Month: August 2017

Russia to spend $630 million to build Vostochny Angara launchpad

9:23 am

Despite years of construction and more than a billion dollars spent, Russia still needs to spend about $630 million more to build the Angara launchpad at its new Vostochny spaceport.

The specified sum does not include the development, manufacture and assembly of technological equipment at the launch compound, the materials say. According to the Roscosmos document, the construction completion and the commissioning of this infrastructure are scheduled for 2022.

Russian Deputy Defense Minister Timur Ivanov who visited the Vostochny spaceport in the Russian Far East in late May was informed that the construction of the launch pad for the Angara carrier rocket at this cosmodrome would cost 58 billion rubles ($968 million) and would be completed in 2023.

It appears that the Russia government is trying to reduce the overall cost and time needed to build this launchpad. I am willing to bet that this effort will fail, and the cost will raise and time to build will lengthen. And even if they meet these new targets, it is still going to take an awful lot of money and time to do it. Construction on Vostochny began in 2010. Angara’s construction began near the end of the 20th century. Overall, they are going to take decades to get this rocket off the ground. Meanwhile, SpaceX should have four launchpads in regular operation, all built for relatively little money in less than five years overall.

I don’t see anyway Russia is going to be able to compete in the global launch market, based on this information.

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SpaceX completes static fire for next launch, advances its Falcon Heavy prep

2:13 pm

Capitalism in space: SpaceX today successfully completed its routine dress rehearsal static fire in preparation for a Monday launch of a Dragon cargo capsule to ISS.

Two items of note regarding this launch. First, it will be the last cargo capsule launched by SpaceX that has not been used before. From now on they plan on recycling all cargo ships, and have actually shut down the production line building new cargo capsules. Instead, they want to focus on building new upgraded manned Dragon capsules.

Second, even as this launch goes forward, with the first stage expected to land at Kennedy on their landing pad there, they are building the second landing pad at this same site to accommodate the planned November first launch of Falcon Heavy. For that launch, the two side mounted first stages will return to Kennedy, while the core stage will land on a barge in the ocean.

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The fifteen most popular search engines

1:40 pm

Link here. Considering the increasingly fascist attitude of Google towards its employees and its users, I thought it worthwhile to provide this list of alternatives. I use Startpage, which isn’t listed because it is actually a slightly different version of Ixquick.

There is no reason to blindly and mindlessly depend on Google. There are many choices out there. Use your freedom and choose. It is our own personal responsibility to do so.

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Minnesota writing conference cancelled because of too many whites

1:34 pm

Bigoted intelligentsia: A Minnesota writing conference was cancelled yesterday because people complained the line-up of speakers did not have enough minorities.

Twenty-two authors were set to speak at the event, but only one had an ethnic background. William Alexander, winner of a National Book Award, is a Cuban-American author. Udesen said the event was canceled in part because of the lack of diversity in the line-up, but also because not enough people were going to attend.

[Britt Udesen, executive director of the event] added that they invited more than 30 people of color to speak at the conference, but none accepted the invitation.

So, now it is unacceptable to even hold an event if minorities are not interested in participated. They must be there, since whites don’t count.

Utter and blatant bigotry. That’s all this is.

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First very short movie from Jupiter

7:37 am

Using two Juno images of the same area, taken at slightly different times, scientists have produced what might be the first very short gif animation showing the changing circulation patterns in Jupiter’s atmosphere.

The animation is only two images long, so in a sense it isn’t a movie but a blink comparison. Moreover, the difference in circulation patterns between the two images is not strongly evident, partly because the two images have different resolution and somewhat different lighting. Nonetheless, this animation foretells what will should become possible with time, as Juno’s mission continues. Eventually its images will show the changes in the gas giant’s storms.

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Cassini’s last five orbits of Saturn

10:14 pm

Cassini is about to begin its last of five orbits of Saturn, before it is sent into the planet’s atmosphere to burn up.

Cassini will make the first of these five passes over Saturn at 12:22 a.m. EDT Monday, Aug. 14. The spacecraft’s point of closest approach to Saturn during these passes will be between about 1,010 and 1,060 miles (1,630 and 1,710 kilometers) above Saturn’s cloud tops.

