A launch of a Russian Earth resource satellite was aborted today at T -0.
The information at the link suggests they will be able to try again when the launch window opens again tomorrow. This kind of launch abort is a rare thing for the Russians. Usually they scrub much earlier, or launch.
Update: As expected they successfully launched today, Sunday, with no problems.
Andrew Klavan captures the sense of the modern Donald Trump supporter perfectly.
The competition heats up: Jeff Bezos has released an update on Blue Origin’s test program of its BE-4 rocket engine, being built as a possible replacement for the Russian engines in the Atlas 5.
Bezos’s final comment kind of explains why Boeing has favored them over Aerojet Rocketdyne for this engine:
One of the many benefits of a privately funded engine development is that we can make and implement decisions quickly. Building these two new test cells is a $10 million commitment, and we as a team made the decision to move forward in 10 minutes. Less than three weeks later we were pouring the needed three-foot thick foundations. Private funding and rapid decision making are two of the reasons why the BE-4 is the fastest path to eliminate U.S. dependence on the Russian-made RD-180.
I imagine however a lot of Congressmen are upset by this. If they do it too cheaply or too quickly there will be far less opportunity to spend pork in their districts!
NASA now estimates that it will cost about $150 million to delay the troubled InSight Mars lander two years until 2018 in order to fix the spacecraft’s primary instrument.
The extra money has to come out of the planetary program, which suggests that NASA will be forced to only fund one new planetary mission this year rather than the hoped-for two.
Government in action! The second flight of NASA’s SLS rocket, originally scheduled for around 2021 as the first manned mission, faces a possible delay of two years to 2023 so that it can be outfitted to launch the lander/orbiter planetary probe to Europa rather than flown manned.
The upper stage will be a new design that has never flown before. Thus, it has to be flown at least once unmanned to test it. Moreover, Congress in its most recent budget mandated that SLS be used for the Europa mission, probably in a team effort with NASA management to find a purpose for this missionless rocket that Congress has micromanaged from the beginning.
NASA has not officially decided to replace SLS’s original lunar manned mission for this second flight with the Europa mission, but I fully expect them to do so. They can’t fly the rocket with humans on it without first testing that upper stage engine at least once. Furthermore, the entire goal of SLS is not to fly missions but to employ people in Congressional districts. Delaying the first flight two years to outfit it for an unmanned planetary probe serves that absurd mission wonderfully.
The situation thus is that SLS will have a launch rate of once every five years, with a giant standing army of NASA and contractor employees paid during those years to do practically nothing while waiting for the next launch. While the article notes the high cost of building anything for SLS, it doesn’t explain that the reason things cost so much is that the government is slow-walking the construction of everything.
Note also that this means that Lockheed Martin will have an additional five years or so to finish its third Orion capsule. By that point the company will likely have spent about $20 billion, to build three capsules. Only a fool and a Congressman would consider this a good buy for the money.
Fascists: Upset that a Republican candidate they disagree with planned to hold a rally in Chicago, thousands of protesters threatened violence at tonight’s Trump rally and forced Trump to cancel the event.
In a telephone interview after postponing his event in Chicago, Trump said he didn’t “want to see people hurt or worse” at the rally, telling MSNBC, “I think we did the right thing.”
But Chicago police said they had sufficient manpower on scene to handle the situation and did not recommended Trump cancel the rally. That decision was made “independently” by the campaign, said police spokesman Anthony Guglielmi.
I am not a supporter of Donald Trump, but I will always defend to the death his right to speak. These protesters are merely an extension of the oppressive academic leftwing movement that tolerates no dissent, and does whatever it can to silence and squelch any opposition. That was their goal tonight, and they succeeded. And if you doubt my conclusions, consider this quote from the above article:
Veronica Kowalkowsky, an 18-year-old Trump supporter, said she had no ill will toward the protesters — but didn’t think they felt the same way. “I feel a lot of hate,” she said. “I haven’t said anything bad to anyone.”
Chicago community activist Quo Vadis said hundreds of protesters had positioned themselves in groups around the arena, and they intended to demonstrate right after Trump took the stage. Their goal, he said, was “for Donald to take the stage and to completely interrupt him. The plan is to shut Donald Trump all the way down.” [emphasis mine]
Sadly, it was Trump’s nonchalant encouragement of violence against protesters that helped inflame this situation. In some ways he is as guilty of misbehavior as are these protesters.
Update: Read this eye-witness account of what happened at the rally tonight, and weep for the death of free speech and freedom in America.
An evening pause: From the film An American Tale (1986) and composed by James Horner (who is the guy they show periodically watching in the audience).
