Tag: government

New exoplanet makes eight in rival solar system

1:27 pm

comparing solar systems

Worlds without end: Astronomers using Kepler data mined by computers have discovered an eighth planet in another solar system, making that system somewhat comparable to our own.

The newly discovered Kepler-90i — a sizzling hot, rocky planet orbiting its star once every 14.4 days — was found using computers that “learned” to find planets in data from NASA’s Kepler space telescope. Kepler finds distant planets beyond the solar system, or exoplanets, by detecting the minuscule change in brightness when a planet transits (crosses in front of) a star.

Vanderburg, a NASA Sagan fellow at UT Austin, and Shallue, a Google machine learning researcher, teamed up to train a computer to learn how to identify signs of an exoplanet in the light readings from distant stars recorded by Kepler. Similar to the way neurons connect in the human brain, this “neural network” sifted through the Kepler data to identify the weak transit signals from a previously missed eighth planet orbiting Kepler-90, a sun-like star 2,545 light-years from Earth in the constellation Draco. “For the first time since our solar system planets were discovered thousands of years ago, we know for sure that our solar system is not the sole record holder for the most planets,” Vanderburg said.

The image to the right compares the planet sizes between this solar system and ours. It does not show that, for this distant star, all eight planets have orbits closer to the star than the Earth, and would therefore be very unlikely to harbor life.

One more thing: This story is very cool, but it also is another one of those NASA press releases that the agency PR department overhyped beforehand, even allowing some reporters to think that it might involve the discovery of life beyond Earth. Not surprisingly, several news sources and radio shows asked me to talk about it. To their disappointment I said I’d rather wait, since NASA has overhyped more than a few stories like this in recent years. Once again, my instincts were right. This story has nothing to do with alien life, and though interesting, is actually not that big a deal.

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Sea Launch will assemble rockets in U.S.

10:14 am

Capitalism in space: S7, the Russian company that now owns Sea Launch, announced today that it plans to assemble its rockets in United States.

This means the dock for the floating launch platform will remain in California. The article also indicates that S7 will continue to use Ukrainian Zenit rockets, which the platform was designed for, despite the desire of the Russian government to cut off all dependence on Ukrainian technology. There is also this tidbit:

The S7 company, which is about to resume the Sea Launch program, has enough clients, S7 Group co-owner and chair of the board of directors Natalia Filyova told the press. “We have [launch] orders, there is a long line [of clients], and we offer a good price. We are expecting revenue, but this will not happen right away. We will be investing heavily but we realize that we will make money,” Filyova said.

No details of the clients or the launch schedule were announced, however, so I remain skeptical. Meanwhile, Roscosmos announced today that it is negotiating with Boeing for future space tourism flights. This second story is directly related to Sea Launch, but you would only know this if you read Behind the Black. To pay off Boeing, which used to be a half partner in Sea Launch and was owed $320 million by the Russians, Roscosmos gave Boeing an unspecified number of seats on future Soyuz capsules to sell to others. Two of those seats were sold to NASA.

These new negotiations probably are an effort to arrange further sales for Boeing to help it get its money back. Boeing’s lawsuit for that money has placed a lien on the Sea Launch platform, and until its concerns are satisfied, S7 really can’t begin operations.

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Trump signs new space policy directive, making Moon 1st priority again

2:57 pm

Yawn. President Trump today signed a new space policy directive that makes the Moon the U.S.’s first exploration priority again.

“The directive I am signing today will refocus America’s space program on human exploration and discovery,” said President Trump. “It marks a first step in returning American astronauts to the Moon for the first time since 1972, for long-term exploration and use. This time, we will not only plant our flag and leave our footprints — we will establish a foundation for an eventual mission to Mars, and perhaps someday, to many worlds beyond.”

As I wrote above, yawn. Same old same old. In 2004 Bush declared we will go to the Moon. In 2010 Obama declared we will go to an asteroid. In 2017 Trump declares we will go to the Moon.

In all those years, where have we actually gone? Nowhere. The government’s effort during all that time to build a rocket and a manned spacecraft to do any of this stuff has come up completely empty. Neither will carry humans into space for at least another five years, if not longer.

The only thing these empty promises have accomplished is to waste a god-awful amount of taxpayer money, now about $33 billion, with appropriations likely to increase that to more that $43 billion before that first manned SLS/Orion flight.

I predict that this government promise will come up empty as well, at least in the manner the government and NASA is trying to sell it. It won’t be the government rocket and capsule that will get us back to the Moon, but a host of new private companies, making profits and doing things efficiently and fast, that will get us there. And I am firmly confident that they will do it before the government even gets off the ground.

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Lawsuit reveals two customers for Soyuz circumlunar tourist flight

8:50 am

Capitalism in space: A lawsuit against Space Adventures, the company that has previously organized tourist trips to ISS using Russian rockets, has finally revealed the names of the two individuals who had purchased tickets for a circumlunar flight around the Moon using a modified Soyuz capsule.

