt McCain can take Michigan, one of the bluest of blue states. Moreover, while Romney made false promised about getting all those lost jobs back in Michigan, McCain had the audacity to tell the truth: "Those jobs are gone. They are never coming back". He instead proposed training Michiganders to do different kinds of jobs. People who have lost their very way of life are not particularly wont to hear a hard-hitting truth. I suspect the situation in Florida is much, much dicier for the Democrats. They did support Clinton, after all. The elderly are one of her core constituencies. I am on the record as predicting that Florida will go for McCain should Florida's delegation not be allowed to participate in the Democratic Convention. The Obama campaign is going after a younger crowd. BTW, what's the deal with this? Demographics and past voting characteristics of young adults suggest that this is a doubly-losing tactic.

I have seen some Democrats trying to spin the Florida debacle as a Republican plot on the basis that it was the Republican-dominated state legislature that voted to move to the Florida primary to January 29. However, the situation in Florida is the Florida Democrats own doing (and possibly undoing). From a October 30, 2007 article in Salon.com ( http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2007/10/30/florida/index.html): To hear the DNC tell it, however, the fault for the current imbroglio lies with Geller and his fellow Democrats in the Legislature. For months, the party has threatened to punish any state that unilaterally tried to move its primary date before Feb. 5. Under party rules, the punishment, which is also likely to be imposed on Michigan, can only be carried out if state Democrats were complicit in the change. The Florida effort to move the date was sponsored by a Democrat, state Sen. Jeremy Ring, also of Broward, who remains unapologetic about his role. "I think we have successfully blown up this antiquated primary process," he said in a phone interview last week. "I have absolutely no regrets." The DNC rules would not have applied if this were a Republican dirty trick; those delegates would have been seated were this the case. This was not a Republican dirty trick. A Democratic representative proposed the move and the Democratic representatives voted unanimously in support of it. To blame this on Republicans is simply scandalous. The Democrats did this to themselves.

As far as the satellite is concerned, missing will just put the military in the same position it would have been in had they just let it fall. The military even uses this as one of the justifications for trying to hit it. On the other hand, if they miss, the military itself will have a lot of egg on their face. From http://dsc.discovery.com/news/2008/02/15/spy-satellite-challenge.html, "If they can't hit this, they can't hit anything," said John Pike, a Washington, DC-based military policy analyst with GlobalSecurity.org. A number of respected space experts think the hydrazine tank rationale is merely a ruse. The real reason is that the military wants an excuse to play with the fancy ASAT toys and send a message to China and North Korea. More at http://blog.wired.com/defense/2008/02/fishy-rationale.html.

The upper reaches of the atmosphere are very tenuous. A vehicle in low Earth orbit in the tenuous part of the atmosphere never loses kinetic energy. In those upper reaches, atmospheric drag is best viewed as a perturbative effect. I will call the position/velocity phase state vector of a vehicle the vehicles "state". Atmospheric drag does not effect the near future state nearly as much as it effects the state half an orbit later. The vehicle gains kinetic energy via exchange with potential energy faster than it loses kinetic energy via friction -- that is, until it reaches some critical atmospheric density. The altitude at which the atmosphere has critical density is called "entry interface". Below entry interface, friction does slow the vehicle down. The Shuttle and Martian landers rely on this. They do not carry anywhere near enough fuel to completely cancel their orbital velocity.

