The competition heats up: Construction of India’s scaled-down prototype of a mini-shuttle is almost complete as they prepare for a July test flight.
This is an unmanned test vehicle. The full scale version, not yet built, would be manned.
Theft by government: Evidence suggests that the Drug Enforcement agency routinely detains, searches, and then steals from train passengers under the guise of searching for drugs.
Read it. This story isn’t from some right wing libertarian website, but from the Atlantic. It describes the routine abuse of power by agents, often resulting in the theft of cash.
An evening pause: Just watch.
In a speech before the State Duma, Russian deputy prime minister Dmitry Rogozin blamed the “moral degeneration” of the top leaders of their county’s aerospace industry for Saturday’s Proton launch failure.
“With such degeneration in the leadership of the enterprises, there’s no surprise at such a high degree of accidents,” said Rogozin who said that “space bosses have long gone into their own space.” … The vice premier expressed those that the force of “legal gravitation will lead them [those responsible for the failure of the Progress and the Proton] to where they should be,” RIA Novosti quoted him as saying.
In other words, expect more arrests and prosecutions. Meanwhile, there is little evidence that Rogozin or Putin are doing anything to make their space industry more competitive and thus capable of generating the profits necessary to keep it afloat.
Working for the Democratic Party: A detailed list of documented cases since 1992 where mainstream media sources were caught deliberately falsifying facts in order to slander conservatives or to promote the leftwing agenda.
None of these 48 examples are opinion pieces. In every case, false information or opinions were reported as facts, only to be found to be fabricated or completely counter to the facts as later documented. And as the author notes, the number of these faked stories has increased in recent years, partly because of the existence of alternative news sources on the web which point them out, but mostly because the mainstream media has become more blatantly partisan and dishonest in recent years.
Details here.
As usual, the pork of SLS gets a boost while commercial space gets squeezed. The squeeze however continues to get less with each budget, and as I’ve said before, better a slight squeeze than a blank check. That way the commercial companies will have to stay lean and mean and will avoid getting bloated, like SLS.
Link here. The news is not good. It appears that, after disassembling the giant drill’s front end, it has numerous engineering problems. Moreover, the cost keeps going up.
[M]embers of the mainstream media are presumptively hacks, and the pain and misery they endure as their organizations convulse and die should inspire laughter and joy. Sure, there are honest reporters out there, but that’s only a fluke of statistics. There have to be some, if only because of the random vagaries of chance. They can get real jobs with the new media. But in general, MSM members’ pain is our gain.
Remember, they hate us. Hate us. They don’t merely not care about us. They don’t simply misunderstand us. They hate what we think. They hate how we live. They hate what we believe. They hate us.
And it shouldn’t come as a shock if we hate them right back. We normals have already started an unofficial, uncoordinated boycott of the mainstream media.
Read it all, and remind yourself that ABC News considers it perfectly acceptable for their lead anchor to contribute big bucks to the Democratic Party. This is also the same network that is working hand-in-glove with the communist dictatorship in Cuba to spread their propaganda.
An evening pause: Performed live in Reno in 2000. It is amazing to compare this older Lightfoot with Lightfoot performing in 1974. He is as good, but he looks like a different man.
Hat tip Danae.
My posts for the next week or so are going to be shorter than I would prefer. This weekend I had a minor fall during a cave trip and broke one bone in my lower left arm. We were about two hours from the entrance, so the trip out was somewhat entertaining, though it did go smoothly without any significant difficulties. taking about three hours to get back to the surface.
Nonetheless, I am a lefty, so writing is now difficult, and with the cast on my arm touch typing is a challenge as well. I can manage posts, but writing long commentaries will likely not happen for the next week or so while the arm heals or I get a smaller cast.
Link here. The failure was in the third stage, which was the cause of a previous Proton failure last May.
Note that the Proton also put a commercial satellite in the wrong orbit in October when the upper stage underperformed.
Overall, the Russians are doing a very poor job in eliminating the serious quality control problems that have plagued their aerospace industry in recent years. If anything, the problems appear to be worsening.
Cool image time! Rosetta’s high resolution camera has discovered a group of balancing rocks on the surface of Comet 67P/C-G.
The image on the right, cropped and brightened by me, shows the most dramatic of these rocks. The scientists are as yet uncertain on how these rocks got to where they are.
“How this apparent balancing rock on Comet 67P/C-G was formed is not clear at this point,” says OSIRIS Principal Investigator Holger Sierks from the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research (MPS) in Germany. One possibility is that transport processes related to cometary activity played a role, causing such boulders to move from their original site and reach a new location.
It is also possible that the rocks were sitting on a base of ice that simply evaporated away over time.
