October 4, 2016 Zimmerman/Batchelor podcast
Embedded below the fold. This was another double-length 39 minute appearance.
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Year: 2016
IRS renews harassment of tea party groups
Still working for the Democratic Party: Despite repeatedly saying it has stopped its harassment of conservatives, the IRS this week issued a new set of invasive questions to one tea party group that has been waiting since 2012 for its non-profit application to be processed.
Worse, the IRS did it publicly, and in the process released confidential information.
More jarringly, the IRS then publicly released one of the sets of questions it sent to the Texas Patriots Tea Party — a move the group’s lawyer says puts secret taxpayer return information, supposed to be protected, out in the public. Tax experts say the IRS may be on safe legal ground, since the filing was made as part of a court case, and that’s one of the few narrow exceptions to strict IRSprivacy laws.
Still, the move to release the information has inflamed an already tense class action legal battle between the IRS and tea party groups who feel the agency is still targeting them more than three years after it promised to cease. “The IRS has taken the unprecedented step of publicly filing actual return information,” said Edward Greim, who is handling the case on behalf of more than 400 groups targeted by the IRS. He said the questions asked by the IRS show the agency has not ceased the intrusive questioning that landed it in trouble in the first place back in 2013.
This behavior tells us more about Barack Obama and the Democratic Party than the IRS itself. When the scandal initially broke, Obama expressed outrage and anger that such harassment was happening, but from the beginning has literally done nothing to end it. Instead, the IRS has stonewalled every investigation and court suit, including continuning its harassment of the President’s opponents. That could only be happening if the man running the executive branch, Obama himself, approved that behavior. In addition, the investigations have found that numerous Democratic members of Congress not only demanded this harassment, they continue to help the IRS in its stonewalling.
Expect worse should Hillary Clinton win the election. Her track record when she was first lady was actually worse than Obama’s.
Redesigned Antares launch scheduled for Oct 13
NASA and Orbital ATK have now set October 13 as the date for the first Antares launch in two years.
Though ISS is not short of supplies, this quote underlines the difficulty of the particular situation now.
While the space station has plenty of food, water, experiments and other provisions, NASA officials are eager for the Antares rocket to resume flights as all of the research outpost’s other servicing vehicles are facing delays.
SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket, which launches the company’s Dragon cargo craft, is grounded after a launch pad explosion Sept. 1, and Dragon resupply missions to the space station may not start up again until early next year.
The Japanese HTV cargo freighter was supposed to blast off Sept. 30 with several tons of supplies, including new lithium-ion batteries for the space station’s electrical system. But that launch has been delayed until at least December after Japanese engineers discovered a leak during an air tightness test in August.
And a Soyuz crew capsule that was supposed to launch Sept. 23 with three new space station residents will not lift off until at least Oct. 19 after Russian workers discovered a technical problem on the vehicle. The Soyuz delay will likely push back the launch of Russia’s next unpiloted Progress cargo freighter from Oct. 20 until late November or early December.
Even with numerous redundent methods for hauling cargo to ISS, it is still possible for them all to have problems all at once.
Space letter wars in Congress!
Turf war! A bi-partisan group of Congressmen, in response to an earlier letter by ten Republican senators questioning SpaceX’s ability to complete a thorough investigation of its September 1st launchpad explosion, have issued their own letter of support for the company.
In a letter to the heads of the Air Force, NASA and the Federal Aviation Administration, 24 members of Congress said that it was proper that SpaceX was leading the investigation. “Accidents are unfortunate events, and accident investigations should not be politicized,” wrote the bipartisan group led by Rep. Bill Flores (R-Tex.). “We encourage you to reject calls for your organizations to abandon established, well-considered and long-standing procedures.”
Ain’t democracy wonderful? It seems that SpaceX might have rounded up its own crony Congressmen to battle ULA’s crony Congressmen.
Vitas – Opera #2
An evening pause: Hat tip Jim Mallamace, who also provides an English translation of the Russian lyrics, which I think combine very well with the dark and intriguing performance.
My house has been built,
But I’m alone in it.
A door was slammed behind my back.
Autumn wind is knocking at the window,
It’s crying over me again.
It was thunderstorm last night,
So it’s foggy in the morning.
The Sun got quite cold.
Old anguishes
Are going in a long train.
Let them get together.
My house has been built,
But I’m alone in it.
A door was slammed behind my back.
Autumn wind is knocking at the window,
It’s crying over me again.
It’s my fate, I can’t
Ask my fate for anything.
I only know, how the winds
Will cry after I’ve gone.
Agriculture Secretary demands Americans reduce their food portions
We’re here to help you! The Obama administraton’s agriculture secretary on Monday called for Americans to stop wasting food by reducing their food portions.
Vilsack declared that “first and foremost, America can stop wasting food.”
“We can reduce portion sizes, we can have a more informed consuming public,” he said. “The USDA is providing an app that allows you to sort of go online and figure out if something’s been in the refrigerator for a couple of days, is it still OK to eat that type of thing? And if we can’t reduce it or reuse it, then we need to recycle it. So that’s one strategy that we’re working on.”
He was trying to outline ways to solve future food shortage issues as well as landfill shortages. However, this is really a case of the pot calling the kettle black. For example, I wonder if he has ever looked at the food that is routinely wasted at every Washington function at the fancy buffet tables that are made available to every participant. I doubt it. I suspect that food alone could probably feed the populations of several third world nations.