The details are included in a lawsuit now winding its way through U.S. District Court in Virginia. Harald McPike, a wealth Austrian investor and adventurer who resides in the Bahamas, has sued Space Adventures, its chairman and CEO Eric Anderson, and its president Thomas Shelley seeking to recover the $7 million down payment he put down on the flight in March 2013.

The other lunar tourist? The lawsuit says Space Adventures told McPike that it was Anousheh Ansari, who flew to the International Space Station (ISS) as a tourist in 2006 on a Soyuz in a deal the company brokered with the Russians. Ansari’s family also sponsored the $10 million Ansari X Prize won by Burt Rutan’s SpaceShipOne in 2004.

The dispute centers on McPike’s realization, after paying $7 million of the $30 million down payment, that Space Adventures probably could not deliver on its promises, mostly because of a Russian reluctance to sent tourists on such a mission. He wants his money back, and Space Adventures doesn’t want to return it.

While several modified Soyuz capsules, called Zond, were sent around the Moon during the 1960s, that was a very long time ago. Configuring the modern Soyuz for such a manned mission would require a lot of work, and I suspect the Russians didn’t want to do it without money up front. Moreover, I’m not even sure that the $300 million from the two tourists would have been sufficient.

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Update on Russia’s troubled Sea Launch

8:35 am

Link here. It appears that the launch platform faces numerous additional obstacles before it can become operational again, including complex political maneuvering withing Russia and with Ukraine.

Yuzhmash officials [in Ukraine] gave their Russian counterparts at the S7 Group a list of components which are no longer available for the Zenit [rocket]. One of the most important items on the list is the ignition systems produced in the Lugansk region which has been taken over by pro-Russian rebels and remains practically cut off from the rest of Ukraine. The igniters burning black powder are used to initiate small solid-propellant motors which generate reverse thrust to facilitate the safe separation of the first and second stages during the ascent of the Zenit rocket to orbit.

According to industry sources, the S7 company has been so far unable to secure the delivery of Russian equivalents of the necessary hardware and materials, probably due to lack of permissions from Moscow. Instead, the S7 Group asked KB Yuzhnoe to organize the production of missing components in Ukraine. However, in the case of black powder, launching its production in Ukraine would not make economic sense due to lack of other applications beyond the very small amount required for the ignition systems, one source said.

Some observers question whether the S7 company has a real motivation to see the Sea Launch venture through because the airline with no prior experience in the space launch business ended up with the Sea Launch assets in its lap likely under pressure from the Kremlin. [emphasis mine]

S7 has also proposed using the Sea Launch platform to launch Russia’s next generation unmanned freighter, but this faces numerous technical issues. Regardless, the highlighted sentence above indicates how much the Russian government and the top-down Russian approach to everything interferes with efficient operations. It suggests that S7 didn’t buy into Sea Launch because it thought it could make money on it, but because of political pressure. Such pressure does not produce effective and profitable companies.

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ARCA’s CEO provides update on charges against him

8:34 am

Capitalism in space: The CEO of ARCA, Dumitru Popescu, yesterday released a youtube video where he provides an update on the fraud and embezzlement charges against him.

He spends most of the video describing what happened when he was arrested. However, he also says that he and his attorney have now seen the evidence against him, and though he cannot discuss it yet he is confident that he will be found innocent in court.

The man appears sincere, but who knows. We shall see. He also says that ARCA is moving forward, though he also admits that his arrest was a setback for the company.

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Leftist prosecutors spied on conservatives, defied court orders

11:15 am

The law is such an inconvenient thing: Newly released documents in connection with the leftwing Democratic Party political “John Doe” witchhunt in Wisconsin against conservatives have revealed that the prosecutors not only used their power to obtain private and inappropriate information about their political opponents, they continued to do so even after the courts had repeatedly ordered them to cease and desist.

A Wisconsin Attorney General report on the year-long investigation into leaks of sealed John Doe court documents to a liberal British publication in September 2016 finds a rogue agency of partisan bureaucrats bent on a mission “to bring down the (Gov. Scott) Walker campaign and the Governor himself.” The AG report, released Wednesday, details an expanded John Doe probe into a “broad range of Wisconsin Republicans,” a “John Doe III,” according to Attorney General Brad Schimel, that widened the scope of the so-called John Doe II investigation into dozens of right-of-center groups and scores of conservatives. Republican lawmakers, conservative talk show hosts, a former employee from the MacIver Institute, average citizens, even churches, were secretly monitored by the dark John Doe. State Department of Justice investigators found hundreds of thousands of John Doe documents in the possession of the GAB long after they were ordered to be turned over to the Wisconsin Supreme Court.

