Year: 2016

Does Trump have the best space policy?

8:59 am

This opinion column looks at the three remaining politicians campaigning for president, and finds that Donald Trump probably has the most favorable position toward commercial space.

While all three candidates mouth favorable platitudes towards NASA and space exploration, all three also express reluctance to fund a giant government space program. Trump however was the only one to note the positive aspects of commercial space and express

…support for the government partnering with private space companies like Elon Musk’s SpaceX. “I think there needs to be a growing partnership between the government and the private sector as we continue to explore space,” Trump told AIAA. “There seems to be tremendous overlap of interests so it seems logical to go forward together.”

Obviously, one can’t and shouldn’t put much faith in what any politician says during the campaign. Nonetheless, this might be a hopeful sign that if elected, Trump would push to dump NASA’s SLS/Orion and have NASA instead focus on buying space exploration services designed and operated by private companies.

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Pima county files motion to dismiss World View lawsuit

8:49 am

In the heat of competition: The Arizona county government that made a deal with the space tourism balloon company World View to help them build their launch facilities in Tucson has filed a motion to dismiss the lawsuit by the Goldwater Institute that claims the deal is illegal.

I don’t know if the deal was illegal, but I suspect that even if it was the county will win and the deal will go through. Too much money at stake.

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Global elevation map of Mercury

8:39 am

The science team for Messenger have now released a new digital elevation model of Mercury’s global surface.

The new product reveals a variety of interesting topographic features, as shown in the animation above, including the highest and lowest points on the planet. The highest elevation on Mercury is at 4.48 kilometers [2.78 miles] above Mercury’s average elevation, located just south of the equator in some of Mercury’s oldest terrain. The lowest elevation, at 5.38 kilometers [3.34 miles] below Mercury’s average, is found on the floor of Rachmaninoff basin, a basin suspected to host some of the most recent volcanic deposits on the planet.

If you watch the animation at the link, you will notice that the high points tend to cluster in the lower latitudes, while the low points tend to favor the high latitudes, suggesting a very slightly bulged shape, which is not surprising considering Mercury’s close proximity to the Sun.

The data release today also included an additional map showing the known geological features in more detail.

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SpaceX lands the first stage again!

12:08 am

The competition heats up: In tonight’s launch, SpaceX not only put a commercial satellite into geosynchronous orbit, it successfully landed the first stage on a barge, a landing they did not expect to succeed.

Go here to watch a launch replay. The landing is at about 38 minutes.

With this success, I think they have demonstrated that they can recover that first stage in almost every circumstance. The next big challenge: Launch Falcon Heavy and recovering all three of its first stages.

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Future Republican battle leans right and anti-establishment

1:10 pm

Three more stories today, in addition to this already posted story (Cruz’s political stature enhanced by campaign) suggest that the Republican Party is going to move rightward and anti-establishment.

The headline of the last story is misleading. What it is really about is how Cruz’s yearlong effort to enlist conservatives who agree with him as Republican delegates will result in giving him and his views a great deal of influence at the convention and within the party. Similarly, Trump as nominee puts him in a powerful position to influence policy. Meanwhile, the old guard establishment of moderate Republicans who specialized in failure theater and giving Democrats everything they want are not showing up.

So, what will we have? We will have a Republican convention dominated by either Cruz conservatives or Trump outsiders. This is good news, even if I myself am not enthused about Trump. It likely means that the days of nonchalant surrender to liberal demands are ending. Though what will happen instead remains unknown, and might very well be as bad, the change is more likely to be a good thing.

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Luxembourg signs deal with asteroid mining company

10:32 am

The competition heats up: As part of its outer space development program, the government of Luxembourg has signed a deal with asteroid mining company Deep Space, Inc. to build an orbital demonstration test satellite.

The inaugural project of this exciting new partnership is Prospector-X™, an experimental, low Earth orbit technology demonstration mission, designed to test the company’s innovative deep space technology. These key enabling technologies will be instrumental to the success of the company’s first deep space resource exploration missions in the near future. The Prospector-X spacecraft will be built at Deep Space Industries’ new European headquarters, in Luxembourg, in conjunction with the company’s international and American partners, including the Interdisciplinary Centre for Security, Reliability, and Trust (SnT) at the University of Luxembourg.

