Year: 2017

Private company builds high resolution space radar facility in Texas

6:36 pm

Capitalism in space: A private company, Leo Labs, has built a high resolution space radar facility in Midland, Texas, aimed at providing satellite companies precise location information of their orbiting satellites as well as the space junk that might threaten them.

It is not clear from the article or the company’s webpage whether they are funded by the federal government or by private capital investment. Up until now this data has been routinely gathered by the U.S. military, though obtaining it has I think been somewhat difficult due to security concerns. It seems this company is trying to compete with the government in offering a better data stream that is also easier to obtain.

Posted over Poland during my return flight from Israel.

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UC-Berkeley tries to silence Coulter speech

6:23 pm

Fascist Berkeley: Fearing violence and unwilling to protect the free speech rights of conservatives, UC-Berkeley has refused to allow Ann Coulter to give a speech at the campus on April 27.

The problem is that the university, a public institution, does not have the right to ban her from speaking, and Coulter knows it.

Miss Coulter took to Twitter to denounce the public university with her usual verve and said she would speak in Berkeley next week no matter what. “I acceded to Berkeley’s every silly demand (never made of lib speakers). Called their bluff & they canceled anyway,” she posted, adding that “no school accepting public funds can ban free speech.”

“If I were going to Berkeley to get an abortion, this would be a national scandal,” she tweeted.

Miss Coulter said she was “instructing Berkeley student group to spare no expense in renting my speaking venue — part of my legal damages,” the last phrase likely a reference to damages she expects from a possible lawsuit against the University of California. In an interview with the Hollywood Reporter, she elaborated that “they can’t stop me. I’m an American. I have constitutional rights.” [emphasis mine]

I hope she goes, and I hope a lot of conservatives show up prepared to defend her right to speak, with whatever means possible. We know from last week’s violence during pro-Trump demonstrations that the Berkeley authorities, on campus or off, will do nothing to protect her.

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Israeli student cubesat launched from Atlas 5

6:04 pm

When the Cygnus capsule was placed in orbit yesterday, it also released a number of nanosats, one of which was a cubesat built by Israeli high school students.

More than 80 pupils in grades 9-12 at schools in Herzliya, Ofakim, Yeruham, Ofra, and the Bedouin town of Hura helped to construct Duchifat-2, which weighs just 1.8 kilograms (four pounds), and is just 20 centimeters (eight inches) tall and 10 centimeters wide. Due to its small size, the satellite has no motors and instead uses the earth’s magnetic field to keep itself correctly aligned in space.

Cubesats have generally been built and launched as college projects to help teach students the engineering behind satellites. This however was the only nanosat released by the Atlas 5 that involved high school students.

Note also that the project did not simply involve Jewish students.

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New poll says most Hawaiians favor TMT

5:53 pm

It won’t matter: A new poll suggests that a large majority of Hawaiians strongly favor the construction of the Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT) on Mauna Kea on Hawaii’s Big Island.

When it comes to the Thirty Meter Telescope atop Mauna Kea, 72 percent of likely voters said they supported it. On the Big Island, 68 percent of residents said they favored it, 15 percent more than two years ago.

“Even on Hawaii Island, support is over 2-to-1 that this is a project that they don’t want to see an opportunity lost for local kids there,” said Kyle Chock, interim executive director of Pacific Resource Partnership, which conducted the poll.

I am not surprised by this poll. Nor do I think it makes a bit of difference. I right now do not believe TMT will be built on Hawaii. The state government, controlled by the Democratic Party, is entirely sympathetic to the position of the small minority that is hostile to this project. This minority is opposed mostly because of a bigoted dislike of non-natives and a close-minded ignorance of modern technology. And because today’s Democratic Party cares only for racial and ethnic minorites, it supports them entirely. That government has been slow-walking the permitting process so much that it will decades to get through it.

Posted about 36,000 feet in the air over Hungary, returning from my week-long visit to Israel.

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U.S. space law versus UN Outer Space Treaty

10:26 am

In its effort to provide legal protections to private companies attempting to do asteroid mining, it appears that the U.S.’s most recent space law directly contradicts the UN Outer Space Treaty.

The United States recently passed a law that contains an article that directly concerns asteroid mining and legalizes it. This law is the Commercial Space Launch Competitiveness Act (CSLCA), which was signed into law by President Obama in 2015. The CSLCA addresses resource extraction in Article IV, and states, “A U.S. citizen engaged in commercial recovery of an asteroid resource or a space resource shall be entitled to any asteroid resource or space resource obtained, including to possess, own, transport, use, and sell it according to applicable law, including U.S. international obligations.”