Satellite reentry 101. First things first. Satellites in orbit well above the Earth's atmosphere will essentially stay in those orbits forever. While our atmosphere can sustain life up to only about 10 kilometers or so (Mt. Everest is at the limit; most climbers need to carry oxygen), our atmosphere extends much higher than that. The atmosphere rotates more-or-less at the Earth's rotation rate; it is not in orbit. Vehicles in low Earth orbit go 7.87 kph (17,600 mph); about 16 times faster than the atmosphere they are flying through. The difference in velocity means they encounter a stiff breeze. Paradoxically, this makes the speed up. A satellite in a decaying orbit suffers a reduction in total energy but gains kinetic energy. Except near the end of its decay, the decay of a satellites orbit is quite gradual. Even the International Space Station, which has a large surface area-to-mass ratio, falls about 100 meters per day. Another paradoxical effect of orbit decay is that it tends to circularize the orbit. A vehicle in a non-circular orbit will encounter greater drag near perigee than at apogee. Velocity changes at perigee change the apogee, and velocity changes at apogee change the perigee. The orbit quickly becomes essentially circular (but with an ever decreasing altitude). Atmospheric density in the upper atmosphere is roughly exponential function of altitude. This means that near the decay is anything but gradual once the satellite starts plunging into the thicker parts of the atmosphere. The end is very quick, as we recently saw with the Columbia disaster. Vehicles like the Shuttle are designed to stand up to reentry. Most satellites are not. Those satellites not designed to stand up to the intense heating and intense acceleration of entry break up. Some junk might (and has) reached the ground. All satellites in low Earth orbit will eventually fall to the Earth. To avoid damage, satellites are supposed to carry enough fuel to do a planned reentry. The planned reentry makes them fall harmlessly into the ocean. The vehicle in question is a dead vehicle. It can't perform a deorbit burn.

Link to McCain's statement is in post #13. Click on the word here. EDIT: Never mind. I now see that iNow wasn't talking about McCain.

The military was not initially concern about the reentry. There initial response: "Yawn. It will burn up in the atmosphere." Apparently it was NASA that told the military about the heightened risk resulting from the vehicle being in space unpowered and unheated for a long time: From http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/23172469/: NASA Administrator Michael Griffin sketched out a different scenario, however, during Thursday's news conference with Gen. James Cartwright, the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Griffin said NASA experts calculated that the hydrazine was frozen solid due to the satellite’s yearlong drift through the cold of space. The tank, with its half-ton ice core of hydrazine, would thus become one of the most perfect re-entry vehicles ever to fall back to Earth. Griffin explained that the contents of the tank could turn to slush during the fall, but would very likely survive and leak toxic gas over the crash site. Another expert told msnbc.com privately that the solid ice would provide structural support against the 20 to 25 G’s of deceleration experienced by the satellite during re-entry.

The problem is that the vehicle has been dead in space for quite some time. The vehicle is very, very cold. The hydrazine fuel is almost certainly frozen. This is the cornerstone of the military's justification for getting a chance to playing with their fancy ASAT toys. A spherical tank containing a lot of very cold material makes a very good reentry vehicle in the sense the odds are quite good it will hit the ground with a lot of the contents still inside. It depends a lot on where in the atmosphere the satellite breaks up. We don't know where that breakup will happen. BTW, it is unclear whether the "hydrazine" on the vehicle is plain old vanilla hydrazine (N2H4) or one of the slightly less reactive derivatives of hydrazine formed by replacing one (MMH) or two (UDMH) of the hydrogen with a methyl group. All three compounds are used as propellant and all three are colloquially called "hydrazine".

He voted against a new law that did other things than banned torture techniques. If it is already illegal, why a new law? Enforce the laws that already exist. If it is so important to emphasize that it is illegal, why all the extra cr@p that makes people who largely support the main gist of the bill vote against it? Congresscritters seem to love to tack extra stuff on to their bills. Note well: I'm not picking on any one party here; they all do it.

You can read his own words explaining his vote here. McCain remains steadfast that waterboarding is torture. He voted no because "it is unfortunate that the reluctance of officials to stand by this straightforward conclusion [ that waterboarding is illegal ] has produced in the Congress such frustration that we are today debating whether to apply a military field manual to non-military intelligence activities. It would be far better, I believe, for the Administration to state forthrightly what is clear in current law – that anyone who engages in waterboarding, on behalf of any U.S. government agency, puts himself at risk of criminal prosecution and civil liability."

Don't forget that last item I mentioned: Giving the military a chance to play with their fancy ASAT toys.