The spacecraft is expected to encounter atmosphere dense enough to require the use of its small rocket thrusters to maintain stability – conditions similar to those encountered during many of Cassini’s close flybys of Saturn’s moon Titan, which has its own dense atmosphere. “Cassini’s Titan flybys prepared us for these rapid passes through Saturn’s upper atmosphere,” said Earl Maize, Cassini project manager at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in California. “Thanks to our past experience, the team is confident that we understand how the spacecraft will behave at the atmospheric densities our models predict.”

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University excludes white males from $10K journalism grant

11:20 am

Bigoted academia: For the second year in a row Brandeis University is offering a racist $10K journalism grant only to minorities and women, specifically excluding white males.

The grant’s entire eligibility requirements, from the university’s press release, are quite blunt:

Applications from women and journalists of color working in any type of media — print, audio, video, online — will be considered.

Applicants must be U.S. citizens but can be reporting from abroad.

As the article above notes, federal law forbids any organization that receives federal funds (as Brandeis does) from discriminating based on either sex or race. But then, bigotry today in the leftwing community is perfectly all right, as long as you are oppressing whites or men.

I think Lous Brandeis, for whom this university is named, would be horrified by its actions.

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How did the Democrats’ IT foreigners get in the U.S?

10:48 am

Michelle Malkin has raised an interesting question regarding the three Pakistani brothers who ran the Democrats computer infrastructure in Congress for the past thirteen years and are now charged with bank fraud and are suspected of doing much worse: How did they get in the country in the first place?

Were the Awans and their family and friends H-1B tech workers — like so many of the 650,000 “temporary” foreign guest workers imported into America under that program over the past quarter-century and predominantly working in IT?

And if they’re not H-1Bs, how exactly did Awan and company get here, when did they get here, and who brought them over here and why?

…Awan first landed a job with former Democrat Rep. Robert Wexler as an “information technology director” in 2004 at the ripe age of 24 or 25. His younger brother, Jamal, is reportedly only 23 years old, yet has pulled in a salary of nearly $160,000 a year since 2014 (when he was 20!) as an information technology worker for Democrat Rep. Julia Brownley. That’s 3.1 times greater than the median salary for a House IT worker, according to InsideGov.

Who sponsored these young foreign techies and chose them to do work in our nation’s capital doing a job that countless young Americans are qualified to do? If not H-1B, did they arrive first as students on foreign visas (who are supposed to return home after their course of study), then game the system to work through the cheap-labor loopholes, such as the Optional Practical Training program? Or did they switch visa categories? Did they pull strings through their well-connected Democratic employers?

Not surprisingly, she has been unable to get an answer to this question from any of the many Democrats who had hired these Pakistanis. You would almost think the Democrats are stonewalling the investigation. It would also be reasonable for you to think the Democrats seem more interested in protecting non-Americans, coming from a Muslim country with many ties to radical Islamic terrorists, then in defending the security of the United States.

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The Google Gulag

10:37 am

Link here. The essay contains a nice collection of links documenting Google’s increasing leftwing fascist bent. The key quote however is this:

Damore [the man Google fired] was working on Google’s search infrastructure. And there’s little doubt that he was wasted there. Google’s search has grown more useless even as the company’s search revenues have grown. Google’s goal is to streamline and shape search results for a mobile environment by giving users what it thinks they want rather than what they are actually searching for. Google isn’t just politically left-wing, its product mindset has become all about forcing users to do what it thinks they should be doing. [emphasis mine]

In other words, Google’s approach to providing a search engine is now aimed at shaping all searches to go where they want them to.

If you use Google, it is time to find another search engine.

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Google unveils new slogan

12:23 pm

News you can use! Google unveils new slogan. Trust me, it is worth it to click on the link.

And this also: New Google technology autocorrects users’ thoughts

At a special press conference held at the technology giant’s sprawling campus Tuesday, Google engineers revealed exciting new technology that autocorrects any errant thoughts its users are having, replacing them with positions approved by the company.

Utilizing advanced retinal scan and proprietary telepathic scanning technology, the new automatic thought correction algorithm is now live for users of Google’s search engine, Android operating system, Chrome OS, and the hundreds of other apps and services the company provides. “Let’s say you start thinking there may be some kind of inherent biological difference between men and women,” Google employee Ryan Vo said in a live demo of the new tech. “Immediately, the thought suggestion program in any nearby Google device, app, or service will scrub the idea of inherent gender differences and replace them with the sure knowledge that there are at least three hundred different genders in existence, and always has been.”

