40 years ago Apollo 13

History of the Mission here NASA - Apollo 13.

STS-1 April 12, 1981

A clip of Bob Crippen on the mission and Yuri's night here.

Yuri's Night 49 years ago

From About.com:

Yuri A. Gagarin was born on a collective farm in a region west of Moscow, Russia on March 9, 1934. His father was a carpenter. Yuri attended the local school for six years and continued his education at vocational and technical schools.

Yuri Gagarin joined the Russian Air Force in 1955 and graduated with honors from the Soviet Air Force Academy in 1957. Soon afterward, he became a military fighter pilot. By 1959, he had been selected for cosmonaut training as part of the first group of USSR cosmonauts.

Yuri Gagarin flew only one space mission. On April 12, 1961 he became the first human to orbit Earth. Major Yuri Gagarin's spacecraft, Vostok 1, circled Earth at a speed of 27,400 kilometers per hour. The flight lasted 108 minutes. At the highest point, Yuri Gagarin was about 327 kilometers above Earth.

Once in orbit, Yuri Gagarin had no control over his spacecraft. Vostok's reentry was controlled by a computer program sending radio commands to the space capsule. Although the controls were locked, a key had been placed in a sealed envelope in case an emergency situation made it necessary for Yuri Gagarin to take control. As was planned, Cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin ejected after reentry into Earth's atmosphere and landed by parachute.

Colonel Yuri Gagarin died on March 27, 1968 when the MiG-15 he was piloting crashed near Moscow. At the time of his death, Yuri Gagarin was in training for a second space mission.

Science Dude says good bye to OCRegister

Science Dude Gary Robbins will hang up his hat at the Orange County Register after twenty years. He now will report at the San Diego Union. I hope he'll have a blog over there so we can still follow. (I'm sure he will!)

Save Space rally draws 4,000

Thousands packed Cocoa Expo on Sunday in a unified plea to President Obama to extend the shuttle program, send astronauts to the moon and Mars, and maintain America's lead in space and the inspiration the program inspires.

They waved signs that read, "Save Space." They warned of the national security implications of ceding dominance in space to Russia and China. And they worried about the estimated 8,000 Kennedy Space Center jobs that will go away when the shuttle lands for the last time.

From Florida Today here.

I advocate for Space and wish I could have been at the rally. My husband works for one of the big aerospace companies. Space is the High Frontier. We need to stay in the leadership role of space. Obama wants to dismiss the USA as a space faring Nation. We need to be ahead. And Space is one of them.

Cows aren't the cause of Climate Change--Go ahead and have steak today!

Telegraph here

Bessie and her gas bag! LOL!

However a new study found that cattle grazed on the grasslands of China actually reduce another greenhouse gas, nitrous oxide.

Authors of the paper, published in Nature, say the research does not mean that producing livestock to eat is good for the environment in all countries. However in certain circumstances, it can be better for global warming to let animals graze on grassland.

ISS Welcomes STS-131

STS-131 Pitch Roll

STS-131 Launch

Happy Birthday Yeoman Rand

Grace Lee Whitney turns 80 today. Many more happy birthdays to come!


American Journal - on Star Trek's Grace Lee Whitney, 1993!
Uploaded by videohollic. - Full seasons and entire episodes online.

Holes in GISS data

From Fox News here.

Concerns about the validity of NASA's climate research are being raised following revelations that the space agency admitted its data was less accurate than other weather trackers'. Disturbed by these reports, as well as the growing Climate-gate scandal that has left global-warming theorists reeling, Senators John Barrasso (R-Wyo.) and David Vitter (R-La.) have written a letter to space agency chief Charles Bolden demanding answers.

"The American people deserve to learn the truth about the data," Barrasso told FoxNews.com, stressing the risks of basing public policy on science that remains largely undecided.

