The competition heats up: Blue Origin has announced that its next New Shepard test flight, in which they will test the capsule’s launch abort capabilities, will take place on Tuesday, October 4
They will webcast the test live, coverage starting at 10:50 am (Eastern).
The competition heats up: In restructuring to cut costs and reduce its bureaucracy Airbus has decided to make significant management cuts and merge different divisions.
More here, including this revealing quote:
The move is the latest in [Airbus Chief Executive Tom] Enders’ four-year campaign to overhaul the company in the wake of the 2012 failed merger attempt with Europe’s largest arms maker BAE Systems PLC. “For me this is the logical conclusion of the journey we started in 2012,” Mr. Enders said.
After the deal faltered on German government opposition, he won shareholder backing for a new structure that reduced French, German and Spanish government involvement in company decision making, a legacy of the founding of the company in 2000 through the combination of European aerospace and defense assets.
The first link above also adds this:
[Airbus] changed its name from EADS and overhauled its governance in 2013-14, limiting the influence of French and German minority state shareholdings and granting more independence to management under German-born Chief Executive Tom Enders. But it remained saddled with separate bureaucracies and confusion over the brand, with the planemaking unit keeping the core “Airbus” identity and no fewer than five CEOs spread across the parent company, three units and one geographical division.
In other words, this restructuring is intended to remove any further government influence on the management of the company. Rather than provide pork for politicians, Airbus will now focus on maximizing its profits. The thinking here also corresponds with how the company organized its joint partnership with Safran and took over design and construction of Ariane 6 from the bureaucracy of the European Space Agency. Expect similar management cuts and even the possible elimination entirely of ESA’s Arianespace division in the coming years.
The Rosetta mission has ended. The spacecraft worked up until it landed on the comet’s surface. The image on the right was the last image, taken from about 167 feet away with a resolution capable of seeing objects less than a quarter of an inch across.
You can see a nice collection of approach images here.
Though its investigation into the September 1 Falcon 9 launchpad explosion is not yet complete, and no launch has actually been scheduled, SpaceX and the Air Force 45th Space Wing that supervises the launch range at Cape Canaveral have penciled November 17 as the target date for SpaceX’s next launch.
The date has been chosen merely for “planning purposes” and I would not be surprised it no launch happens.
The knives are out: Ten Republican House members have sent a letter to the Air Force, FAA, and NASA questioning whether SpaceX should lead the investigation into its September 1 launchpad explosion.
The Congress members said the investigation responses raised “serious concerns about the authority provided to commercial providers and the protection of national space assets…. Although subject to FAA oversight, it can be asserted the investigation lacked the openness taxpayers would expect before a return-to-flight,” the letter says. “We feel strongly that the current investigation should be led by NASA and the Air Force to ensure that proper investigative engineering rigor is applied and that the outcomes are sufficient to prevent NASA and military launch mishaps in the future.”
…The letter also includes a list of questions for each agency including whether the Air Force will reconsider certification of the Falcon 9 rocket for national security launches; whether NASA will reevaluate the use of the Falcon 9 rocket for its commercial resupply and upcoming commercial crew missions; and whether the FAA would reconsider issuing licenses to SpaceX after its September launch pad explosion.
More details here, including the letter’s full text. Congressman Mike Coffman (R-Colorado), whose district interestingly includes ULA’s headquarters, is heading this attack.
I find this a typical example of why conservatives are disgusted with the Republican Party. It claims it stands for private enterprise and less regulation, but the first chance these guys get, they demand more government control in order to benefit the crony companies they support. Nothing in this letter will make SpaceX’s operations safer. The only thing any of its demands will accomplish if enforced will be to damage the company, thus aiding its competitor ULA.
Betrayal: The just passed budget deal worked out by the Republican establishment got more Democrats to vote for it than Republicans.
The continuing resolution spending deal that the Republican-controlled House of Representatives passed at 9:56 p.m. on Wednesday night, won more votes from Democratic members than from Republican members. 172 House Democrats and 170 Republicans voted for the spending deal, according to the roll call published by the Clerk of the House. 75 Republicans and 10 Democrats voted against it. 5 members did not vote.
More betrayal: The continuing resolution is set to expire on December 9, 2016, thereby allowing a lame duck Congress and President to negotiate a new budget, after the election, when they will be able to spend money any which way they want, for their crony friends.
What good is a Republican majority if its leadership is going to work hand-in-glove with the Democrats to pass Democratic Party proposals, while also working to make corrupt backroom deals that bust the budget? No wonder the outsiders cleaned the floor with the Republican establishment’s favorite son, Jeb Bush. No wonder Donald Trump became the Republican party’s presidential candidate.
