Year: 2015

Blue Origin to begin flight tests of new rocket engine

4:22 pm

The competition heats up: The rocket engine that Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin company has been building is now ready for suborbital flight tests.

Blue Origin says the BE-3 is the first new hydrogen-fueled engine to be developed in the United States in more than a decade. It can be continuously throttled between 20,000 and 110,000 pounds of thrust. “Liquid hydrogen is challenging, deep throttling is challenging, and reusability is challenging,” Bezos said. “This engine has all three. The rewards are highest performance, vertical landing even with a single-engine vehicle, and low cost. And as a future upper-stage engine, hydrogen greatly increases payload capabilities.”

They hope to begin flight tests by the end of the year. Even as they develop this suborbital hydrogen engine, they are also developing an bigger engine for orbital flights in ULA’S next generation rocket that will replace the Atlas 5 and Delta.

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The sunspot crash continues

11:12 am

On Sunday NOAA posted its monthly update of the solar cycle, showing the Sun’s sunspot activity in March. I am posting it here, with annotations to give it context, as I have done since 2010.

March 2015 Solar Cycle graph

The graph above has been modified to show the predictions of the solar science community. The green curves show the community’s two original predictions from April 2007, with half the scientists predicting a very strong maximum and half predicting a weak one. The red curve is their revised May 2009 prediction.

In February the Sun’s sunspot activity plunged, dropping way below the prediction of the solar science community. In March that plunge continued. Even though activity had seemed to track that prediction through most of 2014, the overall levels were always less than the prediction. The sunspot numbers for the past two months have simply made this fact obvious once again, dropping to levels almost as low as those last seen in 2011, before the onset of the solar maximum.

That the ramp down at this time is so precipitous is especially intriguing, as historically the ramp down from previous solar maximums has been slow and steady. It is once again evidence that the Sun is doing things that solar scientists have never yet had the opportunity to observe.

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Another global warming advocate demands the arrest of skeptics

10:32 am

Fascist: Continuing in what is becoming a pattern for the left, another global warming advocate has called for the arrest of anyone who dares question the existence of human-caused global warming.

You can read his entire rant here. This quote is especially telling:

Those denialists should face jail. They should face fines. They should face lawsuits from the classes of people whose lives and livelihoods are most threatened by denialist tactics.

Let’s make a clear distinction here: I’m not talking about the man on the street who thinks Rush Limbaugh is right, and climate change is a socialist United Nations conspiracy foisted by a Muslim U.S. president on an unwitting public to erode its civil liberties.

You all know that man. That man is an idiot. He is too stupid to do anything other than choke the earth’s atmosphere a little more with his Mr. Pibb burps and his F-150’s gassy exhaust. Few of us believers in climate change can do much more—or less—than he can.

This is why, at this time especially, I refuse to cede any further power to government and its allies. A significant percentage of our population is in favor of using that power to oppress their opponents. Give them any more power and they will do it.

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Rising sales of US Constitution put Homeland Security on alert!

9:22 am

Heh.

A surge of book sales that pushed the US Constitution into the top ten best seller list of the Conservative Book Club has caused federal officials to put the Department of Homeland Security on “full alert.”

“This is just the type of abnormal behavior that should trigger a high state of vigilance,” Secretary Jeh Johnson declared. “We expect a few loud-mouthed right-wing politicians to repeatedly harp on whether some action taken by the government is constitutional. But we can’t afford to overlook tens of thousands of ordinary citizens reading such seditious literature.”

The site calls itself “Semi-News/Semi-Satire”. It is tragic how accurate that title is.

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Brontosaurus returns!

9:14 am

The uncertainty of science: The popular but unofficial and rejected dinosaur name “Brontosaurus” has been resurrected by paleontologists.

A new study has found that the bones that had been assigned to Apatosaurus, the term that paleontologists in the 1970s chose over the more popular term Brontosaurus, actually appear to come from two distinct but different species, and they have chosen the more popular term for one of these species.