The Government Accountability Board [GAB], the state’s former “nonpartisan” speech cop, proved to be more partisan than originally suspected, the state Department of Justice report found. For reasons that “perhaps may never be fully explained,” GAB held onto thousands of private emails from Wisconsin conservatives in several folders on their servers marked “Opposition Research.” The report’s findings validate what conservatives have long contended was nothing more than a witch-hunt into limited government groups and the governor who was turning conservative ideas into public policy.

No charges can be filed because the hard drive that held the most damning evidence has mysteriously vanished.

And in an all-too familiar occurrence involving allegations of government abuse, a key hard drive believed to contain the court-sealed John Doe documents leaked to The Guardian in October 2016 has suspiciously disappeared – GAB officials with knowledge of the hard drive can’t seem to explain what happened to it. Still, despite a damning report laying out myriad examples of criminal misconduct by government bureaucrats, Schimel, a Republican, says his Department of Justice cannot file criminal charges – chiefly because of disappearing evidence, less-than-cooperative John Doe agents and the “systemic and pervasive mishandling of John Doe evidence (that) likely resulted in circumstances allowing the Guardian leak in the first place.” Such failures prevent prosecutors from proving criminal liability beyond a reasonable doubt, the attorney general wrote, although the report points to a small universe of GAB employees that had access to the leaked documents. They also seemed to have a political ax to grind.

Essentially, this corrupt political operation and abuse of power by leftists in Wisconsin appears to have been a dress rehearsal for the political witch hunt now being engineered in Washington by the FBI and political hack and Democratic operative Robert Mueller.

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More delays expected for launch of Webb telescope

8:52 am

NASA’s chief scientist admitted during House hearings this week that there will possibly be further delays in the launch of the James Webb Space Telescope, now set for the 2nd quarter of 2019.

“At this moment in time, with the information that I have, I believe it’s achievable,” he said of the current launch window of March to June 2019, which NASA announced in September after delaying the launch from October 2018. However, he said an independent review “is exactly what we should be doing, and frankly I have directed the team to do just that in January.”

That review won’t start until January, he said, because of ongoing tests of unfolding the sunshade of the space telescope. Previous tests, he said, took much longer than anticipated, playing a key factor in the decision to delay the launch. An updated launch date, he said, would likely come in “January or February.”

Such an independent review was proposed earlier in the hearing by another witness, retired aerospace executive Thomas Young. “In my opinion, the launch date and required funding cannot be determined until a new plan is thoroughly developed and verified by independent review,” he said.

While it does make perfect sense to make sure everything is really really really ready before launch, that this telescope is already 8 years behind schedule and yet might still need more delays suggests that the whole project was managed badly, from start to finish.

The hearing also dealt with the cost increases NASA is experiencing for WFIRST. As is usual, it sounds like NASA’s buy-in approach there has worked, and that Congress will fork up the extra cash to keep that project alive, until it experiences further delays and more cost increases, when Congress will fork up even more money. Then, wash and repeat. The WFIRST budget is already up from about $3.5 billion to more than $4 billion. I predict before it is done it will have cost around $8-$10 billion, and not launch until the late 2020s, at the earliest.

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“Mueller’s anti-Trump investigation is effectively dead.”

3:24 pm

Link here. The article details the legal reasons why it will be difficult if not impossible for Special Counsel (and partisan Democratic Party hack) Robert Mueller to bring further criminal charges against anyone in the Trump administration.

Under federal law, a prosecutor is required “to disclose exculpatory and impeachment information to criminal defendants and to seek a just result in every case.” Specifically, pursuant to Giglio v. United States, prosecutors are obligated to provide defendants with impeachment evidence, which includes, according to the DOJ’s guidelines, evidence of a witness’s biases, “[a]nimosity toward defendant,” or “[a]nimosity toward a group of which the defendant is a member or with which the defendant is affiliated.”

As a result, in any prosecution brought by Mueller against a Republican target, defense counsel would be entitled under the Constitution to all evidence in the government’s possession relevant to exploring the apparent biases of FBI agent Peter Strzok and his animosity toward Trump and the Republican Party. This, in and of itself, could be a case-killer because it is very unlikely that Mueller or the DOJ would want defense counsel poring through all the records and documents, emails, and texts in the DOJ’s and Strzok’s possession revealing the agent’s biases since this could fatally undermine any other cases or investigations the agent has worked on—such as the FBI’s decision to recommend charging General Flynn with lying to federal agents even though Hillary Clinton’s besties, Cheryl Mills and Huma Abedin, were given a free pass despite apparently doing the same thing.

Significantly, the fatal damage done to Mueller’s anti-Trump investigation does not only rest in the fact that defense counsel will be able to conduct an unlubricated prostate examination on the FBI’s key agent at trial. Instead, the real reason why Mueller will not risk a criminal trial is the lasting damage that would be done to the FBI’s reputation by having Strzok’s baggage brought into the daylight.