April Fool's Global Warming Forcast

Global warming has unthawed an entire race of warrior mermen and mermaids in the Arctic, scientists revealed today. At a packed press conference in Boulder, Colorado, Dr. Mark Xyzzy of the National Institute for Cryosphere Exploration and Tertiary Research on Yetis (NICETRY) revealed the details of the discovery: "We've been operating robot research submarines under the sea ice in the Chukchi Sea north of Barrow, Alaska this winter, as part of International Geophysical Year studies on the dynamics of arctic sea ice loss," commented Dr. Xyzzy. "Last week, one of our submersibles caught a remarkable video of a warrior mermaid, armed with a trident, riding past the submarine on the back of a narwhal. We were able to track the mermaid to her home--an underwater merfolk city at the bottom of the Chukchi Sea. The city had been thawed out in 2005 by warm water currents invading the Arctic due to global warming. These mermaids and mermen had been frozen into the underwater permafrost since the onset of the last ice age, 115,000 years ago. We undertook immediate efforts to establish communications with the merfolk, by sending in divers with underwater writing boards who were able to work out a simple symbol-based language. We learned that the Chukchi Sea merfolk are at war with a tribe of rival merfolk in the Greenland Sea. The two tribes have been fighting a heated underwater battle for dominance of the Arctic Ocean ever since global warming thawed out both tribes in 2005. It is the explosions from their undersea battles that have been the dominant cause of arctic sea ice loss since 2005, not global warming, as had been previously assumed. A team of experienced United Nations negotiators is now in the Arctic, attempting to broker a truce between the rivals and save the arctic sea ice from further destruction."

From Wunder Blog here.

Tsunami Map

Live stream here from Hawaii.

Green Police Audi commercial (great!)

Hail Columbia!

Day of Remeberance

NASA has a site dedicated to the lost NASA astronauts here.

Challenger 24 years ago

A memory from Holyoke here:

The effects of the Challenger explosion were far reaching in both location and time. It seems no matter where people were, they heard about the tragedy. HJHS teacher Kevin Asbury noted he was underwater, on a submarine when it happened. They heard via radio communication, but it wasn’t until they resurfaced that he and the other men finally saw the stories and watched the explosion.

To this day, the Challenger is still influencing the nation. When asked about their memories of the explosion, most people still stop, taking a moment to reflect on all that was lost on that day. Even those who were too young to remember the actual event learned about it in school, and McAuliffe’s face is still seen in classrooms here in Holyoke.

For some, the Challenger played a larger role than others. Clark Ginapp shared that his nephew, who was in grade school at the time of the Challenger launch, was so impacted by the event that he went on to a career at Johnson Space Center. It’s hard to tell just how extensive the effect of the explosion is on people today, but it is certainly still an event that lives on in people’s memories.

Great link here from Timelines with videos.

It's ironic the day Obama Axes Return to Moon and Apollo 1 fire

I truly want the US to get back to the Moon. Maybe this time it will be done from Private Enterprise. The Obama Administration will axe Constellation/Ares Project here. It's sad that today is the 43rd anniversary of the Apollo 1 fire on the pad that ended the life of three astronauts, Grissom, White and Chaffe. For their sake we must forge on to discovery and continue our exploring of space. If NASA won't do it, private enterprise will.

Apollo 1 Pure Oxygen Fire 1967

Apollo 1

There You'll Be: Apollo 1 Tribute

3 Dem HCR sign on to veto EPA!

I'm amazed that three senators who sold their Health Care votes signed on with Republican Murkowski to Anti EPA. here.

Sens. Ben Nelson, D-Neb., Blanche Lincoln, D-Ark., and Mary Landrieu, D-La., on Thursday signed on as co-sponsors to a new resolution offered by Murkowski that would effectively veto the Environmental Protection Agency's formal declaration last year that carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases endanger the public health and welfare.

The Senators want to use a congressional act to put a stop to the EPA's Carbon regulations:

Murkowski, R-Alaska, said she wanted to ensure the EPA could not "issue backdoor climate regulations under the Clean Air Act," a tactic she called "our worst option for reducing the emissions blamed for climate change."

Murkowski and other critics of what they call the EPA's "command-and-control approach" to regulating greenhouse gases say it is a blunt tool for cutting carbon dioxide emissions that would not apply across all sectors of the U.S. economy and cannot be tailored for different regions.

Murkowski said she wanted more time before EPA regulations kicked in -- to allow for Congress to draft and pass its own broad climate change and energy legislation. But though the House passed such a measure last year, hopes are dimming on Capitol Hill for swift passage of any similar bill in the Senate this spring.

Lies about Ice Melting

Strait from Planet Gore here:
More at Cosmic Conservative here:

Data was not verified here at Mail Online.

ESA first satellite map of Haiti

From ESA Portal here

Object wizzed by Earth today

From Mail Online here.

It made its closest pass at 12.46pm (GMT) streaking past just 76,000 miles away, which is a third the distance to the Moon. Amateur astronomers were able to track it in the United States.