It essentially appears that Luxembourg is creating its own space program, focused entirely on profit by acting as the venture capitalist for private commercial companies. Most interesting.

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Cruz’s political stature enhanced by campaign

10:06 am

Good news: Ted Cruz’s strong campaign has positioned him to likely be “a leading GOP voice for the foreseeable future.”

Read it all. The article’s main point, which I had noticed earlier when Cruz was doing the hard work to forge allies throughout the grassroots Republican Party, is that Cruz’s success during the campaign, becoming a strong #2 while all establishment picks (Bush, Rudio, Walker, Huckebee, Christie) did poorly, places him in the position to dominate the loyal opposition against either Trump or Clinton.

Note also that the conventional wisdom, that shutting down the government would hurt a candidate and the Republican Party, did no such thing for Cruz. In fact, it helped him. The anger the public feels because of the Republican Party’s unwillingness to stand up to Obama and the Democrats, was reflected in the fact that in the end Trump and Cruz were the top vote getters.

Sadly, I do not expect the rest of the Republican Senate to learn this lesson.

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Obamacare includes 171-word definition of menu

9:54 am

Finding out what’s in it: The Food and Drug Administration has released its final regulations on how restaurants must write their menus as mandated by Obamacare.

The final guidance includes a 96-word definition of “combination meal” and a 163-word definition of “restaurant-type food.” The government also goes into when “Aunt Cora’s French toast breakfast” must have its calories listed and tells restaurants not to use plus or minus signs on their menus because they are too “confusing” to Americans.

But drawing the biggest criticism is the government’s definition of menu and strict rules for calorie labeling of toppings. The government considers a menu to be the “primary writing of the covered establishment from which a customer makes an order selection, including, but not limited to, breakfast, lunch and dinner menus; dessert menus; beverage menus, children’s menus, other specialty menus (such as catering), electronic menus, and menus on the Internet.” The full definition is 171 words. Merriam-Webster has a 12-word definition for menu.

The phrase “from which a customer makes an order selection” opened the door for coupons and advertisements to be included in the mandate. The FDA said calories must be listed on coupons if they have the restaurant’s phone number, and advertisements can be “considered a menu.”

There’s more at the link. Read it all to find out how deeply Obamacare is working to organize and regulate our lives.

But don’t worry. The same people who wrote the law are going to be running things after November. They will surely fix it!

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Trump’s new finance chief donates 2x more to Democrats than Republicans

9:37 am

Researching November’s Democratic primary: The man Donald Trump just appointed as his finance chairman routinely donates twice as much to Democrats than he does to Republicans, and has deep ties with the Democratic Party’s most liberal wing.

Beyond his contributions, Mnuchin’s past employers don’t fall in line with Trump’s rhetoric on the campaign trail. Mnuchin is a former Goldman Sachs partner and worked for liberal mega-donor George Soros’s hedge fund. He also contributed to a group called America Coming Together, which was largely funded by Soros and unions.

But don’t worry. We now have two candidates who will fix Obamacare and make sure the foreign policy of the United States is run by the same people that have been doing it for the past eight years.

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Putin signs Russian homesteading act

9:26 am

On Monday Russia’s president Vladimir Putin signed a new law that is a variation of the American homesteading acts that helped settle the west in the 1800s.

Trutnev’s initial suggestion was to “create a mechanism for the free allocation of a 1 hectare (2.5 acres) plot of land to every resident of the Far East and to anyone who is willing to come and live in the region so that they could start a private business in farming, forestry, game hunting or some other enterprise.” He added that the agreement could be signed for five years, and then it should either enter full force if the new landlord follows the plan, or be declared void if the land is not used.

They might be doing it wrong in aerospace, but if this story is correct Putin’s government has got it right when it comes to land ownership.

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