Year: 2016

Explosion at SpaceX test site part of launchpad investigation

9:14 am

An explosion yesterday at SpaceX’s Texas test facility appears to have been planned and is part of the company’s investigation into the September 1 Falcon 9 launchpad explosion.

“The sound heard by residents was actually the result of a pressurization test at the McGregor Rocket R&D facility. These tests take place periodically at the site, and this particular test was part of the ongoing testing being conducted by our Accident Investigation Team,” SpaceX spokesman Phil Larson said in an email response to questions. “The volunteer fire department responded as a matter of procedure, but there was no damage to the site or injuries to any personnel.”

I would guess that they are trying to see if they can precisely duplicate the conditions that produced the September 1st explosion, including triggering new explosions in a reliable manner. If so, they would then know precisely what to avoid doing to trigger future tank failures.

Meanwhile, this story notes the successful first pressure tests of the carbon fiber tank that SpaceX is developing for its interplanetary spaceship. Not much information, though SpaceX has released some cool images of the tank being prepped for the test.

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No Trump NASA transition team yet

9:09 am

It appears that the Trump transition operation has no plans as yet to form a transition team for NASA.

NASA Associate Administrator Robert Lightfoot sent a memo to NASA employees stating that NASA has been informed that no ART will be assigned to NASA for now. “The President-Elect Transition Team (PETT) has indicated that NASA will not be receiving an Agency Review Team (ART) at this time. NASA, as all federal agencies, stands ready to support the PETT at a future date.” A NASA transition team could be set up later, although time is getting short, or the incoming Administration could wait until after the inauguration to address NASA and other space issues.

Rumors were that former Congressman Bob Walker would be very involved in a NASA transition team. He was the point man for space policy during the final weeks of the Trump campaign. He co-authored two op-eds for Space News, one on civil space policy, the other on national security space, and spoke to the FAA’s Commercial Space Transportation Advisory Committee (COMSTAC) on October 26 outlining top-level Trump space priorities. Walker became a lobbyist after he retired from Congress and is now executive chairman of one of the top lobbying firms in Washington, Wexler|Walker. The lobbyist ban presumably excludes him from serving now.

One pattern I see developing with Trump is his willingness to hire and fire people. The change in transition leadership between Christie and Pence shows this. I suspect that he will be replacing cabinet appointees and administration management heads much more frequently that we are used to seeing in government. This is good. And it will certainly be different from the Obama administration, where you could literally commit crimes and not be fired.

As to NASA, it is not surprising that Trump is not making this a priority. It is not unusual for it to take months, even a year, for a new administration to pick its NASA administrator. That is what happened under Obama. The new administration has far more important slots to fill that must come first.

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New conclusions about Pluto from New Horizons data

1:00 am

Based on New Horizons data scientists have proposed that Pluto’s equatorial tilt has been shifted because of a seasonal pile-up of nitrogen that literally causes the planet to tip over.

Over the course of a Pluto year, nitrogen and other exotic gases condense on the permanently shadowed regions, and eventually, as Pluto goes around the sun, those frozen gases heat up, become gaseous again and re-condense on the other side of the planet, resulting in seasonal “snowfall” on Sputnik Planitia. “Each time Pluto goes around the sun, a bit of nitrogen accumulates in the heart,” Keane said. “And once enough ice has piled up, maybe a hundred meters thick, it starts to overwhelm the planet’s shape, which dictates the planet’s orientation. And if you have an excess of mass in one spot on the planet, it wants to go to the equator. Eventually, over millions of years, it will drag the whole planet over.”

The theory also requires there to be a subsurface ocean as well.

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SpaceX files FCC application for 4000+ internet satellite constellation

11:56 pm

The competition heats up: SpaceX today filed an FCC application for the construction and launch of a 4,425-satellite constellation designed to provide internet access worldwide.

In the technical information that accompanied its application, SpaceX said it would start commercial broadband service with 800 satellites. That service would cover areas of the globe from 15 degrees north to 60 degrees north, and from 15 degrees south to 60 degrees south. That leaves out some portions of Alaska, which would require a temporary waiver from the FCC.

Eventually, the network would grow to 4,425 satellites, transmitting in the Ku and Ka frequency bands. “Once fully deployed, the SpaceX system will pass over virtually all parts of the Earth’s surface and therefore, in principle, have the ability to provide ubiquitous global service,” SpaceX said.

When Musk first proposed this last year, he said it would take about $10 billion and five years to get it built. So, don’t expect these satellites to fly tomorrow. A lot of other things must happen first before this new plan takes flight.

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OutKast – Hey Ya!

6:01 pm

An evening pause: I am generally not a fan of hip hop, but this music video is filled with so much happiness I can’t resist it.

Hat tip Jim Mallamace, who adds, “Andre’ 3000 sings and plays all 8 parts in this video from 2003. There were so many takes from different angles, eventually exhausted, he had his last character sit down during the performance.”

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Ryan stops vote on earmarks

2:58 pm

House speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wisconsin) was today able to convince Republicans to delay a vote on reinstating earmarks.