To expose the agent’s biases, defense counsel would have the opportunity to cross-examine the agent and his apparent mistress, an FBI lawyer who also worked on Mueller’s investigation and the Clinton email probe, about their exchanged messages showing support for Clinton and hostility to Trump. Additionally, the agent’s wife, a high-profile attorney at another federal agency, apparently was a member of several pro-Obama and pro-Clinton Facebook groups and is a follower of a Facebook page called “We Voted for Hillary.”

One can only imagine the fun that an aggressive defense attorney would have shredding Strzok’s credibility by grilling him to see if he shared his wife’s posted political views. [emphasis in original]

To anyone with the slightest objectivity and common sense, this whole investigation into “Trump/Russian collusion” has been a joke, from the start. During the process however it has become increasingly clear that both the FBI and the Obama administration worked together to try to undermine the election, to spy on Obama’s political opponents for purely political purposes.

This fact, more than anything else, is probably going to kill this witch hunt. The risks to the corrupt Washington establishment that has been trying to bring Trump down has now grown too great.

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The roots of our modern fascist and bankrupt academia

3:34 pm

Since October I have been posting each week a collection of links illustrating the sad and fascist state of modern American academia. It is now time to post another collection, but this time I will also provide some thoughts that might help explain the roots of this intellectual bankruptcy.

These stories not only illustrate the fascist nature of today’s academic community, they once again show that these so-called institutions of higher learning know nothing about the concepts of liberty, individual responsibility, and thoughtful dialogue that are the hallmarks of western civilization.

First we have the story out of Texas State University of a student writing an op-ed calling for genocide against whites.

Essentially, the author argued that whites are by definition bigoted, and therefore must be wiped out. Though the student body at Texas State appeared to respond correctly to this racist column, one has to wonder how it got published in the first place.

Then we have some stories illustrating the bankruptcy of intellectual thought at some campuses.

The first story in this group is especially interesting. Considering the hate now routinely exhibited on college campuses against whites (as illustrated by second story above as well as my first group of stories above), I think it now behooves every white person attending Brown University to self-identify as black. Doing so makes no sense and has no connection with reality or truth, but hey, what do those values have to do with modern education?

Similarly, the last two stories, about how students disrupted a lecture, preventing its completion, shows that the administration of the University of Connecticut actually agrees with these hecklers’ goals. Rather than punish the hecklers and protesters, the university acted to shut down free speech entirely. Whoopie!

Further examples can be found in my previous updates from October 11, October 13, October 20, October 25, November 3, November 9, and November 22. Before October you can simply do a search on Behind the Black for “academia” and you will find numerous additional horror stories.

What are the roots of this madness? A recent experience on my part might help provide an explanation. I recently finished reading a college philosophy book called Classics of Western Thought: The Modern World that had been assigned to me when I attended college in the early 1970s. Then, I had been assigned to read only one or two of the essays (I don’t remember which), and since then it had been sitting on my bookshelf unread. I recently decided it would be worthwhile to read it all, from the start, as it covers intellectual thought beginning in the 1600s, just before the Enlightenment, with the following chapters providing these excerpts:
» Read more

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Trump declares Jerusalem Israel’s capital, delays moving embassy

12:56 pm

President Trump today declared that Jerusalem is the capital of Israel, though the move of the U.S. embassy to that city will be delayed for several more years.

Since the 1990s, when Congress passed a law that said the embassy should move but allowed presidents to waive that move repeatedly, every president issued a waiver because it was thought such a move would hurt the so-called peace process. Trump’s comments addressed this.

The President repeatedly addressed concerns about a peace agreement between the Israelis and Palestinians being hindered as a result of the recognition. He argued failing to move the U.S. Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, as verified by law and Congress through the Jerusalem Embassy Act, has done nothing to move the region closer to a peace deal. “We cannot solve our problems by making the same failed assumptions and repeating the same failed strategies of the past. Old challenges demand new approaches,” Trump said. “The record is in, after two decades of waivers, we are no closer to a peace agreement.” [emphasis mine]

Trump is correct. We are no closer to Middle East peace now than we were in the 1990s. And I think the reason is illustrated by how the Palestinians (and their enablers) have responded to today’s announcement, with their usual grace and good will:

Gee, doesn’t the Palestinian response now kind of remind you of the gentle response of the Islamic community to some cartoons that were critical of Mohammad?

As I have written repeatedly, you can’t negotiate with someone who wants to kill you. When the Palestinians finally accept the fact that an Israeli state exists and will continue to exist, we will finally have peace. Not before, no matter how many deals get brokered by politicians.

I should also add that this announcement today does not fulfill Trump’s promise to move the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem. It only makes believe that it does. Only when that embassy actually moves will Trump have done what he (and every previous Republican president or candidate since the 1990s) has promised.