The object was discovered by MIT's Linear survey on January 10 and astronomers are divided about what it is.

Here are more video and pictures of the object from Universe Today.

Gallelon Moons

It's cold in the MidWest!

Al Gore Interactive Ice Carving

aLGORE is smoking!

Red Shirt Boogie Blues

More Red Shirt!

Star Trek: Redshirts

In Dedication to Global Warming (like the Red Shirt is Dead!)

The Global Warming HOAX has been exposed!

I'm a Rush Limbaugh listener and he is on fire today about the E-mails that were exposed from the CRU server. I'm so glad the lies and cover-up of the truth has been exposed. It was needed and my hat's off to the whistle blower.

Here is Watt's Up and the comments in the code tell it all here:

Uses “corrected” MXD – but shouldn’t usually
; plot past 1960 because these will be artificially adjusted to look closer to
; the real temperatures.

More comments from Watt's Up:

Spin that, spin it to the moon if you want. I’ll believe programmer notes over the word of somebody who stands to gain from suggesting there’s nothing “untowards” about it.

Either the data tells the story of nature or it does not. Data that has been “artificially adjusted to look closer to the real temperatures” is false data, yielding a false result.

Again, the truth comes out before the Cap and Tax and Copenhagen. Sen. Inhofe in The Hill here:

However, it is not immediately clear what Inhofe hopes to accomplish with his proposed hearing. U.S. lawmakers and scientists routinely cite IPCC evidence when discussing climate change legislation, but Congress can hardly force the United Nations to halt spending on a program over which it has no jurisdiction.

Rather, Inhofe perhaps hopes to deal a symbolic blow to next month's climate change conference, at which IPCC is likely to play a major role.

"The timing couldn’t be better," said the Oklahoma Republican, who previously announced he would attend the December summit as a "one-man truth squad." "Whoever is on the ball in Great Britain, their time was good."

Large Hadron Collider makes first collision

CERN's LHC has made it's first particle collision. The world is still here naysayers. No little black holes to gobble us up!

In contrast to last year's start-up, this event has occurred with very little press coverage. Some of the US' mainstream news organizations don't even have a headline anywhere on their front page. (Adam Lambert's kiss and Khloe Karadashian's nesting instinct were recent top news items on CNN's main Web portal, which no longer even has a science section.) As a life-long science enthusiast, it saddens me to see so little coverage of a huge milestone in experimental physics. However, this also seems to have cut down on the inevitable "end of the world" speculation that was rampant last year.

NASA Ares I-X Rocket Launch Wed, 28 Oct 2009

Great Launch! NASA Rocks!

kitten hates droids

Cat on a hot droid dome

911/WTC - View From Space Station

From NASA

Update: I did have a youtube video from space but apparently the Truther's over at Google deleted it. A shame.

Hubble new Pictures

From BBC News here.

The Apollo experiment that's still working

The experiment that Apollo 11 left on the Moon are still working, The Lunar Laser Ranging Experiment. "it studies the Earth-Moon system and returns data to scientific centers around the world, including NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory".

Three things the experiment has proved:
-The Moon is moving away from the Earth
-The Moon has a fluid core
-Einstein's Theory of Relativity is accurate

University of Maryland physics professor Carroll Alley was the project's principal investigator during the Apollo years, and he follows its progress today. "Using these mirrors," explains Alley, "we can 'ping' the moon with laser pulses and measure the Earth-moon distance very precisely. This is a wonderful way to learn about the moon's orbit and to test theories of gravity."

Here's how it works: A laser pulse shoots out of a telescope on Earth, crosses the Earth-moon divide, and hits the array. Because the mirrors are "corner-cube reflectors," they send the pulse straight back where it came from. "It's like hitting a ball into the corner of a squash court," explains Alley. Back on Earth, telescopes intercept the returning pulse--"usually just a single photon," he marvels.

The round-trip travel time pinpoints the moon's distance with staggering precision: better than a few centimeters out of 385,000 km, typically.

Buzz on Space policy

From Discovery Channel here:

Aldrin urged Congress and the American people to use the memory of Apollo 11 as inspiration to prepare for a space journey to Mars.

"Apollo 11 was a symbol of what a great nation and a great people can do if we work hard and work together," he said.

"America, do you still dream a great dream? Do you still believe in yourself?" he went on to ask. "I call on the next generation and our political leaders to give this answer: Yes We Can!"