Hat tip Edward Thelen.
The bigotry in the Democratic Party is not racial or ethnic. It is political. They hate Republicans so intensely that they are willing to let veterans die rather than work with Republicans to fix the problems at the Veterans Administration.
A federal employee union president is wracked with regret because veterans likely died at a time when she knew about gross misconduct within her Department of Veterans Affairs facility but didn’t tell congressional leaders because they were Republicans.
“If I would’ve gone to him two years ago, who knows what kind of lives could’ve been saved,” Germaine Clarno told a radio interviewer Monday, referring to the Republican leader of a VA subcommittee. Clarno, a lifelong Democrat and social worker at the Hines Veterans Affairs Hospital in Hines, Ill., has been president of the union representing doctors at the hospital since before the deadly wait-time scandal unfolded.
Several things about this story. First, my close reading of it does not indicate that this union official “is wracked with regret.” I think she is bothered, but not much more than that.
Second, as a union official she clearly works hand-in-glove with Democrats, who reciprocate that relationship. And in the case of the corruption at the Veterans Administration, that close working relationship between elected Democrats and unions was so strong that none of the Democrats this union official spoke to were willing to do anything to help sick vets, because to do so might do damage to the government unions and workers who were running the VA as their private little playground.
Third, the hatred of Republicans runs so deep in the Democratic Party and leftwing unions that not only were they unwilling to work with Republicans to help sick vets, they were willing to use the corruption at the VA to attack the very Republicans who had been the only politicians willing to deal with the problem. Consider for example this quote from the article:
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Embedded below the fold. I would dub this podcast an updated summary of what I in 2005 called the new colonial movement.
We are at the dawn of a new colonial age. The growing space competition between nations is in many ways very reminiscent of the 19th century competition between the European powers to colonize Africa and the South Pacific. In the 1800s, Germany, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom aggressively competed to carve up the undeveloped world. The result was foreign-run colonies controlling most of the Third World, for both good and ill, for almost a century.
Today, a new list of nations – India, China, Japan, Russia, Europe and the United States — are throwing their resources at space exploration in much the same way. Their goal, unstated but indisputable, is similar to the colonial powers of the 19th century: to obtain future domination over unclaimed territories in space.
This quest will, like the previous colonial efforts, be a long, complex and difficult historical process. Just as the colonial movement dominated much of 19th century politics and history, the growing desire by nations today to settle and control the solar system is also likely to dominate human history for centuries to come. The significant difference, however, is there are no aborigine peoples in space. The colonization of the solar system offers the hope of oppressing no one while bringing benefits to everyone who does it.
The uncertainty of science: New research now suggests an explanation for why in some cases having a high level of the supposedly good HDL cholesterol is not a good thing.
They think it is genetic, and that some people are missing the genes that help the HDL work to clean cholesterol out of the body. It is important however to recognize the uncertainties here. They still do not understand very well how this all works.
Scientists using Rosetta have finally detected the expected bubble or region surrounding Comet 67P/C-G where there is no magnetic field and the Sun’s solar wind does not enter.
The bubble is caused by the material being ejected from the comet. Scientists had detected the same thing around Halley’s Comet back in 1986, but it turns out the bubble around Comet 67P/C-G is larger than expected based on those previous measurements, and also fluctuates in size more than predicted.
The competition heats up: At a satellite conference on Wednesday SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell estimated that they will be able to cut the price of launch to about $40 million, a 30% cut from their already low prices, once they can reliably begin reusing the first stages of the Falcon 9 rocket.
Given that SpaceX has no intention, for now, of recovering the second stage, she said a launch with a previously used first stage could be priced 30 percent less than the current Falcon 9 rockets.
SES of Luxembourg, SpaceX’s biggest backer among the large commercial satellite fleet operators, has said it wants to be the first customer to fly with a reused stage. But SES Chief Executive Karim Michel Sabbagh said here March 8 that SES wanted a 50 percent price cut, to around $30 million, in return for pioneering the reusable version.
Shotwell said it was too early to set precise prices for a reused Falcon 9, but that if the fuel on the first stage costs $1 million or less, and a reused first stage could be prepared for reflight for $3 million or so, a price reduction of 30 percent – to around $40 million – should be possible.
Shotwell also said they hope to launch 18 times this year, with the first Falcon Heavy launch now set for November. This is another two month delay from their previous announcement, which had said they were hoping to launch in September.
With only two launches so far this year, I must say I am skeptical they can achieve 16 more launches in the year’s remaining 9 months, a rate of about one almost every two weeks. They have never come close to this schedule, and though I believe they can eventually do so, I don’t think they can do it so quickly.