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UAE invites its citizens to apply to join its astronaut program

9:51 am

The new colonial movement: The United Arab Emirates (UAE) today launched its astronaut program, inviting its citizens to apply for four positions that they hope to eventually fly to ISS.

Much of this effort is simply propaganda designed to push the UAE to diversify its economy and encourage aerospace development. Nonetheless, when SpaceX’s Dragon and Boeing’s Starliner are operational there will be nothing to prevent those companies from selling seats on them to the UAE, much as the Russians have done with tourists in the past. In fact, I expect this to happen.

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Argentine scientist indicted for creating census of glaciers

9:44 am

An Argentinian scientist has been indicted on criminal charges for the standard manner in which he designed Argentine’s glacier census.

The lawsuit was filed by a grassroots group after the Veladero mine in northwestern Argentina spilled cyanide into the Jáchal watershed in September 2015. Another spill in the same area occurred this past September.

[Ricardo] Villalba, who led the National Institute of Snow, Ice and Environmental Research (IANIGLA) in Mendoza from 2005 to 2015, launched Argentina’s first comprehensive glacier inventory in 2012. Based on satellite images, the inventory set a minimum glacier size of 1 hectare. “The process of making that inventory wasn’t unusual. That size cutoff is standard practice,” says Bruce Raup of the University of Colorado in Boulder, who is also director of the Global Land Ice Measurements from Space project, an international glacier monitoring project. Argentina’s inventory includes 30 ice masses covering about 400 hectares in the Veladero area, Villalba says.

The indictment argues that the 1-hectare limit and the lack of an on-site inspection led to “the exclusion—and resulting lack of protection—of many bodies of ice” around Veladero that should have been considered priorities because of their importance as water sources.

I would say that this is an example of the dog biting the hand that feeds it. The article notes that Villalba is “sympathic” to the activists who filed the lawsuit. They however don’t care about that. They instead want to use his research and the law to distort how glacier research is done in order to gain power over water use that actually has little if anything to do with glaciers.

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FAA submits its red tape recommendations to National Space Council

9:22 am

As requested by Vice-President Mike Pence during the first meeting of the National Space Council, the FAA has now submitted its recommendations for streamlining the launch licensing process.

“We came up with our vision for a 21st century licensing process,” [George Nield, FAA associate administrator for commercial space transportation] said. That process, he said, could include licenses that cover different versions of a family of vehicles, launching from different sites on different missions, “on the same piece of paper.” Nield said other elements of that vision include “performance-based” regulations that don’t limit companies on how they can achieve a certain requirement, as well as ways to accelerate the license review process, which can take up to 180 days once a completed application is submitted.

Some of those changes, Nield said, may take longer to carry our, particularly when they involve issues like environmental reviews. He said the FAA is looking at other near-term streamlining approaches, such as the use of a mechanism called “safety approvals” that provides pre-approval of subsystems or processes — and potentially entire launch vehicles — to speed the license review process.

Nield also put in a request for additional staff for his office, which currently has about 100 people. “If we had some additional folks that could look at fixing the process rather than just having everybody having their head down cranking out these licenses, then we could make a significant improvement” in the license review process, he said. [emphasis mine]

While I do think Nield is sincere about reducing regulation, and has generally been a positive force in his job in helping the new commercial launch business, he is still a bureaucrat. The whole point here is to encourage the policy-makers to give his office the job of regulating space, so that Nield’s responsibilities grow.

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Another negative op-ed of India’s oppressive draft space law

10:04 am

Link here. Unlike the first negative op-ed earlier this week, the writer of today’s op-ed gets closer to the heart of the problem.

It is proposed that all powers to licence private players to launch and operate “space objects” will rest with the Union government (read DoS). And these powers will be quite sweeping. DoS will not only have powers to “grant, transfer, vary, suspend or terminate licence” but also have powers to inspect books of accounts and other documents of licensees and seek all information about partners, directors, etc.

This is particularly worrying because “space activity” under this proposed law not only covers launch of satellites but also “use of space objects” as well as “operation, guidance and entry of space object into and from outer space and all functions for performing the said activities.” This would technically mean even data companies handling satellite imagery or universities operating ground facilities for their microsatellites may also need a licence. If this is going to be so, it is a recipe for a new “licence raj”.

The writer is of course correct. The law as written gives all power and control to India’s government and its bureaucracy, a sure recipe for discouraging private enterprise. However, this writer also avoids the law’s worst component, that it places ownership of all space objects — rockets, satellites, and what they produce — with the government, not the private sector. Such a rule will not only squelch any commercial space development in India, it will likely cause private companies outside of India from buying India’s launch services. Why would I place my satellite on an Indian rocket if that country’s law means I will then no longer own it?

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Trump shrinks two national monuments significantly

2:46 pm

As he had promised, President Trump today announced that two national monuments, one created by Obama against the wishes of local residents and the second created by Clinton, will be reduced significantly in size.