For the background see this story.

And people wonder why I do not use Google, got rid of gmail years ago, and wiped my history at both as soon as I could.

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University scrubs professor’s plan to let students pick their grades

11:52 am

This is a victory: The University of Georgia has told a professor that his plan to let students pick their grades if they feel stressed in any way is not in accordance this school policy and will not be allowed.

Terry College of Business Dean Benjamin Ayers has since released a statement on the matter, calling Watson’s policy “an ill-advised proposal” that “will not be implemented in any Terry classroom. … The syllabus stated that his grading policy would allow students inappropriate input into the assignment of their own grades. I want you to know that the syllabus did not conform with the university’s rigorous expectations and policy regarding academic standards for grading,” Ayers added, noting that he has “explained this discrepancy to the professor” who “has removed the statement from his syllabus.”

“Rest assured that this ill-advised proposal will not be implemented in any Terry classroom,” he concluded. “The University of Georgia upholds strict guidelines and academic policies to promote a culture of academic rigor, integrity, and honesty.”

I wonder how many alumni donars contacted them in the past day telling them that this policy would end their support.

Personally, if I was in charge of this school I would consider firing this teacher. I certainly would not trust him to give honest grades, based on his willingness to institute this absurd policy.

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A Martian Journey

10:56 am

The exploration of the solar system has barely begun. Though we regularly get to see some spectacular images taken by the fleet of unmanned planetary probes that now circle or rove the various planets throughout the solar system, we mustn’t think we have seen very much. In truth, we have only gotten a very distant glimpse of only a few tiny spots, most of which have been viewed from very far away. Even at the highest resolution the images do not really tell us what it really will be like when we can stroll across those surfaces routinely.

To give you an idea of how much remains hidden, let’s take a journey inward from Mars orbit. The image below looks down on a good portion of the Martian globe, with the giant volcano Olympus Mons on the left, its three companion volcanoes in line to the east, and the vast valley of Valles Marineris east of these. This valley would cover the continental United States almost entirely, and extend significantly beyond into the oceans on either side.

Olympus Mons and Valles Marineris

This was essentially our first good look at Mars, taken from orbit by Mariner 9 in 1971.
» Read more

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Sunspot update for July 2017

10:06 am

NOAA today posted its monthly update of the solar cycle, covering sunspot activity for July. As I have done every month since 2010, the graph is posted below, with annotations.

July 2017 Solar Cycle graph

The graph above has been modified to show the predictions of the solar science community. The green curves show the community’s two original predictions from April 2007, with half the scientists predicting a very strong maximum and half predicting a weak one. The red curve is their revised May 2009 prediction.

Sunspot activity in July remained almost exactly the same as in both May and June. This is the first indication that this cycle’s ramp down from solar maximum will follow the standard pattern of a slow and extended decline to minimum. Up until now the drop in sunspot activity has been as fast as the increase during ramp up. Historically the ramp down has instead been slower, sloping downward gently and over a much longer time period. The last few months suggest that this cycle’s end is beginning to resemble past cycles.

Meanwhile, a review of past solar cycles by German scientists suggests that a cyclical cooling period in the Sun’s output is coming, and that such ups and downs can be tracked in the solar record.

In order to elucidate the solar influence, we have used a large number of temperature proxies worldwide to construct a global temperature mean G7 over the last 2000 years. The Fourier spectrum of G7 shows the strongest components as ~1000-, ~460-, and ~190 – year periods whereas other cycles of the individual proxies are considerably weaker. The G7 temperature extrema coincide with the Roman, medieval, and present optima as well as the well-known minimum of AD 1450 during the Little Ice Age. We note that the temperature increase of the late 19th and 20th century is represented by the harmonic temperature representation, and thus is of pure multiperiodic nature. It can be expected that the periodicity of G7, lasting 2000 years so far, will persist also for the foreseeable future. It predicts a temperature drop from present to AD 2050, a slight rise from 2050 to 2130, and a further drop from AD 2130 to 2200. [emphasis mine]

Note that this prediction is not based on any real understanding of the Sun’s sunspot cycle or what causes any variations in its brightness. All they have done is extrapolate into the future the patterns of past fluctuations. This is as if a weatherman averaged how many times it normally rains in your town, and then predicted rain in the next few days merely by those averages. “It rains on average every three days, so because it rained yesterday expect no rain for the next two days!”