An evening pause: Originally from the 1997 film, The Fifth Element.
Hat tip Carey Unruh.
Below is only a small sampling of the many stories I have been reading in the past two weeks that clearly signal the end of freedom and western civilization. Tolerance for opposing viewpoints is dying, even as our academic community descends into insanity.
The last story is especially depressing. The head of a university advocates the idea that students shouldn’t be forced to hear ideas they don’t like, that they shouldn’t be exposed to any thoughts or statements that might offend them. He then proceeds to insult and denigrate anyone who disagrees with him. This is a man in charge of a university! I read this, as well as the other stories, and realize that the coming dark age is coming far sooner than anyone imagines.
According to this article in the journal Science, planetary scientists are increasingly worried about the future of the Deep Space Network (DSN), operated by JPL and that they use to communicate with their unmanned planetary probes.
For most of its life, the network, run by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California, has been metronomic in its reliability. Its three sites, spaced 120° apart around the globe, all have a 70-meter dish built in the 1960s or ’70s, and several newer, 34-meter dishes, which can be arrayed together to match the larger dishes’ downlink performance. The network allows continuous contact with spacecraft anywhere in the solar system—or beyond it, as in the case of Voyager 1, which officially entered interstellar space in 2013. Currently, 35 missions rely on the DSN.
Ironically, the glitches this past December and January largely stemmed from problems with the network’s newest 34-meter antenna, DSS-35, in Canberra, which began operating in 2014, NASA says. Rain and dust compromised an instrument that helps aim it, several other pointing components overheated, and contaminants leaked into a cryogenic refrigerator used to cool an amplifier. NASA says these problems have mostly been fixed, and the Canberra station’s reliability will increase when its next 34-meter antenna, DSS-36, begins operating on 1 October.
Staffing issues have also compounded the hardware problems. In January, the Magnetospheric Multiscale mission, which measures the boundary between Earth’s magnetic field and the solar wind, was, like Cassini, having trouble connecting to DSS-35. Communications could have shifted to another Canberra antenna. But on 22 January, a snowstorm shut down the Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. No one was there to reconfigure the spacecraft, and so the retrieval of a day’s worth of data was delayed.
While there has been a tendency to take the DSN for granted, much of this article seems to me to be a lobbying ploy for more money, budget increases that really aren’t needed that desperately. Almost all the problems listed in the article as well as in the quote above are not really from budgeting problems. In the first case above the failure came from a new antenna, showing that funds had been provided to upgrade the network’s equipment. The second case above was simply a problem caused by an unusual snowstorm.
Moreover, the article noted how Europe has finally built its own network to provide communications for its own planetary probes as well as redundancy to the American network. In addition, the U.S. is negotiating partnerships with several other countries to further supplement its DSN.
In other words, there really isn’t a problem here. The article is informative about this often ignored but essential component of planetary research, but when you read it ignore the pleas for more cash.
The Rosetta science team has released a summary of what they have learned about the interior of Comet 67P/C-G.
Essentially, they have found that the comet’s interior has a rather uniform and soft and fluffy interior, with few voids or dense pockets. They also found that the comet’s two lobes almost certainly came from two different objects that somehow made contact and stuck to each other. And finally, it appears that the upper few feet of the surface of the smaller lobe where Philae landed is different than its interior, a difference likely caused by the surface’s exposure to the Sun.
Archaeologists have uncovered what is obviously a stone toilet that appears to have been installed by the king inside a religious shrine in order to intentionally desecrate it.
Apart from being the nerve center of the city’s bureaucratic system, the site also housed a gate shrine, which was accessible via “steps … in the form of a staircase [that] ascended to a large room where there was a bench upon which offerings were placed.” While finding religious artifacts such as altars and ceremonial artifacts is par for the course at such sites, what has gotten archaeologists buzzing is something far more incongruous: “A stone fashioned in the shape of a chair with a hole in its center.” In other words, a toilet.
Installing such an object in the Holy of Holies, a sacred inner sanctum in the shrine accessible only to a High Priest, would have been considered “the ultimate desecration” of a holy space, which was most likely what [King] Hezekiah in mind. A purely symbolic act – lab tests have confirmed that the commode was never used – it was meant to show pagan worshippers that he meant business when he declared he was getting rid of religious cults.
While such practices, most notably King Jehu’s destruction of temples dedicated to the pagan god Baal, have been documented in the Bible, this is the first time that archaeological evidence has confirmed it.
An evening pause: These clips come from an episode of the 1970s television situation comedy, The Odd Couple, and showcases the incredible ability Roy Clark had to play almost anything.
Hat tip Mike Nelson.