Trump shrunk Bears Ears by nearly 85 percent and reduced Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument by almost half. The plan would cut the total amount of land in the state’s red rock country protected under monument status from more than 3.2 million acres (5,000 square miles) to about 1.2 million acres (1,875 square miles).

I think Trump’s statement explains very well the root reasons this is happening.

“Some people think that the natural resources of Utah should be controlled by a small handful of very distant bureaucrats located in Washington. And guess what? They’re wrong,” he said in the cavernous Utah Capitol Rotunda in Salt Lake City. “The families and communities of Utah know and love this land the best. And you know the best how to take care of your land. You know how to protect it, and you know best how to conserve this land for many, many generations to come,” he said.

“Your timeless bond with the outdoors should not be replaced with the whims of regulators thousands and thousands of miles away. They don’t know your land, and truly they don’t care for your land like you do.”

The establishment of the national parks and monuments involved a lot of good intentions, and we all know where that leads. Today it has led to most of the land in the western states controlled by an oppressive bureaucracy in Washington that doesn’t have the resources to manage the land properly, but has the power to make the lives of the local population quite miserable. And they sadly do both, quite thoroughly.

In the eastern states there are few national parks. Instead, the land was controlled by the states, who treated the natural resources there most reasonably, and at the same time allowed for their citizens to live and work and take advantage of those resources. This is how our federal system of government is supposed to work, and Trump’s action today is merely the first step in shifting policy back in that direction.

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The corruption in Washington DC

10:52 am

If you think there has been any draining of the swamp in Washington DC with recent elections, think again. The passage this weekend of the new tax package illustrates that the Republican-led Congress really is little different than the Democratic-led Congress that passed Obamacare without reading it.

PJMedia asked Rounds if he would have time to read the full text before casting his vote.

“No, because the entire bill, there’s two separate parts, first of all, there’s a summary of what each of the parts does, that part we’ve been able to read. The actual text itself will be completed and then it will go into a conference committee where it will come back out again. So most of us have looked at all of the analysis of each one of the sections, section-by-section, that part has been completed,” Rounds told PJM on Capitol Hill on Friday evening.

“But there will still be more work to be completed in terms of the actual fine language within the bill itself.”

In other words, we need to pass the law to find out what’s in it.

This stinks. Though there is some evidence that the new tax law will lower taxes (which generally is a good thing), no one really knows what the law’s full consequences will be. A responsible Congress would never pass such a thing. Congresses before the 1960s never did.

Laws are made of words. If you vote for a law but don’t know the words that actually make up the law you guarantee that some of those words will impose tyranny. This process, and the law that results, is no different than Obamacare, and will likely result in similar disasters.

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Wyoming judge rules against theft by government

9:47 am

Good work if you can get it: A Wyoming judge today ordered the state to return a man’s life savings, $92K in cash, that police officers confiscated for no reason during a traffic stop.

Parhamovich told The Associated Press that he was traveling to several performances in Western states and decided to bring his “life savings” because maintenance staff often came into his rented apartment in Madison, Wisconsin. The 50-year-old hid the money inside a speaker he was bringing along on the trip.

While driving near Cheyenne on March 13, officers with the Wyoming Highway Patrol and the Wyoming Division of Criminal Investigations pulled him over. Parhamovich said officers questioned him about whether any drugs or large amounts of cash were in the car and then used a police dog before physically searching through his minivan and finding the money. Parhamovich said the officers implied that carrying that much cash was illegal. He lied and said it was a friend’s. Parhamovich said officers then told him that he could leave if he signed a form saying he was giving the $91,800 to the investigative agency for “narcotics law enforcement purposes.”

“I remember asking them a bunch of times: ‘What happens if I don’t sign this?'” Parhamovich said. “I couldn’t get a straight answer. What I was told kind of made it seem like I would go to jail or they’d detain me for a long time.”

He drove away with a $25 ticket for failing to wear a seatbelt, he said.

This behavior by the police and the state government is wrong and immoral on so many levels it is hard to count them all. Here are a few: It is not illegal to carry lots of cash. The Constitution expressly forbids the taking of private property without just compensation. Parhamovich was never charged with any crime and yet the state tried to keep his money.

There’s more in the article, including another case where Wyoming stole almost a half a million from an innocent citizen, never charged him with a crime, and was still allowed to keep the money because the state supreme court said it was okay for the state to steal.

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Vostochny failure points to serious problems in Russian aerospace

9:18 am

This update on the launch failure at Vostochny last week suggests there are some very serious problems permeating the entire Russian aerospace industry.

According to a post on the online forum of the Novosti Kosmonavtiki magazine, the Fregat stage for the ill-fated first mission from Vostochny was originally built for the launch of the Rezonans scientific satellites from Baikonur.