Nonetheless, the past fluctuations seem to follow a cyclical pattern, and thus also appear to confirm other studies that suggest we are heading towards another grand minimum, with no sunspots for decades, which also in the past corresponded with cooler global temperatures.

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Georgia University professor allows students to pick their grades

9:42 am

The coming dark age: A Georgia University professor, in establishing what he calls “a stress reduction policy,” will allow students to change their grades should any grade cause them “undue stress.”

As he instructs his students:

If you feel unduly stressed by a grade for any assessable material or the overall course, you can email the instructor indicating what grade you think is appropriate, and it will be so changed. No explanation is required.”

The professor also will allow students to quit any group assignment if they don’t like “the group’s dynamics.” He will also forbid any negative comments about anyone’s work in class.

If this reflects the standards of this university, I question why anyone would want to attend it. Your degree will essentially be a waste of money.

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Looking down at Saturn’s rings

9:19 am

Looking down at Saturn's rings

Cool image time! The image on the right, reduced in resolution to show here, was taken by Cassini in May and looks down at the outer rings of Saturn. The moon Prometheus can also be seen in the large gap between the main rings and the outermost F ring.

Most of the small moon’s surface is in darkness due to the viewing geometry here. Cassini was positioned behind Saturn and Prometheus with respect to the sun, looking toward the moon’s dark side and just a bit of the moon’s sunlit northern hemisphere.

Also visible here is a distinct difference in brightness between the outermost section of Saturn’s A ring (left of center) and rest of the ring, interior to the Keeler Gap (lower left).

The image clearly shows the gravitational influence of the moon on the outer ring. As Prometheus orbits past the F ring its mass creates waves through the ring’s materials.

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China has a giant radio telescope and no one to run it

9:04 am

China’s effort to become a major player in the astronomy and space exploration field has run up against a strange problem.

China has built a staggeringly large instrument in the remote southern, mountainous region of the country called the Five hundred-meter Aperture Spherical Telescope, or FAST. The telescope measures nearly twice as large as the closest comparable facility in the world, the US-operated Arecibo radio telescope in Puerto Rico. Radio telescopes use a large, parabolic dish to collect radio waves from distant sources, such as pulsars and black holes—or even alien civilizations.

According to the South China Morning Post, the country is looking for a foreigner to run the observatory because no Chinese astronomer has the experience of running a facility of such size and complexity. The Chinese Academy of Sciences began advertising the position in western journals and job postings in May, but so far there have been no qualified applicants.

Part of the problem here is that it appears the telescope was built by order of the Chinese government, not Chinese astronomers. It would have been better for China to have built something its own astronomers were qualified to run. Instead, they built something to impress the world, and now can’t find a way to use it.

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Webb telescope launch might be delayed again

8:59 am

Because of a scheduling conflict with a European mission to Mercury Arianespace might delay its launch of the American James Webb Space Telescope to 2019.

A time-sensitive mission to explore the planet Mercury, already delayed several times, may force the European Space Agency (ESA) and Arianespace to push back the launch of NASA’s multi-billion dollar James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) into early 2019. The mission, named BepiColombo, is currently scheduled to launch on the same rocket, the Ariane 5, from the same spaceport in French Guiana, during the same timeframe that the JWST is scheduled to launch (October 2018).

A launch delay to BepiColumbo won’t impact the science of the ESA/Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) mission, but it would translate to a longer journey to Mercury. The last launch delay, which pushed it from April 2018 to October 2018, also translated to a year longer voyage to reach Mercury, now expected to arrive in 2025 instead of 2024.

This is a perfect illustration of the difference between governments and private enterprise. Government-owned Arianespace has been flying its Ariane 5 rockets now for almost two decades, but they have not yet learned how to launch two rockets in one month, and don’t appear interested in trying. Meanwhile, private companies like SpaceX and ULA are both working to achieve a normal twice-a-month launch rate, with SpaceX likely to beat that in the next few years.

