Pete Townshend – Let My Love Open The Door
An evening pause: Hat tip Edward Thelen.
Year: 2016
ULA and SpaceX to compete for GPS launch
The competition heats up: ULA and SpaceX will likely face-off for the right to launch the Air Force’s next GPS satellite.
SpaceX won the last GPS launch with an unopposed bid of $83 million. ULA has said that their average price for an Air Force launch under the EELV program has been $225 million. I suspect that their bid here will be significantly less than that.
After 31 months, Jade Rabbit ceases operation
China’s first lunar rover, Yutu (Jade Rabbit in English) has finally ceased operations after 31 months.
The rover stalled shortly after it moved away from its lander, Chang’e 3, but its instruments were still able to gather data, and they did so for about 10 times longer than originally planned.
Moon Express gets FAA approval for Moon landing
The competition heats up: Moon Express, one of the leading private competitors in the Google Lunar X-Prize, has gotten FAA approval for its planned 2017 Moon landing.
It is looking like 2017-2018 will be very exciting years for private space. We will not only see the first launches of privately-built manned spacecraft, we will see the first privately-built and -funded missions to both the Moon and Mars.
The interior of Ceres
Using data from Dawn, scientists have created their first rough map of the internal structure of Ceres.
The data indicate that Ceres is “differentiated,” which means that it has compositionally distinct layers at different depths, with the densest layer at the core. Scientists also have found that, as they suspected, Ceres is much less dense than Earth, the moon, giant asteroid Vesta (Dawn’s previous target) and other rocky bodies in our solar system. Additionally, Ceres has long been suspected to contain low-density materials such as water ice, which the study shows separated from the rocky material and rose to the outer layer along with other light materials. “We have found that the divisions between different layers are less pronounced inside Ceres than the moon and other planets in our solar system,” Park said. “Earth, with its metallic crust, semi-fluid mantle and outer crust, has a more clearly defined structure than Ceres,” Park said.
Scientists also found that high-elevation areas on Ceres displace mass in the interior. This is analogous to how a boat floats on water: the amount of displaced water depends on the mass of the boat. Similarly, scientists conclude that Ceres’ weak mantle can be pushed aside by the mass of mountains and other high topography in the outermost layer as though the high-elevation areas “float” on the material below. This phenomenon has been observed on other planets, including Earth, but this study is the first to confirm it at Ceres.
In other words, Ceres behaves more like a semi-hardened blob of jello than a rock.
3rd largest insurer begins retreat from Obamacare
Finding out what’s in it: Aetna, the nation’s third largest health insurer and faced with $300 million in loses, has decided against expanding its participation in the Obamacare exchanges.
They also announced that they are re-evaluating their entire participation in the remaining exchanges.
In related news, Obamacare rates are likely to go up from 23% to 45% in Illinois, and 17.3% in Michigan.
But don’t worry, we’ve got the situation covered. We’re going to vote for Hillary Clinton and Democrats, the people that gave us this failed law. They’ll surely fix it!
“News Media Now Giving Trump the ‘Full Palin.’”
Working for the Democratic Party: The expected full-media assault on the Republican Party candidate has begun. As the author at the link notes,
There have been few conservatives who have been more critical of Trump since the start of this insane campaign than me, and he deserves every bit of condemnation he has gotten for needlessly mishandling the Khan situation. However, there is also no doubt that the media became obsessed with the story because they want Trump to lose, got a bit freaked out about his very temporary convention bounce, and smelled blood.
Hillary, while she is less likely to be stupid enough to so publicly take on the parents of a fallen war hero, would also never have been lured by the media into the conflict to the extent Trump was. If she had somehow stepped in it, the news media would have let it go far sooner than they did for Trump (for instance, how many voters are even aware of the controversy over her basically calling some family members of Benghazi victims liars?).
This story has seemed to open the floodgates now on Trump in much the same way that the infamous Katie Couric interview did with regards to Sarah Palin in 2008. Now, everything Trump says seems to be instant fodder for the media’s intensified “gaffe watch.”
It is very important to recognize one more additional fact: Any Republican candidate would have been treated this way by the now openly partisan and decidedly bankrupt mainstream media. The question now is whether the low-information public has finally become aware of this game.
Vector completes suborbital test launch, signs contract
The competition heats up: The smallsat rocket company Vector Space Systems successfully completed its first suborbital test launch on July 30 as part of the signing of a new contract for 21 launches.
This company is moving quickly. In April they obtained financing, In July they revealed their launch schedule, with the first launch set for 2018. Mere weeks later, they complete their first test flight and announce a major launch contract.
August 2, 2016 Zimmerman/Batchelor podcast
Embedded below the fold. I like John Batchelor’s description of our discussion about NASA’s fantasy asteroid manned mission: “Vaporware.”
» Read more
Outsiders win primaries in Kansas and Missouri
The revolt continues: Outsiders in both Kansas and Missouri today won Republican primaries.
In a four-way Missouri governor primary, the two professional politicians finished third and fourth. In a Kansas primary for Congress, the incumbent was defeated by the challenger.
Sara Bareilles – Many the Miles
An evening pause: Performed live, on a houseboat in Sausalito, California.
Hat tip Frank Kelly.
Design problems for Starliner
In the heat of competition: Boeing is working to correct two serious design problems that cropped up during the construction of its Starliner manned capsule.
First the thing was weighing too much:
One issue involved the mass of the crew capsule, which outgrew the lift capability of the United Launch Alliance Atlas 5 rocket selected to put it into orbit. The CST-100 Starliner will ride an Atlas 5 rocket with two solid rocket boosters and a dual-engine Centaur upper stage, and although Boeing and ULA engineers considered adding a third strap-on motor to compensate for the capsule’s extra weight, managers now have the spacecraft back under its mass allowance, Ferguson said.
Second, the capsule has a shape problem:
Ferguson said Boeing has a model of the Atlas 5 rocket and CST-100 Starliner in a wind tunnel to verify a change to capsule’s outer shape devised to overcome higher-than-expected aerodynamic launch loads discovered in testing. “They had one issue, a non-linear aerodynamic loads issue, where they were getting some high acoustic loads right behind the spacecraft,” said Phil McAlister, head of NASA’s commercial spaceflight development office in Washington.
Something here is rotten. It seems to me that Boeing shouldn’t be having these very basic problems right off the bat. In the past, under the older cost-plus contracts NASA used to routinely hand out, these kinds of problems would simply have meant that Boeing would have gotten more money from NASA, This time, however the contract is fixed-price. If Boeing has problems or delays, the company will have to bear the cost, not NASA. I suspect these problems might have occurred because of some cultural laziness at Boeing. Their management is used to not having to eat the cost of these kinds of mistakes. Now, they will. I expect the culture to therefore begin changing.