Year: 2015

XCOR progress report in construction of Lynx

9:00 am

The competition heats up: In a press release today XCOR announced new progress in the assembly of its Lynx suborbital space plane.

They revealed that they have “bonded the XCOR Lynx Mark I strakes to the Lynx spacecraft fuselage.”

To be honest, my impression of the work at XCOR from the photo at the link is that of one or two guys working in their spare time in their garage on restoring a classic car. Though I wish them well, the progress seems very slow, and piecemeal. In fact, it reminds me much of Richard Branson’s many false promises at Virgin Galactic. For example, back in 2012 XCOR announced a test flight schedule for 2013. None of those flights ever happened. Then in 2014 they said they hoped to begin flight tests before the end of that year. Again, nothing happened.

At least with this most recent release they aren’t saying when they plan to fly, since from the picture it appears they are quite a long ways from doing so. It is far better to make real promises that false ones, and XCOR might have learned that lesson watching the public relations problems Richard Branson has had in recent years.

Even so, I have been consistently very skeptical of this project. In fact, back in October 2013, in describing the effort of Blue Origin in the suborbital tourism trade, I predicted the following:

That the present ship [Blue Origin’s New Shepard] is being designed for suborbital tourist flights makes it a direct competitor of Virgin Galactic and XCOR. And considering the problems that Virgin Galactic has with SpaceShipTwo [written one year before its crash], and that XCOR doesn’t have the big bucks of Bezos, Blue Origin might actually be in the lead in the race to put the first tourists in space.

It appears now that this prediction was right on the money.

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Russian sources confirm their plan to flip launches to ISS

8:31 am

Though not yet officially decided, managers in the Russian space agency are definitely considering switching the launch dates of the next Soyuz and Progress missions to ISS, so that the unmanned cargo flight flies first.

Both spacecraft use the Soyuz rocket, and it now appears that the cause of last week’s Progress failure was a problem in the Soyuz third stage. They want to check out all Soyuz third stages before they put any humans on one. Switching the flights gives them time to do it. It also gets needed cargo to ISS sooner.

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Progress failure causes delay in next manned mission to ISS

5:22 pm

Russian sources suggest that they will postpone the next manned mission to ISS from May 26 to June 11 as they investigate the failure of the Progress freighter last week.

This article also suggests that the Russians might flip the next Progress and Soyuz flights to have the Progress go first. (This schedule change is something I suggested might happen last week, right after the launch failure.)

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Tory Party unexpectedly wins big in Great Britain

5:05 pm

The rage builds: Conservatives in Great Britain have won a much larger victory in today’s election than polls or pundits had predicted.

The article attributes the surprisingly big win to a variety of factors. Yet, this election reminds me of the Israeli election, which the polls and pundits all said would be a tie, or go to the liberal parties. Instead, Netanyahu’s rightwing party won big.

Both elections, plus other recent elections in the U.S., suggest to me that there is a growing disconnect between the electorate and the intellectual class who makes these predictions. With such a disconnect, don’t be surprised if the candidate who wins the election in 2016 is the one who is least liked by that pundit class.

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Michigan voters resoundingly reject tax increase proposed by Republicans

1:13 pm

The rage builds: Eighty percent of Michigan voters rejected a tax increase proposed by their Republican governor and legislature and backed by a gigantic almost $10 million advertising campaign.

The colossal defeat of Prop 1 is even more intriguing since it had the backing of both the Republican and Democratic parties as well as the governor, who campaigned for it in the final weeks. With a few exceptions the mainstream news media also overwhelmingly favored the measure, with the state’s three statewide print and online news sources (Detroit Free Press, The Detroit News, MLive) all calling for a “yes” vote.

The defeat came despite the fact that a scattered opposition was massively outspent. According the most recent reports the election committee Safe Votes Yes raised $9.6 million to get the measure passed, mostly coming from road builders but also from other special interests that appeared to have no direct stake in the outcome, such as large utilities (who have separate issues of their own pending before the current Legislature).

“The distance between voters on one side and the mainstream media and political class on the other is both startling and unprecedented,” said Jack McHugh, the legislative analyst for the Mackinac Center for Public Policy, in an email. “According to MIRS News the measure passed in just three communities, two of which (Ann Arbor and East Lansing) are considered by many to be elitist and disconnected from the mass of Michigan voters (Kalamazoo was the third community).”

The proposition was pushed by a Republican governor and a Republican legislature. The voters bluntly told them to go to hell. I ask: When will Republicans wake up and start doing what the voters want, rather than what they think the media, their liberal friends, and their big money backers demand? The public wants government trimmed, cut back, shrunk, and reorganized to be more efficient. They do not want more taxes, as they know that the government is already taking far more money from them than it really needs.

Elections like this tell me that the 2016 election is likely to be a shocking surprise to our society’s elite community.