Morever, what business is it of his to tell us how much food we are allowed to eat? Since when did the federal government gain this power? Worse, I expect that every proposal that the government will try to solve the problem is only going to make it worse. Instead, the government should just shut up, get out of the way, and allow competition, freedom, and necessity to find solutions, quickly and in the most efficient manner.
The mystery of Tabby’s star deepens
Astronomers looking at the light variations of the star dubbed by some Tabby’s star have become even more baffled.
Spurred by a controversial claim that the star’s brightness gradually decreased by 14 percent from 1890 to 1989, Montet and Simon decided to investigate its behavior in a series of Kepler calibration images that had not previously been used for scientific measurements. “We thought that these data could confirm or refute the star’s long-term fading, and hopefully clarify what was causing the extraordinary dimming events observed in KIC 8462852,” explained Simon.
Simon and Montet found that, over the first three years of the Kepler mission, KIC 8462852 dimmed by almost 1 percent. Its brightness then dropped by an extraordinary 2 percent over just six months, remaining at about that level for the final six months of the mission. The pair then compared this with more than 500 similar stars observed by Kepler and found thata small fraction of them showed fading similar to that seen in KIC 8462852 over the first three years of Kepler images. However, none exhibited such a dramatic dimming in just six months, or a total change in brightness of 3 percent.
“The steady brightness change in KIC 8462852 is pretty astounding,” said Montet. “Our highly accurate measurements over four years demonstrate that the star really is getting fainter with time. It is unprecedented for this type of star to slowly fade for years, and we don’t see anything else like it in the Kepler data.”
At the moment, there is no good theory based on what astronomers know of stellar evolution to explain this star’s behavior. This does not mean the only explanation left is that aliens are building a Dyson sphere around the star, but it also leaves everyone at a loss to explain what is happening.
Not sabotage!
This closer look at the circumstances behind the September 1 Falcon 9 launchpad explosion outlines why sabotage by a sniper is almost certainly not the cause of the explosion.
The rocket was destroyed about eight minutes before it could start its engines for the static test fire. The supposed sniper could have waited until first-stage engine ignition, which would have covered the sound of a shot. Even a suppressed rifle can be quite loud, and the passage of the bullet through the air would have generated a distinctive sound. As Elon Musk wrote on Twitter a while ago, his team did not come to that conclusion. “Particularly trying to understand the quieter bang sound a few seconds before the fireball goes off,” Musk tweeted. “May come from rocket or something else.”
The .50-caliber Barrett rifle has a maximum effective range of little over a mile. It would be extraordinarily difficult (albeit not impossible) for a trained sniper to get within rifle range of the launch pad, given the tight security at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station.
The article also notes that fuel tanks simply don’lt explode when you fire a bullet into them. Moreover, the problem came from the rocket’s second stage helium tank, and it would have been easier for a sniper to fire at the rocket’s first stage.
It was necessary for the investigation to look into this possibility, but it is also necessary to put the suspicion aside when it is found to be invalid. SpaceX had a rocket failure of significant importance on September 1st, and they need to uncover its actual cause in order to prevent it from happening again. Getting distracted by theories that don’t work will prevent them from doing that.
Firefly shuts down
More details have been released by the shut down of operations at Firefly Space Systems.
They have furloughed all their employees, having lost one of their major investors. According to the company, the investor did not pull out because of the company’s litigation with Virgin Galactic, but because of its own internal considerations. The article also includes hints that Firefly might be one of the options that Vulcan Aerospace is looking at for building the rocket that its giant airplane Stratolaunch will launch.
Blue Origin test flight scrubbed
Due to bad weather Blue Origin has scrubbed today’s test flight of its suborbital New Shepard spacecraft.
They have rescheduled the launch abort test for tomorrow at 10:45 am (Eastern).
Curiosity moves on
The Curiosity science team today put out press release summarizing what they have accomplished at Murray Buttes and what they hope to do next.
For those who have been reading my weekly rover updates on Behind the Black, most of this release will be old news. However, the release did provide the following interesting geological information that supplements what I have been reporting:
This latest drill site — the 14th for Curiosity — is in a geological layer about 600 feet (180 meters) thick, called the Murray formation. Curiosity has climbed nearly half of this formation’s thickness so far and found it consists primarily of mudstone, formed from mud that accumulated at the bottom of ancient lakes. The findings indicate that the lake environment was enduring, not fleeting. For roughly the first half of the new two-year mission extension, the rover team anticipates investigating the upper half of the Murray formation. “We will see whether that record of lakes continues further,” Vasavada said. “The more vertical thickness we see, the longer the lakes were present, and the longer habitable conditions existed here. Did the ancient environment change over time? Will the type of evidence we’ve found so far transition to something else?”
The “Hematite Unit” and “Clay Unit” above the Murray formation were identified from Mars orbiter observations before Curiosity’s landing. Information about their composition, from the Compact Reconnaissance Imaging Spectrometer aboard NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, made them high priorities as destinations for the rover mission. Both hematite and clay typically form in wet environments.
It also appears that the problems they had while doing the last drill hole were related to the electrical design flaw of Curiosity’s drill. It caused a short circuit this time, which is worrisome based on what I understand because this design flaw has the capability of shorting out the rover’s entire electrical system, ending the mission.
I will post a new rover update later this week, once I get back from Illinois.
On the road
I am presently in Champaign-Urbana, Illinois to give a lecture tomorrow, Tuesday, to the local AIAA chapter. This is why posting was light today, as I spent the day on airplanes getting from Tucson to Illinois.