Year: 2016

SpaceX lands its first stage on a barge

1:56 pm

The competition heats up: SpaceX has for the first time successfully landed the first stage of its Falcon 9 rocket on a barge, even as it has successfully launched Dragon to ISS.

Go here to see the stage on the barge, even as I type. More here, including images.

That makes two first stages recovered, suggesting that this is going to become increasingly routine for the company. Now comes the next big step, using one of these used stages a second time to launch another satellite.

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Serious security flaws found in Obamacare websites in three states

9:58 am

Finding out what’s in it: Federal investigators have found significant security problems with the Obamacare health insurance websites in the states of California, Kentucky, and Vermont.

The GAO report examined the three states’ systems from October 2013 to March 2015 and released an abbreviated, public version of its findings last month without identifying the states. On Thursday, the GAO revealed the states’ names in response to a Freedom of Information request from the AP.

According to the GAO, one state did not encrypt passwords, potentially making it easy for hackers to gain access to individual accounts. One state did not properly use a filter to block hostile attempts to visit the website. And one state did not use the proper encryption on its servers, making it easier for hackers to get in. The report did not say which state had what problem.

According to the story, it appears that nothing has been done in two of the three states to fix the problem. Worse, the study suggests similar problems exist at other state websites.

Hey, let’s solve the problem by voting for Clinton or Sanders! Both say the solution is to give the governments that screwed up here more power, money, and control. What could go wrong?

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Vet charities not getting promised Trump donations

9:31 am

What does this tell us? Three months after Donald Trump held a charity event for veterans rather than participate in a presidential debate, more than half of the $6 million raised has not been given to any of the veteran organizations.

A survey by The Wall Street Journal of 19 of the 22 groups originally listed by Mr. Trump’s presidential campaign as the prospective recipients of the funds found that they had received roughly $2.4 million of the estimated $6 million in donations the campaign said the event generated. The total received by all of the groups is likely to be more.

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Fascist New Jersey threatens prison for man flying Trump flag

9:24 am

Fascists: A man in New Jersey faces jail time for flying a campaign flag for Donald Trump in front of his home.

A New Jersey man who’s been flying Donald Trump’s campaign flag in front of his home since February could face up to a $2,000 fine or jail time when he faces a judge in the case.

Joe Hornick has been flying Trump’s “Make America Great Again” flag outside his West Long Branch home on a busy corner near the Monmouth University campus for months. But he got a ticket recently citing him for illegally posting political signage more than 30 days before an election. The New Jersey presidential primary isn’t until June 7. [emphasis mine]

Where in the Constitution does it say that political speech is forbidden thirty days before an election?

Anyway, this is another reason to avoid New Jersey, the state that routinely jails ordinary citizens for daring to exercise their second amendment rights. Now the state wants to jail people for exercising their first amendment rights.

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Brownshirts shut down student Trump meeting

9:13 am

Facists: A collection of leftwing, Marxist, Black Lives Matter brownshirts crashed the first meeting of a Students for Trump club forming at Portland State University, shutting it down and threatening the participants.

I have posted the video below the fold. Be sure to watch it all. There is no doubt that if and when these fascists gain power they will use it to oppress and persecute anyone who disagrees with them. In fact, they readily admit on the video that they are doing this now, gleefully. Their hate is palatable.
» Read more

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Phase 2 begins in DARPA spaceplane program

8:59 am

The competition heats up: DARPA is about to start asking for proposals for the second phase of its XS-1 spaceplane program.

In Phase 1 of XS-1, DARPA sought to evaluate the technical feasibility and methods for achieving the program’s goals. To achieve that, it awarded prime contracts to three companies, each working in concert with a commercial launch provider: The Boeing Company (working with Blue Origin, LLC); Masten Space Systems (working with XCOR Aerospace); and Northrop Grumman Corporation (working with Virgin Galactic). Phases 2 and 3 will be competed as a full and open Program Solicitation mandating an Other Transaction Authority (OTA) agreement with the expectation of a single resulting award. Cost share is expected.

The primary goal is to build a vehicle that can fly ten times in ten days and put a small satellite into orbit.

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In the wild

6:01 pm

An evening pause: A beautiful nature video from National Geographic. Though it contains lots of cute animals, it also shows them in the wild, as they really are, hunting and being hunted. I am thus reminded of Tennyson’s description of nature, “red in tooth and claw,” from his poem In Memoriam, written at the death of a close friend.

… A monster then, a dream,
A discord. Dragons of the prime,
That tare each other in their slime,
Were mellow music match’d with him.

O life as futile, then, as frail!
O for thy voice to sooth and bless!
What hope of answer, or redress?
Behind the veil, behind the veil.

Hat tip George Petricko.

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Update on Dawn at Ceres

10:07 am

Link here. Though the story initially focuses on the possibility that the mission might be extended a few extra months until the spacecraft’s fuel runs out, it also gives a good summary of what has been learned so far about the dwarf planet, including the theory that Ceres was once an “ocean world.”

[Carol Raymond, Dawn’s deputy principal investigator,] said Ceres appears to be a former ocean world and could have once been similar to Europa or Enceladus, the icy moons of Jupiter and Saturn. “One of the things that we anticipated about Ceres before getting there is that it’s a former ocean world,” Raymond said. “We’re so interested in going to Europa and Enceladus, and these other interesting objects in the outer solar system because we think they harbor subsurface oceans at present, and possible habitable environments, and possibly even locations where there’s extant life.