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Pamela Geller a non-person to the Obama FBI

10:37 am

Whose side is Obama on? Though ISIS has specifically put Pamela Geller on its kill list, her calls to the FBI have gone unanswered.

This story reminds me of the fake FBI investigation into the IRS scandal. Obama was outraged by the scandal and said he would hunt down the wrong-doers with every ounce of his being, but the FBI never assigned anyone to lead the investigation, and none of the conservatives who were harassed by the IRS were ever interviewed by any FBI agents.

Here, an American is threatened with death by an Islamic terrorist state, and the FBI, and the Obama administration, does nothing. As I said, whose side is Obama on?

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The plans for the first Arab probe to Mars revealed

10:17 am

The competition heats up: The United Arab Emirates (UAE) on Thursday unveiled its plans for its first unmanned mission to Mars, dubbed al-Amal (“Hope”).

They hope to launch by 2020.

Forgive me if I am skeptical. Unlike India, which just succeeded in doing this, the UAE has no history or background in space exploration. India has been building satellites for decades. It has its own rockets. It had already launched a successful mission to the Moon. The UAE has done none of this yet. They are starting from ground zero.

Then again, one has to start somewhere.

This UAE effort illustrates again what I call the new colonial movement, where nations across the globe are increasingly pushing to participate in the exploration of space, because they realize that if they don’t, they will get left behind by their neighbors. Whether or not UAE succeeds, their decision to enter the competition proves the competition exists, and such a competition can only add energy to the effort to colonize the solar system.

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A second experiment on the next X-37B flight revealed

5:28 pm

NASA has outlined the materials research it will be conducting on the next X-37B flight, scheduled to launch on May 20.

Known as the Materials Exposure and Technology Innovation in Space, or METIS, the investigation on the X-37B will expose nearly 100 different materials samples to the space environment for more than 200 days, NASA says. METIS is building upon data obtained by several missions of the Materials on International Space Station Experiment (MISSE), which flew more than 4,000 samples in space from 2001 to 2013. For both MISSE and METIS, small samples the size of quarters are used. METIS will fly a variety of materials including polymers, composites and coatings.

Not only does this information, plus earlier information about an Air Force ion engine thruster experiment, probably describe a great deal of what the X-37B is carrying, it also tells us the probable duration of the flight.

I have no doubt there are other classified Air Force experiments on board, but like these, they are likely to be test articles, since the X-37B provides the perfect testbed for exposing new technology to space to see how it fares.

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DEA steals life savings of innocent man

5:04 pm

Theft by government: In another example of civil forfeiture, DEA agents confiscated the life savings of a man heading to California based on no evidence.

There was no evidence of a crime, the man was never charged, but three weeks later he still has not gotten his money back.

Sean Waite, the agent in charge for the DEA in Albuquerque, said he could not comment on the Rivers case because it is ongoing. He disputed allegations that Rivers was targeted because of his race. Waite said that in general DEA agents look for “indicators” such as whether the person bought an expensive one-way ticket with cash, if the person is traveling from or to a city known as a hot spot for drug activity, if the person’s story has inconsistencies or if the large sums of money found could have been transported by more conventional means.

“We don’t have to prove that the person is guilty,” Waite said. “It’s that the money is presumed to be guilty.” [emphasis mine]

Read the whole article. This is entirely unconstitutional. The fifth amendment to the Bill of Rights expressly forbids the taking of private property “without just compensation.”

But hey, the obvious solution is to give the federal government more power! That’s what Obama and Al Sharpton want. They must be right!

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Freedom speaks: An interview with Pamela Geller

12:07 pm

Muhammad bomb cartoon

Link here. As she bluntly notes right at the start of the interview:

We incited no one. We didn’t call for violence, justify violence, or approve of violence. The people who were inciting were the ones saying that we should be killed for exhibiting Muhammad cartoons. There is no automatic or unavoidable response to being insulted. No one is forced to kill for being insulted. Those who choose to do so are responsible for their actions. No one else is.

When asked about the criticism that pundits and reporters on both the left and the right have been leveling at her for provoking the attacks, she was equally blunt, though she saved her harshest criticism for the quislings on the right.

This is the problem with the conservatives. This is why we can never nominate qualified, brave, true conservative candidates. The conservative movement has trimmed to accommodate the leftist media so much that they’ve trimmed themselves out of principle. They attack me because they’re desperately afraid that the leftist media will smear them by association with me. It is an act of sheer cowardice.

It has been disgusting these last few days watching the so-called intellectuals of our society, including many reporters who should know better, rush over themselves to blame Pamela Geller and the victims in this Islamic terrorist attack, merely because they exercised their first amendment rights.

The Islamic State has not only claimed credit for the attack, it says it plans to do more, targeting people in as many as 15 states, with Geller as one of those named to its kill list.

And we should blame Geller for the violence? How divorced from reality has our society’s intellectual class become?

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