Kind of ride on Obama's coat tails eh? But Buzz is right. WE Can go to MARS! We got to the Moon 40 years ago. Let's get started and get to Mars soon!

Logo from 30th anniversary

Apollo 11 crew at Smithsonian Air & Space

Lem seprated from CM

Moon Landing Collectables

Col. Tim Kopra (Go Army)

He is a link to Go Army where you can leave a question for Col. Kopra to answer. He'll tweet from space too!

Neil Armstrong's comments on Cronkite's passing

"For a news analyst and reporter of the happenings of the day to be successful, he or she needs three things: accuracy, timeliness, and the trust of the audience. Many are fortunate to have the first two. The trust of the audience must be earned," said Armstrong.

"Walter Cronkite seemed to enjoy the highest of ratings. He had a passion for human space exploration, an enthusiasm that was contagious, and the trust of his audience. He will be missed."

from Flame Trench here.

NASA Mission Control in Memory of Walter Cronkite

RIP Walter Cronkite

When I was growing up I idolized Walter Cronkite and equated him with the space program. But after his comments about the Vietnam War my views changed about him and the way TV NEWS portrayed National events. (I won't get into that here on this blog.) But he was a great Newsman and CBS Anchorman. And would the space program have done without Walter? My condolences and prayers go out to his family in his memory.

HT from Little Green Footballs here.

WSJ Photo Journal to 40th Moon Landing

Earthrise from Apollo 11

Apollo 11's historic journey here at the WSJ.

LEM Eagle and Buzz

NASA/Neil Armstrong

News to Hoaxer's: We did land on the Moon!

LRO picture of Apollo 11 Landing site

Krauthammer on 40th Moon Landing Aniversary

Yes, we have a financial crisis. No one's asking for a crash Manhattan Project. All we need is sufficient funding from the hundreds of billions being showered from Washington -- "stimulus" monies that, unlike Eisenhower's interstate highway system or Kennedy's Apollo program, will leave behind not a trace on our country or our consciousness -- to build Constellation and get us back to Earth orbit and the moon a half-century after the original landing.

Why do it? It's not for practicality. We didn't go to the moon to spin off cooling suits and freeze-dried fruit. Any technological return is a bonus, not a reason. We go for the wonder and glory of it. Or, to put it less grandly, for its immense possibilities. We choose to do such things, said JFK, "not because they are easy, but because they are hard." And when you do such magnificently hard things -- send sailing a Ferdinand Magellan or a Neil Armstrong -- you open new human possibility in ways utterly unpredictable.

1963 Boeing Ad in Time

Boeing Ad

Apollo 11 Flight Journal

And if you want the transcripts before launch of the Apollo 11 go here.

PAO: ...2, 1, zero, all engine running, LIFT-OFF!

[Public Affairs Officer Jack King, whose coolness is legendary, finally succumbs to the tension and is clearly heard to say "all engine running" instead of "all engines running".]

PAO: We have a lift-off, 32 minutes past the hour. Lift-off on Apollo 11.

000:00:04 Armstrong: Roger. Clock.

PAO: Tower cleared.

[As planned, control of the flight now passes from the Launch Control Center at Cape Kennedy, Florida to the Mission Control Center in Houston, Texas. There, communication with the crew is handled by an astronaut sitting at the CapCom console; in this case, Bruce McCandless. The PAO also switches, and Jack King relinquishes the commentary to the Houston PAO, whose voice is heard from now on.]

000:00:13 Armstrong: Roger. We got a roll program.

000:00:15 McCandless: Roger. Roll. [Long pause.]

PAO: Neil Armstrong reporting their roll and pitch program which puts Apollo 11 on a proper heading. Plus 30 seconds.

000:00:34 Armstrong: Roll's complete and the pitch is programming. [Pause.]

000:00:44 Armstrong: One Bravo. (Long pause.)

PAO: One Bravo is a abort control mode.

PAO: Altitude's 2 miles.

000:01:02 McCandless: Apollo 11, Houston. You're good at 1 minute.

000:01:06 Armstrong: Roger. [Long pause.]

PAO: Down range 1 mile, altitude 3, 4 miles now. Velocity 2,195 feet per second.

PAO: We're through the region of maximum dynamic pressure now.

Real Time Audio of the Apollo Mission

This is so cool. A site of the actual audio recordings of the mission played in real-time. Follow the whole mission from day one to the end here.