Ryan convinced his colleagues to postpone the vote until the first quarter of 2017. “After a long debate, it was clear there’s a lot of pent up frustration with ceding spending authority to the Executive Branch,” said one source in the room. “Based on the comments by members, it was likely that an earmark amendment would have passed. Ultimately, the speaker stepped in and urged that we not make this decision today.”

“[Ryan] said we just had a ‘drain the swamp’ election and cannot turn right around and bring back earmarks behind closed doors,” the source continued.

Be warned. This issue is not dead. The crooks in Congress on the Republican side have simply agreed to delay the vote in the hope that after things calm down in a few months they can slip it in without anyone noticing.

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The American city-rural political divide

9:10 am

Though the article at the link focuses on how in this year’s election the Democratic Party has lost its traditional support from white blue collar Democrats, I think it illustrates quite forcefully the increasing political polarization between the cities and the rural parts of the country.

“There are 490 counties in Appalachia technically, which is defined by federal law. Hillary Clinton won 21 counties in that region,” he said. And that is it. She did not win a single county in Appalachia that is mostly white, non-college-educated and has a population of under 100,000 people.

Not one county.

Looking at the map, the 21 counties she won were either college campuses like Virginia Tech, Cornell, Penn State and Mississippi State or counties in major metropolitan areas like Atlanta, Birmingham, Ala., Winston-Salem, N.C., Youngstown, Ohio, and Pittsburgh. And she also won five counties in Mississippi that are nearly majority black. “I went back and looked at the home precinct in Tennessee where I grew up and Bill Clinton wins it, Al Gore gets forty percent, Obama gets 28 percent and she got 18 percent. In short, Donald Trump got 80 percent of that vote,” he said, astounded at the cultural shift among Appalachians.

What does all of this data tell you about America? Todd says it is simple, “There are absolutely no more blue-collar whites in the Democratic Party. They just don’t exist, even the ones who want there to be have recognized there is no room for them,” he said. These voters had stayed with the Democrats forever and now 80 percent of them in Appalachia have voted Republican. “That means they don’t know anyone who voted for her,” he said.

This polarization also explains why it is becoming more common for the choice of the electoral college to not match the popular vote. Democratic voters are increasingly packed into big cities that cover very small amounts of area. The electoral college as well as Congress were specifically designed to prevent such concentrations from dominating elections.

These results also show that the Democrats are not doing a very good job convincing anyone to vote for them outside of their reliable core constituencies. In fact, if anything the policies of the Democratic Party has been repelling everyone away from it, except in those big cities where a large percentage of the voters are their direct welfare clients, dependent on government aid.

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Nebraska bans civil forfeiture without a criminal conviction

8:52 am

Good news: A Nebraska law passed and signed in April has banned the police from confiscating any private property prior to a criminal conviction.

Now that the Nebraska bill has been signed into law, innocent property owners will have some rather significant new protections, the most significant of which is the requirement for a criminal conviction. Believe it or not, under civil forfeiture laws, no convictions need to be obtained—nor even any charge filed—to permanently forfeit property. Nebraska’s decision to require a conviction essentially eliminates civil forfeiture in the state.

The state may still forfeit property, but only after obtaining a conviction on drug, child pornography, or illegal gambling charges, and then only after demonstrating by clear and convincing evidence that the property in question was used or intended to be used in the commission of the crime, or that it represented the illicit “fruits” of the criminal activity.

The law was passed back in April but I missed the story. Hat tip to reader Tim Vogel for letting me know.

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Software issues threaten Orion/SLS schedule

8:36 am

Despite having more than a decade to develop the software for SLS and Orion, NASA now faces the possibility that the rocket’s first test flight in 2018 might be delayed because that software is not ready.

Specifically, a NASA advisory board has revealed that Orion’s flight software is behind schedule and might not be ready in time. This, combined with schedule problems for the capsule’s service module, being built by the European Space Agency, threatens the 2018 launch date.

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Problems with Russia force private company to deemphasize ISS cameras

10:29 pm

UrtheCast has been forced to write off almost $8 million because it has not been able fully use its two cameras installed on the Russian half of ISS.

The Vancouver-based company said its was writing off some of the cameras’ value because of strained relations with their Russian hosts, who recently approached UrtheCast with a request to renegotiate their deal. Russian cosmonauts installed two UrtheCast cameras on the exterior of space station in 2014. The medium-resolution camera, called Theia, captures 50-kilometer swaths of multispectral imagery sharp enough to discern features 5-meters across. The high-resolution camera, called Iris, records ultra-high-def-quality, full-color video of the Earth and still images at a resolution of one meter per pixel. Iris entered service only last year due to technical issues.

Wade Larson, UrtheCast’s co-founder and chief executive, told investors during a Nov. 10 conference call that tensions between Russia and the U.S. and its allies are spilling over into UrtheCast’s agreement with the Russian space agency, Roscosmos, and Russia’s lead space station contractor RSC Energia. “There’s been some geopolitical challenges that have influenced this relationship and candidly … that has impacted our ability to task these cameras operationally,” Larson said.

In the long run, this is very bad for the Russians. It shows them to be an unreliable business partner, which will increasingly limit their ability to attract business from outside Russia.

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