The House today voted to hold former IRS official Lois Lerner in contempt.
The case now heads to Eric Holder’s Justice Department. I would not hold my breath waiting for them to uphold the law.
Working for the Democratic Party: The IRS audited 10 percent of all Tea Party donors, a rate much higher than for average Americans.
Republicans said 24 conservative groups were asked for their donor lists. The IRS initially told Congress that those lists were destroyed, but when they went through their files they discovered three lists that weren’t destroyed.
Rep. Dave Camp, Michigan Republican and chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, asked the IRS to review the names on those lists to see whether any had been audited. The IRS reported back that 10 percent were audited — substantially higher than the average rate of 1 percent of average Americans who are audited each year.
In other words, the IRS acted as an agent of the Democratic Party to harass and strike fear into their opponents.
According to a GAO report, the sequester cuts that were going to destroy civilization as we know it resulted in exactly one layoff across the entire federal government.
That is not a typo. Only one person total was laid off to meet the mandated cuts imposed by sequestration. Most agencies froze hiring or imposed furloughs, though even the number of furloughs was less than predicted.
Remember this fact the next time a politician screams dire warnings about any cuts in the federal budget.
Obama administration officials from three departments have asked a federal judge to lift her injunction against Lockheed Martin’s use of Russian engines in its Atlas 5 rocket.
Not much teeth in these sanctions imposed by the Obama administration, is there? They exempt ISS, which is the bulk of NASA’s effort with the Russians. Now they wish to exempt the Atlas 5. Pretty soon I expect them to exempt almost everything else.
Putin and the Russians are certainly watching this story unfold, and will use what happens here to help gauge how much they can get away with in the Ukraine. And based on some fascinating information conveyed by a caller to my appearance last night on the Space Show, the Russians are definitely going to have to grab more of the Ukraine to make their capture of the Crimea stick. Expect that situation to remain very hot for the near future.
I will again be discussing this subject in depth tonight on Coast to Coast with George Noory.
The sanctions against Russia imposed by the Obama administration could delay the launch of Iridium’s second generation communications constellation of satellites.
The competition heats up: SpaceX continues to acquire land in Texas for its planned spaceport in Brownsville.
Elon Musk’s Dogleg Park LLC picked up an additional five lots in late April, bringing the total number of lots it has acquired in Cameron County to 95. The total land area that SpaceX now owns is roughly 38 acres of land, public records show. This is in addition to 56.5 acres that SpaceX has under lease at the site of what would be the world’s first private and commercial vertical launch site.
Compared to the acquisitions made by the federal government when it established its space centers in Florida and Wallops Island, these purchases are small. Nonetheless, they are likely sufficient for what the company plans to do.
The competition heats up: SpaceX releases spectacular footage of another vertical take-off and landing test of their Falcon 9R rocket, this time flying over 3,000 feet in the air.
Video below the fold. What I think everyone, including me, has missed so far about both the Grasshopper and the Falcon 9R test flights is that the test vehicle not only was able to land safely using its rockets, both vehicles were quickly turned around and flown again. This certainly lends weight to the feasibility of the company’s plan to make their first stage reusable.
The competition heats up: The Russians have ten launches scheduled in the next three months, using their Proton, Soyuz, Zenit, Rokot, and new Angara rockets.
Half of these launches are for commercial customers.
The uncertainty of science: It turns out that the object dubbed G2 that is zipping past the Milky Way’s central black hole is behaving not like a cloud but more like a star.
The latest observations by the Keck Observatory in Hawaii show that the gas cloud called “G2” was surprisingly still intact, even during its closest approach to the supermassive black hole at the center of our Milky Way galaxy. Astronomers from the UCLA Galactic Center Group reported today that observations obtained on March 19 and 20, 2014 show the object’s density was still “robust” enough to be detected. This means G2 is not just a gas cloud, but likely has a star inside.
When I wrote a piece about this object for Sky & Telescope I found that among astronomers there was great skepticism about it being just a gas cloud that would be ripped apart when it flew past the black hole. The early data was not conclusive, but enough of it suggested G2 was a star, not a cloud. It turns out here that the skeptics were right.
A draft bill in Congress is proposing the Pentagon develop an engine for the Atlas 5 engine to replace the Russian engine now used.
The legislation passed by a House subcommittee Wednesday calls for up the U.S. military to spend up to $220 million next year to kick off full-scale development of the engine, which could be ready for flights no later than 2019. The bill states the Defense Department “should develop a next-generation liquid rocket engine that is made in the United States, meets the requirements of the national security space community, is developed by not later than 2019, is developed using full and open competition, and is available for purchase by all space launch providers of the United States.”
There is no reason for this funding gift to the aerospace industry. For one thing, there are two rockets that already exist that use all U.S. parts, the Delta family of rockets and the Falcon 9. For another, if Congress stays out, the private sector will take care of this need and do it for a lot less and far quicker, while costing the taxpayers relatively little. By making this a government project we guarantee it will be expensive and take forever, thus keeping the pork flowing to Congressional districts without solving the problem.
And speaking of keeping pork flowing to Congressional districts, pork king Senator Richard Shelby (R-Alabama) today ripped into NASA for trying to trim a little from the budget of SLS (which sends a lot of cash to Alabama). He also condemned NASA’s manned commercial effort.
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Guns or rockets: Which part of the ATK split is the stronger?
In addition to my May 6 at 7 pm (Pacific) appearance on the Space Show with David Livingston to discuss the situation with the Russians and ISS, I am also going to appear on Coast to Coast with George Noory on May 7 from 10 to 11 pm (Pacific) to discuss the same topic.
The Russian situation is a difficult one for the United States, and the reason it is difficult is because of a long series of incredibly stupid decisions by our elected officials, from both parties, for the past decade. Nor is my complaint here 20-20 hindsight. From the day George Bush proposed retiring the shuttle in 2010 and not replacing it until 2014, at the earliest, I have said this is stupid and astonishingly short-sighted. Sadly, Congress liked Bush’s short-sightedness and has been endorsing it now for a decade. Hearing them complain now about our dependence on Russian space capabilities is more than infuriating. Where were they when they might have done something to prevent this situation?
Listen in. I think it will be entertaining.