Apollo 11 Video restoration tapes

I saw the press conference this morning at the Newseum. The actual tapes were stored at Goddard and were reused or "degaussed." So the slow scan tapes are gone. What the restoration team did was get the best copies from the TV tapes and contracted Lowry to restore the transmission tape. Listening to some of the press questions seems like they really want to present the "hoaxers" side of the story. But then again that is the MSM for you. I see the "Hoaxers" comments on youtube. It is sad that some still don't believe we really did land on the Moon. The samples of the Restoration of the Moon Landing EVA are here.

Brian Eno "An Ending (Ascent)" from "Apollo..."

For all mankind (2) NASA

For all mankind (1) NASA

For All Mankind, 1989.

As You Remember It: The Lift-Off of APOLLO 11

Apollo 11 lift off July 16, 1969 9:32 AM EST

The Meaning of Apollo

Space.Com has a video on the 40Th Anniversary of The Moon landing and meaning of the Apollo program here.

The series of articles on Space.Com are here:

LEM

Air and Space Museum

Ares I-X stacked

The stacking of the Ares I-X aft assembly on the MLP is compl... on Twitpic

Saturn V

Excerpt from Air and Space Museum here:

The manned Apollo missions were each launched aboard a Saturn V launch vehicle. The "V" designation originates from the five powerful F-1 engines that powered the first stage of the rocket. The Saturn V remains the largest and most powerful U.S. expendable launch vehicle ever built.

The Apollo spacecraft, including the Command Module (CM), Service Module (SM) and Lunar Module (LM) sat atop the launch vehicle. Above the CM was the emergency escape system.

The complete assembly including the Apollo spacecraft and the Saturn launch vehicle stood 363 feet tall (110.6 meters) and weighed over 6 million pounds (2.7 million kg).

The Saturn V launch vehicle itselft consisted of three stages:

First Stage (S-IC): The first stage includes the five F-1 engines producing nearly 7.7 million pounds of thrust. These powerful engines are required to lift the heavy rocket fast enough to escape Earth's gravity. The first stage engines are burned at liftoff and last for about 2.5 minutes taking the vehicle and payload to an altitude of 38 miles. The first stage then separates and burns up in the Earth's atmosphere.

Second Stage (S-II): The second stage conatins five J-2 engines. After the first stage is discarded, the second stage burns for approximately 6 minutes taking the vehicle and payload to 115 miles altitude. The second stage is then also discarded.

Third Stage (S-IVB): The third stage contains one J-2 engine. This engine burns for 2.75 minutes boosting the spacecraft to orbital velocity of about 17,500 mph. The third stage is shut down with fuel remaining and remains attached the spacecraft in Earth orbit. The J-2 engine is reignited to propel the spacecraft into translunar trajectory (speed of 24,500 mph) before finally being discarded.

Astronaut Hall of Fame

Here is the list of participants.

Top Ten Scientific Discoveries Made During Apollo Exploration of the Moon

From the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum here:

1. The Moon is not a primordial object; it is an evolved terrestrial planet with internal zoning similar to that of Earth.

2. The Moon is ancient and still preserves an early history (the first billion years) that must be common to all terrestrial planets.

3. The youngest Moon rocks are virtually as old as the oldest Earth rocks. The earliest processes and events that probably affected both planetary bodies can now only be found on the Moon.

4. The Moon and Earth are genetically related and formed from different proportions of a common reservoir of materials.

5. The Moon is lifeless; it contains no living organisms, fossils, or native organic compounds.

6. All Moon rocks originated through high-temperature processes with little or no involvement with water. They are roughly divisible into three types: basalts, anorthosites, and breccias.

7. Early in its history, the Moon was melted to great depths to form a "magma ocean." The lunar highlands contain the remnants of early, low density rocks that floated to the surface of the magma ocean.

8. The lunar magma ocean was followed by a series of huge asteroid impacts that created basins which were later filled by lava flows.

9. The Moon is slightly asymmetrical in bulk form, possibly as a consequence of its evolution under Earth's gravitational influence. Its crust is thicker on the far side, while most volcanic basins -- and unusual mass concentrations -- occur on the near side.

10. The surface of the Moon is covered by a rubble pile of rock fragments and dust, called the lunar regolith, that contains a unique radiation history of the Sun which is of importance to understanding climate changes on Earth.

I find Number 10 most interesting. Have the climatologists figured in their climate change models the lunar regolith radiation history of the Sun? Just wondering. I'll have to go investigate.