“Ceres appears to have been one of those objects in the past, when it was younger and hotter,” Raymond said. “What we’re looking at now is, we believe, the remnant of a frozen ocean. The salt is left over from the brines that were concentrated as the ocean froze out, so it’s all a fairly consistent story that Ceres is a former ocean (world) where the ocean froze, and now we’re interrogating the chemistry, essentially, of that ocean-rock interface through the subsurface layers that we’re detecting on Ceres.”

The data has found the high latitudes to have lots of hydrogen, suggesting water-ice on or near the surface. The bright salt patches also suggest frozen water below the surface that left behind the salt when it reached the surface and evaporated away.

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NASA picks Aerojet Rocketdyne engine for SLS upper stage

9:49 am

Government in slow motion: Only six years after program start, NASA has finally chosen Aerojet Rocketdyne’s legacy RL10 rocket engine for the upper stage of the SLS rocket.

The RL10 is an expander cycle liquid hydrogen/liquid oxygen rocket engine typically used on upper stage applications. It was first developed by Pratt & Whitney in the late 1950s and first flown in 1963. It has flown on hundreds of launches, logged approximately 15,000 hot fires, and accumulated more than 2.3 million seconds of hot fire operation time with a demonstrated reliability ratio greater than 0.999 throughout its history. The RL10 – which is used in various forms with Atlas’ Centaur Upper Stage (RL10A-4-2) and Delta IV’s Upper Stage (RL10B-2) – has a history back to the Saturn I’s S-IV Stage.

No other engine exists that can be built in time. Even so, the engine will not be ready for the first SLS launch tentatively scheduled in 2018, but will instead be used on the next two flights. The article also indicates that NASA is planning to delay SLS’s second flight two years to 2023, creating a five year gap which they will use to integrate the RL10 into SLS, while also rebuilding the mobile platform used to move SLS to the launchpad. (For some reason, the reconfiguration installed for the first SLS flight won’t work for later flights.)

The delay to 2023 has not been announced officially, but I have seen too much evidence recently, including statements in this GAO report, that tells me the delay is certain. Furthermore, it seems increasingly likely that the second flight will also be unmanned, and it won’t be until the third flight (as yet unfunded by Coingress) that humans will finally fly on SLS.

The cost? I am doing an analysis of this subject right now for a policy paper I am writing for a Washington think tank, and my preliminary estimate exceeds $41 billion for NASA to fly just one manned flight of SLS. That’s a bit more expensive than the $10 billion NASA is paying SpaceX, Orbital ATK, and Boeing to launch more than a dozen cargo freighters and as many as a dozen manned flights to ISS.

For those elected officials out there who have trouble with math, let’s compare again:

  • SLS: $41 billion for one flight, 15 years development to first flight.
  • Commercial space: $10 billion for two dozen flights, 5 years development to first flight.

Which costs less and gives more bang for the buck? Can you figure that out, Congressmen and Senators? If you need help I can provide you a few more fingers so you can count above ten.

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The changing color of Comet 67P/C-G

9:12 am

Data from Rosetta has found that Comet 67P/C-G has changed color and brightness since the spacecraft’s arrival.

Even when Rosetta first rendezvoused with the comet far from the Sun, ices hidden below the surface were being gently warmed, sublimating into gas, and escaping, lifting some of the surface dust away and contributing to the comet’s coma and tail. VIRTIS shows that as the ‘old’ dust layers were slowly ejected, fresher material was gradually exposed. This new surface was both more reflective, making the comet brighter, and richer in ice, resulting in bluer measurements.

On average, the comet’s brightness changed by about 34%. In the Imhotep region, it increased from 6.4% to 9.7% over the three months of observations

The changes are similar to those found on the Moon when the surface there is disturbed. The old surface is very dark. When hit by a meteorite or scrapped by an astronaut’s foot, it brightens. In the case of Comet 67P, the underlying ice pushes outward when heated, the dust is removed, and the surface gets brighter.

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Smallsat company searches for launch services

9:04 am

The competition heats up: Terra Bella, formally known as Skybox Imaging, hopes to have as many as 21 satellites in orbit by the end of 2017.

Space Systems Loral (SSL) is Terra Bella’s manufacturing partner for the SkySat satellites, building 19 SkySat Cs — one prototype and 18 final versions. Joe Rothenberg, director of Skybox engineering and operations at Google, told Via Satellite that the first SkySat C satellite is currently scheduled to launch aboard a Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle (PSLV) from the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) on May 31. The PSLV launch is for the prototype to precede the rest of the series. The next four are then to launch on an Arianespace Vega as a rideshare this summer, followed by six more on Orbital ATK’s Minotaur rocket during the fourth quarter this year.

The Skybox C satellite only weights 265 pounds, so it is larger than a cubesat but tiny compared to most commercial satellites. The company’s problem now is that, except for Orbital ATK’s Minotaur rocket, they don’t have a launch vehicle dedicated to this size satellite. And Minotaur is probably too expensive (which is why Orbital wants the right to use surplus ICBM motors to power it). Because of this Terra Bella must launch its satellites as secondary payloads, which leaves them at the scheduling mercy of the primary payload. Virgin Galactic’s LauncherOne is intended to serve this smallsat market, competing directly with Minotaur, but Terra Bella is understandably skeptical of that company’s effort.

A small piece of trivia. Rothenberg was a key NASA manager running the shuttle Hubble repair missions, one of the few NASA efforts that operated like a private company: competitive, hard-working, and demanding of success. It is entirely fitting that he has moved out of the government and into the private sector, where his skills can truly shine. It speaks well of Terra Bella that they hired him.

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