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Ground equipment caused premature end to first Rocket Lab launch

8:51 am

Capitalism in space: Rocket Lab’s first test flight of its Electron rocket in May was terminated early because of a loss of communications due to an “misconfiguration” of ground telemetry equipment.

The company said the fix for the issue was “simple” and that “corrective procedures” were put into place to prevent it from happening in the future. Rocket Lab said it did not make any major changes to the Electron hardware.

No word on when their second test launch will take place. For their Moon Express customer, the clock is ticking, as that company is a Google Lunar X-prize contestant that needs to launch its lunar rover before the end of this year to have a chance at winning the prize.

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California’s public colleges to no longer require students to know math or read

12:40 pm

The coming dark age: California’s public universities have decided to drop its requirements that all in-coming students be able to do basic math and be able to read and write English.

Cal State will no longer make those students who may need extra help take the standardized entry-level mathematics (ELM) exam and the English placement test (EPT).

The new protocol, which will go into effect in fall 2018, “facilitates equitable opportunity for first-year students to succeed through existing and redesigned education models,” White wrote in a memorandum to the system’s 23 campus presidents, who will be responsible for working with faculty to implement the changes. The hope is that these efforts will also help students obtain their degrees sooner — one of the public university system’s priorities. Cal State has committed to doubling its four-year graduation rate, from 19% to 40%, by 2025.

…“This will have a tremendous effect on the number of units students accumulate in their first year of college,” said James T. Minor, Cal State’s senior strategist for academic success and inclusive excellence. “It will have an enormous effect on college affordability, on the number of semesters that a student is required to be enrolled in before they earn a degree, and it will have a significant impact on the number of students that ultimately cross a commencement stage with a degree in hand, ready to move into the workforce, ready to move into graduate or professional school.” [emphasis mine]

In other words, the university has no interest in producing graduates with any useful skills. All the university wants to do is to give them a degree, so that they can claim success. Under this new policy, students incapable of reading and writing English and doing math will still be able to take normal courses that require such skills the moment they enter college. They will likely be pushed through the system, given passing grades, so that when they graduate, they will be like the characters in the movie Idiocracy, functionally illiterate but expected to run society as college educated elites.

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SES agrees to a second Falcon 9 launch with used first stage

6:46 pm

Capitalism in space: SES has agreed to launch a second commercial satellite using a previously flown Falcon 9 first stage.

The launch of the SES 11 spacecraft, also named EchoStar 105, will be the third time SpaceX has sent a customer’s satellite into orbit with the help of a reused rocket stage. Industry officials said SES, EchoStar and SpaceX agreed in recent weeks to shift the satellite from an all-new rocket to one with a previously-flown first stage. The SES 11/EchoStar 105 satellite will likely ride a Falcon 9 first stage that first flew Feb. 19 with a Dragon supply ship heading for the International Space Station, one source said, but a firm assignment has not been confirmed. That vehicle returned to a vertical touchdown at Landing Zone 1 at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station.

Liftoff from a Florida launch pad is scheduled no sooner than around Sept. 27, a couple of days after a United Launch Alliance Atlas 5 rocket is set to haul a classified payload into orbit for the National Reconnaissance Office, the U.S. government’s spy satellite agency.

The most wonderful aspect of this is how routine it is steadily becoming.

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One of Jupiter’s mid-sized storms

8:54 am

One of Jupiter's mid-sized storms

Cool image time! The Juno image on the right, cropped to show here, focuses in on one of Jupiter’s mid-sized storms near its high northern latitudes and just on the edge of the chaotic polar region.

This storm is a long-lived anticyclonic oval named North North Temperate Little Red Spot 1 (NN-LRS-1); it has been tracked at least since 1993, and may be older still. An anticyclone is a weather phenomenon where winds around the storm flow in the direction opposite to that of the flow around a region of low pressure. It is the third largest anticyclonic oval on the planet, typically around 3,700 miles (6,000 kilometers) long. The color varies between red and off-white (as it is now), but this JunoCam image shows that it still has a pale reddish core within the radius of maximum wind speeds.

Be sure to take a look at the full image, which provides a bit of context.

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