Apollo 11 Command Module "Columbia"

Smithsonian Photograph
I've been up and close to the "Columbia" Command Module at the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum. It is a great exhibit.

Facts about the Apollo 11 Command Module here:

The blunt-end design for the Command Module was chosen to build upon experience gained with the similarly shaped Mercury and Gemini spacecraft. The spacecraft reentered the atmosphere with its protective heat shield facing forward. Layers of special "ablative" material on the shield were purposely allowed to burn away during reentry to help dissipate the extremely high temperatures caused by atmospheric friction.

Height: 3.2 m (10 ft 7 in)
Maximum Diameter: 3.9 m (12 ft 10 in)
Weight: 5,900 kg (13,000 lb)
Manufacturer: North American Rockwell for NASA
Launch Vehicle: Saturn V

LRO first Moon Pictures

LRO or Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter has taken its first pictures of the Moon on June 30. The first pictures were taken on the moon's terminator (line separating light and dark).

"Our first images were taken along the moon's terminator -- the dividing line between day and night -- making us initially unsure of how they would turn out," said LROC Principal Investigator Mark Robinson of Arizona State University in Tempe. "Because of the deep shadowing, subtle topography is exaggerated, suggesting a craggy and inhospitable surface. In reality, the area is similar to the region where the Apollo 16 astronauts safely explored in 1972. While these are magnificent in their own right, the main message is that LROC is nearly ready to begin its mission."

More pictures will come as LRO orbits around the Moon. It is in an elliptical polar orbit around the Moon and by next month its orbit will become circular about 31 miles above the Moons surface.

Apollo 11 Landing site

From a link to the National Space and Air Museum here about the Apollo 11 landing site:

Mare Tranquillitatis (Sea of Tranquility)
00.67408 °N latitude, 23.47297 °E longitude

For the first lunar landing, Mare Tranquilitatis was the site chosen because it is a relatively smooth and level area. It does, however, have a high density of craters and in the last seconds before landing, the LM had to be manually piloted by Neil Armstrong to avoid a sharp-rimmed ray crater measuring some 180 meters across and 30 meters deep known as West. The LM landed safely some 6 km from the originally intended landing site.

The Apollo 11 LM landed approximately 400 meters west of West crater and 20km south-southwest of the crater Sabine D in the southwestern part of Mare Tranquilitatis. The lunar surface at the landing site consisted of fragmental debris ranging in size from fine particles to blocks about 0.8 meter wide.

The landing site is 41.5 km north-northeast of the western promontory of the Kant Plateau, which is the nearest highland region. The Surveyor 5 spacecraft is approximately 25 km north-northwest of the Apollo 11 landing site, and the impact crater formed by Ranger 8 is 69 km northeast of the landing site.

Happy Fourth to All!

NASA Apollo 11 launch

Moonstruck on the Space Coast

We Choose the Moon

Moon Landing Memories

Florida Today has launched Moon Landing Memories. A collection of photographs of the Apollo missions. Most are B&W but some color. Back then all were made of celluloid and not digitized. I was amazed at granny and dust seen on some. You don't see that anymore with digitization! Very historic in telling the story in pictures of the Apollo program and Moon landings.

**18TH JUNE 2009** 'NASA'S' RETURN TO THE MOON (if they actually went there)

Japan's Satellite finally Crashes Into the Moon June 11th 2009

Haynes Apollo 11 Owners Manual

How cool is that! HT to Bad Astronomy here.

Happy 16th Anniversary to "APOD"

First post here at APOD archive

And today's Astronomy Picture of the Day here.

NorKor ICBM range--Alaska

From Military.com here:

The missile being prepared for launch is believed to be an intercontinental ballistic missile with a range of up to 4,000 miles, the JoongAng Ilbo newspaper reported, citing an unnamed South Korean official.

That would put Alaska within striking range.

Today, the North said again that it is being provoked by South Korea and the United States, saying that the number of spy planes operating in its airspace has risen dramatically.

"The U.S. imperialists and the South Korean puppets perpetrated at least 200 cases of aerial espionage against the DPRK in May, or 30 cases more than those in the same month of last year," it said in a report in its official Korean Central News Agency.

The Ground Based Mid-Range missile Defense are housed in Vandenberg AFB and Fort Greely in Alaska. Should be fully deployed in 2011. Let's hope we don't have to use them, but if NorKor's do launch we'll be there to knock them down.
Missile Defense Agency page here.