The issue here is that US law is in opposition to a UN treaty, to which the US is a signatory. The Outer Space Treaty is one of the oldest and most important agreements in the history of international space policy. Under the Outer Space Treaty, asteroid mining is illegal, since it is an appropriation of a celestial body by a State. Since the human being or organization that is doing the resource extraction is under the purview of some State, that State is responsible for the actions that are done by the nationals or organizations that are doing the mining.

This responsibility was given to the State by the sixth article of the OST and is strengthened by the Liability Convention of 1972. Since the State is responsible and liable for the actions done by their nationals, this means that the State could be interpreted as appropriating the asteroid.

I am surprised and encouraged to see two different articles about the problems of the Outer Space Treaty appear in the press less than a week after my op-ed on the very subject. I am sure there is no connection, other than the subject is increasingly topical, and others are recognizing the same things I am. Still, that these stories are appearing suggests that the chances are increasing that something will finally be done to either change or abandon the treaty.

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Want your food kosher in space?

9:57 am

While some of the food can be kosher, it is presently not possible for an astronaut on ISS to maintain a completely kosher diet.

It has nothing to do with the space station per se; it has to do with our food production facility,” Kloeris told Space.com. “We have a single packaging room on the U.S. side. All of the food that’s part of our standard menu that we provide — from what I understand, in order for them to be kosher and halal, they have to be done in separate, unique facilities. Therefore, everything we package would not meet that requirement.”


Kloeris noted that it’s possible to travel with a limited allotment of kosher or halal foods, in order to honor an astronaut’s heritage; every astronaut is allowed a certain number of crew-specific containers sent to the space station, which can account for about 10 percent of their diet.

The same limitations also apply to halal food for Muslims.

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Luxembourg rejects proposed space legislation because of Outer Space Treaty

9:37 am

Luxembourg’s legislature has rejected a proposed space regulatory framework because it did not address the legal restrictions on property rights imposed by the United Nations Outer Space Treaty.

Schneider, the deputy prime minister and minister for economy, presented a bill whose objective was to set a legal framework and give legal security to the property of minerals and other valuable resources in space, in particular on asteroids, and to regulate the authorisation and surveillance of both exploration and mining missions.

In a formal opinion published on 7 April, the council noted that private property claims are illegal or at least not legally binding in most of the international treaties and agreements relating to space and celestial bodies.

Neither the UN treaty on principles governing the activities of states in the exploration and use of outer space, including the moon and other celestial bodies of 1967, nor the agreement governing the activities of states on the moon and other celestial bodies of 1979 (which was not ratified by Luxembourg) answer the question of private property of space resources.

What is most important here is that the Luxembourg government now intends to “to ask for a revision of the question of property in the Outer Space Treaty.” As I said in my op-ed in The Federalist on Monday, nations are increasingly recognizing that the Outer Space Treaty is a problem for property rights, and needs to be revised. Otherwise, private development will be difficult if not impossible.

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Jean Mitry – Pacific 231

6:01 pm

An evening pause: I would never sit through a performance of the music played during this 1949 short film showing the power of the steam locomotive. Juxtapositioned with the powerful images of the train in motion, however, this music works splendidly. The film itself is an example of the kind of short avant garde films produced during the 1950s and 1950s, and well worth watching.

Hat tip Blair Ivey.

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Landslides on Ceres reveal presence of ice

4:37 pm

An analysis of data from Dawn has shown that Ceres’s landslides are distributed in greater numbers towards the poles, which suggests the presence of water ice just below the surface.

Georgia Tech Assistant Professor and Dawn Science Team Associate Britney Schmidt led the study. She believes it provides more proof that the asteroid’s shallow subsurface is a mixture of rock and ice. “Landslides cover more area in the poles than at the equator, but most surface processes generally don’t care about latitude,” said Schmidt, a faculty member in the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences. “That’s one reason why we think it’s ice affecting the flow processes. There’s no other good way to explain why the poles have huge, thick landslides; mid-latitudes have a mixture of sheeted and thick landslides; and low latitudes have just a few.”

The data also showed that Ceres has far more landslides than expected, which also supports the idea that the shallow subsurface has a lot of water ice in it, as much as 10% to 50% by volume.

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Japan aims for record 8 launches in 2017

3:46 pm

Capitalism in space: If all goes as planned, Japan plans to launch a record of eight launches in a single year in 2017, partly because they will begin launch that nation’s own GPS satellite constellation.

Most of these satellites are government launches. Still, the number and in increase in launch pace indicates that Japan does not wish to be left behind in the increasing competition within the launch industry.

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