At the same time, experts agree that the problem could theoretically have been resolved before launch, if not for the poor coordination between the developers of the flight control systems of the Soyuz-2 launch vehicle and their colleagues working on flight controls for the Fregat. As one poster on the Novosti Kosmonavtiki forum noted: in the deluge of pre-launch paperwork between RKTs Progress in Samara, which built Soyuz-2, and NPO Lavochkin, which developed Fregat, discussing a multitude of legal issues, confirming and reconfirming various agreements and reminders, there was not a single memo attracting the developers’ attention to a different alignment of the launch pad in Vostochny from that of other sites. Obviously, such information was buried in the working documentation on the mission, but nobody thought about the effect of this fact on the launch. The lower echelon of engineers simply missed that detail, while top managers had no idea at all, because, the majority of them lacked the necessary qualifications, the poster said. [emphasis mine]

Top managers who “lack the necessary qualifications?” This smacks of a corrupt hiring system having nothing to do with qualifications or the need to do good work. It also is typical of a government-run operation, which the entire Russian aerospace industry is after Putin consolidated it all into one single cooperation under government control in 2014. And prior to that the big Russian companies didn’t really operate under a system of free competition, but like mob gangsters they divided up the work among themselves and then worked together to prevent any new competition from forming.

I’m not sure how Russia is going to fix this. In a free market the solution would be for competition to produce new companies with fresh ideas, forcing the bad companies out of business. Putin’s consolidation combined with a Russian culture that does not seem to understand the idea of competition appear to make that process difficult, if not impossible.

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China launches another military satellite

8:46 am

The race between Russia, China, and SpaceX for the most launches in 2017 tightened today with another successful Chinese launch this morning of a classified military satellite using its Long March 2D rocket.

The race as of today:

27 United States
18 Russia
16 SpaceX
14 China

According to this article as well as SpacflightNow’s launch log), China, Russia, and SpaceX all have three more launches scheduled in 2017. If that is what happens, these standings will not change.

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Soyuz launches military satellite, despite failure earlier this week

8:42 am

A Russian Soyuz rocket today successfully launched a military satellite, despite the launch failure from improper software earlier this week.

The reason they launched this Soyuz was because of two reasons. First, it was not using the Fregat upper stage that had had the incorrect programming. Second, it launched from Plesetsk, a Russian spaceport they have used since the beginning of the space age. The failure launched from the new spaceport at Vostochny, with software that had not been updated for that spaceport.

This launch widens the Russian lead in successful launches over SpaceX for 2018. The U.S. however still leads handily overall.

27 United States
18 Russian
16 SpaceX
13 China

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Europe commits $107 million for new rocket and space plane

8:56 pm

The European Space Agency (ESA) today allocated $107 million to develop both a new larger version of its Vega rocket as well as an orbital version of the spaceplane engineering test vehicle flown in 2015.

The Vega-E will be larger and will give them another rocket capable of competing for launch business, but the space plane project is more interesting.

ESA awarded 36.7 million split between Avio and Thales Alenia Space Italy for Space Rider, an unmanned spaceplane capable of lifting 800 kilograms to LEO for missions up to two months. A single Space Rider should be capable of six missions with refurbishing, according to Thales Alenia Space.

Space Rider leverages technology from ESA’s Intermediate Experimental Vehicle (IXV), which performed a suborbital mission in February 2015, landing in the Pacific Ocean. Unlike its predecessor, Space Rider is designed for ground landings. ESA tasked Thales Alenia Space with building Space Rider’s reentry module based on the IXV.

It seems Europe wants its own version of X-37B and Dream Chaser.

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House panel approves concealed carry reciprocity for all 50 states

12:53 pm

The House Judiciary committee yesterday approved a nationwide law that would require states to recognize the legality of concealed carry licenses from other states.

The legislation allows firearm owners with a concealed carry permit issued by their home state to carry the firearm into any other state (all allow some form of concealed carry, although many are highly restrictive). The gun owners wouldn’t have to reveal they are carrying a weapon, though the bill does require they be eligible to possess a firearm under federal law (which requires a background check), carry a valid photo identification and a concealed carry permit. Gun owners from states that don’t require a concealed carry permit will need to obtain some credential from their home state to take advantage of the new law’s provisions. What form that would take isn’t specified in the House bill.

The bill still has to pass both the House and the Senate. A similar bill in the Senate already has 38 co-sponsors.

The article is typical for the modern mainstream press. It spends a lot of time getting quotes from numerous anti-gun groups and Democratic politicians, but never highlights the numerous examples in recent years where entirely innocent individuals have had their lives ruined because they entered places like New Jersey, DC, and New York with a gun that was totally legal in their home states.

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More delays in Democratic IT scandal

10:52 am

The attorney for Imran Awan, the computer specialist who had worked for numerous Democratic congressmen, including Debbie Wasserman Schlutz and is now charged with bank fraud, has caused a month delay in the court case in an effort to block the use of a laptop and its contents as evidence.