Brontosaurus was always easy to pronounce, which has probably contributed to its popularity as a general term for dinosaurs. When it was officially rejected in the 1970s there were a lot of unhappy fans of paleontology. I suspect the modern generation of scientists, children in the 1970s, had a warm spot in their heart for the term and have thus found a way to bring it back.

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ALMA captures the rotation of the large asteroid Juno

8:52 am

The large ground-based telescope ALMA has captured a series of images of the large asteroid Juno, allowing scientists to estimate its rotation and overall shape.

Linked together into a brief animation, these high-resolution images show the asteroid rotating through space as it shines in millimeter-wavelength light. “In contrast to optical telescopes, which capture the reflected light from the Sun, the new ALMA images show the actual millimeter-wavelength light emitted by the asteroid,” said Todd Hunter, an astronomer with the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO) in Charlottesville, Va.

…The complete ALMA observation, which includes 10 separate images, documents about 60 percent of one rotation of the asteroid. It was conducted over the course of four hours on 19 October 2014 when Juno was approximately 295 million kilometers from Earth. In these images, the asteroid’s axis of rotation is tilted away from the Earth, revealing its southern hemisphere most prominently.

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Obama lets stand Iran’s goal of destroying Israel

5:03 pm

Whose side is Obama on? During an NPR interview, President Obama said that it would be a “fundamental misjudgment” to require that Iran recognize the Jewish state of Israel as part of the nuclear deal.

Israel meanwhile is required to make deals, give up land, restrict its military strengths, and do nothing when attacked. Iran, the Palestinian Authority, Hamas, Hezbollah, and a host of other Islamic terrorist organizations can have the goal of killing all the Jews so that we can make nice with them.

Madness. It is all madness, and it is the same kind of naive madness that put us into a bloody world war in the 1930s that killed millions.

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Jordan and Israel agree on Dead Sea water project partnership

1:09 pm

On February 26 Israel and Jordan signed an partnership agreement to build a pipeline to bring water from the Red Sea to the Dead Sea as well as build a desalination plant in the Gulf of Aqaba.

Proves once again that it is all lies when the Palestinians and Islamic radicals claim that Israel’s existence causes the violence in the Middle East. Work with the Israelis, and your lives will improve. Hate them, and everyone’s lives gets worse. Apparently Jordan’s leadership understands this.

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$10 billion wasted on military projects

10:56 am

Government marches on! In the past decade the Pentagon’s Missile Defence Agency has wasted $10 billion on defense projects that were either impractical and impossible.

I can’t provide any single quote about the absurd stupidity of these projects because the article is filled with so many. Read it all and weep. However, here is one quote which indicates who we should blame:

President George W. Bush, in 2002, ordered an urgent effort to field a homeland missile defense system within two years. In their rush to make that deadline, Missile Defense Agency officials latched onto exotic, unproven concepts without doing a rigorous analysis of their cost and feasibility. Members of Congress whose states and districts benefited from the spending tenaciously defended the programs, even after their deficiencies became evident.

You are probably thinking the fault lies with Bush and Congress for proposing foolish programs and then funding them even after they were revealed to be obviously foolish, because they provided pork for congressional districts. You are wrong. Though Congress and Bush certainly share the guilt, the really guilty party is the American public, which has been voting in favor of pork for decades.

We get the government we deserve. Until we stop electing candidates (from either party) who promise pork, we will continue to get pork, and waste, and a society that is steadily going bankrupt.

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Build a satellite of your own for less than $30K

8:37 am

The competition heats up: An industry of new cubesat builders can now build satellites for anyone for any reason for very little money.

The miniaturisation of technology allows people to do more with less hardware, said Chad Anderson, the managing director of Space Angels Network, an investment house specialising in the space industry. That industry, he said, was worth $300bn (£200bn) last year. Constellations of smaller satellites, like those suggested as tracking devices for planes over oceans, are now a possibility. “The launch costs are coming down and people leveraging today’s technology are able to do more with less and launch less mass to orbit. The price point has come down to where start-ups and entrepreneurs can really make an impact on the scene for the first time,” he said.

When the first tiny satellite launch companies arrive, expect this industry to blossom at an astonishing rate.

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