Wasserman Schultz fought to prevent law enforcement from looking at the laptop, threatening a police chief with “consequences” and implying it was “a member’s” laptop. She hired an outside lawyer, Bill Pittard, who specializes in the “speech and debate” clause of the Constitution that is designed to protect lawmakers from persecution for political stances, but lawmakers have used to try to stymie criminal probes in the past.

Now, it is Awans’ lawyers who are seeking the right to keep information in the backpack, including the “hard drive,” from being used as evidence.

The Awan attorneys are claiming that the laptop and all other information found in the backpack should be blocked as evidence because they fall under attorney-client privilege. This is absurd. If the court agrees with this interpretation, it will allow criminals to declare almost all evidence inadmissible, just by claiming it was communications between lawyer and client.

Based on all this effort to keep law enforcement from seeing what’s on that laptop, I suspect it contains some very damning information, both to Awan as well as to Wasserman Schultz and many other Democrats who had hired Awan.

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Someone in India finally reads its proposed oppressive space law

9:25 am

Link here. The analysis of India’s proposed new space law [pdf] is generally very negative, but strangely it avoids entirely the bill’s worst aspect, its requirement that everything launched by India into space must belong to the government.

Instead, the author focuses on how the bill’s broad language fails to deal with specific issues of insurance, the licensing of different kinds of space activities, and environmental pollution. In other words, it appears he cannot see the forest because of the trees.

In the end, however, in concluding that the bill as written does not serve the private sector he does make one good suggestion that I hope the Indian government takes to heart.

It will not do justice to the entrepreneurial community if this Bill is implemented as is. One of the exercises that can be conducted to align the Bill to enable a competitive ecosystem for commercial space in India is to conduct a review of international best practices in managing the space value chain and inducting them within the Bill.

In other words, read what other nations like the U.S. and Luxembourg are doing to encourage their private commercial space sector. India might find that the last entity allowed to own something in space should be the government.

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Soyuz failed because it was programmed for Baikonur, not Vostochny

8:39 am

It now appears that the Soyuz rocket failure this week occurred because the Fregat upper stage had not been programmed for a launch from Vostochny.

Although the information is still preliminary, it is increasingly clear that all the hardware aboard the Fregat upper stage performed as planned. But, almost unbelievably, the flight control system on the Fregat did not have the correct settings for the mission originating from the new launch site in Vostochny, as apposed to routine launches from Baikonur and Plesetsk. As a result, as soon as Fregat and its cargo separated from the third stage of the launch vehicle, its flight control system began commanding a change of orientation of the stack to compensate for what the computer had perceived as a deviation from the correct attitude, which was considerable. As a result, when the Fregat began its first preprogrammed main engine firing, the vehicle was apparently still changing its attitude, which led to a maneuvering in a wrong direction. [emphasis mine]

This reminds me of the NASA’s epic failure with Mars Climate Orbiter in 1998, where some programming used the metric system and other programming used the English system, and no one noticed.

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NASA confirms next Dragon launch will be on used first stage

6:32 pm

Capitalism in space: NASA today confirmed that it has finally approved the use of a Falcon 9 used first stage for the next Dragon launch on December 8.

NASA had said back on November 12 that they were considering this idea. It seems to me that SpaceX has probably been proceeding under the assumption they would say yes, which essentially at this point, only a few weeks from launch, put pressure on the timid NASA bureaucracy to finally get on the bandwagon.

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India’s next launch might slip to 2018

9:22 am

India’s next PSLV commercial launch might slip to 2018, despite months of effort to resume launches in 2017 following the August 31 PSLV launch failure when the rockets fairing did not release.

“We are working towards it. It will be in the end of December or first week of January. In that time frame,” ISRO Chairman A S Kiran Kumar said.

Kumar also said ISRO will try to launch on an average of once a month in 2018. The article also mentions the new and very oppressive Indian space law that has been proposed.

Asked whether the Space Activities Bill, 2017 would come up during the Budget session of Parliament, Kiran Kumar said “We have now put it in public comments. It would have to go through a set of discussions. The process has started.”

The draft of the proposed Bill to promote and regulate space activities of India, along with encouraging the participation of the private sector, has been uploaded on the ISRO website for comments from stakeholders and the public. [emphasis mine]

The highlighted text is typical of all news reports coming from India. The law does no such thing, and in fact will strongly discourage any work by the private sector. It appears that in India reporters either do not read the text of laws they are reporting on, or they really do not have freedom of the press there.

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North Korea launches another ICBM

2:42 pm

North Korea today launched another ICBM, landing it in the Sea of Japan.

The Department of Defense said that initial assessments indicated the missile was an intercontinental ballistic missile, or ICBM. In a news conference, Japan’s defense minister also said it seemed to be an ICBM. The missile went higher than any shot North Korea had previously taken, according to Defense Secretary James Mattis.

This was North Korea’s first launch in a couple of months.

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